A Turn in the South (8 page)

“Yes, I think so.” But I had interrupted. She went on: “In high school I did everything I thought I should. I was homecoming queen.”

“Homecoming queen?”

“It’s at a big football game. And when the alumni all come back there is a queen in her court, and she is given roses and presented to her court at half-time. And I was a cheerleader, and all the things you were supposed to be. I was a popular girl. And that was what we all thought we had to do, to get this man and to have a good life.

“And most of us could learn to do that. But the other side of us that wanted to
learn
—we were always ashamed of it. We never prized our minds. We never prized our individuality. It was all right to make good grades. It was all part of being a good little girl. But to be a great thinker, to have a great talent and pursue it, would cut you right out of the herd. And that was the thing we were most afraid of. It could send you walking alone. I mean it almost literally in some cases.

“I knew a girl at college who was a wonderfully gifted painter—and, oh, she was good—and she spent all her working time in the art-department laboratory, painting. It was all she did. She was extremely reclusive. She was the only woman at that college allowed to have a room alone. The stigmas she bore were cruel.”

I wanted to know more about being “cut out of the herd.” I remembered what Esther Lefever had said about leaving her Mennonite community
and feeling “alone”: feeling yourself the last tree on a hill, all the others having been cut down.

Anne Siddons said, “The feeling you get is of being totally exposed, totally vulnerable to
chaos
.

“I think that goes back to safety. I think I can tell you why Southern women teach their daughters that, or that they must have a man to protect them. After the Civil War those women had lost their entire worlds. Their homes were burnt, their slaves (if they had had them) were scattered, their men might have been killed. And I think they perceived that this had happened through the sheer folly and childishness of these men of theirs. That was a
silly
war. It was quixotic, romantic in the extreme. It was foolhardy. We fought a ridiculous war that any reflection would have told us we couldn’t win.

“And these women who had lost everything determined to ensure that their daughters and granddaughters would never again hand their power over to men who would toss it away so lightly. Never again would they allow their men to throw their very lives away. And they determined then to control those men by guile and charm and feminine wiles, because those were the only weapons they had.

“If we lived in the East—of the United States—we might have used our minds. In the West we might have exercised a physical initiative and bravery. But we were here, and many of us were trapped here economically. And you can’t aspire to what you can’t imagine. And so, to survive, we had to hook up with a man. My mother to this day would be happier if I had a teaching certificate and was married to a lawyer. ‘You should get a teaching certificate. That way you’ll always have something to fall back on.’ ”

And Anne Siddons herself still had something of her old anxiety about chaos. “What I am most afraid of is a very real vulnerability to forces I can’t control. This thing about control is important to me.”

She spoke again about the conventions of her adolescence. “The very things that could have enriched us and set us apart were the things that we learned, by omission, were wrong. We grew up without prizing what was real. The South is dreadfully hard on its women, and what we allow it to do to us … I suppose this is true of other regions as well, but I think it is more true of the South. It would be interesting to know
why
we are so suspicious of eccentricity.”

“Did it affect your emotional life?”

“I’ve only begun to know now how much it affected my emotional
life. It kept me from examining myself. It terrified me. Consequently I came to that examination twenty years later than many people do. What I resent is the power that examination might have liberated earlier. In my writing and my life.

“I am regretting the years of waste. I am trying to deal with anger against my parents for bringing me up as they did—though that anger comes out of the deep knowledge that they acted out of the highest love they had in them.

“I am glad it happened to me. I might have become one of those beautiful tragic drunk women in the South, on a country-club terrace somewhere. There are many drunk women in the South.”

But there was the comfort of the land that the family had farmed for seven or eight generations, since the family had moved down from Virginia in 1820.

“I’m glad I have those ties. The feeling of floating free is frightening to me. I go back almost every weekend. I have dinner with my parents.”

And now came the explanation of the “hoarding” of passion she had spoken about earlier: the need to spare feeling for private life, private ties, to divert at least some passion from public issues.

“I’ve talked about this with two or three women friends. And we find that we are now irrationally angry with our parents. And I think that it’s because we sense that the original contract—the contract between parent and child, the contract that says, ‘I will always take care of you,’ and is an impossible commitment—that contract is going to be broken now, and they are going to die soon. That is what I mean by our passions having to be focused.”

Still, what thought was there now, from her side, about the blacks, people equally obsessed?

“If we, Southern women, feel strictured, I wonder how the Southern black, who has had so many more overt strictures, must feel about them. Though I suspect that I may have highly romanticized whatever they may feel about them—I have a tendency to do that.”

“Do you think protest is being so formalized that even black people are beginning to lose contact with what they feel, and often say what they think is expected of them?”

“I think that rote and rhetoric have replaced outrage. The first thing that happened after the very real shock about the business in Forsyth County—the shock that
it
, the Southern violence, wasn’t dead
—what swung into action then was the
perfect
march. And we knew just exactly how to do it. As though some cosmic march chairman pulled all the switches—and, goodness, in a week we had the perfect march.

“We had the right component of public-safety awareness, the right component of media awareness. The right crowd makeup, a nice balance of young blacks and old battle-scarred lions; and we had the right component of white liberals. You wouldn’t have found an ex-president marching in that first civil-rights march. You know, the organization! The buses appeared, just like that. That’s Hosea. Boy, can he stage a civil disobedience now!”

Wasn’t it good, though, that protest in the United States could be ritualized like this?

“I don’t want to sound pejorative. How else would I have it? I am so thankful no lives were lost in Forsyth County, no harm was done. What I miss are the howls of pure outrage that greeted the murder of the three civil-rights workers in Mississippi. In the 1960s. But it was the spilled blood that called out the outrage. And we must not have the blood.”

But there was this to the formalization of protest: there was an orthodoxy of thought about race and rights. Perhaps people would be censoring themselves sometimes, to appear to be saying the right thing.

Anne Siddons said, “I guess that happens in all revolutions. They don’t end. They just pass into caricature over the years. And therefore they lose their credibility. The civil-rights movement will lose its energy and peter out into a series of sporadic brush fires, as other things come up. The civil-rights movement began to die as the peace movement and the women’s movement came to life in the sixties. As I said, Americans protest anything. We are protesters. But protest made the country. It’s what we know how to do.”

We had talked for two hours. And across the road from the Ritz, on the ground floor at Macy’s, smiling uniformed young men and women, like a kind of ceremonial designer-guard for Gloria Vanderbilt, walked lightly—lightly, like dancers—down a walkway between dark-red rope barriers, while a small band played and Gloria Vanderbilt herself—impossible to imagine that a real person possessed the name and actually was at the heart of the fame, the goods, the book, the talk show—Gloria Vanderbilt herself, dark eyes in pale, blooming skin, in the fluorescent light of the department store, the light matching the air
conditioning, completing the bubble world, Gloria Vanderbilt sat and signed things for people waiting in line.

T
OM
T
EEPEN
walked me over to the gold-domed Capitol building. In the big central hall, hung with portraits of people famous in the political life of Georgia, there was a display of flags from the Civil War. Tom Teepen said, “A lot of history here.”

And the lieutenant governor, Zell Miller, was in his wood-paneled office. He was from the northeast of the state, which he said was Indian territory, Cherokee territory, until the 1830s, when the Cherokees were sent to Oklahoma along the “Trail of Tears.” Was that what the trail was called then? Possibly not; it was hard and painful to think about now. The settlers who took the Indian land were Scottish and Irish and some Germans, moving down from Carolina and Virginia. And the northeast of the state remained isolated—American history busy about other areas, leapfrogging or skipping over the hills of Appalachia and the communities in the “coves” and “hollows”—until the 1930s and 1940s. There were few blacks; that area was not a “racist society.” But now, with the newcomers from other places, mainly from Florida, he said, there were prejudices among the local people.

That was the lieutenant governor’s background. His mother came to Atlanta in 1942, when he was ten years old, and she worked for two years at the Lockheed plant. She saved up and took the children once for lunch at the Biltmore Hotel. For two years they stayed in Atlanta, and then they went back to the mountains. And now the lieutenant governor was in the wood-paneled office.

And to the paneled bar of the Ritz-Carlton later that evening came Atlanta City Council President Marvin Arrington, as concerned with his own past as the lieutenant governor was with his.

But Marvin Arrington was black. He was heavy and strong, though with noticeable bowlegs. He was forty-six, by profession a lawyer. And his talk, open and unabashed, and fresh still, though he must have spoken the lines a hundred times, was about the difference between today and yesterday, between today, when honor was his, and yesterday, when Atlanta was so segregated that the only place where black people could use the lavatories was the bus station. So that his mother, when she brought the children to town, urged them to use the lavatories there if they didn’t want to walk back the miles to it.

The black bar attendants, women, were pleased to see Arrington. Smiles came to their faces, though he was not a glamorous man, and had a heavy, long face. He wore a pale-brown suit; he seemed to sit low in his chair. He told Tom Teepen he had lost twenty pounds. But his long day—he had come quite late for our meeting—had exhausted him; and though he had a cranberry juice only, he dipped his large hand into the nut bowl and drew out nuts by the handful.

We talked about the rich blacks in Atlanta—were they real? He said (as in the reprint of an Atlanta
Constitution
article I had read) that he earned a six-figure salary. But he didn’t think there were all that many rich people among the blacks of Atlanta; and the figures he gave, of salaries and expenses, were really rather modest.

He said he was sorry he couldn’t talk more just then, but he would like to see me; and he gave me a two-hour appointment in his law office some days ahead.

“C
UT OUT
of the herd.” Anne Siddons had used the words to describe one of the anxieties of her Southern upbringing. And I heard almost the same words from a woman at a theology school, where I went to follow up the idea that had been given me in northwestern Georgia of religion and identity.

The woman who spoke the words—“I didn’t want to be not part of the herd. That’s where my identity came from”—was, like Anne Siddons, from a long-established family, not in Georgia, but in Mississippi. Mississippi, this woman said, had a history of 250 years; her family had lived in the same house for nearly two hundred years.

“The way my identity was formed was by my family and by who we were in Jackson and in Mississippi. In the Presbyterian church we had our own pew. And that was your identity. My aunt was shocked one day when she went to church and found a stranger in her pew.”

Didn’t the idea of piety and correctness contain the idea of service?

No, she said; that idea wasn’t for her family. Other people had the idea of service; the idea was for other people. Yet she had spent much time in Atlanta serving the black community.

“There is a noblesse oblige that separated you but imposed an obligation, but with no person-to-person connection. And I think the reason I’ve spent so much time in the black community in Atlanta is that I was
hungry.”

“For what?”

“Hungry for …” She had trouble finding words. “For contact. With people who were living lives that were more real than mine was. We were real cold folks.”

She meant the decorum, the rigidity, the manners of the family. When she broke away she welcomed even the idea of tears. In the idea of service now, and in the dream of becoming a minister, she had found a new idea of community.

“But remember,” she said, talking of the identity that had been hers and probably still was, “this is a very specialized herd. White upper-class Mississippi people.”

And while she was reaching towards a new community, the old way of things she had known was changing. The family was now scattered all over the United States; and the old family house, the “plantation,” was probably “going to disintegrate.” “And my mother is distraught in a way I’ve never known her. Because a lot of her identity is going to go. That house has been the gathering place; many people can stay there. For my mother it’s a sense of place. That house, those trees, that dirt. My aunts talked about the Civil War as though it was yesterday. And the people there show off the old houses, you know. It’s part of the economy of the place. They put on the old costumes and show the houses.”