A Turn in the South (36 page)

It gave a new poetry to what one saw on the highway: the baseball caps with the bill “turned down just so,” the bandeaux or sweat bands on the forehead of women drivers of redneck-style pickup trucks. Even the advertisements in the newspapers for those trucks—and the price: about $8,000—had a new meaning.

A
ND IT
was of the redneck, the unlikely descendant of the frontiers-man, that I talked to Eudora Welty when I went to call on her. I had arrived early, and waited on the street below the dripping trees. She was ready early, and could clearly be seen through her uncurtained front window. But I was nervous of knocking too soon.

So for a while we waited below the big, dripping trees in the gloom after rain, she behind her window at the end of her wet front garden, I in the car. And when I felt the time was suitable I walked up the wet path to her front door. On the door, in her strong writing, was a note asking people not to bring any more books for her to sign. She wanted to save as much of her energy as possible now for her work. I knocked; and she opened, like someone waiting to do just that. She was extraordinarily familiar from her photographs.

The frontier was so much in her stories: a fact I had only just begun to appreciate. And she was willing to talk of the frontiersman character.

“He’s not a villain. But there’s a whole side of him that’s
cunning
. Sometimes it goes over the line and he becomes an outright scoundrel. The blacks never lived in that part of the state. They came over to
work on the plantations. Most of the rednecks grew up without black people, and yet they hate them. That’s where all the bad things originate—that’s the appeal they make. Rednecks worked in sawmills and things like that. And they had small farms. They are all fiercely proud. They dictate the politics of the state. They take their excitement—in those small towns—when the politicians and evangelists come. Scare everybody, outwit everybody, beat everybody, kill everybody—that’s the frontiersman’s mentality.”

I told her the story Ellen had heard as a child about the rednecks to the south of the town where she had spent her summers: the story of traveling salesmen who had been roughed up and hitched to a plow and made to plow a field. Ellen had said that this story had come down from the past; and I had thought of it as a romantic story of the wickedness of times past, an exaggerated story about people living without law. But Eudora Welty took the story seriously. She said, “I can believe the story about the salesmen. I’ve heard about punishing people by making them plow farms.”

We talked about Mississippi and its reputation.

“At the time of the troubles many people passed through and called on me. They wanted me to confirm what they thought. And all of them thought I lived in a state of terror. ‘Aren’t you scared of them all the time?’ A young man came and said that he had been told that a Mr. So-and-So, who was a terrible racist, owned all of Jackson, all the banks and hotels, and that he was doing terrible things to black people. It was a fantasy. It wasn’t true. The violence here is not nearly as frightening as the Northern—urban—brand.”

A frontier state, limited culturally—had that been hard for her as a writer, and as a woman writer? The richness of a writer depends to some extent on the society he or she writes about.

She said: “There is a lot behind it, the life of the state. There is the great variety of the peoples who came and settled the different sections. There is a great awareness of that as you get older—you see what things have stemmed from. The great thing taught me here as a writer is a sense of continuity. In a. place that hasn’t changed much you get to know the generations. You can see the whole narrative of a town’s history or a family’s history.”

I
HAD
been hearing more and more about the unusual constitution of the state of Mississippi, the constitution drafted in 1890, after the Civil War and Reconstruction. I had heard that this constitution was responsible for a good deal of what one saw still; and I went to see former Governor William Winter about it. He had a high reputation in the state, both as a governor and as a man knowledgeable about the state’s history.

Mr. Winter saw me in his office late one afternoon, at the end of a busy day; that morning he had flown to Little Rock, Arkansas. The former governor was now a partner in a Jackson law firm. He spoke precisely and legally; he had books and a map ready; and all the time we spoke he was looking up references in books.

On the wall of his office—and among color photographs of his family—was a large, old map of the state. When he went to get me a cold diet-cola drink I got up and looked at it. It was linen-mounted and framed, and had been a gift to Mr. Winter. It was a French map, of 1830 perhaps. It showed only the southern counties of the state as settled. A large central area had been marked out for further white settlement. Though this area was almost as large as all the settled counties put together, on the map it was just called Hinds County (and part of that area was to become the Rankin County of which Campbell had spoken with so much feeling). The areas to the east and north were still, in 1830, Indian country: Choctaws and Chickasaws.

Half the state Indian country in 1830; in 1860, the Civil War about to come; in 1890, after the Civil War and Reconstruction, a new constitution. History here seemed to come in thirty-year segments. Add the yellow-fever epidemics of 1873, 1874, 1878, 1903; add the Great Depression. There was nothing settled, stable.

The former governor said: “The atmosphere in which the 1890 constitution was written was dominated by the need for whites to provide a means for the restoration of white control of the political processes of the state. The constitution of 1861 did not afford a vehicle for the elimination of black voters and black officeholders. There were many black officeholders when the 1890 constitution was written.” There were two black senators, a black congressman, a black lieutenant governor, and a black superintendent of education. “The 1890 constitution
of Mississippi became a model for other Southern states—in its resourceful provisions for the discouragement of black voting.”

Almost as important as the racial provisions were the antibusiness provisions. The people who wrote the constitution wanted the state to remain “a pastoral state, an agricultural state.” They didn’t want big business or the corporations coming in, encouraging “unfavorable competition for jobs with the agricultural community.”

“We threw various roadblocks in the path of corporate development. It had the effect of discouraging investment in industrial plants in the state. A major paper-manufacturing company, the Gaylord Corporation, desired to locate in Pearl River, Mississippi. Because of the constitutional limitations here, that plant located across the river, in Louisiana, within sight of Pearl River County, and virtually created a new town in Louisiana, Bogalusa. There was a limit in Mississippi on the amount of property a corporation could own, a limit on the capital structure of a corporation. Even in 1890 that constitution singled us out as being noncompetitive for capital.

“There is an archaic tone to the whole document. We need the psychological benefit now of a late-twentieth-century document. And, the second thing, we need the restructuring of the manner in which we govern the state. We have to eliminate many of the processes designed to decentralize and fragment power. In 1890 there was a distrust of any concentration of power in any one individual. With the result that there’s not a single law that’s passed by the Mississippi legislature that is in strict accordance with the constitution of 1890.”

He handled a mighty law book and showed me Section 59 of the 1890 constitution.

“Bills may originate in either house, and be amended or rejected in the other; and every bill shall be read on three different days in each house, unless two-thirds of the house where the same is pending shall dispense with the rule; and every bill shall be read in full immediately before the vote on its final passage; and every bill, having passed both houses, shall be signed by the president of the senate and the speaker of the house of representatives, in open session; but before either shall sign any bill, he shall give notice thereof, suspend business in the house over which he presides, have the bill read by its title, and, on the demand of any member, have it read in full; and all such proceedings shall be entered on the journal.”

There was a provision in the section for amendment, so that laws could be passed. But an awkward member could still cause delay. “I have seen it happen. I have seen one member stand up and demand that the bill be read.”

Was there an element of madness in the framers of the constitution?

“It was an anti-government legislation. It was intended to make it as difficult as possible to pass legislation. The attitude being: The fewer bills we have, the better off we are going to be. The less government the better—that is a fair way to put it.”

“What sort of men were they in 1890?”

“They represented the ultraconservative, planter, agricultural interests. Many of them were veterans of the Civil War. There was a strong racial bias which ran through the membership. They were committed to eliminating the black presence in the political process.”

“Do you think there was anything like a romantic feeling for the land?”

“It was a feeling for the land of the landowner, not the worker. The yeoman farmer was not the dominant feature of the convention. The constitution spoke to the economic interests of those who drafted it. For instance, it spoke of the maintenance of a levee system along the Mississippi River—which really has no place in a constitution.

“The story about that is like this. In the spring of 1890 the levees gave way and parts of the Delta were inundated. To cope with that, the constitution-framers later that year, 1890, wrote into the constitution a whole article designed to cope with such disasters. Article 11.”

He showed it to me. It ran to eight pages. It dealt in great detail, technical and fiscal, with the way the levees were to be maintained; it outlined taxation to meet the expenses; it mentioned the names of vanished railroad companies.

“An article like this really has no place in the constitution of a state. But you can see the preoccupation of the drafters. They were looking after their farms up in the Delta.”

There might have been no romantic feeling for the land. But how did the former governor explain the anti-government tone of the constitution?

“It reflected the basic frontier aspect of the state. They were saying: ‘We’re going to use government to solve those problems that appear to us important, but we’re not going to use government to interfere with
our lives.’ As it was used, the constitution worked against the powerless in the state. But that is no longer a valid objection. Corrections have been made.”

And the constitution has left its mark. “The Carolinas and Georgia had tobacco-processing plants and textile plants. Alabama has a well-established industrial base going back to the nineteenth century. Mississippi never developed this kind of base.”

On the former governor’s desk, and got out for our meeting, was a map of the United States showing, for 1984, the “economically competitive” counties and the “distressed” counties. The competitive counties were colored blue, the distressed counties pink. The map showed three concentrated areas of distressed counties: on the Mexican border; the Indian areas in the West; and, making almost one pink area, the Southern Black Belt of Alabama and almost all of Mississippi. Only the area around Jackson was colored blue.

A
ND YET
, though there was distress—comparatively speaking: American distress was not like the distress in other countries—and though many people would agree with what the former governor said about the archaic nature of the constitution, there was also in some people a nervousness about change. The frontier constitution had grown to represent something true about the state. Many people now grieved for the past which that constitution had secured, when life was “easier,” more countrylike; when communities were small and everyone knew everyone else; when time was not money.

In the 1830 map in the former governor’s office Hinds County had been marked out for settlement by people whose descendants were to become the rednecks of Campbell’s poetry. Now the rednecks, like the Indians before them, found their hunting grounds shrinking.

I
T HAD
been a frontier state, but always with this contradictory component of slavery. It was of slavery that the old plantation land around Natchez, on the river, spoke. That land, as flat and warm and soft as the ricelands of South Carolina, spoke of wealth and the need for black men, by the thousands. But Natchez also had its plantation houses, nowadays the object twice a year of “pilgrimages”: the old sentimentality of the South, the divided mind, the beauty and sorrow
of the past containing the unmentionable, ragged, black thing of slavery.

It was a wretched little town, steaming after rain on its “bluff”—not very high—beside the muddy river. Rain dripped from the heavy branches of the red and white crape-myrtle trees. It had had an oil boom. That boom, like so many other Southern booms, had abated.

Louisiana lay across the river. I drove there, hoping to find some solid, real place—rather than something connected with the tourist trade—to have lunch in. It was flat, delta country. The air that came through the car’s air conditioning smelled of onions. It was this high smell, as much as the flatness of the land and the apparent hopelessness of my quest—just fast-food places beside the highway: tall, beckoning signs above, simple structures below, bright colors against the flat green—that drove me back to Natchez.

The Louisiana town was called Vidalia. Vidalia was also the name of a kind of onion. It must have been a delicacy in the South; in many places I had seen home-painted signs at the roadside offering Vidalia onions. So I smelled onions until I got back to Natchez, where I had the jungle-sewer smell, the smell of the river, which was almost exactly like the jungle-sewer smell of Manaus, on the Amazon, in Brazil. Just as the rusting corrugated-iron roofs and the relaxed black people sitting in old wooden houses or standing or rocking and staring gave a touch of the West Indies—as disturbing to one’s sense of place as the overgrown tennis courts of Tuskegee had been: those courts one afternoon, with African students at play, had absolutely suggested Africa.