A Turn in the South (46 page)

He said that there was something he had wanted to show me in his house, but he had forgotten. “The wallboards of a tobacco barn from my family farm are in my sitting room. And the ceiling beams were posts in the barn.”

But I had noticed the planks on the end wall, broad planks, set diagonally.

He said they were of pinewood, and had been made so hard from the years of heat of the curing process that he had had to use an electric drill to get nails into them.

“The industry changed in its desires when the filter tip came in. The classic cigarette was the unfiltered Lucky Strike or Chesterfield or Old Gold. That’s the kind of cigarette the companies wanted the most beautiful tobacco for, the most beautiful, lemon-yellow, ‘bright-leaf’ tobacco. When the filter came in they wanted a heavier kind of tobacco, less bright, not as good a quality. So the premium for growing the most golden bright leaf lessened. The whole mode of production has been degraded by different kinds of demand and, most flagrantly, by altered growing practices. Chemicals are used to inhibit sucker growth and to artificially increase the bulk, the weight of the leaf. It’s called MH 30. It was developed in North Carolina. And of course tobacco doesn’t support as many people in its mechanized aspect. Formerly tobacco-growing would support whole countrysides of people. It was the chief cash source for the rural descendants of slaves, white Southern farmers who owned no land of their own, as well as for the landowners. Today there’s simply so much more money, and the importance of tobacco is less.”

His past had been more or less abolished. But it was this past that gave him eyes for the landscape he now lived in—though there could be no landscape like the first.

“I am now able to write about the landscape of Durham County.
But I realize that that is in part the case because the landscape has been historicized for my imagination by the evidences I can still see there of an older agrarian economy, before the land was covered again with trees.

“A Southern field, if you leave it alone, will grow up in broom sedge, and in a few years young pines will be bristling up, scattered through the broom sedge. After twenty or thirty years it’s woodland again.” Hardwood trees then grew up in the shelter of the pines; and then the hardwoods killed the pines. He lived in a landscape of second-growth timber, eighty to a hundred years old. “But in places the old farm rows are still there, like small waves in a bay frozen by time. They were the rows of the last crop planted by some farmer, in the last century perhaps, or the early part of this. And deep in the trees you see fallen chimneys, areas where in spring jonquils still come back where there had been family gardens. A few old tombstones in places. Some beech trees with names and dates still legible from being cut into the bark, in 1908 or 1911 or 1914. This is about the period when this change we’ve been talking about began—electrification, roads, motorcars.”

Every stage of history marked by small ruins, a landscape of small ruins—this had been my first impression of the South when I had come down at Easter with Howard, to see the place that to him was home, not very far from here.

Jim Applewhite said: “The landscape of eastern North Carolina was always to me a kind of landscape of the past. There was this dichotomy in my own life between my father and my grandfather. My grandfather had been born in that Civil War-era farmhouse, and he was always associated in my mind with the agrarian economy. My father ran a service station and believed in progress and sold electrical appliances for a number of years. He was always in a hurry. My grandfather was never hurried.

“It was in my grandfather’s house—just across the road from our house—that we went for the ritual occasions that marked the farmer’s year. My grandfather represented a kind of permanence for me. He had a packhouse—that’s where they packed the meat. That’s where they cured hams and shoulders. And they did lovely things like rendering lard, making sausages. Very hard work. But formalized, because people were in direct contact with the necessity that constrained them
to do what they did. The hogs had to be killed on a very cold day in winter. Otherwise the meat would spoil. Corns and beans had to be canned when they were ripe, or they wouldn’t last.”

“One has this romanticism, but when one goes and looks at it, it’s not a fiction. It does exist. A quarter of a mile away from this farmhouse of my grandfather’s is a graveyard, and there my grandfather’s parents are buried with some other people.”

T
HE WORD
“tobacco” is thought to have come from Tobago, the dependency or sister island of Trinidad. And before “Virginia” became the word in England for tobacco, tobacco was sometimes called “Trinidado,” after the island of Trinidad, part of the Spanish Empire since its discovery by Columbus in 1498. Tobacco was a native Indian crop. But after the discovery and plunder of Mexico in 1519–20 and Peru fifteen years later, the Spaniards were interested only in gold and silver; they were not interested in tobacco. It was the English and the Dutch and the French who went to Trinidad to load up with tobacco. There were hardly ever more than fifty Spaniards at a time in Trinidad in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Gulf of Paria, between Trinidad and Venezuela, a vast safe harbor, was nearly always full of foreign ships. An English explorer and diplomatist, Sir Thomas Roe (who later went to the Mogul court at Agra in India as the representative of King James), came to the Gulf of Paria one year and saw fifteen English, French, and Dutch ships “freighting smoke.” Another English official reported that the tobacco trade might in time be worth more than all the Spanish gold and silver from the Americas.

The trade was illegal, however—even though crops were grown in Trinidad with the complicity of the Spanish governor. Under Spanish law only Spain could trade with a Spanish colony. Occasional sweeps were made by the Spanish navy against foreign interlopers in the Gulf
of Paria; and foreign sea captains and sailors who were caught could be hanged on the spot. And the Indian tobacco fields—tobacco a crop requiring such great care, as I was to see in North Carolina—were flattened: part of the process by which in three hundred years both the native Indian population and tobacco were to be rooted out from Trinidad.

The island that the British captured (without a shot) in 1797 was a sugarcane slave colony. And it was to work in the sugarcane estates that, thirty years or so after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, Indians were brought over from India on indenture. It was sugarcane that gave a rhythm to the life of rural Indian communities. Tobacco was no longer a local crop.

I would have been disbelieving, and delighted, to be told as a child that Trinidad had once been known for its tobacco. To me tobacco was glamorous, remote, from England (in absurdly luxurious airtight tins), or American (in soft, aromatic, cellophane-wrapped packets), something from an advertisement in
Life
.

S
HE HAD
a name tag on her blouse:
Paula
in white on black plastic, drawing attention to itself, and making you see that she was almost flat-chested. She was a waitress in a newish salad-and-quiche “gourmet” bar in one of the rich towns of the Research Triangle.

She said, “Would you like a cocktail or a drink before your lunch?” It was a formality. As spoken by her, it held no invitation at all. There seemed to be as little zest in her for these restaurant refinements as there was in me, after months of restaurants and hotels. “Now, let me tell you about our specials.” Mechanically, she recited the specials.

At first on this trip, for the first month or so, during these recitals in restaurants, I used to smile: the recitals seemed ironic, to be a kind of joke between the waiter and the customer. But the recitals were always perfectly serious; the waiters were doing, often doggedly, what they had been told to do.

Paula got through to the end of what she had to say. It was then, unexpectedly, that life came to her voice. She said, “I’m leaving today.”

“Leaving the restaurant?”

“After this serving. Leaving here. Leaving the town. Going to Wilmington. Tomorrow.”

“Have you packed? You don’t have much time now.”

“I’ll just throw it all in the Chevy. One of those little subcompacts. Like a Pinto.”

“You won’t take a U-Haul?”

“I’ve been throwing away things for like a month. You throw away and throw away and then you find you still have things you want to throw away.”

“You really think it will all go in the Chevy?” It had become one of my own little anxieties about traveling and the hotel life: telephoning for the bellman, emptying the safe-deposit box, loading up, wondering whether it was all in, whether there was going to be a doorman at the other end, to help with the many bits and pieces: so many books and papers and files and notebooks now, so many little bags and sacks.

She said, “Well, you see. My husband and I had like a fight about a month ago. And he took half the stuff, and I had, like, well, the other half. But God gave me the strength to see that through.”

“What are you going to do in Wilmington?”

“Peter’s there. I’m going to De with him.”

“Your husband?”

“God worked the miracle. Let me bring you your salad.”

When she brought the salad I said, “The U-Haul people have a depot here. I saw it yesterday.”

“We have a lot of bills. I want to pay those off first. It’ll all go in the Chevy.”

“Bills. I know.”

“It was one of the things we used to fight about. He’d pay some. And some he’d outright refuse to pay.”

“Why did he do that?”

“Exactly. He said he was saved. Like me.”

“Are you saved?”

Her voice trembled. “Oh yes. But he didn’t, like, grow. Grow in Jesus, as they say.” The last phrase, and its tone, suggested that she was slightly mocking what she was talking about, or keeping at a certain distance from it. But, as with the specials, she was speaking seriously.

She wore cheap jeans, of a vivid, factory-fresh blue. The body below the heavy blue cloth was thin. There was a lot of Southern makeup on her face: rosy cheeks below big tinted glasses and above a thin white neck. A small, worn-away woman with a rustic accent: all
the weakness and the fight, all the will to survive, contained in that little body.

She brought the quiche, stale, soggy, dead-looking from its long exposure.

She said, “We were always quarreling. Fighting every day. We would fight and he would want to go away, and then I would beg him not to leave.”

“Had you been married long?”

“Three years.”

“You didn’t think you would get someone else?”

“I was frightened of being alone. But God gave me the strength this time. I didn’t ask him to stay. I let him go. And then God worked the miracle in both our hearts.”

“How were you saved?”

“I just got saved.”

“Did you have a pastor? Was there some preacher you were following?”

“Nothing like that. I was feeling for some years that I had to do something. Feeling that if I didn’t do something—”

“You would be unhappy with yourself?”

“Unhappi-er. But I felt that the God of the earth or the universe or whatever couldn’t be interested in someone as unimportant as me. And I did nothing.”

“No one was advising you?” Many of the words she was using seemed to have been put in her mouth by someone who knew about the saving of souls.

“There was a minister.” She gave the name of a fundamentalist Protestant church. “And one day I don’t know what came over me—I found myself walking to the altar during a service, and I said something, I don’t know what, and I knew I was saved. I just felt the love of the Lord in me then. It was after that that I met Peter.”

“Was he already saved?”

“He got saved after me. When I told him. But Satan was tempting me with an ex-boyfriend.”

“After you were married?”

“After I was married. That was when Peter stopped paying bills and started to make trouble about the tithing. Started to make trouble generally. And we had these fights.”

“Did you fall when Satan tempted you?”

“Only in my head.”

“Did you meet the ex-boyfriend?”

“No, never. He wasn’t interested in me. He never wanted me. That was the trouble.”

“What was it about the ex-boyfriend that was so attractive?”

“I can’t say. I don’t know. It was just there. Satan’s temptation.”

“I can see how your husband would get unhappy.”

“I’m not blaming Peter. But the tithing and the bills, and especially the tithing—that didn’t have anything to do with anything. But God gave me the strength last month, when he left. I didn’t fall before him and hold his knees and ask him not to leave. I just had the strength. I didn’t know what I was going to do, what was going to happen to me. I just felt the strength God gave me. And now it’s all right.”

“How often do you pray?”

“Every morning. For about twenty minutes.”

“Do you speak to God in your head? Do you feel you have to make some physical gesture? Do you kneel?”

“Sometimes I talk to God in my head. Sometimes I talk to him aloud.”

“You enjoy it?”

“Most definitely. And the prayers are answered. Like the way Peter and I have come together again. That’s prayer. That’s God. But he answers prayers only when they’re according to his wishes.”

“How do you know when they are according to his wishes?”

“I used to pray to get my ex-boyfriend. But that wasn’t according to God’s wishes.”

“When did you pray to get your ex-boyfriend? After you were saved?”

“After I was saved.” She smiled at the boldness.

“Do you love your husband now?”

“That’s why I’m going to him. I love him. I love him. God worked the miracle in both our hearts.”

“And your ex-boyfriend?”

“I’ve forgiven him.”

Or she might have said she had forgotten him.