A Turn in the South (47 page)

Satan and God fighting for Paula’s soul, Paula herself not responsible for the movements of her passion, helpless, capable only of choosing salvation and asking God to reveal his will: a medieval idea of
chaos, and the solitude and helplessness of men, and the necessity for salvation. But this was not set in a medieval world of plague and disease and deprivation, the arbitrariness of the sovereign and the humility of the poor. We were in a town of the Research Triangle; and the theme of this culture was abundance and choice, the paramountcy of the individual (if only as consumer), with beauty and luxury and sensual satisfactions as imminent possibilities for all.

Abundance and choice was the motif even of this little restaurant, where there were very big color photographs on the wall of loaves of bread and ears of wheat and unsmeared glasses of translucent red wine, and where even on her last day Paula dutifully recited the specials.

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-two.”

“I thought you were much younger.”

And that was true. The orange-colored thread zigzagging down the crotch of the blue jeans had come out less as an erotic device than a beginner’s attempt at style, a signal of the inexperienced frailty of the body beneath—the body that was in fact the thirty-two-year-old woman’s capital and liability. The big tinted glasses masked her eyes; and below the glasses the thick, flaring Southern makeup concealed the skin of her cheeks. She was like someone in disguise.

She said, in the Southern way,
“Thank
you! Thank you. When I was going through it I looked much older. I looked like nothing.”

I had asked Jim Applewhite whether in the old days people in the countryside hadn’t felt lost. He had said, “People did feel lost here. The sense of needing to form a life that had its own regularities, its own formalities—that was a reason that religion had the contour it had.”

T
O THE
east it was a land of small farms, never absolute country, no big towns. The fields of corn (or maize) were tall and brown. The big thick leaves of tobacco, ripening fast now, were lime-yellow; and for me it was as though, having learned a little about the crop, I had learned to see its beauty: lime-yellow, gold, “bright leaf,” against the brown and green of other fields: the green of potatoes or soybean, plants low to the ground, dotted with white and purple flowers that Jim Applewhite later told me would have been the flowers of the morning glory.

There were old tobacco barns everywhere, tall, squarish, sealed structures, sometimes with green asphalted felting on the outer walls, the felting (originally intended to keep the barn as tight as possible, and now much torn) held down by closely spaced vertical battens. Battens and tattered felting sometimes suggested, from a distance, an old barn wearing down to its frames. Weeds and small trees grew right up against abandoned houses and farmhouses; vines covered chimneys; crape myrtle marked the site of drives and old gardens.

Small fields, small houses, small ruins, churches, small towns, the freeways of the central part of the state giving way to crowded and dangerous two-lane roads—the land spoke of the nature of the people, independent small farmers, conservative or fundamentalist in religion, and conservative in politics.

I had been told that the politics of the region were “tobacco politics,” small-farmer politics, in which a promise of a continued subsidy for tobacco-growers could somehow also be read as containing a promise to keep blacks in their place.

But Reverend James Abrahamson, pastor of the Chapel Hill Bible Church, thought that this ridiculing or underplaying of the conservatism of eastern North Carolina was foolish.

He said, “The fundamentalist political impulse has always been there. From the 1930s it has been repressed, largely because it did not have the support of the universities. Ideologically, the universities pulled up their tent pegs and moved to another side. Ideologically, they moved from a world view which embraced a Christian God to a place where the only reality that was recognized was material, could be measured, scientifically defined. They are reappearing—the fundamentalists—largely because they have seen or felt the pressure of a secular society.

“That eastern–North Carolina conservative side is viewed by many as being redneck and knee-jerk. Irresponsible—fanatical, almost. Unenlightened, lacking what I call the three ‘I’s—intelligence, information, and integrity. But they’ve got a stronger argument. They’re easy to laugh at, and they’ll never be popular. Our culture may self-destruct before they have a chance to articulate clearly the common sense they represent—for a culture that is based on more than self and materialism.”

Jim Abrahamson—it was the way he announced himself on the telephone—was from the Midwest. He was a fundamentalist himself,
and he felt that his Bible Church was meeting a need in Chapel Hill. He had a number of Ph.D.’s in his congregation; and his church was expanding. Extensive construction work was going on when I went to see him. American society, he said, had been built on a religious base. It couldn’t float free. A recent poll had found that one out of every three Americans was a born-again Christian. “That’s a lot of people.”

But he had his quarrel with the fundamentalists of North Carolina.

“I think there are powerful and legitimate and almost eternal principles that would recur again and again. But the people fighting for those principles are not able to articulate them palatably. The religious right appear not to understand the world view the left or the secular intelligentsia embrace. They tend to dismiss them as God-haters or infidels. And they have a difficulty about knowing how to translate religious ideals into a political policy.”

It was the Islamic problem too—since the Islamic state had never been defined by its founder—and it was the prompting to fundamentalism in many countries: how to know the truth and hold on to one’s soul at a time of great change.

It was strange that in a left-behind corner of the United States—perhaps the world motor of change—the same issue should come up, the same need for security.

B
UT NO
one was more secure in his faith and in his politics than Barry McCarty. Politics and faith made with him a whole. He was only thirty-three, but he had already made some impression, and people who followed political affairs in the state saw him as one of the new generation of New Right leaders, someone whose time was going to come in ten or fifteen years.

His training had been in theology and debate. (Like the training of many fundamentalist leaders in Muslim countries: again this curious convergence of two opposed cultures.) He had taken a first degree in Bible at Roanoke Bible College in 1975; had done a master’s degree in speech and rhetoric at Abilene Christian University in 1977; and had got his Ph.D. in rhetoric and argumentation at the University of Pittsburgh in 1980. Since 1980 he had been professor of public speaking and debate at his old school.

Roanoke Bible College was a Church of Christ institution. It was in Elizabeth City, a small town far to the east, on the coast, nearly two
hundred miles away from Raleigh and the landscaped pinelands of the Research Triangle.

Beyond the Chowan River the land, already without hill or accent, became flat, the land of a delta, with a high sky. Albemarle Sound (unknown to me, even as a name, until that moment) gave a great, continental sense of the North Carolina coast, making me half regret that I hadn’t known of it before, and making me want to come again and be for a day in that openness. It was one of those places where it was easy to imagine the excitement of the early explorers, finding themselves in what was truly a new world.

Barry McCarty’s office was a small room on the upper floor of a turn-of-the-century wooden building. There were framed and autographed color photographs of President Reagan and Senator Jesse Helms on one wall. Below those photographs, and also framed, were Barry McCarty’s various admission tickets as a delegate to the Republican convention in Dallas in 1984. A young politician’s treasures. He also drew my attention to a flag laid flat on another wall: a flag with two red bars and a white bar, and seven stars in a circle on a blue field. He asked whether I knew the flag. He said the seven stars gave a clue. I didn’t know the flag. He said it was the Stars and Bars, the first flag of the Confederacy.

He was a small, stocky man, cool, self-possessed, pink-faced, with glasses. He looked very clean and neat in his collar and tie, as neat as his office, his bookshelves, his photographs, his files. He looked a middle-class professional man from a small town; not a politician, not a man anxious to stand out.

He idolized Jesse Helms. On the telephone, trying to persuade me to make the two-hundred-mile run to Elizabeth City, he had said (as though it was going to be reward enough for me), “We’re Jesse-crats here.”

I asked him what a Jesse-crat was.

He said, “It describes a conservative North Carolina Democrat who votes for Jesse Helms and people like Jesse Helms. They represent the conservative values of the Old South. Faith in God. A belief in limited government. A belief in free enterprise. Individual liberty and individual responsibility—two ideas that go together.”

And within those principles were contained all his politics, all the conservative program. He showed me the text—typewritten or word-processed in capital letters, with emendations in handwriting—of a
speech he had made in praise of Jesse Helms at a dinner for the senator. The speech began, “It is one of the greatest honors of my short life to be asked to present to you one of the greatest living Americans.” And very quickly then, while offering praise to the senator and criticizing his enemies, the speech outlined the conservative program on taxes, welfare, government spending, education, communism; and fitted it together with freedom and religion.

There was a story, in the speech, about the senator: “I was with him on one occasion as he checked into a hotel for an overnight stay. The woman behind the desk asked the senator if he had a credit card to charge his room to. He turned to her and said, ‘Young lady, I’d just as soon carry a rattlesnake in my pocket.’ And paid cash.”

Was it still true about the senator and the credit cards?

Barry McCarty smiled. “He has one now. But that’s the mind-set of someone prudent with his own finances.”

In 1985 the governor of North Carolina appointed Barry McCarty chairman of the state Social Services Commission for a four-year term.

“We’ve been trying to introduce the ‘workfare’ idea instead of welfare. The basic idea of workfare is that welfare recipients who are able to work are required to work in order to continue to be able to receive their benefits. It’s part of the Southern work ethic.

“You must remember that the majority of the Founding Fathers of this country were Southerners. The first English-speaking colony on these shores were founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Raleigh—not sixty miles from where we are—at Roanoke Island. It is known as ‘the lost colony,’ because Walter Raleigh established the colony and the next time the provision ship came to find them they were lost.”

(But Sir Walter Raleigh also had other projects at that time. He became interested in the idea of El Dorado. In 1595 he raided the island of Trinidad with a large force. He killed the small, half-starved Spanish garrison and captured the Spanish governor, a crazed old soldier who had spent his fortune looking for El Dorado. Raleigh wanted Trinidad to be his base for El Dorado; he wanted the kidnapped Spanish governor to be his guide; and he wanted the Indians of Trinidad and Guiana—in the Orinoco Delta—to be his allies. He took Indians back to England, to prove to people where he had been; and in that same year, 1595, he wrote a book called
The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana
, which suggested that he had discovered El Dorado and its gold mines without actually stating that
he had. He talked of an English-Indian South American empire, Ralearía. But nothing happened. He had roused the local Indians against the Spaniards, but he could do nothing for them; they were ground down by the Spaniards. In 1617, as crazed now as the Spaniard he had dispossessed twenty-two years before, he was let out of the Tower of London to find the Guiana gold mines he had spoken about—which he had never seen, and which didn’t exist. His son died in the fraudulent quest; Raleigh blamed a very old friend for the disaster and drove that friend to suicide. It is a squalid story. But Raleigh, because he is known mainly by his own writings, remains a romantic costume figure—and an exquisite tapestry of him in costume hangs in the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill.)

Barry McCarty said: “The country actually began here in the South. And when you look at the guiding minds of constitutional government in America you find that so many of them were Southerners—Jefferson, Washington, Patrick Henry, Randolph, the Madisons.

“Slavery was not the real issue in the War Between the States. The real issue was the power of the federal government over the states. The same distrust of a central power, the same jealousy over individual rights that moved the Founding Fathers to demand the Bill of Rights, that same spirit is really what led the Southern states to resist the North in the issues that led to the War Between the States.”

Was that still of moment today?

“Here is a man—Jesse Helms—who believes that the powers of the federal government ought to be strictly limited. The most important government to the individual should be the one closest to him. The more remote the government becomes, the less it should have to do with the life of the individual.”

“Where did you get your passion about politics? Was it through your father, your family?”

“The first influence could be religious. The Bible teaches that governments are necessary in order to establish order and justice in human society.”

“Does the Bible teach that?”

“Romans, chapter 13. Where the Apostle Paul teaches that governments have the authority of God.”

(Later, in my hotel, I read the chapter in the New International Version of the Bible. I thought it was full of repetitions and anxiety,
the work of a man who had a very good idea of the power of the Roman Empire and didn’t want his little group to be crushed. It was more than “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”; Paul appeared to be making up a theology to suit his purpose.