Jim said, “We’ll go to the farm.”
We crossed the railroad track. It had once divided the white town from the black. There was still an Amtrak station; and, on what would have been the white side of town, the old hotel. Like an arrangement of properties in a simple film set: station, rails, the small hotel.
“Traveling salesmen would have stayed here,” Jim said.
“What a life.”
“Some of them would have liked it.”
Beyond the rails, and in what was still the black town, there were shotgun houses, as narrow as mobile homes, and set close together side by side. Already the Wilson of the big houses seemed far away.
The ten miles to the farm went very quickly. There were old tobacco barns everywhere, three or four together sometimes in a field. And, before I was ready for the farm, we had turned off the road and parked in a clear space between an old two-story frame house and many galvanized-iron farm buildings. There were two oldish cars in the yard: part of the yard’s metallic aspect. Across the road were fields connected with the farm.
I had been told by Jim about the family house and farm, about the family move to the nearby small town of Stantonsburg, about the sharecropping family and the black hired hands. But I hadn’t taken it all in. I was confused by all the things I had been told; and when we stopped in the yard I didn’t absolutely know where I was. I thought that there would have been Jim’s family in the old frame house; I thought of the sharecropper as a kind of employee.
When Jim got out and went into the house, I opened my can of nuts and poured orange juice into a paper cup. Nuts in one hand, orange juice in another, with an elbow keeping the supermarket orange-juice carton upright beside me—that was how I was when a heavy pink-and-white man in his late forties, in dark-blue trousers and a check shirt, and with glasses, came out to the car, smiling.
He said, with a certain confidence, “I’m Dee Grimes.”
I knew the name well. He was the man celebrated in the poem “How to Fix a Pig.” His speech, his life in tobacco, had been turned into poetry.
He waited for me to make a move out of the car—he had been told that I was coming. But I was encumbered. I couldn’t open the car door just then, and couldn’t find words to explain. He became abashed, said something I couldn’t follow about “Mr. Jim,” and took a step back.
I said at last that I had read the poem about him.
This pleased him. He said that someone else who had read the poem had wanted him to do some cooking.
And it was only after some time that I understood—what in fact I had been told before—that Dee Grimes, the sharecropper, lived in the old Applewhite family house—one of Jim’s sacred places.
It stands today, upstairs porch railed in
Before narrow windows, their antique glass
Upright and open toward the cleanly furrows.
Their hand-blown panes show lines imperfectly,
As if miraging heat since the Civil War
Had imprinted ripples.
Between the main house and the kitchen, which was a separate building, there was a wide, covered passage, a “breezeway,” with open screen walls. (There would have been no screens in the old days, Jim said.) It was there that we eventually sat, though Dee Grimes would have liked us to go inside to enjoy the air conditioning.
His talk—not easy for me to follow: he sat on the other side of a table and at some distance from it—was about the drought. There had been no rain and no rain. He had tried to dig a well, but he had found no water. Some of his talk was also about Dan, a neighbor. Dan had an irrigation system; Dan had watered three times this summer. Dan also had a mechanical tobacco-cropper; it had cost him $35,000 some years ago. Dan was that very day “putting in” tobacco, using the mechanical cropper to pick the ripe leaf, and then getting his people to “put in” the leaf in the curing barns.
He talked about the house; he had been told that I might be wanting to see that as well. He said that one of the most notable things about the house was that so much of it had been put together with wooden pegs, even the rafters of the breezeway. He took us inside. The house was more spacious than one would have thought from the outside. There was a solid feeling to the floor, no hollow sound in the wooden house, no resonance. The front rooms were of beautiful proportions, almost square, seventeen feet by eighteen, and high. When we were outside again, we considered the brick chimneys at the sides of the house, and the two railed porches facing the road and the fields across the road.
Jim said: “It’s a lovely old house. A noble house, in its plain vernacular fashion. I especially like the tall windows. Although I have never actually looked out across fields from the upper porch, it seems to me a vantage point.”
The bulk barns for curing tobacco were at the other side of the open yard. Three or four stood side by side and were like little mobile homes. The heat inside was electrically generated, and the air around the barns smelled of hot green leaf. When Dee opened the door of one barn the air that came out was very hot and the smell was a little cloying. The outer leaves on the racks, leaves already brown, were ragged. Dee said this was from the colder air striking them every time he opened the door to have a look; the leaves farther in would be better.
In the packhouse—where the cured tobacco was stored, after it had been “ordered” (given moisture, that is) to prevent the cured leaves from going brittle and shredding away—we saw the poor crop of the year. In the large space there were just a few bundles of golden leaf in sacking. There was a warm, rich smell here, and the floorboards had a sheen from the resin of years. Without being asked, Dee prepared a couple of old-fashioned “hands”: taking six leaves or so, holding them stem up, and then tying them tightly at the stem (on the principle first of the cummerbund and then of the loincloth) with a good-quality leaf folded two or three times.
Dee’s wife—she had been out somewhere, and had just got back—came into the packhouse. She stood silently with us, watching Dee tie the hands.
The old mule barn was still whole, another of the metallic structures of the yard: a reminder of another labor of the past. There were no mules to look after now, but there were reminders of mules that had been there: the top boards of the stalls had been gnawed away in a wavy pattern.
At the end of the yard was an amazing contraption. It was a tobacco-leaf harvester, with a canopy. There were low metal seats for four croppers, and the idea was that as the harvester was pulled along by a tractor the seated croppers would break off the ripe leaves from the tobacco stalks, without the strain of bending or walking on their knees. But, with the “handers” and others needed to transfer the picked leaf to the clamps, it took eleven people to keep the harvester going. Labor, labor in midsummer—and a little distance away, just the roof and upper walls visible, was the small one-story house where the black hired hands would have lived.
Farmhouse, barns old and new, the house for the hired help at the back—there was as great a simplicity about this layout as about the railroad station, the railway track, and the small hotel at Wilson. But a poet had looked long at this yard; and everything in it was shot through with radiance for him. As I saw when, just before we left, Dee and his wife began to talk about the danger of branches falling off the oaks near the farmhouse.
Dee and his wife wanted the trees to be lopped. Jim was concerned; he didn’t want the trees to be lopped too hard, to lose their appearance. And for a while they talked, each side with its own interest.
We left at last to go on to the small town of Stantonsburg. This was where Jim Applewhite’s grandfather had moved after he had left the family farmhouse. It was there that Jim had been born. It wasn’t far away.
Jim said: “The Applewhites came from England, from Suffolk, and seem to have landed in Barbados. There are Applewhite or Apple-thwaite records in Barbados. The next records are in Virginia in the eighteenth century, and then in North Carolina. They were probably in Stantonsburg before the town was incorporated in 1818.
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“I’ve been told that at one time the Applewhites owned the land on both sides of the road between Stantonsburg and Saratoga, the next small town.”
There it was again, the recurring Southern story of great wealth in the past (the whole of the island of Trinidad, a third of an English county, a chest of gold that sent up a cloud of gold dust when it was emptied on to a floor). But there would have been some substance to this story: the Applewhites owned the Stantonsburg general store as well as a sawmill.
The town was like Wilson in miniature. There was even a railroad track dividing the black town from the white, the side-by-side black shotgun houses from the frame houses and the lawns.
We passed what had been the Applewhite store. It was a low white frame building with a shelter over the sidewalk. It now looked empty.
Jim said: “It held everything you’d need to house a crop or carry on your life. In the old days these stores were essentially a company store. In other words, the farmer would get everything they needed on credit, paying back when they sold their crop. And when my grandfather owned a lot of land the tenant farmers would get their things there and pay him back.”
And it occurred to me just then, driving past the now empty store, that—without my having intended it—my journey was ending almost as it had begun. I had gone to the town of Bowen at Easter with Howard and seen his home district from the other side of the tracks, as it were. (I had such a clear memory still of the oddity I had felt on the Sunday morning when, as we were walking to the black church, three white men had stopped in a car to ask the way to the country club.) This town was like Bowen in its size and appearance; and the Applewhites (as I was to learn, but not from Jim) owned slaves, at one time forty. (And how odd it was that, as soon as you began to live with the idea of slaves, you developed this other way of reckoning wealth—in slaves.)
Hetty, the daughter of a black sharecropper, had taken me to see Mr. Bowen, to pay my respects. She had then taken me to the black cemetery, where her father was buried. She had shown me the farmhouse, now in ruin, with small trees and vines growing right up against it, where her father had lived as a sharecropper. She had her special way of looking: her chant, as we had driven through the countryside, had been, “Black people, black people, white people, black people. All this side white people, all that side black people.” She had said, but quite late, unwilling to go into the gloom of the past, that tobacco (which she had grown both with her father and her husband) had made her cry.
At Bowen in the spring the flowers in the roadside grass had been purple. Now, in Stantonsburg, almost at the end of the summer, the flowers were yellow, little all-yellow daisies. And now, with Jim Applewhite, I was considering another kind of past: a past where the child had seen completeness, even in the stock—for tenants—of his grandfather’s general store: mule collars, tobacco twine, ten-penny nails (“Probably they were ten for a penny”), bonnets, shoes for children.
“I did feel there was a kind of complete world contained there. Partly because the houses here were built without architects, without trained builders, and I grew to feel that the capability of building those houses was contained in those objects in the store.”
The Applewhite house was in a residential street with two or three churches. Outside the Baptist church some black men and a white man were working. The street was full of children, many of them black, and for some reason they all had large ice-cream cones.
Old Mr. Applewhite was in the sitting room watching football on a big television set. He was eighty, and a little proud of his age. He was much shorter than his son, and stouter, his physique suggesting a man who had been very strong. He explained about the children and the ice cream. A local shop was celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary and selling ice creams for 5¢—which was what the shop had charged for an ice cream in 1912.
On the table in the dining room was food for our visit. And the old man had got out a magazine for me, The Flue Cured Tobacco Farmer, together with a booklet for tobacco farmers, How to Grow It Ripe.
Jim ate. I talked to his father.
He said, “Did my tenant show you some good stuff? This has been the sorriest tobacco crop for thirty-five years. There’s been no rain for thirteen weeks.”
He told me that the farm was between 150 and 175 years old, and he showed me a framed certificate that said that the farmhouse was on the Register of Historical Places. He thought that Dee should have persevered with his well and gone down a further twenty feet; someone he knew had found water at 150 feet.
Then he grew philosophical, religious. “We can’t complain. The farm has done very well, up until this year. If you do right by your fellow man it will be all right. My father was in the best financial shape of anybody around. And he did like kind of what Social Security does now. He was blessed.”
Later, in a back room, with a view through a screen door of the shaded lawn and the neighboring house, Jim and I sat and talked and I took down his words.
He had from the start spoken as though he had cut himself off from his past, made a far journey. But that past was here still, a couple of hours away from Durham—or as much of the past as a man of fifty-two might reasonably expect still to find. But a journey had been made; there had been a break.
“I was put to bed when I was six with what was then said to be rheumatic fever. My mother read me the whole of Huckleberry Finn. I staved in bed for a year. I was protected more than my fellow students for a few years. It set me apart. Something like that always happens to the person who is going to be a writer.
“I think I’m always conscious of the fact that I’m not truly of the world I’ve been showing you. I’ve not worked in tobacco. Dee Grimes is truly of that world. A real tobacco man, if you want to be colloquial. Educated in the school of hard knocks, educated by experience. I feel a kind of kinship and a kind of separation when I am with him.”
“Separation?”
“Presumably it began with that separation when I was a child, when I was set apart from those who were unselfconsciously playing their part in this eastern-North Carolina world, which is a world of action, not of thinking.”
Separation, and kinship. The Applewhite name was no longer in the windows of the store. But for Jim the letters on the glass—they had been in gold, and set in an arc—still existed, “in a ghostly way.”
“I do remember occasions of visiting back during my early years of college and once again experiencing what I have now almost forgotten—and that is a sensation of being so utterly at home in, and a part of, a place, that one feels somehow coextensive with the place.
“On the other hand, there is a sense of separateness in being in part of myself an observing stranger in my own native land. To the extent that at times I was fascinated by the idea of the pre-existence of the soul. Fascinated especially by the original Edgar Rice Burroughs book, Tarzan of the Apes, the first and best of the Tarzan books. Because in that book the Tarzan-to-be was landed in the jungle by the crash of his parents’ plane. There was something in that idea—of a person from another culture being deposited from the sky in a tropical environment—that was fascinating to me.”
It was extraordinary. Not only (as had happened more than once) did I find Jim Applewhite talking for me, expressing things I had felt as a child and an adolescent in Trinidad. He was also—though he was from the other side of the tracks—talking like Howard, Hetty’s son. In New York, at the airport, Howard had said, of the place that was his home, “I hated the place when I was young, for the continuity.” I had puzzled over that word “continuity.” It had meant old things, old buildings (like tobacco barns and farmhouses) still standing, keeping a place physically dull. It had also meant, as came out later, old ways persisting. When we had returned to New York after our Southern weekend, Howard had said, “I’m different. I felt different at the high school. It’s what you think and what you feel that makes you different. I always felt different. Which leads me to believe I was born in the wrong to
wn. Like many people.”
Jim Applewhite said: “My feeling of duality at that time was being physically in the world I identified with, but which on the other hand completely left out a whole other side of my psyche or my soul. There was still a cultural transmission here—from something quite other—through the churches, the hymns, the words and the music, the poetry of the Psalms in the King James Bible, and through books. My uncle would stay with us in the summer. He was a bachelor. He was probably my first literary influence. When I was six years old he told me stories which I later realized were from the Odyssey.
“There was a duality of worlds as a child and a young man that is probably not at all unique for a person of artistic inclinations, but which was given an exceptional tension by the intensity with which so many in this small-town world defied or opposed those values which were foreign to it—those cultural values that were transmitted from afar. There is a sense of self-subsistence about the South—that it is itself, knows itself, and needs nothing else. Because of this sense of beleaguered self-sufficiency it can be extremely pigheaded. It can cherish ignorance. It can cherish the unreasonable, the unreasoning.
“And I was hungry to have things explained. I remember looking up at the constellations and not knowing the names of the constellations. Or not knowing the names of trees. I have my telescope now, which I didn’t have then.
“Finally, one wanted consciousness, the right to be aware, or to name in language, in harmonious language, or in music—to name things, or else simply to name. Art is a sort of divine uselessness. That’s one of the reasons I’m also attracted to tobacco. It’s not practical. It’s not for any use that’s good for anything.”