Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  Which is to say, Mitchell had a genius for both unearthing people and then paying attention to them until, in time, they unlocked their own secrets. He also had a playwright’s ear for speech and the way language defines character. One reason his subjects are so real is because Mitchell lets them talk, often in lengthy speeches.

  Some literary critics have maintained that Mitchell became invisible in his stories, but in fact his is a palpable presence in most of them, be it as narrator or commentator, and the reader learns much about the writer—his appetites, his encyclopedic knowledge of flora and fauna, his Southern roots, his preying mind, his propensity for wandering cemeteries. But more than this, Mitchell often seems almost to inhabit his characters. Like him, they are rooted in the past, they are stubborn but compassionate, and they have scant use for the changes and acceleration of modernity. Certainly he saw a good deal of himself in the figure of John McSorley, who died two years after Joseph Mitchell was born. But Mitchell’s reporting—and doubtless that personal connection—brings Old John back to life so vividly that the great man might as well be looking over your shoulder as you read his story. “Except for a few experimental months in 1905 or 1906, no spirits ever have been sold in McSorley’s,” wrote Mitchell, continuing:

  Old John maintained that the man never lived who needed a stronger drink than a mug of ale warmed on the hob of a stove. He was a big eater. Customarily, just before locking up for the night, he would grill himself a three-pound T-bone, placing it on a coal shovel and holding it over a bed of oak coals in the back-room fireplace. He liked to fit a whole onion into the hollowed-out heel of a loaf of French bread and eat it as if it were an apple. He had an extraordinary appetite for onions, the stronger the better, and said that “Good ale, raw onions, and no ladies” was the motto of his saloon.

  Now on this chill autumn afternoon Mitchell finds himself back at McSorley’s, where he came so often when seeking to quell some restlessness. Ostensibly here to assess how the saloon was managing its later years, the writer almost certainly was asking the same question of himself. In the fall of 1964, when Mitchell was fifty-six, The New Yorker published “Joe Gould’s Secret,” the surprising sequel to the Profile of the Greenwich Village vagabond he had written two decades earlier. And then…nothing. A naturally private person—his father had taught him it was best not to let people know too much about your business—Mitchell had never been inclined to discuss works in progress. So as year followed year and no new work appeared, and as a kind of stasis settled in on Mitchell, co-workers and readers alike were left to ponder the mystery of a gifted writer who was trapped by his own expectations.

  Or maybe he was simply starting to live out the great themes of his best work—stories about earth and sky, time and tide, the serendipity of life and loss, unavoidable sorrow and ultimately death, and, not infrequently, the triumph of the human spirit. He had profiled dozens and dozens of other people, yes, most of whom in some way, cursorily or profoundly, resonated with the writer. Now here he was, literally trying to write about himself—and he was stuck.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE CENTER OF GRAVITY

  Tree-climbing was exhilarating to me, and I discovered that I had a natural aptitude for it, and I got to be quite good at it; it is one of the few things I have ever been genuinely good at. Barefooted, and using a throw rope to draw myself up from one limb to another if the limbs were too widely spaced, I could climb some of the tallest trees in the branch…. Sometimes, up in a tree in one of the thickly wooded parts of the branch, I would look for some overlapping limbs from a neighboring tree or for a connecting vine, and I would cross over to the neighboring tree on the strongest of these limbs or vines, risking my neck as often as not…. It was part of the game to go from tree to tree as rapidly as possible. Sometimes I was Daniel Boone pursuing a hostile Indian chief and sometimes I was the hostile Indian chief; sometimes I was the sheriff of Robeson County pursuing a convict who had escaped from the chain gang and sometimes I was the convict; sometimes I was a slave fleeing on the Underground Railroad and making a gap in my tracks to throw off the bloodhounds; sometimes I was Jan Ridd, the farmboy hero of my favorite novel, Lorna Doone, fleeing from Lorna’s brothers, the outlaws of the Doone Valley in Exmoor in England….

  —From Joseph Mitchell’s unfinished memoir

  —

  North Carolinians like to say their state represents the nation in microcosm, and at least geographically it does, its five-hundred-mile expanse reaching from the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean to the Piedmont to the misty Appalachians. In the state’s underbelly, just above the South Carolina border, lies Robeson County, where rivers, swamps, ancient cypress and pine stands, and rich black farmland converge in a natural wonderland for adventurous and imaginative children. Here are places where vine-wrapped trees create a canopy so dense it’s always like dusk, and in the pools below, mud sliders crowd the trunks of fallen tulip poplars. In the lower part of the county is the small community of Fairmont, and in Fairmont the Pitman Mill Branch of the Old Field Swamp.

  “I spent a large part of my childhood and youth in Pitman Mill Branch,” Joseph Mitchell would remember years later, writing in what was intended to be a kind of memoir but was never finished. Land and water—these elements were part of Mitchell from his earliest memories, and they were such powerful forces in his experience they became motifs he would return to again and again in his writing career.

  “From the time I was old enough to wander around by myself—old enough, that is, to be trusted to shut gates and to watch out for snakes—until I went away to college, I spent every moment in it that I possibly could,” he said of the swamp that abutted the Mitchell family farm. “Quite often, in the winter, I went into the branch as soon as I got home from school and stayed in it the rest of the day. Quite often, in the summer, if I had no work to do for my father, I went into it early in the morning, right after breakfast, and stayed in it until dinner, which we had in the middle of the day, and then I went back and stayed in it until supper. Some days, I kept pretty close to the stream. I would walk beside it, climbing over the fence that marked the western boundary line of my father’s land when I reached it and following the stream across other people’s lands for several miles. I would walk slowly and keep looking into the water, studying it. The water mesmerized me; everything in it interested me, still or moving, dead or alive….”

  By the time young Joseph was frolicking in those trees and swamps, his family had become as much a fixture in Fairmont as Pitman Mill Branch. The Mitchells traced their Robeson County roots to Nazareth Mitchell, a Revolutionary War veteran who was born in the northern reaches of the North Carolina colony in 1758, and who as a twenty-year-old joined the militia in the War of Independence. Nazareth first saw Robeson County during the war, and in 1787 he moved there and started a family. The last of Nazareth’s children—born when he was seventy-three years old—was Hugh G. Mitchell, who in turn would have twelve children of his own. One of these, Quince Bostic Mitchell, married Catherine Nance, and in 1881 they had a son, Averette Nance (or A.N., as he was often called later in life). When A.N. took over the family homestead, he became the fourth generation of Mitchells to earn his living from the rich land in and around Fairmont.

  Fairmont, Joseph Mitchell observed, “happens to be a remarkably inexact name. The town’s original name was Ashpole and this was changed to Union City and this was changed to Fairmont. There are no monts in or around it or anywhere near it.” At the turn of the century, Fairmont was a village of several hundred people, the small hub of an agrarian region focused on cotton and tobacco. Farms were worked by both poor whites and poor blacks (both often tenant farmers), as well as by Native Americans of the Lumbee tribe, who called this region home and provided much of the backbreaking labor. Indeed, this was one of those parts of the South where race was more than a binary issue; public facilities, for instance, often had three separate sections—labeled WHITES, NEGROES, and INDIANS.

  “I
used to climb a tremendous white oak high up on the hill of the branch,” Mitchell would write, “from one of whose topmost limbs, hidden by leaves, I could look out on a wide panorama of small farms on the southern side of the branch mostly owned by Negro farmers and watch people at work in cotton and tobacco fields who were entirely oblivious of course to the fact that they were being watched and being watched secretly and from aloft and from afar, a situation that made me feel Olympian but at the same time curiously lonely and alien and uneasy and cut off from the rest of the human race, the way a spy might feel, or a Peeping Tom.”

  Such a tableau would have been equally familiar to A. N. Mitchell when he was a boy—though his own childhood was considerably more compressed. When Averette was just fourteen, his father died unexpectedly, suddenly turning the boy into the man of a household that included his mother and six sisters. If that prospect intimidated him, young Averette didn’t show it. Confronted with adversity that would buckle many an adult, he simply set out to do what had to be done. On a North Carolina cotton farm in the late nineteenth century, that meant, first and foremost, getting out the crop.

  David Britt, who served as North Carolina’s Speaker of the House of Representatives and a Supreme Court justice, knew A. N. Mitchell as a law client and family friend. He related a legend about the steely boy who would grow to become one of the most influential men in all of Robeson County.

  In early spring of 1896, the first planting season after Quince Mitchell’s death, Averette hitched up the family’s wagon and rode off to the county seat of Lumberton, a fifteen-mile journey from his small farm outside Fairmont. He planned to get his seed and other supplies from a purveyor his father had used for years, a man named McNeill. The merchant sized up the boy and the situation, then told him, “I’m afraid I’ve already taken on all I can handle this year.” So Averette walked in to the store of another supplier in town. There he found the owner, a man named Caldwell, busily moving around the aisles, and the boy hesitated several times before working up the nerve to interrupt him and make a fourteen-year-old’s case for credit. Caldwell listened to his story, which Averette concluded by saying, “If you let me have enough supplies to get started this year, I’ll never forget you.” The owner decided he would take a chance on this determined if desperate young cotton farmer. Caldwell asked for a list of his seed and supply needs, which the boy had carefully calculated and handed over. After reviewing it, Caldwell said he didn’t need any money at the moment; they would settle what was owed when the cotton crop came in.

  Some years later, A. N. Mitchell was not only running his own successful farm but was starting to buy up nearby properties and acquiring a name for himself as an up-and-comer in the southeastern part of Robeson County. Back in Lumberton one day, he ran into the merchant McNeill.

  “Aren’t you Mr. Mitchell’s son?” McNeill asked. A.N. said he was. “Well, I sure would like to do business with you,” the merchant said. “Your father did business here with us for I don’t know how long.”

  “Mr. McNeill,” A.N. replied, “when I needed you, you wouldn’t listen to me. I don’t need you anymore.”

  —

  In 1907, when he was twenty-six, A. N. Mitchell transplanted his mother and his siblings to a new, larger spread in Fairmont proper. He was beginning to make the transition from just another cotton farmer to one who also bought the commodity from others in Robeson County and nearby South Carolina and then resold it to exporters based in Charleston, Norfolk, and other regional ports. A grower was important, but a buyer was a person of greater influence in a farm community.

  Credit 2.1

  Young man in a hurry: A. N. Mitchell in his twenties.

  By this time he was also courting a keen young woman who, while rather traditional in most of her views and carriage, had enough of an independent streak to set her apart. Elizabeth Amanda Parker, born in 1886, was five years younger than the wiry and ambitious A. N. Mitchell. Like many residents of the region, she descended from Scots lineage on both sides. She, too, had grown up on a family farm in Robeson County. Unusually for a girl of that time and place, Betty Parker was a college graduate, having attended Southern Presbyterian College in Red Springs, North Carolina, which later became Flora MacDonald College. “I don’t know if she expected to have a career,” wrote Joseph Mitchell’s daughter Nora Mitchell Sanborn, in a family history, “but she never did.”

  Indeed, despite her education, she was soon destined for the conventional path of a farm wife, if one with more amenities at her disposal than most. A. N. Mitchell and Betty Parker were married on November 3, 1907. Early on they built a new home, at 305 Church Street in Fairmont, for the large family they anticipated. It was an inviting and comfortable Southern residence, big and breezy and surrounded by screened porches. One side porch, with a row of wicker rocking chairs, would become a favorite gathering spot before and after meals. The home cost seven hundred and fifty dollars; A.N. later built a twin to it next door, for his mother and sisters.

  Almost nine months from their wedding day—on July 27, 1908—Elizabeth and A.N. had their first child, a son. He was christened Joseph Quincy Mitchell, the middle name after A.N.’s father. When it came time for his wife to deliver, A.N. was in the hospital, recovering from a contagious fever then circulating in the area, so Joseph was born on the Parker family farm. A Lumbee woman served as the midwife. As it turned out, Joseph would be the first of a passel of Mitchell children—a common-enough occurrence in agrarian families—and the young couple wasted little time. Next came Jack, in 1911, followed by Elizabeth, in 1913; Linda, in 1915; Harry, in 1919; and finally Laura, in 1922. Betty Mitchell spent most of her first two decades of married life chasing around someone in diapers.

  By the time Joseph was born, A.N. was well on his way to becoming one of the largest and most influential landowners in the region. Over time he would accumulate upward of six thousand acres, individual farms that the Mitchells continued to reference by their historic names—the Butler Place, Fox Bay, the Townsend Place—and that ultimately would require more than fifty tenant farmers (white, black, and Lumbee) to keep under cultivation. A.N.’s business savvy and intense focus resulted in a remarkable, Horatio Alger type success story. The Mitchells were not wealthy, exactly, but financially they were more than comfortable, especially for that time in that part of America. For instance, when Joseph was young, his family was one of the few in the Fairmont area to own an automobile (though in the beginning its utility was confined to fair weather, as a good rain would turn the country roads to mud). A cook and a cleaning woman helped Joseph’s mother with the growing household, while other hired hands were always busy around the Mitchell properties.

  So Joseph and his siblings were raised wanting for little. Yet at that time the area was one of the poorest corners of the South, and Mitchell’s early grasp of this dichotomy would profoundly affect him and shape his life’s work. Pictures of Robeson County taken in the Depression years depict a gritty reality: the dirt roads, the barefoot children in tatty clothing, the swayback clapboard shacks of the Mitchell tenant farmers.

  Though A.N.’s formal schooling ended with his father’s death, his agile mind never rested. He had a knack for doing complicated mathematics in his head, a useful gift for a man in commodities markets who had to make snap decisions with a great deal of money on the line. He was also quietly observant. A.N. understood not only the natural world, where he made his living, but also a fair amount of human psychology; he had come to learn how both a man’s strengths and flaws could be turned to one’s advantage if you were shrewd. Yet he played fair; by all accounts he was highly principled and respected, a man whose word was as good as any contract. Later in his life, he would twice be elected mayor of Fairmont.

  On the other hand, life had suppressed any youthful frivolity A.N. might once have had; taking on so much responsibility at such a tender age would give him a stern, emotionally remote mien that marked him for the rest of his life. Though not an unplea
sant man, people would say, A. N. Mitchell was certainly not one to be trifled with. Joseph Mitchell often related a story from his early childhood to make that point. Halfheartedly studying arithmetic one afternoon, he saw his father enter the next room, calmly pull a revolver from the bureau drawer, load it, then leave. From an overheard conversation, Joseph knew his father was in a boundary dispute with a violence-prone neighbor. Now A.N. meant to walk the property line with the man, and he wasn’t taking any chances. “I wasn’t worried about my father in the least,” Joseph wrote years later in his journal. A.N. had “a quality of no-nonsense about him…. If necessary, he would shoot.”

  Credit 2.2

  The house in Fairmont that A. N. Mitchell built anticipating a large farm family.

  Credit 2.3

  Young Joseph reads to his siblings, from left, Elizabeth, Jack, and Linda.

  A.N. “was very smart and a good businessman,” recalled Nora Mitchell Sanborn in her family memoir, “but…he was very dour and intimidating…. He called all girls and women ‘sister’ and all boys and young men ‘son’ or ‘buddy,’ and he expected to be called ‘sir,’ as did…most Southern men.” To his few intimates he was A.N., or Averette; to most others he was “Mr. Averette” or simply “Mr. Mitchell.” To Joseph and his five siblings he was always “Daddy,” even when the children had become middle-aged or older themselves. He was, in other words, a formidable figure to most everyone he encountered—including his firstborn son.

  —

  The Mitchell household moved to the rhythms of the farming and business cycles, punctuated by the cotton crop (harvested in the fall and sold through the winter) and the tobacco crop (harvested and cured in summer, for sale through early fall). For much of its history, Robeson County was unquestionably “cotton country.” Tobacco certainly was grown, and it was important. But cotton was king, and A. N. Mitchell was a cotton man. Having first established himself as a successful grower, then as a buyer, of the Southern staple, A.N. went on to build his own cotton warehouse next to Fairmont’s railroad tracks. But with the eventual arrival of boll weevils and the devastation of the cotton industry, tobacco suddenly became the county’s cash crop, and A.N. would transition to that commodity as his primary focus—growing it as well as storing it in another warehouse he built for that purpose. In later years the Mitchells, like other farmers in the region, tried their hand at commercial corn and soybean crops. But they couldn’t really compete with the big Midwest operations, and in any case they considered those crops considerably less dignified. Cotton and tobacco built the South, they shaped the fate of the nation, they changed how Americans lived. Joseph Mitchell would say that his father could scarcely utter the word “soybean” without an inflection of disgust.