A Turn in the South, Page 3

  Reading the familiar land in her own way—where I saw only the colors of the spring, the purple flowers on the roadside, the sour weed, the pines and dogwood and oaks and maples, and the gray and green and dark-red colors of abandoned farmhouses and tobacco barns. Going back to the airport now, I saw the past a little more clearly. I saw a little more clearly what I had seen the day before.

  And I began to see how Howard, leaving his home and going to New York, could hold himself separate both from the past and from the rage of Harlem.

  I asked him why he didn’t live in Harlem.

  “My rhythm is different. And they pick up on that. Rhythm? It’s like your energy level. How shall I put it? I’m not angry. Most people in Harlem are angry.” And, trying to explain more about himself, he said, “I’m different. I felt different at the high school. It’s what you think and what you feel that makes you different. I always felt different. Which leads me to believe I was born in the wrong town. Like many people.”

  TWO DAYS later, in New York (and just before I began my true Southern journey), I talked again with Howard, to make sure I had got certain things right.

  About the presence of Asians and Cubans and Mexicans he said, “I get very pro-American when I think about that.” And that pro-American attitude extended to foreign affairs, which were his special interest. So, starting from the small Southern black community of Bowen, Howard had become a conservative. He said, “I think that when you come out of a Southern Baptist background that is the groundwork of being a conservative.”

  I asked him about what he had said about the black community as we had walked back from the church. He had said that the community was going to disappear in twenty to twenty-five years; and he had seemed to talk neutrally about that. Was he really neutral?

  He didn’t commit himself. He said that there would be less unity in the community, but that good would come of the change. Making a mystical leap, he said, “Change is like death. Good things can come out of it. It’s like the Civil War, when a whole way of life ended.”

  So at the end it turned out that his early comment, about the continuity of his home town, had had to do with history, as I had thought at the beginning. I had changed my mind because the word had then appeared to contain the idea of sameness and dullness: the same buildings, the ruins left standing in the fields, the dullness of the small-town life. He had meant that; but he had also meant the past living on. It was as though, talking to me, a stranger, he had had to find a way of talking about the unmentionable past.

  1

  ATLANTA

  Tuning In

  IT WAS in New York that I planned my trip. One suggestion was that I should go to Tuskegee in Alabama, to have a look at the trades institute, now a university, that Booker T. Washington had founded more than a hundred years before for black people, then barely out of slavery.

  Tuskegee was a name I knew. It was half mythical for me, from my memories of the Booker T. Washington book Up from Slavery, which I had been introduced to as a child in Trinidad. So far away: it was hard to think of this place with the strange name being there still, in the light of common day.

  I was given the name of a writer who had been educated at Tuskegee, Al Murray. He was, or had been, a protégé of Ralph Ellison’s, and he lived in New York. He was friendly on the telephone, interested in my project, and ready to talk on. He wanted me to come to his apartment. It was in the heart of Harlem, he said; and he thought I should see Harlem. It would be part of my preparation for the journey.

  He lived on 132nd Street. He thought I should simply take the Madison Avenue bus. He made it sound feeble to do anything else, and it was my intention to take the bus; but at the last moment I faltered and waved down a taxi. In no time we were in Harlem. In no time, racing through the synchronized lights, we were in what looked like a caricature of the city lower down.

  It was like a jump ahead in time, a turning of the page: upper windows blown out and blackened in walls of warm brown stone or old red brick, houses surrendered, camped in, old craft and elegance surviving in stonework (as in some pillaged ancient Roman site), some house walls enclosing only earth, awaiting excavation one day: no apparent relation between the people and the place, the mixed population of the city lower down altered, the pavement bustle gone, the people now all black, not many women about, and the men often in postures of idleness, sitting on steps or standing on street corners. In the same light of fifteen minutes before, the same weather, in what was still Fifth Avenue.

  It should have stopped after a while; but it went on. At some lights a thin, expressionless boy ran to the car and said something to the driver. The driver, a fat black man, didn’t reply. The lights changed; the thin-legged boy ran off again between the cars without another word. What had he wanted? The driver, from his accent a West Indian from one of the smaller islands, said, “He wanted to clean my windscreen.” The driver gave a nervous laugh and—only now—turned up his window.

  Not far away was the apartment building where Al Murray lived. It was one of a set of three or four tall apartment buildings that must have been built on the site of old house-rows. In Al’s building—set back from the sidewalk, and with a shallow curved drive to the glass-doored entrance—there was, unexpectedly, a uniformed doorman, and a notice that visitors had to be announced.

  His apartment was at the very end of a central, windowless corridor. It got warmer towards the end of the corridor; electric lights were on. When Al opened the door it was daylight again, and there was a glimpse, through the big glass window at the end of his sitting room, of the New York sky again. He was a brown man, and older than I had thought. I had expected a young man or a man in mid-career; and he had sounded young on the telephone. But Al had just turned seventy.

  His sitting room was full of books and records. A moment’s looking showed that the books were a serious collection of twentieth-century American writing in first or very early editions: Al had been buying, or collecting, for more than forty years. His jazz records (worn sleeves standing upright, filling many shelves) were equally valuable. Jazz was one of his passions, and he was a noted writer on the subject. Among the first things he showed me were private photographs of Louis Armstrong—a small man, unexpectedly, Picasso-size, and, again unexpectedly, a careful dresser: everything about the great man noteworthy, almost an aspect of the talent, and to Al exciting.

  He was a man of enthusiasms, easy to be with, easy to listen to. His life seemed to have been a series of happy discoveries. Tuskegee—where he had studied fifty years before—had been one of those discoveries. He loved his school, and admired its founder.

  He showed photographs of the place: Georgian-style brick buildings built by the students themselves eighty or ninety years before. They were the first photographs I had seen of Tuskegee, and they made me want to go there. And Booker T. Washington, as Al spoke about him, became a little more real. He was born a slave in 1856, but that was only five years before the Civil War; so (whatever his memories) he hadn’t been a slave for very long. And he would have grown up in the extraordinary period just after the Civil War, when freedmen asserted themselves here and there, and some of the gifted ones did well. He would have grown up with American ideas, the big ideas of the late nineteenth century. Booker Washington, Al said, had to be seen as an American of the late nineteenth century, in his energy and in his understanding of the way capitalist America worked. He would have been at one with the very rich and powerful men he successfully appealed to.

  Al Murray took down the two volumes of the Louis R. Harlan biography to show the photographs. They were moving: those long-held poses, Booker T. Washington with his family, with his dandified male secretary, all those clothes of turn-of-the-century respectability—and the great man’s eyes always tired. And the Tuskegee students, men and women, doing as students the tasks so recently performed by slaves—raking hay, building brick walls—but doing those jobs now in respectable clothes, the men sometimes even in suits—clothes b
eing important to people who, as slaves, hardly had any.

  Tuskegee was on the site of an old plantation, Al Murray said. The plantation mansion had for many years remained outside the school compound; but he had heard that it had been acquired recently and was now the residence of the school’s president. Change, in the American way. And it might have been said that Al Murray, with his books and records, was a demonstration in himself of that change. He had been born in Alabama in the deepest South; had gone to Tuskegee; had served in the air force and retired as a major; and had then had a second career as an academic and a writer.

  It was at the end of his time with the air force that he had come to New York, to that apartment. Were his neighbors there middle-class, professional blacks? No; they were a mixed group. One neighbor, for instance, was a doorman at the midtown club of which Al was a member. “He’s a doorman there. Here he’s my neighbor.” Al liked that. He also liked the apartment for its own sake.

  But there was the setting. When he took me out to his dizzying little balcony to show me the view, the elegance that the first builders of Harlem had intended, I saw from a height the streets that at ground level had so demoralized me. I also saw the ruins of the red-brick house-row to the south. There had been a fire six years before, Al said; the brick shells had simply been allowed to stand since then. A big tree (now with spring foliage) had grown within the walls of one house without damaging the walls. The scene was a little like the war ruins preserved in parts of East Berlin as a memorial—and certain ravaged streets of Harlem did make one think of war.

  But Al had lived for a long time with the burned-out houses on the next block. He seemed to have almost stopped seeing them; he saw the larger view. To the south, all Manhattan lay at our feet. If that tall building some blocks down wasn’t in the way, Al said, we would have been seeing the Empire State Building from where we were. To the west was a multicolored row of buildings that a famous black artist, a friend of Al’s, had made the subject of a picture. And when Al looked down at the street below he saw the two or three churches and the house of the local congressman: buildings standing for important aspects of local life.

  So, with Al’s help, my eye changed. And where at first I had seen only Harlem and gloom, I began on the high balcony to see the comparative order of the area where Al lived. And the splendor of the original Harlem design: grander, in the intention of the planners, than anything farther south.

  But those first planners of Harlem had overbuilt. There were not enough people, in the 1890s, for the new houses of Harlem. Some businessmen had then begun to buy the houses, with the aim of renting to blacks from the South. They advertised; they tried to get the goodwill and participation of Booker T. Washington, at that time the best known black man in the United States. Washington didn’t like the idea; he thought it too commercial. But Washington’s secretary, Emmett Scott, one of the big three of Tuskegee (the big houses of Washington, his treasurer, and his secretary still stand side by side at Tuskegee), joined the business venture. So black Harlem began as it was to continue, in need and exploitation. And there was, ever so slightly, a Tuskegee connection.

  Al Murray took me walking in the neighborhood. He asked me to notice the very wide sidewalks: it was part of the elegance of the original Harlem plan. He took me to a bookshop with books about the black cause, and posters and leaflets about local events. I bought a paperback of The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois, a contemporary black critic of Washington (there was a very early edition of this book on Al’s shelves); and we exchanged courtesies with the dedicated and cultured lady who ran the shop. He said, about the Harlem Hospital—the most important building in the neighborhood—that its standards were professional and that it was getting better. And then, my “disentangling” vision developing, we went to the Schomburg Center, a splendid new building devoted to black studies, with an extraordinary collection of books and documents, and with enthusiastic staff, black and white.

  The Center gave researchers a stipend to work in its library. The stipendiary or scholar I met was a handsome brown woman who had traveled much and was doing work on the cultural links between Brazil and West Africa. She spoke of her work with the excitement of a discoverer. For her the black cause, or this extension of it, was like a new country.

  I didn’t take a taxi back. There were no taxis in the streets. Al waited a little while with me, talking of Ralph Ellison, until a bus came. And then, unwillingly, I saw again, and more slowly this time, stop by stop, what I had seen on the way out: a whole section of a great city in decay.

  IT WAS in Dallas in 1984, at the Republican convention, that the idea of traveling in the American South, or Southeast, came to me. I had never been in the South before; and though Dallas was not part of the Southeast I later chose to travel in, I had a sufficiently strong sense there of a region quite distinct from New York and New England, which were essentially all that I knew of the United States.

  I liked the new buildings, the shapes, the glossiness, the architectural playfulness, and the wealth that it implied. Architecture as pleasure—it was interesting to see it growing out of the drabness of the older, warehouse-style town.

  It was mid-August, and hot. I liked the contrast on the downtown streets of bright light and the deep shadows of tall buildings, and the strange feel of another, more temperate climate that those shadows gave. One constantly played with contrasts like that. The tinted glass of the hotel room softened the glare of the hot sky: the true color of the sky, outside, was always a surprise. Air conditioning in hotels, cars, and the convention center made the heat, in one’s passages through it, stimulating.

  The heat was a revelation. It made one think of the old days. Together with the great distances, it gave another idea of the lives of the early settlers. But now the very weather of the South had been made to work the other way. The heat that should have debilitated had been turned into a source of pleasure, a sensual excitement, an attraction: a political convention could be held in Dallas in the middle of August.

  On the wall at the back of the podium in the convention center the flags of the states were laid flat, in alphabetical order. The flags of the older states were distinctive; they made me think of the British-colonial flag (and the British-given colonial motto, in Latin, from Virgil) I had known as a child in Trinidad. And for the first time it occurred to me that Trinidad, a former British colony (from 1797), and an agricultural slave colony (until 1833, when slavery was abolished in the British Empire), would have had more in common with the old slave states of the Southeast than with New England or the newer European-immigrant states of the North. That should have occurred to me a long time before, but it hadn’t. What I had heard as a child about the racial demeanor of the South had been too shocking. It had tainted the United States, and had made me close my mind to the South.

  The convention center was very big. The eye could not take it all in at once. In that vast space the figures on the podium looked small. They could have been lost; but a big screen above them magnified their image, and scores of smaller screens all over the center repeated this living, filmed picture. It was hypnotic, that same face or gesture in close-up coming at one from so many angles. The aim might only have been communication and clarity; but no more grandiose statement could have been made about the primacy of men; nothing could have so attempted to stretch out the glory of the passing moment. And yet, almost as part of its political virtue, this convention dealt in piety and humility and heaven, and daily abased itself before God.

  A famous local Baptist pastor spoke the final benediction. His church organization was prodigious; its property in downtown Dallas was said by the newspapers to be worth very many millions. His service, on the Sunday after the convention, was to a packed congregation. It was also being carried on television; and it was a full, costumed production, with music and singing. But the hellfire sermon might have come from a simpler, rougher time, when perhaps for five or six months of the year people had no escape from the hea
t, when travel was hard, when people lived narrowly in the communities into which they had been born, and life was given meaning only by absolute religious certainties.

  I began to think of writing about the South. My first travel book—undertaken at the suggestion of Eric Williams, the first black prime minister of Trinidad—had been about some of the former slave colonies of the Caribbean and South America. I was twenty-eight then. It seemed to me fitting that my last travel book—travel on a theme—should be about the old slave states of the American Southeast.

  My thoughts—in Dallas, and then in New York, when I was planning the journey—were about the race issue. I didn’t know then that that issue would quickly work itself out during the journey, and that my subject would become that other South—of order and faith, and music and melancholy—which I didn’t know about, but of which I had been given an intimation in Dallas.

  FROM NEW YORK I went to Atlanta. I had been told that there was an old black elite there, a kind of black-American aristocracy; that there were many established black businessmen, and a number of black millionaires; and that blacks ran the city. I booked an airplane flight; in Atlanta stood in a line at the airport to hire a car; and then drove through the mighty roadworks of the city center to the hotel. And there I was, slightly astonished that the journey, so long in the planning, should begin in such a matter-of-fact way.

  And, as if answering my anxiety, all the little Atlanta arrangements I had made in New York came to nothing, one after the other, and very quickly. A newspaperman had gone to another town to cover a story; a black businessman said on the telephone that he was out of touch, had lived these last twenty years out of Atlanta. And the black man whose name had been given me by a filmmaker said that almost everything I had heard about Atlanta was wrong.