Coast to Coast (7 page)

It is an assured and contented little island, Nantucket, well insulated against the conflicts and squabbles of the mainland. Abrupt indeed is the transition, which we will now undertake, from its honest marine placidity to the perfumed grumbles of the South.

Y
ou may well hate the South, but you can never accuse it of dull uniformity, for it is a pungent entity of its own. It is not simply a region; it is an amalgam of sensations, memories, prejudices and emotions; a place of symbols, where excesses of nostalgia can be prompted by the cadence of a voice or a glimpse of a crumbling mansion. Two races only dominate the Southern States—the Anglo-Saxon and the Negro. The white people, already homogeneous, were fused into a new unity by the Civil War, a disaster and humiliation which has bound them in resentful clannishness ever since. The Negroes, freed by the conflict, their reputation perverted by the subsequent horrors of Reconstruction, remained without cause of loyalty or pride, knowing no other home, but despised and distrusted everywhere; it is their presence, and the blind passions engendered by it, that gives the South both its sense of separation, and its overpowering atmosphere of rottenness and menace.

The poorer Anglo-Saxons contribute to this feeling by a shameless virulence of thought and speech; the more educated by a subtle unpleasantness that inspires their attitudes not only towards racial questions, but in anything (so insidious are the complexes of defeat) that affects themselves or their status. But it is, of course, when the Negro question arises that the underlying malice seeps most ominously to the surface. I was in Atlanta, a great Southern manufacturing city, the day after the Supreme Court in Washington decreed that racial segregation in schools was illegal. For Southerners, this was the greatest internal event of the post-war years, the beginning of the road to Little Rock, the starting-gun for the Freedom Riders. The abolition of separate schools for blacks and whites would only be the start (they felt) of federal measures against segregation in general, enforced by Washington without regard to the rights of individual States, and without knowledge of the intricate psychological structure of the South. For months the decision of the court had been awaited, and every Tuesday (the day on which the Court announces its decisions) newspaper editors stood by expectantly for the big news. Dreadful consequences were threatened by the South if the court decided against segregation. Several States, even then, gave warning that they might abolish public schools altogether,
and rely on a private system where Jim Crowism would be legal by any standards. There were rumours that the Ku-Klux-Klan would be on the march again, that there would be lynchings and bloody race riots.

When the decision was announced, all the simmering discontent of the Southerners boiled over; though, mercifully, chiefly only in bitter words. I spent the day in Atlanta listening to angry men and women. The abuse they used was at once so theatrical and so repetitive that I could scarcely believe it had not been plucked wholesale from some common phrasebook of prejudice. I joined a conversation, in a coffee-shop, with the manager of the place and a man who told me that he was a senior officer of the police. They spent some minutes reminiscing about race riots of the past, talking comfortably of “niggers” bashed and beaten in the streets; and of one especially, hounded by the mob, who had thrown himself into the doorway of that very coffee-shop, only to be pushed back on to the pavement. “The only place for a nigger,” said the manager with finality, “is at the back door, with his hat in his hand.”

Other, gentler Atlantans, as horrified as anyone by these expressions of brutality, advocated other ways of sustaining white supremacy. Drugged by the sentimentality of the Old South, they would say, like sanctimonious jailers: “Leave the matter to us. We understand the negroes, and they understand and respect us. After all, we've lived together for a long time. We know them through and through, and believe me, their minds are different from ours. Leave it all to us.
The
South
takes
care
of
its
own
.” If I were a southern Negro, I think I would prefer, on the whole, the loud-mouthed to the soft-spoken. To be sure it is the white trash and riff-raff, the feckless poor and the heartless ignorant, who have since screamed their slogans and paraded their placards through Arkansas and New Orleans, tainting the reputation of their country the world over, and cruelly (if hopelessly) delaying the course of history: but for myself, I dislike the educated bigot more. The poor white, who talks so horribly, has grown up a nigger-hater because he was for long in economic competition with the Negroes, sharing with them the poor fruits of a poverty-stricken land; and though the South is mostly burgeoning now, with new industries everywhere, and the
raison
d'être
of his bias is fading, nevertheless one can just, at a broadminded pinch, understand the fervency of his prejudices. The southern gentleman, on the other hand, all string ties and gracious living, has no excuse at all. He is not, like the hill-billies, struggling to uphold the only source of pride he has—his colour. He is not, like the Afrikaner, embroiled in a truly tragic dilemma, his very culture and civilization at stake. His bile seems to me unforgiveable, and his attitudes are chiefly governed
by the most despicable kind of snobbery. As for the Dixie politicians—from the hide-bound sages on Capitol Hill by way of the Faubuses to the petty precinct prophets—where segregation is concerned they have usually passed the bounds of independent judgment, so absolutely do they represent the passions of their electorate. A friend of mine was once interviewing a celebrated Southern Governor when news arrived that two Negroes had been caught gambling in the State Capitol. The Governor paused only a moment before issuing an edict that fitted admirably with the medieval arrogance of his nature. “Throw them into the chain gang!” he said. (Road gangs of convicts are a common sight in the South; but the chains he added by dramatic or gubernatorial licence.)

The nature of the region itself contributes to the oppressive quality of the South. It is, generally speaking, a wide, dry, dusty, spiritless country; sometimes hauntingly beautiful, but usually melancholy; lacking robustness, good cheer, freshness, animation; a singularly un-Dickensian country. As you drive through South Carolina (for example) on a summer day the endless cotton fields engulf you. Here and there, there are shabby villages, dusty and derelict, with patched wooden buildings and rusting advertisements, and with a few dispirited people, white and black, gathered outside the stores. Outside the unpainted houses of the poor whites there are often decrepit cars, and washing machines stand white among the cluttered objects on the verandas. Sometimes there is a little white church with a crooked steeple. There are frequent swamps, dark and mildewy, with gloomy trees standing in water. The plantation mansions are sometimes magnificent, but often in depressingly bad repair.

I called at one such house for a talk with its owner and found it no more than a sad echo of a munificent past. Three generations ago the Parker plantation embraced some 10,000 acres, and was one of the great estates of the region. Now it is whittled down to about 150 acres, of cotton, tobacco, sweet potatoes and corn. The drive up to the house is a narrow one between pine trees, unpaved; a cloud of dust rose up behind us as we drove along it. Near the road there were a couple of small wooden shacks, one of them inhabited, for there was a string of washing outside it, the other filled to the eaves with straw; and far at the end of the drive stood the big house, crumbling, classical, reminding me of Pharaoh's Palace at Petra, seen through the crevice of the
sik.
It had a wide and splendid porch, with four pillars. Mrs. Parker thought that only Washington or Thomas Jefferson could really do justice to it, but I felt myself better qualified to sit there when I noticed that its broad steps
were rickety, that the frame of its front door was sagging, and that high in its roof there was a dormant wasp nest. Inside, the house was agreeably untidy; in the hall, which ran clean through the building front to back, there was an elderly harmonium, with a large hymn-book propped on its music-stand.

The planter, fresh from a tussle with his tractor, had greasy hands and wore a topee and an open-necked shirt. But like most southern gentlemen he had a talent for hospitality, and soon we were sitting on the balustrade of the porch, sipping long cool drinks and looking out through the pines. He told me that he ran the plantation almost single-handed, with only one full-time employee. His children go to the local public school and his wife does the housework. The five cabins on the estate are let to Negro families whose men work elsewhere, sometimes giving part-time help on the plantation; and “The Street”, the double row of uniform cottages where the slaves used to live is empty, and tumble-down.

While we were talking on the porch a great cloud of dust approached us from the drive, and there emerged in stately motion two large mules. They were pulling a kind of sledge, a cross between a bobsleigh and Cleopatra's barge, and sitting on it, very old and wrinkled, very dignified, was a Negro in a straw hat. Round the corner he came in imperial state, the mules panting, the sledge creaking, the dust billowing all round us; and as he passed the porch he raised his hat by its crown and called: “G'd evening, boss, sir; g'd evening, Missus Parker.” “Good evening‚ Uncle Henry,” they replied.

Uncle Henry well illustrates the sad contradictions of the southern mind. He is an old retainer of the Parkers who lives almost entirely upon their kindness. He is given a house and a few acres, firewood and storage space, and a loan when he needs one. The planter would not see him in distress for the world. He humours the old man's whims, never complaining at waste nor demanding recompense, enjoying watching Uncle Henry sail by on his sledge, kicking up the dust all over the porch. He likes exchanging greetings and accepting respect. He is sincere and generous in his charity. But to suggest that Mr. Parker might invite Uncle Henry into the house, or even shake hands with him, would be more than an impertinence; it might, such is the sudden intensity of passion in the warm South, be construed as a deliberate insult. Uncle Henry will always have a home; but after all, the race must be preserved.

So there is a tinge of cruelty even to southern kindliness; but the legend of crinolines, sweet accents and scented summer evenings is not
altogether a myth. I found myself wallowing, no less, in the fabled charm of the South during a hot summer stay at Oxford, Mississippi. This is a market and university town made famous by William Faulkner, who is a native of the place, and it is bursting with the combination of sordidness and heavy beauty that is the fascination of the South. The town is built around a central square, and in the middle of it all is the court house, centre of justice and administration, solid and ornate, a-flutter with noticeboards. Under the shade of the trees that surround this building the people of Oxford laze the hours away. There are innumerable old men whose chins are prickly with white stubble, wearing wide hats, chewing tobacco, spitting, and determinedly lounging. Little knots of negroes gather separately, like boys from another form, who are not privileged to undo the second button of their jacket, or walk on the grass in Great Quad. Farmers, negligently sitting on parapets and leaning against walls, offer vegetables and fruits for sale. Little boys run up and down the steps, and through the courthouse, from one brown swing door to the other. Outside the hotel a few idle guests are reclining in chairs, smoking; a gaggle of plump women is doing its shopping in the square. On the first floor verandas of the buildings (their style reminiscent sometimes of the Wild West, sometimes of New Orleans, sometimes of the shuttered balconies of Baghdad) lawyers and realtors, in shirtsleeves, are exchanging business advice. The streets are dirty and dusty, and there is a tobacco-stained, beer-ringed, ashtray atmosphere to the scene.

All around the square, though, are streets of lovely old houses; white and creeper-clad, with graceful porches and refreshing gardens; shaded by old trees in secluded corners, with tactful negroes working in the gardens, and fountains watering the lawns. At dusk in summer these streets are suffused with an aromatic charm. The air is heavy and warm, and laden with the scent of roses and honeysuckle. Children scamper among the gardens, in and out of narrow lanes. Sometimes there is the sound of laughter from inside a house, or the raised voice of a scolding Negro nanny. A languid content lies thickly over the town, and down in the square the old men loll silently. I can smell Oxford, Mississippi, now, 4,000 miles away—a smell compact of flowers and dust and old buildings—and still feel the lazy seduction of its manner.

Indeed, the South is full of pleasant encounters. The poor white, a shambling, ill-jointed, colourless, ungainly figure of a man, gives the region an air of ignorant meanness; but even he has his agreeable side, and when the mountaineers go square dancing they make a gay company. I remember an evening of such festivity in the streets of Chattanooga,
Tennessee, in the Middle South. The roads were closed to traffic, and a hill-billy band played from the back of a truck. In the dim lights of the street lamps the dancers looked like sinewy leprechauns in check shirts and flounced skirts, prancing with an infectious abandon. They danced till late at night, and then piled into their disjointed trucks to drive back to rickety villages and isolated poor broken farmhouses, with mules and water-wells, or to dirty wooden cabins hidden away in the hills.

In another kind, I recall with affection the crusty bachelor who lives alone at the mansion of Longwood, outside Natchez, Mississippi. Natchez, once a lawless river port, famous for thieves and gamblers and horsetraders, has acquired an excessive Southern fragility because of its many well-preserved old houses (old, that is, by the standards of the inland South; they are mostly early nineteenth century, and despite the hushed pride of the local ladies, are furnished much as our grandmothers' houses were furnished in England). The regional myth is thus powerful there. Racial animosities are especially bitter, and many people (seeing themselves, perhaps, as present-day O'Hara's) proclaim a pride in poverty. Longwood is the oddest of the mansions of Natchez. It was begun shortly before the Civil War, a wild architectural extravaganza, octagonal, topped with a dome, surrounded by balconies. Northern workmen were brought in to work on it, but soon after the war began they were withdrawn; they dropped their tools and left, leaving the house unfinished; and unfinished it remains, with their hammers and wheelbarrows and paint-pots still lying about, with ladders propped against walls, and scaffolding still in place, exactly as they left it. It stands in a wooded garden, a grotesque monument of “steamboat Gothic”, its glassless windows gaping, on its porch a dusty and disintegrating barouche.