A Turn in the South

  But then, after Tallahassee and Tuskegee, I had adjusted. Modern air-conditioning systems—not the single-room units, as debilitating by their noise and cold currents as the heat they pumped away—made that adjustment possible. The summer became something one had learned to live with. Until, in northwestern Georgia one day, about a week after I had arrived, there came, quite suddenly, the great heat, with thermometer temperatures of almost a hundred degrees. And that heat stayed in its first spell for three weeks.

  I wasn’t aware the first day that the heat had come. The air conditioning of house and car and shops had set up an expectation of temperature contrasts. But then the ground heated up and the air heated up. Every exposed object radiated heat. To be in the open was to breathe in hot, humid air that irritated one’s lungs.

  The house where I was staying was on the side of a hill and was set among fields and woodland. Outside the estate there were many small houses. From the road the area would have appeared to be pure cracker country. But from the estate itself the view—and it was an extensive one—showed no other house, showed nothing mean or disturbing. From the house and the pines around the house the hill sloped down, through rough open meadow, to an artificial pond and the branch-littered bank of a creek or river. Beyond, between massed trees, were glimpses of other fields and meadows; and in the distance were forested hills, blue fading into gray, line beyond line.

  There had been very few birds in the wood around the house. Now, in the heat, there appeared to be none. The crickets, though, started up as usual in the late afternoon, before the light changed, the cricket sound steady but with occasional, odd fadings-away. The meadows, the one in front of the house and the ones in the distance, browned after two or three days; the trees, both near and far, showed greener and darker. Then the leaves of some of the big trees around the house yellowed and fluttered down in masses for minutes at a time, as though it were autumn.

  The house dogs, importunate before for walks and human company, now became more private in daylight, raising a tail in greeting, letting it drop, and then going hunch-shouldered, head down, tail between legs, to the hollows they had dug themselves in the earth below the floor of the porch. In a pond beside the road on the way to Fort Oglethorpe cattle stood in muddy water up to their bellies—one might have been in India.

  The sky darkened in various places far away. But it seemed for many days that only other places were getting the rain. One day, though, it came, with wind. I saw it first on the water of the pool. Away from that, on the concrete edge of the pool, on the sandy ground, and on the wood shingles of the house roof, the rain dried almost as soon as it fell. But just as the first flakes of a snowfall can melt before the snow starts building up, so the rain now slowly soaked the roof shingles, and began to fall too fast on the pool edge to be evaporated away at once. Slowly the wet began to show.

  I opened the door to hear the rain and to smell it. There was the baked-earth smell—the first-rain smell that in India is re-created by some perfumers, using a kind of clay on a sandalwood-oil base, to make a monsoon scent. To this there was added a deep smell of pine, from the wet and cooling pine logs of the house.

  After the rain the dogs were everywhere active, running about the littered yards or ornamented gardens of small houses and mobile homes, or trotting intently at the sides of the road, as though they needed to be up and about in the cooler weather, after their long confinement, and as though they had been called out everywhere by the earth smells the rain had released. For a long time after the rain had fallen, the asphalted roads steamed.

  The thermometer fell twenty degrees in a few hours. But it was the merest remission in the heat, which soon returned: as imprisoning, while it lasted, as any spell of severe winter weather in the far North. It was hard to understand how people had made out here before air conditioning and screens. In the days before travel was easy, this kind of heat would have thrown people into themselves, as much as the winters of the Far North are said to throw Scandinavians into themselves. And perhaps this six-month summer weather, hot rising to hotter, was a factor in the still-visible degeneracy of a section of the local white population (the pinelanders whom Fanny Kemble observed would have left issue); and a factor as well in the almost Indian obsession of the South with religion, the idea of a life beyond the senses.

  TO THE west was Nashville or the area around it, awaiting the change that was going to come with the Saturn plant. To the east, in North Carolina, was the area known as the Research Triangle, bounded by the university campuses of Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham, where over a period of almost thirty years a big industrial park of seventy-five hundred acres had been created: thirty thousand new jobs there, poor North Carolina pineland landscaped into the discreetest kind of industrial garden, many modern technological and pharmaceutical names represented by new buildings, long low lines of brick or concrete and glass, giving an impression of spaciousness and order and elegance, the land of rural poverty remade to suit its new function, the South seemingly abolished here, as it had been abolished at the space-research town of Huntsville in Alabama.

  At Huntsville the Southern businessman with me had pointed out a field of cotton—more than a crop: something from the past—literally across the road from a high-tech building: cotton, which, the businessman said, tore your hands and broke your back (because the plants were short and you had to bend all day to pick cotton).

  In some such way, at the edge of the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, a small, well-tended field of tobacco was pointed out to me in late August: tobacco the famous old crop of North Carolina, the very names of some towns here more famous now as the names of cigarettes—Winston, Salem.

  When I had gone with Howard to his home town at Easter I had seen the tobacco seedlings being planted. I didn’t know the plant and, though I must have seen tobacco in many places after that, I didn’t know what I was looking at until now, when the bigness of the leaves was noticeable. I had been told that the great heat we had had in late July and the first half of August would have been good for cotton; and I thought that the same heat—which had yellowed the leaves of forest trees—had scorched the edges of the tobacco leaves lower down. But the tobacco leaves were ripening rather than drying. That was the way tobacco leaves ripened, from the bottom up.

  Tobacco leaves had to be picked or cropped only when they were ripe, so a row had to be worked many times. The lowest leaves on the plants we were looking at had already been cropped. Tobacco not only called for stoop labor; it had also to be harvested at the time of the greatest heat. The ridges and furrows of this tobacco field were as without weeds and as clean as a swept dirt yard. This little field, which one might have passed by without a second thought, spoke of a slow, detailed labor, as back-breaking as the cotton labor.

  The man who made me see all this was James Applewhite. He was from an old tobacco family in eastern North Carolina. He was fifty-two. He was a teacher at Duke University in Durham—the university founded and endowed by a tobacco fortune. He was also a poet. And though he was no longer part of the tobacco culture, and though he spoke of it as physically far away (though in fact it was reasonably close, two hours by car), that tobacco culture of eastern North Carolina was one of the subjects of his poetry, together with all that old semi-rural family life.

  I didn’t know his poetry when I met him. But I began to be aware of his quality as a man when he stopped to show me the tobacco field: a poet’s sensibility and a farmer’s dedication, with an academic evenness of manner. He was a slender man, narrow-waisted, concerned about exercise. He took all my inquiries seriously, and spoke from the heart, without affectation, with a farmer’s matter-of-factness, offering me at once, as soon as he saw that I was receptive, thoughts he would have spent some time arriving at.

  Durham was not his landscape, he said; he had only recently begun to make it the subject of his poetry. There was no landscape like the first that one knew. He elaborated on that, and he couldn’t have known how
directly he was speaking to me (the scarcely bearable idea of the beginning of things now existing only in my heart, no longer existing physically in the ravaged, repopulated Trinidad of today). I could understand how the past he meditated on, though physically so close and still existing in Wilson County, was in his mind quite far away.

  He took me by byways to his house. At a certain stage, after we had seen a man on a sit-down mowing machine in the garden of a house, he talked about the sweeping of the dirt yards in the old days. The soil would have been sandy; it would have been swept with brooms made of dogwood saplings. “And the marks of the sweeping would have been deliberately left in the yard to show that it had been swept and was clean.” Would that sweeping have been done by a servant? No. “The mistress of the house did that with pride, as evidence of her good order.”

  That touched something in me. But at the time all I could think of was the African huts and their clean yellow-brown yards on the banks of the Congo or Zaire River, seen from a river steamer twelve years ago. The yards were scraped like that, I had been told, to keep snakes away. Jim Applewhite thought there might have been something in that, even in the South. And that brought to mind Will Campbell’s story about the “stomp” outside his bare, clean, family house yard near McComb, Mississippi.

  Something else remained, though. It came to me later: a memory, from some unplaceable time in my childhood, of the marks in dark sand of a cocoye broom, a broom made from the hard central stems—rigid at the top, but thin and limber at the bottom—of the blades of a coconut branch or frond. Those marks in a corner of a Trinidad Indian yard that came back to me did stand for order and cleanliness, almost the piety of a house, its adherence to good old ways. There was a ritual about yard-sweeping in Indian or Hindu families like ours in Trinidad when I was a child. It had to be done first thing in the morning; it was part of the purification of a house before prayers. And there was something like a religious interdiction against sweeping after nightfall (no doubt because valuable things might have been swept away and lost). And perhaps, as well, some such idea of religion and piety lay at the back of the Japanese raked garden.

  Farmer, child, and poet came together in Jim Applewhite’s contemplation of the physical circumstances of his childhood, and in his serious, generous talk.

  His house was in the countryside, in a dead end with a few other houses in a patch of woodland. It was a wooden house. The end wall of his sitting room was made up of old wide planks set diagonally. At the back was an unroofed platform looking onto woodland—a style of living that in other countries was open only to a few, but here in the United States was open to many.

  He gave me a copy of his new book, Ode to a Chinaberry Tree, published in 1986 by Louisiana State University Press. While he got tea ready, I looked at “A Leaf of Tobacco.”

  Is veined with mulatto hands

  Then the veins were seen as streams, “a river system draining a whole basin,” collecting all the historical debris of the South. At the same time:

  Scented and sweetened with rum and molasses,

  Rolled into cigarettes or squared in a thick plug,

  Then inhaled or chewed, this history is like syrupy

  Moonshine distilled through a car radiator so the salts

  Strike you blind. Saliva starts in the body. We die for this leaf.

  The crop that required such labor, slave and free, the crop that gave the region a special calendar and culture, was a narcotic, dangerous to men. Commercially it was on the way out: another little disaster for the South. Jim Applewhite didn’t smoke, had smoked only for a short while many years before. But the culture was so close to him that, almost in spite of himself, the tobacco product in the poem comes out as tempting. The idea of rum and molasses and tobacco, the sweet and the bitter, made me think of Will Campbell’s aromatic, moist, licorice-sweetened Beech Nut chewing tobacco, and made me think of the cellophane or clear-plastic-wrapped squares of tobacco, as dark and rich as fruitcake, at the checkouts of Southern supermarkets.

  He liked tobacco as a culture, for the formalities that went with the growing and curing and selling of the crop. And when, later that evening, I read his poetry in my hotel room, I found it enriched by his talk and the sights I had seen, and already half familiar.

  In “For W. H. Applewhite” he wrote of his grandfather. (And in my imagination I saw the tobacco field he had shown me at the edge of the Research Triangle Park.)

  He dug grey marl near the swamp, set out

  Tobacco by hand, broke the suckers and tops

  Before they flowered, leaving some for seed.

  Cropped the broad sand lugs, bent double

  In air hot rank in his face from the rained-on Soil.

  “How to Fix a Pig,” a celebration of a “pig-picking” at the end of the tobacco harvest, was also a celebration of the man who “fixed” or barbecued the pig, a man called Dee Grimes, who was—still—the sharecropper or tenant on the old Applewhite farm.

  It comes from down home, from

  When they cured tobacco with wood, and ears of corn

  Roasted in ashes in the flue.

  The pig was the last thing.

  The party At the looping shelter when the crop was all in.

  The fall was in its smell,

  Like red leaves and money.

  Agricultural communities are conditioned, given a calendar, by the crops they grow, and the origin or first purpose of the crop becomes unimportant: rice in Java, tobacco in North Carolina, sugarcane in Trinidad in the old days. The talk in that poem of celebration at the end of the crop—the hard crop, originally the slave crop—brought back very faint memories of something called “crop-over” in Trinidad, when the sugarcane had all been cut, and the horns of the black water buffaloes that drew the cane carts were decorated and there was something like music in the main road of the small country town where I lived, at the very edge of the sugarcane fields, acres upon acres, scene of bitter labor: memories like snapshots from very far back, when I was six or seven, memories seemingly spread over a long time, but perhaps in reality the memories of no more than a week or so.

  THE GREAT size of the land, the distance between places—this was one of the things that would have separated Jim Applewhite’s comprehension of the world as a child from my own comprehension of things in Trinidad. Was it oppressive or frightening sometimes, in the old days? Did people feel lost? I asked him some days later, when we met at the hotel where I was staying.

  He said, “For my grandfather to go a buggy ride to Wilson, the county center and center of tobacco sales, ten miles there and ten miles back, was a day’s journey.”

  And even that was already familiar to me from the poetry:

  His memory held an earlier era: a steamboat

  To the New York fair, when soot spoiled his hat.

  Horse and buggy courting, when ten miles two ways

  Was a day.

  “Automobiles began to come into that area in the 1920s, and electric lights. Electrification tended to follow the roads. My wife’s mother was reminiscing earlier this year, remembering when electrification got to the country. People did feel lost here. The sense of needing to form a life that had its own regularities, its own formalities—that was a reason that religion had the contour it had. That’s why the formalities of tobacco-growing were so important.”

  I asked him about the tobacco field he had shown me. I had seen that when I had just arrived in the area and was in a geographical haze.

  “We were on the boundary between Orange and Durham counties. The old road from Durham to Chapel Hill. There was a little soybean growing too, a little soybean nearby. What is happening in this area is that the rural agrarian economy is being replaced by another economy. Which made that farm unusual. It was five or six miles from Duke University campus.”

  Then he spoke about the formalities of tobacco-growing.

  “Tobacco was associated with an older mode of living. Associated for me with my grandfather, with
a kind of ritualized cyclical time order, where the cycle of the seasons was marked by sowing the plant bed, preparing the land in the spring, setting out the plants in early summer, harvesting in midsummer. You’d be finishing up curing and grading in August.”

  Grading?

  “Grading involved separating the leaves from the different levels of cropping. And actually different levels of ripeness. So that the best tobacco was placed together, wrapped together, in these ‘hands,’ to bring the highest price at auction. There might be three or four tobacco companies, or five maybe—in flush times—bidding for the tobacco whose quality they liked. The buyers would travel to different markets. There would be a kind of marketing sequence. The market would begin south and go up north, following the pattern of tobacco ripening and harvesting, roughly.

  “I think that tobacco in its best incarnation was a sort of folk art. An art practiced by people who were extremely good at it but who might not be able to read and write. I remember when other areas, like Canada and Rhodesia, were trying to get into tobacco-growing, they would come to North Carolina to get to these folk experts—who might not be able to sign their own names, but who knew how to harvest, cure, and grade tobacco.

  “The artful thing about harvesting is knowing when the tobacco should be cropped. It won’t cure properly if it’s picked too soon or too late. You can’t make a perfect leaf some seasons. That’s why tobacco has a vintage, like wine.”

  “Are you an expert?”

  “No, no. I just know what is involved. I saw this around me all my youth. Mostly, I think I was impressed by the aesthetic contour of the tobacco ritual. Planting had to be done at the right time, with hand care, individually. A handcrafted mode of agricultural production. It’s much more mechanized now. But this handcrafted aspect of tobacco was predicated upon cheap labor in the South at a time when the South was economically disadvantaged.