Long Time Leaving (7 page)

And got influenced. According to Menand, old Abiel acquired from slaveowners in his congregation a prejudice against black people, which he passed on to his son. In a lecture in New York in 1855, Dr. Holmes attacked abolitionists as “ultra melanophiles,” by which he meant extremist lovers of dark pigment. Dr. Holmes held certain truths to be self-evident, and one of these—before the Civil “War, at least—was the natural superiority of white people.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., for his part, was an ardent abolitionist when war broke out during his senior year at Harvard. He joined the Union army right away and served with distinction throughout most of the war, the wound at Antietam being one of three he received. The war turned him into a pragmatist. When he thought he was dying (“a gone coon,” as he put it) from his first wound, he wondered whether he should start believing in God but decided he didn't need to. As the bloody conflict went on, he lost his fervor for abolitionism or any other cause, as such. After Antietam, he wrote home that “the South have achieved their independence …believe me, we shall never lick 'em,” and that war was “the brother of slavery …slavery's parent, child and sustainer at once.” He declined to accept a major's rank in the regiment of black volunteers that would eventually be celebrated in the movie
Glory.

But he kept fighting, through the horrific Wilderness campaign, because he had concluded that the right thing was to do one's job right, whatever the consequences. He held rigorously to that belief throughout a long postwar legal career. His opinions as a U. S. Supreme Court justice were crucial in bolstering and expanding application of the First Amendment—but he grounded his thinking not in divinely endowed rights or the brotherhood of man but rather in his procedural judgment, based on the Constitution and experience, that society is strongest when everyone can speak out.

Like the “Nothin ” man, he was uneffusive. (Henry James, who grew up with Holmes Jr., likened his demeanor to “a full glass carried without spilling a drop.”) He eschewed church, was skeptical of every absolute value, and saw that his father's broidery was but loosely wound into the woof of reality. He came to believe that we can never know for sure what is true, all we can do is bet on what will most likely work. This
Brahmin learned a lot from getting shot at, and hit, by what might be thought of at Rutgers as good ol’ boys just trying to do their jobs right.

I
n his power-building years in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson figured that “he himself would likely never reach the presidency,” writes Marshall Frady, “owing to the Southern odor on him.” The political sensorium has changed since then, of course, but—I don't know about you—I still stink a little. I like to roll in it, some. But I can't entirely get over the apprehension that people smell me the wrong way.

See, I live in Massachusetts, among people who regard being liberal as perfectly natural, whereas it is in some ways a stretch for me, which is why I like it. I feel like a naked person in a nudist colony. A couple of winters ago I was wandering around my house wearing six or seven sweaters and muttering about the confluence of two things:

One: Senator Trent Lott's nostalgic tribute to the segregationist heyday of Strom Thurmond. If Thurmond had been elected president in 1948, “we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years,” said Lott with a twinkle in his eye. Here is a man from the same part of the same state as my mama, and he was born almost the same week I was, and he hasn't managed to inherit or acquire any better sense than that? Works for me professionally, of course. Enables me, on the radio, to thank the cowpaddy-coifed Lott for showing that there is, after all, a limit to how far a Republican can ride the wave of neo-peckerwood regressivism, and for proceeding, in apology after apology, to give new meaning to the formerly racist expression “world's sorriest white man.” But the whole thing is so retro it makes me feel tired.

Two: The attempt—which, thank heaven, I managed to squelch—by the publisher of my forthcoming biography of Robert E. Lee to assert, in marketing copy, that the book will appeal to “proud Southerners.” If, say, Italo Calvino had written a biography of, say, Columbus, would they have advertised it as appealing to “proud Italians”? If Joan Didion did Hillary Clinton, would they pitch it to “proud white ladies”? And can it be that they believe, or even would like to believe, that I home in on people who
regard themselves as
proud
…? I am not an ashamed, not even a sheepish, Southerner. But …I feel tired.

So I turn on the TV and what comes boiling out at me? That moment in
Raintree County
when Elizabeth Taylor, voluptuously abed, hollers at Montgomery Clift, her long-suffering husband:

“You don't love me! You never did love me! You hate me because I'm Southern!”

And I think to myself, Yes! Why not! Why can't I have the option of going about in the world as a
maligned
Southerner, an object of
unjust
disregard?

This would not be an option that I would overexploit. For I bear no ancient grudges. The truth is, I think it was right sweet of the nation not to let my ancestors go. If the North had seceded, my ancestors might have said, “Fine. Get on out of here, then. See if we care. We've got our own fish to fry, which y'all don't even know how to do right.” And today the Atlanta airport would be even more of an ordeal, with all those passengers originating outside the Confederacy having to go through customs and who knows what extra layers of security.

But I would like to bear a
contemporary
grudge. Who wouldn't? I'm human, I sometimes feel disadvantaged, and mine is the added disadvantage of knowing it isn't so. Frequently insulted by otherwise multi-culturally scrupulous people, yes. But oppressed? No.

And now …You know Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, a.k.a. the thinking person's Satan? I mean the Tom DeLay whose explanation of the Columbine High School shootings was as follows: “Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.” That Tom DeLay. The medieval one. Well, his right-hand man in the Congress now is named Roy Blunt. My name, phonetically. I have been coming out for integration since 1961. And now, shades of
Mandingo,
people probably think I'm the majority whip.
^*

I met Roy Blunt once. Nice fellow. The fact that I think he will burn in hell for—Let me, in all fairness, rephrase that. The fact that I think
I
would burn in hell if
I
ever served, for one moment, as the sidekick of someone who blames teenage mass murder on Darwin, for God's sake, is of scant consequence. I hitched myself to the wrong wagon forty years ago.

I blame the liberal media. And literature. Do you suppose Tom DeLay has ever read any literature? If I'd majored in something besides Enlish, and had my finger on the pulse of the future, I would have skimmed some libidinous foam off the sixties and then devoted myself hand over fist to premodernism. It would have been more fun, rhetorically, and far more lucrative, than typing my fingers to the bone trying to achieve a fusion of—oh, never mind.

It is not a good movie,
Raintree County.
First of all, why would anybody ever want to marry Montgomery Clift? Or even—this may surprise Hollywood—Elizabeth Taylor. Very beautiful, sure, but the average person looks at Elizabeth Taylor and thinks: too much trouble. “Way too much. So, of course, she has to represent the South.

We don't believe for a moment, if we have any sense at all, that if by some chance any given character played by Elizabeth Taylor and any given character played by Montgomery Clift were to become a couple, the latter would be the strong one. And yet because Clift is the Hoosier and Taylor the Louisianan (her name is Susanna), she is crazy and he is the high-minded rock whom she seduces and tricks into marriage. So they move to Indiana and the Civil “War is about to start, and she wants to retain the retainers she has brought up from Louisiana, and he tells her, “You can't have slaves up here.”

And her response is, “Why do you keep picking on me?”

She runs away from him, taking the slaves with her. He joins the Union army so he can get down South to find her. He does find her, in a way substandard insane asylum. She is still attended there, though the war has ended, by her slaves. (The male one, Old George, is played by Bill “Walker, who between 1917 and 1978, according to the Internet Movie Database, played ninety-four movie and TV characters, only three of whom had more than a first name.)

Here's why Susanna is crazy: because, as her slave Soona (or maybe Parthenia) explains, “Long as I've knowed her there's been a war going on inside her.” “We've been led to believe, in fact, that Susanna's mother was black, but the case turns out to be more psychological. “When Susanna was a girl, another slave, Henrietta, was more motherly toward her than her mother was. (Susanna's mother went crazy because Susanna's father preferred the company of Henrietta.) So, according to Soona or Parthenia, “she wanted Henrietta to be her mother, only she hated wanting it because Henrietta was …like me.”

Clift doesn't care if she's suffering from hysterical miscegenation; he wants to save their marriage. “You don't think the foundation's too
rikkitih, after awl this tahm?” Susanna asks. Aw, no, he says. So she returns to his bosom. (That's right, she to his.)

Then, after a bit, she runs off again and drowns so that he can finally marry the sensible Indiana woman who has always loved him: Eva Marie Saint.

In other words, only when the South is attached to the North is the South sane, and the South would rather die.

Shouldn't I be able to construct a cultural grievance from all this? As I look back over my life, however, I realize that something I said earlier, with regard to Elizabeth Taylor, was a lie. If fate had brought the two of us together, and made me the type of person she was interested in at the time, I might well—those lips!—have been her third or fourth hubby. In which case, that is where I'd be coming from. I would speak, whether I wanted to or not, as someone formerly married to Liz.

As it is, I speak as this Southern white guy. Condemned by every syllable I utter to be linked at least in retrospect with—how did Senator Lott put it?—“discarded policies of the past.”

So. No sympathy for me. Unless I go crazy.

In closing, here's what I think: The South started going wrong when it started getting so heavy into the cultivation of soybeans. Soy's not Southern. Ham is Southern. Everywhere you look it's soy milk, soy ice cream, soy meat, soy I don't know what all. Why can't there be ham milk and ham ice cream and ham this and ham that?

And here's another thought. It's high time we rehabilitated a Southern fruit that has for so long, through no fault of its own, been associated with prejudice. Why not go through culture replacing the word
stone
with the word
watermelon?

The philosopher's watermelon, like a rolling watermelon, leave no watermelon unturned, watermelon walls do not a prison make, if you live in a glass house don't throw watermelons, John Ruskin's
Watermelons of Venice,
heart made of watermelon doody-wa doody-wa, bomb them back to the Watermelon Age, great watermelon face. Oliver Watermelon. Everybody must get watermeloned.

James Dickey put out a collection of poems called
Into the Stone.
And he was Southern! Let's make that
Into the Watermelon.
I can see the cover illustration now! A sword (as in
The Sword in the Watermelon)
stuck into Watermelon Mountain, which has carved into it Jeff Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Melonwall Jackson on horseback. Wouldn't that make a Southerner proud?

Poets think they are so hard and cool, getting down to
stone
all the time. Let's get hot and wet and sweet:

I'm not talking about charity toward the watermelon. What good is that? I'm saying, why not co-opt the watermelon, get the juice out of it, as we have the blues. And if any damn Yankee doesn't like it, let him who is without sin cast the first…

Or, getting back to my first thought, how about “lest thou dash thy foot on a ham.” That's not bad. “Hath flung the Ham that puts the Stars…” Maybe. Maybe. But “a ham look on the ham's face”? Nope. Doesn't work.

But I'll say this. If we had stuck by watermelon
and
ham, and the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years.