A Turn in the South (32 page)

“But Mississippi needs investment.”

“I don’t know how it can be worked out. The more concerns you have for these little things, and that side of life, the more concern you’re going to have for your neighbor.”

The contract with other men, serving God by serving mankind—they were themes to which William returned.

“I feel that man and nature have to go together. The Lord put us here to be caretaker of things. A lot of my thoughts are tied back with religion and the Lord’s creation.”

It seemed to me that we could now go back to what he had said at the beginning, about the North’s historical wish to disrupt the economy of the South. But he didn’t want to go back just then to that side of things. He wanted to stay a little longer with his more mystical thoughts.

I felt I had begun to understand how his fundamentalist faith—
from the outside so constricting—was in fact complete and flexible. The mixture of the Old Testament and the New, the life of Jesus and the Book of Genesis, made a whole. The sanctity of the created world, the good life of conscience, the loving of one’s neighbor as oneself—they ran together, and they appeared to fit the Mississippi character and history: the love of nature and the outdoor life, an admiration for the pantheism of the Indians, the love of family and community, the resentment of outside interference, which could feel almost like interference with a religious code.

William said, of his religion, “I don’t wear it on my sleeve. I hope I don’t flash it around. It’s just part of me. I don’t want to be a goody-goody or better-than-thou, because I don’t feel that way. I just want to be part of God’s creation. His handiwork is in everything. And the more respect we have for his creation, the more respect we have for our fellow man.”

A
FTER
T
ALLAHASSEE
and Tuskegee, I wanted in Mississippi to look at things from the white point of view, as far as that was possible. But it was put to me not long after I had arrived that, with the high percentage of black people in the state, and with the possibility that Jackson might soon have a black mayor, I should meet some black politicians.

Andrew, a young Mississippian politician, put this to me at lunch one day, and he thought the man I should meet was Willard. Andrew himself was going to meet Willard for the first time that day, after lunch, and he thought I should come with him. “If the meeting goes well,” Andrew said, “I can leave and you can talk to him. I can always talk to him some other time.”

Andrew was not looking for black votes. It was his ambition as a politician to rewrite the Mississippi state constitution of 1890, and to do that he needed all the political support he could get. For this first meeting with Willard he had dressed with some formality, in a pale-blue seersucker suit.

The meeting was to take place in a hotel not far away. We left the cool of the restaurant and went down into the glare of the parking lot. The car was hot. The air conditioning, turned on to “high fan,” roared; and it became hotter in the car than it had been outside. The air had just begun to cool when we arrived at the hotel and had to get out, into
the glare of another parking lot. Always these reminders of the discomfort of earlier generations; and wonder at the energy they had shown; and more wonder that a great war should have been fought in temperatures like this.

We sat in the lobby and waited for Willard. Conversation was easy up to the time at which Willard was due to come. After that it became awkward, with both of us waiting for Willard. Andrew said, “I’ve never met him.” He said that two or three times. Once he got up and walked across the lobby to greet someone he knew: impeccable his manners, his charm unfailing, his politician’s role now apparently second nature to him.

And then, when we had given him up, fifteen minutes having passed beyond the appointed time, Willard came. He was in shirt and trousers; no tie; and he was unexpectedly ordinary, not at all the black leader or would-be leader I had imagined someone like Andrew treating with. I had expected a black man of disturbing charm. There was no charm to Willard. He was in his forties, plumpish, strong, no mark of physical hardship on him. He had prepared a serious face for the meeting. If one didn’t know he was regarded as a politician one would have missed the rage in his eyes, or one might have read that deliberateness of gaze as sensuality.

Willard was very much a local politician. In Mississippi, because of the 1890 constitution, the most modest of public offices are elected offices. This provision, intended to prevent any government from having too much power, and intended also to keep blacks out of even small jobs, now worked in favor of blacks, and politicized posts that elsewhere would have been purely professional or technical. Willard looked after the roads of a particular district of a particular county: a very small post indeed.

I left almost as soon as I had met Willard. And, partly through Andrew’s good offices (the meeting must have gone well), a meeting with Willard was arranged for me some days later.

It was an early-morning meeting. I had assumed from the directions I had been given that the place was in Jackson. I hadn’t asked what the distance was. But after twenty minutes or so on an interstate highway I began to feel that I was driving back to Alabama.

At last, the time now past the time fixed for the meeting, the exit appeared. Only then did I realize that I had been given nothing like a house or office address, that I had driven all this way with only the
number of a county district for destination. However, I pressed on, thinking I might make inquiries when I crossed the county border. I passed a board. It gave the name of the county and the number of the district. It was not the number I had been given, but I thought I would stop to ask at the building at the back. There were cars parked around it. When I got to the building I saw that among the parked cars there was a space, and the space was reserved for Willard. This was the address I had been meant to come to. But he wasn’t there.

I pushed the door open and found myself in a shed divided into offices. The shed was full of black people. In the front office or cubicle there was a black girl with a telephone, with other black people around her.

This girl asked brightly for my name. I gave it. She said that she had been trying all morning, and Mr. Willard had been trying all the day before, to get to me, to tell me that Mr. Willard couldn’t be at this address, but that he would be free to see me at an hour later than the one he had given, at Jackson. He would meet me in Jackson at my hotel. They had telephoned all the hotels in Jackson to locate me. But they hadn’t succeeded. They had telephoned the Sheraton, the Holiday Inn. Where was I staying? I told her. She said that Mr. Willard would be there in an hour. How would she get a message to him? By the radio, she said; and I felt that the radio was important, a badge of office.

I asked her to radio him while I was there, so that I would know he had got the message. She said I was not to worry. So I drove back to Jackson, along the route that had seemed so long and unlikely earlier that morning, and which towards the end had made me a little frantic because I had thought I was going to be late for Willard.

When I got back to the Ramada Renaissance there was no Willard. Not then, and not in the afternoon. When I telephoned his office the girl said that Mr. Willard had spoken to her on the radio and that he intended to keep the appointment. He even knew my room number, she said. But Willard didn’t come; and the next day there was no message from him or his office.

Later I told Andrew of Willard’s little—or big—joke. Andrew said, “I don’t really know him. I met him for the first time that day with you.” And when I asked whether the politics of cooperation such as he envisaged were really possible, Andrew said he had to be an optimist. The black problems were bad, and there were many blacks in Mississippi.
If he wasn’t optimistic, he said, it would be better for him to move to Oregon, where only 10 percent of the population was black.

Andrew said, “It’s been dawning on everybody that a disaster is occurring in the black community, and we do have to talk about it. The attitude of the polite press won’t do any longer.” Yet Andrew knew only what he knew. “I regurgitate more of what I’ve read about the society than what I’ve experienced. I get it from TV documentaries and specials. I haven’t really experienced it. I haven’t talked to black folks or rednecks. I’ve got to go over the top of some of these basic problems. If we can’t get together we are lost.”

Optimism in the foreground; irrationality in the background.

T
HE STORY
about my adventure with Willard must have got around, because one day I had a telephone call from a man called Lewis. He said he was black and he wanted to introduce me to the real black culture. He worked in the stores section of a county department (like the one Willard oversaw). He began to give me directions to get to his house. But then he said he would come over to the hotel to pick me up. He said he would be there within the hour.

He was as good as his word. I recognized him as soon as he came into the Ramada. He was easy, light, friendly. His manner was so easy that I was prepared for general or neutral conversation, at least in the beginning. But as soon as we were in the privacy of his car, and even before we drove out of the Ramada parking lot, he said that in the old days he wouldn’t have been able to live where he now lived. He had helped “integrate” his neighborhood. It turned out to be a modest neighborhood. The houses were small and close together. The surprise, after what he had said, was his yard. It was overgrown, and noticeable among its better-kept neighbors.

Inside, the house was cluttered, close, unaired. He made no reference to the clutter (even a few unwashed cups and plates in the sitting room), saying only that his wife had gone with the children to her mother’s for a few days; and there was a kind of order below the clutter.

On the sitting-room wall were framed enlargements of two old black-and-white studio photographs. They were of his grandparents. The period clothes, the choking up of the neck in collar and ruff, and the stare of the long-held expressions were oddly moving. In the enlargement or the printing the tones of the photographs had been
bleached away, so that both the people looked white, with black eyes. The photographs carried the stamp of a studio in Memphis.

Lewis said: “Mississippi people. They went to Memphis. Everybody went to Memphis. My father came back to Mississippi after the war. Do you know what they did? The people in the photographs. Do you want me to tell you? They were servants. Those two people made me. No hate developed in me because they taught me never to hate. The word was never used in their house. ‘Be a good boy.’ That was the motto. ‘Treat everybody nice.’ You heard it every day. I was taught that—to be good, and to be good to everybody.”

It was hot in the sitting room because the air-conditioning unit had broken down. I asked him if he could open a window. He said he couldn’t; the insects would come in. So we sat in the high, warm, musty smell.

He said, “When my grandfather died my grandmother sent some of my grandfather’s clothes to my father. Servant clothes, suits. They were still good clothes, you see. Still some wear in them. And my father left one to me. I put it on one day. Just cloth, but I felt it burn my skin.”

“Do you still have that suit?”

“I don’t know where it is.”

“All this is such a long time ago, though.”

“But the past is always interesting. Knowing the past, I can do a better job. It’s an awakening for me, to think of the past. Sometimes it’s a rude awakening. To think of some of the things that happened—that I couldn’t live where I’m living now, and didn’t even think of it. That I sat at the back of the bus. That my grandmother washed clothes for white people at fifty cents a basket. Why didn’t they pay her more? But I didn’t question it when I heard. It’s a rude awakening now. Still, they shielded me from the hate. It was there. I lived in my black section. They lived in their white section. That hatred was there, all around me, and I didn’t feel it. They saved me from it, my grandparents, and my father after them. I’d hear about killing black men. But my father never allowed us to talk too much of it. And I’ll tell you. Up to the day he died he said to whites, my father, ‘Yes, sir!’ ‘No, sir!’ No matter how young they were.”

“What do you think of that now?”

“It doesn’t bother me. He was my father. He did well for us, his family. So I didn’t say to him, ‘Don’t say it.’ ” He went on, “I myself
fight daily to be happy. Every day. It’s the one thing I strive for. To be content, to be happy with myself.”

What did he mean by that?

“I can’t change my surroundings, but I can respect myself. I’ll tell you a story. I went one time to my mother’s sister’s house. Black soldiers used to come to the house across the road, and they would be entertained by the young lady who lived there. One day one of the soldiers complained he had lost his billfold. The policeman who came to deal with this came to my mother’s sister’s house, because the young lady was sitting on the porch there when he came. He walked up to her and said, ‘Gal, did you take that boy’s billfold?’ She said, ‘No, sir.’ He said, ‘Get in the car.’ And when she bent down to get in the car he kicked her hard on her behind. That never,
never
got away from me.”

“What did you feel about that?”

I wanted to know, because I was no longer certain of the point of some of the things he was saying, the memories he was playing with. It was getting dark, too, in the little choked house—he seemed as indifferent to this as to the airlessness and the clutter—and it was becoming harder to see the expression on his face when he spoke. He was running a number of ideas together. He wished to be happy, content; he had been shielded from pain; and threaded into this was something like admiration for the grandparents who had founded his line and taught him to keep out of trouble in an irrational world.

“What do I think of the policeman and the woman? I don’t know. I was so young. I didn’t talk to anybody about it. I just saw it. It was cruel. But I don’t know what I really felt about the cruelty. Every now and then the incident crosses my mind. Even today. I see it. But I don’t know what I think about it.”