Coast to Coast (8 page)

Only the ground floor of Longwood is inhabitable, and in it there lives a Mr. John Price, white-haired and short-sighted, who is always ready to show visitors around, only excusing himself when they want to climb up the workmen's ladders and see the upper floors. Mr. Price lives alone, attended by an elderly Negress who inhabits an outhouse (specifically the
garçonnière
‚ where the intending proprietor of Longwood proposed to house his sons, in the old French manner). He once gave us an admirable lunch. This was a feat, for he seems normally to live entirely upon marshmallows and fig rolls, and his servant is no great cook. However, a jolly cousin of his (very active in the ladies' activities of Natchez) came in to do the cooking, and the results were capital. Mr. Price had no tablecloth handy, but a sheet on the table served just as well; and we
ate Southern fried chicken, in enormous quantities, and blancmange and cheese; finishing with either fig rolls or marshmallow, I forget which. I dare say that in the minds of these delightful Southerners there were latent prejudices that would have horrified me, but they never protruded. Instead, as we ate, the room was filled with good things of the South; much laughter, and pungent conversation; audacious gossip; talk of steamboats, and gamblers, and country balls; the smell of well-cooked food; and charm of a rather fey kind (inherited, surely, from the early Scots-Irish labouring immigrants rather than the little band of English aristocrats with which every Southerner likes to claim kinship).

As for the country negroes, they seem identical still with those pictured in old prints of the slave-owning times; still toiling half-naked in the fields, still addicted to colour and gaudy ornaments, still full of song, still ignorant and unorganized; a people of bondage, infinitely pitiful. They look like well-trained domestic animals as they board their buses, confined to the back seats, sitting blankly by the windows with their parcels on their laps; and often, when the drink is in them, they develop an animal ferocity. Few of them appear to think deeply about their social status, but they reflect it often enough in a sad apathy. I talked once with a Negro farmer in Alabama, and asked him if things were getting any better for the coloured people. “Things ain't gettin' no better, suh,” he said, “and things ain't gettin' no worse. They jess stay the same. Things can't ever get no better for the coloured people, not so long as we stay down here.” He was not so badly off, though. He owned his few acres of land, and lived in his own house. He had two mules. But he seemed incapable of ambition or aspiration, and his two sons had left him, and gone off to Chicago in an old car, to work out their salvation among its slums and rubbish. Another farmer I met seemed to think I had some political aspirations, or perhaps Byronic leanings. “We can't change things down here by ourselves,” he said, and added with an unpleasantly suggestive leer: “Not by ourselves, that is, not without people to help us.” He was surrounded by a swarm of children as he spoke; poor little creatures, they were very scabrous piccaninnies, and badly needed some soap behind the ears.

The Southern Negro still retains his traditional gaiety, all the same, whether expressed in riotous jazz in a New Orleans bar, or in the flashing smile of a train conductor. My wife and I once took a middle-aged Negro woman to the zoo at Jackson, Mississippi; she viewed every animal with hand-clapping delight, as pleased with the elephant as she was with the alligator, eating a messy ice-cream as she wandered, in a
blue floral dress and a hat with a feather in it. Another old negress, encountered on the edge of a swamp in Lousiana, was fishing in the oozy water with a long home-cut rod. She had already caught a few fish, and they were floundering in the shallows tied up in a net. She told me she had been dropped there that morning from the train, which passed nearby; her husband worked on the railroads, and in the evening, when the train came back again, it would slow down past the swamp and allow her to scramble aboard a freight car with her rod and her net of fish, clutching her enormous floppy straw hat. She asked me to drive a little way down the road and fetch some Coca-Cola. I bought her four bottles, and she seemed well satisfied; the last I saw of her, she was standing on the boggy bank with the rod in one hand and a bottle raised her lips with the other—a portly, statuesque figure against a gloomy background of cypress trees.

For me, the temper of the deep South is best exemplified by the city of Memphis, on the Mississippi River. It is a sprawling place with a business district of assertive skyscrapers and a fine promenade along the river, and it is alive with the familiar associations of the South. Here W.C. Handy wrote the Memphis Blues. His memory is perpetuated by a shabby little park in the Negro district. All around it the black people move with loose-limbed grace, through dirty streets full of pawnbrokers and rooming-houses and cheap clothing stores, with pictures of Negro actresses in their windows. Cotton, the master crop of the old South, rules Memphis still. Here are the offices of the great cotton brokers, and you can see bales of the stuff lying outside their doors. One of the big hotels is called the King Cotton. There is violent racial feeling in Memphis, and much political chicanery. When I first went there E. H. Crump, most famous of the “bosses”, was still in power, a funny old man with a wizened face and a wide-brimmed hat, who liked going to football matches; at election time one was offered a list of candidates “approved by Mr. Crump”.

There was a battle of Memphis in the Civil War, and a naval engagement on the river, watched by huge crowds lining the banks. You can hardly escape the river there, for it bounds the business section, and there are always tow-boats passing by and hooters sounding; “river rats”, shantymen and the like live along its banks (until recently there was one slovenly shack-dweller who had an Oxford degree and talked, in his cloaca, in an impeccable English accent). Memphis has its share of southern high spirits, too—the Cotton Carnival, held annually in May, is among the least inhibited of American festivals. In the lobby of one of the hotels five ducks live comfortably in an ornamental fountain; each
evening they waddle in file into a passenger lift and are taken up to the roof for the night.

Memphis is heavy with prejudice and poverty, but buoyant with a primitive gusto. For many people in several States it represents the lights and the music, excitement, opportunity, grace, culture, fun; they marvel at its flashing signs, its cool riverside parks, its hint of elegance and friendly charm; and indeed, seen at night across the dismal dust of the cotton-fields, or from the steps of some miserable one-roomed hovel, it seems the very embodiment of the fabled Southern flavour.

W
hat a wonderful country it would be, were it not for schism, fear and hatred! It has so omnivorous a capacity for enjoyment; so many beauties of manner and design; such haunting memories (not all of them bogus) of gallantries and delicacies. Charleston sums up this tragedy of the South. It is a lovely city, warm and graceful; but over it hangs a pall of obsession, distorting thoughts and perverting motives, turning almost every conversation into a rude clash of prejudices. The mind of educated Charleston is dominated first by the endless conceits of pedigree; secondly (and more horribly) by the rearguard actions of white supremacy. Just as there is no snob quite like a Charleston snob, so no shiftless cracker from the Tennessee hills has more bilious spleen in his system than the well-bred ladies who live in Charleston’s mansions. “Death on the Atlantic”, they used to call the city, and though the economic basis for the insult has disintegrated, there is still the sick aroma of a mausoleum about its virulence.

Charleston is a Colonial seaport, marvellously preserved, with its predominant flavour of seamen and pirates enriched by overtones of aristocratic society. The fabled southern gentlemen of old, of distinguished European lineage, was a rare bird, and many a southerner who speaks of the ancestral place in England must have been persuaded, over
the generations, into mendacity. Charleston is one place, however, where English gentlemen settlers flourished. They filled it with delicate ironwork and high-walled gardens, narrow streets and handsome doorways, steeples, shutters and tall brick chimneys. Its houses, cool and reserved, are related to the plantation houses of the West Indies. They are often built at right angles to the road, facing a shady garden, and each story has its own pillared balcony (called a
piazza
in Charleston). This arrangement gives them an enchanted air of mingled mystery and invitation, as if unnamed delights are to be found behind the high brick walls of the garden or among the shadows of the
piazza,
Charleston is full of such innuendoes. It is a place of narrow lanes, with swinging lights and crumbling corners; of old taverns where sailors do their drinking; of shutters, dark squares and squeaky staircases. The climate of Charleston is semi-tropical, and everywhere there are palm trees and bouganvillias and flaring southern flowers. In the balmy summer evenings people move about the streets with unhurried calm, or sip cool drinks from frosted glasses in their shaded balconies, or stroll through their gardens chatting.

The nostalgic past still colours the streets of this wonderful old city, which ought to be, but isn’t, one of the great tourist magnets of the world. There is the slave market, Gothically turreted, with the buildings where the slaves were housed during their days in the hands of the brokers. (Most of the South Carolina planters refused to engage in the slave trade, says one of the Charleston guide books virtuously; but “no doubt there were merchants in Charleston who did”.) At the City Market the negroes, in straw hats, gaudy skirts and head-scarves, still congregate each day to sell avocadoes, fish and vegetables. If you stand and listen to them you may hear snatches of a strange language. The Gullah Negroes, from the islands south of Charleston, have a language of their own, described by some etymologists as the worst English in the world, and containing both antique English and African elements. Their children are still given such barbaric names as Bambula, Ishi, Asigbe and Momo, and their speech is a baffling jumble of contorted sounds. The Gullahs are strong, raw-boned people, most amiable and courteous. Isolated for centuries on their little sea islands, they have developed a distinctive culture, with strange music and folktales, and a firm independence of outlook.

There is a house in Charleston, a modest place with gables, where Blackbeard the pirate is said to have made his headquarters; once he lay off Charleston for nearly a week, and captured eight ships coming in and out of the harbour. Many famous pirates were hanged in Charleston in
those brave eighteenth-century days, their execution processions headed by a man carrying a silver oar, their bodies buried in a shoal offshore, just above the low-water mark. A fine old theatre is still active, and adjoining it is the Planter’s Hotel, where planters’ punch was allegedly invented. Not far outside the town, hidden in a little clump of trees, is a tiny chapel, for all the world like an English country church, left behind from the days of English hegemony. It has the arms of the Stuarts inside it, and the tombs of many an English worthy, and the smell of hassocks and prayer books; an old negress with an itching palm is its caretaker, living in a small house beyond the churchyard (all grey headstones and flowery inscriptions) and once a year they hold a service there, attended by some churchgoers of habit, and many Charlestonians anxious to reassert their connexions with the English nobility.

For these claims of ancient pedigree are dear, indeed, to the hearts of Charleston. This city once had its own orders of nobility, the grades of chivalry being barons, caciques and landgraves; an exotic device instituted by the original Lords Proprietors on the advice of John Locke. But the resulting social partitions seem to have largely dissolved, and snobbery in Charleston concerns itself with still more distant honours—with English dukedoms and baronies, even sometimes with royalty itself. The southern myth, of course, demands lengthy lineage no less than polished manners (though not a few planters will admit that their life, even in the spacious days, was a good deal nearer the soil than the propagators of legend will allow). Your hostess at dinner in Charleston, you may be sure, will soon be telling you of the moated castle in which her ancestors lived and died, of the battles they fought for the English crown, of the glories of feudalism and heraldry, some substantial echo of which they brought with them when they came to America. Do not laugh at her pretensions. It was partly the conviction of unshakable universal gentlemanliness, of unquestionable social superiority, which enabled the South to fight with such scornful brilliance in the Civil War; and it is the concomitants of this settled belief, the associated chivalry (involving honour and flourishing generosity and the flower of southern womanhood) that still gives the South its pungent charm.

Soon enough, in any case, the conversation will move away from genealogy (unimpeachable beginnings having been emphatically established). Wherever you are in the South, and however you struggle to prevent the approaching clatter of prejudices, sooner or later the talk turns to the problem of the negro; and nowhere more readily or more virulently than in Charleston. I was new to the game when I was there and I found the attitude of my hosts profoundly disconcerting. Their
basic postulant was, of course, that the white man was intrinsically superior to the black; that his position of authority and organizing privilege must be maintained; and that there must therefore be strict barriers between the races, to be enforced by measures of total segregation. But upon this plank they erected a monstrous structure of perversions, half-truths and distorted conclusions; drawing upon wildly disparate sources for their illustrations, plunging into arguments Christian and pagan, personal and political, ethnical, historical, biological, Mendelian, Darwinian, Hitlerian.

“It’s no good trying to help the nigrahs,” they will say, “they’re incapable of progress. Anyway, they want segregation themselves, just as much as we do; they’ve been brought up with it, haven’t they?”

“Politically conscious Nigrahs? There are a few, and the fewer the better. They’re exceptions anyway, you can’t quote them. They may suffer, certainly, but we can’t help that; they’re only a minority, and they’ve only themselves to blame.”

“Don’t you realize that the whites will soon be outnumbered in the South? We have to preserve ourselves—there’s a morality in self-preservation. Anyway, the nigrahs can never run the place—they’re congenitally incapable of it. They’ve never produced a single genius.”

“Class counts, you know. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Churchill’s descended from Dukes? (My own forebears were associated with the Marlboroughs, you know. Did I tell you?) They’re scarcely human, the nigrahs, you don’t realize. Anyway, we always looked after them; in the old days they were like members of the family. I loved my old mammy dearly. You people don’t realize how kindly the old South treated its slaves.”

“Obviously we can’t mix socially with the nigrahs. It’s common sense. How would you feel if you lived here, with nigrahs everywhere, and more of them every year, and soon we’ll be outnumbered? I put it to you:
how
would
you
feel
if
your
daughter
married
a
nigrah?
”

This weather-beaten old hoary heralds the climax of every such perilous discussion (the whole conversation, of course, is informed with a rumbling danger, so that you feel, as you parry and counter, as if you are tampering with explosives, or walking a loose tightrope). It is asked, perhaps, a little more often by women than by men; for though the ideal of unblemished southern womanhood, the quintessence of purity, was established by the southern male, nevertheless it is undeniable that a large proportion of southern negroes have white blood in them; and for this we may blame the gallant southern gentlemen (if we feel inclined to blame anybody) rather than his delicate wife, hampered by convention
as by crinoline. Perhaps, indeed, the womanhood cult was established by Southerners as a deliberate penance, or camouflage, for their lascivious tendencies. It was certainly more than a casual expression of temperament. “Woman! ! !” began the toast at a southern dinner to celebrate the centenary of Georgia. “The centre and circumference, diameter and periphery, sine, tangent and secant of all our affections!"

Alas! however much you sympathize with some tenets of the southern argument, before the evening is over you feel the tightrope loosening more, and the powder keg growing ominously warm. Your Charleston hosts are unlikely to be abusive, however strongly they disagree with you; indeed, to the end they will ply you wholeheartedly with food and drink, and intersperse their diatribes with witty asides, and conduct differences with an easy humour; but gradually there will creep into their talk the suspicion of insult, so subtle that at first you will not notice it; an insidious
basso
profondo
that will sound the clearer when you recall the conversation next morning. The southerner is a master of the acrid inference, believing in the theory that a gentleman is never unintentionally rude. If your dress is a little crumpled, your hostess, sometime during the evening, will be heard enumerating the delights of England: “Oh, hunting, my dear, and green fields, and lovely old houses, and really good tea, and the simply immaculate turnout of English gentlewomen! How it’s managed, I just don’t know!” If your origins are suspect, there will be an innuendo, no more, about the universal stamp of the
bourgeois.
If you happen to live in Nashville, Tennessee, it will be faintly intimated that most of the gathering has never heard of the place. If you are a Yankee from anywhere, you may hear, buried away in a heap of calculated comment, the faint, sharp, bitter echo of the rebel yell.

I am sure that as the Negro slowly advances to equality, the South will lose its festering stratum of resentment; the gaiety of its spirit, inherited from frontiersmen and Africans, will eventually triumph, encouraged by new prosperity; the raucous clamours of snobbery will mellow, and become no more than that faintly eccentric interest in family trees and place-names common among elderly Englishmen; and Charleston will one day enjoy the tranquillity of spirit it deserves, unharrassed by complexes and prejudices. But so far the old South is still struggling in humiliation, desperately aware of the world’s opinion, clinging to old mores and ways of thought, resentful of criticism, testy and painfully rigid of view. It is pitiful that a country so full of delight should be so racked and tainted by disease.