Long Time Leaving (24 page)

For my part, I've had enough of Southern defensiveness. Everything about me that is still Southern is something that I have held on to because it is tasty. My maleness and whiteness and one thing and another can no doubt still stand some judicious reconstruction, but if I forgo any more Southernness, it will be because I have gotten too old to exercise it.

But how in the world, you are wondering, can I imagine that coming out as a white writer puts me in a position to confound Northern assumptions that I
ought
to be defensive?

Here is my thinking. Since I can't—don't want to, damn it—avoid being regarded as Southern, by coming out as a white writer I categorize myself as a white Southern writer. And since no one who manages to find himself in decent Northeastern company can be suspected, these days, of being motivated by overt racial exclusiveness, I can, in such company, go on the offensive. I can quite accurately accuse Northeast-erners of using the term
Southern
to mean
white Southern.

If, as I am willing to bet he would, B. B. King were to pronounce
longitude
with a hard
g,
nobody would think of telling him that he was doing so because he was Southern. He would be doing so because it sounds better that way.
(Lonjitude
sounds like it goes with
lassitude—
like what you feel when you've been lonjing around too much.) I am, among Southern writers, one of the white ones.

People keep wanting to say that there are so many Southern writers because the South lost the Civil “War, but the black South didn't lose it, and neither, incidentally, did I. Maybe I would have helped lose it if I'd been around at the time, but that was a long time ago. I didn't lose the civil rights movement, because I was for it.

And say the Confederacy had prevailed. Would Faulkner have been content to have a career in its post office? Would Carson McCullers have been just a typist? Maybe the Confederate army lost because it had too many writers’ grandfathers in it. Probably a big percentage of whom got killed before they had a chance to continue the family line— the war no doubt nipped quite a few Southern writers in the bud. If we must invoke that grotesque intersectional bloodbath, we might rather say that Southern literature derives from what caused the war in the first place: the volatile mix of black and white in the South, and the cultural differences—the largely resultant differences—between the South and the North. But I would rather leave the war out of it, and observe with pride that Ray Charles and Flannery O'Connor jump out of the same bag.

A Southern writer is a product of the bodacious social and moral stew created when Africans and Celts or Anglo-Saxons found themselves in the same regional pot. It was, to be sure, white Southerners who, with the help of black Africans, brought black Southerners in, and the institution under which they were brought in was abominable. But in the long run, didn't slavery do more for American culture—however undeserving, and ungrateful, the culture may have been—than Hitler even? I am privileged, as a white Southern writer, to be a direct inheritor of the orality, earthiness, emotional juice, metaphorical fluency, rhythmic relish, and improvisatory looseness of Southern American English,
whose black and white ingredients vary as to proportions but are inseparable.

The difference between Southern and Northern diction is the difference between “Ebbody talkin’ 'bout Heaven ain't goin’ there” and, oh I don't know, here's something from Ralph “Waldo Emerson (a Northern white writer): “The test of a religion or philosophy is the number of things it can explain.” Thank you for sharing that, Ralph, but do you have anything we can dance to?

I realize that the bag image and the pot image I used above entail any number of potentially divisive snags. So does every other image of white and black Southerners together. Mark Twain and Richard Wright were both great integrators of European and African culture; the blend is a lot darker in
Black Boy
than in
Huckleberry Finn.
As Ernest Gaines pointed out a while back in the
Oxford American,
“Faulkner knows Dilsey from his kitchen, and I know Miss Jane from Miss Jane's kitchen…. She can be freer in her own little place, and she can tell you much more than Faulkner would get out of Dilsey in his own kitchen.” I would add that Faulkner told us things about the rest of his house that Dilsey wasn't studying.
The Sound and the Fury
is a white Southern novel.
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
is a black Southern novel.

We will read, say,
To Kill a Mockingbird
less fondly, I think, but with more interest, if we take into account that it is a white writer's sentimental story of white courage (and meanness, and innocence), with black people as a backdrop and a particular black victim as the MacGuf-fin. Compare
The Color Purple,
which has a different cultural skew. To call both books racist, however, would obscure the virtues of each and get everybody's back up. I would like for the different ethnocentrisms within Southernness to be de-pejoratized sufficiently for black and white Southerners to thrash them out together openly. If it ever gets lukewarm in that pot, though, we'll know that Southern lit hath lost its savor. Or maybe I should say if it gets cozy in that bag, nobody new is going to jump out.

Something like that is what I was going to say during the Vanderbilt panel on race. But Tretheway was right—first I had to be candid about my whiteness. Not to pin myself down but to gain latitude.

L
ord help a writer, we may think, whose aunt writes a book. But wouldn't you read a book by Shakespeare's aunt? Bound to be something in it. In
Truman Capote: The Story of His Bizarre and Exotic Boyhood by an Aunt Who Helped Raise Him,
there is, for instance, this, about Capote's mother, Lillie Mae:

So they took it, “among the bloodroot and puffballs.” Clay was Lillie Mae's Monroeville, Alabama, beau for the afternoon, Truman's father being in New Orleans. The narrator is Marie Rudisill, the aforementioned aunt, who accompanied her sister Lillie Mae on trysts for appearances’ sake. She wrote this book with James C. Simmons, a scholar. Mustard-green smoke erupts on every page.

Here are some of the other things that Aunt Marie (hereinafter referred to as Rudisill) confides:

• Truman's mother was some number. Once she tried to seduce a Catholic priest during communion. “When she knelt at the railing, she strained every muscle in her body, so that her breasts looked as though they were ready to pop right out of her blouse.” The man she always preferred, but would not marry because he was a Creek Indian, was Tecumseh” Waterford. Rudisill would often accompany Lillie Mae to meet this romantic figure in the woods, where the lovers would “talk and act as though I were not ever there.” She was, though.
  

• Truman's mother didn't love him. He once overheard her telling the cook, “I just can't stand the sight of my son…. He's just like his father sometimes—Little Miss Mouse Fart.” Most of the time, she left little Truman in the care of his aunt and his four grown-up cousins, one of them a lifelong bachelor and the other three spinsters (as then they were called), in their house in Monroeville. Sometimes Lillie Mae stayed there, too, but when she did, Truman drooped.
  

• Truman's mother didn't love Truman's father, either. His name was Arch Persons.
  

• If Arch Persons loved Truman, he gave scant evidence of it. He was usually out of town doing things like selling tickets to the burial and resurrection of a down-and-out Egyptian named Hadjah, who could control his breathing but was dead when last dug up.
  

• Truman's mother constantly berated her son for his effeminacy, but just before her death Truman felt that the two of them were approaching an understanding. “My contacts with Grace Kelly and Princess Margaret,” he told his aunt, “were so important to her.”
  

• The surname by which we know Truman came from his mother's second husband, “a chubby little Cuban gentleman” named Joe Capote, who was on the way to Sing Sing for embezzlement when Truman's mother, on discovering that Joe had pawned her full-length mink coat, took a fatal overdose of sleeping pills.
  

• The strongest figure in Truman's childhood was his middle-age cousin Jenny Faulk, a ladies’ clothing entrepreneur who ran the household in Monroeville with an iron will, who caused a fence of animal bones to be erected around the garden, who horsewhipped her sister Callie's fiancé out of town, and who had discreet affairs. “In the front yard hidden beneath the rose bushes was a small tombstone that read simply, ONE DAY OLD.’ Jenny would never answer our questions about it.” We might call that Gothic discreet.
  

• The person who showed young Truman the most affection was his childlike grown-up cousin Sook. She joined him enthusiastically in fantasizing, kite making, and dressing up in women's finery, but she wouldn't let him ride his bike except right around the house. “Youse gonna make a man-chile into a split-tail chile if yo ain't careful,” complained the cook. (For the most part, this book
  evinces a good ear but not here. The contraction of
  you is
  should be written
  you's,
  to distinguish it from the Northern
  youse
  as in
  youse guys.
  More important,
  yo
  is a shortening of
  yore,
  meaning
  your.
  No one, in or out of the South, has ever said
  yo
  for
  you. Yuh,
  more like it, or
  y.
  Capote, whose ear was fine, used
  yuh
  to convey the way a popcorn-selling midget said
  you
  in “The Headless Hawk,” a story he wrote from the viewpoint of a man in New York who strains, unsuccessfully, to be truly in love with—not to be evil to—a ghostly, waifish, boyish, artistic, insane young Southern woman with short “fawn-colored” hair. Personal pronouns stand out in this story. At one point the male character awakes and cries, “You, where are you?” Another time his cry is “I am not him! Only me, only me!” Ah, we might say, a story about Capote trying and failing to love himself in all his gender confusion. But this story isn't psychology; it's dreams within dreams.
  

• Those readers who know of Sook as the lovingly portrayed character in Capote's celebrated, insistently heartwarming story “A Christmas Memory” may be taken aback to learn that her bedroom stank because she wouldn't let any fresh air into it and that she hated black people and Yankees. She informed Truman with relish that her father once punished a ham-stealing field hand by nailing him up in a rain barrel with long nails driven into its sides and rolling him downhill.
  

• Truman's elderly cousin Bud was fond of him, told him wholesome stories, and predicted he would become famous. Bud was in several ways a Negrophile, and a nice man. (I don't know about you, but I never met anybody named Bud I didn't like.) But Bud never worked or married. Except presumably with regard to black people and Yankees, “Sook's influence,” says Rudisill, “eventually proved the stronger.”
  

• Monroeville also offered Truman great soul food, spooky neighbors, cool places to sit alone and think, and family retainers who did voodoo and said things like “Don't y'all spit in de fire. It will dry up yore lungs.” There were also friends his own age, notably including Nelle Harper Lee, who later, as Harper Lee, wrote
  To Kill a Mockingbird,
  in which Nelle is Scout and Truman is Dill. (Interesting how many Southern women writers of note have dropped their first names in their bylines: Mary Flannery O'Connor, Lula
  Carson McCullers, June Bailey White.) Nelle and Truman would get out a typewriter and a dictionary and play writer for hours. Nelle could knock Truman flat and jump up and down on him like a rooster, he was so tiny, but Truman's imagination, energy, and flair for tall tales made him Tom Sawyerishly dominant among the kids.
  

• When Truman came back to Monroeville as a famous writer, a prominent local banker invited him to lunch. Truman told him to shit up a stick: “simply because he was a nobody,” Truman explained to his aunt, “and he only wanted to be seen with a somebody.”
  

Okay. Rudisill is an aunt, with an aunt's perspective. To her, Capote remains a nephew, and one who has refused to take her phone calls for fifteen years. A person's development may be more mysterious and advanced than it seems to his aunt. Give Capote credit. His need to see himself as “a somebody” by regarding others as nobodies is unpleasant (which is not to say he should have gone out to lunch with the banker in question), and his writing did over time tend to break up in the opposite but complementary directions of mistiness and nastiness (until all the romance was gone and he was reduced to a mode we might call desiccated indiscreet), and he did, like Elvis, bloat and kill himself with toxic substances. But Humphrey Bogart did call him “a ballsy little guy,” Marlon Brando was not immune to his charm, and he did cut an international figure as a quintessentially arch person. And he had mature literary achievements. Neither your therapist nor Rudisill nor I could have written “The Headless Hawk,” for instance, to save his or her or my life. Unlike so many things called magical, it is. High as its gossamer quotient is, it lives up to its epigraph from the Book of Job.

And yet Truman comes through more appealingly in his aunt's stories than in his own. When we pull back from the magic to see him in his aunt's eyes, he is somebody, forget the “a.” She recalls walking into town with Truman and Nelle on hot sidewalks. “Occasionally Truman would step over into the dirt street and dance a few steps of the Charleston to cool the bottoms of his feet in the warm dust.” Her most nearly recent recollection is of Truman at age thirty, crying over his mother's death “as a small boy cries, pressing his mouth hard against the white knuckles of his fist.”