Coast to Coast (4 page)

T
here are many such dogged Eastern traditionalists still. It is true that society along the Atlantic coast is more completely formed than it is in other regions of the country, and you can see one American mode of life in its absolute maturity; but it is wrong to imagine these old States as totally enshrouded in a pall of conformity. There is still a remarkable variety of independent communities, some anachronistic, some eccentric, some just stubborn in preferring unconventional forms and loyalties; from the Canadian lumbermen in Maine and Vermont to the Pennsylvanian Dutch, with their quaint antique vernacular, their indelicate humour, and their irrepressible superstition.

The oddest of all these groups is perhaps the sect called the Amish, who live in Pennsylvania and have some distinctly unusual habits of thought and manner. You can often see them in the rolling farmlands of Lancaster County, their great stronghold, looking like figures from some almost forgotten Europe of the past, engulfed in traditions and dogma, but kindly and good-humoured none the less. Most of the Amish came originally from Germany, and they are one of a number of intricately related sects subscribing to the Mennonite faith (almost as baffling as those innumerable persuasions, Jacobites, Gregorians, Syrian Catholics, Nestorians, Chaldeans, Armenian Catholics, which so entangle relationships in some parts of the Middle East).

The men, thanks partly to their costume, partly to their seraphical benignity of expression, often look like saintly patriarchs. Their hats are wide, black and stiff of brim, like the Vicar of Wakefield’s. Their
suits are black, too and singularly plain and baggy. They have no buttons, only rough hooks and eyes, and their trousers have no flies, but open in the front in a wide flap. The Amish wear flourishing beards but no moustaches, and their hair is parted in the middle and smoothed down each side over the ears, not unlike an old-fashioned advertisement for hair cream.

As for the ladies, they are suggestive of the Salvation Army at the apogee of its Victorian propriety. Their dresses, coarse, black and heavy, reach almost down to their ankles, and their aprons are spiritually white; their black stockings are the ultimate antithesis of nylon, their shoes noticeably lack peep-toes or high heels; their cloaks are all-enveloping, their bonnets virtuous, their hair is parted in the centre and plaited demurely round the back of the head to form that crowning token of respectability, a bun.

There is nothing doctrinaire or forbidding, however, about the small talk of the Amish; they are most pleasant people to meet in the street, and speak readily enough of their beliefs and taboos. One elderly farmer I met in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, willingly demonstrated to me the eccentricities of his dress. Why, I asked him, did the Amish use no buttons? It must be so tedious to rely, like babes-in-arms, upon tapes, hooks, eyes and such elementary devices. He replied that first, the Amish did not approve of labour-saving devices in general, and the button certainly fell into that category. Secondly, they disapproved of the unnecessary killing of animals, and buttons were often made of animal bones. Thirdly, he added (with only the suspicion of a twinkle in his eye), buttons were very useful to the Devil, when he “wanted something to hang things on”.

The more conservative Amish certainly live up to their own tenets. They wear no belts or neckties. Some forswear braces, some allow the use of one brace, so to speak, slung across the body like a bandolier, and imparting a graceful lop-sided sag to the trousers. They ride around in high wooden buggies, pulled by handsome horses. The stricter Amish not only forbid cars, but even buggies with roofs, so that families must ride in all weathers totally exposed to the climate. (Some of the younger Amish, I was told, are simply not to be trusted with the family buggies; they are so inclined to speed.) Telephones, bicycles, central heating, musical instruments, carpets, even window curtains—among the Amish extremists all are banned as being “sinful pleasures of life”. The orthodox Amish do not smoke, may read only sacred books, do not exert their right to vote, are conscientious objectors, and are never supposed to sleep outside their own houses. The simplicity of their life is fading a
little, even under this rigid regime, but their society is still amazingly immune to the modern pressures that surround them. They are still placid, content and other worldly, and show no signs of disappearing; and they are still objects of curiosity to their neighbours. When a party of Amish once paid a call on the U.N. headquarters the New York Press, which has its choice of turbaned Pathans, Princes of Mecca, Nubians and Eskimos, nevertheless devoted headlines and big pictures to the visit of those be-whiskered Pennsylvanians.

Not all the compact communities of the East are religious in origin; some are resistant or homogeneous because of the nature of their calling. The oystermen of Chesapeake Bay, for example, are individualistic still because their work requires them to live among the coves and marshes of the Bay shore (a country full of haunting character), and to commune with the misty spirits of that waterway. I called on one such oysterman on the Maryland side of the Bay, off the main road, on one of the innumerable spits of land that project from the western shore of the Delaware peninsula. There was snow on the ground, and the road struggled through scrubby dunes and harsh, sparse fields. Now and again we came across a grey lagoon, with its rushes bent by the wind and a sliver of ice around its banks. The trees were thin and nasty; away over the marshes was the chilly line of the sea.

Among all this desolation the oysterman lived, on the edge of the Bay, in a house with a shingle roof, painted a greenish yellow. When I reached this homestead across the snow I looked in through a window and saw an antique American interior. The house was built in the seventeenth century, and had a profusion of beams, niches, crannies and fireplaces, and a flavour of smoke and old-fashioned food. Against this honourable background (as I peered through the window) the oysterman and his family moved with dignity. There was the woman of the house, plain and honest of face, like a Dutchwoman in a painting, in a blue woollen dress and carpet slippers; she was sitting in a worn wooden chair, saying something over her shoulder, and feeding a small baby. From time to time another child, a little older, propelled himself into my line of vision in an infant’s chair mounted on wheels, which he manœuvred with some skill among the furniture and even up and down the steps and unevennesses which characterized the general surface of the floor. The householder, a youngish man in shirtsleeves, was doing something to his pipe with a penknife, half leaning, half sitting on a table. At one end of the room a wood fire blazed; and very soon I was warming my hands in front of it.

This man combined two trades. He farmed a few hard acres with the
help of an elderly tractor, and he fished for oysters off the shore; from the window of his living-room you could see the reedy creek, a melancholy inlet, where his boat was moored. The withered solitude of the place had affected him, and though he was obliging and kindly he seemed a remote and introspective person, living away there among the marshes; not so enigmatic as an oyster, perhaps, but akin in character to some sedgy water bird that stalks on spindly legs along the seashore. I complained to him, mildly, about the quality of the oysters of eastern America. They are cheap and available everywhere, in almost every coffee-shop; but they are slobbery molluscs, unpleasant in appearance and unsubtle in taste, watery objects, commonly swamped (with reason) in tomato sauce. He agreed sadly that they were lacking in character. Even on the Pacific Coast, where a few people were still breeding the small, delicate Puget Sound oyster, the huge Japanese variety (introduced into American waters since the war) had flooded the market. “I guess that’s the way with Americans,” he remarked. “If it’s big, it’s gotta be good; and if it’s only good, you gotta make it bigger.”

Far up in the northern States, on the borders of Canada, live the French folk of Maine and Vermont, a sturdy racial minority. We stayed one night in a small town in Vermont, between Lake Champlain and the rich green country of the maple trees. It was a shabby little place, built on a cross-roads, with a few murky drapers’ shops, a tavern or two, a garage, and a general merchant’s (where you could buy, so lavish is the American Press, no fewer than thirteen daily newspapers). The best place to sleep seemed to be an inn with a wide veranda and slightly dirty windows. Its paint was flaking, its steps were cracked, and an aroma of hoary tobacco had lingered, down the generations, about its hall; but it looked warm, so in we went. We found ourselves at once in an atmosphere redolent not only of another people and time, but another continent.

French was the only language we could hear in the shadowy chambers of this hostelry. The manager was a small bony man with black greased hair, who needed a shave but carried the unmistakable air of not intending to have one. He spoke to us in broken English that was barely understandable, and ushered us heavily upstairs. Nothing in this drab inn conformed with the American standard. On the landing there protruded from behind a calendar a gaudy picture of the Virgin, with some faded flowers pinned to it, and a scrap of a palm frond, relic of some distant festival. Our room was large and unornamented, with monochromatic coverings. The bathroom was far away, and its broken door had to be fastened from inside with a piece of string. Several French
magazines (damp because someone had been reading them in the bath, tattered because someone had been tearing out the dress patterns) lay forlornly on a wicker chair.

It was odd to find oneself so near in spirit to provincial Europe; for the predominantly English communities of the United States have long ago discarded their inheritances and developed mores of their own, so that you will search for a long time before you hear an echo of Moreton-in-the-Marsh, or recapture the stolid phlegm of an English pub. From downstairs, in this old French enclave, we could hear somebody practising the piano—an approximation of
Rustle
of
Spring,
some Chopin played very slowly and with soulful emotion, a snatch of a pompous marching song. I went down to the bar for a glass of beer, and found it thronged with whole families of French people, talking cheerfully in a muffled intestinal patois. A very old man with a bushy moustache, wearing a peaked cap, was playing shuffleboard with a pleasing swagger, followed everywhere by a couple of devoted urchins, and now and again from the darker recesses of the room he would arouse a murmur of admiration. The air was full of strong tobacco smoke, and there was a smell not of onions, but of potato chips.

But even in such cultural islands the new Americanism sometimes intrudes. The escapist quality of that evening (which threatened to become a little maudlin) was rudely shattered by an expression of changing philosophies. As I sat sipping my beer, watching the old shuffieboard man, and occasionally exchanging indecipherable witticisms with my neighbours, I became aware of activity outside the door of the bar. Shadowy shapes passed by, there was the clink of cutlery, the sound of furniture being moved, a growing murmur of voices; until suddenly into the bar-room there burst the crash of an introductory chord on the piano, out of tune but immensely reverberant, and the heady opening lines, throatily delivered in male voice chorus, of
America
‚
The
Beautiful.
The bar-room stiffened. The barman looked virtuous. The urchins pulled up their socks. Even the shuffleboard king removed his eye from the board. This was a moment pregnant with emotion and significance, familiar to all Americans from one shoreline to the other, whether they speak in a European dialect or a western drawl, the clipped pseudo-Oxford of Boston or the hideous distortions of Brooklyn: the Elks were beginning their weekly dinner.

To the south of Vermont, in New Hampshire, I came across another cohesive society: a group of Shakers. In a pleasant country spot there stood a collection of brick buildings, grouped around a green, and among them moved a few middle-aged women dressed like Puritans, in rough
grey dresses and aprons, severely devoid of make-up, their hair austere and their figures (like the Amish ladies’) blameless of compulsion or pretence. These were members of “The American Shaker”, a celibate religious community, named for the physical tremors that used to result from the ecstasies of their devotions. The order was imported from England in 1774, when a number of its adherents crossed the Atlantic under the leadership of the most famous of the Shakers, Mother Ann Lee of Manchester. The three basic principles of the Shaker faith are: Purity of Life; Confession of Sin; Consecration of Strength, Time and Talent. Although both men and women can be Shakers, the order has a pronounced feminist bias (as Dickens discovered to his distaste when he visited a Shaker settlement in 1842). Among its declared beliefs are the Duality of the Deity, Father and Mother God; the Equality of the Sexes; and most startling, the Duality of the Christ Spirit, “as manifested by Jesus and Ann Lee”. Such unorthodoxies led to the persecution of the sect in England, the imprisonment of Mother Lee, and the eventual
hegira
from Lancashire to New York State.

The Shaker women talked willingly, but with a virginal shyness. They told us that the Order was declining disastrously, chiefly because of a shortage of recruits. Young men who wanted to be Shakers were extremely rare, and the positions designed to be held by men in the hierarchy of the order were unhappily vacant, making the Shaker concept of sexual equality rather top-heavy in application: in point of harsh fact, by the end of 1961 only one male Shaker was still alive, and he was 88 years old. The Shaker statement of beliefs says that the community is to be perpetuated “by the admission of serious-minded persons, and the adoption of children”. The serious-minded persons are mostly finding their vocations elsewhere, but the settlement we were visiting was in fact a children’s home, where orphans were housed and educated. The women hoped that some of these boys and girls (whose carriage and behaviour was decorous but cheerful) would subscribe as adults to the Shaker faith. The Shakers have always been famous for handicrafts, and there was a small gift shop in one building of the orphanage. It sold well-worked aprons and dresses, in gay colours; books about the Shakers, with some forbidding portraits of eminent adherents of the past; and greetings cards made by the children, consisting of postage stamps put together to form pictures. It was all very clean, wholesome and pleasant, with an air of tempered monasticism; so scrupulously tempered, indeed, that I suspect in a few years’ time there will be no more Shakers at all, whether Elders or Sisters (this being an age and a country addicted to extremes of sin and sanctity).