A Turn in the South

  Almost as important as the racial provisions were the antibusiness provisions. The people who wrote the constitution wanted the state to remain “a pastoral state, an agricultural state.” They didn’t want big business or the corporations coming in, encouraging “unfavorable competition for jobs with the agricultural community.”

  “We threw various roadblocks in the path of corporate development. It had the effect of discouraging investment in industrial plants in the state. A major paper-manufacturing company, the Gaylord Corporation, desired to locate in Pearl River, Mississippi. Because of the constitutional limitations here, that plant located across the river, in Louisiana, within sight of Pearl River County, and virtually created a new town in Louisiana, Bogalusa. There was a limit in Mississippi on the amount of property a corporation could own, a limit on the capital structure of a corporation. Even in 1890 that constitution singled us out as being noncompetitive for capital.

  “There is an archaic tone to the whole document. We need the psychological benefit now of a late-twentieth-century document. And, the second thing, we need the restructuring of the manner in which we govern the state. We have to eliminate many of the processes designed to decentralize and fragment power. In 1890 there was a distrust of any concentration of power in any one individual. With the result that there’s not a single law that’s passed by the Mississippi legislature that is in strict accordance with the constitution of 1890.”

  He handled a mighty law book and showed me Section 59 of the 1890 constitution.

  “Bills may originate in either house, and be amended or rejected in the other; and every bill shall be read on three different days in each house, unless two-thirds of the house where the same is pending shall dispense with the rule; and every bill shall be read in full immediately before the vote on its final passage; and every bill, having passed both houses, shall be signed by the president of the senate and the speaker of the house of representatives, in open session; but before either shall sign any bill, he shall give notice thereof, suspend business in the house over which he presides, have the bill read by its title, and, on the demand of any member, have it read in full; and all such proceedings shall be entered on the journal.”

  There was a provision in the section for amendment, so that laws could be passed. But an awkward member could still cause delay. “I have seen it happen. I have seen one member stand up and demand that the bill be read.”

  Was there an element of madness in the framers of the constitution?

  “It was an anti-government legislation. It was intended to make it as difficult as possible to pass legislation. The attitude being: The fewer bills we have, the better off we are going to be. The less government the better—that is a fair way to put it.”

  “What sort of men were they in 1890?”

  “They represented the ultraconservative, planter, agricultural interests. Many of them were veterans of the Civil War. There was a strong racial bias which ran through the membership. They were committed to eliminating the black presence in the political process.”

  “Do you think there was anything like a romantic feeling for the land?”

  “It was a feeling for the land of the landowner, not the worker. The yeoman farmer was not the dominant feature of the convention. The constitution spoke to the economic interests of those who drafted it. For instance, it spoke of the maintenance of a levee system along the Mississippi River—which really has no place in a constitution.

  “The story about that is like this. In the spring of 1890 the levees gave way and parts of the Delta were inundated. To cope with that, the constitution-framers later that year, 1890, wrote into the constitution a whole article designed to cope with such disasters. Article 11.”

  He showed it to me. It ran to eight pages. It dealt in great detail, technical and fiscal, with the way the levees were to be maintained; it outlined taxation to meet the expenses; it mentioned the names of vanished railroad companies.

  “An article like this really has no place in the constitution of a state. But you can see the preoccupation of the drafters. They were looking after their farms up in the Delta.”

  There might have been no romantic feeling for the land. But how did the former governor explain the anti-government tone of the constitution?

  “It reflected the basic frontier aspect of the state. They were saying: ‘We’re going to use government to solve those problems that appear to us important, but we’re not going to use government to interfere with our lives.’ As it was used, the constitution worked against the powerless in the state. But that is no longer a valid objection. Corrections have been made.”

  And the constitution has left its mark. “The Carolinas and Georgia had tobacco-processing plants and textile plants. Alabama has a well-established industrial base going back to the nineteenth century. Mississippi never developed this kind of base.”

  On the former governor’s desk, and got out for our meeting, was a map of the United States showing, for 1984, the “economically competitive” counties and the “distressed” counties. The competitive counties were colored blue, the distressed counties pink. The map showed three concentrated areas of distressed counties: on the Mexican border; the Indian areas in the West; and, making almost one pink area, the Southern Black Belt of Alabama and almost all of Mississippi. Only the area around Jackson was colored blue.

  AND YET, though there was distress—comparatively speaking: American distress was not like the distress in other countries—and though many people would agree with what the former governor said about the archaic nature of the constitution, there was also in some people a nervousness about change. The frontier constitution had grown to represent something true about the state. Many people now grieved for the past which that constitution had secured, when life was “easier,” more countrylike; when communities were small and everyone knew everyone else; when time was not money.

  In the 1830 map in the former governor’s office Hinds County had been marked out for settlement by people whose descendants were to become the rednecks of Campbell’s poetry. Now the rednecks, like the Indians before them, found their hunting grounds shrinking.

  IT HAD been a frontier state, but always with this contradictory component of slavery. It was of slavery that the old plantation land around Natchez, on the river, spoke. That land, as flat and warm and soft as the ricelands of South Carolina, spoke of wealth and the need for black men, by the thousands. But Natchez also had its plantation houses, nowadays the object twice a year of “pilgrimages”: the old sentimentality of the South, the divided mind, the beauty and sorrow of the past containing the unmentionable, ragged, black thing of slavery.

  It was a wretched little town, steaming after rain on its “bluff”—not very high—beside the muddy river. Rain dripped from the heavy branches of the red and white crape-myrtle trees. It had had an oil boom. That boom, like so many other Southern booms, had abated.

  Louisiana lay across the river. I drove there, hoping to find some solid, real place—rather than something connected with the tourist trade—to have lunch in. It was flat, delta country. The air that came through the car’s air conditioning smelled of onions. It was this high smell, as much as the flatness of the land and the apparent hopelessness of my quest—just fast-food places beside the highway: tall, beckoning signs above, simple structures below, bright colors against the flat green—that drove me back to Natchez.

  The Louisiana town was called Vidalia. Vidalia was also the name of a kind of onion. It must have been a delicacy in the South; in many places I had seen home-painted signs at the roadside offering Vidalia onions. So I smelled onions until I got back to Natchez, where I had the jungle-sewer smell, the smell of the river, which was almost exactly like the jungle-sewer smell of Manaus, on the Amazon, in Brazil. Just as the rusting corrugated-iron roofs and the relaxed black people sitting in old wooden houses or standing or rocking and staring gave a touch of the West Indies—as disturbing to one’s sense of place as the over
grown tennis courts of Tuskegee had been: those courts one afternoon, with African students at play, had absolutely suggested Africa.

  And I was wrong about the Louisiana town of Vidalia. A woman in a souvenir shop with a little view of the river told me so. The Vidalia of the onions was in Georgia, however much I might have smelled onions in Vidalia, Louisiana.

  The woman, suffering—trade wasn’t so good—said: “My husband loves Vidalia onions. On Sundays”—they lived on the other side of the river—“when we are going to the club, he will say, ‘Susan, get a couple of Vidalia onions.’ I will say, ‘To take to the club? On Sunday?’ And he will say, ‘Bring me the onions.’ He has a black girl up there in the club who spoils him. He loves bread, butter, ketchup, and slices and slices of Vidalia onions. She fixes it for him.”

  There was a cloudburst. I looked over her stock. She was selling a big black mammy in a long red dress over a white blouse.

  She said, “The day I bought them I said to Pearlene—she’s the cook—‘Pearlene, do you know what I’ve done this morning? I’ve bought two of you.’ It broke her up, and she said, ‘Well, at least you could buy me the dress to go with it.’ ”

  It cleared up. But as soon as I went outside it began to rain again. I went back into the shop.

  I said, “I don’t want to get a cold.”

  She said, “The first year I ran this place I got bronchitis every day. If it wasn’t for my husband, I wouldn’t have stuck it out. But then somehow I developed an immunity. Silver tarnishes in three days in this kind of weather. Polishing silver every three days can’t be good for the silver.”

  The rain fell harder, big, splashing drops. She talked on, pleased to have the company, in the middle of her Natchez souvenirs. The Mississippi was hazed with mist and rain; the bridge was indistinct; the Louisiana bank couldn’t be seen.

  And when I got back to Jackson—driving along the Indian Natchez Trace Parkway—I found that the rain, and the great heat, and my own ignorance of the beauties to look for, had kept me from the other wonder of Natchez. The river was altering its course; the bank at some place was being washed away; and some of the pretty old houses of planter days were collapsing into the river.

  And every gal on Natchez bluff

  Will cry as we go by, oh.

  They were lines brought back to me by the weather, and the heat, and the thought of plantation labor: lines, perhaps mangled by memory, from a long narrative poem about the Civil War by Stephen Vincent Benét, which I had looked at forty years before.

  6

  NASHVILLE

  Sanctities

  DRIVING BACK one stormy afternoon in Mississippi from the Delta to Jackson, and excited by the dark sky, the rain, the lightning, the lights of cars and trucks, the spray that rose window-high from heavy wheels, I began to be aware of the great pleasure I had taken in traveling in the South. Romance, a glow of hopefulness and freedom, had already begun to touch the earlier stages of the journey: my arrival at Atlanta, the drive from there to Charleston. I had all but forgotten the writing anxieties I had had on both those occasions.

  And I thought that afternoon that it would have completed my pleasure if I didn’t have to write anything; if I didn’t have to worry about what to do next and who to see; if I could simply be with the experience. But if I wasn’t writing, if I didn’t have a purpose and at times a feeling of urgency, if the writing hadn’t given me a schedule, places to go to, how would I have passed the days at the Ramada Renaissance hotel in Jackson, beside the freeways? Would I have even come to Mississippi?

  The land was big and varied, in parts wild. But it had nearly everywhere been made uniform and easy for the traveler. One result was that no travel book (unless the writer was writing about himself) could be only about the roads and the hotels. Such a book could have been written a hundred years ago. (Fanny Kemble’s account of traveling in 1838 from Philadelphia to the Georgia Sea Islands, by rail and stagecoach, partly on a road covered with logs, is a proper adventure.)

  Such a book can still be written about certain countries in Africa, say. It is often enough for a traveler in that kind of country to say, more or less, “This is me here. This is me getting off the old native bus and being led by strange boys, making improper proposals, to some squalid lodging. This is me having a drink in a bar with some local characters. This is me getting lost later that night.”

  This kind of traveler is not really a discoverer. He is more a man defining himself against a foreign background; and, depending on who he is, the book he writes can be attractive. A book like that can be written about the United States only if the writer, taking the reader into his confidence, sets himself up as alien or outlandish in some way. Generally, though, this approach cannot work in the United States. The place is not and cannot be alien in the simple way an African country is alien. It is too well known, too photographed, too written about; and, being more organized and less informal, it is not so open to casual inspection.

  I had been concerned, from the start of my own journey, to establish some lines of inquiry, to define a theme. The approach had its difficulties. At the back of my mind was always a worry that I would come to a place and all contacts would break down and I would not get beyond the uniformity of highway and chain hotel (the very romance I was surrendering to that afternoon in the Delta). If you travel on a theme, the theme has to develop with the travel. At the beginning your interests can be broad and scattered. But then they must be more focused; the different stages of a journey cannot simply be versions of one another. And, more than the other kind of travel, this traveling on a theme depended on luck. It depended on the people you met, the little illuminations you had. As with the next day’s issue of a fast-moving daily newspaper, the shape of the chapter in hand was continually being changed by accidents on the way.

  Pure luck—our conversation had begun so tamely—had given me Campbell’s lyrical account of the rednecks of Rankin County: the outdoor life, relic of frontier self-sufficiency, mixed up with a dislike of black people, and oddly meshed with the love of country music, “down-home music, crying music,” and the cult of Elvis Presley.

  That meeting with Campbell (putting to flight ideas about Faulkner and Oxford, Mississippi) had suggested to me how I might move.

  Though I knew little about music; and the achievement of Presley, while he lived, had passed me by.

  PRESLEY’S BIRTHPLACE was in the small town of Tupelo in northern Mississippi.

  The businessman who was taking me there said, “He was the lowest of the low.” He spoke gravely, without compassion; and with a very slight toss of the head. His distaste for the lowness he had in mind was touched with something like awe.

  I remembered Campbell’s words, and quoted them: “ ‘The all-time neck’?”

  “Lower than that.”

  In a magazine in the Jackson hotel I had seen a photograph of the narrow, two-roomed “shotgun” house, front porch opening into bedroom opening into back kitchen. I had expected, from the photograph, to find a preserved building in an urban wasteland. But Tupelo was a busy little town, one of the busier business places in Mississippi, and the area around the Presley birthplace had become suburban, with the house itself like somebody’s ancillary cabin (or “dependency”) in the shade of a tree, with lawn all around.

  On the front porch was a swing seat for two, hung on chains fixed to the ceiling. The front room was the bedroom. It was freshly papered, with a simple floral design; and on one wall was a framed printed copy of the “If” poem.

  I asked the woman in attendance whether the poem had been there in the Presley days—in the days of Presley’s father, that is, who was said to have built the house. It was a foolish question; the woman didn’t answer. The businessman said that the paper on the walls in the old days would have been newspaper.

  And of course the house had been made to look as pretty as possible, with the swing seat and the bedstead and the period stuff in the kitchen—like something from the Mississi
ppi Agriculture and Forestry Museum in Jackson, where the artifacts, the household tools, of only a few years before had been put on reverential display because, though so recent, they were part of a special country past which many people had shared and which had now vanished. (In England the 1920s are within reach, like the day before yesterday. In Mississippi the 1920s are long ago, closer to the beginning of things.)

  In the Mississippi museum the past on display could be felt as a kind of religion, a bonding. And there was something of that feeling in the prettied-up little shotgun house. (Imagine people living in that cramped space, though: imagine the crush, the disorder.) The very lowness of the man’s origins had made him that much more sacred, to the—fattish—people who sat on the swing seat and had their photographs taken.

  At the back of the house was a hall where cards and souvenirs and copies of Memphis newspapers printed the day after Presley’s death in 1977 were on sale; and there was a new small chapel, with stained glass. At the side of the house was a park. Presley money had worked that magic. It was like the stories one heard—and these stories were always moving, the fulfillment of so many kinds of fantasies—of nurses in hospitals and other simple people whom Presley had surprised with the gift of a Cadillac.

  In the souvenir shop the businessman said, “Did you get that woman’s accent? Listen.” He spoke with the awe with which he had spoken of Presley’s origins. But my ears didn’t have the fine local tuning. They didn’t pick up what the businessman heard.