A Turn in the South (3 page)

I asked Hetty what she wanted for herself and her family. Her reply was strange and moving. For her family, she said, she wished that one of her sons had been cured of his drinking. And this was strange because it was a look backwards: the son she spoke of was dead.

For herself, she said she would like, if it were possible, to get married. She didn’t want to get married for the sake of getting married. She was old—she knew that—but that was why she would like to get married. She spent too much time alone; she wanted the companionship. Howard understood. But both he and Hetty didn’t think it would be easy for her to find someone.

Hetty said: “Men are scarce here. There are very few men here. Go to church and count the men. The good ones have gone away. And the ones who have stayed are no good. There may be a couple of good ones on the quiet, but …”

What of the past, though? Had it been a reasonable sort of life? She said she had no regret for the past. Hadn’t things got better for her? Hadn’t things got better in the 1950s?

She said, “I hardly think even about my own past.”

And Howard said, “I can hardly remember the past.”

The words were like the words spoken at lunchtime by Hetty’s sister.

But then Hetty said: “I didn’t like the tobacco. It would make me sick at the end of one row, smell and all. When I was married we would get up early in the morning, when the dew was still on the tobacco
leaves, and it didn’t smell then. Even now tobacco makes me sick. When I was young I would be in a field and after two hours I would cry. That was when I was working with my father.”

And behind that was the unmentionable past.

O
N SATURDAY
Hetty had talked with holiday excitement of the Easter Sunday sunrise service at five in the morning. She had said she might go to that. But when Jimmy and I checked out of the Peters Indian motel in the morning and went to the house for breakfast, we found Hetty there. The driving around the previous afternoon had tired her; she hadn’t been able to make the sunrise service. She thought now she would go to the eleven o’clock service.

Jimmy and I thought that we would go at eleven-thirty to hear the singing and at least the beginning of the sermon, which Hetty said would start at twelve. The problem about that was Jimmy’s clothes. In New York Howard had said that Bowen was a very country sort of place and that casual clothes and sneakers would be enough for whatever we might have to do. The only warm-weather clothes Jimmy had was a Banana Republic safari outfit. Hetty said it would be all right; but she would at a certain stage have to stand up in church and ask the congregation’s forgiveness for his clothes.

On the television set in Hetty’s sitting room there was constant religious excitement, with services from black churches and white churches, pastor and choir always stylishly dressed, each church having its own colors in clerical gowns, almost its own livery.

One preacher, with a serious, hectoring manner, broke off from the matter in hand to give a puff for a new book about the Bible and the afterlife. The book answered the questions people asked, he said. “Will we be merry in heaven?” And before I could fully savor that “merry”—merry with wine, Merry Christmas, Old King Cole was a merry old soul—the other question the book answered was spoken: “Will there be progress in heaven?” This American heaven clearly being a replication of American earth, with black and white, and North and South, and Republicans and Democrats.

Hetty, going into her room in her denim skirt, came out dressed for church in a bright-pink dress, quite overwhelming; and then she put on her flat dark-blue hat. The hat, and her glasses, gave her an executive appearance.

She drove to church. Howard had allowed his driver’s license to lapse; he couldn’t drive Hetty and then come back for us. We walked. The church was about a mile away. Jimmy was in his Banana Republic clothes. Howard was casually dressed and in sneakers; he wasn’t going to the service. He said he didn’t like going to church; it was something he had had to do too often when he was a child.

The road was wide. Cars went by one or two at a time. The grass was full of purple spring flowers; and from time to time, unexpectedly, there was black swamp (making one think of the primeval land, before the settlers came, and of the desolation the settlers must have felt sometimes).

We walked past Mr. Alexander’s house. He was an old black man, formally dressed for Sunday, with a jacket and tie and hat; and he was in the bare patch of ground at the side of his house, practicing putts, or at any rate holding a golf club. The area in front of his small house was choked with ornamental garden statuary and anything that could be put in a yard as an ornament. He said his grandfather had started the collection; and then, with his own quicksilver sense of time, he said, “Two hundred years.” Some of the pieces came from Jamaica in the West Indies; Mr. Alexander pronounced it “Jee-maica.”

Howard said, as we walked on, “You can tell he’s an oddball. Not only because of the golf club. But because he’s not at church.”

A car stopped on the road beside us. There were three white men inside—the race and color of people being now what was very noticeable about them. They wanted to know where the country club golf course was. Howard said he couldn’t help them; he was a visitor himself. And they drove on.

The church was small and neat, in red brick, with a white spire and with the pediment of its portico resting on slender wooden columns. There were many cars in the yard at the side of the church. I said the cars made the town look rich. Howard said everybody had a car; cars meant nothing.

As we went up the steps to the portico Howard said, “They’re singing.” He didn’t go in with us. He said—very boyish now, very much the licensed son—that he would wait outside.

A slender young brown woman welcomed Jimmy and me at the door and gave us an order of service. We sat at the back. And I remembered what Hetty had said: “Go to the church. Count the men.” The men were fewer than the women. Some children were at the back, with
their mothers. And everyone—as Hetty had hinted—was in his Sunday best.

The church inside was as plain and neat as it was outside. It had newish blond hardwood pews and a fawn-colored carpet. At the end of the hall, on a dais, was the choir, with a pianist on either side. The men of the choir, in the back row, were in suits; the women and girls, in the three front rows, were in gold gowns. So that it was like a local and smaller version of what we had been seeing on the television in Hetty’s sitting room.

At the back of the choir, at the back of the girls in gold and the men in dark suits, was a large, oddly transparent-looking painting of the baptism of Christ: the water blue, the riverbanks green. The whiteness of Christ and the Baptist was a surprise. (As much a surprise as, the previous night, in the house of the old retired black teacher, the picture of Jesus Christ had been: a bearded figure, looking like General Custer in
Little Big Man
.) But perhaps the surprise or incongruity lay only in my eyes, the whiteness of Jesus being as much an iconographical element as the blueness of the gods in the Hindu pantheon, or the Indian-ness of the first Buddhist missionary, Daruma, in Japanese art.

The singing ended. It was time for “Reports, Announcements, and Recognition of Visitors.” The short black man in a dark suit who announced this—not the pastor—spoke the last word in an extraordinary way, breaking the word up into syllables and then, as though to extract the last bit of flavor from the word, giving a mighty stress to the final syllable, saying something like “vee-zee-TORRS.”

He spoke, and waited for declarations. One man got up and said he had come from Philadelphia; he had come back to see some of his family. Then Hetty stood up, in her flat blue hat and pink dress. She looked at us and then addressed the man in the dark suit. We were friends of her son, she said. He was outside somewhere. She explained Jimmy’s tieless and jacketless appearance, and asked forgiveness for it.

We got up then, I first, Jimmy after me, and announced ourselves as the man from Philadelphia had done. A pale woman in one of the front rows turned around and said to us that she too was from New York; she welcomed us as people from New York. It was like a binding together, I thought. And when, afterwards, the man in the dark suit spoke of brothers and sisters, the words seemed to have a more than formal meaning.

The brass basin for the collection was passed up and down the
pews. (The figure for the previous week’s collection, a little over $350, was given in the order of service.) The pastor, a young man with a clear, educated voice, asked us to meditate on the miracle of Easter. To help us, he called on the choir.

The leader of the choir, a big woman, adjusted the microphone. And after this small, delicate gesture, there was passion. The hymn was “What About Me?” There was hand-clapping from the choir, and swaying. One man stood up in the congregation—he was in a brown suit—and he clapped and sang. A woman in white, with a white hat, got up and sang. So I began to feel the pleasures of the religious meeting: the pleasures of brotherhood, union, formality, ritual, clothes, music, all combining to create a possibility of ecstasy.

It was the formality—derived by these black people from so many sources—that was the surprise; and the idea of community.

Someone else in a suit got up and spoke to the congregation after the black man in the dark suit had spoken. “This
is
a great day,” the new speaker said. “This is the day the Lord
rose
. He rose for everybody.” There were constant subdued cries of “Amen!” from the congregation. The speaker said, “A lot of people better off than we are didn’t have this privilege.”

Finally the educated young pastor in his elegant gown with two red crosses spoke. “Jesus had to pray.
We
have to pray. Jesus had to cry.
We
have to cry.… God has been so good to us. He has given us a second chance.”

Torture and tears, luck and grief: these were the motifs of this religion, this binding, this consoling union—union the unexpected, moving idea to me. And, as in Muslim countries, I understood the power a preacher might have.

As Howard said afterwards, as he and Jimmy and I were walking back to the house,
“Everything
happens in the church.”

We came upon another local oddball, to use the word Howard had used on the way out: this was the drinker of the black community. We were some way from the man’s house when Howard spotted him looking out of a window. And Howard said, “Look down. Don’t talk to him. Don’t see him.” It was one of the ways Howard had learned, both here and in New York, of avoiding trouble: avoiding “eye contact,” which, he said, provoked the mugger, the beggar, the racial fanatic, the madman, the alcoholic.

The drinking man, framed in his window, considered us as we
walked towards his house. When we passed the house I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. Standing at his window in his undershirt, isolated in his house, he was red-eyed, spiritually and mentally far away.

I told Howard that the idea I had been given that morning of a black community with its own strict code was surprising to me.

He said, “This community, or what you see, is going to disappear in twenty or twenty-five years.” Segregation had preserved the black community. But now blacks and whites, especially of the younger generation, were doing more things together. This gave point to what Hetty (grieving for a son) had said the day before about black and white boys now “drinking together.” And I wasn’t sure whether Howard or Hetty wholly liked the new mixing and what it foreshadowed. I didn’t think that Hetty could be as serene as she was, without her community.

At lunch, when Hetty had come back from church, we talked for a little about the position of black people. We hadn’t touched that subject the day before.

Black people had lived through the bad times. Now, when things should have been easier for them, there were new racial elements in the country: Mexicans and Cubans and the other foreigners. The Mexicans were soon going to be politically powerful in the country. The Asians were not just buying motels; they were going into other kinds of business as well; and they had been here only a few years. In a hospital not far away, Hetty said, there were only two
American
doctors.

And soon Howard and Hetty were reminding each other of the way things were changing. In the old days trucks would come around to pick up blacks for the fruit-picking. The trucks didn’t come now: the Mexicans did the fruit-picking. And Howard said the blacks had eased themselves out of Miami. The blacks hadn’t wanted the hotel jobs; they thought those jobs demeaning. So the Cubans had taken over those jobs, and the blacks wouldn’t be allowed to get in there again. In ways like that the blacks had allowed the Cubans to get control of the city. Spanish was now the language of Miami.

Later, when we were going back to the airport, we saw a white congregation coming out of the other Baptist church in Bowen. It wasn’t far from the black church where we had been. And it was only then that I realized that what I had been seeing was a segregated small town, with old segregated institutions.

It gave a fuller meaning to Hetty’s words, her chant, as we had driven through the countryside: “All this side white people, all that side black people. Black people, black people, white people, black people. Black people, white people.”

Reading the familiar land in her own way—where I saw only the colors of the spring, the purple flowers on the roadside, the sour weed, the pines and dogwood and oaks and maples, and the gray and green and dark-red colors of abandoned farmhouses and tobacco barns. Going back to the airport now, I saw the past a little more clearly. I saw a little more clearly what I had seen the day before.

And I began to see how Howard, leaving his home and going to New York, could hold himself separate both from the past and from the rage of Harlem.

I asked him why he didn’t live in Harlem.

“My rhythm is different. And they pick up on that. Rhythm? It’s like your energy level. How shall I put it? I’m not angry. Most people in Harlem are angry.” And, trying to explain more about himself, he said, “I’m different. I felt different at the high school. It’s what you think and what you feel that makes you different. I always felt different. Which leads me to believe I was born in the wrong town. Like many people.”