A Turn in the South (28 page)

There are some film directors who prefer to work in natural light, the light that’s available, the light they find. And travel of the sort I was doing, travel on a theme, depends on accidents: the books read on a journey, the people met. To travel in the way I was doing was like painting in acrylic or fresco; things set quickly. The whole shape of a section of the narrative can be determined by some chance meeting, some phrase heard or devised. If I had met someone else my thoughts might have worked differently; though I might at the end have arrived at the same general feeling about the place I was in.

Ellen’s thoughts, just before we separated, were of her father, who had died when she was thirteen. “My father told me you never got ahead by stepping on somebody’s back. We all need to come up together.”

That had been the great discovery of my travels so far in the South. In no other part of the world had I found people so driven by the idea of good behavior and the good religious life. And that was true for black and white.

M
Y THOUGHTS
were running on the frontier, the life at the extremity of a culture. And I went early one afternoon to see Louise, nearly eighty and living alone in a big house in Jackson, in a garden too much for her now, and dry after many weeks without rain.

In her old bookcase, American work from perhaps 1840, cherry-wood that had taken on a lovely deep color after nearly a century and a half, there were small, leather-bound volumes of an edition of
The Spectator
—of Addison and Steele—issued by a Philadelphia firm in 1847. A reminder of the colonial past here, of an idea of civility and education so at odds with the world around. A reissue in 1847 of
The Spectator
—American publishers having in those days the camp-following attitude to English books that English publishers today have to American books.
The Spectator
, a hundred years out of date, at the time when Parkman was making his journey on the Oregon trail and coming across reminders, almost as terrible as bones, of the settlers who had passed that way: abandoned furniture, pieces perhaps of the early 1840s, like Louise’s bookcase, which those settlers had loaded onto their carts and wagons, hoping to take them to the West.

In a drawer of the cherrywood bookcase there were documents and copies of documents connected with Louise’s family history. Her family went back to colonial times.

Her husband’s ancestor came from Pennsylvania. He came to Mississippi in about 1820. “All wilderness, you know.” He was part of a group, families who had intermarried. They hadn’t come directly to Mississippi. “They had traveled together in their migration through Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama.” She gave this idea of the kinship of the migrating group: “When the two young men”—her husband’s ancestor, and another man in the group—“were of an age to marry, they went up to Oxford”—the Mississippi Oxford, in the hills to the east of the Delta, the flat alluvial river plain—“and married two Tankersley girls they had met.” The Tankersleys were one of the families of the migrating group. “The land hadn’t been cleared and travel was hard. And when they got there they stayed.

“My grandfather was a sixteen-year-old boy when he went to the Civil War and fought at Shiloh in Tennessee. He survived it, and came back to northeast Alabama and started his family. Things were hard after the Civil War, and then my grandfather died. My father left home
at the age of fifteen and came and stayed with an uncle in the Delta in Mississippi. He had some education, and he paid a Baptist minister to teach him bookkeeping, and he opened a little store and began buying land in the Delta.
And it was beautiful country
. Now it’s one big cotton patch—all cleared and drained. But then it was like William Faulkner’s ‘Bear,’ one of his finest pieces of writing. It was just wilderness country—great oaks that had not been harvested. This was before the plantations. It was just gorgeous.

“It was a land of flowers, all kinds of wild iris and wild violets, water lilies and alligators. They were just beginning the plantations in the Delta. It was hard. You see, we had malaria. I had malaria every summer when I was a child. It took a little while to clear the Delta. It flooded every spring.

“When I was a little girl—say in 1915—they were still clearing it. They would go and chop around these mighty oaks and they would let them die and then they would cut them. When they were going to clear out a field they would kill the trees. I never paid any attention to it. It was what they did. I took it for granted. I played in the woods. If you were not at home for meals you were punished, because you had gone too far away and they had to go out and look for you seriously. Everybody had so many children then, you know. There was no birth control. We had so many. And many families lost lots of children.”

Pioneer land, the Delta region of Mississippi. Yet Mississippi, for a frontier state, had the curious complication of slavery, from the days of the cotton plantations beside the river. The frontier, the pioneers, the solitude; but then, also, the cheap black labor. What did Louise think now? The black population was now very large in the country where as a child she had been delighted by the wildflowers and the big trees of the forest.

She said, “There is not much reason for being in the Delta unless you were a big landowner. You could hardly have cleared it yourself. Parts of it were just canebrake.”

“I’ve read that word. What is it?”

“A wild type of cane, not anything you cultivate. We had plenty of help, servants. After they were freed they just stayed where they were, you know. They lived and multiplied everywhere. As many of the whites grew up, they left. But the blacks stayed. And one reason they stayed—it’s interesting to read the obituaries even now—is that they are very gregarious people. They don’t bother too much about lines of
marriage and that sort of thing, but they are very devoted families.” And black people liked to come back to the place they considered home.

That idea, about the importance of the family, I had heard about in West Africa, in the Ivory Coast. It overrode the other idea—if it existed at all among Africans—of marital fidelity. I had been told that in the Ivory Coast it would be considered frivolous to give infidelity as a cause for divorce. And that went with another, African idea: you didn’t marry a person, you allied yourself to a family.

Louise said, “I feel very concerned about the black thing, the black problem. My maid told me this morning that up and down their street they are out running and shooting guns in the air—these young blacks.” A twisted version of the frontier, here in the city of Jackson. “I don’t know how we are going to come out of it. Some of them are very intelligent and ambitious. Some are primitive. Some white people are too, but maybe not so many. We are not multiplying as fast as they do.”

She offered an unrelated memory, in which the ideas of the pioneer life and black people ran together. “When I was growing up in the Delta I had a nanny, I suppose. She even wet-nursed me. There were no formulas. Doctors didn’t know anything about babies. In fact, they had only gotten a little beyond leeches, but not much further. They did not have much skill.”

The wonderful forests of the Delta, where a child could play among the wildflowers, had been cut down. And her father had created a plantation. What had happened to that plantation?

“My father died when he was fifty. He sold about a thousand acres just before the Great Depression, and he had about seven hundred acres left.” But forest no longer. “Mud in winter, dust in summer. My father bought a Chalmers automobile. This was even before the time of radio. It was a diversion.” Sometimes they just sat in the Chalmers, for the pleasure, not going anywhere. “We lived quietly. If a town was five miles away, that was a long way.” But later, when the roads improved and the cars improved, people in the Delta became famous in Mississippi for their willingness to travel long distances for dinner or other entertainment.

And then Louise touched a topic that linked the Delta region to the Trinidad of my own Indian community. Chinese had been brought in to work the Delta; just as Chinese and Portuguese and, more enduringly, Indians from India had been brought into Trinidad and other
colonies of the British Empire (including South Africa) to work the plantations, after the abolition of Negro slavery.

Chinese here, beside the Mississippi!

Louise said: “The Chinese lived strictly among themselves. And they still do. There was one at Vance, and the low-class whites would tease him unmercifully. My father looked after him if it got bad. After my father died the Chinese man left Vance too. They deviled him. The schoolchildren on their way home would pass his store and say:

And he would come out—it may have been his sense of humor—and shake his fist, and they would laugh and run away.”

Still lodged in her memory, this meaningless children’s rhyme, clearly from another country, and adapted to the Chinese of the Delta. As ineradicable as the rhyme lodged from childhood in my own head about Chinese in Trinidad, a rhyme sung by black children—and just as harmless:

Who was the originator? An adult—or a child, speaking verse naturally, as certain children can do? There must have been an originator, for my Chinese rhyme as well as for Louise’s.

It would have been pleasant to talk for a while about Mississippi children’s rhymes. But Louise had other memories. She was getting tired now, and no longer as able to complete a train of thought as when we had started.

She said: “The blacks were so oppressed during that time that it was a peaceful place. They didn’t do the sort of things they do now. We had very little trouble. They went their way; we went ours. We were used to having help. During the Depression my sister had a maid. She had a daughter the same age—” But this story was never finished. Perhaps it was too painful to recall; perhaps Louise wished to keep it buried. It led to this thought, unexpectedly: “I have a great respect for what the blacks call poor white trash. I think they have suffered. They too need opportunities.” Then Louise said wearily, as if with the
weight now of her illness and age, “But the needs of the world are so great that they are overwhelming.”

The combination of thoughts about blacks, and poor white trash who needed help as much as anybody, and her sister and the Depression, led to the dredging up of this story:

“During the depth of the Depression—we have not had anything ever in the class of that Great Depression—we lived not far from a penal farm.” Thinking of the story she was about to tell, she said: “But it was something terrible. One of the trusties up there worked in the homes of employees of the penal farm. Ah, it was something that electrified the Delta! This daughter of one of the warders there—they said she was having an affair with one of these black prisoners. Unheard of. But, anyway, the prisoner killed her father. And then they set out to capture him, and there was a reward of two thousand dollars. A big sum then. And this young planter’s son just walked into a barn loft to bring him down. And of course the prisoner shot him and killed him. Twenty-three or twenty-four, the handsomest man you ever saw, and a fine young man; but he just walked to his death. And then of course they took the black man and killed him. This happened about ten miles away from where we lived. And it just really upset everybody. But now we have rapes here all the time. It was a very, very rare thing then. Now they don’t seem to make much of it. I was a young woman, about twenty. It affected me very deeply. It was very tragic. But there were occasional instances of violence like that.”

We talked about the Emmett Till murder in 1955. Emmett Till (how extraordinary the names of people become when they are associated with big and tragic events) was a black youth who had been accused of whistling at or molesting a white woman, and had been killed. It was something that had added to Mississippi’s bad reputation.

Louise said: “Parts of my family were still living there in the Delta. And he did more than whistle at her. My brother had a drugstore in Sumner, where they had that trial. We are not that kind of people.” Louise was talking of the social distinctions of the Delta. Earlier, speaking of her family’s position as planters, she had said, “There are class divisions everywhere.” And she meant now that the woman who worked as a store clerk—like the woman Emmett Till had allegedly whistled at or molested—was of a different class. “My mother and sisters never worked in that commissary. We always had hired help.” “Commissary,” a plantation word, meaning the plantation store, where
workers bought goods on trust, against their wages. “My father didn’t think it was a suitable place for the women of his family to be. All kinds of people came in there—sometimes drinking.”

I had already been struck, in Ellen’s account of her childhood, by the modest jobs that people of good family did. One of Ellen’s aunts had been a postmistress; and now Louise was reporting that her brother ran a drugstore. It was as though, in the poverty of the South, class was something in the mind and consciousness of a family, related to an idea of good behavior and seemliness.

Louise said, “The civil-rights movement altered everything. It’s good and it’s bad.” She added, the thought seeming to come to her by association, “I wouldn’t like to live anywhere where there are not any blacks. I’ve lived among them all my life and I like them. And right now”—and she meant in spite of the crime in Jackson, and although the city was moving towards a black majority and might soon even have a black mayor—“they are warmhearted and humorous. I would miss them. But—we have such a mass of them here in Jackson. And wherever they are they are in a mass, because they like their own kind of people, and they are not going to settle where there are not other black people—they’re lonely. This woman was in Iowa, and she was earning much more, but she came back here because it was lonely for her there. But they are forming gangs now in Jackson. If they could be scattered about the country, it would be better. But we are not Russia. We can’t do that.”