Long Time Leaving (13 page)

Alex Haley, a Tennessee native and the author of
Roots,
once said, in accepting an award, that he couldn't take full credit for his success. “It's like a turtle on a fencepost. You know he didn't get there by himself.” A strange image of literary eminence. Never mind how the turtle got there, he would rather not be there. Maybe Haley, whose writerliness and veracity suffered some reproach, didn't feel good about where he was. Every time I'm tempted to resent not ever having had the opportunity to make an award-acceptance speech myself, I can just
see
that turtle there on that post.

But I can't see life as a bottomless boat. If it doesn't have a bottom, it isn't a boat. It might be something that floats, but then there wouldn't be any free fall involved. If it's something that you're born into and it immediately starts to sink—still it wouldn't
be free fall,
and how and why are you hanging on to it? Not to mention how you would breathe, unless you're some kind of aquatic animal, in which case…

I don't say Southerners can't lapse into the unvisualizable. A friend of mine in Atlanta says she heard somebody on the radio say, “Atlanta—it has seized itself by its bootstraps, and now it's standing tall.” Then, too, isn't that Atlanta all over? It's not in free fall, it's in free rise, a topless bubble.

That's what's so irritating about Atlanta, to Southerners and Northerners as well. It's not Southern; it's fluxational, like life. Unless you just live there and have money and think in terms of the nice street you live on, Atlanta will drive you crazy trying to come up with a figure of speech for it. Good solid Southern images are vehicles to drive people
through
crazy. (Also, a boat is a vehicle. How can a boat, even with a bottom,
be
life?)

Granted, the vehicle may get carried away with itself and make things worse. I remember once, in college, riding on the back of a flatbed truck in a float depicting Interfraternity Cooperation, or something. We who were riding were supposed to be shouting out invitations to a big charity do of some kind. Promoting brotherhood, I believe. But the driver of the truck found himself to be enjoying truck driving so much for its own sake that he went faster and faster, so that we clarion callers in the back were reduced to hanging on for dear life and shouting, “Bobby, slow down!” The medium is the message. The notion of fraternal organizations’ fostering breadth of brotherhood was flawed to begin with—there were separate Jewish and non-Jewish fraternities, there were separate fraternities and sororities, there was a separate organization for “independents” (people whom no fraternity wanted), and there were no black students in the whole college—so the statement we conveyed as we hurtled through the streets made sense, as a matter of fact. Instinctively, Bobby may have known what he was doing.

Probably, speaking of Gothic, so did the ancient German tribe of Goths, although they struck other early Europeans as barbarous, uncivilized.
Not our sort. Outlandish.
When the Visigoths (who were too Gothic even for the Ostrogoths) whipped Rome, that's when the Dark Ages began. Well, what came to be known as Gothic architecture “reflected the exalted religious intensity, the pathos, and the self-intoxication with logical formalism that were the essence of the medieval,” according to
The Columbia Encyclopedia.
Do the French get defensive about that Chartres cathedral?

Just a couple of months ago, a Frenchwoman told me, on first acquaintance, that she didn't trust Southerners because the South had oppressed black people so. What was I going to do, deny it? I said, well, I knew it was true and knew it was a shame. She was a guest in my country, and was probably born after France's Nazi phase, so I didn't even counterattack. It occurred to me later that I might have given her something to think about by citing Harold Bloom's assertion that since there are no soliloquies in classic French drama, the French don't appreciate “the extraordinary
originality of the way Shakespeare's protagonists ponder to themselves and, on the basis of that pondering, change.”

Of course she could have come right back at me with, “So how rich is
Southern
culture in heroic inner bootstrap dialectic?” The French ward off bottomless free fall, layers of fear, all those things that Sandy Duncan went head to head with (“sit with her anguish”—
that
expression registers) by spinning out reductive abstract theories. Southerners prefer concrete figures of speech and anecdotes about life.

I found just such an anecdote the other day in a book called
Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting and Gambling in the Old South,
by Kenneth S. Greenberg. According to Greenberg, it took a long time for baseball to take hold in the South, because Southern gentlemen found it dishonorable to
run
after hitting a ball. I don't know about that, but—here's the anecdote. After the Civil “War, a Union veteran named George Haven Putnam recalled a baseball game “played by Northern soldiers outside their fortifications in the Deep South. While the ballplayers focused on fielding and hitting, Confederate skirmishers attacked them, shot the right fielder, captured the center fielder, and stole the baseball.”

That's showing 'em! And why should that anecdote make me feel defensive? Sure, I love baseball and hated being in the army. But it's not as if those Yankees were
invited
to come South and set up fortifications. Then to play ball
outside
the walls! That's insulting. I'd say the ball was in the Confederates’ court, so to speak.

The original Goths were invaders. I know invasion is in the eye of the invaded, but, still, calling Southerners Gothic could be projection on Northerners’ part. A lot of people would call burning down Georgia more Gothic than shooting a right fielder. Particularly one who was probably standing in the trampled remains of somebody's pea patch, or even on somebody's mama's grave.

Generally you stick your weakest player out in right field, in a pickup game like that. Lots of times a right fielder, realizing this, will become isolated and start brooding, pondering to himself. And all this time he's standing in the trampled remains of a pea patch that people planted around their mama's grave because she loved peas so much? And he knows it, too. I can just see it, sumbitch shot himself.

I
guess I am one of the go-to guys on grits, etc., because in the course of one day I got a letter asking me to tell “what is the weirdest thing you ever ate off a hog” (the best I could come up with was nuts, but I should have said, “Apricot sorbet—the hog went
whooo!”)
and John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, phoned to request a fond oral recollection of eating, for a big Southern cookbook he's putting together. I could have sworn there was nothing left in memory's pantry that I hadn't served already, but, tickled to be called upon, I tried to rustle something up. I started telling Edge about my mother's giblet gravy and then her other gravies, the word for which was
fine:
thin, as in nonglobby, but rich, as in sumptuous. For instance, her roast-beef gravy, with its delicate little glistening grease-bubble traces, “like halos,” I said.

And I thought to myself, “Why am I giving this away?

“I'm selling my pork chops, but I'm giving my gravy away,” sang Memphis Minnie, but she did get paid—not enough, undoubtedly—for singing it. As did Cootie “Williams and His Rug-Cutters for “Ain't the Gravy Good,” Link Davis for “Rice and Gravy Blues” (my mother made one kind of beef gravy to put over rice, another kind for mashed potatoes), Dee Dee Sharp for “Gravy (For My Mashed Potatoes),” Cisco Houston for “Beans, Bacon and Gravy,” the Ink Spots for “Pork Chops and Gravy,” the Nighthawks for “Lickin Gravy,” King David's Jug Band for “What's That Tastes Like Gravy?” Johnnie Temple and the Harlem Hamfats for “What Is That Smells Like Gravy?” and others too numerous to mention. All of whom sound, on recordings, like they are working up an appetite. So was I, on the phone there with John T. Edge, as I extemporized back over the years regarding my mother's gravy.

“Which God knows she gave away. Sometimes she'd say it did her a world of good to see how hearty I ate, but in another mood she'd say, “You give and give and give, and what do you get in return?” By “you” she meant herself. Money can't buy gravy that has that much going on.

If you were a ballplayer back in the old days you'd better not say, out of love for the game, “I'd play for free,” because management would take you up on it. So players went to court and formed a tough union and got agents, and now an ordinary person has to float a bank loan to take his family to see the Arizona Diamondbacks or whatever the hell they're called.

As far as negotiating leverage goes, what you want is for somebody to want, badly, for you to do something you don't want to do. So you say to yourself, “If I'm going to do something I don't want to do, it's only fair to ask them for more than they want to pay,” and eventually both of you are doing something you'd rather not. It's better than how Communism turned out, but it doesn't do anybody's heart good. Which is why I am sitting here writing this, instead of a seven-figure blockbuster. That's all right, you don't have to say anything.

You know the old expression: “He's got a handful of ‘gimme’ and a mouthful of ‘much obliged.’ ” To keep on showing generosity to such a person—who wants to take, take, take all the time without, in fact, feeling any obligation in return—is like pounding sand down a rathole. I have never pounded sand down a rathole myself, but I gather that people who have, have concluded either that a rathole is literally abysmal or that a rat can dig faster than anybody can pound sand.

These are stingy concepts, ill befitting a nation many of whose legislators have had to be restrained, over the years, from proclaiming it officially Christian. (To be sure, the person accused of having the aforementioned handful and mouthful has often been a preacher.) We may need something grander than folk wisdom to keep us on the generous path.

The epic of giving, I guess, is
Les Misérables.
I haven't read the novel or attended the musical, but in the 1935 movie version, Jean Valjean (Fredric March) learns from a saintly abbot that “Life is not to take, life is to give.” This belief makes Valjean (as opposed to his legalistic pursuer, Javert, played by Charles Laughton looking a bit like a joyless John Candy dressed as Tweedle Dum or Tweedle Dee) a beautiful soul.

So
beautiful that I don't see how anybody in his or her right mind can identify. Let's face it: Valjean is in love with his ward, Cosette. He comes to realize, however, that he should suppress his own desire and let her go on and make a life with the young man she loves. Okay. I am willing to stipulate that a Frenchman (though not any Frenchman I have met) might be open-hearted enough, in prosperous middle age, to toss away
such advantage over this young rival as he has. “Life is to give,” Valjean reminds himself—so even though he is just one step ahead of Javert, who means to make him a galley slave again, our hero races
toward
Javert to extricate this young man, a radical student, from a melee with the police. He finds the youth out cold.

Well. If the kid is going to get knocked unconscious at critical junctures, maybe he wouldn't be good for Cosette. There's another young woman—a sexier one, frankly, than Cosette—who is in love with this young man. Probably they would make a better French couple. And Cosette has already indicated, if sadly, her willingness to escape with Valjean, for his sake. Why not give
her
a chance to prove that life is to give?

But if that is what passes through Valjean's mind, even for a moment, we get no indication of it from Fredric March. He hoists the youth onto his back! Will any man, of any nationality, be unselfish enough to carry, bodily, a prospective foster son-in-law—let alone one who is apparently unemployed and might well need financial assistance to finish college-through the sewers of Paris in liquid filth (the opposite of gravy) up to his nostrils? That is what Valjean does. I don't believe Jesus Christ would have done it. If he had, no one with any sense would have organized a religion around him.

I am not denying that to live is to give. I am just saying that
Les Misérables
doesn't prove it.

What exactly is meant by “I'm selling my pork chops, but I'm giving my gravy away”? As I take it: I'm selling my body, but my essence has no price. The other lyrics don't necessarily drive this interpretation home. They are along these lines:

The spirit conveyed, though, is of an artist who embraces the marketplace as best she can (that America is a commercial nation we needn't bother to proclaim, and Memphis Minnie never had enough of an edge on Mammon to worry about being corrupted by a gravy train) while keeping her soul by giving it freely.