Old Glory (63 page)

The inmates, black and white together, were distributed around the lobby, on sofas, in wheelchairs, leaning on sticks. Some were asleep. Others were giving lectures to themselves in loud voices. Miss Mary was called from her room. She came out, painfully trundling herself along on an aluminum walker. Her hair was cut in a jagged fringe across the top of her skull. She looked like Bertolt Brecht.

“So, you’ve come to see me in my
in
-carcer-
a
-tion?”

“I’m sorry. Is it really like that?”

She sniffed, and winced with hurt as she lowered herself onto a chair.

“What? Sleeping four to a room? Listening to
these
people? You can’t keep nothing of your own. It goes. I don’t know what you’d call it, but I’d call it incarceration.”

She felt around in the pocket of her grubby housecoat and found a cigarette there.

“I wonder if I can get away with this one.… They don’t allow me to smoke, even. One every two hours. That’s my
allowance
. They’ve taken them out of the machines, now; too ‘dangerous.’ And I’ve been smoking Lucky Strikes since 1919.
Tskch!
”

The old people’s home had been a terrible new world for Miss Mary.

“See?” she whispered, pointing behind her. “
Integration!
”

On the day she had been brought in, she had been helped up the veranda. The first person she saw was the man who had been her cousin’s chauffeur.

“He was sitting right there. With a big smile. In a rocker. ‘Why, hello, Miss Mary!’ You know what? As soon as I was in here I had to set and learn to call Negroes ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’? I wasn’t raised to
that
. I know what’s behind this integration—Yankee greenbacks and a gang of
crook lawyers up in the state capitol. That’s what’s done it. And we ain’t only got Negroes in here, neither. There’s Catholics, Methodists and a lot of …” Her voice dropped again to an angry whisper. “… 
Baptists!
”

“What are you?”

She looked at me as if I were mad to ask such a question.

“I’m a Presbyterian.” She was palming her lighted cigarette, shooting sidewise glances in search of nurses on patrol. “And Baptists and Presbyterians don’t
mix
”

All the Southern distinctions of rank and station had been dissolved in the home. Half of Miss Mary’s high school class had found themselves in a forced reunion here. They shared rooms and tables with the people who had once been their house servants. They had revived all their classroom enmities and friendships.

“Oh, but I wanted a
weapon
today,” Miss Mary said. “You read in the papers about how they’ve been doing these
terrible
things … you know, stabbing of someone twelve times … another stabbing, seventeen wounds … shot in the face five times with a gun
 … I know how they feel!
”

An old man in a Hawaiian shirt went tapping past on his stick. He nodded to us.

“Morning, Miss Mary.”

Miss Mary didn’t reply. She waited until he had gone by, then tapped her skull. “The brain’s a funny thing—
when it goes.
”

I had been warned not to excite her. I thought that perhaps the past might be more restful territory. She told me how her father had run coal barges down the Ohio and Mississippi from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. She had been a clever child. She had left high school to go to the University of Wisconsin, where she took a liberal-arts degree. When she came back to Natchez, she refused to go out to work.

“I had me a
royal
time.”

“What did you do?”

“Oh, every week they had balls in the mansions.…” Her crab-apple hand pushed irritably at her walker. “I did so love to dance.”

New Orleans had been “Mecca.” She had sailed down on the
Tennessee Belle
.

“Yes—I’ve seen a photograph of her.” The steamboat had been owned by the New Orleans-Vicksburg Packet Company: one of the biggest cotton-running ships on the river.

In Natchez there had been the Baker Grand Opera House. She had gone there to see Ben Greet playing Shakespeare, Bud Scott’s New Orleans Dance Band, the Algy Fields Minstrels.

“Oh, it was
royal.
” Ash from her Lucky Strike spattered the roses on her housecoat. “Then there was the movies … They had player pianos with them then. Oh, yes. There was one I saw every day for a whole week. What was it called …?
Nigger Heaven
. That was it.”

She snorted with bitter amusement. The title had brought her back to the lobby of the home, its orange sunlit leatherette, its nursery smell of urine, milk and Lysol.

“When they put me in here, I’d never looked at TV. I had to learn all the personalities. You couldn’t join in the conversation without you knew the names of all the people on TV. That’s all they talk about. Johnny
Carson
. They were all new to me. I’d kept up with college football, but the shows … they were all new. I couldn’t make head nor tail of them. To me they was just plain dumb. These people, though, they love them. They turn the noise of it up so loud you can’t read, you can’t think. Huh.” She tilted her head back and rolled her eyes so that her pupils almost disappeared into her skull. “
Nigger Heaven.
” The father of the man behind her could, I supposed, easily have been a slave.

Natchez was littered with the mansions where Miss Mary had danced in her royal days. Deep in elms and live oaks, they looked out across wide parterres of close-shaven lawn. One kept on seeing bits of them between the leaves: a dome, a colonnade of white pillars, a balustraded gallery, strips of wrought-iron tracery, shuttered windows. Up in Illinois and Iowa, I had been delighted by the late Victorian imitations of these Southern planters’ houses. They were pieces of good-humored dandyism, and it looked as if the men who had put them up had had fun in their building.

I found it much harder to like the real thing. This was seigneurial fat-cat architecture, and whatever pretty twiddles and curlicues were incorporated into the fringes of the design, it was brutally straightforward about its main intention, which was to boast and belittle. The Natchez mansion presented a standard face to the world with its triumphal portico. Four vast white columns held up a peaked tent of stucco over a spreading fan of stone steps. To cross the threshold, one had first to be ritually humbled. Just as European cathedrals bully the visitor into bowing his head and drooping his shoulders because their scale is so much grander than his own, so the entry to these mansions was constructed to make one feel shy, impoverished and small. I was happier about the idea of shrinking before the glory of God than I was about abasing myself in front of the amazing amounts of money
that cotton farmers had put by. The planters of Natchez had behaved more like Pharaohs than Medicis. Their palaces weren’t furnished with masterpieces commissioned from individual artists; they were straightforward monuments to the power of the great fortune when it went hand in hand with a more or less unlimited supply of cheap labor. Even their most intricate work—the wrought iron, the carved wooden trellis—was done to a fixed pattern. Once I had got used to the sight of these places, all I could see was their splendid bulk; and that left me cold.

Since reaching the South I had spent time wriggling, as politely as I could, from invitations to tour the local antebellum homes. When I did succumb, I was made to stand, slack with boredom, in front of collections of objects for which I couldn’t raise a glimmer of interest. There were bits and pieces of ordinary Victorian furniture. There were mild novelties, like oval spiral staircases. I was told that a photograph of some Confederate officers, taken in 1863, was one of the “oldest” photographs ever made. There were things to see and hear in the deadest bar in town that made it an infinitely livelier place than the biggest and most authentically restored planter’s mansion.

When I stood on the steps of Melrose in Natchez, dwarfed by the usual arrangement of Greek columns, I expected nothing more than an hour of deep tedium. The door was opened by a black butler. His presence, at least, gave the occasion a twist of consoling irony. He led me into the dining room and demonstrated how the punkah over the table had been worked. Ropes went through pulleys across the ceiling, down a wall and out to where a “house nigger” had kept the fan turning over his masters’ heads at dinner.

“Kind of neat, huh?” said the butler.

We went on to the next room. I made routine admiring noises about the painted floorcloths. I was shown an antique writing desk which I did like, since it was almost exactly the same, if not quite as old, as the one on which I usually worked at home. Then I looked out the window. The grounds at the rear of the house were full of blacks working on some sort of construction project.

“What’s going on out there?”

“Oh, they’re just putting up the slave quarters. Now, here, we have a chest made in Philadelphia …”

“
Slave
quarters?”

“Oh, yeah; didn’t you hear? We got the movie people coming in at Christmas. They’re doing
Beulah Land
for the TV.”

I skipped the imitation Louis Quinze and the chest from Philadelphia
and made for the gardens. The slave quarters were coming along fine. Men were sawing logs, toting wood and swinging roof beams through the trees. A line of long log cabins was half finished already; in a week, Melrose would be genuinely restored.

The making of
Beulah Land
had temporarily solved the problem of black unemployment in Natchez. A casting director from Los Angeles was signing up extras for the film. Some people, with previous experience of playing slaves, would get talking parts and stacks of Hollywood money.

“It’s something about the faces around here. The thing about these guys is they really look the part. You bring in black actors from the West Coast, it always looks wrong, somehow.”

It was a regular Natchez industry. Whenever anyone was making a picture set in the Old South, the production crews came to Natchez. Many of the blacks had enough experience of screen slavery to qualify for membership in the film actors’ union. Being make-believe field niggers and house niggers had become their major occupation.

“They’ve run into trouble with the N.A.A.C.P. When there’s no movie work going, they sit in the ditches playing banjos and singing old darky songs for the tourists. Then the N.A.A.C.P. comes in and tells them they’re degrading themselves. So they wait till the N.A.A.C.P. guys get out of town, then they’re in the ditches with their banjos again. You know—‘Camptown Races,’ ‘Old Man River,’ stuff like that.”

Fifty-foot logs were going at speed past my left ear, shouldered by blacks who were stripped to the waist in the December cool.

“George! Hey, where’s George?” This was a white supervisor with a clipboard.

“
Yassuh?
”

In his
Republic
, Plato abolished the profession of actor, on the grounds that imitation of life turned dangerously easily into the fabric of life itself. Looking at Melrose’s new slave quarters, smelling their fresh pine, I thought that Plato himself could hardly have imagined a more telling illustration for his argument.

I had slept badly in Natchez. In the small hours, catching the glint of the mirror on the wardrobe, I had mistaken it for the river, and I thought that the river was trying to kill me in earnest now. Every day it was getting faster and rougher; I saw my boat sliding out of control into the black eye of an eddy, swamped in shoal water, capsized by a wake. There were no convenient towns along the shore between here and Baton Rouge; and after Baton Rouge the Mississippi turned into
an international waterway, full of big ships. If only I could get a ride on a tow to New Orleans … then I could take my boat west into the bayous of the Delta and look for an ending there.

I telephoned Vicksburg, where a helpful man named Gene Neill said that he’d try to arrange something for me. He called back. Yes, there was a tow, the
Jimmie
L.; it would be passing Natchez sometime tonight, and I should raise its captain on my radio. “Ask for Boom-Boom Kelley. You’ll like Boom-Boom. He’s a real character.”

Killing time, I walked along Canal and Broadway on the edge of the bluff, feeling saved from the river two hundred feet below. The water was pitted with whirlpools and boils. My own boat, a tiny splash of yellow at the landing, was the only small craft in sight. I passed a row of two-room shacks on stilts, their scraps of garden rowdy with chickens. I played pool in a tumbledown wooden grocery-and-bar. My partner was disconsolate. There was nothing for him in the great work going on up at Melrose; presumably he didn’t look like a convincing slave. We spoke at long intervals over the steady
chock-chock-chock
of colliding balls.

“You come all the way down the river?”

“Yes. Pretty much all the way.”

“Shit.”

He potted the eight ball and reached for the wooden triangle to set up another game.

“Me … I hate the river. I done ride on it once. Shit, was I scared!”

“It’s scared the shit out of me too, sometimes. I’m frightened of it; but I don’t hate it.”

“You lucky you ain’t drownded.”

“Ah, maybe you’re playing pool with a dead man’s ghost.”

“Don’t
talk
that way, man; I’m
telling
you …”

“Well, one thing the river does, it certainly ages you. I feel about ten years older than when I started out on Labor Day.”

“Shit, I done stay in Natchez, and
I
feels ten years older than what I done on Labor Day.”

The long carbide beam of the
Jimmie L
. lit a channel for me across the water below the highway bridge. The surface of the river, coiled and thick, was like hot tar. There was just enough of a moon for me to see the low angular plateau of the barge fleet; then, behind it, the stepped pyramid of the towboat. The crew guided me alongside with flashlights. I climbed onto the deck, and my boat was scooped out of the Mississippi on a winch.

Up in the pilothouse, the dim moonlight and the amber glow of the instruments had turned Mr. Kelley to a bearded silhouette at the steering bars. Even in the dark, though, I could see his character written into the furnishing of the pilothouse. He had done his best to turn it into a comfortable men’s club, with pine-paneled walls, a black leather chesterfield, brass spittoons filled with gray cat litter for ashtrays.