A Turn in the South (31 page)

I was interested in that idea. I said, “No one has put it like that to me.”

“I don’t think they did. Understand the race problem. I still don’t think they do. I know that people of, like, my grandmother’s generation—her generation and black people of the same generation had a closeness that doesn’t exist any more. In those days no one had any money. You know, the Depression and things. A lot of the jobs the black people had depended on the white people—in the houses and yards and things. But the white people depended on the black people too. I think that at that time there was a better respect between the races.”

“People outside didn’t have that impression. There were the lynchings.”

“There were, exactly. But the people I was talking about—and I’m sure that people are much more capable of violence than I realize—the people who carried out the inhumanities were not typical of everyone.”

“What effect does the physical appearance of Canton have on you? The town you showed me.”

“That kind of question makes us defensive.”

“No, no. I don’t want that.”

“What did I show you? Buildings and fields.”

“You showed me a lot that was run-down. It isn’t worthy of the history.” And I meant—though I didn’t speak precisely—that if you took away the cemetery and the main square, there would be little in Canton that wasn’t contemporary slum. The land and setting were hard to associate with a great and difficult history. How, in such a setting, did she support her sense of history?

Mary said, “It may not be worthy. But I don’t think poverty and deprivation are limited to the South. I think we are addressing the economic problems more than we have ever done. People are addressing the problems of black and white as of one group.”

“What do you like about the South?”

“It’s a very nourishing place to live. I like the people, even though I’m not close to them. If there was some sort of tragedy people would rally round, even though they were not my family. And the sense of the past can be satisfying—even though my family is not from this area. What did Faulkner say? The past is more real than the present? I can’t remember the exact words. But it’s that the past is something we all live with. Possibly in larger places they don’t put the importance on the past. We’re preoccupied with the past. Some people think that’s because we lost the war.”

So we had circled back almost to where we had begun. I had asked, seeing some military-looking figure in a memorial in the cemetery, whether he was wearing a Confederate uniform. But the memorial wasn’t what I had thought. And Mary had said, “There was no uniform. Towards the end they were lucky to have shoes.”

W
ILLIAM SAID
: “People up north think they know better than we about problems and people down here. They think they know how the black man thinks and the white man thinks. They have missed miserably on the black man.” The North had disrupted the more economically active South in 1860; and they had done it again after World War II.

I wanted him to go beyond that.

He said, “Let’s talk through certain things first, before you make notes.”

I put away my notebook and we began to talk at random. He was a businessman, of a prominent Mississippi family. He was in his forties. He loved the outdoor life and was athletic and handsome. He appeared to be blessed in many ways. Yet what came out after a few minutes of conversation was that he was a man to whom religion was supremely important. His judgments, even the tough ones he had spoken at the beginning of our meeting, were contained within his idea of the religious life. And that was where we began again.

We sat on rocking chairs in front of his desk: the tradition of the porch, transferred here to an air-conditioned office.

William said, “The Bible says the Lord helps those who help themselves, and I really believe that. I feel there are not enough people trying to help themselves. And I don’t think that the help these people need is a free check.”

I asked about the development of his faith.

“Both sets of my grandparents were very strong workers in the Baptist church. My parents were and are strong members of the church. I don’t remember us not praying or reading a Bible. I made my profession of faith when I was seven years old. I guess I went to my parents first—after hearing the Sunday-school teachers talk about Jesus and the Lord, and I believe that he did come out of heaven and walked among us and died for us, to give us an opportunity to be with him in heaven. And finally I said publicly, ‘I want to accept Christ.’ And they said, ‘Fine, let’s go to the preacher.’ And he talked to me. And I guess they felt my feeling was strong enough, and I was baptized at seven. I grew up around it, I accepted it, and I made that profession of faith.

“I had a dream around that time—but it didn’t cross my mind until many years later. I was spending the night with my grandmother. I was sleeping on the porch. I remember sitting up in bed—waking up real fast—and I thought I saw Jesus Christ walking through the back door. The door had a little knocker, a wooden ball on a string, and I remember hearing that knocker, and the door opening. And I just had that vision of Jesus Christ walking through that door. And I remember sitting up all night to see if he was going out through the back door. But he never did. I never thought much about that dream until six or seven years ago. I was riding down the highway, and it just flashed
back in my mind. At that point I really realized that it was Jesus Christ entering my heart. And the reason I didn’t see him leave that back door was that he didn’t leave us. I just haven’t discussed that story with my family. But I remember that dream and that whole night as if it was yesterday. I feel that Jesus Christ entered my heart that day and he’s never left.”

“Did it change your attitude to other people?”

“I hope I have more patience with people. I hope I’m quicker to see the good than I am to see the shortcomings. I certainly try to have a short memory for bad experiences. I try to forgive and forget.”

“What about irreligious people? What do you think of them?”

“I guess I feel that if I can set an example to them I can encourage them to be less irreligious. Nor do I think less of a person who has a different religion from mine.”

“Do you feel you are in a religious community?”

“I think I am. I’m not sure that the religious part of the community is keeping up with the population growth. I’m not sure that the church
membership
is keeping up. But I realize that there are many Christians. I was encouraged by the short patience people had with the Gary Hart–Donna Rice situation. I am certainly encouraged about Christianity in this country and the work of the Lord.”

“Why aren’t you in the church?”

He misunderstood the question. “I was there until nine last night.”

“No, no. I was asking why you aren’t in the ministry.”

“I believe the Lord has a will for every one of us, a plan for us. He knows what he wants us to do. If we were all architects, we would all have pretty buildings, but we wouldn’t have farmers to grow food. I think that his plan for creation is that it takes a lot of people to make up this world. And he needs workers in all of these areas.”

“Is this why you feel as you do about people who do no work?”

“I have never expressed it like that. But I think that is why I feel the way I do.”

“Do you think men need to work?”

“No question about that. The Lord created the Garden of Eden and he put Adam and Eve there, and when they sinned he put them out of the Garden of Eden and told them to go to work.”

“You feel that people are still working out that sin?”

“I don’t think I’m still working out their sin. But I think that all of us have sins. The human race is a sinful race—and this is where we
are, and that’s what we have to deal with now. I feel strongly that we are required to work for six days and rest on the seventh. The Lord talks about giving each individual talents, and the Lord told us to use them. I think that working is an important part of using those talents. Some people are writers, farmers, architects. These are talents that the Lord gave them.

“Someone wrote to my father several months ago. In this letter he was saying: I enjoy my work; how does a successful businessman continue being a Christian? Should he stay with his business, or should he go back into the church? My father wrote a letter to explain why it’s necessary for a Christian businessman to be in the world. Our own preacher here has said several times that with the TV pastors getting into such hot water and getting such bad attention, he’s been seeing some doors closed against him; and the responsibility for leading people to Christianity is more on the shoulders of laymen.”

I said, “Some people are saying that it’s the work of the devil, that those TV pastors are in trouble.”

William said, “When I fail at something I fail. I feel like I’ve got to take the consequences for my failure. I also know that I’ve got outside forces working against me. But I know that before I start. So I can’t pass the buck. The devil might have made me do it, but it’s still my problem, my responsibility. The ultimate accountability is mine.”

I asked him to talk about accountability.

He sucked in his breath. “Whoo! It’s difficult to go public about it. I guess it goes back to what I was taught by Mom and Dad: that if you have responsibility you have accountability. The more responsibility, the more people are affected. And I think the accountability to Christ is the ultimate responsibility I have. This also gives me a background to what Mom and Dad were teaching about responsibility and accountability. Perhaps the people dependent on me the most are my family. Then there are the people I’m tied into business with. They’ve given me a certain responsibility, and I’ve accountability. We are in business to serve customers. And that gives us another whole segment of people we’re accountable to, people we’ll never see.

“You’ve told me about your trip to the catfish farms. Those catfish are going to go all over the world. And the farmer has got to see that the fish is on flavor—for that person who is going to eat that catfish, for where that catfish is going to end up. If we do it right they’ll come back. If we do it wrong they won’t come back.”

So the religious ideas of the God-given talent, work, and accountability coincided with sound business practice. It was true of other religious groups as well, this coincidence of religious devotion and business sense: one kind of dedication encouraging, and even becoming, another kind of dedication. It was true of certain Hindu caste groups and certain minority or heretical sects in Islam. But religions and cultures have their own identities. One isn’t just like another. The idea of the God-given talent is contained in the Hindu idea of
dharma;
but the Hindu religious-business dedication is different from the dedication William was talking about. However much his business practices appear to contain the idea of service, the Hindu businessman has a contract with God alone, and not with men.

And it was of his contract with men that William went on to talk. He said: “To me, without religion there wouldn’t be any purpose. It’s religion that gives us purpose in being here. The purpose is to serve the Lord. And the only way we have of serving him is to serve mankind. We can’t give him anything he doesn’t already have. We can’t touch that. Nothing he doesn’t already have, unless it’s our heart.”

William spent a certain amount of his spare time on church work. He gave “devotions” sometimes; he taught Sunday school sometimes; he worked with the boy scouts. Did he, so full of his church, judge people according to the degree of their faith?

He read the question as half a political one, connected with “equal opportunity” and the racial issue. He said—puzzlingly, unless you understood the semipolitical question he felt he was answering—“I try not to judge an individual as an individual. I don’t have the facts to judge on. But I try to judge and weigh his actions against the work that has to be done—to weigh his strengths and weaknesses as I can interpret them. Though that’s what I used to be
told
—that this person fits this particular job. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. But what that does is that the individual knows intuitively: ‘I’m here because you’ve been told to put me here. It doesn’t matter about my job performance. Therefore it doesn’t matter what I do here.’ And at that point the person loses incentives and a proper motivation.”

But William talked about this wearily, as though he had talked about it many times before and had no faith now that the plain and obvious things he was saying would ever be heeded.

Then, rocking, leaving the subject of equal opportunity aside, he said, “I have such a wholesome respect for the early-American natives.
I really feel like they believed that the Lord lived in everything on earth, the rocks, the trees, the bush, the animals—the Lord lived in everything—and they were part of it. And what I think of the early-American natives is that they had an almost reverent respect for nature. For them the life of a blade of grass was as important as a great buffalo. They didn’t make any distinction. And they probably realized, more than the greatest scientist on earth now, that everything on this earth is totally related. They understood the chain reaction that comes from getting one thing in nature out of balance with the others. And I think that, because of the reverence they had for all living things, they had a reverence for mankind that I’m not sure we’ll ever see again.”

“How did you find out about the Indians?”

“I’ve read a few books. I’ve made a few trips out west and talked with a few Indians by the roadside. And I was impressed with the minuteness of the attention to small details that they had. For every action there is a reaction. And what worries me the most now is that where I see a new highway or subdivision, where they’re clearing land, there’s a major destruction of plant life, animal life that can’t be replaced. The thing that disturbs me about that is that it’s not done with any consciousness or concern. It’s only done with concern for the dollar.

“Go down on your stomach on the ground. Look at a square foot of grass for about forty-five minutes. See the life, the insects. And magnify that to the size of a project.”