A Turn in the South (35 page)

“Is that because they’re descendants of pioneers?”

“There’s no question about it. They’re descendants of pioneers. They’re satisified to live in those mobile homes. I never knew how my father was so cultured. If you saw the place he came from—he came from the most absolute, the most desolate place in the woods on the Mississippi-Alabama border. The rednecks have the pioneer attitude, all right. They don’t want to go to the damn country club and play golf. They ain’t got fifteen damn cents, and they’re just tickled to death.

“They’re Scotch-Irish in origin. A lot of them intermarried, interbred. I’m talking about the good old rednecks now. He’s going to have an old eight-to-five job. But there’s an upscale redneck, and he’s going to want it cleaned up. Yard mowed, a little garden in the back. Old Mama, she’s gonna wear designer jeans and they’re gonna go to Shoney’s to eat once every three weeks.”

I had seen any number of those restaurants beside the highways, but had never gone into one. Were they like McDonald’s?

Campbell said, “At Shoney’s you’ll get the gravy all over it. That’s going to be a big deal. They’ll love it. I know those sons of bitches.

“If he or she moves to North Jackson, he’d be upscale. He wouldn’t be having that twang so much. But the good old fellow, he’s just going to work six or eight months a year. He’s going to tell his old lady, ‘I’m going to work.’ And he ain’t going. If it rains, he ain’t going to work—shit, no. He’s going to go to the crummiest dump he can find, and he’s going to start drinking beer and shooting pool. When he gets home there’ll be a little quarrel with his wife, and he’ll be half drunk and eat a little cornbread and pass out, and that’s the damn truth. And she’ll understand, because she’s so used to it.

“She doesn’t drink. It’s normally the redneck guys who drink—whiskey or beer. She’s got some little piddling job. She’s probably the basis of the income. She’s going to try to work every day. But he’s always waiting for that big job at fifteen dollars an hour, which is never going to come around. One time he had a union job at twelve dollars an hour. And he thinks that’s going to come back. He’ll be waiting fifteen years for another twelve-dollar job. And he won’t get it
unless he gets off his ass and goes to Atlanta, Georgia, or Nashville—someplace that’s hot. It’s sure not hot around here. But he’s so damn satisfied. The son of a bitch’s so damn satisfied. When he gets the four-dollar job: ‘No, I got something else to do.’ I could give five guys a job today, minimum wage. Three-thirty-five an hour. But I wouldn’t find five sons of bitches if I looked all damn day long. ‘You want to work for three-thirty-five?’ ‘No. Not going to work for no three-thirty-five son of a bitch.’

“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?’ ”

A
RT 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.