A Turn in the South (30 page)

Sam Hinote smiled. I was a visitor; he was tolerant. He said, “Tuskegee is a black school. But Auburn is not its rival. Auburn’s rival is Alabama State University.”

He had started his professional life as an economist, a market analyst dealing with grain prices and other commodity prices. Then, as director of economic research for a big company in Omaha, Nebraska, it became his job to find new ventures for that company. That was how he got into catfish.

“We ended up in 1969 buying a small company that was involved in the catfish business. The company we bought had a hatchery and a processing plant. Their business was selling the baby fish to farmers, and buying back the market-size fish from farmers, and processing and selling the dressed fish. I thought it was very much like the early days of the chicken business.”

His analysis was right. The fish-farming cooperative he began to run in Indianola in 1981 with fifty employees now provided employment for fourteen hundred people, and indirectly for many more, many
of them black people who until then could only get seasonal jobs on cotton plantations, “chopping cotton” in the spring, getting rid of weeds that couldn’t be poisoned, and working in the cotton gin in the autumn. Many farmers had been saved from having to leave their farms. “A lot of farmers didn’t want to be involved in catfish, but they had few alternatives. It’s hard for a farmer once they’ve become a farmer to ever give up. It’s a way of life for them.”

Sam Hinote had done a lot of useful advertising. “We’re spending a lot of advertising dollars as a company and as an industry to upscale the image of catfish. We’ve hired professional chefs like this guy”—he held up a pamphlet with a photograph of a chef holding serious-looking dishes in both hands—“to help us change the image of catfish.” Catfish, catfish—like the dedicated man he was, Sam Hinote appeared never to tire of speaking the word. The Catfish Institute, founded in 1986, had been publishing booklets. Sam Hinote gave me one:
Fishing for Compliments—Cooking with Catfish
. It had been an American-style campaign, and it had produced American results. The catfish business as a whole now had sales of $200 million; almost half of that came from the plant at Indianola. And Sam Hinote thought that within ten years the industry was going to have sales of $1 billion.

And though men cannot absolutely control other living creatures—Cannery Row itself died because the sardine vanished from that coast—and no one can be absolutely certain what will happen to catfish—what mutations, what debilities—as a result of this intensive farming, it is nevertheless an astonishing thing to have happened in a place that Louise knew as wilderness, malarial, liable to floods, but beautiful with wildflowers, and where now, within hours of leaving their ponds, the red entrails of fish pour into red trucks, their life cycle over.

T
HERE IS
no landscape like the landscape of our childhood. For Louise, though her father had been a planter, the “big cotton patch” that the planters had created in the Delta was a disfiguring of the forest she had known as a child. And for Mary, born in the Delta forty years later, there would be no landscape like the flat, stripped land she had grown up in.

She said, “I think there is nothing more beautiful than the flat, flat land and the big, big sky.”

She was showing me the small country town of Canton, fifteen miles or so north of Jackson, giving meaning to a shabbiness I had driven through once before without comprehension. I had taken in only the broken-down air of the main road through the town, and noticed the large number of black people in a town where there appeared to be little to do. All at once now, with Mary taking me through the streets around the main square, the layers of history became apparent, as they did in so many places in the South.

The town had been established in the mid-1830s. But most of the buildings on the square had been put up in the twenty years from 1890 to 1910. The Civil War had intervened; and in a street not far from the main square was the first reminder.

It was a street of pretty, old houses, but with black people. Some of them could be seen sitting on the porches. In the middle of this street was an open green space with a gray marble obelisk. It was inscribed on one side:
Erected by W. H. Howcott in memory of the good and loyal servants who followed the fortunes of Harvey Scouts during the Civil War
. On another side:
A tribute to my faithful Servant and Friend Willis Howcott, a Colored Boy of rare loyalty and faithfulness whose memory I cherish with deep gratitude. W. H. Howcott
. And on a third side:
Loyal, Faithful, True Were Each and All of Them
. The fourth side of the obelisk was bare.

The slave, Willis, had taken the name of the master. Had the “colored boy” who had gone to the war with his master really been a boy, or had he been a man who had remained a boy even in death? True feeling was there, but how much of defiance had there also been, in this obelisk put up after the war to celebrate the loyalty of slaves?

The obelisk was in a black street. The memorial to the Harvey Scouts was in the white cemetery, elsewhere. And the slave memorial was still tended. The grass around the gray obelisk was neatly cut; on the base there was a bouquet of artificial flowers. Black people sat on porches not far away. Black people walked past while we looked. Didn’t they mind?

They didn’t. But, Mary said, it was something that hadn’t been put to them. Perhaps they would mind if someone came one day and put certain things to them.

In the white cemetery, some streets away, and centrally placed in it, was the memorial to the Harvey Scouts. It was also an obelisk, but not as plain as the one for the servants. It was carved with crossed
flags, a star and crescent; and there was a metal plaque on the plinth. Some verse had also been carved:

It was unsettling, that flawed last line; it made one think that the first three lines had been borrowed. Yet there had been sacrifice:
CAPT ADDISON HARVEY BORN JUNE
1837
KILLED APRIL
19 1865
Just as the Country’s Flag was Furled forever Death saved him the pain of defeat
.

At the far end of the cemetery, not far from the corner with old Jewish graves, were small tombstones, in rows of five, running down the length of the cemetery, each stone marked
UNKNOWN CONFEDERATE SOLDIER
. It was shocking, in this small-town cemetery, the thought of all these unclaimed men. The bodies or the remains, Mary said, would have been gathered together some time after the war. The headstones might have been put up in the 1870s. The Harvey memorial, and the memorial to the black servants, would have been put up later.

The cemetery was still in use. Other people, with heavier needs, were driving about the lanes, as we had been doing. There were two new graves, below green awnings marked with the undertaker’s name, Breeland. And not far away was the undertaker’s own family plot, with a large stone marked
Breeland
. Mary said, “Some people think it’s advertising.”

Small as it was, Canton had its social and racial divisions. The railroad track divided the good side of the town from the bad. On the bad side, the black side, many of the houses were in disrepair; and many of them were shotgun houses, one room in front, one room at the back, the houses set close together. There were other, better black areas; but even new developments appeared to be going down. There didn’t seem to be much doing in Canton. In an older part of the town were the settlements associated with the timber industry, when there had been one. Milltown was for the white workers. Next to it was the black area, with a designation that recalled the cabins of the slave plantations: Sawmill Quarters.

There was still a furniture factory in Canton, and there were two or three other factories outside the town. But the industrial area was in
a mess. It looked like tropical slum. It was hard to think, when we got to the area of the country club—with a membership of professional people from Canton and from Jackson—that both areas shared the same climate and vegetation. In one area the sun seemed part of the blight and torpor. In the other, among the tall trees and well-cut driveways, the sunlight was like part of the general privilege of the place.

“Sun,” “sunlight”—to me they had always been different words. “Sunlight” was a nice word. “Sun” was harsher; it was what the sunlight of early morning in Trinidad turned to at about eight, when it was time to go to school. The slogan on the label for Trinidad Grapefruit Juice, when I was a child, was “Fruit Ripened in Tropical Sunshine.” I had always thought that the words were too pretty. “Fruit Ripened in Hot Sun” would have been truer to the climate I lived in; but then they might have been less of a slogan. “Tropical Sunshine”—they were tourist words, I always thought; and, indeed, they could have little meaning for someone who had known nothing else.

Agricultural and industrial depression now; civil-rights movement twenty to thirty years before; the Great Depression before that; and Reconstruction; and the Civil War—it seemed, considering the layers of history whose memorials or remains one could see in a place like Canton, that the South had moved from crisis to crisis. And at the back of it all was the institution that had seeded most of the crises, or aggravated them: slavery, which had led to this present superfluity of black people, people no longer needed in a machine age.

Mary said: “It’s been frustrating to me because the enormity of the problem is something I know I’m not going to see solved. It’s heartbreaking to see people living like that. And it will keep the area from progressing, economically and culturally. These people don’t read books, or even newspapers. TV is the only thing. And in fact some of them probably can’t read. Not in the way that you and I can read. They can read a sign, but not a thought or an idea.”

During our drive through the town she had shown me a red-brick high school that had been turned into a furniture store after the schools had been desegregated.

“The enrollment in the public system made the building unnecessary.” She meant that white people had withdrawn their children, and sent them instead to private and usually Christian academies. But now that was a financial strain on some people, and people were beginning to think again about the public system. “I’ve been encouraged recently
because some of the people here who would not be considered liberal are realizing that so much of the future of the town is tied into the school system.”

“Is there still bitterness about desegregation?”

“A lot of bitterness from the sixties has gone into the second generation. But now it’s more of an economic resentment. People resent seeing the welfare programs like food stamps—and there is something that provides food and milk for babies. And of course people that have worked hard for their families are certainly going to resent seeing people being given for nothing the equivalent of what you’ve had to work hard to earn. Medicare is another thing. There are clinics for people who pay according to their income. Which means that they are supported by the federal government—that is, other people’s income tax.

“I’m not a bleeding heart racially, believing in universal brotherhood. People are too different. I believe in God, but I’m not religious. This is the Bible Belt. For some reason Southern people have a tremendous capacity for faith—black and white. When I go to a church service where people are extremely devout I feel I’m missing something. But it doesn’t last. Religion is very social here—fellowship, church suppers, things like that. And I suppose I’m not a particularly social person.”

“When did you start thinking of yourself as a Southerner, somebody different?”

“I’ve always felt it. We’re so proud of it. We are permeated by the feeling that the South is special. My family were always interested in the literary aspects. We were very proud of our writers here.”

What about the other side? The bigotry, the violence? Was there one view that could hold it all?

“I was aware of the other side. The violence, the deprivation. There was a very ugly incident when I was growing up. That was the Emmett Till murder. He was a young black boy from Chicago visiting the area. He was shot supposedly for whistling at a white woman who worked in a little store in a rural area. And this all happened close to Greenwood, where I was living. This was in 1955. I was eleven. I remember reading it in the newspaper first. I had a friend and she knew the people in the store. And I remember people at school saying it wasn’t true, that he was still living in Chicago, and that people were trying to make Mississippi look bad. But even at eleven I knew that was a sad way of thinking, and that people who thought like that were of the same social class as the woman at the store.”

Here it was again, the emphasis on social distinctions. How did they operate in the Delta, where lives were so isolated and confined?

Mary said, “My grandmother would say of some people that they were not folks. That was probably her favorite phrase. She was very conscious of who were and were not folks.”

“Who were folks?”

“Generally, folks were people who weren’t transient, who’d lived here for some time. You knew their families. And if they’d moved in, say, from Lafayette County, you would know their families.”

“But, apart from some people in Natchez, no one has been here for more than five generations.”

“No. It simply meant that you knew they were the same kind of people. They knew how to behave. They didn’t say ‘nigger.’ Nor did they say ‘ain’t.’ People who said ‘ain’t’ and ‘niggers’ were not folks—that would definitely put you beyond the pale then and there. She was a stickler for manners. If you put your elbows on the table, she would pick up those heavy silver knives and she would hit your elbows, if there wasn’t company—in those days people had the heavy silverware, not the stainless steel. I think we behaved like this because we genuinely thought that this—the South—was the best place in the world. To be technical about it, my grandmother came from Alabama. She had lived in Mississippi since she was married. I can remember my parents talking to me and trying to explain the racial problem. And since nobody really understood it—”