A Turn in the South (27 page)

I
T WAS
my wish, in Mississippi, to consider things from the white point of view, as far as that was possible for me. Someone in New York had told me that it wouldn’t be easy. In Mississippi, though, I found that people were defensive about their reputation. This seemed to give me a start. But then I wasn’t sure.

How quickly, for example, I appeared to get to the limit of Ellen’s ideas and memories! She was sixty, of a good family. She had liberal attitudes; and it seemed hard for her to go beyond a statement of those attitudes.

She said: “I feel we’ve been through a revolution in Mississippi since the 1960s. It was like two separate societies here. Now black people have much better jobs than they had. Instead of everybody having to work in a home—I’m talking about women—now they’re working in McDonald’s or a bank or a store.”

And there we stayed for some time, Ellen—perhaps because I wasn’t being acute enough, or because I hadn’t yet learned to talk to Mississippi people—not appearing to say more than that. I even put away my notebook. She was gentle, welcoming, anxious to talk. But I couldn’t find questions to put to her. Her optimism, her idea of progress and change, covered nearly everything I could think about. We
got finally to talking about her childhood. And that was when I took my notebook out again.

“I grew up in the Depression. But I didn’t feel badly about myself. Everybody else was poor too. The reason I didn’t feel badly was that I had a lot of aunts and uncles and cousins and all—a large extended family, but I didn’t know you called it that. They loved me and had time for me. I would go out and spend summers with them. They always had time to talk to you and fix your favorite foods. They even made me dresses.”

That idea of a small community, where everyone knew everyone else and people were related—I had found that for many people it was part of the beauty of the ways of the past.

I asked Ellen, “Where did those uncles and aunts live?”

“They lived in the most conservative town in Mississippi.”

Happy summers in a small conservative town. What lay outside the family group? What did Ellen feel as a child about the rednecks? Was there really such a thing as a “redneck mentality”?

There was. She acted it out. “ ‘Don’t mess with me.’ ” She raised her slender arms in a boxing posture. “A fighting mentality.” But she had been protected from that. “I had an aunt who read a lot to me. She had a lot of books. Actually, she was the postmistress. She encouraged me to be my best self. I guess this sounds snobbish, but she would say, ‘Ellen dear, there are some things we just don’t do.’ There were some
people
we just didn’t go around.”

She returned to the topic of the love she had experienced in her childhood, the love that had partly made her. “It helped me to have a positive self-image—though that wasn’t the way we talked about it then. I think people still have scars from the Depression here. It seemed to me like it was very bad here. There just weren’t any jobs. My sister was older than I and she suffered more than I, but that was because she had had more to begin with. She had things that were lost. I just grew up poor.

“I became more proud of being a Southerner when I got away from the South. My husband went to school in the East, and I worked. This was after World War II. At that time we had a politician, a senator called Bilbo. Bilbo was a racist, and he was advocating sending all the blacks back to Africa as a solution to the problem; and he was absolutely admired by the people of Mississippi, I guess. But he was
absolutely hated by the people I worked with in Massachusetts. This was a psychology group I worked with. They were doing research in group dynamics—prejudice and so forth.

“That was when I began to look for things that were positive about the South and Mississippi. I thought about the people. And I thought about the hardships we had been through—and you can’t expect people to act perfect when you think of all the things they’ve gone through. The people in Massachusetts—in 1946—they could act surprised that someone from Mississippi could read and write and we ‘wore shoes.’ It’s still true in some places. People have a very, very bad impression of Mississippi. But it’s changing.”

“Is it because of the writers?”

“The writing grew out of the dirt and this love of talk, talk.”

And, going back to her time in Massachusetts, Ellen said: “The people I worked with, they wanted to know if I would really do this. There was a black man visiting, and guess who they got to show him around? Well, I showed him around. He was a lovely person. I learned from him. I think they were surprised. They never did say it. I never gave them the opportunity. Do you see how far we’ve come?”

But there was Mississippi’s reputation for violence.

“The rednecks to the south of the town were just mean. They had the reputation. They were very pugilistic. There were stories about them. Like, if a traveling salesman came through, they would hitch him to the plow and have him plow all night. I don’t know if that was fact or fiction. They would get drunk on Saturday night and fight each other and kill each other off. That’s really the worst part of Mississippi. It just had a bad reputation. But out of that group there grew some fine outstanding Mississippians, including some fine clergymen. It shows that there’s hope, doesn’t it?”

And there was also the racial issue, never to be forgotten in Mississippi and the South.

“I played with my cousins, and we played with black children, too. They were the children of the servants, the washerwomen and so on. That’s why I think Southerners have a better feeling about black people than the Northerners. We called them Negroes—‘black’ is a new word. I’ve gotten used to it. We didn’t use ‘nigger’ in my house.” I didn’t ask Ellen about the words, or prompt her; what she said came out naturally. “My relatives didn’t call people niggers either. I guess they
had a little more civility than that. Even though they lived out in the country.”

For the third or fourth or fifth time Ellen said, “I grew up in a loving environment.”

A memory came to her. She had been breaking off to say that our talk had begun to make her put things together, call up old things.

“My daddy liked to fish. He took me fishing. I don’t think I have as harsh attitudes”—and she meant racial attitudes—“as some people, because of that.” She broke off again and smiled. “My summers in the country are important, aren’t they?”

“How many summers?”

“It’s more like the first twelve years of my life. I know I feel differently from some other people, but I just don’t know why.”

“Religion?”

“I do think my religion makes the difference, and the feeling that we are all made in God’s image. Probably not as a child. I’d have to have more understanding to think that.” Then she said, “And these stories about people doing mean things.”

Mean things, in a loving childhood?

Ellen said—memory working, unrelated pieces of the past fitting together, as she said they had begun to do while she talked, answering questions that had never been put to her before—“My mother told me about hiding her maid from the Ku Klux Klan. It shows just how far we’ve progressed. My mother had a maid. Her name was Mollie Wheeler, I think. And the Ku Klux Klan was trying to get her. I don’t know why. My mother didn’t talk very much about it. I think the Klan wanted to give the maid a good beating and send her away for some reason. My mother said she hid her in a laundry basket in her house to protect her. Of course they wouldn’t come into my mother’s house. This was really before I was born. They—the Klan—they were probably young men, OK people in the town.”

“Didn’t this frighten you?”

“I don’t think it frightened me. It gave me a great sense of disgust for something like the Klan.” She added, “The rednecks—that story I told you, it probably happened before I was born.”

And I understood what Ellen was saying better than I said. No situation or circumstance is absolutely like any other; but in the Indian countryside of my childhood in Trinidad there were many murders
and acts of violence, and these acts of violence gave the Trinidad Indians, already separated from the rest of the island by language, religion, and culture, a fearful reputation. But to us to whom the stories of murders and feuds were closer, other things were at stake. The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.

Imagine this scene in a Trinidad Indian village of the 1920s or 1930s. A village big man, say, is murdered. The next morning, after the legal formalities, the body is displayed in a coffin, which is perhaps set out on two chairs on the road outside his house. This is a statement of defiance by the family of the murdered man. Among the people coming to pay their respects is the killer. He has to come; he cannot stay away; and he is almost certainly known. And now two men’s lives are spoiled: the killer’s, and that of the relation of the dead man who will have to kill the killer. The code demands no less; it isn’t open to a man who wishes to be at peace with himself to walk away.

So deep, for me, was this idea of honor and the feud that the film of
Romeo and Juliet
(with Basil Rathbone) was one of my earliest true theatrical experiences, the story to me being not so much a story of love as of the family feud. What fear, what horror at all that was to follow, when the blood darkened the shirt of Mercutio! Honor—that was what I understood, or saw, in some of the murders around us. Not the barbarism that, as I understood later, outsiders attributed to us.

Some such way of feeling I attributed to Ellen, in her childhood in the small town where she had spent such happy summers with her extended family. Violence, where it existed, would not have appeared to her as naked as it would have done to absolute outsiders. Too many other things were attached.

Violence then; and there was violence now. The violence of her childhood had been white. The violence people spoke of now was black, and was of the cities.

She said: “I think it’s just the frustration. So much of the violence is now in the black community. The black people don’t like me to say this, but if you go to the penitentiaries you’ll see it’s true—a high population of young blacks.”

How had she arrived at her civility, her calmness, her wish to be fair—in a state with the reputation that Mississippi had?

She said: “I went to college. I think that made an impression on me. I had a very good professor. They took a personal interest in you. And my father died when I was young. I was barely thirteen. That was when I started looking at myself and other people. I think I had to grow up too soon. I was living in a small town. My father didn’t leave a lot of money for us to live on. And so my mother had to go to work. She was a nurse, and she went back to work. And I—I went back and lived with my aunts, to go to school, in that same little country town. My mother worked very hard to send me to college. She was very successful in her occupation. She was a strong woman, and she believed in fairness to all people. When she was in training she nursed everybody. She grew up with a great regard for all people.”

Abruptly, then, out of random memories that were coming to her, Ellen said: “This story really did impress me. I was talking about it to one of my relations not long ago. This really happened, and I was there. I was eight. I was visiting my aunt, and she had a wonderful maid; and several of my cousins were there. Myrtle—the maid—played the piano. She could play anything by ear. She kept all us children entertained with her music and everything. One time she had a little roadster car and she took us riding. And we really loved her. She was a black maid. Maybe one of her boyfriends gave her the car. She was quite a girl. She wore bright lipstick and she had a big gold tooth in front.

“Anyway, she was missing one day. She lived in a house behind my aunt’s house. And finally they went out to see about her. And they found her, and she was dead—in a wardrobe, upside down. She had been hit on the head with a pine knot. They called it a lighter knot—it was to start fires with. They thought it was one of her boyfriends, but we never knew. It was awful. I knew that was wrong. My aunt was grief-stricken. I think that if it had been a white woman killed like that, they would have found out who did it. But I think that’s something I’m thinking now. I don’t think I thought that when I was eight years old. To me Myrtle was Myrtle. I didn’t think of her being black. She would snap her fingers and dance.” And Ellen, remembering, sitting in her upholstered chair, made a gesture and snapped her fingers too. “She was just a lot of fun. She was the daughter of the woman who went from house to house doing the laundry. They did it in great big pots. This was before rural electrification, when they started having running water in most of the houses. My aunt had running water and
a bathroom inside, because my daddy had built a water-tower when he had lived there—before I was born.

“I went back to her house.” Myrtle’s mother’s house, at the back of Ellen’s aunt’s house. “They had removed her body. But I saw where it was. That was just nosy. My aunt didn’t want me to go see it. But I wanted to, and she let me.”

What a story, from a memory of twelve happy summers! And that story released another memory in Ellen.

“My mother and father used to tell me about when they would hang people in the courthouse square. Legal hangings, not lynchings. That was when my father and mother were children. And my daddy was born in 1897. And that was just abhorrent to me—and it was to them. These were stories that people would tell you as you were growing up. I think we’ve come a long way. It seems like people are becoming more civilized, I hope.”

The stories told to Ellen as she was growing up were frontier stories; that was how I regarded them. They had echoes of any number of Western films; and it was remarkable to hear them from someone who had just turned sixty. In one lifetime, then, it seemed that she had moved from frontier culture, or the relics of a frontier culture, to late twentieth-century Jackson and the United States. It gave a new cast to my thoughts, and a new cast to my conversation with people.