A Turn in the South (20 page)

The green highway signs measured off our progress back to Charleston. There came a moment when Jack Leland stopped leaning forward, his hand on the back of my seat.

He leaned back and said, “We are now out of my territory.”

I
T WAS
Alex Sanders, chief judge of the South Carolina Court of Appeals, who had directed me to the Confederate Memorial. I had had an introduction to him; and when we first met in Columbia he had given me lunch at the Faculty Club in the university. Our conversation had been general. I felt he had been puzzled by our inconclusive meeting. But it wasn’t possible for me to tell him exactly what I wanted from him; for the simple reason that on this kind of journey one doesn’t know what one wants from a man until one has spoken to him.

He was a big man with a strong accent that could divert one from the precision and economy with which, as a lawyer, he could speak. He had sent me to the memorial, he said later, to enable me to understand something about the South. He himself, though he found the words moving, wasn’t certain about the cause.

“Lost causes are espoused or romanticized by the second generation.” The memorial had been put up in 1879, 14 years after the end of the war. It was astonishing to him that people in 1879 had found the money to make the memorial, at a time when there wasn’t enough to eat. He remembered talking to one or two veterans on the Confederate side. One of them said, “I gotten my arse shot off for other folks’ niggers.”

“He didn’t have any, you see. And the vast majority who fought in that war didn’t have any. They were fodder for the aristocracy. Identity is more than just remembering the past. We have to be like museum curators. In the dynasty of Ming there was obviously a lot that was beautiful. But I am sure there was a lot that was junk. The job of the curator is to pick and choose.”

But didn’t he, when he was growing up, have an attitude to the South?

He didn’t, any more than a fish has an attitude to the ocean in which he swims. “It was only after I’d grown up and left that I developed an attitude. And at first my attitude was that I was ashamed of it. But the older I get the more I realize that the transgressions of the South were the transgressions of mankind, and that there were certain things that were superior. There is a cultural attitude in the South that embraces respect for family and God and in some ways for country. Although patriotism is not among the highest virtues on my list, still, the patriot believes in something larger than himself, and it is therefore a virtue. There is an attitude in the South that there is more to life than the moment.”

“Honor? It’s such a theme. So many people talk about it.”

“I was trained that way. To believe that truth is an ultimate virtue. The watchword for life was unselfishness.” He stopped. “But I don’t know that any of this is peculiar to the South. I am inclined to think, however, that the closer you get to the equator, life tends to be exaggerated.”

“Did you try to distance yourself from the South, after you’d become ashamed of it?”

“Particularly when I was with people from the North. And even when I was in the South I spoke out against things I didn’t like. That meant the racism.”

“It must create disturbance, turning against what you had grown up with.”

He said: “It produces a certain schizophrenia. But as I get older I get more tolerant. I become more tolerant of intolerance. If you find a Klansman to talk to you, and you ask him what the Ku Klux Klan stands for, he would say it stands for law and order, and love and friendship, and brotherhood. If you would ask him how he would set about achieving those things, he would say, ‘Whatever it takes. Whether we have to blow up that building or attack that man.’ He doesn’t see how those two ideas are not in harmony with one another. You can’t deal with that kind of schizophrenia.”

At our lunch he had spoken of the South’s acceptance of civil rights as a kind of recognition by the South of the immorality of its earlier position. I wanted to know whether he could chart particular stages of that recognition.

“I have a hard time explaining that to myself. It is a wondrous thing. If you had told me in the late fifties and early sixties that in the very near future we were going to have an integrated society, I wouldn’t have believed you. I thought then that it might have been a hundred years in coming. It may even be divine, the change that has come about—I don’t know. It’s hard to understand. But people all of a sudden saw that it was wrong. And that is miraculous, for people to say that their own behavior had been morally defective. Nobody ever confesses on that scale. And here we have not only a somebody, an individual, saying that, but a whole society.”

And commercial pressures were now bringing about social change. There had been the recent uproar about a black IBM executive being denied membership of a club in Columbia. IBM as a result had dropped an idea about putting up a local plant. Neither IBM nor the executive had wished to talk about the matter or make race the issue; and it wasn’t, therefore, easy for people to deal with. The consequence was that there had been no bluster on the part of the club; they had simply changed their policy and invited some blacks to join.

Judge Sanders spoke as a lawyer. Through the law he had arrived at a larger identity.

He said, “The common law is a majestic thing. It has a remarkable capacity to resolve disputes in a way which not only preserves civilization but enhances it. It is not unusual for me to find myself guided in a decision by a decision which a judge made a thousand years ago. I am aware I’m serving a larger civilization. And I know I’m
serving
it.”

“So you don’t have a problem of identity, no trouble between background and profession.”

“Not any more. I am more at peace with myself. Of course, that may be a matter of getting old and less judgmental and more understanding.”

His family had been in South Carolina “forever.” An early ancestor on his mother’s side had come out as a missionary to the Indians, and had then become a missionary to slaves.

TALLAHASSEE

P
EOPLE IN
Charleston had been complaining about the lack of their afternoon rain. As if to make up for this, on the day I left, and almost as soon as I had cleared the town and was going west, there was a fierce cloudburst. The tall trees tossed, the leaves showing their undersides, every big bough in separate convulsion. The rain slapped the windshield; nervous cars parked off the traffic lanes with their lights on. Not many miles away it became clearer, midafternoon again; though still from time to time approaching cars—when they had their headlights on—alerted one to the storms ahead.

Tropical weather, of continental violence, matching the landscape: the swamp of South Carolina running into the marsh of northern Florida, reeds green and brown, patches of water silver or black, a landscape impressive by its great size. And soon enough, from this tropical swamp, Charleston—which one had begun to take for granted: so perfect a creation—began to seem far away. It was hard to think of that town being set down here—as it was hard to associate all this coastal land with African slavery, land so much of the New World, so unlike any other, land one wanted to contemplate, to enter a little into its wonder.

The slavery of the British Caribbean islands began to seem small-scale, even domestic. Slavery in the British Caribbean was really an eighteenth-century institution; when slavery was abolished in the British
Empire in 1834, England had become a manufacturing and trading country and could afford to write off both the plantations and the islands. Slavery in the Southern United States was most important in the first half of the nineteenth century—most important, that is, when slavery was on the point of becoming anachronistic, an absurdity in an industrializing country. But business people are concerned with the here and now (it is fearful to read of the slave-owners’ wish to extend plantation slavery to the Western territories); and it took a war to do away with slavery in the South. The freed slaves remained, in inescapable numbers, no longer mere units of labor and wealth, a kind of currency; and it was they—for whose sake, one way or the other, the war had been fought—who bore the brunt of the South’s anguish.

A slave is a slave; a master need not think of humiliating or tormenting him. In the hundred years after the end of slavery the black man was tormented in the South in ways that I never knew about until I began to travel in the region. Jack Leland had told me that in the early days of the motorcar in South Carolina blacks hadn’t been allowed to drive. In Tallahassee I heard that blacks were not allowed to try on clothes in stores; they had to buy anything they tried on. In Mississippi blacks could not be educated beyond a certain point; in South Carolina there was a time when attempts were made to deny blacks education altogether.

And there was in the South something we never knew in the Caribbean of colonial days: violence, and the absence of law. How did a black family react to news of lynchings? What happened to the bodies? How were they buried? A man I met told me that when he was a child he was not allowed by his father to be a delivery boy. The father feared that a white woman might accuse the boy of being a Peeping Tom or of attempting rape.

In the Caribbean the black man, after a hundred years of colonial neglect, a hundred years of separation from slavery, found himself in a majority on his own island, with the power of electing his own leaders and his own government. The black American, at about the same time, found himself just liberated but in a minority in the world’s most advanced country, and among the most denuded in that country. His possibilities, as an American, were far greater than those of a West Indian. But there could be no easy movement forward for the mass; they had lived through too much; the irrationality of slavery and the years after slavery had made many irrational and self-destructive.

It was in the news every day: drugs, crime, street life, “negative peer pressure” at school (blacks beating up those blacks who did well at school). In Atlanta, Anne Siddons had spoken of her need after a certain age to hoard emotion, to save parts of herself for herself. It seemed that blacks of all ages—living out their cause in their lives—felt a similar need. But in their more desperate condition this looking inward could separate them from their cause and often work against it.

“Finally, I suppose, the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality.” The words by James Baldwin (among the most elegant handlers of the language) had stayed with me since I had read them, nearly thirty years before. “Reality”—it was what I remembered and what I accepted; but now, in the South, in the middle of my own journey, I began to wonder whether the truce that every black man looked for hadn’t in fact been with the irrationality of the world around him. And the achievement of certain people began to appear grander.

T
HE
R
EVEREND
Bernyce Clausell lived in Tallahassee on Joe Louis Street. “Not in the project,” she said on the telephone. “Tell the driver not in the project.” And the white driver not only went straight to the house, but spotted the lady in her collar in the street, talking to a member of her congregation.

Reverend Clausell was a Baptist pastor, and she had some reputation both as the only Baptist woman pastor in this part of Florida and as someone who did social work. She had been in the news for having sent a relief mission to Mississippi, to the town of Tunica, in a poor region with the name of Sugar Ditch. She had sent a truckload of supplies. Down the side of the truck there had been a professionally lettered banner:
TALLAHASSEE TO TUNICA
. There had been a copywriter’s feeling there for effect, I thought. But the lady I saw in the street when the taxi-driver pointed had nothing forbidding or assertive about her.

She was small and slender and mild-featured, academic-looking in her collar, someone suited to the quiet residential street, with its little houses and neat yards; definitely not a street in the “project.”

She said goodbye to the woman she was with, and greeted me. She said that the woman, who was of her congregation, had stopped her
just as she was on her way to the church to turn the lights off. She asked me to go with her. It was a few house plots away, on the other side of the road: Calvary Baptist Church, a white building, with a board that gave the name of her late husband, the Reverend James Aaron Clausell. He had founded the church.

The grass around the small church was as clipped and neat as the grass in the house yards. The light bulbs in the porch were burning wastefully away.

Clausell—what sort of name was that? She said it was French. It came from Louisiana; it was the name of one of the important early settlers there. Her husband had been a light-skinned man, like many of his family.

And there was a story about the founding of the church in that street. The Clausells had been holding prayer meetings in their house, and people were being saved and baptized. One day Reverend Clausell asked her, “What are we going to do with these people?” She said, “Let’s start a church.” He said, “I don’t need a church. I pastor too many churches already.” She said, “Well, honey, I wasn’t thinking of what you needed. I was thinking of what the people needed.” That was how the church had started. And when Reverend Clausell died, Bernyce, his wife, had become pastor, in response to the wishes of the congregation.