A Turn in the South

by V. S. Naipaul

  “I guess it’s just a part of your life. For instance, today, if I’m walking down the street and if some white man tries to panhandle, I ignore him. But if it’s a black, I stop and talk with him, to see if he really needs help or if he’s trying to get a drink. I think a lot of the blacks—the ones I know intimately—understand this about me. But to the other blacks I’m just a honkie, the enemy, the archdemon personified. And I’m perfectly willing to admit they have some reason for not liking whites.

  “It is really difficult to get a black person to sit down here.” He gestured towards his settee, placed against the wall of his single house, next to the door, with, on the other side of the door, the two sea chests from Barbados, which had come into his family in 1685 and were the mark of his Charleston aristocracy, the mark of the colonial ancestor from Barbados. “Difficult to get a black person to sit down and talk to me. They don’t say what they feel. They don’t trust the white people. The Uncle Toms—there’s no truth in them. In 1952 I was assigned to cover all the counties in the lower part of the state and find out how the Negroes were going to vote. The 1952 election was the first one in which Negroes were going to vote in some number. In Beaufort County, down the coast, I was amazed myself. The Republican Party was the party of Lincoln. But I found, after talking to about a hundred blacks, that they were all going to vote Democratic. I turned in a story to that effect, and my editor, who had a lot of Uncle Tom friends, refused to believe it.”

  I asked Jack Leland whether he took an interest in the affairs of the Caribbean islands, and whether this to some extent affected his view of American blacks.

  He said, “Well, look what happened in Santo Domingo. That island was divided into two parts, Haiti on one side and the Dominican Republic on the other. In Haiti they killed all the white people. And when you go to Santo Domingo there is the difference between night and day. The Dominican Republic has a stable economy. The Haitians are starving. I had it tremendously impressed on me when I was on that ship—and we went to the Dominican Republic and we were loading bananas. I met some English people, and they took me over to Haiti. It was like the difference between night and day. I hate to think it’s because there’s no white connection in Haiti and there is in the Dominican Republic. But somewhere along the line something went wrong. And when I look at what’s happening in Africa today—I don’t think my point of view gets any hearing. The American people have closed their minds to thoughts like that. They think globally. They’ve turned their thoughts to one world, one people. It’s unpractical, unfeasible. I don’t think the way a native of Nigeria thinks, and he doesn’t think the way I think. We are different people.”

  I was aware the first day we had met that Jack Leland had a bad leg. The third or fourth time we met he seemed to be in especial discomfort, and I asked him about his leg. He said he had damaged both legs in North Africa, in February 1943. He had gone on a bombing run over Sicily, and the last bomb had stuck in the rack. Orders had been given to the returning crew to jump, and he had jumped; it was the first time he had ever used a parachute. He had landed on a rock and had torn the ligaments of both ankles; it had taken him two and a half months to recover. An irony was that the pilot who had given the orders to jump had managed to land the plane without accident.

  That was how the war had gone for him. Yet he had spoken of the war as a time of learning and adventure; he had never referred to this lasting damage until I had asked. It was like an aspect of his training, his fine manners, his “Sir?” when he hadn’t quite caught what I had said: the manners that were part of the South’s idea of itself.

  “IT’S MORE like religion,” the upper-class woman from Mississippi had said, speaking of a certain attitude in her family (and other Mississippi families like hers) to the Civil War and the past; and the old family houses; and the dressing up in period costume on some days, when the houses were shown. Not a masque, not vanity: more like religion. And in Charleston too there came to one that idea of the past as religion.

  It wasn’t only the old houses and the old families, the old names, the antiquarian side of provincial or state history. It was also the past as a wound: the past of which the dead or alienated plantations spoke, many of them still with physical mementoes of the old days, the houses, the dependencies, the oak avenues. The past of which the more-black-than-white city now spoke, the past of slavery and the Civil War.

  Not a day had passed since I had come to the South without my reading in the newspapers about General Sherman, or hearing about him on television. And—in that newspaper or television way, when a well-known name is to be stressed, ironically or otherwise—he was often given his full name, with the strange American Indian middle one: William Tecumseh Sherman.

  Charleston had survived the war. Columbia, the state capital, hadn’t. It had been burned by Sherman in 1865. It was of that burning that the elderly lady, a guide to the cathedral near the State House in Columbia, spoke to me; and she spoke as though it had happened quite recently. And perhaps Hannibal had been remembered in Italy and Rome in a similar way a hundred years after he had passed. The cathedral was one of the few things in Columbia that hadn’t been burned by Sherman, the lady said. And this might have been because he thought it was Roman Catholic; Sherman’s wife was Catholic. And towards the end of the tour, when we were talking of the stained glass (so fragile in a city about to be razed), she broke off and said, as though offering thanks again, “It’s a miracle the cathedral wasn’t burned.”

  I had read about the burning of Columbia. But the fact wasn’t at the front of my mind that afternoon. And this talk of burning—from an elderly lady, in the cathedral—made a fearful impression. I hadn’t been looking for the cathedral. I had gone in after noticing the graveyard. I was on my way to the State House grounds to look at the Confederate Memorial. I had been directed to that by a judge I had come to see. He had said that the inscription of the memorial was something that should be studied. It was poetic and contained much of the Souths idea of itself.

  On one side of the monument was engraved: To South Carolina’s dead of the Confederate Army 1861–1865. On another side it said: Erected by the Women of South Carolina. Unveiled May 13, 1879. There was rhetoric in that reference to women; monuments of grief and revenge, or grief and piety, are most unsettling when they depict women bowed in grief.

  On the other side facing the busy road the monument read: This monument perpetuates the memory of those who, true to the instincts of their birth, faithful to the teachings of their fathers, constant in their love for the state, died in the performance of their duty: who have glorified a fallen cause by the simple manhood of their lives, the patient endurance of suffering, and the heroism of death, and who, in the dark hours of imprisonment, in the hopelessness of the hospital, in the short, sharp agony of the field, found support and consolation in the belief that at home they would not be forgotten.

  On the other side, facing the State House, and read with difficulty from an oblique angle if one didn’t want to walk on the grass at the monument’s back, there was this: Let the stranger who may in future times read this inscription recognize that these were men whom power could not corrupt, whom death could not terrify, whom defeat could not dishonor, and let their virtues plead for just judgment of the cause in which they perished. Let the South Carolinians of another generation remember that the state taught them how to live and how to die. And that from her broken fortunes she preserved for her children the priceless treasure of their memories, teaching all who may claim the same birthright that truth, courage and patriotism endure forever.

  On one side: birth, faith, duty, suffering, and death. On the other side: the nameless, undefined cause, ennobled by these virtues. The words are grand, nevertheless. The pain of defeat is something that can be shared by everyone, since everyone at some stage in his life knows defeat of some sort and hopes in his heart to undo it, or at least to have his cause correctly seen. But the pain of the Confederate Memorial is very great; the d
efeat it speaks of is complete. Defeat like this leads to religion. It can be religion: the crucifixion, as eternal a grief for Christians as, for the Shias of Islam, the death of Ali and his sons. Grief and the conviction of a just cause; defeat going against every idea of morality, every idea of the good story, the right story, the way it should have been: the tears of the Confederate Memorial are close to religion, the helpless grief and rage (such as the Shias know) about an injustice that cannot be rehearsed too often.

  And there was more of that in this central square of South Carolina, the state that had started the war: more pain, more humiliation, more exposing of a wrong that was one day to be undone. On the lower granite steps there was a life-size bronze statue of George Washington. This plaque had been affixed: During the occupation of Columbia by Sherman’s army February 17–19, 1865, soldiers brickbatted this statue and broke off the lower part of the walking cane. The cane had been left hanging in the air. On the pillar at the foot of the steps was another plaque: Construction of this State House was begun in 1855 and continued uninterruptedly to February 71, 1865, when Sherman burned Columbia. Work was resumed in 1867 and carried on irregularly to 1900.

  The Confederate Memorial, the one erected by the women of South Carolina, had been put up in 1879; when the Northern occupation army had been removed and the state had been redeemed from Reconstruction. The State House plaque, with all its grief about Sherman and the burning, had been put up more than twenty years later, when the world had changed even more. There was evidence of this change right there: the other memorial in the paved forecourt of the State House was a jaunty one, a celebration of the Spanish-American War of 1898, with a Kiplingesque inscription.

  It was as though the grief of the Confederate Memorial had found its expiation in the jauntiness of the other memorial; as though the unmentioned Southern cause had lived on and found justification in the later imperialist war; as though the unmentioned racial anguish of the period after the Civil War, the later hardness towards blacks, had become incorporated into something a good deal less squalid than the slave cabins with the very black and ragged slaves of South Carolina, had become incorporated, as some Southerners had said, into the wider cause of white civilization, spreading to Africa, Australia, and the East Indies.

  But the true past of the South was the thing that had been lost: the world before the war, and then the war itself. That grief was special and was like religion; it would last beyond the decline of the nineteenth-century empires, beyond the idea of empire itself. And, now that the memorial about the Spanish-American War was embarrassing, the episode itself hardly remembered, what remained moving in the State House grounds, what could still be felt to come from the heart, were the words of the Confederate Memorial. And there was still that difficulty about the cause.

  How could such a cause be defended?

  In the library of my Oxford college, one day in 1952, I came across a small book, privately printed, a gift to the college from the author, possibly an old American member of the college. The book, which had been printed in the 1920s, was about slavery. The author wished to clear up the misunderstandings the rest of the world had about American slavery. That was what the author said. But the little memoir he had settled down to write in his old age was about his childhood and the pleasures of his childhood. Slavery had been part of his childhood; his childhood could not be imagined separate from the background of slavery, and its special rituals. White children, the writer said, were often given slave children of their own age to play with and knock about. The writer said that he too had had his “own negro boy.” The fact that this had been so, that the writer had had his own slave boy, was offered as sufficient explanation of the practice.

  And something as simple and heartfelt as that was at the back of a beautiful, celebratory book, A Carolina Rice Plantation of the Fifties, published in New York in 1936 by William Morrow.

  The fifties of the title were the 1850s, before the Civil War, when the slave-worked plantations were still going concerns. The historical core of the book was a short memoir of that time by D. E. Huger Smith (Huger one of the old Charleston names with a special Charleston pronunciation: “ewe-gee,” just like the two letters “U” and “G”). To this had been added thirty water-color paintings—done seventy or eighty years later—by Alice R. Huger Smith; and a “Narrative”—really a historical essay—by Herbert Ravenel Sass (another old name, Sass a name of German origin, Ravenel pronounced in the French way and in Charleston in 1987 still a name seen on signboards).

  The water colors, of plantation scenes, were romantic: sometimes dealing with plantation work, black men in a work gang mending a broken embankment, women loading rice onto a flat plantation barge; sometimes atmospheric studies of water and forest; sometimes pure calendar (or “Soviet”) art, the planter and his wife (like father and mother in an illustration in a children’s book) moving white and gracious among the smiling blacks, with—in another picture—a little blonde girl receiving a bouquet from a black child.

  A big reproduction of the embankment-mending scene I was to see later in a Charleston restaurant, as something from the old days—and romantic, suitable for the tourist town. And the romance of the paintings was genuine. They hadn’t come from the 1850s, the slave time. If they had they might have been different—more topographical and descriptive, and for that reason upsetting. The paintings had been done by someone who (as she said in the foreword) wished to record a world that was vanishing; and they had been done by someone who had been born towards the end of the Reconstruction period—in the 1870s—when the vast plantation world, the ordering of so many millions of acres, had been turned upside down. Shame and anger at the Reconstruction, grief for the defeat, nostalgia for the world as it had been, or an idea of the past: all of that mingled—in these water colors—with the delight in brush and color and paper, delight in the natural world, the painter’s sense of her own delicacy.

  And there was something of that mood in Herbert Ravenel Sass’s essay. He too dealt in romance: the oak avenues, the beauty of the river onto which the plantation houses fronted; the organization of the great plantations; the technical skills connected with the flooding and draining of a tidal plantation; the self-containedness of each plantation, each almost a little state with its own lord, who had certain legal punishing rights over his subjects.

  It was that idea of the plantation state that no doubt made the writer see the Rice Coast as “in essence an attempt to recreate in America the classic Greek ideal of democracy.” And in a curiously written paragraph that makes no reference to Africans or slaves or black people, plantation slavery is incorporated into this Greek ideal as “the most complete ‘economic security’ ” ever offered certain people in America. “For this security, covering the whole period of their lives from babyhood to old age, a price was paid.” “A price”—that is the silent way in which, to preserve the idea of the classical world, slavery is referred to. And this “price,” the writer adds, was “perhaps not wholly excessive,” considering the people—again never mentioned—to whom this security was offered.

  But—when this Greek aspect was set aside—there was another way of talking about slavery. “For the South the slavery problem became the negro problem, and what in reality the Carolinian state strove against from 1831 to 1865 was a threatened ‘solution’ of the negro problem which would destroy them.” The state required slaves; without slaves it couldn’t get by; but the slaves threatened the state with extinction always. So the planter’s special way of life in the ricelands of Carolina became “white civilization”; that was the thing that had to be preserved.

  There was a torment in this way of reasoning, this unwillingness of educated men and religious men—and sensitive men—ever to say that what they were defending was simply the world they had known. And there is always the silence—the lack of reference to Negroes, the slave cabins below the oaks—when the plantation world becomes something nobler than itself, becomes something like the
Greek city-state. That had been the silence as well, fifty-seven years before, of the Confederate Memorial in Columbia; the virtues of the dead men ennobling the cause, the cause itself never defined. But how else, in 1879 or 1936, even at that time of high imperialism, could educated men defend slavery?

  I had come across the rice-plantation book in the collection of a lady with a famous name. She lived with unusual simplicity in an old house in Charleston, with a piazza (Charleston for “porch” or “veranda”) looking out onto a green yard shaded by an old oak, a yard neither ordered nor overgrown. At the boundary of the plot (or beyond the fence) there was the windowless back of the neighboring house. This was the Charleston style, the piazza at the side, for privacy. But the house next door rocked with a radio; no protection against that.

  And it was there, on that piazza, where the furniture was simple, weather-hardened, with ingrained dust (the breeze in Charleston, Jack Leland told me, was from the south or the west, and that was where people placed their piazzas, to catch the breeze), it was there that, through the courtesy of the lady, I met the son of the man who had written the “Narrative” for the plantation book of fifty years before.

  Marion Sass was in his fifties, tall, thin, stooped, excessively wrapped up for this hot Charleston afternoon: a brown tweed jacket worn without stylishness over a pullover. He had small, sad blue eyes in a thin, gentle face. He didn’t want to sit with his back to the breeze; he sat with his back to the wall of the house. The air was full of pollen. My own eyes were heavy; I felt a cough building up; and, like Marion Sass, I was wearing a jacket. And on the sagging floor of the piazza, facing the unkempt garden or yard, almost as on a stage set of a play about the South, and in the sound of the next-door radio, we talked.