A Turn in the South (34 page)

“I think religion had a great part to play in the pioneer spirit. Because, in the pioneer spirit, at the back of the mind you know you are going to make things better for the generations to follow. Part of the motivation for that would come from religion. I think they are so closely intertwined you couldn’t separate them.”

The frontier, nature, faith, work, the contract with other men—in Judge Sugg’s world picture the ideas were as knitted together as they were in the world picture of William, the businessman. The Baptist faith made both men complete, each in his own way. But Judge Sugg had also been led by his faith and his past (the two things almost one) to an unlikely compassion—for black people, who had formed 30 percent of the population of his little home town.

“I grew up with blacks that I knew intimately, played with—many blacks my own age. And I thought that they were for the most part a deeply spiritual people. After our church was over we used to go to the black churches on Sunday night and stand outside to listen to them sing, and also to see. We enjoyed hearing and seeing them. I remember an old black man we called Uncle Steve. I don’t remember his last name. He played a tambourine. And many times it was the only accompaniment—but it was enough. They had rhythm. You could hardly stand still hearing the songs. Many of the songs they made up. Those songs have a great message.”

So it must make him unhappy, what had happened to the blacks in the cities, and in Jackson?

He said: “Being black is not the reason. There are also many whites in that position. The reason is they don’t have any spiritual values. Somebody asked Jesus one time what the greatest commandment was. The first one was: Love God. The second was: Love your neighbor as yourself. And that to me is the effect of Christian principles applied daily.”

Mississippi’s reputation for violence towards blacks was deserved. “Especially in the 1960s, many people were unwilling to acknowledge
that black people had the same rights and privileges as people of other colors. I think this was a holdover from the days of slavery, when the blacks were servants and were looked upon as property, not people. And we white people have got to recognize the fact that God loves
everybody.”

I told him about my conversation with Alex Sanders, the Court of Appeals judge in South Carolina. Judge Sanders had said that the change of heart in the South, the acceptance by white people of black people’s rights, might have had a divine cause.

Judge Sugg said: “I believe that God has to create a change of heart—from our adhering to the principles I have mentioned. He has set up the principles there, and I have to accept it. He didn’t strike me with a bolt of lightning and say, ‘Hey, son, love that black man.’ Remember that I grew up in a society where black people were not permitted to enter your front door. They were servants. I had to do some soul-searching.”

“When did you start doing that?”

“Early. Before the sixties. And I finally came to the conclusion that when he said love your neighbor as yourself—I came to the conclusion that the black man was your neighbor too. And I believe I’ve overcome 99.9 percent of the attitudes someone would have, growing up in a society of white supremists.

“Well, here again I haven’t had any bolt of lightning. It’s been a slow, steady acceptance of the truth that’s been with us since the world began. For example, I am now teaching a black man to read and write. He’s thirty-nine years old. I count him as one of my friends. We go fishing together. He went to school through the eighth grade, but he lived in a rural community. His father was a farmer. So when school started in September he had to stay at home and pick cotton, gather the corn and other crops. So that by the time he finally entered the school in November all the books had been given out, and he just sat in class. From time to time he had to miss school to cut firewood. Had to drop out in the spring to prepare the land for planting. The result was he didn’t go to school for half the school year. He could read a little, write a little, but not enough to function in our society. He is a good man; he has a good job; he works hard. He is deeply religious, married, with three children. Illiterate people are not dumb. Most of them have real good minds.”

This was how Judge Sugg touched on the work that had been
occupying his retirement: the teaching of English to illiterate people and to “internationals.”

“I regard it as religious work. It gives me an opportunity to share my faith with the people I teach. The Christian faith is built on the great principle that we have to help our fellow man.”

When he was sixty, and while he was still a judge, he had taken a Baptist workshop in the teaching of English as a second language. He had done so with his wife’s encouragement.

“Two months after I took the workshop this young man appeared before me charged with burglary. He was fifteen years old. I sentenced him to the training school. The next day one of his sisters appeared and told me that he had got into trouble because his older brother led him to assist in the crime. The older brother was an ex-convict. The father and mother of the young man were both alcoholics, and he had gone to school for only part of one year—that was all the school he had gone to in his life. The sister told me that if I would give him a chance she would provide him with a home and get him a job. I told her that if she provided him with a home I would teach him to read and write. So I did. At the end of little more than a year he could read and write. His father was no longer an alcoholic. So I permitted him to return to Texas with his mother and father.”

There was a moving symmetry to the judge’s career. The man who had grown up in an isolated, inward-looking community had now, in his busy retirement, found a mission. His faith had seen him through all the changes of his circumstances. At every moment his faith had been part of the completeness of his world.

I
HAD
the vaguest idea of what a redneck was. Someone intolerant and uneducated—that was what the word suggested. And it fitted in with what I had been told in New York: that some motoring organizations gave their members maps of safe routes through the South, to steer them away from areas infested with rednecks. Then I also became aware that the word had been turned by some middle-class people into a romantic word; and that in this extension it stood for the unintellectual, physical, virile man, someone who (for instance) wouldn’t mind saying “shit” in company.

It wasn’t until I met Campbell that I was given a full and beautiful and lyrical account, an account that ran it all together, by a man who
half looked down on and half loved the redneck, and who, when he began to speak of redneck pleasures, was moved to confess that he was half a redneck himself.

It wasn’t for his redneck side, strictly speaking, that I had been introduced to Campbell. I had been told that he was the new kind of young conservative, with strong views on race and welfare. (Judge Sugg had told me that people of that type were still coming up, but that his own way, of understanding and help, was the way ahead and was the way most people would eventually go.) Campbell was also the man who represented the other side of the religious South: the authoritarian side. And it was of family and values and authority that we spoke, all quite predictably, until it occurred to me to ask, “Campbell, what do you understand by the word ‘redneck’?”

And—as though it had been prepared—a great Theophrastan “character,” something almost in the style of the seventeenth-century character-writers, poured out of Campbell. It might have been an updated version of something from Elizabethan low-life writing, or John Earle’s
Microcosmography
, or something from Sir Thomas Overbury. (Sir Thomas Overbury, on the English country gentleman, 1616: “His travel is seldom farther than the next market town, and his inquisition is about the price of corn. When he travelleth, he will go ten mile out of the way to a cousin’s house of his to save charges; and rewards the servants by taking them by the hand when he departs.”)

Campbell said, “A redneck is a lower blue-collar construction worker who definitely doesn’t like blacks. He likes to drink beer. He’s going to wear cowboy boots.…”

That was the concrete, lyrical way Campbell spoke. But it would be better at this point to go back and hear a little of what he said about himself.

“My father was born in Alabama, and his family picked themselves up, left the farm they owned, 360 acres, left it and came to Mississippi to get an education. His father, my father’s father, and his mother said, ‘We got to get you guys over there to get you a good education.’ They obviously had some money saved to do that, pick up and leave. They kept the farm. Daddy sold it all five or six years ago. And when they came to Mississippi all the brothers got jobs when they weren’t in school. My father left Alabama in 1923-24. Graduated in 1928. Wound up having a garage and gas station. But they were happy. I never heard my father say a curse word in his life, and that’s the truth. He worked
all the damn time. We weren’t ever real close. He didn’t have time to be close.

“My mother was a schoolteacher. I grew up in the Baptist church. I was pretty force-fed. We went to church as soon as the doors opened. We went there on Wednesdays for the prayer meeting. We would go for the big summer revivals. Go every night, bored to death.”

Then, without a pause, Campbell said: “In the long run it was the best thing I’ve ever had. My mom and dad gave me values that came back to me when I was twenty years old. But I’d rebelled out. Most of the children conformed. I really wanted to act crazy. I drank more, ran around more. I started working in a grocery store when I was twelve, and that’s the damned truth. I loved it. You met all the characters. You got all the black trade. They sat on the feed bags; Mama came to town with four or five kids, and she had to nurse a couple. I liked working there. Always somebody coming in there. Hee-hawing all the time. You knew everybody who came in. It was a good store. This was Saturdays. I liked the money. When I started I made four dollars a day. When I left I was making about seven.

“I cut right away. I drove a damn dumper in the summertime. They were constructing this interstate and they needed somebody who could read and write, to count the sacks of fertilizer that went into the airplane. They were fertilizing the sides of the road to get the grass to grow. It was boring as hell. These are days long gone. It’s funny how you change and mature. I wanted to be crazy. I had a good time being crazy.”

“You wanted to be one of the boys?”

“It’s important in Northeast Jackson, as we call it, to be well liked, to be well thought of. But I wasn’t relating to the church. I’d go with my mama at Christmastime, but I was bored to death. But the values of the church—do good, do right, don’t drink, don’t kill anybody, no stealing, the Ten Commandments, don’t covet your neighbor’s wife—I don’t believe in some parts of this culture those values are being instilled. Those kids running up and down—I used to work in mobile-home parks, and we’ve got some unsavory characters there—they need their butts worn out, like I’ve gotten mine worn out.

“I think the reason for that is the breakdown of the family. Where the father and mother are not both there doing their job. I bring up my children to respect me. And I think he fears me, and I think that’s good, because he knows I’m not going to put up with everything. I hug
him and kiss him every day. Some people say I’m right; some people say I’m wrong. I was afraid of my father. I was afraid I was going to get my behind worn out. I don’t like it any other way. People saying ‘Yah,’ ‘Nah’—smart-mouth children—I think they’d do so much better if they worked hard for just ten more minutes every day, and if they said ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir,’ and you whipped their ass until they said it right.

“I think it all goes back to being brought up right. Get some values back in the homes. We’re talking about blacks now. Get them to stay in the school, keep their damn butts quiet. I’d be a dictator and have this place shaped up. I’m just a law-and-order, blood-and-guts guy.”

Campbell was in his early forties or late thirties. He was short and chunky, a strong man. He wore bright colors. He talked like a man with a character to keep up, but there was no touch of humor in his voice or face.

He had seen the black area of Jackson spread. And he had made money out of that, buying from fleeing whites and selling at a profit to the blacks moving in. There was one year when he had sold ten houses like that, and had made $60,000.

“That wasn’t bad. I was profiteering. I ought to be shot.”

I wasn’t sure what was “character,” and what was real. And then I said, “Campbell, what do you understand by the word ‘redneck’?”

And the man was transformed.

He said: “A redneck is a lower blue-collar construction worker who definitely doesn’t like blacks. He likes to drink beer. He’s going to wear cowboy boots; he is not necessarily going to have a cowboy hat. He is going to live in a trailer someplace out in Rankin County, and he’s going to smoke about two and a half packs of cigarettes a day and drink about ten cans of beer at night, and he’s going to be mad as hell if he doesn’t have some cornbread and peas and fried okra and some fried pork chops to eat—I’ve never seen one of those bitches yet who doesn’t like fried pork chops. And he’ll be late on his trailer payment.

“He’s been raised that way. His father was just like him. And the son of a bitch loves country music. They love to hunt and fish. They go out all night to the Pearl River. They put out a trot line—a long line running across the river, hooks on it every four or five feet. They bait them with damn old crawfish, and that line’ll sink to the bottom, and they’ll go to the bank and shit and drink all night long, and they’ll get a big fire going. They’ll check it two or three times in the night, to see
if they’re getting a catfish. It’ll be good catfish. These redneck sons of bitches say that they’ll rather have one of these river catfish than one of those pond catfish. They say it’s got a better taste.

“You know, I like those rednecks. They’re so laid back. They don’t give a shit. They don’t give a shit.”