Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  As A.N. rode his properties or visited with other farmers in the county, he often took along young Joseph in the family buggy. It didn’t take the boy long to appreciate that life on a farm was hard at best and backbreaking at worst, as experienced by the laborers tending to cotton fields in the oppressively damp Southern summer. (“A lot of men made their career decision during the heat of the day,” said David Britt.) Passing by certain farmsteads and houses, A.N. would comment on difficulties those owners had encountered, perhaps recently but as often as not in the distant past. Maybe a hailstorm had ruined a crop, or an estate had been divided up acrimoniously, or a mortgage couldn’t be met. Some of the people he discussed were distant relatives of the Mitchells themselves. It astonished the boy how much his father knew about these people, and all of it at ready command. “Know a little something that will be to your advantage,” A.N. would tell him. “If you know how some of these people did in the past you’ll know how they’ll most likely do in the future.”

  At the same time he advised Joseph not to let anyone know what he knew, or what he was thinking. Put this information in the back of your mind, he would say, and don’t mention it to anyone else. Never give another man that advantage over you. The father asserted this idea so often that it became almost a mantra to the boy. Joseph understood what his father meant by the admonition; many times he had noted A.N.’s inscrutable face at the seasonal tobacco auctions, which had helped make him a successful broker. But Joseph would adopt this lesson for different purposes. All his life he was remarkably circumspect about himself and especially about his work. Even fellow writers who were close friends didn’t know what Mitchell was working on most of the time, and eventually they learned not to ask. On the other hand, Mitchell himself was forever observing others, deriving information from them or about them. It underlay his endless sense of curiosity. Know a little something that will be to your advantage, said the voice in his head.

  The boy didn’t realize it at first, of course, but these father–son transactions were all part of an implicit apprenticeship, a tradition centuries old. It was assumed Joseph, as scion of a family that had been tied to the land for generations, would make his career there in Fairmont, first working with his father and brothers, then eventually taking over as the head man. In the rural South of the time, this was so evident it scarcely needed saying.

  At home, Betty Mitchell ran things as efficiently as A.N. ran his business, and family life revolved around her. She was “one of the finest women you would see,” said Britt, who was Joseph’s contemporary growing up in Fairmont. She was friendly if not especially outgoing. She preferred simple dresses and wore her hair in a long braid down her back or wrapped about her head. She doted on her children and didn’t often leave her comfortable house, except for trips to the local stores, where she exchanged gossip with the merchants and her neighbors. She was nearly puritanical about the use of bad language in her presence.

  As in many farm families, the day’s routine centered on a main meal. In the Mitchell home this was the noontime repast, called dinner (the evening meal being supper), an opportunity for the men to come in from the fields, eat, and get some rest before returning to the day’s labors. This tended to be a capacious spread, featuring the bounty of their farms and extensive gardens. According to Nora Mitchell Sanborn, a typical dinner from her father’s childhood might include fried chicken, biscuits, a variety of beans (all prepared with fatback), tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, corn, and iced tea. And the feast was always followed by some kind of homemade dessert. In summer this might be a fresh pie that the family cook, a black woman named Anna McNair, made from huckleberries that young Joseph had picked while out in the swamp.

  Though Betty Mitchell had few material wants, her life was not a placid one. A.N. loved his family but he was not the easiest man to please or be married to. Betty worked hard to put across the image of a perfect family, as her neighbors’ impressions were important to her—her own father had been a bit of a ne’er-do-well—and to her husband, given their position in the community. Her granddaughter suggested that “she must have had a pretty hard life, raising six children, close in age, with a distant, silent husband who was destined from childhood to be as obsessed by work as she was destined to be insecure about what would happen next.”

  Still, she had more than enough spirit to challenge her husband, if need be—as is evident from an anecdote Mitchell enjoyed telling friends. Sunday was supposed to be a day of rest, church, and a big dinner. At certain times of the year, however, A.N. spent part of his Sunday on the telephone to Texas—long-distance, that is, when such calls were a nearly unheard-of extravagance—talking to fellow cotton dealers about market conditions. Midday one Sunday, the family was gathered at the table, ready for the meal, but waited and waited while A.N. carried on his business. The children saw their mother becoming increasingly irritated with her husband’s priorities. At last he joined them in the dining room. As he did, Betty said sharply, in what would be as close as she would come to reproaching him in front of others, “Averette, did your ox fall in the ditch?”

  As a girl, Betty likely didn’t venture beyond the county line much more than young Averette Mitchell had. Yet as the first person on either side of Joseph Mitchell’s family to attend college, she had a much more visceral sense of the world than her husband did, at least until business caused him to travel occasionally. According to her grandson Jack Mitchell, Betty subscribed to dozens of magazines and devoured them, and she always had them around the house for her children—especially Joseph—to devour, as well. Thanks to her formal education, Betty also had a highly developed cultural appreciation, and she particularly loved books. She ingrained in her first child a passion for reading and a taste for literary variety. Joseph read constantly; even when he was “doing his homework,” he often had a novel slipped inside the textbook, taking pains not to let his father see it. Betty ensured that once Joseph outgrew children’s books he became familiar with Mark Twain (who would remain a lifelong favorite) and the action stories of Jack London. As an adolescent reader, Joseph was particularly enamored of Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, a romantic and popular recounting of a young man’s adventures in the American West. While it’s doubtful that Betty Mitchell’s intent was to plant the notion that her son’s future lay elsewhere, she wanted him to know there was life beyond the fields and swamps of Fairmont, North Carolina.

  Though A.N. didn’t travel all that often—he didn’t enjoy it much, frankly—when he did he sometimes took family along. As a boy, Joseph, unlike most of his Fairmont friends, was exposed to the excitements of actual cities—Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, and beyond—and these excursions were thrilling to him. For a lad already transported by literature, one of the highlights was visiting honest-to-goodness bookstores. (Mitchell specifically recalled buying copies of Winesburg, Ohio and Madame Bovary during one visit.) But one trip easily trumped all the others: the time A.N. took Joseph with him to New York City. The boy was all of ten years old, and the impact of that journey on Joseph Mitchell, who later in life would chronicle the great metropolis like few others, was never doubted by his family. According to Mitchell lore, the first time he saw the skyscrapers and hurly-burly of Gotham, Joseph declared to his father, “This is for me.”

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  That trip also would have marked one of Joseph’s earliest opportunities to see firsthand the divergent social structures of North and South. While discrimination was a fact of life in both regions, it was fixed in Southern law and woven throughout Southern life. On the other hand, everyday interaction between whites and blacks was much more routine and natural in the South than in the North, where often the races were physically segregated from each other. Certainly Joseph had the typical Southern farm child’s exposure to, and familiarity with, people of color. He was at ease with them because he literally grew up with them.

  But for anyone living in Robeson County just after the turn of the century, there was an a
dditional element in his or her racial consciousness—the population of Native Americans. In fact, the county traditionally had been divided into roughly one-third of each group. Many of the Native Americans were members of the Lumbee tribe. For the most part they lived along the Lumber River, which in its meandering from northwest to southeast roughly bisects Robeson County. Post-emancipation, the three groups coexisted uneasily at best. Blacks faced the same kinds of discrimination that their brothers and sisters did throughout the South; in fact, some chroniclers of the civil-rights movement consider the prejudice rooted around Robeson County to have been among the most virulent in the nation. And as for the Lumbees, well, in the eyes of many whites they were inferior even to blacks. The upshot is that Joseph Mitchell, while completely comfortable interacting with all his neighbors, witnessed what it was like for many of them to live as second-class, or even third-class, citizens.

  Born into a family that had farmed North Carolina’s coastal plain for well over a century, Joseph knew from an early age that his ancestors included slaveholders; later in life he would discover that his Nance forebears might have owned as many as one hundred. But whenever the inquisitive boy raised the subject, he found it was not one A.N. was especially interested in discussing. Mitchell would recall the “irritation in his voice” while rebuffing his son’s curiosity. Of course, this was not an uncommon reticence, or even one confined to whites. When Mitchell was getting acquainted with George Hunter, the African American son of an escaped slave and the protagonist of Mitchell’s 1956 story “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” the two men were talking about their respective family histories. Hunter asked Mitchell whether his family had owned slaves. He reluctantly acknowledged that they had. “Mr. Hunter,” he said, “I’ve thought about it a lot. It’s just all history. I can’t even visualize it. I’m sorry.” George Hunter said he understood. He told the writer that he often asked his mother to talk about her slave experiences as a girl in Virginia, but she was disinclined to rake up those memories. She would simply say, “Let the dead bury the dead.”

  It would be hard to find a more “Southern man” than A. N. Mitchell, circumspect and proud. A product of his times and temperaments, he fully embraced the planter’s lifestyle. Yet when it came to race, it seems his judgment of a person had much more to do with what he did and how he comported himself than with what ethnicity he happened to be. Part of this owed to A.N.’s being an unsentimental businessman who had various men of color working for him as tenant farmers and whose capabilities contributed to his own prosperity. A.N. knew well which farmers could be relied upon and which couldn’t, who warranted credit and who didn’t, who drank to excess and who didn’t, who respected his wife and who didn’t—and none of that had anything to do with skin color. But the consistency of A.N.’s outlook suggests it went beyond mere self-interest to a deeper level of tolerance. For instance, in an environment where whites routinely referred to blacks as “niggers,” A.N. and Betty considered this an offensive term. Mitchell related an episode that occurred when he was small and accompanying his father to a country store. A drunken white man in the store was carrying on at length about “niggers.” On their way home, A.N. became increasingly upset about the man’s tirade, and he reinforced his objection to that “ugly way of talking.” He told Joseph, “I never heard my own father use the word nigger and I never heard my own mother use it, and you never heard me use it, and you certainly never heard your mother use it, and don’t you ever let me hear you use it.”

  Nor was A.N. enamored of the Ku Klux Klan vigilantes then spreading fear in the Carolinas. “I’m not in favor of people taking the law in their own hands,” he said. This attitude indirectly led to one of Mitchell’s better-known early contributions to The New Yorker: “The Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County,” a short story he wrote in 1939 during his first year at the magazine. Mitchell’s fictional Black Ankle County is a sparsely populated North Carolina region of cotton fields, tobacco barns, plain white churches, moonshine stills, slow-moving rivers—not to mention the gooey, tarry flats that give the county its name. It’s a place, in other words, much like Mitchell’s native Robeson County. (Not far from Fairmont, in fact, is an actual swamp known as Black Ankle, one of many interconnected swamps that permeate the county.)

  “Downfall of Fascism” is a comic telling of the brief history of the local Klan chapter. The group is populated exclusively by local eccentrics, no-accounts, and drunks, headed up by one Mr. Catfish Giddy, who leads his sheet-wearing cohorts on B-grade night rides and cross burnings more as an excuse to get out of the house than to provoke real terror. They are finally brought to heel when the three moonshine-manufacturing Kidney brothers, having been tipped off to the fact that they are to be targeted, lie in wait for the Klansmen—and in their own state of inebriation set off dynamite charges so fearsome that they rattle half the county. No one is actually hurt, but the next day a clearly shaken Mr. Giddy, having contemplated the fate he narrowly escaped, tells everyone he encounters, “Friend, I have resigned.” Resigned from what? they ask. “Don’t make no difference what I resigned from,” Mr. Giddy replies. “I just want you to know I resigned.”

  What Mitchell’s readers could not have known is that “Downfall” was based on one frightening evening the writer himself experienced, probably when he was the same age—about fifteen—as his narrator in the story. According to family accounts, Klansmen had made it known around the county that they were going to stage a ride to the Mitchell home after A.N. had refused their request to use his cotton warehouse for a meeting. Taking the threat seriously, A.N. readied himself with a shotgun—and likewise armed Joseph and his younger brother Jack. They sat on the front porch and waited into the evening. At last the sheet-wearing riders materialized from out of the darkness. As they neared the house, A.N. calmly stood, raised his gun, and fired a blast over their heads. The Klansmen retreated, and that was the end of the trouble.

  It doesn’t take much imagination to appreciate what an indelibly terrifying experience that must have been for a teenage boy. But the episode provided Joseph Mitchell with more than fodder for a good story. It reinforced a notion about tolerance, not to mention about right and wrong, that he repeatedly saw in the example of his parents. Due in great part to their enlightened perspectives, Mitchell developed his own acute sense of social justice and a deep appreciation for the underdog—values that went on to inform a lifetime of storytelling.

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  Considering how small and out of the way Fairmont was—think Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, if Mayberry had slave descendants, Native Americans, tenant farmers, and tobacco—it’s hardly surprising that some of Mitchell’s most vivid childhood memories centered on the annual arrival of the traveling circus. This highly anticipated event was a commotion of lights, foods, music, and people quite different—including exotic gypsies and sideshow acts—from those he was exposed to the other fifty-one weeks of the year. “They were just little one-ring circuses, you know,” he would recall. “There’d be an elephant and a camel and a half dozen other animals—that would be enough for Fairmont. It was just a little town. But that was such an exciting time. They’d be playing those ‘race records,’ don’t you know, and those fish cafés would be open just about all night. My God, you never saw such a time.” Then he added slyly: “Course, the rest of the year was pretty dull.”

  In fact, about the only other excitement sleepy Fairmont experienced coincided with the tobacco auctions. On these days, when the corporate buyers converged on the town to assess and bid on that year’s crops, Fairmont took on a charged atmosphere that was a bit like the circus in miniature. Mitchell’s daughter Nora called the auction days of Joseph’s youth “a veritable carnival, with medicine men and blues singers and entertainment and scam artists of every kind.” People of all classes and colors crowded the town, mingling and gorging themselves on fried foods, grilled meat, and sweet, succulent melons. More than a business, the auction was an entertainment—a fact hardly lost
on Mitchell. “My father was very proud of running a tobacco warehouse,” he said. “The kid whose father was an auctioneer, Christ, your father could be the ringmaster in the circus and he wouldn’t be any better. He was in show business.”

  Credit 2.4

  Tobacco farmers bring their product to market in Fairmont, just after the turn of the century.

  Of course, in Mitchell’s culture, raucous Saturday nights inevitably gave way to sober Sunday mornings. Like the majority of their neighbors, generations of Mitchells were raised as Southern Baptists. But with her deep Scots roots, Betty was an observant Presbyterian. Thus, when the family headed off for Sunday services, Betty went to her church with her daughters, and A.N. took the boys to the main establishment in town, the First Baptist Church. Joseph publicly professed his Christian belief in the fall of 1923, at age fifteen, and was baptized. But what he seems to have most carried away from those early religious experiences, as animatedly practiced in the rural South early in the century, was the fear and the trauma they could, and indeed were intended to, provoke.