A Turn in the South
“So he’s going to be making six dollars on an average, six to six and a half an hour. And just for six, eight months a year. You see, he doesn’t want to work all day long. He’s satisfied by getting by. They don’t like to be told what to do. It’s the independent spirit. It’s the old pioneer attitude. ‘I’ve got enough to eat, drink, and a little shelter. What more do I want?’
“Religion? They’ll go to church when the wife beats the hell out of him. But he’s not going to put on a coat and tie or anything. He won’t do it. He’ll kick her ass.
“They’re not too sexual. They’d rather drink a bunch of old beer. And hang around with other males and go hunting, fishing. We’re talking about the good old rednecks now. Not the upscale ones. They’ve got the dick still hard. That’s damn true.
“The rednecks are about sixty to sixty-five percent of the white population. I’m running the good old rednecks and the upscale rednecks and a whole bunch of lower-middle-class rednecks. They have the same old attitude as the black people. Daddy is home a little more often. But they’re tickled pink that they ain’t got nothing. You wouldn’t believe.”
I asked about the dress, and especially the cowboy boots. Why were they so important?
“It’s the image they have to project. They’ll have an old baseball hat with the bill turned down just so. They won’t have the cowboy hat. They want that particular redneck style. They want people to know that they don’t give a damn. They want people to know: ‘I’m a redneck and proud of it.’
“What you must put in, and make sure you do, is them sons of bitches love country-and-Western music. It’s down-home music. It’s crying music. Somebody got killed in a truck. Or a train ran over somebody. Or somebody ran away with somebody’s wife.
“Presley is a redneck like you wouldn’t believe. He’s a double redneck. Some of the women here would whip your ass for saying it. I’m probably a redneck myself.”
And when he said that, Campbell won me over.
He said, “I just dress differently. Polo shirt and Corbin slacks.”
I liked the concreteness of Campbell’s details, the brand names, the revelation of a fashion code where I had just seen bright colors.
Abruptly, then, he went off on another track. “If my father hadn’t worked so hard—and I know that was important, to work hard and try to do good—”
I got him back to the subject of redneck sex.
“If they’re young they got it hard. But the older they get they drink more, and then they don’t care about it any more. And she’s just there, getting some clothes washed down in the laundromat once a week. Sit down and watch it and smoke some cigarettes—that’s right, that’s what she will do.
“I’ll tell you. My son ain’t gonna fool with a redneck girl in Rankin County. Can’t hide it. Everybody knows everybody else. And I’ll tell you something else. They talk different. And I want my children to stay in their social strata, and that’s where they’ll stay. I would say, ‘Keith, you weren’t brought up like that. You get your ass out of that. You’re way above that, and we’re going to stay way above that.’ But Keith’s all right. He wants to dress nice; he wants to look good; he wants to make money. We run in the Northeast Jackson crowd. That’s supposed to be upscale.”
I said, “But beauty is beauty. A beautiful woman is going to win admirers anywhere.”
“Beauty is beauty. But when she opens her mouth and starts talking and says she lives in Rankin County—uh-uh—that’s the end of any charm. But that case will probably never happen with me. It will never happen with my son, because he already knows what a redneck is. You know what the word comes from? The back of the man’s neck is red from the sun—”
But something happened—somebody came into the room, someone asked a question—and Campbell didn’t finish the thought. It was finished for me some days later when I heard from an old Mississippian that the word “redneck,” when he was a child, was not a pejorative; was the opposite, in fact, and meant a man who lived by the sweat of his brow; and that it was only in the 1950s, when the frontier or pioneer life was changing, that the word began to have unflattering associations.
Campbell said: “I admire them for their independence. But it’s not right for the society now. No question about it. It was great a long time ago. But not now. You can’t get business done in a modern city with that kind of mentality. We got to change that redneck society and that black society, or the wealth is going to be just in the few hands that it’s always been in. As far as I’m concerned, I hope it stays like that. I ought to be shot.”
He came back from that political pitch. He said: “Rednecks like four-wheel-drives. Four-wheel drive pickup trucks. They can run down everywhere through the swamps. And some of them like an old beat-up van, half-painted. Half-painted, because he’s going to fix this side but he’s never going to get around to the other side. He’ll drive that son of a bitch forever, until it falls apart or gets a flat tire, and he’ll just leave it then. He won’t have a spare, you see. And he’ll come back that afternoon and get it fixed. He’ll get one of his buddies to get an old tire, and they’ll go and fix it. The sons of bitches can fix anything on a car. Them bastards can do anything. They can drag the car to the side of the highway and jack it up and fix it on the spot.”
The morning was over. Campbell had a business lunch. He was going just as he was, in his bright, horizontally striped green-and-yellow jersey, the stripes of varying width. But he had so enjoyed talking of redneck life; it had brought back so many memories of his own “crazy” youth, and prompted so many yearnings, that he wanted to talk a little more, and he promised to come again, in the afternoon, after his lunch and before a business trip to Florida.
He telephoned after his lunch. I asked how it had gone.
“I’m smelling like hell. A whole load of garlic at lunch. But made money. Unusual, a business lunch where I actually made money.”
We met later, in a hotel bar. He had been drinking to celebrate his deal. His eyes were moist, a little bloodshot. He had spoken deadpan in the morning; and he spoke deadpan now. But the drink had made his speech chaste. He spoke no swear word, no unnecessary or blaspheming intensive.
I said I had been thinking over what he had said about the rednecks. From the way he had described them, I thought of them as a tribe, almost an Indian tribe, free spirits wandering freely over empty spaces. But weren’t they now a little cramped, even in Mississippi?
Campbell said: “It’s a nice life, but it depends on a natural life being available. I would say that if those rednecks didn’t have these natural surroundings in Mississippi—because the outdoor thing’s their favorite pastime—they would be very bored. And hunting rights are becoming so valuable now, they’re going to be forced out of the market within five years. We’ve got a lot of people coming up this far north now from Louisiana, because we have a lot of deer, big deer, and they’re paying big prices for hunting rights. I bet you couldn’t drive forty-five minutes out of Jackson without finding land that wasn’t leased. It’s going to have a ‘Posted’ sign: ‘This land is leased by So-and-So Hunting Club. Don’t Trespass.’ One day there’s going to be a killing about it, I tell you. They’ve already had a couple of killings in the state. Duck-hunting especially—it’s so competitive in the Delta, so valuable, so expensive to get a lease up there. You’ve got to have a lot of money. It will cost you about three thousand dollars a year to hunt duck. Though duck-hunting is more of a gentleman’s sport. Those rednecks are more meat-hunters.
“Still, there’s a lot of land in Mississippi. They’ll poach on somebody. Otherwise they’ll just be beer-drinkers and have no place to go and nothing to do. It’s what’s worrying me about rednecks. They’re not adapting, and they’re being left behind. As the population grows, it’s going to be more and more expensive for them to go out hunting, and they’re not going to be able to afford it.
“At the moment they have some dog clubs. They get in real cheap somewhere and they’ll
do some deal, some deal with somebody’s family—fifteen, twenty, thirty guys in a family deal; cousins, all of them on family land. All getting together ten or twelve times a year. And they’ll have a ball.”
“What about the women? Do they go out on those trips?”
“They just sit at home. They’re worrying about where the next sack of potatoes is coming from. But they can live on a hundred dollars a week. Cheaper than you and I. And they’re not skinny. Some of them are big and fat. What am I saying? They’re all big and fat.
“After lunch, you know, I went back to the office. The secretary’s a redneck woman. I told her about our talk this morning. About the rednecks and the frontier mentality. Telling her it’s not so great these days, you know. Different times. And she said, ‘You know, Mr. Campbell, at one time I used to be envious of you. I wanted what you had. But now I feel I’m just different. I’m just born into it. I ain’t got nothing, and I know now I ain’t going to have nothing.’ I said, ‘It’s because you ain’t got the right kind of husband. Why don’t you kick your husband’s ass?’ And she said, ‘Oh, Mr. Campbell, I can’t do that. He’s just an old redneck.’ And her children are just like him.
“Presley, he was the all-time neck. And that fellow there, that fellow at the desk with the long hair and beard.”
He was talking about a man with a red plaid shirt hanging out of his trousers. This man was walking delicately on the floor, as though nervous of slipping on it with the leather soles of his cowboy boots.
Campbell said, “He’s probably thinking, with that hair and beard, that he’s God’s gift to the world. But he’s just a neck. He’s as lost as a goose. He’s never been on a tiled floor in his life. He’s come in here thinking it was another motel. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s just moping around here: ‘Oh shit, where am I?’ ”
ART HALLOWS, creates, makes one see. And though other people said other things about rednecks—though one man said that the best way of dealing with them was to have nothing to do with them, that their tempers were too close to the surface, that they were too little educated to cope with what they saw as slights, too little educated to understand human behavior, or to understand people who were not like themselves; that their exaggerated sense of slight and honor could make them talk with you and smile even while they were planning to blow your head off—though this was the received wisdom, Campbell’s description of their mode of living made me see pride and style and a fashion code where I had seen nothing, made me notice what so far I hadn’t sufficiently noticed: the pickup trucks dashingly driven, the baseball caps marked with the name of some company.
The next day, a Saturday, there was a crowd in the hotel and the restaurant across the parking area from the hotel. And, as if in fulfillment of Campbell’s description of the redneck style, three men got out of a dented and dusty car and opened the trunk to take out their redneck boots. They had arrived in gym shoes. They took off their gym shoes and put on their cowboy boots before going into the hotel. One among them was opening a bottle of beer with his teeth. I felt now, after Campbell, that the man doing that very redneck thing perhaps needed a little courage. Perhaps, entering the hotel and walking on the tiled floor, he was going to feel “as lost as a goose.”
For some days Campbell’s words and phrases sang in my head, and I spoke them to others. One afternoon I went to a farm just outside Jackson. Someone there, knowing of my new craze, came to me and said, “There are three of your rednecks fishing in the pond.” And I hurried to see them, as I might have hurried to see an unusual bird or a deer. And there, indeed, they were, bare-backed, but with the wonderful baseball hats, in a boat among the reeds, on a weekday afternoon—people who, before Campbell had spoken, I might have seen flatly, but now saw as people with a certain past, living out a certain code, a threatened species.
It gave a new poetry to what one saw on the highway: the baseball caps with the bill “turned down just so,” the bandeaux or sweat bands on the forehead of women drivers of redneck-style pickup trucks. Even the advertisements in the newspapers for those trucks—and the price: about $8,000—had a new meaning.
AND IT was of the redneck, the unlikely descendant of the frontiers-man, that I talked to Eudora Welty when I went to call on her. I had arrived early, and waited on the street below the dripping trees. She was ready early, and could clearly be seen through her uncurtained front window. But I was nervous of knocking too soon.
So for a while we waited below the big, dripping trees in the gloom after rain, she behind her window at the end of her wet front garden, I in the car. And when I felt the time was suitable I walked up the wet path to her front door. On the door, in her strong writing, was a note asking people not to bring any more books for her to sign. She wanted to save as much of her energy as possible now for her work. I knocked; and she opened, like someone waiting to do just that. She was extraordinarily familiar from her photographs.
The frontier was so much in her stories: a fact I had only just begun to appreciate. And she was willing to talk of the frontiersman character.
“He’s not a villain. But there’s a whole side of him that’s cunning. Sometimes it goes over the line and he becomes an outright scoundrel. The blacks never lived in that part of the state. They came over to work on the plantations. Most of the rednecks grew up without black people, and yet they hate them. That’s where all the bad things originate—that’s the appeal they make. Rednecks worked in sawmills and things like that. And they had small farms. They are all fiercely proud. They dictate the politics of the state. They take their excitement—in those small towns—when the politicians and evangelists come. Scare everybody, outwit everybody, beat everybody, kill everybody—that’s the frontiersman’s mentality.”
I told her the story Ellen had heard as a child about the rednecks to the south of the town where she had spent her summers: the story of traveling salesmen who had been roughed up and hitched to a plow and made to plow a field. Ellen had said that this story had come down from the past; and I had thought of it as a romantic story of the wickedness of times past, an exaggerated story about people living without law. But Eudora Welty took the story seriously. She said, “I can believe the story about the salesmen. I’ve heard about punishing people by making them plow farms.”
We talked about Mississippi and its reputation.
“At the time of the troubles many people passed through and called on me. They wanted me to confirm what they thought. And all of them thought I lived in a state of terror. ‘Aren’t you scared of them all the time?’ A young man came and said that he had been told that a Mr. So-and-So, who was a terrible racist, owned all of Jackson, all the banks and hotels, and that he was doing terrible things to black people. It was a fantasy. It wasn’t true. The violence here is not nearly as frightening as the Northern—urban—brand.”
A frontier state, limited culturally—had that been hard for her as a writer, and as a woman writer? The richness of a writer depends to some extent on the society he or she writes about.
She said: “There is a lot behind it, the life of the state. There is the great variety of the peoples who came and settled the different sections. There is a great awareness of that as you get older—you see what things have stemmed from. The great thing taught me here as a writer is a sense of continuity. In a. place that hasn’t changed much you get to know the generations. You can see the whole narrative of a town’s history or a family’s history.”
I HAD been hearing more and more about the unusual constitution of the state of Mississippi, the constitution drafted in 1890, after the Civil War and Reconstruction. I had heard that this constitution was responsible for a good deal of what one saw still; and I went to see former Governor William Winter about it. He had a high reputation in the state, both as a governor and as a man knowledgeable about the state’s history.
Mr. Winter saw me in his office late one afternoon, at the end of a busy day; that morning he had flown to Little Rock, Arkansas. The former
governor was now a partner in a Jackson law firm. He spoke precisely and legally; he had books and a map ready; and all the time we spoke he was looking up references in books.
On the wall of his office—and among color photographs of his family—was a large, old map of the state. When he went to get me a cold diet-cola drink I got up and looked at it. It was linen-mounted and framed, and had been a gift to Mr. Winter. It was a French map, of 1830 perhaps. It showed only the southern counties of the state as settled. A large central area had been marked out for further white settlement. Though this area was almost as large as all the settled counties put together, on the map it was just called Hinds County (and part of that area was to become the Rankin County of which Campbell had spoken with so much feeling). The areas to the east and north were still, in 1830, Indian country: Choctaws and Chickasaws.
Half the state Indian country in 1830; in 1860, the Civil War about to come; in 1890, after the Civil War and Reconstruction, a new constitution. History here seemed to come in thirty-year segments. Add the yellow-fever epidemics of 1873, 1874, 1878, 1903; add the Great Depression. There was nothing settled, stable.
The former governor said: “The atmosphere in which the 1890 constitution was written was dominated by the need for whites to provide a means for the restoration of white control of the political processes of the state. The constitution of 1861 did not afford a vehicle for the elimination of black voters and black officeholders. There were many black officeholders when the 1890 constitution was written.” There were two black senators, a black congressman, a black lieutenant governor, and a black superintendent of education. “The 1890 constitution of Mississippi became a model for other Southern states—in its resourceful provisions for the discouragement of black voting.”