A Turn in the South (50 page)

At Bowen in the spring the flowers in the roadside grass had been purple. Now, in Stantonsburg, almost at the end of the summer, the flowers were yellow, little all-yellow daisies. And now, with Jim Applewhite, I was considering another kind of past: a past where the child had seen completeness, even in the stock—for tenants—of his grandfather’s general store: mule collars, tobacco twine, ten-penny nails (“Probably they were ten for a penny”), bonnets, shoes for children.

“I did feel there was a kind of complete world contained there. Partly because the houses here were built without architects, without
trained builders, and I grew to feel that the capability of building those houses was contained in those objects in the store.”

The Applewhite house was in a residential street with two or three churches. Outside the Baptist church some black men and a white man were working. The street was full of children, many of them black, and for some reason they all had large ice-cream cones.

Old Mr. Applewhite was in the sitting room watching football on a big television set. He was eighty, and a little proud of his age. He was much shorter than his son, and stouter, his physique suggesting a man who had been very strong. He explained about the children and the ice cream. A local shop was celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary and selling ice creams for 5¢—which was what the shop had charged for an ice cream in 1912.

On the table in the dining room was food for our visit. And the old man had got out a magazine for me,
The Flue Cured Tobacco Farmer
, together with a booklet for tobacco farmers,
How to Grow It Ripe
.

Jim ate. I talked to his father.

He said, “Did my tenant show you some good stuff? This has been the sorriest tobacco crop for thirty-five years. There’s been no rain for thirteen weeks.”

He told me that the farm was between 150 and 175 years old, and he showed me a framed certificate that said that the farmhouse was on the Register of Historical Places. He thought that Dee should have persevered with his well and gone down a further twenty feet; someone he knew had found water at 150 feet.

Then he grew philosophical, religious. “We can’t complain. The farm has done very well, up until this year. If you do right by your fellow man it will be all right. My father was in the best financial shape of anybody around. And he did like kind of what Social Security does now. He was blessed.”

Later, in a back room, with a view through a screen door of the shaded lawn and the neighboring house, Jim and I sat and talked and I took down his words.

He had from the start spoken as though he had cut himself off from his past, made a far journey. But that past was here still, a couple of hours away from Durham—or as much of the past as a man of fifty-two might reasonably expect still to find. But a journey had been made; there had been a break.

“I was put to bed when I was six with what was then said to be
rheumatic fever. My mother read me the whole of
Huckleberry Finn
. I staved in bed for a year. I was protected more than my fellow students for a few years. It set me apart. Something like that always happens to the person who is going to be a writer.

“I think I’m always conscious of the fact that I’m not truly of the world I’ve been showing you. I’ve not worked in tobacco. Dee Grimes is truly of that world. A real tobacco man, if you want to be colloquial. Educated in the school of hard knocks, educated by experience. I feel a kind of kinship and a kind of separation when I am with him.”

“Separation?”

“Presumably it began with that separation when I was a child, when I was set apart from those who were unselfconsciously playing their part in this eastern-North Carolina world, which is a world of action, not of thinking.”

Separation, and kinship. The Applewhite name was no longer in the windows of the store. But for Jim the letters on the glass—they had been in gold, and set in an arc—still existed, “in a ghostly way.”

“I do remember occasions of visiting back during my early years of college and once again experiencing what I have now almost forgotten—and that is a sensation of being so utterly at home in, and a part of, a place, that one feels somehow coextensive with the place.

“On the other hand, there is a sense of separateness in being in part of myself an observing stranger in my own native land. To the extent that at times I was fascinated by the idea of the pre-existence of the soul. Fascinated especially by the original Edgar Rice Burroughs book,
Tarzan of the Apes
, the first and best of the Tarzan books. Because in that book the Tarzan-to-be was landed in the jungle by the crash of his parents’ plane. There was something in that idea—of a person from another culture being deposited from the sky in a tropical environment—that was fascinating to me.”

It was extraordinary. Not only (as had happened more than once) did I find Jim Applewhite talking for me, expressing things I had felt as a child and an adolescent in Trinidad. He was also—though he was from the other side of the tracks—talking like Howard, Hetty’s son. In New York, at the airport, Howard had said, of the place that was his home, “I hated the place when I was young, for the continuity.” I had puzzled over that word “continuity.” It had meant old things, old buildings (like tobacco barns and farmhouses) still standing, keeping a
place physically dull. It had also meant, as came out later, old ways persisting. When we had returned to New York after our Southern weekend, Howard had 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.”

Jim Applewhite said: “My feeling of duality at that time was being physically in the world I identified with, but which on the other hand completely left out a whole other side of my psyche or my soul. There was still a cultural transmission here—from something quite other—through the churches, the hymns, the words and the music, the poetry of the Psalms in the King James Bible, and through books. My uncle would stay with us in the summer. He was a bachelor. He was probably my first literary influence. When I was six years old he told me stories which I later realized were from the
Odyssey
.

“There was a duality of worlds as a child and a young man that is probably not at all unique for a person of artistic inclinations, but which was given an exceptional tension by the intensity with which so many in this small-town world defied or opposed those values which were foreign to it—those cultural values that were transmitted from afar. There is a sense of self-subsistence about the South—that it is itself, knows itself, and needs nothing else. Because of this sense of beleaguered self-sufficiency it can be extremely pigheaded. It can cherish ignorance. It can cherish the unreasonable, the unreasoning.

“And I was hungry to have things explained. I remember looking up at the constellations and not knowing the names of the constellations. Or not knowing the names of trees. I have my telescope now, which I didn’t have then.

“Finally, one wanted consciousness, the right to be aware, or to name in language, in harmonious language, or in music—to name things, or else simply to name. Art is a sort of divine uselessness. That’s one of the reasons I’m also attracted to tobacco. It’s not practical. It’s not for any use that’s good for anything.”

W
E HAD
heard much, from Dee Grimes and from Jim Applewhite’s father, of Dan the neighbor, the lucky man with the irrigation system and the mechanical harvester, who was that day
“putting in” tobacco. And when we left Stantonsburg we went to see Dan.

He was a friendly, well-exercised middle-aged man with glasses, in pale-brown clothes and with a dark-brown baseball cap (“Pride in Tobacco”)—through he himself didn’t smoke. His hands were black with grease and also with tobacco tar, from the leaf he was “putting in”—the green-leaf tobacco tar I had first heard about from Howard.

His harvester—with a black man at the controls—was at work, straddling many rows. It was fascinating to watch this large, awkward-looking, but delicate machine, which had done away with the brute labor of tobacco-cropping. The wheels of the harvester, and the driver’s seat, moved along furrows; on either side two long rubber rollers with a little space between them caught the tobacco stalks and rolled off the leaves up to a certain height. The rolled-off leaves fell into bins and were taken up fast-moving bands to the leaf basket. The tobacco stalks with the uncropped upper leaves snapped back into their upright position; and at the end only an occasional yellow-green leaf remained on the ground to show that the harvester had just passed.

In the shed outside Dan’s bulk barns four black people, two men and two women (casual workers, to judge by their goodish clothes: no overalls), unpacked the leaves, fixed them into metal clamps, and slid the clamps along the racks in the bulk barns. To “put in” in a bulk barn was easier than in the tall old barns, where a man had to climb on a ladder to hang the sticks on the upper racks. Some years ago, Jim said, Dee Grimes had fallen off a top rack and fractured his hand. The racked leaves in the bulk barns looked like gigantic green salads.

It was easier with the bulk barns. But some of the ritual of the old days that the boy had studied on the Applewhite farm had also gone—the many black women looping tobacco leaves on sticks, the heated barns tended all night, the sweet corn roasting in coals, the pig being barbecued.

The field with the old Applewhite family graveyard no longer belonged to the family. But there is always a right of way to a graveyard, and a grass track led to it from the road. It was a small enclosure, about thirty feet by twenty. The iron rails were overgrown with weeds and orange trumpet vines. The oldest stone, very nearly indecipherable, had been put up in 1849. Small stones marked children’s graves. There were two wooden markers.

Jim said, “Probably heart of pine. What they call ‘fat lightwood.’ Possibly a slave. Sometimes slaves were buried with wooden markers.”

These markers looked scorched. I thought it might have been from age, but Jim said there might have been a fire in the field. The softer wood had worn away around the ridges of the harder grain.

Across the grass track from the graveyard there was a field of tobacco, the veined, resilient, umbrellalike leaves drooping a little after the weeks of drought. These small fields and rusting old tobacco barns—picturesque when I had first seen them—spoke now of great, detailed labor. And in the graveyard in the center of the field it was easy to imagine how confining it would have been in the old days, before roads and motorcars and electricity, and how the country town of Wilson, ten miles away, made a day’s journey.

But now there was an easy road to Durham.

O
UT OF
his intense contemplation of the physical world of his childhood—an act that made me feel close to him, though his world had not been at all like mine—and out of his separation from that first world of his, Jim Applewhite had gone beyond the religious faith of his father and grandfather and arrived at a feeling for “the sanctity of the smallest gestures.”

It was an imaginative, poetic resolution, quite different in its calm, its positiveness, and its import from Barry McCarty’s feeling, as a politician and a Church of Christ minister, for the beauty of the simple life—which, with him, seemed also linked to the idea of a world threatening to get out of control.

Such different men; yet they had certain important things in common. They had been made by the same history. And it was that sense of a special past, the past as a wound, that I missed almost as soon as I went north to Virginia, to Charlottesville.

There was history there in quantity—Jefferson, Monticello, the University of Virginia. But that was history as celebration, the history
of the resort, the history that was causing the subdivisions (or housing developments) to multiply in Virginia, and was even threatening the fox hunt (where already the hounds were trained to hunt foxes and foxes alone in special rented fox-compounds with deep-buried fences; and where the huntsman knew where all the foxes were in his “country” and inoculated all the cubs against rabies).

I had been living until then—and this perhaps had made the people of the South or Southeast so congenial to me—with people coming to terms with a more desperate kind of New World history, and a poorer land reflecting this history—the history that, in his poem “Southern Voices,” Jim Applewhite writes of as
“defeat,”
putting the word in italics, the defeat that he hears in Southern speech: