A Turn in the South (43 page)

And for Will Campbell this person was the—despised, as he saw it—redneck: the man like himself. He hated the word. He thought it should be used only by people like himself.

“The tragedy of the redneck is that he chose the wrong enemy. I know a good song. ‘Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer.’ You want to hear it? I’m not a musician. But I like the songs of the people.”

He left the high stool and, taking his guitar, went and sat on the settee. A glossy black dog had come into the cabin. When Will Campbell began to play the guitar and sing, the dog sat up and sat still, fixing glittering eyes on the hand strumming the guitar, and listening to his master’s voice.

Will Campbell said, “That’s the song of alienation. It says a lot: ‘We’re a little too rowdy,’ ‘a little too loud.’ ”
I asked, “Who wrote it?”

“Bob McDill. If you listen to it selectively you’ll learn a lot.”

A
ND YET
the history that so exercised Will Campbell could be by-passed, just as in some quarters the old, too-demanding faith had been bypassed.

Twenty-five minutes away from downtown Nashville, in the little town of Smyrna, there was the very big Nissan truck-and-car assembly plant. It was three factories in one, on a site of eight hundred acres. The factory building was flat and straight-lined, gray and almost featureless on the flat land. From the outside it was hardly a disfiguring of the site or the surrounding landscape. But, inside, it was a world of its own: seventy-eight contiguous acres under a roof that seemed higher when you were below it than when you saw it against the sky. It was a plant run on Japanese lines, with the Southern work force, white and black and a few Asians, men and women, broken up into small military-style units, each with its own leader, goals, and loyalties.

Thirty miles south of Nashville, in Spring Hill, an even bigger project was under way: the creation, on eleven hundred acres, of the Saturn plant of General Motors, a manufacturing plant (not an assembly plant like Nissan at Smyrna). It was going to cost $3.6 billion, and was going to be the largest industrial plant ever built in the United States. Even with its automation and robots, Saturn was going to employ some six thousand people. But nothing would show from the road. General Motors was landscaping the ground, banking up a low and not-too-noticeable hill, to hide the big plant. Crops would be grown on General Motors land beside the road. To the person driving by, the land would look like farmland. But Saturn, when it came, would physically and culturally alter the country for many miles around. General Motors thought that the “halo effect” would create fourteen to fifteen thousand new jobs in the middle-Tennessee area: new houses, new facilities, a new kind of working population.

There was at the moment little to see. But the area was on the brink of an upheaval. Land values had risen. I had heard stories in Nashville
of the “greed” of some local people, and of the readiness with which old Southern people, faced with the prospect of wealth, had alienated old farms and land and cut themselves off from the past that was, until the other day, so sacred to them.

But Frank Bumstead, a Nashville businessman who knew the area well and drove me around it one morning, was less condemning. Frank was in his early forties, a self-made man, a Texan of Georgian ancestry; he had gone through university on a basketball scholarship. As a man with many business partnerships, he had an immense amount of local knowledge; and he had a precise, analytical mind.

Frank said: “The fact of the matter is that in 1985, and today, an
efficient
family farmer is fortunate if his farming covers his variable costs—seed, feed, fertilizer, chemicals, gasoline, etc., labor. If he has any debt on his land or equipment he is in serious financial trouble. Farmers cannot pay for their land or equipment. They can only hope to cover their variable costs. Why should people not sell?

“A lot of the locals in fact were frozen like a frog who has a light shined in his eye at night. They saw the prices escalating and were scared to death to sell too cheap or too soon. That can be interpreted as greed. It can also be interpreted as someone intensely afraid that he is not going to sell a near and dear asset—to a farmer his land is next only to his wife and God—for enough money. Many of the people who sold had those farms in their families for several generations.

“In many cases the people who sold used the money to pay off debts. I know one farmer who owned a piece of roughly 120 acres. It was not immediately adjacent to the site; it was about three miles away. He sold for $350,000. He paid the bank three hundred thousand. After the lawyers’ fees he was probably left with twenty, twenty-five thousand.”

He talked of land values. “The Saturn project was announced by General Motors in 1985. Six months before the announcement farmland in Maury County, if you could sell it—and there was almost no market for it—sold for a low of four to five hundred an acre, up to a high of a thousand to fifteen hundred an acre, depending on the type of land, pasture being cheaper than cropland. A month after the Saturn announcement much of the land in northern Maury and southern Williamson, to the north, was selling for a low of twenty-five hundred an acre. Some land changed hands at prices up to ten thousand dollars an acre, ‘raw’ farmland. Some sales were reported in the twenty-to
twenty-five-thousand area. In other words, it was insanity. A substantial amount of that speculation was done by Texas land-buyers who had experienced the land boom in Dallas and Houston and were in the midst of a downturn in those markets—‘depression’ is a better word.

“There was a terrific amount of wealth created overnight in that area. I know someone who, having sold his radio station and his interest in a successful cable-TV system, bought three hundred acres less than half a mile south of southern Franklin City, on U.S. Highway 31. Lots of road frontage. He paid an average of three thousand dollars an acre six to nine months before the Saturn announcement. After the Saturn announcement he sold the land for seventeen thousand dollars an acre—and he owned it for less than eighteen months. He recognized that the land was far too valuable to raise horses on. He said he made more money on the farm than on the radio station. And he’d bought the farm to retire to. It just shows that it pays to be lucky rather than just smart.”

It was with Frank that on another morning I went to see the Nissan plant at Smyrna, moving from green Tennessee to, at first, office suites of gray and chrome, with noticeably thick, soft carpets. Many people were in uniform, dark-blue trousers, light-blue shirt, with
NISSAN
machine-embroidered above the left pocket of the shirt, and the person’s first name above the other pocket.

The public-relations woman with us said at one stage, in a corridor, “That was the president we just passed.” He too had been in the Nissan uniform.

In an open office area we saw a robot mail cart. It ran on a chemical strip laid into the gray carpet. The mail cart made the rounds of offices and halted at certain spots, not moving on again until someone pressed a strip at the top. If a person got in its way the cart beeped.

The three-in-one assembly plant was E-shaped. The spine was more than a mile long: a lane, a road, flat and dead straight, disappearing at either end. Frank had seen places as big, and bigger; I hadn’t. We rode about the great distances on an electric car, the public-relations woman driving and talking. There were no Japanese to be seen (there were only eleven among the thirty-five hundred staff); the people who looked Japanese were American Chinese or other American Orientals. In free areas in various parts of the plant there were basketball backboards and table-tennis tables. The table-tennis idea had been brought back by the workers who had trained in Japan before the opening of the plant. At many places there were television screens,
giving constant production data and schedules and sometimes important items of national or international news.

A real world, a complete world. But it was a relief to get outside and to see, in the distance, a relic of the old world: a corrugated-iron barn, against trees.

Growing up in Trinidad, I had never wanted to be employed. I had always wanted to be a free man. This was partly the effect of my peasant Indian background and the colonial agricultural society of Trinidad. And though it had not been easy in the beginning, I had remained a free man. I had had as a result almost no experience of the twentieth-century world of work; and had few means of understanding the adjustments people made. Here at this Nissan plant people were treated well and paid well; there was freedom of a sort there, and dignity too. But it seemed to me that, for that, they lived in a very small space.

Some days later I asked Frank, as a businessman and Southerner, to tell me what he thought we had seen.

He said, “The first thing you saw there is the Nissan corporate culture. It’s a superior corporate culture, that focuses on the participation of the worker in the process. It also focuses on the well-being of the worker. Their average work force is highly educated, extremely well paid, and nonunionized. The Japanese management idea is for the whole plant to be broken into little work groups, and these work groups have a specific responsibility. Within the group they elect a leader and assign responsibilities, and they are involved constantly in making their work more efficient and productive. Part of the culture is that the worker is encouraged to make the workplace a better, more efficient, safer, and happier place. You saw the table-tennis tables.

“The corporate culture was adopted for several reasons. Wages are attractive. The plant is clean, modern, well cared for, and, as far as manufacturing facilities go, a very pleasant place to work in. Nissan provides many fringe benefits. ‘Wellness’—that’s one: a new word in our lexicon, a process of becoming and remaining well. And exercise facilities. And there’s the team image.

“The president walked by
in his uniform
with his first name above his pocket. The uniforms are optional, but the vast majority were wearing their uniforms. Everyone is made to feel part of the team. And there are substantial incentives built into the Nissan corporate culture for excellent performers. These incentives are fair and evenly
distributed across the work force and—more importantly—they are attainable.

“You saw two components of the corporate culture that are worth mentioning. People with no experience of working side by side with robots find themselves working side by side with robots. These are Southerners, people whose roots are in the land and the farms. The second culture clash is that Nissan is a well-organized, very powerful, extremely large business, operating in the midst of a culture that had been largely agrarian, largely unorganized, and largely informal.

“And what Nissan means to me is the cutting edge of a debate that is going to rage in the mid-sized metropolitan areas of the South for the next twenty years—Nashville, Lexington, Kentucky, Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina, Charlotte in North Carolina. This debate has quite simply to do with industrialization. Against the money, you have the sacrifice in life style. We’ve got a very high quality of life in the South, and even when we industrialize in a sensible way there are sacrifices. Increased traffic and the tensions that go with it; increased population and the tensions that go with that. Crime. And the increasing pressures brought on local governmental organizations to provide for growth.

“Thirty-five percent of the Nissan assembly plant are women. In the South women didn’t work. Woman’s work was in the home.

“Nissan had no effect on land prices. There was a lot of speculation, and most people lost. Because Nissan is an assembly plant, there was no halo effect. And Nissan had local people, people who were already here. Most of the General Motors workers are going to come from the upper Midwest. They will need homes. They’re not Southerners. We know they’re going to have an effect. They’re unionized. Again, there’s going to be a clash: standard of living versus quality of life.

“My impression is that the upper-middle and middle class tend to resist growth and change, particularly if they have adequate jobs, a nice house, good schools. The upper class will profit from growth. The very wealthy support growth, because it’s good for business. The poor become pawns in the game.”

I
T WAS
now getting towards the end of July. I went to stay in an estate in northwestern Georgia, seeing that area now differently from the way I had seen it almost at the beginning of my trip.

Then I had traveled up from Atlanta and had seen it as a near-Indian wilderness. Now I came down from Chattanooga, an industrial town partly in decay. Not here the fast-food shops of the highways, with their tall standards and vivid liveries; just pawnshop after pawnshop, palmists and card-readers, little offices offering loans, and mobile-home sale lots sometimes strung with pennants. Outside Chattanooga I saw the mobile homes, tarnished and without bunting, in their home settings. I saw the small houses; the hoarded old-metal litter in some yards: Georgia of the crackers, with occasionally a small, disconcerting black figure in a yard, the figure intended to be what it looked like, an “artificial nigger,” a local decorative feature, a reminder of the past.

Fort Oglethorpe was my nearest town; James Oglethorpe was the founder of Georgia. There was a new way to Fort Oglethorpe, over the hills. There was another way, through the town of Lafayette (pronounced locally “Lafette”) and then through the Chickamauga Battlefield Park—war as monuments and rhetoric and difficult strategy: Chickamauga the last big victory of the South over the North.

My normal way to Fort Oglethorpe was over the hills; it was quicker. Driving on from there one day to Chattanooga, I saw from the slum around the Rossville Boulevard—saw and at first could scarcely believe—the patterns of white headstones in the battlefield cemetery: dotted white arcs, tidy and regular, on the low hills beyond the black and white slums, through which, as I drove, I continued to have glimpses of the cemetery. I didn’t know the area; I wasn’t expecting to see a cemetery there, and of such size, such patterns of dotted white lines; Chickamauga barely a name to me until I had come here, and now—the second day of that two-day battle perhaps the bloodiest day of the war, as I was to hear later in Memphis from Shelby Foote, the historian of the war—far more shocking than the cemetery at Canton in Mississippi. Important, that war, necessary; yet now it seemed past and dead, a waste.