A Turn in the South (18 page)

And there was something of that mood in Herbert Ravenel Sass’s essay. He too dealt in romance: the oak avenues, the beauty of the river onto which the plantation houses fronted; the organization of the great plantations; the technical skills connected with the flooding and draining of a tidal plantation; the self-containedness of each plantation, each almost a little state with its own lord, who had certain legal punishing rights over his subjects.

It was that idea of the plantation state that no doubt made the writer see the Rice Coast as “in essence an attempt to recreate in America the classic Greek ideal of democracy.” And in a curiously written paragraph that makes no reference to Africans or slaves or black people, plantation slavery is incorporated into this Greek ideal as “the most complete ‘economic security’ ” ever offered certain people in America. “For this security, covering the whole period of their lives from babyhood to old age, a price was paid.” “A price”—that is the silent way in which, to preserve the idea of the classical world, slavery is referred to. And this “price,” the writer adds, was “perhaps not wholly excessive,” considering the people—again never mentioned—to whom this security was offered.

But—when this Greek aspect was set aside—there was another way of talking about slavery. “For the South the slavery problem became the negro problem, and what in reality the Carolinian state strove against from 1831 to 1865 was a threatened ‘solution’ of the negro problem which would destroy them.” The state required slaves; without slaves it couldn’t get by; but the slaves threatened the state with extinction always. So the planter’s special way of life in the ricelands of Carolina became “white civilization”; that was the thing that had to be preserved.

There was a torment in this way of reasoning, this unwillingness of educated men and religious men—and sensitive men—ever to say that what they were defending was simply the world they had known. And
there is always the silence—the lack of reference to Negroes, the slave cabins below the oaks—when the plantation world becomes something nobler than itself, becomes something like the Greek city-state. That had been the silence as well, fifty-seven years before, of the Confederate Memorial in Columbia; the virtues of the dead men ennobling the cause, the cause itself never defined. But how else, in 1879 or 1936, even at that time of high imperialism, could educated men defend slavery?

I had come across the rice-plantation book in the collection of a lady with a famous name. She lived with unusual simplicity in an old house in Charleston, with a piazza (Charleston for “porch” or “veranda”) looking out onto a green yard shaded by an old oak, a yard neither ordered nor overgrown. At the boundary of the plot (or beyond the fence) there was the windowless back of the neighboring house. This was the Charleston style, the piazza at the side, for privacy. But the house next door rocked with a radio; no protection against that.

And it was there, on that piazza, where the furniture was simple, weather-hardened, with ingrained dust (the breeze in Charleston, Jack Leland told me, was from the south or the west, and that was where people placed their piazzas, to catch the breeze), it was there that, through the courtesy of the lady, I met the son of the man who had written the “Narrative” for the plantation book of fifty years before.

Marion Sass was in his fifties, tall, thin, stooped, excessively wrapped up for this hot Charleston afternoon: a brown tweed jacket worn without stylishness over a pullover. He had small, sad blue eyes in a thin, gentle face. He didn’t want to sit with his back to the breeze; he sat with his back to the wall of the house. The air was full of pollen. My own eyes were heavy; I felt a cough building up; and, like Marion Sass, I was wearing a jacket. And on the sagging floor of the piazza, facing the unkempt garden or yard, almost as on a stage set of a play about the South, and in the sound of the next-door radio, we talked.

He was shy; he spoke softly; he looked down and away. As a Charlestonian he went right back, to Henry Woodward, who had explored and prospected the land for the foundation of 1670. I asked whether such an ancestry in Charleston wasn’t a burden, whether it didn’t constrict a man. He said it was a burden. His ancestry was one of the things that kept him in Charleston. There was a large part of him (in spite of his German surname) that would have liked to live in England; his late wife had been English. It was of England, and its curious effect on
people—so many people, he said, seeing England for the first time, felt it to be their home—that he talked for some time; and it was of England, I felt, he would have preferred talking, if such a thing, so simple and free of complication, had been open to him. But there was the burden of the ancestry; and there was his Southernness. And it was to that, without my prompting just then, that he turned the talk.

His father, Herbert Ravenel Sass, had been born in 1884 and had died in 1958. So his father was fifty-two when the rice-plantation book was published in 1936. Eighteen years later, when his father was seventy, the main civil-rights cause had been conceded. Marion Sass himself had been born in 1930. He would have shared some political defeats with his father; but the Southern cause, as he saw it, lived on in him.

He told me that at the time the schools had been integrated his father had broken through the “paper curtain” the North had imposed on Southern views, and had published an article in the
Atlantic
magazine suggesting that mixed schools would lead to a mixed race. That had been proved wrong, Marion Sass said; with integration the races had in fact kept more to themselves socially. But that didn’t lessen the need for his political work, to which he now gave more time than to his law practice.

This talk of political work, he said, might sound as though he were engaged in getting people elected to office. He had done that as well. But he was now more concerned with “resistance.” Resistance to the conquest by the North and resistance to Americanization, which was really Northernization. Though it was ironical, he observed, that some of the most important “American” things—Coca-Cola, and country music, and even the idea of supermarkets—were Southern. (Just as there are Swedes who can recite the five—or six, or seven—industrial inventions that made Sweden rich, so Marion Sass appeared to have at his fingertips the Southern contributions to the idea of America.)

There was no need to define Southern values. “Southern culture is not simply a matter of the agrarian culture versus the industrial, or the ideals of honor against the crass values of commerce. Southern identity is important because it is Southern. We are Southern. That’s enough. It’s like the Irish. But they—the Irish—don’t have this terrible burden of an alien population in their midst.”

There, again, a full fifty years after his father’s essay in the rice-plantation book, was the vagueness connected with “the problem.” How did he deal with that—the question of race—as a thinker?

He said, “Our way of dealing with that? I try to have as little as possible to do with the race problem. A lot of the white-supremacist cause is in the North and has nothing to do with the South. The Southern cause and the Southern problem are really different things. The North uses the blacks all the time against the South. They did it in 1860, and they’ve done it in this century.”

The North was now very concerned with all its minorities. It might have been thought that they would have considered the South a minority area. But they didn’t. The official Northern view could be put like this: “The white Southerner is not a minority. He is a backward fellow American who oppresses a minority, the Negro.”

Had he looked at his father’s book about the plantations recently?

No, not recently. But he knew the book well, and he had some of the feeling for the old plantation life.

I said, “But you can’t feel nostalgia for what you don’t know?”

“Although I didn’t grow up with any knowledge of the working life of the plantation, still, life on the plantations—when we went to visit them when I was a child—it was more like the old Southern countryside, even though we didn’t have slavery. It was the old easygoing rural life, and relations between the races were much more what they had been. So I can feel nostalgia for a past.”

He was as concerned, even obsessed, as his father had been by the superficial destruction of the South—the highways, the fast-food chains—and pained by the alienation of some of the plantations to people and firms from outside.

The past as a dream of purity, the past as cause for grief, the past as religion: it is the very prompting of the Shias of Islam to nobility and sacrifice, the dream of the good time of the Prophet and the first four caliphs, before greed and ambition destroyed the newly saved world. It was the very prompting of the Confederate Memorial in Columbia. And that very special Southern past, and cause, could be made pure only if it was removed from the squalor of the race issue.

When—again as in a stage set—we got up from our chairs and went inside, for a salad provided by our hostess, I said I felt he was dealing in emotion without a program. He agreed; but then he said the program was being created.

The talk became general. We looked at some of our hostess’s old books about South Carolina. We looked at copies of her family letters—many of them plantation letters—that were almost two hundred
years old: the letters had been typed out and bound in heavy folio volumes. When they—Marion Sass and our hostess—spoke the names of plantations, Fairfield, Oakland, Middleburg, Middleton, Hampton House, it was as though they were talking of country houses. But then I understood that they were also talking in an allusive way of the very many families to whom they were related.

He drove me back to the hotel in his untidy old car. He was nagged by what I had said about emotion without a program; and the next morning he sent me a copy of a letter he had written to the local paper in 1983 and a copy of an advertisement announcing a Southern publishing program. These copies were left at the hotel in a very large, used envelope, with my name and his name in very small letters; the envelope carried the printed name of a health organization.

And then he telephoned; and as he spoke I could visualize his thin, sensitive face. He hadn’t done the publishing the advertisement had promised, he said; but the advertisement had drawn a response; he felt he had touched a chord. He told me that because of the developments of the 1950s his father had ended as a Southern separatist; and that was where he himself was now. The defeat of the South, the surrender of Lee, was for him an unappeasable sorrow, I felt.

I asked him whether he knew the Confederate Memorial in Columbia. He said he had studied law in Columbia, and he liked the town, which some people didn’t like. He knew the words of the Confederate Memorial very well; he spoke some of them on the telephone. He thought the words might have been written by W. J. Grayson, who in the 1850S had written an epic poem called
The Hireling and the Slave
, a poem in rhyming couplets in the style of Pope. The theme of the poem was the superior condition of the slave in the South to the industrial worker in Massachusetts. He hadn’t read the poem right through.

His cause had come out of an unappeasable sorrow. And I felt it could lead only to further sorrow: he himself knew that there was now another, and perhaps more predominant, side to Southern thinking. I thought of what Anne Siddons had spoken in Atlanta: the need at a certain age to hoard emotion, to spare passion from public causes for one’s own spiritual concerns, to make one’s peace with age and the frailties of one’s own human state. I spoke of that as best I could on the telephone. He said he understood; but still it worried him that at times he could so sink into himself that he could forget his cause.

Then, courtesy returning, he said he would like to read some of the
things I had written. But there was trouble with his eyes—those eyes whose sensitive rims and whose smallness had made an impression on me. He needed to have a cataract operation on both eyes. That was said to be a simple operation these days, but in the leaflet he had been sent (perhaps in that overlarge envelope in which he had sent me copies of his letter to the newspaper and his publishing advertisement) he had read of possible complications. And he wished to trust to his own lenses for as long as possible.

O
NE HOT
morning—hot for May, everyone said, and without the rain that the gardens needed, the rain that could sometimes fall every afternoon—on such a morning Jack Leland took me through what he called his “territory.”

First we went to Mount Pleasant, on the east side of Charleston harbor. It had been the “summering place” of planters, and was now a rich-looking suburb with old trees, very shady. Not far below was the sea. We saw a trawler putting out. The Portuguese were the first to use those trawlers in Charleston, in the 1920s, Jack Leland said; he logged everything connected with his town. We had come to Mount Pleasant to see the Hibben house, the house of the family where Jack Leland’s New England ancestor had come as a tutor and stayed to wed. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac, a two-hundred-year-old house with columns, the house of the people who had once owned all the land of this suburb—a story of ancestors given unexpected reality.

On the road again, he pointed out where black communities had grown up on plots of ground that had been given them after the war, the Civil War. “They’re not doing well. These Negroes up to World War II had land and they all had gardens. They raised a lot of their own food. Now you very rarely see a Negro family in the country that has a vegetable garden.”

We drove through one black village, and Jack Leland showed the houses of two of his black “friends.” These friends were people he bought things from: his definition of black friends was South Carolinian. Some of the houses suggested that the owners were well off. I asked whether they were small businessmen. He said no; the blacks in those houses probably worked in the naval yard or had other federal jobs. The local black population had lost its most ambitious section
with the migration to the cities in the North; almost every Negro of ambition had gone.