A Turn in the South (26 page)

The quarrel or debate between the two men, Du Bois and Washington, both mulattoes, is famous. Du Bois might seem closer to contemporary feeling. But his best-known book,
The Souls of Black Folk
(1903), a collection of essays and articles, is a little mysterious. The
very title of the book is strange, even whimsical. The lyrical, mystical tone (mixed up with social and economic facts, and sometimes a little romantic fiction) calls to mind some of the essays of the late-nineteenth-century English country writer Richard Jefferies (1848–87). (This is the lyrical Du Bois: “I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there in the King’s Highway sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed.…”)

I even have the impression that Du Bois might have been trying to do for Southern blacks what Jefferies had done for farm people in the south of England. There is an uncertainty in both writers about their relationship with the people they are writing about. Jefferies, in spite of hints that he might be socially all right, was the son of a small farmer, and almost a laborer; Du Bois was a mulatto. The Jefferies model would explain Du Bois’s occasional evasiveness and too-pretty ways with words (using the poetic conceit of “the veil,” for instance, for segregation). If Booker T. Washington can make a darky joke, Du Bois can speak of “the joyous abandon and playfulness which we are wont to associate with the plantation Negro”; can say, “Even today the mass of the Negro laborers need stricter guardianship than Northern laborers”; and he can ask, “What did slavery mean to the African savage?”

But we can read through both the Du Bois way of writing and the Booker T. Washington manliness to the facts of Negro life of the time, and see the difficulty both men would have had in defining themselves, and establishing their own dignity, against such an abject background. As if in resolution of that difficulty, Du Bois’s book seems lyrical for the sake of the lyricism. It can appear to use blacks and ruined plantations as poetic properties. It deals in tears and rage; it offers no program.

In this beginning of Du Bois there was also his end. He lived very long, and towards the end of his life—facing irrationality with irrationality—he left the United States and went to live in West Africa, in Ghana, a former British colony that had in independence very quickly become an African despotism, and was soon to revert to bush and poverty, exporting labor to its neighbors.

At the very beginning of the century, in
Up from Slavery
, Booker T. Washington, in his late-Victorian man-of-the-world style, had cautioned against just that kind of sentimentality about Africa. “In the House of Commons, which we visited several times, we met Sir Henry
M. Stanley. I talked with him about Africa and its relation to the American Negro, and after my interview with him became more convinced than ever that there was no hope of the American Negro’s improving his condition by emigrating to Africa.”

On this journey I read
Up from Slavery
twice. On the second reading, after I had been nearly four months in the South, I found that the book had changed for me. It became more than the fabulous story of a disadvantaged man’s rise. I began to see it as a painful coded work, making separate signals even in a single paragraph to Northerners, Southerners, and blacks.

I also began to see the book as the work of a man constantly concerned to raise funds for his school. That should have been obvious to me always, but it hadn’t been; that had been swept away by the power of the fable. Below that primary appeal, however, there were others: the man of the world appealing knowledgeably to the very rich on behalf of the wretched, representing himself as honorable and worthy and manly and educated; yet at the same time taking care to do the contrary thing, and making it clear that as a black man he knew his place.

Hence his confident, socially knowing talk, like any solid late-nineteenth-century citizen, of the “best people” and the “vices” of “the lower class of people.” But he is mortified when, on a train journey from Augusta to Atlanta in Georgia, in a Pullman car “full of Southern white men,” two ladies from Boston, “ignorant, it seems, of the customs of the South,” insist on inviting him to supper. The meal seems very long. As soon as he can, he breaks away from the ladies to go to the smoking room, where the men now are, “to see how the land lay.” It is all right; the men know who he is and are anxious to introduce themselves to him.

In England he develops a high regard for the aristocracy and the time and money they devote to philanthropic works. He is impressed by the deference of servants, who are content to be servants all their working life and, unlike American servants, use the words “master” and “mistress” without any constraint. In that ambiguous observation there are consoling messages both for blacks and Southern whites. He becomes friendly, he says, with the Duchess of Sutherland. She is a famous beauty. But as a black man he will be out of place to say so directly. He writes, “I may add that I believe the Duchess of Sutherland is said to be the most beautiful woman in England.”

So many snares; so many people to please; so many contradictions to resolve; so many possibilities of destruction. The achievement was great. But at what cost. He died at the age of fifty-nine.

T
O THE
west, on the road to Mississippi, were shabby small settlements, like an extension of the poverty of the town of Tuskegee. I spent the night on a timber plantation on the border. There was still something like presettlement desolation there: cypress trees, half stripped of leaves, their bald knees rising out of muddy water like a kind of humped aquatic animal; shifting swamps, with forest litter at their margins; great damp heat. The land was not old. Tuskegee had been settled only in 1830.

Two months later I entered Alabama again, but from the north, driving down from Nashville in Tennessee, down from the hills to the flat land around Huntsville. Huntsville was where space research and the industries it had attracted had created a whole new landscape in the South: wide boulevards, low, flat factories, spacious grounds meant only to please the eye. Huntsville was also near where, in 1873, the first State Normal and Industrial School for Negroes had been set up in Alabama. That past had been swallowed up—though cotton still grew at the very edge of the new industrial town.

From the NASA museum—full of Asian visitors, Indians, Chinese (“coming to look at the place where they intend to work,” as the Southern businessman with me said)—Tuskegee seemed to belong to another age, to exist in a melancholy time warp. It made one think of the prisons of the spirit men create for themselves and for others—so overpowering, so much part of the way things appear to have to be, and then, abruptly, with a little shift, so insubstantial.

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI

E
VEN IN
Alabama—the repeated vowel sound of which seems to be a mimicking of “ma mama” or “ma mammy” and (because of all the songs) carries suggestions of banjos and black men and plantations—even in Alabama I found that Mississippi had a reputation for poverty and racial hardness.

But the black (really brown) pharmacist at Tuskegee also told me that my asthma would abate the farther west I got. And, true enough, after the heat and humidity of Tallahassee (made worse for me by the glass tower in which I had been staying, the western wall radiating heat from early afternoon), and after the enclosed hot air of the upper corridor of Dorothy Hall in Tuskegee (where at times, after climbing the steps, I felt the heat catch in my throat, and I couldn’t breathe until I got to the comparative coolness of my room), I began to revive in the air-conditioned air of the Ramada Renaissance hotel in Jackson, Mississippi.

The air-conditioning system was silent; the tinted glass of my window shut out glare as well as traffic noise. All around were great highways. To the east the city was green, trees hiding the better-off housing developments. To the northeast was a big new shopping area. Pleasing views: hardly the poverty I had been fearing. And I was grateful to the city for ridding me, as if by magic, of the constriction in my lungs.

But, of course, there was another side to Jackson, there, in its very
center. And on Sunday afternoon it was easy to see, in the streets without business traffic. The inner city was black. There were streets of “shotgun” houses. It was the first time I had ever heard the expressive word: narrow wooden houses (like mobile homes or old-fashioned railway carriages) with the front room opening into the back room and with the front door and back door aligned. On Sunday afternoon the people were out on the streets, so that the effect of crowd and slum and blackness was immediate: as though outdoor life, life outside the houses, was an aspect of poverty.

At a street corner, on an open lot, in the hot midafternoon sun, there was a prayer meeting. It had no audience. Everyone there was a performer. The women were dressed for Sunday, and the men were in suits and ties, except for the pastor, who was in a white gown. This was the West Jackson Crusade of the Saint Paul Church of God in Christ. It was an occasion of music and dance. Many of the people in that dressed-up group were to have the chance to go to the pulpit or to hold the microphone and sing.

The songs seemed to be variations on a single line.

That was all that a middle-aged man in a brown suit was singing, leaning on the pulpit and bending over the microphone in a confiding manner, as though he had a large audience, instead of no one at all (save the people in our car). What would that man have done for a living? What would have been his true—or his other—occupation?

The leader of the chorus was a big woman in a white dress. She stood a little way in front of the chorus. She was distinguished from them by the plain white of her dress, her size, and her voice. When her turn came to use the microphone she didn’t go to the pulpit. She took the microphone on its cord and sang from where she stood:

That was her line, and the variations on it seemed to come naturally.

And the group danced. Among the dancers were three small boys. One of them stood in front. He was very small, perhaps five or six, and
he was in long trousers, with suspenders. The two other boys were bigger; they were at the back; and the dancing—all the intricate and inventive things they did with their legs—seemed to come to them in fits. At one moment they were like children at a grown-up occasion, indifferent and far away. And then suddenly they were possessed. The dance rippled through them. And then just as suddenly they came to the end of their dancing, even while the singing was going on, in the middle of a line of the song of the woman in white; and they returned to what they had been doing, their apparently childish concerns. The pastor, in his long white gown, danced while the woman sang, the disturbance of his gown, from his dancing on the spot, creating its own rhythm.

They were not the only religious group active in West Jackson that afternoon. The bus of another group passed by, a bus painted white with thin red markings. And after that bus had passed, I saw, a few house plots away from the dancing evangelical group, another boy dancing, this time with a black neighborhood dog, the boy holding the front paws of the dog.

When she had done with her singing, the young woman in white came across to where our car was. She was perspiring at the top of her forehead from her dancing in the afternoon heat, the heat added to here by its reflection from the streets and buildings. She asked, honey-voiced, whether we were witnessing the service, and she gave a tract.

In the tract there was a photograph of the pastor, not in his white gown and with his cross, not in a pose suggesting the rhythm of his own dance, but in a jacket and tie, studious, looking past the photographer. He was the Elder Jesse Kelly. In addition to being pastor of his church he was “founder of the West Jackson Crusade, local announcer of WOAD, graduate of JSU,” and “presently working towards a Masters of Divinity at Wesley Biblical Seminary.” Some story—like that of Danny or that of Reverend Clausell in Tallahassee—might have been behind this religious call, which included (according to the tract the woman in white had given) a Sunday school, a nightclub ministry, a radio ministry, a street ministry, and tent services.

The music and the singing held us; the dancing held us; we could marvel at the religious dedication. But we could only be witnesses; we couldn’t participate. And the approach of the woman in white, in fact, made us think of leaving.

At the side of my grandmother’s house in central Trinidad there
was a tall gate, of corrugated iron on a timber-plank frame. This was the main entrance to the house and yard. One of my earliest ideas—when I was six or seven—was that there were two worlds: the world within, the world without. To go out of that gate was to be in a world quite different from the one in the house; to go back through that gate at the end of the school day was to shed the ideas of the world outside. Everyone lives with ideas like these; everyone has different sets of behavior. But in a racially mixed society, especially one where race is a big issue, the different worlds have racial attributes or overtones. Distinctions and differences can have the force of taboos—things sensed rather than consciously worked out. In such a society participation is different from witness; they engage different sides of the person. And it was with—old—relief that I put an end to my pleasure in the singing and dancing of the West Jackson Crusade, and returned to the silent healing of the air-conditioned room of the Ramada Renaissance in the north of the city.