Long Time Leaving (11 page)

You know what a Möbius strip is. Take a strip of paper, give it one twist and glue the ends together, and run your finger along one surface, and the next thing you know you're running it along the other surface. You've got a strip of paper with only one side.

What does this mean? That you can't separate inner from outer, subjective from objective? That's postmodern, I believe. Or that anybody who tells you there's two sides to everything is just trying to get you to take his side? That's Southern. Eurocentric philosophy has come to realize only fairly recently, and with great
ahas
and alarums, that objective rationality is not the bedrock of human affairs. In the South, nobody ever thought it was. The South doesn't produce ideas, it produces rhetoricians, yarn spinners, visionaries, musicians, demagogues …all sorts of people Plato would have expelled from his Republic. And it produces Möbius notions.

Consider Robert E. Lee's most famous remark, as he watched his troops win overwhelmingly at Fredericksburg, slaughtering bluecoats by the thousands:

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”

A great utterance. But when you think about it, what does it mean? “Was General Lee saying that if war were less terrible, it would be worse, because we'd get too attached to it? A more logical, proactive utterance would have been “Boys, war doesn't get any better than this, and it's still too terrible. Let's quit.” But, of course, that wouldn't have done. (How often, in real-life situations, has sweet reason done?) The only thing I can figure is that Lee was warning us against big-time college football.

I'll tell you a Southerner who won over the world without any resort to pure logic: Elvis. He told an interviewer once, “There's not an intellectual son of a gun walking the face of the earth that could make me believe a certain thing unless I really thought it. So, I don't try to surround myself with a group of intellectuals.”

Oh, sure, intellectuals surround Elvis, now, when he is not around to stave them off, but the Southerners who have made great contributions to world culture—in the blues, jazz, rock and roll, country music, folk art, fiction, cuisine, and humor—have not sprung from an educated elite. They have arisen from people who, if they'd made it to deputy sheriff, would have been coming up in the world. Well, Mark Twain's father was a sort of jackleg judge but not much of one, and William
Faulkner's paternal grandfather was a lawyer among other things, but the other things included killing people in brawls and getting shot to death himself. On both sides of his family, Faulkner came from roughnecks distinguished by drunkenness and absquatulation.

They probably absquatulated in part because they liked the sound of the word.
Nullification
has a certain rollicky ring to it, too, at least the
ification
part, after the part that means “nothing;” and remember what Paul Newman said in
Cool Hand Luke:
“Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.”

How about jury nullification? It richly earned a bad name in the South before and during the civil rights movement. But then there's the story about the jury that heard the case of a highly regarded, hardworking neighbor accused of stealing a rich, miserly, none-too-upstanding neighbor's mule. The jury brought in a verdict of not guilty, but he had to give the mule back. The judge said that didn't make sense. The jury deliberated further and came back and said, okay, then, he's not guilty and he can keep the mule, because he must need it worse than the owner does or, knowing him, he would never've stolen it. That's Möbius justice. (But that doesn't mean that “to each according to his need,” as a governing principle, would ever have gone over in South Carolina.)

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was from Massachusetts and fought in the Union army, but after the war, as a highly influential U.S. Supreme Court justice, he wrote: “The first requirement of a sound body of law is that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.” That principle has let the white South off the hook at times in history when de facto nullification was going on. It all depends on what the meaning of
community
is. I remember reading about a man convicted of robbing houses in California somewhere, who, when the judge asked him whether he had anything to say, said yes. He said he had not been convicted by a jury of his peers, as was his right, because his peers were burglars. Members of the housebreaking community. That didn't get him anywhere, even in California, but the man had a Möbius point.

In Virginia a while ago, I came upon a many-volumed encyclopedia of Southern biography printed in 1900. It said that John C. Calhoun “was upholding the rights of the Southern people against the assaults of the abolitionists. The charges made by the latter against the system of slavery he denounced as false. On the other hand, he never grew weary in the work of telling how the Southern people were generously lifting upward the entire body of negro slaves to a higher and nobler plane of life.”

On the other hand? What's “on the other hand” about that? Sounds
like two sides of the same hand to me. But then “the one hand, the other hand” doesn't make any sense unless the hands are connected by a particular body and particular bodies tend to be partial to themselves. The body in this case was that of “the Southern people”—slaves not being considered, even after thirty-five years of retrospect, to be part of that category. We know better than that now, and heaven help us for what we don't know better than yet.

Heaven, in that connection, is the Möbius twist.

I
went with an old Mississippi liberal friend of mine to the shortlived Broadway musical
The Civil War.
Too pageant-y for my taste, but it fit his pistol, in large part because it stressed the fact that the Civil “War was about slavery. He was sick and tired of hearing people maintain that the real issue was freight rates or something.

It hit me, how far I had drifted from a Southern context. I am
surrounded
by people who believe the Civil “War was about slavery. I'm lucky if they don't assume too firmly that slavery was my fault.

Living in the Northeast makes me feel more Southern, if anything, than I felt growing up in the South, because so many people I meet say to me, as if it were perfectly mannerly, “I see you've kept the accent,” or “What are you doing up here?” A while back at a Manhattan cocktail party—in honor of
my book—I
met a woman in television with whom I had spoken several times on the phone. Her face fell. “You look too urban,” she said.

“Uh?” I said.

“You're wearing a suit. I thought you'd be chewing on a blade of grass.”

I believe, myself, that the Civil “War was about slavery. People who say it wasn't are like people who say that the impeachment of Bill Clinton was not about sex. They have a point—broader constitutional issues and narrower grievances were also at stake—but, hey, come on. No doubt it was morally convenient for Northerners (who hadn't gotten around to outlawing slavery in all their own states) to declare that they were fighting to free the slaves, as it was for Southerners to deny that they were fighting to keep them enslaved. But if all that blood was shed over tariffs, then secession was an even dumber move than I think it was.

To say that the Rebs were fighting to preserve “the Southern way of life” is euphemistic. What do people mean when they say they are opposed to “the homosexual lifestyle”? They mean they just can't accept that homophobia
(pace
Trent Lott) is a disease. I don't mean to classify the antebellum Southern way of life as a disease (someone, in fact, should come up with a catchy term for anti-Southern bias— Dixiephobia?), but Southern hotheads’ refusal to admit that slavery was carcinogenic (compounded by their dread of what was oxymoroni-cally referred to as “servile rebellion”—slave revolt) metastasized into bellicosity.

In the South before the war, there were several ways of life. One of them was that of being treated as property. Another way of life back then was that of treating some people as property and not wanting to admit that it was morally wrong. Another was trying to make a living on your own little hardscrabble farm. Those farmers may have wound up doing most of the fighting against the Northern invasion, but there was room in the Union for their lifestyle. It was slavery that brought out the self-righteousness on both sides, got the blood up, and reduced the Southern way of life to a war-torn commonality.

But I don't get any pleasure out of taking up such a position here, because I am surrounded by people who take some more simplistic version of it for granted. Nor do they get any pleasure out of hearing such talk from me. If they're going to talk to a cop (off duty), they want it be one who will admit to being trigger-happy. If they're going to talk to a white Southerner, they want it to be one who will own up to a vestigial affection for Simon Legree. I spent some time in London back during the Reagan administration, and seldom have I irritated anyone more than I did lefty Brit journalists by calmly agreeing with them when they informed me that my president was an ignoramus. At least over there I was regarded as an inauthentic
American.

Not that white Northeasterners generally care much about slavery anymore. They roll their eyes, with, to be sure, considerable reason, when Larry Johnson of the New York Knicks, who has an $84 million contract, informs the media that he and his teammates are looked down upon as “rebellious slaves.”
The Civil War,
the musical, was, as I say, short-lived, and when I try to tell people, black or white, that the slavery-obsessed movie
Beloved,
though muddled and overwrought, is as incandescent as go-girl fluff like
How Stella Got Her Groove Back
is silly, I get the feeling that they think it's time I got over white Southern guilt.

That really gets my goat. I hated
Mississippi Burning
because of its despicable
misapprehension of the civil rights movement (Pauline Kael, bless her, called it “morally repugnant”), but when I said so once on the radio in the North, the show's host remarked in a sympathetic tone of voice, “Well, you probably had
friends
in the Klan.” The movie version of
The Color Purple
made me cringe because it was so heavy-handed and cartoonish, but a lot of people seem to feel that a white Southerner has no room to talk.

I demand that room. It isn't
paradoxical
for a white Southerner not to be over slavery yet. It's natural. Slavery still colors non-Southerners’ generic attitude toward me, so I have a selfish interest.

What I would love to do is attach some comparable stigma to a Northeastern insitution. The stock market springs to mind. Its professed purpose, to provide capital for business expansion, is fine by me, but then slavery was regarded by slaveowners as a sound business proposition. Speculation in the stock market wreaked destruction in the thirties, and it may well be turning the economy into a bubble today. Thirty years ago people were well-advisedly content to build up a nest egg by investing in home ownership for themselves and others, via preinflation savings and loans. Now people are afraid not to help keep pumping up the Dow out of all proportion to the productivity of the companies they are investing in. The companies, in turn, are more intent upon keeping the price of their stock on the upswing than they are upon making good products. Call me a foot-shuffling country boy, but when I hear the stock market being referred to as “the national pastime,” it don't sound right to me.

“More than ever,” says
Newsweek,
“achieving the American Dream is a game of chance—and picking the right stock.” Gambling is a venial sin compared to owning human beings, but when the stakes are everybody's savings (prospectively, everybody's Social Security, if you please), well, there used to be general agreement that
organized
gambling should not get too powerful.

Of course, now, I don't know much about the stock market. Don't even have any money in it, if you can believe that. In fact, when a prominent Southern brokerage offered me a good deal of cash some years ago to appear in a series of commercials, I turned it down, because I didn't know nothing about broking stocks and also because the catch line I was supposed to deliver, “Southern and smart,” sounded a lot like “Southern but smart” to me.

I am no abolitionist, no warmonger either. But what if a consensus were to arise in the South that the stock market has become a corrupt institution antithetical to freedom? Sure would be gratifying to hear
Northerners try to defend it on some other ground than how hard it would hit their economy if they had to give it up.

The other night a New York stockbroker told me the reason the market was all out of whack was that “every janitor has a 401(k) and chooses the riskier, high-income option.”

“Just as the only problem with slavery,” I said, “was the irresponsibility of the slaves.” It's nice to be dismissed as a dangerous radical for a change.

W
hen Krispy Kreme doughnuts arrived in New York City in 1996 I was pleased, and in fact wrote an appreciation for
The New York Times.
(See “Food-Song Maven,” p. 91.) But: “What if this fine old Southern institution got corrupted? Then one evening, sure enough, I happened upon the Third Avenue outlet, and saw that the neon
HOT DOUGHNUTS NOW
sign was lit. “Here, now you'll see!” I said to my Northern companion, whom I had been at pains to convince of hot Krispy Kremes’ divinity. “We went inside, my mouth watering for freshly risen yeastiness with the glaze still oozy, rolling off the line “Right at This Moment,” to quote the company's “Web site. And what did I find? For the first time in my life? The sign was hot, the doughnuts not. They sat there, having rolled some time before.

I expostulated. This just wasn't done! “The manager told us to leave that light on all the time,” explained the counterman, with, yes, a shrug.