Long Time Leaving (5 page)

That would dispense with a lot of the idle conversation in which I find myself bogged down in the Northeast.

“What do you do?” people ask.

I say, “I'm a writer.”

And people of the Northeast don't respond the way you'd think people would. They don't say, “I knew a writer once. He could never sit still in a boat,” or “Yeah, that's about all you
look
like being, too. “What do you do, make it all up, or do the media tell you what to say?” or “Uh-huh, well, I breed ostriches.” I could roll with any one of those responses. One reason there are so many Southern writers is that people of the South either tell a writer things he can use, or they disapprove of him enough to keep his loins girded, or they just nod and shake their heads and leave him to it. But people of the Northeast act like being a writer is
normal

“Oh,” they say with a certain gracious almost-twinkle in their eye, “what kind?”

“What am I supposed to say to that? “Living”? “Recovering”? They'll just respond, “Oh, should I have heard of some of your books?” I don't know how to answer that question. And I'm damned if I'm going to stand there and start naming off the titles. That's
personal!
Can you imagine Flannery O'Connor standing there munching brie on a Ry-Krisp and saying, “Well, there's
The Violent Bear It Away…
.”

People of the Northeast don't seem to think it
is
all that personal. They seem to think that you can find out about books by having a schmooze with the writer, in the same way they might think you can find out about whiskey by chatting up someone in personnel down at the distillery.

“What I want to do, when somebody asks me what kind of writer I am,
is sull up for several long seconds until I am blue in the face and then, from somewhere way farther back and deeper down than the bottom of my throat, I want to vouchsafe this person an utterance such that the closest thing you could compare it to would be the screech of a freshly damned soul shot through with cricket song and intermittently all but drowned out by the crashing of surf. But I was brought up to be polite.

I was also brought up Methodist and went to graduate school, so I can't honestly say what I want to say: “Self-taught annunciatory. I received a vision out of this corner, of this eye, at about 7:45 p.m. on January 11, 1949, and since that moment in earthly time I have been an inspired revelational writer from the crown of my hat to the soles of my shoes. And do you want to know the nature of that vision?

“The nature of that vision was a footprint in the side of an edifice, and the heel of it was cloven and the toes of it was twelve. And how could a footprint be in the side of an edifice, you wonder? Especially since I stood alone at the time, stark naked and daubed with orange clay, in a stand of tulip poplar trees some eleven miles outside of Half Dog, Alabama, way off a great ways from the closest man-made structure in any literal subannunciatory sense. That footprint could be in the side of an edifice for one reason and one reason only: because—”

But then they'd just say, “Oh, a
Southern
writer. What
are
grits?”

I don't live in the South anymore. I maintain you can't live in the South and be a deep-dyed Southern writer. If you live in the South you are just writing about folks, so far as as you can tell, and it comes out Southern. For all we know, if you moved West you'd be a Western writer. Whereas, if you live outside the South, you are being a Southern writer either (a) on purpose or (b) because you can't help it. Which comes to the same thing in the end: you are deep dyed.

Whether or not anybody in the South thinks you are a Southern writer is not a problem. Englishmen thought of Alistair Cooke as an American. Americans thought of him as English. So he was in good shape, as I see it: nobody kept track of whether he went to church.

One thing to be said for being in the Northeast and you Southern is that it provokes you to keep an edge on your Southernness. Sometimes I'll bring up obscure examples of anti-Southern prejudice—“You ever think about the fact that in the book, the good witch is the Witch of the South, but when they made the movie they changed her to the Witch of the North?”

Also I make a point of taking no interest whatsoever in what passes in
the North for college sports. When I was a boy in Georgia, college sports was Bobby Dodd versus Bear Bryant immemorial. Compared to that, the Harvard-Yale game is a panel discussion. When all the college sports you can follow in the local media are Nehi or Lehigh or whatever against Hofstra or Colgate or somebody, why bother? You know what they call the teams at Williams College? The Ephs. Let me repeat that: the Ephs. Pronounced
eefs.
Do you think that anybody who is willing to be called an Eph is capable of playing any sport at a level anywhere near root-hog-or-die? Caring about college sports in the Northeast is like caring about French food in South Carolina.

A good thing about being Southern is that it often involves getting to a point where you don't know what to think. People of the Northeast act like they have never been to that point before. Certainly they think they know what to think about Southern things. Whenever people try to prove they are down with Southern culture by professing love for, say, Garth Brooks, I look at them with a certain expression on my face and ask whether they haven't heard of the real cutting-edge genre, Faded Country—songs like “I Guess Fishin’ Is Sufficient, But I'd Like a Little Love” and “I'm So Lonesome I Could Go Out and Ride Around on I-285.” Or if somebody starts telling me how deeply he or she responds to B. B. King, I'll say, “You know they've isolated the blues gene.”

I let that sink in and then I add, “Now.
What do we do with that knowledge?”

I bring up awkward racial questions whenever possible. For some years now, drastically bad race relations have been cropping up mostly outside the South, and I want to see some Northern white people sweat. I don't accuse them of being racist, because they know they aren't
that kind of person.
What I will do is say that anybody who claims to be “colorblind” or not to have “a racist bone” in his or her body is at best
pre-
racist and has a longer way to go than the rest of us. Back when the O. J. Simpson verdict was a hot topic, I would bring that up. A lot of enlightened-feeling Northern white people, who have never even suspected themselves of what we might call ethnocentric assumptions, are completely unself-conscious about blaming the whole thing on the jury.

The reason O. J. got off, people of the Northeast would feel fine about asserting, is that the jury was (a) too black to have any sympathy for the victims and (b) too dumb to get out of serving on the jury.

My response to (a) was to wonder aloud whether, if we stay humble long enough,
Southern
white people will ever be qualified to get away with bald-faced color-coded mind reading. My response to (b) was that
it sounded to me like the sort of assumption that enabled noncombat-ants to feel cozy about blaming Vietnam on American draftees.

I wouldn't hear a word against the O.J. jury until I heard several thousand words against the L.A. cops and the prosecutors. I would point to all manner of bungling on the part of these professionals, and observe that the DNA doesn't prove anything if the specimens were planted.

“Oh,” people of the Northeast would say, as if they had me now. “Was the investigation-prosecution a conspiracy, or was it incompetent? You can't have it both ways.”

“The hell I can't,” I would counter. “Y'all never heard of an incompetent conspiracy?”

“But O.J. did it!” they would protest.

“Most likely. Chances are, so did some of the people who—as has not been forgotten down where
I
come from—used to get lynched.”

And whatever else you think about Johnnie Cochran, whether his client was the devil or not, the son of a bitch could
preach
,! Alive in his words—without
needing
impeccable high ground. I will presume to put myself in the mind of a given black juror to this extent: I believe if I were such a juror listening to Johnnie Cochran represent a black defendant, I'd be thinking, “Let's remake
To Kill a Mockingbird
with this brother here as Atticus Finch!”

I don't throw lynching at people of the Northeast lightly, but I do freely
say y'all.
The language needs a second-person plural, and
y'all
is manifestly more precise, more mannerly and friendlier than
y'uns
or
you people.
When Northerners tell me they have heard Southerners use
y'all
in the singular, I tell them they lack structural linguistic understanding. And when they ask me to explain grits, I look at them like an Irishman who's been asked to explain potatoes.

All too often in the Northeast,
writers themselves
seem to regard being a writer as normal. When people ask a Northeastern writer what kind he or she is, instead of expostulating, “What do you mean what
kind?
Getting by the best I
can
kind! Trying to make some kind of semi-intelligible sense out of the goddamn
cosmos
kind! If you're interested, see if you can't find a way to read something I wrote! If I knew it by heart I would recite the scene in
Marry and Burn
where the fire ants drive the one-legged boy insane (which I'll admit I think almost comes up to what it might have been, but it's not
simple
enough, there are too many
of s
in it; I couldn't get enough
of s
out of it to save my life!); but I don't carry it around in my head—I was trying to get it
out
of my head; and even if I did, reciting it wouldn't do it justice! You have to
read
it”—a Northeastern
writer will natter away about being poststructuralist or something. And everybody's happy Writers fitting into the social scheme of things—it don't seem right to me.

Grits
is normal.

S
omebody called me a “niche writer” once, to my face. I was so taken aback I didn't tell him I wished to hell he'd tell me which niche he had in mind, so I could get a good foothold in it. It's true that back in the midsixties, when I was working for
The Atlanta Journal,
I would sometimes devote my op-ed column to a verse form I made up: the Georgia limerick, whose first line had to end in the name of a Georgia town. For instance:

That was a very popular feature, the Georgia limerick. Originally, it had a redeeming social purpose: to establish the right—the local—way to pronounce the Georgia town in question, as in this:

But the Georgia limerick didn't need that rationale. Many readers sent in their own, some of whose opening couplets, inspired by readily pronounceable towns, I still remember:

Lots of domestic tension in the Georgia limerick, as there was in my life at the time. I figured it was that way in everybody's. Maybe if I had managed to grit my teeth and hang in there, I might have become a miserable local institution. Verse sometimes popped up on the
Journal's
editorial page under the nom de plume of Georgia Keats. I could have been Georgia Keats. Author of
Peach Fuzz (And Other Things You Just Have to Work Your Way through in Life, to Get Down to Where the Goodness Is).

Actually I guess you can usually find a faucet or spigot, indoors or outdoors, where you can rinse the fuzz off of a peach or more precisely, damp down the down. But here's the beauty of having a niche: my second book could have
been Real Men Don't Rinse a Peach,
which happens to be something I believe. My father wouldn't run water over a peach, he'd bite right into one, fuzz and all, and my mother would shudder, but you could tell she found it dashing. She freely admitted being impressed by another aspect of his audacity: how he would pass up any number of fairly close parking places in the confidence that he would find one right next to where we were going in the car. “I couldn't stand to do that,” my mother would marvel. There was niche-finding for you. When I was writing for the
Journal,
my father—after decades of frustration in the automobile business (Packard and Edsel)—had at last come into his own, in the Atlanta area. He was a self-denying, warmly appreciated savings-and-loan president pretty much à la Jimmy Stewart in
It's a Wonderful Life.
I don't recall any pagan namesake son in that movie.

I couldn't keep my column in the light-verse mode, at any rate, because there were people in Atlanta who, despite the city's motto, were not too busy to hate. Managed to find the time somehow. One night I was writing at home in the wee hours, typing away against bigotry, when the phone rang and a woman said in a slow sultry voice that she liked what I had written that day, she wanted to get together with me, why didn't I come over and see her. In that afternoon's paper, I had written something snide about a local man who'd been outed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The woman made a moist mouthy sound. “Mmm, scuse me, I'm eatin’
uh peach,
uh good rahp one,” she said, “and you know how that juice'll jes’ git awl ovuh y’ mouth 'n’ lips, 'n’…”

My then wife, who had gone off me, pretty much for good (maybe because I put too much of myself into Georgia limericks), was asleep,
and I was tempted. But, for one thing, I had not been brought up to depart from the straight and narrow anywhere near that abruptly, alas, and for another thing, it sounded like a setup to me. I often wonder, though. Maybe I should have gone out and met that woman, maybe she wasn't—come to think about it,
she probably
wasn't—a Klan seductress, maybe she would have rocked me till my back didn't have no bones just purely in appreciation of how much of myself I put into my column. And she and I would've moved to Mystic or Leaf, and I'd have made a bundle writing shamelessly inspirational lurid novels while she bustled around the house—all sweaty in just her slip—eating those peaches of hers. Or, say she
was
an operative for the dark side. Maybe that's where I missed the story of my life. I know I'm feeling around for it at the moment. The poet John Keats, England Keats, wrote: