A Turn in the South (33 page)

Wasn’t it a little self-indulgent, living so much in the past, especially now that times had changed?

“Yes. I’m enjoying the harvest now. But I don’t think I’ve done much as a fighter, a marcher for freedom.”

“That worries you?”

He didn’t say anything. Then he laughed. “I don’t know how I feel about it. I suppose I am in my own little world. And I suppose I’m selfish, being in my own world. I ought to be mad and angry and fighting. But I don’t get mad.”

“Is this something from religion? Did your grandparents teach you that?”

“I’m not religious. I’m not like many people who go to church every Sunday and want to be deacons.”

“Why do you look back at the past if you don’t know what you think about it?”

“I love to talk about the past.”

How far back did that past go? Did it go back to the days of slavery? It didn’t, of course. The past he liked to talk about was the past he could remember, that curiously sheltered past.

He said, “If my grandmother made fifty cents a day I ought to be happy with what I make now.”

What was it about his grandparents that he now especially remembered and liked?

“Pride. Pride. My grandmother used to sit up in church with her corset on. Very proud, very cultured-like. Very classy lady. I don’t know where she, and the others, got it from. Probably from the whites. Today I don’t see it. They’re nice people, but they don’t have that something. I suppose I don’t have it either. But you must know that I truly respect my past, be it segregated, be it filled with racism, be it whatever. Because I feel I have a place in the world, and I’m going to get it.”

The telephone rang. He took it up in the darkness. He listened more than he talked. He was being rebuked by someone he knew for not keeping an appointment.

He said, when he put the phone down, “I’ll drive you back to the Ramada.” That was where he had told the man on the phone to meet him. “We’ll talk again tomorrow. I’ll come for you at six.”

It was a relief to be out of the house and in the open, warm though the air was.

And now, driving to North Jackson, Lewis appeared to qualify some of the things he had said in his house. In the house he seemed not to have put together his thoughts about the civil-rights movement. Now he spoke with reverence of Martin Luther King.

He said, “If he hadn’t turned it the nonviolent way, they would have killed
every
black in Mississippi. Every black in the South.”

I heard real panic in the words.

I asked him again about his “little world.” Had it really protected him?

He said, “I suppose I was aware of everything outside. I was frightened of it—I suppose.”

And then, without prompting from me, he began to talk about God. In the house he had said he was not religious in the way most people were. Now he said that without God he would have done nothing; without God he would have been nothing; without God he didn’t know how he would have endured.

In the parking lot of the Ramada Renaissance he drove to the edge of one of the parking rows. There was a black man in a parked car. Lewis introduced me. The man in the car shrank from me.

Lewis didn’t come at six the next day, or at half past six. No one answered when I telephoned. About eight o’clock he answered. He sounded tired, distant.

“I’ve been ill. I’ve been to the doctor. I didn’t go to work today.”

“I telephoned very often and got no reply.”

“I was a long time at the doctor.”

He asked me to come to see him right away. I took a taxi. The ventilation in his house was better, but the clutter was as bad. He looked extraordinary. He was barefooted, with a dressing gown open over a bare chest and a black net over his hair. The getup was like a black version of the shower cap and white gown of the workers in the catfish plant.

He said, “The net’s to keep my hair curly.”

I began to say polite things about his illness. He brushed the subject aside. He walked barefoot about the sitting room. “I’ll tell you about my grandfather. I think he was the kind of man who knew how to handle people, especially Southern whites. ‘Yes, sir!’ ‘No, sir!’ And tip your hat to them and grin. But he was successful, in his day. Regardless of how mediocre it might seem today or yesterday, it happened. And that’s it.”

“It bothers you that you didn’t do more for the civil-rights movement?”

“The dogs never bit me. Does it bother me? I don’t know. You must decide for me.”

The telephone rang.

It was his friend again, the one of the night before.

Lewis said into the phone, “He’s here. We want your input.” He laughed, and seemed to be getting out of control, laughing into the phone, stamping with his bare feet, and acting a little for me.

He said, when he put the phone down, “My friend is scared of you.” He laughed in his new way. “You must take off that jacket. Take
off that jacket, and let me show you how the blacks really live. I will take you to certain places. You will get the smell of corruption.”

He made a gesture with his hand, like a cook suggesting an appealing aroma. And I understood then, putting things together, that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically. The line of development that had begun with his grandfather was ending with him: his own little world, different now from the one he had grown up in.

He began to dress to meet his friend. He said—and I’d hardly arrived—“I’ll take you back to your hotel.”

He put on his trousers and shirt, and we went outside. He left the door unlatched. I pointed this out to him. He said, “I have to do something. I’ll go back inside.”

I waited for him for some time. When he came out there was a white cream on his chin, the white glowing in the dusk and against his blackness.

He said, “Blacks have kinky hair. Do you know about that? That hair grows under the skin. It is very hard to shave. This cream I’ve put on softens it. By the time I come back here I will be ready to shave, and I will get a very smooth shave.”

And that was how he drove me back to the alien white part of the city, with the net on his hair and the white cream on his chin and upper lip.

He gave me another day to meet him. But he couldn’t make it; I wasn’t surprised. He sounded very tired and slow and far away when I telephoned. He asked me to telephone later in the evening. When I did there was no answer.

J
UST AS
it is hard to comprehend American distances and the heat of the Southern summer until one has experienced them, so in Mississippi and in the city of Jackson it was hard to understand that people of seventy would have lived through many different worlds; that the childhoods of solid citizens would have left memories of frontier life, primitive conditions, and closed communities, things hard now to recapture.

The town of Eupora, in the hills to the east of the Delta, is now on Highway 82. But someone like Judge Sugg, who was born in 1916 and retired from the state Supreme Court in 1983, carries memories from his childhood in Eupora of the time when the Big Black River had no
bridge, only a ford. So that when the river was high there was no means of crossing it, and people stayed where they were, in their little communities, until the water subsided.

“We had dirt roads. No electricity. I’ve seen all sorts of wonderful things happen in the world. I enjoy the luxury of modern civilization. Instant television, instant entertainment. Instant everything. I enjoy it all. Life was hard for us in the early days. At the end of the Civil War we were destitute. And the slaves who had been freed had no training. It has taken us a hundred years to rebuild our capital base. Our slaves had no capital. We were an agricultural state.”

Dates are relative. To me 1890, if I apply it to a place like Trinidad, and apply it therefore to the time when my Indian ancestors were just migrating to the New World—to me that date belongs to a period of darkness, something mythical, very far away. Apply it to England, and I think of the modern world: Oscar Wilde, the young Kipling, Gandhi (four years younger than Kipling) studying law in London. In the South dates became relative in this way. And I understood that many of the people of a certain age whom one saw had a special kind of success story to tell. Many of them had started with very little, had started in the wilderness perhaps with only an idea of civilization. (Many of them would have started with as little as my grandparents in Trinidad; but—a further relativity—they had found themselves in a place of greater potential.)

“Everybody was poor. I was fortunate. My father was a merchant. He was also sheriff for one term. He ran a general merchandise store. Merchants lent to farmers. They furnished the merchandise to the farmers, and at the end of the year, when the farmers sold their crops, mainly cotton, they settled. If there was a bad year the merchants suffered with the farmers, because if the farmers couldn’t pay the merchants couldn’t collect. There was nothing in writing, no promissory notes or anything. The saying was, ‘My word is my bond.’ ”

A success story for the judge. But in the seventy or eighty years before his birth it had been a life with little movement forward for his ancestors. That too is worth contemplating.

“My family on both sides came to Mississippi between 1830 and 1840. My Sugg grandfather lost his leg in the Civil War. He could barely read and write. When he came out he saw that a one-legged man couldn’t make a living as a farmer. He went to school for three years, and then taught school for three years. Then he became treasurer of
Calhoun County for four years and chancery clerk of Webster County for four years. He bought a farm. He had seven children who grew to adulthood, and some tenant families. The tenants were black, former slaves. I was up there about ten years ago, and I met some old people who were descendants of the tenants my grandfather had. When I left Webster County about a third of the people were black. I’m a country boy, you know. I haven’t become accustomed to living in the city yet.

“Once a year a tent would come. They called them ‘chautauquas.’ They would stay about a week in the town. They would have musical programs; sometimes a man would lecture; and you would have plays, dramas. That was our outside entertainment. They came in by train. That was the only way they could come. On Sunday afternoon a passenger train came through. We had four a day. But on Sunday at two-thirty we had a passenger train that went east. A third of the town would go down to the station to see the train, to see who was on the train and who was getting off, and who was leaving town. Everybody just had a big time—that was something to look forward to.

“I remember when I was real young we received word that the Ringling Brothers Circus was going to come through some time after midnight. About half the town got up to get to see the circus train go through. You could see we were hurting for entertainment. It was over a hundred cars—that’s what it seemed like at the time.”

Unlike the Delta, where there were rich and poor and caste or class distinctions, in the hills there were no social distinctions, except between black and white.

“We didn’t have private schools. Everybody went to church. We didn’t have a society section. We didn’t have a social register. We were just people. We had lots of illiterate whites. In the Depression we had only six months of school for one year; at other times we had eight months. There just wasn’t the money to pay the teachers. Formal education suffered. But many of the older people were self-educated, like my father. He wrote a beautiful hand. He used good English.

“I had a desire to look at the things I had read about. New York to me was just on the map. I just never dreamed I would go there. I knew that China was across the Pacific and Europe across the Atlantic. I never dreamed I would go to these places. Yes, I dreamed of it, but I didn’t think it would become a reality.

“But most people were content to remain where they were. We were a close-knit group of people. We had only about thirteen, fourteen
hundred people in the town. The only way you could go anywhere was by rail, and you couldn’t keep a secret in a place like that.

“I believe that closeness is responsible for some of the Mississippi character. When you live that close to people you have to get on with them, or you’d be ostracized. You learn to accept people as they are. We had many eccentrics, rugged individualists. A friend of mine said the other day, ‘We don’t seem to produce characters like we used to.’ I said, ‘We’re the characters now.’ ”

The closeness of that community, deprived and ill-educated, led to violence. People mightn’t feel the need for promissory notes, and mightn’t lock their doors, mightn’t even have keys for some of the doors. But tempers could be quick. There were homicides, crimes of passion.

“They would just get angry, get into an argument, lose their temper. Some of them would be drunk. They would maybe be quarreling and have a fight, and somebody would get killed. They were slow to arouse, but when you get somebody like that angry somebody would get hurt. Otherwise, helpful people, lovely people.”

Self-reliance was another aspect of that Mississippi country character. “We had two and a half acres of land behind the house. To work that requires hard work. It makes you recognize the fact that anything you want you have to work for it. And it’s tied into the religion, because we are taught in the churches that work was honorable and you were not to be lazy and you shouldn’t be reliant on other people for a livelihood. In the Book of Proverbs there are many references to work and discipline and reward.”

So there again it was, the idea of religion threaded into the idea of the pioneer past.

“I guess I was about the third or fourth generation from the pioneers. I guess some of it still remained. But I wasn’t too conscious of it. When I think back to my childhood it reminds me of what I read about countries that are emerging. They are just beginning, some of them, to realize they can have a better life, but they will have to begin with what they have, and that takes education and training. This country was built on hard work.

“The other day I went on a trip, my wife and I, to Arizona. I had been there before. The desert country has an appeal, with the openness of the space. We drove around for four days. And I got to thinking
about the first people who went and settled Arizona, and the difficult times they had crossing canyons, rivers, finding water, and protecting themselves from the Indians who were unfriendly—not all were, but some were. And I’m just thankful that I live in a country that has a heritage of people who are willing to look beyond the horizon and catch a vision of opening up new country for others to enjoy a better life.