South and West Read online

  —is a message that man left me when I was twenty-two.

  The first time I was ever in the South was in late 1942, early 1943. My father was stationed in Durham, North Carolina, and my mother and brother and I took a series of slow and overcrowded trains to meet him there. At home in California I had cried at night, I had lost weight, I had wanted my father. I had imagined the Second World War as a punishment specifically designed to deprive me of my father, had counted up my errors and, with an egocentricity which then approached autism and which afflicts me still in dreams and fevers and marriage, found myself guilty.

  Of the trip I recall mainly that a sailor who had just been torpedoed on the Wasp in the Pacific gave me a silver-and-turquoise ring, and that we missed our connection in New Orleans and could get no room and sat up one night on a covered verandah of the St. Charles Hotel, my brother and I in matching seersucker sunsuits and my mother in a navy-blue-and-white-checked silk dress dusty from the train. She covered us with the mink coat she had bought before her marriage and wore until 1956. We were taking trains instead of driving because a few weeks before in California she had lent the car to an acquaintance who drove it into a lettuce truck outside Salinas, a fact of which I am certain because it remains a source of rancor, in my father’s dialogue, to this day. I last heard it mentioned a week ago. My mother made no response, only laid out another hand of solitaire.

  In Durham we had one room with kitchen privileges in the house of a lay minister whose children ate apple butter on thick slabs of bread all day long and referred to their father in front of us as “Reverend Caudill.” In the evenings Reverend Caudill would bring home five or six quarts of peach ice cream, and he and his wife and children would sit on the front porch spooning peach ice cream from the cartons while we lay in our room watching our mother read and waiting for Thursday.

  Thursday was the day we could take the bus to Duke University, which had been taken over by the military, and spend the afternoon with my father. He would buy us a Coca-Cola in the student union and walk us around the campus and take snapshots of us, which I now have, and look at from time to time: two small children and a woman who resembles me, sitting by the lagoon, standing by the wishing well, the snapshots always lightstruck or badly focused and, in any case, now faded. Thirty years later I am certain that my father must also have been with us on weekends, but I can only suggest that his presence in the small house, his tension and his aggressive privacy and his preference for shooting craps over eating peach ice cream, must have seemed to me so potentially disruptive as to efface all memory of weekends.

  On the days of the week which were not Thursday I played with a set of paper dolls lent me by Mrs. Caudill, the dolls bearing the faces of Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, Ann Rutherford, and Butterfly McQueen as they appeared in Gone With the Wind, and I also learned from the neighborhood children to eat raw potatoes dipped in the soft dust from beneath the house. I know now that eating pica is common in the undernourished South, just as I know now why the driver of the bus on the first Thursday we went out to Duke refused to leave the curb until we had moved from the back seat to the front, but I did not know it then. I did not even know then that my mother found our sojourn of some months in Durham less than ideal.

  —

  I could never precisely name what impelled me to spend time in the South during the summer of 1970. There was no reportorial imperative to any of the places I went at the time I went: nothing “happened” anywhere I was, no celebrated murders, trials, integration orders, confrontations, not even any celebrated acts of God.

  I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center. I did not much want to talk about this.

  I had only the most ephemeral “picture” in my mind. If I talked about it I could mention only Clay Shaw, and Garrison, and a pilot I had once met who flew between the Gulf and unnamed Caribbean and Central American airstrips for several years on small planes with manifests that showed only “tropical flowers,” could mention only some apprehension of paranoia and febrile conspiracy and baroque manipulation and peach ice cream and an unpleasant evening I had spent in 1962 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. In short I could only sound deranged. And so instead of talking about it I flew south one day in the summer of 1970, rented a car, and drove for a month or so around Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama, saw no spokesmen, covered no events, did nothing at all but try to find out, as usual, what was making the picture in my mind.

  —

  In New Orleans, the old people sitting in front of houses and hotels on St. Charles Avenue, barely rocking. In the Quarter I saw them again (along with desolate long-haired children), sitting on balconies, an ironing board behind them, gently rocking, sometimes not rocking at all but only staring. In New Orleans they have mastered the art of the motionless.

  In the evening I visited in the Garden District. “Olly olly oxen free” echoing in the soft twilight, around the magnolias and the trees with fluffy pods of pink. What I saw that night was a world so rich and complex and I was almost disoriented, a world complete unto itself, a world of smooth surfaces broken occasionally by a flash of eccentricity so deep that it numbed any attempt at interpretation.

  “I guess nobody knows more about the South than the people in this room right now,” my host allowed several times before dinner. We were at his house in the Garden District with the requisite bound volumes of the Sewanee and the Southern Review and the requisite Degas portrait of his great-great-grandmother, and he was talking about his wife and their friend, an architect of good Mobile family who specialized in the restoration and building of New Orleans Greek Revival houses.

  And of course he was talking about himself. “Ben C.,” the others called him, their voices fondly inflected. “You just stop that, Ben C.,” as he bullied the two women, his sister and his wife working together on a Junior League project, a guidebook to New Orleans. Already Ben C. had demanded to know what “athletics” my husband played, and why I had been allowed, in the course of doing some reporting a few years before, to “spend time consorting with a lot of marijuana-smoking hippie trash.”

  “Who allowed you?” he repeated.

  I said that I did not know quite what he meant.

  Ben C. only stared at me.

  “I mean, who wouldn’t have allowed me?”

  “You do have a husband?” he said finally. “This man I’ve thought was your husband for several years, he is your husband?”

  The evening, it developed, had started off wrong for Ben C. It seemed that he had called some of his cousins to come for dinner, and they had made excuses, and he had found that “inexcusable.” It further seemed that the excuse made by one cousin, who it would turn out was a well-known southern writer, was a previous engagement with the director of a Head Start program, and Ben C. had found that particularly inexcusable.

  “What am I meant to conclude?” he demanded rhetorically of his wife. “Am I meant to conclude he’s certifiable?”

  “Maybe you’re meant to conclude he didn’t care to come to dinner,” she said, and then, as if to cover her irreverence, she sighed. “I only hope he doesn’t get too mixed up with the Negroes. You know what happened to George Washington Cable.”

  I tried to remember what had happened to George Washington Cable.

  “He ended up having to go north, is what happened.”

  I said that I wanted only to know what people in the South were thinking and doing.

  He continued to gaze at me. He had the smooth, rounded face of well-off New Orleans, that absence of angularity which characterizes the local genetic pool. I tried to think who had incurred his wrath by going up north and whining.

  “I would just gue
ss that we know a little more about the subject,” Ben C. said finally, his voice rising, “than one Mr. Willie Morris.”

  We ate trout with shallots and mushrooms. We drank some white wine, we drank some more bourbon. We passed the evening. I never learned why the spectre of one Mr. Willie Morris had materialized in that living room in the Garden District, nor did I ask.

  Ben C.’s wife and sister, Mrs. Benjamin C. Toledano and Mrs. Beauregard Redmond, soon to be Mrs. Toledano Redmond, had many suggestions for understanding the South. I must walk Bourbon or Royal to Chartres, I must walk Chartres to Esplanade. I must have coffee and doughnuts at the French Market. I should not miss St. Louis Cathedral, the Presbytère, the Cabildo. We should have lunch at Galatoire’s: trout amandine or trout Marguery. We should obtain a copy of The Great Days of the Garden District. We should visit Asphodel, Rosedown, Oakley Plantation. Stanton Hall in Natchez. The Grand Hotel in Point Clear. We should have dinner at Manale’s, tour Coliseum Square Park. I should appreciate the grace, the beauty of their way of life. These graceful preoccupations seemed to be regarded by the women in a spirit at once dedicated and merely tolerant, as if they lived their lives on several quite contradictory levels.

  —

  One afternoon we took the ferry to Algiers and drove an hour or so down the river, in Plaquemines Parish. This is peculiar country. Algiers is a doubtful emulsion of white frame bungalows and jerry-built apartment complexes, the Parc Fontaine Apts. and so forth, and the drive on down the river takes you through a landscape more metaphorical than any I have seen outside the Sonoran Desert.

  Here and there one is conscious of the levee, off to the left. Corn and tomatoes grow aimlessly, as if naturalized. I am too accustomed to agriculture as agribusiness, the rich vistas of the California valleys where all the resources of Standard Oil and the University of California have been brought to bear on glossy constant productivity. No Hunting of Quadrupeds, a sign read in Belle Chasse. What could that mean? Can you hunt reptiles? Bipeds? There are dead dogs by the road, and a sinking graveyard in a grove of live oak.

  Getting close to Port Sulphur we began to see sulphur works, the tanks glowing oddly in the peculiar light. We ran over three snakes in the hour’s drive, one of them a thick black moccasin already dead, twisted across the one lane. There were run-down antiques places, and tomato stands, and a beauty shop called Feminine Fluff. The snakes, the rotting undergrowth, sulphurous light: the images are so specifically those of the nightmare world that when we stopped for gas, or directions, I had to steel myself, deaden every nerve, in order to step from the car onto the crushed oyster shells in front of the gas station. When we got back to the hotel I stood in the shower for almost half an hour trying to wash myself clean of the afternoon, but then I started thinking about where the water came from, what dark places it had pooled in.

  When I think now about New Orleans I remember mainly its dense obsessiveness, its vertiginous preoccupation with race, class, heritage, style, and the absence of style. As it happens, these particular preoccupations all involve distinctions which the frontier ethic teaches western children to deny and to leave deliberately unmentioned, but in New Orleans such distinctions are the basis of much conversation, and lend that conversation its peculiar childlike cruelty and innocence. In New Orleans they also talk about parties, and about food, their voices rising and falling, never still, as if talking about anything at all could keep the wilderness at bay. In New Orleans the wilderness is sensed as very near, not the redemptive wilderness of the western imagination but something rank and old and malevolent, the idea of wilderness not as an escape from civilization and its discontents but as a mortal threat to a community precarious and colonial in its deepest aspect. The effect is lively and avaricious and intensely self-absorbed, a tone not uncommon in colonial cities, and the principal reason I find such cities invigorating.

  New Orleans to Biloxi, Mississippi

  On the Chef Menteur Highway out of New Orleans there is the sense of swamp reclaimed to no point. Dismal subdivisions evoke the romance of Evangeline on their billboards. Shacks along the road sell plaster statues of the Virgin Mary. The gas stations advertise Free Flag Decals. Lake Pontchartrain can be seen now and then on the left, and the rusted hulks of boats at marine repair places.

  The rest of it is swamp. Crude signs point down dirt roads, and along the road are shacks, or “camps,” for fishing. Postboxes are supported on twisted rigid chains, as if the inhabitants are as conscious as the traveler of the presence of snakes. The light is odd, more peculiar still than the light in New Orleans, light entirely absorbed by what it strikes.

  We stopped at a trinket shack called the Beachcomber. A boy was filling the Pepsi machine outside. Towels hung limply on a display clothesline: “Put Your (picture of a HEART) in Dixie or Get Your (picture of an ASS) OUT!” Inside were boxes of shells and dried devilfish. “They get ’em from Mexico,” the boy said.

  Across the Mississippi line we took a side road through the pine forest toward what the sign said would be E. Ansley Estates. Rain was beginning to fall, and as we passed a pond a dozen or so boys were climbing out of the water and into two cars. One felt the rain had spoiled their day, and they would be at loose ends, restless. The cliché of the lonely road in the South took on a certain meaning here. The road was scattered occasionally with armadillo shells. The rain continued. The boys and their cars disappeared. We did not find E. Ansley Estates, or any settlement at all.

  Signs for fireworks, signs for a reptile farm ahead. The rain let up and we stopped at the reptile farm. The Reptile House was a small shack out in back of the main roadside building, across a dirt yard where chickens ran loose. The place was dirty, littered with peanut shells and empty six-pack cartons marked Dad’s Root Beer and Suncrest Orange Drink. There were a few capuchin monkeys, and a couple of big lethargic boas in packing cases, and a Holbrook’s king snake and a couple of rattlers. A cage marked COPPERHEAD appeared to be empty. There was a family in the Reptile House when we were there, a boy about nine and a father and a woman in slacks with her hair piled high and lacquered.

  We stood, the five of us, and looked restlessly out into the driving rain, trapped together in the Reptile House. The dust outside was turning to deep mud. Alligators thrashed in a muddy pool a few yards away. A little farther a sign said Snake Pit.

  “I never would’ve stopped if I’d known it was outside,” the woman said.

  “Known what was outside?” her husband said.

  “The Snake Pit, of course. What do you think is outside?”

  The man drummed his fingers on top of a packing case. The boa inside slid deeper into its coil. To make conversation I asked the man if they had visited a far building marked Reptile House.

  “There aren’t no reptiles upstairs there,” he said, and then, as if I might doubt it: “She told us, there aren’t no reptiles upstairs. She said not to go in.”

  “Maybe there are some reptiles downstairs?” I suggested.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. “I just wouldn’t go in.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t,” the woman said mildly. She was still staring at the Snake Pit.

  I was leaning on the empty copperhead box listening to the rain hiss when an uneasy feeling came over me that the hissing came from inside the box. I looked again and there it was, a copperhead, almost hidden by its shed skins.

  We gave up on one another, and on the possibility of the rain’s stopping, and ran through the mud back to the main house. I slipped and fell in the mud and had an instant of irrational panic that there were snakes in the mud and all around me.

  In the trinket shop the woman and I each paid a dime to use the restroom. With another dime I got a cup of cold coffee from a machine and tried to stop being chilled. The woman bought her son a china potty with a little child disappearing down the drain and the inscription “Goodbye Sweet World.” I bought a cheap beach towel printed with a Confederate flag. It is ragged and gray now and sits in my li
nen closet in California amid thick and delicately colored Fieldcrest beach towels, and my child prefers it to the good ones.

  Pass Christian to Gulfport

  At Pass Christian in the summer of 1970 the debris of the 1969 hurricane had become the natural look of the landscape. The big houses along the water were abandoned, the schools and churches were wiped out, the windows of places hung askew. The devastation along the Gulf had an inevitability about it: the coast was reverting to its natural state. There were For Sale signs all over, but one could not imagine buyers. I remembered people talking about Pass Christian as a summer place, and indeed the houses had once been pretty and white and the American flags unfaded, but even in the good years there must have been an uneasiness there. They sat on those screened porches and waited for something to happen. The place must have always failed at being a resort, if the special quality of a resort is defined as security: there is here that ominous white/dark light so characteristic of the entire Gulf.

  The city hall in Pass Christian faces away from the Gulf, and when you happen upon it from the front it looks like a façade from a studio back lot, abandoned a long time ago. Through the shattered windows one sees the dark glare of the Gulf. You want to close your eyes.

  Long Beach seemed poorer, or harder hit, or both. There were none of those big white houses with the screened porches here. There were trailers, and a twisted pool ladder that marked the place where a swimming pool had been before the hurricane. Mass was being held in the school gym. On the beach there was an occasional woman with children. The women wore two-piece bathing suits, shorts and halters, not bikinis. All along the coast there were cars parked and tables set up to sell colored discs that whir in the air, apparently indefinitely. On the cars are hand-lettered signs that read SPACE STATION. You can see discs shimmering in the light from a long way off.