South and West Page 6

  On the same afternoon I saw a black girl on the campus: she was wearing an Afro and a clinging jersey, and she was quite beautiful, with a NY-LA coastal arrogance. I could not think what she was doing at Ole Miss, or what she thought about it.

  At dinner in the Holiday Inn, overhearing an academic foursome: two teachers, the wife of one of them, and a younger woman, perhaps a graduate student or a teaching assistant. They were talking about how the SAEs and the Sigma Nus and the Sigma Chis used to “control politics.” The break in this situation had come when Archie Manning, who was I believe a Sigma Nu, had run for something and either lost, or just barely won, which went to prove. There had been “a little article in the Mississippian about this,” about the way the Greeks used to run things, and, said one of the men, “it said they did no more, but it upset my wife and daughter. Why did that have to be?”

  The others added that the piece had been “trivial,” “not very well done,” but they did not address themselves to their colleague’s plaintive question.

  At one point during dinner the younger woman stated in a spirit of reckless defiance, “I don’t care what the student union looks like, I couldn’t care less.” At another point she said that she believed the FBI had her “staked out,” because she had two friends who used drugs. She did not and would not use drugs herself, she added: “My mind’s expanded enough.”

  —

  When I think about Oxford now I think about Archie Manning, the Sigma Nu, and all the bumper stickers that read ARCHIE and ARCHIE’S ARMY, with a Rebel flag, and about the immense and beautifully landscaped fraternity and sorority houses that surround the campus, and about boys and girls who in 1970 come out of the pinewoods to sing “White Star of Sigma Nu” at dances after football games. I had telephoned someone I knew in the English Department at Berkeley to ask if he knew anyone on any faculty in any department at any college in Mississippi to whom I should talk, anyone noted in any field he knew about, but he did not, and could only suggest that I call up Miss Eudora Welty, in Jackson.

  As a matter of fact I had intended to, if ever I got near Jackson, but I was afraid to get too near Jackson because planes left from Jackson for New York and California, and I knew I would not last ten minutes in Jackson without telephoning Delta or National and getting out. All that month I hummed in my mind “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane,” Peter, Paul and Mary, and every night in our motel room we got out the maps and figured out how many hours’ driving time to Jackson, to New Orleans, to Baton Rouge, to the closest place the planes left from.

  We drove out on Old Taylor Road at night to look for Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s house. There were fireflies, and heat lightning, and the thick vines all around, and we could not see the house until the next day. It was large and private, secluded, set back from the road. I read a book about Faulkner in Oxford, interviews with his fellow citizens in Oxford, and I was deeply affected by their hostility to him and by the manner in which he had managed to ignore it. I thought if I took a rubbing from his gravestone, a memento from this place, I would know every time I looked at it that the opinion of others counted for not much one way or another.

  So we went out to the graveyard, the Oxford cemetery, to look for the grave. Under a live oak tree a black kid sat in a parked two-tone salmon Buick, the door open. He was sitting on the floorboard with his feet outside, and while I was there several cars with Ole Miss and Archie’s Army stickers came winding up the cemetery road, and boys would get out, and they would have some dealing with the black kid and drive away. He seemed to be dealing marijuana, and his car had a Wayne State sticker. Other than that there was nobody, just rabbits and the squirrels and the hum of bees and the heat, dizzying heat, heat so intense I thought of fainting. For several hours we looked for the grave, found the Faulkner plot and a number of other Faulkner/Falkner graves, but we never found William Faulkner’s grave, not in that whole graveyard full of Oxford citizens and infant sons.

  —

  The way in which all the reporting tricks I had ever known atrophied in the South. There were things I should do, I knew it: but I never did them. I never made an appointment with the bridal consultant of the biggest department store in any town I was in. I never made the Miss Mississippi Hospitality Contest Semi-Finals, although they were being held in little towns not far from where we were, wherever we were. I neglected to call the people whose names I had, and hung around drugstores instead. I was underwater in some real sense, the whole month.

  I kept talking to Mrs. Frances Kirby by telephone in Jackson. Mrs. Kirby was in charge of the Miss Hospitality contests, in Bay Springs, Cleveland, Clinton, Greenwood, Gulfport, Indianola, Leland, Lewisville. I was within a few miles of Cleveland on the day that contest would be held, and I called the sponsors, the chamber of commerce, and they said to come on “up at the country club” and watch, but I never even did that.

  A Sunday Lunch in Clarksdale

  One day we drove from Oxford over to Clarksdale, to have Sunday lunch with Marshall Bouldin and his wife, Mel. Lunch was served promptly at noon, a few minutes after our arrival. There was fried chicken and gravy, white rice, fresh green peas, and a peach pie for dessert. The heat was so intense that the ice was already melted in the Waterford water goblets before we sat down at the table. Grace was said. The children were allowed to speak on topics of interest, but not to interrupt. I have never eaten so long or heavy a meal. I was in a place where “Sunday” still existed as it did in my grandmother’s house, a leadening pause in the week, a day of boredom so extreme as to be exhausting. It was the kind of Sunday to make one ache for Monday morning.

  After lunch we sat in the living room of the small house in town the Bouldins were using while their plantation house was being remodeled. Marshall Bouldin talked, and here are some of the things he said:

  “The money and the power in the South have traditionally been in the hands of the people who plant. The Delta, because of that, is rich. There are rich people in the Delta. You don’t get governors from the Delta, but you do get the money and the power to elect them. Governors come from the hills, and from Hattiesburg. There’s a lieutenant governor now from Clarksdale, but that’s unusual. There are fewer blacks in the hill sections. The Delta, which is more affluent, has a higher black population. The third part of Mississippi, besides the hills and the Delta, is the coastal area, which is really an isolated phenomenon.

  “I’m so glad to see what has happened in Mississippi. The thinking has come so far in just these twenty years. The hill country is certainly more reactionary. The Delta’s still conservative, yes, but people here have money, and people who have money can be exposed to new ideas.

  “Mainly we plant cotton here, soybeans are replacing truck crops. We tried cattle, but the soil here is too rich for cattle, the flat land ends at Vicksburg. The Delta is maybe fifty miles wide, and was all overflow land until after the Civil War when the levees were built. Around 1870, then, people began to move in, they had this rich land, all river silt. What size is the average Delta farm? Well, fourteen thousand acres would be a large one, and two hundred to three hundred acres would be a small one, the average is said to be seven hundred seventy, but that would be small for cotton or beans.

  “Thirty years ago my dad and my Mel’s dad led the ideal planter’s life. Now it’s more of a business, it’s not the same. It was a series of small towns then, there were great social functions, and you went from town to town for your social functions, and this held the country together.

  “What you have here is the last of the feudal system. It’s an area where you have plenty of servants. We’re fortunate to have Charles and Frances here, they were on my dad’s place. What you had around here until very lately was mainly the tenant system. Each black family was responsible for the ten or fifteen acres around his cabin. The owner supervised and provided food, and provided anything else the family needed, and these were sizable families, but they’d say, ‘Mr. Marshall, take care of me,’ and we would. That’s
part of the change here. Mel’s brother is not on the tenant system.

  “My dad never put anyone off. And Mel, your dad never did either. Some planters, they abused the tenant system. There was one planter around here, on payday he used to make them smile, he’d hand out silver dollars when he got the smile, but that was just some, and maybe it was condoned but it was never approved of. Mel’s daddy kept books, and settled with every tenant. The community knew who these people were who took advantage, and frowned on them. Of course, nobody put them in jail, which is maybe what we should’ve done.

  “Automation changed things, the cotton picker meant we didn’t need so many. We never put anybody off the land, they just gradually left for Detroit or they moved into town. A few planters told people to get off, but on the whole there was not much dispossessing of the black man.

  “The big change, I do think, was when television came. The kids could see the way other people lived, other lives. It has been the greatest educational system in the county.

  “My dad’s main job was just talking to John, seeing if he needed anything (John was the overseer or foreman). Mel’s brother, on the other hand, he runs—I don’t want to say it’s a factory, but it turns out cotton. He has about three thousand acres in three pieces. In 1950 I farmed like my daddy farmed, on a horse. Now you need to have a manager on each place, in his pickup. You need to have a personal radio, to be able to reach a man you’ve got in town and tell him to get that part out here in fifteen minutes. You used to be able to have a good time farming. When you got the cotton picked in the fall you read books, went hunting, sat around the fire and socialized. Now, they’re working on the machinery all winter. Maybe if you can get the repair work done in January, you can take a month or six weeks off in February, but that’s it.” He paused, and looked at his wife. “Isn’t that right, Mel?”

  Mel shrugged. “It’s still the good life,” she said.

  “The black population is still high here,” he went on. “In the schools right now it’s 80 percent black and 20 percent white, now that we’re integrated. We have tortured and tortured over what to do with our children, and our tentative decision for now is to send them to private schools, even though that is against our ideals. I can’t sacrifice my child to my ideal. They had to force the black to integrate. Basically I know that the people who are pushing it are right, but they seem so precipitous. They say we had to integrate on February 2. Now, why couldn’t they have waited ’til September? It hardened attitudes, is what it did. There are people in this community who might have been showing signs of opening up their minds, and then a parent finds out that as of next week his kid is going to be over in Higgins High—that door is closed, and when it’s going to open again nobody knows.

  “They say around here it takes three generations to make a gentleman, and yet if I was about a sixteen-year-old black boy I’ll be damned if I’d want to wait three generations. All over this area we still have these large maternal families, families with no daddy, nobody to say if you’re going to reap the benefits, you’ve got to put in the work.

  “I’m a middle-of-the-roader, and like the majority, we’re trying to do the easiest thing that will get us all by happily. There are five or six houses in Clarksdale right now where this conversation could take place. That may not seem like many but when I was growing up there were none.

  “The best thing we can do is raise our children differently, and add four people to the community who can come home from this little Episcopal school and think differently. When the integration orders were flying around Mississippi last year it was hard to think what to do, and it still is.”

  Charles and Frances came out from the kitchen, to say goodbye. They were on their way to church. Marshall Bouldin beamed as he introduced them. “Charles and Frances were on my daddy’s place, isn’t that right, Frances?” Frances bobbed her head. “That’s right, surely is,” she said. “Mr. Marshall and us, we were little itty-bittys together.”

  There was news of a tornado somewhere near the Delta, although not in Coahoma County, and a telephone call to inform Marshall Bouldin that “a black man died on the place last night.”

  We drove out to the plantation, where the house was being remodeled. He pointed out the tenant cabins standing empty. “When I was little we farmed it all with mules,” he said. “When I went off to college we had four-row equipment. Now we have six-row equipment.” He pointed out the tractors, which cost $15,000 apiece, and added that there were $60,000 worth of tractors alone in the shed. He pointed out what had been his father’s payoff office, and one tenant cabin which was occupied. “This is one of the tenant cabins still occupied by my old fishing buddy, Ernie.” Ernie calls the Bouldins Miss Mel and Mister Marshall.

  “That’s cotton,” he said, “far back as the cypress break.” I asked what was beyond the cypress break. “Some more of our place.”

  Mel Bouldin, for a southern woman of her age and class, had done an extraordinary thing: she had gone to medical school after the birth of her children, and now practiced ob-gyn in Memphis, in partnership with three men. She flew to Memphis from “the place” in a private plane. “I can’t stand to sit around the country club and talk,” she said by way of explanation.

  She was, at the time we visited her, taking a year off her practice to supervise the reconstruction of the house. The house was to be “a boys’ house, everything rough and ready.” “I love boys,” she kept saying. In certain ways she seemed to have been affected by the great leap she had taken out of her time and place: in order to be her own woman she had found it necessary to vehemently reject many of the things which traditionally give women pleasure, cooking (“ ’Course I hate to cook, I’d walk a mile and a half to avoid it”), any vanity about her own appearance, any interest in having her house reflect her own tastes. Her mother’s house reflected her mother: Mel’s house would reflect “the boys,” and her greatest delight was in secret stairways and hideaways she was having built into the walls for the children.

  At lunch, or just before, the seven-year-old had been asked to perform, and did so with pleasure, playing “Joy to the World” on the piano, a peculiar melody on this steaming June day in the Delta. Everyone held hands during the blessing at table. The four boys were dressed in matching blue mandarin shirts. The family had just come from church services, at the Presbyterian church. When I called the day before from Oxford and Marshall Bouldin suggested we come to lunch, he had said, “Come after church.” The idea of “church” as a Sunday morning donnée has not existed for a couple of generations in the Protestant societies I know, but it exists in the South.

  On our drive, we passed Delta Road, where there live “nothing but blacks, or if there were any whites, I wouldn’t want to meet them.”

  Out behind the house, the immense Sears, Roebuck swimming tank, raised five or six feet above the lawn. “Keeps the snakes and frogs out,” Mel said.

  Clarksdale calls itself “The Golden Buckle on the Cotton Belt.” At parties in the Delta they say to one another: “How yo’ cotton coming?” And then: “Yeah? What’s wrong?”

  On Silk Stocking Row in Clarksdale there live a few planters, a lawyer, and the cotton broker. Many of the planters live in town. There is one plantation around Clarksdale owned by an English syndicate.

  Down the Delta to Greenville

  Outside the Bolivar County Courthouse in Rosedale, an old policeman, his collar loosened around his thick neck, sat in his car with the motor idling in the Sunday twilight.

  Outside Rosedale, on the sign for a RR crossing, the letters KKK had been painted.

  All the billboards were for cotton and soybean insecticides and fertilizers.

  In Benoit, the town where Baby Doll was shot, people hanging around with that remarkable “vacant” look which people in the South always mention before you do and then become defensive about. (“Ever look on a subway in Detroit, Michigan?”)

  The endless green of the Delta, the flatness, the haze in the morni
ngs. The algae-covered ditches alive with mosquitoes.

  In Greenville, the presence of the levee, a high wall at the end of every street downtown. We ate dinner out on the pier at a place that had good gumbo, and I was glad to be on the river (actually we were on a slough), glad to be in a place with good food, glad to be, I suppose, so very close to the place where the National and Delta flights left for California.

  We went to have dinner with Hodding Carter III and his wife, Peggy, and with Lew Powell, the city editor of the paper, and his girl. Hodding picked us up and there was the ubiquitous glass on the dashboard, the road glass, in this instance a martini.

  We went to dinner at Boyt’s, a roadhouse in the next crossroads over. On Boyt’s menu: “Italian or Wop Salad.”

  Hodding Carter III: “The blacks who leave the Delta say they’d come back if there were just something here—this is a place with a strong pull.”

  He spoke about New Orleans as the place you cop out to, “you go down there with the eleven-and-a-half-month debutante season.” His wife came from New Orleans, went to Miss McGehee’s and to Sophie Newcomb, and now, he implied, she lives on the frontier.

  It would be a while, he thought, before automation came to southern agriculture. Its arrival in California was “speeded up by labor problems.” He saw an industrial New South as a kind of pipe dream, the difficulty being an unskilled labor force. “They talk about cheap labor in the South, but cheap labor is a myth for a national company, for any company with labor contracts. So that’s no advantage, and another disadvantage here for industry, we’ve got social problems you don’t have in the North.”

  “The FBI” as a leitmotif in the South. I had heard it in Biloxi, in Oxford, in Grenada, in Greenville.