A Turn in the South (37 page)

And I was wrong about the Louisiana town of Vidalia. A woman in a souvenir shop with a little view of the river told me so. The Vidalia of the onions was in Georgia, however much I might have smelled onions in Vidalia, Louisiana.

The woman, suffering—trade wasn’t so good—said: “My husband loves Vidalia onions. On Sundays”—they lived on the other side of the river—“when we are going to the club, he will say, ‘Susan, get a couple of Vidalia onions.’ I will say, ‘To take to the club? On Sunday?’ And he will say,
‘Bring
me the onions.’ He has a black girl up there in the club who spoils him. He loves bread, butter, ketchup, and slices and slices of Vidalia onions. She fixes it for him.”

There was a cloudburst. I looked over her stock. She was selling a big black mammy in a long red dress over a white blouse.

She said, “The day I bought them I said to Pearlene—she’s the
cook—‘Pearlene, do you know what I’ve done this morning? I’ve bought two of you.’ It broke her up, and she said, ‘Well, at least you could buy me the dress to go with it.’ ”

It cleared up. But as soon as I went outside it began to rain again. I went back into the shop.

I said, “I don’t want to get a cold.”

She said, “The first year I ran this place I got bronchitis every day. If it wasn’t for my husband, I wouldn’t have stuck it out. But then somehow I developed an immunity. Silver tarnishes in three days in this kind of weather. Polishing silver every three days can’t be good for the silver.”

The rain fell harder, big, splashing drops. She talked on, pleased to have the company, in the middle of her Natchez souvenirs. The Mississippi was hazed with mist and rain; the bridge was indistinct; the Louisiana bank couldn’t be seen.

And when I got back to Jackson—driving along the Indian Natchez Trace Parkway—I found that the rain, and the great heat, and my own ignorance of the beauties to look for, had kept me from the other wonder of Natchez. The river was altering its course; the bank at some place was being washed away; and some of the pretty old houses of planter days were collapsing into the river.

They were lines brought back to me by the weather, and the heat, and the thought of plantation labor: lines, perhaps mangled by memory, from a long narrative poem about the Civil War by Stephen Vincent Benét, which I had looked at forty years before.

NASHVILLE

D
RIVING BACK
one stormy afternoon in Mississippi from the Delta to Jackson, and excited by the dark sky, the rain, the lightning, the lights of cars and trucks, the spray that rose window-high from heavy wheels, I began to be aware of the great pleasure I had taken in traveling in the South. Romance, a glow of hopefulness and freedom, had already begun to touch the earlier stages of the journey: my arrival at Atlanta, the drive from there to Charleston. I had all but forgotten the writing anxieties I had had on both those occasions.

And I thought that afternoon that it would have completed my pleasure if I didn’t have to write anything; if I didn’t have to worry about what to do next and who to see; if I could simply be with the experience. But if I wasn’t writing, if I didn’t have a purpose and at times a feeling of urgency, if the writing hadn’t given me a schedule, places to go to, how would I have passed the days at the Ramada Renaissance hotel in Jackson, beside the freeways? Would I have even come to Mississippi?

The land was big and varied, in parts wild. But it had nearly everywhere been made uniform and easy for the traveler. One result was that no travel book (unless the writer was writing about himself) could be only about the roads and the hotels. Such a book could have been written a hundred years ago. (Fanny Kemble’s account of traveling in
1838 from Philadelphia to the Georgia Sea Islands, by rail and stagecoach, partly on a road covered with logs, is a proper adventure.)

Such a book can still be written about certain countries in Africa, say. It is often enough for a traveler in that kind of country to say, more or less, “This is me here. This is me getting off the old native bus and being led by strange boys, making improper proposals, to some squalid lodging. This is me having a drink in a bar with some local characters. This is me getting lost later that night.”

This kind of traveler is not really a discoverer. He is more a man defining himself against a foreign background; and, depending on who he is, the book he writes can be attractive. A book like that can be written about the United States only if the writer, taking the reader into his confidence, sets himself up as alien or outlandish in some way. Generally, though, this approach cannot work in the United States. The place is not and cannot be alien in the simple way an African country is alien. It is too well known, too photographed, too written about; and, being more organized and less informal, it is not so open to casual inspection.

I had been concerned, from the start of my own journey, to establish some lines of inquiry, to define a theme. The approach had its difficulties. At the back of my mind was always a worry that I would come to a place and all contacts would break down and I would not get beyond the uniformity of highway and chain hotel (the very romance I was surrendering to that afternoon in the Delta). If you travel on a theme, the theme has to develop with the travel. At the beginning your interests can be broad and scattered. But then they must be more focused; the different stages of a journey cannot simply be versions of one another. And, more than the other kind of travel, this traveling on a theme depended on luck. It depended on the people you met, the little illuminations you had. As with the next day’s issue of a fast-moving daily newspaper, the shape of the chapter in hand was continually being changed by accidents on the way.

Pure luck—our conversation had begun so tamely—had given me Campbell’s lyrical account of the rednecks of Rankin County: the outdoor life, relic of frontier self-sufficiency, mixed up with a dislike of black people, and oddly meshed with the love of country music, “down-home music, crying music,” and the cult of Elvis Presley.

That meeting with Campbell (putting to flight ideas about Faulkner and Oxford, Mississippi) had suggested to me how I might move.

Though I knew little about music; and the achievement of Presley, while he lived, had passed me by.

P
RESLEY’S BIRTHPLACE
was in the small town of Tupelo in northern Mississippi.

The businessman who was taking me there said, “He was the lowest of the low.” He spoke gravely, without compassion; and with a very slight toss of the head. His distaste for the lowness he had in mind was touched with something like awe.

I remembered Campbell’s words, and quoted them: “ ‘The all-time neck’?”

“Lower than that.”

In a magazine in the Jackson hotel I had seen a photograph of the narrow, two-roomed “shotgun” house, front porch opening into bedroom opening into back kitchen. I had expected, from the photograph, to find a preserved building in an urban wasteland. But Tupelo was a busy little town, one of the busier business places in Mississippi, and the area around the Presley birthplace had become suburban, with the house itself like somebody’s ancillary cabin (or “dependency”) in the shade of a tree, with lawn all around.

On the front porch was a swing seat for two, hung on chains fixed to the ceiling. The front room was the bedroom. It was freshly papered, with a simple floral design; and on one wall was a framed printed copy of the “If” poem.

I asked the woman in attendance whether the poem had been there in the Presley days—in the days of Presley’s father, that is, who was said to have built the house. It was a foolish question; the woman didn’t answer. The businessman said that the paper on the walls in the old days would have been newspaper.

And of course the house had been made to look as pretty as possible, with the swing seat and the bedstead and the period stuff in the kitchen—like something from the Mississippi Agriculture and Forestry Museum in Jackson, where the artifacts, the household tools, of only a few years before had been put on reverential display because, though so recent, they were part of a special country past which many people had shared and which had now vanished. (In England the 1920s are within reach, like the day before yesterday. In Mississippi the 1920s are long ago, closer to the beginning of things.)

In the Mississippi museum the past on display could be felt as a kind of religion, a bonding. And there was something of that feeling in the prettied-up little shotgun house. (Imagine people living in that cramped space, though: imagine the crush, the disorder.) The very lowness of the man’s origins had made him that much more sacred, to the—fattish—people who sat on the swing seat and had their photographs taken.

At the back of the house was a hall where cards and souvenirs and copies of Memphis newspapers printed the day after Presley’s death in 1977 were on sale; and there was a new small chapel, with stained glass. At the side of the house was a park. Presley money had worked that magic. It was like the stories one heard—and these stories were always moving, the fulfillment of so many kinds of fantasies—of nurses in hospitals and other simple people whom Presley had surprised with the gift of a Cadillac.

In the souvenir shop the businessman said, “Did you get that woman’s accent? Listen.” He spoke with the awe with which he had spoken of Presley’s origins. But my ears didn’t have the fine local tuning. They didn’t pick up what the businessman heard.

The businessman’s attitude was historical. It had precedents almost as old as the state. Even Fanny Kemble, faced with the “pinelanders” of Georgia in 1839, is moved to rage and contempt, rejecting as unspeakable the people of her own race whom she sees as degenerate. One thinks of Fanny Kemble as gentle, hating injustice. But as a former actress, from a very great English acting family, she was also concerned with the way people looked. She hated slavery; but she didn’t care for the physical appearance of the blacks on the American plantations (she thought the West Indian blacks were better-looking). And the passage about the pinelanders should be quoted in full. Its very repetitiveness catches the writer’s confused emotion and shame:

“These are the so-called pinelanders of Georgia, I suppose the most degraded race of human beings claiming an Anglo-Saxon origin that can be found on the face of the earth—filthy, lazy, ignorant, brutal, proud, penniless savages, without one of the nobler attributes which have been found occasionally allied to the vices of savage nature. They own no slaves, for they are almost without exception abjectly poor; they will not work, for that, as they conceive, would reduce them to an equality with the abhorred Negroes; they squat, and steal, and starve, on the outskirts of this lowest of all civilized societies, and their countenances
bear witness to the squalor of their condition and the utter degradation of their natures. To the crime of slavery, though they have no profitable part or lot in it, they are fiercely accessory, because it is the barrier that divides the black and white races, at the foot of which they lie wallowing in unspeakable degradation, but immensely proud of the base freedom which still separates them from the lash-driven tillers of the soil.”

Georgia had been established in 1733 as a colony for free men. But within sixteen years the slave-owners had changed that; and communities of poor whites like the pinelanders, migrants from other states, had been created. There were no poor-white groups of comparable size in the West Indian slave colonies. There were only planters and slaves, in the main. So that after emancipation the islands became in effect black; and, without rednecks, there was on the islands no post-Reconstruction, “Southern”-style history. In the settling of the New World, and other new places in other continents, there were immense cruelties, not only to the local populations but also to the people transported. Long after any group can be held responsible, succeeding generations live on as victims or inheritors of old history.

I began to get some new feeling about the Presley cult at Tupelo: the birthplace of the man of the people, the saint of the people, made pretty and suitable, a shrine. And I was half prepared for what I later saw in Charles Wilson’s informal Presley collection when I went to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Oxford, Mississippi.

The most striking item was a poster that showed a tight-trousered, full-bottomed Presley playing a guitar in the lower left-hand corner, with a staircase leading up to his mother and Graceland—the Presley house in Memphis—in the sky. Redneck fulfillment—socially pathetic at one level; at another, religious art of a kind, with Christian borrowings: the beatification of the central figure, with all his sexuality, Graceland like a version of the New Jerusalem in a medieval Doomsday painting.

On the outskirts of Memphis was Graceland. Highway direction signs proclaimed the name. A public road separated the house and grounds from the Graceland parking lot, the ticket hall, and the place where the two Presley airplanes were now parked: emblems of majesty.