A Turn in the South (16 page)

“The final blows were the big hurricanes. There were three of them—1885, 1893, 1912. They broke the dykes, and there was no means of
repairing them. At the same time rice began to be produced in Mississippi and Louisiana and Arkansas and East Texas. It was grown on high land, and it simply knocked these planters out of business. So by 1920 no more rice was being grown commercially here. We grew a little, but it was just for our own needs.

“The boll weevil came in about 1915, and within three years it had killed the Sea Island cotton crop. Then the farmers went into truck-farming. That is, growing vegetables—potatoes, beans, tomatoes, squash—for New York and Eastern markets. That lasted until California came into the picture, after the irrigation of the desert. The desert soil is very rich, and all it needed was water.”

“So, after a certain stage, the plantation story is a story of bad luck and decline?”

“It makes me very sad. My family owned slaves. I think they were very kind masters. Some years ago I interviewed some of the former slaves—they are all dead now—who had lived on my family’s places. And they were very complimentary on the way they were treated. Slavery was wrong. I can’t make any brief for that. But it existed. It was used to build the agrarian economy we had, and it was a fairly good, workable institution.”

“Was there a particular moment when you became aware of the plantation past?”

“I grew up on a plantation where there were still twenty former slave cabins, and they were all occupied by Negroes. And right from the start I realized that these people had at one time actually belonged to my family. And we were friendly.”

“At this time the family fortune was already on the wane?”

“Rice went, then cotton, then truck-farming. Then the Great Depression came. And my father had to sell it. And that was the end of that.”

This was also the time, as I heard later, when much of the furniture of old Charleston houses passed into the hands of dealers. Charleston furniture is now scattered over the United States and is very valuable, especially those pieces made by Charleston cabinetmakers (like the man who had made the pulpit for Pompion Hill). This story of loss reminded me of what Parkman had seen on the Oregon trail in the 1840s, when emigrants to the West, worn out by the dangers of the trail and the harshness of their travel, abandoned the precious pieces of furniture they had hoped to take to their new homes.

Though this land had gone, Jack Leland was still romantic about it.

“The land is not mine. But I feel it is my heritage.” And this word, “heritage,” I was to hear more than once from him, as though it was the word that explained much of his attitude to Charleston, his family and ancestors. “That particular plantation, the one on which I was born, was bought by my family in 1832. And my father lost it in 1935. So it was in my family for one hundred and three years. But there were other properties that had been in the family longer than that.

“One of the unusual things about my family was that my Leland ancestors were really New Englanders. The first Leland in South Carolina was Aaron Whitney Leland”—Le was particular about all three names, repeating them slowly so that I could write them down—“and he was from Massachusetts. And he’d just graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts, and he’d come down here as a tutor in the Hibben family”—important again, the name of that family—“which at that time owned what is now Mount Pleasant, the eastern shore of the harbor. And I think that, being a sharp Yankee trader, he changed his religion and married one of the daughters. And that began the Leland family here. He changed his religion to Presbyterian from Unitarian, and he even became a Presbyterian minister.

“But my mother and my father were members of families that had come in here at the beginning of the colony, in 1670.” And it was from one of those early families that he had inherited the sea chests that were in the sitting room, on the other side of the central staircase.

How had he become aware of the poverty of his family?

“We had a very good life. There was plenty of food. And actually I didn’t realize that we were poor. Of course, we were better off than the Negroes and what we call the backwoods whites. And I didn’t realize that we were economically poor, that very little was coming in.

“I had one year here at the College of Charleston. It was a private school then; my grandmother paid for it. Then she died. I was looking for a summer job, and I found this job on a Norwegian freighter which was hauling bananas from Cuba up to Charleston and Jacksonville, Florida. Then the captain, who owned two-thirds of the ship, got a cargo of coal to take to Argentina. And while we were in Argentina he got an offer to go to Australia. So I wound up in Australia, on a triangular run from Sydney to Singapore to Manila and back to Australia. In August 1939 we came back to this country and picked up a
load of bananas in Honduras and came up to Mobile, Alabama. The day we came into port, Hitler invaded Norway. Which made the ship a belligerent-nation ship. The U.S. Border Patrol advised me to get off. I came home and went back to the College of Charleston. And of course the next year was the draft for World War II, and I was one of the first men to be drafted from Charleston.”

So he had missed some formal education. The years he might have spent at university had been spent as a seaman. Did he feel he had missed the company of his peers?

“A lot of people on the ship spoke English English. British English. It was a tremendous education. The war was another educational experience. England, North Africa, Sicily, Italy. And having the background I had—my father and mother were great readers, and they had instilled in me the ability and desire to read and learn things.

“I came back in 1945, and went back to college again. And I got a job with the local newspapers and stayed with the newspapers from then on.”

“You’ve seen Charleston rise again?”

“I’ve seen it change too. When I was a boy there was no black district in Charleston, and no white district either. White people and black people lived side by side. The change began during the Depression, when a tremendous number of farms and plantations went out of business, and the Negroes who had worked on those places began moving into Charleston and also going north. And then World War II came along, and there was a tremendous economic thrust, because this was a major naval station, and they developed an airfield, and that drew a lot more of the Negroes from the rural areas into the city.

“After the war the young men began coming back. The areas where most of the nineteenth-century immigrants had lived—Germans, Irish, and Italians and Greeks—these families were still living in what is now the black district. A middle- to low-income area. But the young men coming after the war couldn’t get loans from the banks to buy old houses in the city. They had to build new houses in the subdivisions. And as they did that their parents’ houses became vacant, and the blacks moved in. And today we have a tremendous black section. And the old Charleston, peninsular Charleston, is sixty percent black and forty percent white. The public schools are ninety-five percent black.”

“What a fate for a city that lived off the plantations!”

“It really has been a tremendous upheaval. Consider this. This
house, the house where I now live, was restored about seven years ago. The house was built in the 1840s by an Irish carpenter who had come over perhaps to escape the potato famine. The rooms are terribly small. The architect who opened it up was a good architect, and he utilized every bit of space. And right now we are the only white family on the block. I should say, on the street. The street is only two blocks long. All the rest are Negroes.

“The house next door, now. You may or may not be interested in this. Some years ago my mother-in-law, Mrs. John E. Gibbs, discovered that some old Gibbs retainers—as she called them—were being taken advantage of. And she bought that house and restored it, made it into two apartments, with a little dependency in the back yard. And the old Gibbs servants now live there, and she only gets enough money out of them to pay the taxes and insurance. They are wonderful people to have. They look out for us.

“We have, right down the street here, one of those low-cost housing projects. And those people are terrible. They’re all black in that one. That project is a crime-producer. There is always something bad happening there or being done by people who live there.”

“Is it hard for you to live with Negroes without having authority over them?”

“I’ve always lived with Negroes. Always done it. And they’ve helped me. We’re good friends. But socially we are separate. There is no way to get around it. But last year, when my stepdaughter got married in Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church, which is the mother church of the Anglican communion in the Southeastern United States—a big formal wedding, with a reception in the South Carolina Hall afterwards—the servants came to the wedding, and they were like part of the family. No getting around it. There’s one old man who’s the same age as my father-in-law—he’s eighty-two. He grew up in a dependency of the Gibbs house on Logan Street. And he, the old servant, cannot read or write. He’s legally blind. And my mother-in-law gets his food stamps and cashes his welfare checks. And he really thinks he’s a Gibbs, one of the family. I feel very fortunate to have them.” The old family servants, living in the restored house next door. “They look out for us.”

“When you think of the way the race issue has developed, do you feel sometimes that slavery was a calamity for the South?”

“Slavery
was
a calamity. The outcome was always inevitable. But
you’ve got to remember that the people in New England also had slaves. They didn’t have so many; they had small farms. The Southern economy depended on Negro slaves. The beginning of the end occurred shortly after 1800, when Great Britain outlawed the slave trade. And, then again, the United States passed a law against the importation of slaves.”

“So the end was visible even when the plantations were at the height of their prosperity?”

“The great wealth was just building up.”

“Considering the effects now, do you see it as a weakening of the country?”

“It is. The younger Negroes, the Negroes under sixty, have never been able to really associate with the way the white man lives.” He meant that blacks of that age group lived in their own community, didn’t serve in the houses of white people, as their parents and grandparents had done. “They stand on the outside and look in. And they don’t adopt the white man’s standards.

“Now—just a matter of childbirth. As you probably know, the Negro woman keeps the family together. And they have a tremendous number of children. In South Carolina, at least, the number of illegitimate children born every year is predominantly black. And there’s no stigma—of course, that’s changing today in the white families as well. And these people are willing to live on welfare—or they
do
live on welfare, I don’t know how willingly. The Negro churches, which at one time were the center of the Negro communities, have never put any stigma on illegitimacy. They accept it. It’s really a tragic situation, these young black girls having children when they are thirteen or fourteen years old, and no husband to provide money.”

I asked him about civil rights and postwar politics.

“In 1947 a federal judge, Julius Waties Waring”—he stressed the three names, and he spelt the tricky middle one for me, and it was only later that I got to know how notorious this particular name was in Charleston—“Julius Waties Waring. And he was from a very old Charleston family. And he handed down a ruling that Negroes could no longer be excluded from the Democratic Party primaries. And his ruling was correct. Negroes shouldn’t have been excluded. At that time, the Democratic Party primary was the real election in the state, because there wasn’t any opposition. And by 1952 the Negroes were beginning to vote in large numbers. They are now a potent force in the
election system. They’ve come a long way. Unfortunately, their leadership is sadly lacking. Their leaders tend to be negative, politicians with a lot of rhetoric but very little understanding of the true working of government.”

That was the point he stressed: the true working of government. Charleston had a “rabble-rouser,” but among the black officials there were some good people. And, having lived through so much change, he was now philosophical. “I think we are coming along wonderfully.”

I wanted to know about the evolution of his thought on racial matters.

“I grew up in a family where we were told we could be friends with Negroes, and had to respect them, and couldn’t take advantage of them. But you couldn’t elevate them to being social equals. I grew up believing strongly in that.”

Another day, when I was reflecting on what he had told me and I went back to this point, he said, “The Negroes had their own caste system. In Charleston there used to be a brick-mason contractor called Pinckney. He was a mulatto. He did a lot of the brickwork on the old houses in Charleston when they were being restored. But he knew that on his father’s side he had come from a top-ranking family in South Carolina. And he would refer to his workers as ‘my niggers.’ This shocked me, because my father had told us never to use the word.

“The Negro house servants looked down on the field hands. They referred to them in a derogatory way. ‘A cornfield nigger.’ The house servants started that word. The house people associated with themselves.

“I was only seventeen when I went to work on that ship. At that age you don’t have big ideas about anything. But, going into ports in the Caribbean and South America and Manila and Singapore, I began to change my mind a little about people of other races. Back here the Chinese were called Chinks. Over there in Singapore they ran the show. They were top of the heap.

“Let me tell you this story. When I was in the Army Air Corps I went to Chanute Field, Illinois, to study meteorology. In my class there were four Negroes who had studied at Tuskegee, and they had a tremendous problem with mathematics. In the study of meteorology you study all sorts of things—the various forces of nature—and a lot of mathematics with it. And these young Negroes—it was incomprehensible to them. Most of the people in that school were Yankees. I
was one of the few Southerners, and I realized the problem these Negroes had. I offered to help and I did help, and these Negroes were able to graduate. And I will never forget: I was getting ready to go to Florida, where I had been posted, and I had to catch the bus right there at Chanute Field, and these four Negroes showed up and brought me a bottle of whiskey as a farewell gift. The Yankees at that school would pal around with the Negroes, but they didn’t see that the Negroes needed help and they didn’t do anything to help them. But I had been brought up that you had to
help
the Negroes. This was part of your duty, your heritage.