A Turn in the South (49 page)

“When you look at the paintings of the Dutch masters and other artists whose work was informed by the Reformation in Northern Europe, the world view is of a world God made and God is in control of. A world in which individual people possessed freedom and dignity because they had been made in the image of God. That’s why Rembrandt would bother to paint a picture of a woman cleaning a fish or slicing a loaf of bread. Because that woman had infinite value to God—she was made in the image of God.”

Easy to ridicule, conservatives like himself? But he had been to a major university, he said; he had studied philosophy; he knew the modern world. People knew that about him.

He said, “That is why they feel that that man, the man who has looked at the new world and dismissed it, is to be feared.”

The eyes that a minute before had been soft grew hard. And I felt—quite suddenly—that within him, within the correctness of dress and manner, was a fire.

When we had talked on the telephone to arrange our meeting, I had asked him to think of some educative or illuminating thing he might show me in Elizabeth City. He hadn’t forgotten. At the end of our meeting he took me to see the Confederate Memorial in the Court Square. It had been put up in 1911 by the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy, a chapter that, he said, perhaps no longer existed. He showed the memorial: the pillar (suggesting mass manufacture),
the soldier at the top. He said nothing more about it; he said nothing while I looked. And then it was time to drive him back to the Bible College.

I asked him about the blacks of Elizabeth City. He spoke with puzzlement and sorrow about them. Most of them had the Southern work ethic, he said; most of them, in their values and day-to-day life, were conservatives. But they didn’t vote conservative; they voted for black candidates.

It had been a long day, and it was a long drive back. About fifty miles from Elizabeth City, on the narrow, crowded road, there was a nasty-looking accident: one car smashed in, another overturned, people running to the spot, and then the sound of an approaching ambulance.

My thoughts remained there for a while. And it was only a day or so later that I saw that Barry McCarty had opened our meeting by showing me the Stars and Bars in his office; and had closed it by showing me the Confederate Memorial.

The past transformed, lifted above the actual history, and given an almost religious symbolism: political faith and religious faith running into one. I had been told that the conservatives of North Carolina spoke in code. The code could sometimes be transparent: “Tobacco Is a Way of Life” being the small farmer’s plea for government money. But in this flat land of small fields and small ruins there were also certain emotions that were too deep for words.

J
IM
A
PPLEWHITE
took me one day to see his family farm in Wilson County, in what he said was the heart of the eastern-North Carolina tobacco country. We went first to Wilson, the main town of the county. It was ten miles from the farm—I knew that distance from the poems and from Jim’s talk.

Wilson was a more substantial town than I had expected. The residential part through which we drove looked rich and settled, with big houses set back in wooded gardens. In the old days money in Wilson came principally from the tobacco market. On the other, industrial side of the town (we drove through that side on the way back in the afternoon) there were the tobacco warehouses.

We stopped at a supermarket to buy nuts and fruit for lunch. Ahead of me in the checkout lane was a drunken young black man with cans of beer. His speech, already Southern-slow, was made slower by drink,
and he seemed to be making private sounds rather than words. The cashier, a white girl, was correct, appearing to notice nothing, speaking the supermarket’s formula of thanks after she had taken money and given change. The forecourt, when we went out to it, looked less attractive: supermarket carts, litter, some lounging blacks. It wasn’t a place to have a car snack in.

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.

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.

“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.