A Turn in the South

  “I had a dream around that time—but it didn’t cross my mind until many years later. I was spending the night with my grandmother. I was sleeping on the porch. I remember sitting up in bed—waking up real fast—and I thought I saw Jesus Christ walking through the back door. The door had a little knocker, a wooden ball on a string, and I remember hearing that knocker, and the door opening. And I just had that vision of Jesus Christ walking through that door. And I remember sitting up all night to see if he was going out through the back door. But he never did. I never thought much about that dream until six or seven years ago. I was riding down the highway, and it just flashed back in my mind. At that point I really realized that it was Jesus Christ entering my heart. And the reason I didn’t see him leave that back door was that he didn’t leave us. I just haven’t discussed that story with my family. But I remember that dream and that whole night as if it was yesterday. I feel that Jesus Christ entered my heart that day and he’s never left.”

  “Did it change your attitude to other people?”

  “I hope I have more patience with people. I hope I’m quicker to see the good than I am to see the shortcomings. I certainly try to have a short memory for bad experiences. I try to forgive and forget.”

  “What about irreligious people? What do you think of them?”

  “I guess I feel that if I can set an example to them I can encourage them to be less irreligious. Nor do I think less of a person who has a different religion from mine.”

  “Do you feel you are in a religious community?”

  “I think I am. I’m not sure that the religious part of the community is keeping up with the population growth. I’m not sure that the church membership is keeping up. But I realize that there are many Christians. I was encouraged by the short patience people had with the Gary Hart–Donna Rice situation. I am certainly encouraged about Christianity in this country and the work of the Lord.”

  “Why aren’t you in the church?”

  He misunderstood the question. “I was there until nine last night.”

  “No, no. I was asking why you aren’t in the ministry.”

  “I believe the Lord has a will for every one of us, a plan for us. He knows what he wants us to do. If we were all architects, we would all have pretty buildings, but we wouldn’t have farmers to grow food. I think that his plan for creation is that it takes a lot of people to make up this world. And he needs workers in all of these areas.”

  “Is this why you feel as you do about people who do no work?”

  “I have never expressed it like that. But I think that is why I feel the way I do.”

  “Do you think men need to work?”

  “No question about that. The Lord created the Garden of Eden and he put Adam and Eve there, and when they sinned he put them out of the Garden of Eden and told them to go to work.”

  “You feel that people are still working out that sin?”

  “I don’t think I’m still working out their sin. But I think that all of us have sins. The human race is a sinful race—and this is where we are, and that’s what we have to deal with now. I feel strongly that we are required to work for six days and rest on the seventh. The Lord talks about giving each individual talents, and the Lord told us to use them. I think that working is an important part of using those talents. Some people are writers, farmers, architects. These are talents that the Lord gave them.

  “Someone wrote to my father several months ago. In this letter he was saying: I enjoy my work; how does a successful businessman continue being a Christian? Should he stay with his business, or should he go back into the church? My father wrote a letter to explain why it’s necessary for a Christian businessman to be in the world. Our own preacher here has said several times that with the TV pastors getting into such hot water and getting such bad attention, he’s been seeing some doors closed against him; and the responsibility for leading people to Christianity is more on the shoulders of laymen.”

  I said, “Some people are saying that it’s the work of the devil, that those TV pastors are in trouble.”

  William said, “When I fail at something I fail. I feel like I’ve got to take the consequences for my failure. I also know that I’ve got outside forces working against me. But I know that before I start. So I can’t pass the buck. The devil might have made me do it, but it’s still my problem, my responsibility. The ultimate accountability is mine.”

  I asked him to talk about accountability.

  He sucked in his breath. “Whoo! It’s difficult to go public about it. I guess it goes back to what I was taught by Mom and Dad: that if you have responsibility you have accountability. The more responsibility, the more people are affected. And I think the accountability to Christ is the ultimate responsibility I have. This also gives me a background to what Mom and Dad were teaching about responsibility and accountability. Perhaps the people dependent on me the most are my family. Then there are the people I’m tied into business with. They’ve given me a certain responsibility, and I’ve accountability. We are in business to serve customers. And that gives us another whole segment of people we’re accountable to, people we’ll never see.

  “You’ve told me about your trip to the catfish farms. Those catfish are going to go all over the world. And the farmer has got to see that the fish is on flavor—for that person who is going to eat that catfish, for where that catfish is going to end up. If we do it right they’ll come back. If we do it wrong they won’t come back.”

  So the religious ideas of the God-given talent, work, and accountability coincided with sound business practice. It was true of other religious groups as well, this coincidence of religious devotion and business sense: one kind of dedication encouraging, and even becoming, another kind of dedication. It was true of certain Hindu caste groups and certain minority or heretical sects in Islam. But religions and cultures have their own identities. One isn’t just like another. The idea of the God-given talent is contained in the Hindu idea of dharma; but the Hindu religious-business dedication is different from the dedication William was talking about. However much his business practices appear to contain the idea of service, the Hindu businessman has a contract with God alone, and not with men.

  And it was of his contract with men that William went on to talk. He said: “To me, without religion there wouldn’t be any purpose. It’s religion that gives us purpose in being here. The purpose is to serve the Lord. And the only way we have of serving him is to serve mankind. We can’t give him anything he doesn’t already have. We can’t touch that. Nothing he doesn’t already have, unless it’s our heart.”

  William spent a certain amount of his spare time on church work. He gave “devotions” sometimes; he taught Sunday school sometimes; he worked with the boy scouts. Did he, so full of his church, judge people according to the degree of their faith?

  He read the question as half a political one, connected with “equal opportunity” and the racial issue. He said—puzzlingly, unless you understood the semipolitical question he felt he was answering—“I try not to judge an individual as an individual. I don’t have the facts to judge on. But I try to judge and weigh his actions against the work that has to be done—to weigh his strengths and weaknesses as I can interpret them. Though that’s what I used to be told—that this person fits this particular job. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. But what that does is that the individual knows intuitively: ‘I’m here because you’ve been told to put me here. It doesn’t matter about my job performance. Therefore it doesn’t matter what I do here.’ And at that point the person loses incentives and a proper motivation.”

  But William talked about this wearily, as though he had talked about it many times before and had no faith now that the plain and obvious things he was saying would ever be heeded.

  Then, rocking, leaving the subject of equal opportunity aside, he said, “I have such a wholesome respect for the early-American natives. I really feel like they believed that the Lord lived in everything on eart
h, the rocks, the trees, the bush, the animals—the Lord lived in everything—and they were part of it. And what I think of the early-American natives is that they had an almost reverent respect for nature. For them the life of a blade of grass was as important as a great buffalo. They didn’t make any distinction. And they probably realized, more than the greatest scientist on earth now, that everything on this earth is totally related. They understood the chain reaction that comes from getting one thing in nature out of balance with the others. And I think that, because of the reverence they had for all living things, they had a reverence for mankind that I’m not sure we’ll ever see again.”

  “How did you find out about the Indians?”

  “I’ve read a few books. I’ve made a few trips out west and talked with a few Indians by the roadside. And I was impressed with the minuteness of the attention to small details that they had. For every action there is a reaction. And what worries me the most now is that where I see a new highway or subdivision, where they’re clearing land, there’s a major destruction of plant life, animal life that can’t be replaced. The thing that disturbs me about that is that it’s not done with any consciousness or concern. It’s only done with concern for the dollar.

  “Go down on your stomach on the ground. Look at a square foot of grass for about forty-five minutes. See the life, the insects. And magnify that to the size of a project.”

  “But Mississippi needs investment.”

  “I don’t know how it can be worked out. The more concerns you have for these little things, and that side of life, the more concern you’re going to have for your neighbor.”

  The contract with other men, serving God by serving mankind—they were themes to which William returned.

  “I feel that man and nature have to go together. The Lord put us here to be caretaker of things. A lot of my thoughts are tied back with religion and the Lord’s creation.”

  It seemed to me that we could now go back to what he had said at the beginning, about the North’s historical wish to disrupt the economy of the South. But he didn’t want to go back just then to that side of things. He wanted to stay a little longer with his more mystical thoughts.

  I felt I had begun to understand how his fundamentalist faith—from the outside so constricting—was in fact complete and flexible. The mixture of the Old Testament and the New, the life of Jesus and the Book of Genesis, made a whole. The sanctity of the created world, the good life of conscience, the loving of one’s neighbor as oneself—they ran together, and they appeared to fit the Mississippi character and history: the love of nature and the outdoor life, an admiration for the pantheism of the Indians, the love of family and community, the resentment of outside interference, which could feel almost like interference with a religious code.

  William said, of his religion, “I don’t wear it on my sleeve. I hope I don’t flash it around. It’s just part of me. I don’t want to be a goody-goody or better-than-thou, because I don’t feel that way. I just want to be part of God’s creation. His handiwork is in everything. And the more respect we have for his creation, the more respect we have for our fellow man.”

  AFTER TALLAHASSEE and Tuskegee, I wanted in Mississippi to look at things from the white point of view, as far as that was possible. But it was put to me not long after I had arrived that, with the high percentage of black people in the state, and with the possibility that Jackson might soon have a black mayor, I should meet some black politicians.

  Andrew, a young Mississippian politician, put this to me at lunch one day, and he thought the man I should meet was Willard. Andrew himself was going to meet Willard for the first time that day, after lunch, and he thought I should come with him. “If the meeting goes well,” Andrew said, “I can leave and you can talk to him. I can always talk to him some other time.”

  Andrew was not looking for black votes. It was his ambition as a politician to rewrite the Mississippi state constitution of 1890, and to do that he needed all the political support he could get. For this first meeting with Willard he had dressed with some formality, in a pale-blue seersucker suit.

  The meeting was to take place in a hotel not far away. We left the cool of the restaurant and went down into the glare of the parking lot. The car was hot. The air conditioning, turned on to “high fan,” roared; and it became hotter in the car than it had been outside. The air had just begun to cool when we arrived at the hotel and had to get out, into the glare of another parking lot. Always these reminders of the discomfort of earlier generations; and wonder at the energy they had shown; and more wonder that a great war should have been fought in temperatures like this.

  We sat in the lobby and waited for Willard. Conversation was easy up to the time at which Willard was due to come. After that it became awkward, with both of us waiting for Willard. Andrew said, “I’ve never met him.” He said that two or three times. Once he got up and walked across the lobby to greet someone he knew: impeccable his manners, his charm unfailing, his politician’s role now apparently second nature to him.

  And then, when we had given him up, fifteen minutes having passed beyond the appointed time, Willard came. He was in shirt and trousers; no tie; and he was unexpectedly ordinary, not at all the black leader or would-be leader I had imagined someone like Andrew treating with. I had expected a black man of disturbing charm. There was no charm to Willard. He was in his forties, plumpish, strong, no mark of physical hardship on him. He had prepared a serious face for the meeting. If one didn’t know he was regarded as a politician one would have missed the rage in his eyes, or one might have read that deliberateness of gaze as sensuality.

  Willard was very much a local politician. In Mississippi, because of the 1890 constitution, the most modest of public offices are elected offices. This provision, intended to prevent any government from having too much power, and intended also to keep blacks out of even small jobs, now worked in favor of blacks, and politicized posts that elsewhere would have been purely professional or technical. Willard looked after the roads of a particular district of a particular county: a very small post indeed.

  I left almost as soon as I had met Willard. And, partly through Andrew’s good offices (the meeting must have gone well), a meeting with Willard was arranged for me some days later.

  It was an early-morning meeting. I had assumed from the directions I had been given that the place was in Jackson. I hadn’t asked what the distance was. But after twenty minutes or so on an interstate highway I began to feel that I was driving back to Alabama.

  At last, the time now past the time fixed for the meeting, the exit appeared. Only then did I realize that I had been given nothing like a house or office address, that I had driven all this way with only the number of a county district for destination. However, I pressed on, thinking I might make inquiries when I crossed the county border. I passed a board. It gave the name of the county and the number of the district. It was not the number I had been given, but I thought I would stop to ask at the building at the back. There were cars parked around it. When I got to the building I saw that among the parked cars there was a space, and the space was reserved for Willard. This was the address I had been meant to come to. But he wasn’t there.

  I pushed the door open and found myself in a shed divided into offices. The shed was full of black people. In the front office or cubicle there was a black girl with a telephone, with other black people around her.

  This girl asked brightly for my name. I gave it. She said that she had been trying all morning, and Mr. Willard had been trying all the day before, to get to me, to tell me that Mr. Willard couldn’t be at this address, but that he would be free to see me at an hour later than the one he had given, at Jackson. He would meet me in Jackson at my hotel. They had telephoned all the hotels in Jackson to locate me. But they hadn’t succeeded. They had telephoned the Sheraton, the Holiday Inn. Where was I staying? I told her. She said that Mr. Willard would be there in an hour. How would she get a message to him? By the radio, she sai
d; and I felt that the radio was important, a badge of office.

  I asked her to radio him while I was there, so that I would know he had got the message. She said I was not to worry. So I drove back to Jackson, along the route that had seemed so long and unlikely earlier that morning, and which towards the end had made me a little frantic because I had thought I was going to be late for Willard.

  When I got back to the Ramada Renaissance there was no Willard. Not then, and not in the afternoon. When I telephoned his office the girl said that Mr. Willard had spoken to her on the radio and that he intended to keep the appointment. He even knew my room number, she said. But Willard didn’t come; and the next day there was no message from him or his office.

  Later I told Andrew of Willard’s little—or big—joke. Andrew said, “I don’t really know him. I met him for the first time that day with you.” And when I asked whether the politics of cooperation such as he envisaged were really possible, Andrew said he had to be an optimist. The black problems were bad, and there were many blacks in Mississippi. If he wasn’t optimistic, he said, it would be better for him to move to Oregon, where only 10 percent of the population was black.

  Andrew said, “It’s been dawning on everybody that a disaster is occurring in the black community, and we do have to talk about it. The attitude of the polite press won’t do any longer.” Yet Andrew knew only what he knew. “I regurgitate more of what I’ve read about the society than what I’ve experienced. I get it from TV documentaries and specials. I haven’t really experienced it. I haven’t talked to black folks or rednecks. I’ve got to go over the top of some of these basic problems. If we can’t get together we are lost.”

  Optimism in the foreground; irrationality in the background.

  THE STORY about my adventure with Willard must have got around, because one day I had a telephone call from a man called Lewis. He said he was black and he wanted to introduce me to the real black culture. He worked in the stores section of a county department (like the one Willard oversaw). He began to give me directions to get to his house. But then he said he would come over to the hotel to pick me up. He said he would be there within the hour.