The Rodeo
The rodeo, which is held in an indoor stadium as big as the Vél d’Hiv, is also a mixture of practicality and mythology. The majority of the exploits in which the cowboys engage are operations they perform in their daily work: mounting a horse with or without a saddle, lassoing a calf or bull in a certain number of minutes; but in between one competition and another you get interludes of totally fake Western mythology: the singing cowboys from TV, who are greeted with wild enthusiasm. However the cowboys’ technique is excellent: chasing a calf on horseback, lassoing it with a rope, flinging yourself on to it to turn it over on to its back, managing to tie its legs with the help of the horse which has to keep the lasso taut.
We Are Now in the South
Despite the Texan spirit, the man who drives me on a tour round the city (there is nothing to see: the usual city full of houses and little green lawns, sprawling and shapeless; the black areas that already have the air of poverty of the South) puts his seat-belt on when he drives, because the statistics show that in the majority of accidents, etc. He is a good man, a financial agent, who works for the Democrats: he is the only one who does so here, he is one of the few liberals and he fights for the blacks’ right to vote. But I will talk to you about this when I am in Louisiana or the Deep South. Tonight I am leaving for New Orleans, which is now at the height of Mardi Gras.
Diary from the South
Montgomery, Alabama, 6 March
New Orleans
Despite warnings from everyone, I arrive in New Orleans without any hotel reservation, on Monday the 29th, right in the middle of the Mardi Gras celebrations (Mardi Gras in America – or rather in New Orleans: the only place where it is celebrated – is an elastic term meaning our ‘Carneval’, whereas a ‘carnival’ usually refers to a funfair.) I arrive early in the morning, all the hotels are of course full to the brim, and I start roaming around the Vieux Carré, which is exactly as it looks in photographs, all the houses with little balconies and colonnades in wrought iron. I am used to encountering anything ‘antique’ in America only in minimal proportions but swollen and falsified by rhetoric and propaganda; here, though, I must say that New Orleans is really all New Orleans, decadent, decaying, smelly, but alive. It is a controversial question whether the New Orleans style is more French or Spanish: the present look of the old town is the one given it by the Spanish who governed it for sixty years, before it returned to the French for a few months in 1803 and was then sold by Talleyrand to Jefferson. Now Franco has presented the town with majolica plaques with the street names from the time of Spanish domination, so that the much-vaunted French spirit of the town (many families still retain a cult of Napoleon, as is also shown by the furniture) is countered at every street corner. To cut a long story short, I find a ghastly room which costs me a fortune in a dusty apartment hotel in the middle of Royal Street, and – from the spotless, disinfected world of the motels I have become used to – I am plunged into a Tennessee Williams atmosphere where everything disintegrates into pieces through old age and filth; in a dark closet between my bedroom and the porch a ninety-year-old woman is kept enclosed all day. The Garden District, where the French families went to live in the nineteenth century, is totally different (whereas the Vieux Carré became the black quarter until about ten years ago when it was rediscovered as the great tourist attraction of the South and it became an area of antique shops, hotels and night-spots) and it is all big villas, many of them fine examples of plantation houses with columns and everything. New Orleans closed in on itself in its French aristocratic pride and remained one of the most impoverished and backward cities in the States, and the consequences of the Civil War did the rest; now it is recovering a certain prosperity as an oil city and as a harbour for South American fruit and minerals. The harbour is an Italian quarter, the heart of one of the most ancient Italian settlements in the United States, with families originally from Sicily and the Lipari Islands who have never spoken Italian in previous generations and often have no idea even of their origin. But I am here to see the famous Mardi Gras; and indeed this is in itself a Carneval town, with its eighteenth-century décor, like Venice. Even nature here wears a Carneval mask: oaks and sycamores in the huge parks have their branches covered in Spanish moss, a parasite with flowing tendrils and festoons. Mardi Gras lasts a week and paralyses the whole town and consists of a series of parades of floats which are not anything special compared to the Carneval floats in Viareggio or Nice – because in any case the floats and grotesque masks actually come from Viareggio: from last year’s Viareggio Carneval: special firms there sell them on and export them here. And even the black element, which I expected to be one of the main attractions, is not very prominent. To be sure there are blacks mixed up in the enormous crowds, and black musicians on the floats, and some of them improvise dances in the streets, but they are a very small percentage and the only specifically black element are the bearers of the enormous torches in the night-time parades, who often move in a way that emphasises this ritual’s primitive symbolism. The fact is that the blacks have their own Mardi Gras, in their own neighbourhoods, and nobody is willing to take me there because of the danger that a large number of drunk blacks represents; however, from what I hear, there are often white tourists who organize expeditions to the black areas to see the black Carneval (but without getting out of their cars, of course): the route they take is always along streets that no one ever knows in advance. Well, on my first evening, particularly as luck had it that I found myself without a companion, I got bored and ended up going from one burlesque joint to another, drinking awful whiskey and trying to start discussions with the girl dancers about unionization, but they were only interested in making me buy them drinks, the usual racket, and so on. However, the next day, which is Mardi Gras itself, when the whole city plus half a million visitors go mad for twenty-four hours, I see that this is something really big and unique, even by European standards, because the protagonists here are the people themselves, displaying great imagination in their masks and sheer vitality. In short, an impressive mass spectacle: it has imagination, joy, sensuality, vulgarity and atmosphere, all in the right proportions, and all done in such a way as to redeem the decadent atmosphere of the place with waves of popular feeling. In a word, eighteenth-century Venice could not have been very different, as I tried to explain in an interview for local television. It is intensely cold, but most of the people are almost totally naked; unfortunately, the beautiful girls are outnumbered by homosexuals in female dress: New Orleans is a big centre for transvestite clubs, and homosexuals converge there from all over America, and Carneval is the ideal opportunity for displaying their particular ingeniousness in cross-dressing. People drink hurricanes, tall glasses of rum and fruit juice, and beer out of cans, which are then abandoned on the side of the pavement as harbingers of the desolation of Ash Wednesday, along with the pearl necklaces which are thrown during the parades, each with a little tag (strange are the routes of leisure products): ‘Made in Czechoslovakia’. In short, this New Orleans is just that decaying place that we all knew about, and you can live here only if you know how to make the decadence functional, namely all the antique-dealers, furniture dealers, etc. I forgot to say that the majority of the stories told by the guides about happenings in New Orleans’ historic houses were invented by Faulkner; because when he was young, Faulkner lived here for a few years working as a guide taking tourists around the place; and the stories he told were all invented by him but they were all so successful that all the other guides also started to tell them and now they are part of Louisiana’s history. I was also invited into the villas of the upper class; in fact the most luxurious and aristocratic house that I have been in in this country was certainly here (built a few years ago but all in plantation style and all its accessories authentic), visiting a woman for whom I had a letter of introduction; not having a clue who I was, she invited five or six corporation presidents, who made me listen to the most reactionary discourses that I have
heard in the whole journey: enough to make you despair, because the American ruling class understands nothing but power-politics, is a thousand miles away from starting to think that the rest of the world has problems to solve, that Russia offers the way to some solutions and they don’t. The usual pronouncements for and against Nixon were made in these terms; and a man from Investments and Securities supported Nixon because at this point in time you need ‘a tough, ruthless guy’. In any case, the Southerners talk too much, just the way we imagine they do; when I left, with me in the limousine to the airport there were some men coming back, I think, from a local Democratic Party convention; and what do you think they were talking about? They were against the Yankees and the Easterns [sic] who are stirring up the blacks, because where they live there are very few blacks, but we’d like to see them here where the blacks outnumber us forty to one etc. etc., all the things that you usually hear white Southerners say. Even slightly more sophisticated and adventurous people always talk about this as well, only they do it ironically, expressing blandly anti-segregationist views. Those who are anti-segregationist either eke out the miserable, frightened and isolated existence of the American progressive (I will need to devote a whole instalment to them, to their condition as exiles), or if they are rich or privileged, they close themselves in isolation and don’t see anyone and are careful not to express their opinion, like the philosopher (a friend of Abbagnano) James Fiebleman, who has written twenty-two books, particularly on aesthetics, and has a wonderful modern house full of statues: 4 Epsteins, 1 Manzù, 1 Marini. In short, this is a place that would make you shoot yourself; the only thing to do is act like the Italian professor at the local university, a young man called Cecchetti, about whom I have no idea whether he’s any good as a literary critic, and who in his opinions is very conservative (‘I would not send my children to school with black kids, but not for racial reasons, you know, only for social reasons: the blacks all belong to the lower classes’), but he is someone who does the only intelligent thing to be done to justify the fact of living in America: he plays the stock exchange. Spending the mornings at the local branch of Merrill Lynch, Fenner, Pierce and Smith, following on the ticker-tape the dealings on the New York stock exchange, the fluctuations on the electronic noticeboard, studying the right moment for buying and selling, with the tele-printer in the room displaying the latest news on which to base your dealings, studying the ups and downs of all the major American firms, reading the Wall Street Journal the minute it arrives, that is the only way to live the life of a big capitalistic country in a way that is not passive, it is in fact the real democratic aspiration of America, because even if it does not give you any chance of influencing events, other than speculation on the financial markets, nevertheless it keeps you plugged into the mechanism in its most advanced and active area, and requires constant attention – in this country of frighteningly local and provincial interests – to the whole system. I would not hesitate to declare that in this country where the man who follows and determines party policies is in the vast majority of cases the spokesman for very specific and nearly always reactionary interests, where even the unionized worker refuses to think anything outside strict economic increases for his category, the crowd – the enormous crowd – of owners of small quantities of shares, of small speculators in this highly sensitive stock exchange system represents the blueprint for the most modern citizenry.
Montgomery, Alabama, 6 March
This is a day that I will never forget as long as I live. I have seen what racism is, mass racism, accepted as one of a society’s fundamental rules. I was present at one of the first episodes of mass struggle by the Southern blacks: and it ended in defeat. I don’t know if you are aware that after decades of total immobility black protests began right here, in the worst segregationist State in the country: some were even successful, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, a Baptist minister, advocate of non-violent protest. That is why I came here to Montgomery, the day before yesterday, but I did not expect to find myself right in the middle of these crucial days of struggle.
The scene today is Alabama’s Capitol (which was the first Confederate Capitol, in the early months of the secession, before the capital moved to Richmond), a white building like the Washington Capitol, on a wide, climbing street, Dexter Street. The black students (from the black university) had declared that they would go to the Capitol steps for a peaceful protest demonstration against the expulsion of nine of them from the university, who last week had tried to sit down in the whites’ coffee shop in Court Hall, the State court building. At half-past one there was a meeting of the students at the Baptist church right beside the Capitol (the church where King had been minister, but now he is based in Atlanta directing the whole movement – though in these days he is back here – and his church has another local leader). But the Capitol was already ringed by policemen with truncheons and Highway Police in their cowboy hats, turquoise jerkins and khaki trousers. The pavements were swarming with whites, mostly poor whites who are the worst racists, ready to use their fists, young hooligans working in teams (their organization, which is only barely clandestine, is the Ku Klux Klan), but also comfortable middle-class people, families with children, all there to watch and shout slogans and obscenities against the blacks locked inside the church, plus of course dozens of amateur photographers taking shots of such unusual Sunday events. The crowd’s attitude varied between derision, as though they were watching monkeys asking for civil rights (genuine derision, from people who never thought the blacks could get such ideas in their heads), to hatred, cries of provocation, crow-like sounds made by the young thugs. Here and there, along the pavement, there are also a few small groups of blacks, standing aside, men and women, dressed in their best clothes, watching silently and still, in an attitude of composure. The waiting becomes more and more unbearable, the blacks must by now have finished their service and must be ready to come out; the Capitol steps are blocked by the police, all the pavements are blocked by the crowd of whites who are now angry and shouting ‘Come out, niggers!’ The blacks start to appear on the steps of their church and begin singing a hymn; the whites begin to make a racket, howling and insulting them. The fire-fighters arrive with their hoses and position themselves all around; the police begin to give orders to clear the streets, in other words to warn the whites that if they stay it is at their own risk and peril, whereas the small groups of blacks are dispersed roughly. There is a sound of horse-hooves and the scene is invaded by cowboys wearing the CD (Civil Defense) armband, a local militia of volunteers to keep public order, armed with sticks and guns; the police and militia are there to avoid incidents and see that the blacks clear off, but in reality the whites remain in charge of the street, the blacks stay in their church singing hymns, the police manage to send away only the most peaceful whites, the white thugs become more and more menacing and I who am keen to stay and see how things turn out (naturally, I am on my own; the few pro-black whites cannot allow themselves to be seen in these situations, well-known as they are) find myself surrounded by tougher and tougher looking characters, but also by youths who are there as though to see something funny, and just to make a noise. (I will later learn – though I did not see him – that there is also a white Methodist minister – the only white man in Montgomery with the courage to make a stand for the blacks – and as a result his house and his church have already been bombed twice by the KKK – who was there in front of the church and had organized his white congregation into providing a service to take the blacks safely from the church door to the cars; but, I repeat, I did not see him; the images in my head are of an all-out racial war, with no halfway houses.) Then begins the most painful part to watch: the blacks come out of the church a few at a time, some head down a sidestreet that I cannot see, but which I think the police have cleared of whites, but others go down Dexter Avenue in small groups along the pavements where the white thugs have gathered, walking away silently with their heads held high amid chorus
es of threatening and obscene sneers, insults and gestures. At every insult or witticism made by a white, the other whites, men and women, burst out laughing, sometimes with almost hysterical insistence, but sometimes also just like that, affably, and these people, as far as I am concerned, are the most awful, this all-out racism combined with affability. The most admirable ones are the black girls: they come down the road in twos or threes, and those thugs spit on the ground before their feet, standing in the middle of the pavement and forcing the girls to zigzag past them, shouting abuse at them and making as though to trip them up, and the black girls continue to chat among themselves, never do they move in such a way as to suggest that they want to avoid them, never do they alter their route when they see them blocking their path, as though they were used to these scenes right from birth.
Those who are not used to these things are the whites, because the blacks had never dared do such things, and of course they don’t know what to say except that there has been infiltration by Communists. The first battle was the one about buses, last year. The boycotting of the buses following an incident (the arrest of a black girl who had wanted to sit on a seat reserved for whites) was the first mass protest by the blacks and it was successful. Then they tried to mount a legal action to have the whites’ park open to blacks, but the town council ordered all parks to be closed, and so the city was for the whole summer, and still is today, without a public park, a swimming-pool, etc. These protests were organized by this young black political activist, Luther King (who like all the others is officially a Baptist Church minister), who has no particular social or political programme except equal rights for blacks. Actually there is no doubt that once they gain equality the blacks will be even more conservative than the rest, as has happened with other minorities once they emerge from poverty, the Irish and the Italians; but for the meantime, this spirit of struggle is something unique in America today and it is important that there is also a mobilization of black students, who usually think that they have made it and try only not to cause trouble. With this courtroom coffee-shop row, last week the whole city went into a state of tension like in a civil war, the KKK put bombs in several houses (I visited some of the people who had been bombed) and a few days ago they clubbed a black woman over the head with a baseball bat and the judge did not find the KKK person accused guilty despite witnesses, photographs, etc. The thing that is difficult for a European to understand is how these things can happen in a nation which is 75 percent non-segregationist, and how they can take place without the involvement of the rest of the country. But the autonomy of the individual States is such that here they are even more outside Washington’s jurisdiction or New York public opinion, than if they were, say, in the Middle East. And there is no possibility (or perhaps they lack the ability?) for the black movement here to find allies, neither for King nor for the more left-wing activists, who maintain (correctly) that the crucial point is that of being allowed to vote. King now has allies in the colonial peoples’ movement, but they can only provide moral support; he was recently in Ghana, Egypt, and India; he was also invited to Russia, but refused because otherwise, etc. So the minute I arrived in Montgomery, into the hottest part of this situation, I learnt that King was in town and I got them to take me to him. He is a very stout and capable person, physically resembling Bourghiba a bit, with a little moustache: the fact that he is a pastor has nothing to do with his physical appearance (his second-in-command and successor, Abernathy, a young rather fat man who also has a small moustache, looks like a jazz-player), these are politicians whose only weapon is the pulpit and even their non-violence does not really have a mystical aura about it: it is the only form of struggle possible and they use it with the controlled political skill which the extreme harshness of their conditions has taught them. These black leaders – I’ve approached several of them in the last few days, of different tendencies – are lucid, decisive people, totally devoid of black self-pity, not terribly kind (though of course I was an unknown foreigner who had turned up to nose around in days which were very eventful for them). The race question is a damnable thing: for a century a huge country like the South has not spoken or thought about anything else, just this problem, whether they are progressives or reactionaries. So I arrive escorted by blacks in the sacristy of Abernathy’s church and King is there along with another black minister who is also a leader, and I am present at a council-of-war meeting where they decide on this Sunday’s course of action which I have just described to you; then we go to another church where the students have gathered, in order to give them this instruction, and then I stay for this dramatic, moving meeting, I the sole white among three thousand black students, perhaps the first white to do so in the whole history of the South. Naturally I have come here also with introductions to extremely racist, ultra-reactionary high-society ladies, and I have to divide my days with acrobatic skill so that they do not suspect what a deadly enemy they are harbouring in their midst (above all whites are forbidden by law from entering blacks’ houses or getting into a car with them). From the Baptist church I move on to the city’s theatre where respectable people have gathered for the gala première of the Chicago Ballet, to which I have been invited by the local paper’s gossip columnist, a good friend of the Dominican dictator, Trujillo. Today, however, after the Capitol, I have ten minutes of peace to calm down after all the emotion, then a high-society lady comes to collect me and shows me, as we drive along, their factory of gherkins in vinegar, and hints vaguely at the day’s ‘troubles’ caused by that agitator Luther King. This famous Southern aristocracy gives me the impression of being uniquely stupid in its continual harking back to the glories of the Confederacy; this Confederate patriotism which survives intact after a century, as though they were talking of things from their youth, in the tone of someone who is confident you share their emotions, is something which is more unbearable than ridiculous.
Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings Page 11
