A Turn in the South

by V. S. Naipaul

  But the story I carried in my consciousness was wrong in one detail. The ragged boy, born a slave, who had walked many days and nights to a particular school in order to be educated there, had been asked first of all not to make up a bed, but to sweep a room. The boy had swept the room four times. The woman who had set the test hadn’t then simply said, “All right. You pass.” She had run her fingers over the walls and floor, to check. The boy had judged rightly, after all. He had done the deceptively simple task very well; and in this way he had won over yet another potential tormentor, and turned her into an ally on his magical journey.

  There was a reason why, in my memory, the story had changed from sweeping a room to making up a bed. Beds were important to the slave boy. In the one-room slave cabin, also the farm cookhouse, where he had lived with his mother, the boy had slept in rags on the earth floor; and when, in his rise, he was first presented with a made-up bed, he didn’t know how to use it. He didn’t know whether he had to sleep on both sheets or between them or below both of them. (I would have been sympathetic to that predicament, having at the age of eighteen moved to temperate England from tropical Trinidad, where we made beds in our own way: one sheet spread on the bed, another sheet or blanket folded, to be used as a loose cover during the night if it was needed. I might even have transferred an early personal embarrassment to my memory of the book.) And in the school he had later established at Tuskegee in Alabama for people who, like him, were not far out of slavery, Booker T. Washington was concerned to teach his students how to use beds, and concerned in a more general way to teach good domestic manners as he had grown to understand them.

  A moving story, and a fabulous one: the boy who had slept on the floor of a slave cabin had become one of the most famous Americans of his day, had dined with the president, and had never ceased to serve the cause of his people. It is easy to see how Up from Slavery could have worked on a self-made man like Andrew Carnegie and drawn great sums of money from him for the school at Tuskegee.

  At the same time the very fabulousness of the Booker T. Washington story had made it seem separate from the grimmer aspects of the Southern or American racial issue people wrote about in books and newspapers. What had the great fame of the man served? What had happened to the great achievement? And so the book had receded, leaving only a memory of the bed-making test (which in my mind ran together with the story of the middle-aged Tolstoy, in a peasant phase, wishing to make up his own bed). And then its very title had been undermined by the William Buckley parody title, Up from Liberalism.

  It was only when I began to plan this journey, and had been given the idea of Tuskegee, that the book became real again for me. It became especially real when I went to see Al Murray in his apartment in Harlem.

  Al Murray was the first person educated at Tuskegee whom I had met and spoken to about it. He it was who began to give me some idea of the grandeur and complexity (and anguishes) of Booker T. Washington; gave racial attributes to the neutral fairy-tale figure—the slave boy’s father might have been a white man; and fitted him into historical time. When the school had begun in 1881, as a simple trades school, black men had the vote, and the school had been given some small subsidy by the state of Alabama. Twenty years later, when Up from Slavery was published, black men had been virtually disenfranchised in the South. It was against this background, of increasing legal disabilities, that Booker T. Washington had built up his school. What would have been hard enough in a time of stability had been made much harder, with the walls of prejudice, segregation, and humiliation constantly shifting, closing in. Booker T. Washington did what he did, Al said, because he understood the way capitalist America worked; he knew how to present himself to that side of America. What was important to remember was that Booker T. Washington was a nineteenth-century American, the counterpart of the Carnegies and others whose wealth he tapped.

  Al Murray’s admiration for his university and its founder made the old black-and-white photographs that he showed me, in the two volumes of Louis R. Harlan’s biography, especially moving: the stately photographs of Booker T. Washington; the formally dressed young blacks, men and women, doing domestic work and agricultural work which, just a few years before, would have been slaves’ work, but which was now (like their teacher’s own room-sweeping test) a step to better things.

  It was to a special kind of romance, then, that I was traveling when I left Tallahassee and its drugged, asthma-inducing pollens, and made for Alabama and Tuskegee—going up through the plains of Georgia and then through the extensive flat neon confusion of the camp-following town of Columbus, Georgia: sex shows and pawnshops and fast food restaurants; crossing from that into quiet, rural, seemingly left-behind Alabama.

  Tuskegee became a name on the highway boards; became the name of a forest—speaking then of a pre-1830, preplantation, Indian past, giving another association to the unusual name; and then at last became the name of a town.

  I was expecting a town like some of those on the way. This was smaller, shabbier: small eating places, few of the great fast-food names (I missed the tall, bright, competitive signs, roadside commerce’s equivalent of the joust and the pennants of chivalry), grimy garages, small grocery shops—a place still poor, hardly the setting for the great man’s success story. But then came the campus, and it was grander than anything I, and I am sure my father, had imagined. My father, reading self-help books in Trinidad, no doubt compared himself to poor boys who had become engineers and bridge-builders in industrial England; and though my father might have found aspects of his own story in the beginnings of Booker T. Washington, a man’s possibilities depend on the possibilities of the place where he finds himself. There was nothing slavelike or Trinidad-like about Tuskegee; nothing to be excused. However little one had known about it, it was real, and it was achievement on the American scale: scores and scores of dark-red Georgian brick buildings set about landscaped hilly grounds.

  “You should understand,” a very old lady said to me some days later, and she had spent almost all her working life at Tuskegee, “that until the 1930s Negroes in the United States simply did not have money.”

  And the effect on me of the first sight of the campus must have been like the effect on people who had seen it in the days of segregation, when it would have represented one of the few ways forward for a black person, and when to people who had little it would have appeared dreamlike.

  Al Murray had booked me into the university guest house. It was called Dorothy Hall. It had been built in 1901 as an industrial school for girls. It was almost at the center of the campus now, across the road from the big bronze statue of Booker T. Washington lifting the veil of ignorance from his people.

  It was a famous statue, and was the subject of Tuskegee postcards. I half knew it, but was nonetheless surprised by it. The sculptor had made concrete what was really only a turn of phrase, a metaphor. Booker T. Washington, in a three-piece suit, was shown literally lifting a sheet off a crouching, muscular young black who had an old-fashioned folio book on his knees: figures and properties so unexpected when taken together that they made one wonder how long the muscular black fellow, naked except for the sheet that was now being pulled off him, had been hiding with his big book below the sheet, and why he had stayed there, and why he had needed Booker T. Washington to display him like a conjuror.

  But a black man I had spoken to two or three weeks before had found the statue very affecting when he had been taken to Tuskegee as a schoolboy. “Perhaps you have to be black,” he had said. And I was willing, at that moment of arrival, to see with his eyes of forty or so years before.

  Still, there it was, rhetorical and a little nagging, ever so slightly working against the romance. I will let no man drag me down so low as to make me hate him. The engraved words of another age, the philosophy of helplessness—as were these other words, also engraved at the base of the statue: We shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify labor and put brains and skill into the common o
ccupations of life. The philosophy of a man working against the odds, combining uplift with a wish not to offend. Yet—it had resulted in a great achievement.

  I turned away from the statue and went to the entrance of Dorothy Hall. I saw that the windows were unrepaired and needed painting. One screen frame on an upper window was hanging loose. The beautiful dark-red brick of the old building was in need of repointing. These were bricks that the early students of Tuskegee had made with their own hands, after three heartbreaking failures with kilns.

  The building faced west. It was late afternoon and very hot. I asked whether there was an elevator, to help me with my luggage to the upper floor. I was told that the building was old and the elevator no longer worked. By the time I had taken my luggage up, making three trips up and down the hot steps and through the very hot upstairs hall to my room, my lungs were inflamed again. And the constriction there was to be with me all the time I was at Tuskegee.

  The colors in the hot paneled club upstairs were like the colors of a gentlemen’s club. There was an oil portrait of a white military man; and on the landing wall there was a photograph of Teddy Roosevelt. Dorothy Hall had been built in 1901; Up from Slavery had been published in 1901; and in that year Booker T. Washington had dined with Teddy Roosevelt at the White House. Old history, old dignities, old battles. And I was later told that many famous Americans had stayed at one time or another at Dorothy Hall.

  Almost at the end of my time there, I found out where the elevator was. The person who showed me was one of the oldest men on the campus. He was, or had been, a musician. He had come to Tuskegee as a boy of fourteen in 1913, when Booker T. Washington was still alive; and he had taken part in the funeral procession of Booker T. Washington in 1915. The old musician was very famous locally, and many people I met thought I should see him. He was out of town when I arrived, but he sent word he was going to come to see me at Dorothy Hall on a certain day at twelve o’clock; and he was there absolutely at the time he had given. He was proud of keeping time. It was part of the Booker T. Washington tradition, he said. And his stories—he started on them immediately—were of that old, romantic time.

  “It was like heaven when I got here in 1913. I’d never seen anything like it. I ran away from home and arrived here with a dollar and a half in my pocket. But Booker T. Washington didn’t turn anybody away from this school.”

  The old musician was dressed artistically: pink shirt, blue tie, light-green check jacket. He was tall and straight and proud, at eighty-eight, of the erectness of his carriage. That was another part of the Booker T. Washington training. Clean clothes, erect posture, firm strides: no old-time shambling. That was the way Booker T. Washington wanted it. Everything had to be just so; everything had to be clean. Every day Booker T. Washington walked around the campus dictating notes to a secretary about things that were wrong.

  The old musician came from a small town in Alabama, about 150 miles north of Tuskegee. “My father was a common laborer. My mother’s family looked like white people and had some education.” The old man opened his pink shirt to show the pale color of his skin. “Many white people up there referred to my mother’s family as cousins. I came here just with my trousers and bag and no schooling. An old slave here, a Mr. Baker, he told me that if the people caught a slave learning how to write they would saw this”—the old man wiggled his right thumb—“they would saw that off, because if the slave could write he could write himself a pass to get off the plantation. Slaves weren’t allowed to leave their plantation without permission. That was what Mr. Baker saw as a young man.

  “All that my father could teach me as his oldest child—there was nothing wrong with it, but it didn’t go far enough. This was what he taught me. Don’t talk back to old people. Don’t be sassy. Stay out of bad company. And help Papa take care of the family. All that was good, but it didn’t go far enough. My mother’s brother went to Talladega College. White people started that—the American Missionary Society, organized by white people to start schools in the South for freedmen. Tuskegee was different. After emancipation we could vote here. Black people. Some local politician wanted our vote, and Mr. Adams told him that ‘If you could help us get a school, I think I can get all the colored people to vote for you.’ So people in this county voted for this white man, and the state gave two thousand dollars to start this school.

  “Up there in my hometown I paid a schoolteacher fifty cents a month to teach me reading and writing and arithmetic. Professor Moses had his school on the west side of town. Professor Carmichael had his school on the south side. I lived on the south side. My dad didn’t know it, though—that I was paying fifty cents a month to Professor Carmichael. I was shining shoes. My father used to empty the coal out of the railroad train. Four o’clock in the morning. A dollar a day.

  “When I came here and saw all these buildings, and the dining hall, and the tablecloths, fourteen students to a table, girls on one side, boys on the other, it was like heaven—I’d never seen anything like it. The old chapel! We had grown people coming here. They would walk here, wanting to learn how to read and write. Booker T. would get jobs for these old people, jobs from white people in the town, to work in the day, so that they could study at night and pay their board.”

  He loved the past, this dandified, good-natured man of eighty-eight. He was energetic and full of enthusiasm; he still drove his car. He drove me to see the site of the very first schoolhouse. “You mean no one has taken you to see that yet?” And then he was determined to get me back to Dorothy Hall at the time he had said. It was when we got back to Dorothy Hall that he showed me the little elevator there, and told me the story about it.

  Henry Ford had come to Tuskegee in 1941, when the George Washington Carver Museum was opened. Carver, the Tuskegee agricultural scientist, was then perhaps eighty. Henry Ford had been so shocked to see the old man tottering up the Dorothy Hall staircase that he had then and there made an offer of an elevator. Now the elevator was out of order and out of sight; and the old musician, older now than George Washington Carver had been in 1941, had to climb the difficult stairs.

  THAT MENTION of George Washington Carver dislodged old memories, memories akin to those I had of the Booker T. Washington bed-making test.

  Most of the teachers at the elementary school I went to in Trinidad were black. They were quiet people in the main, one or two fierce only with the whip; and at a time when the world offered them little they had their quiet ways of making racial gestures. A class question might be like this: Who is the world’s greatest cricketer? If you said Bradman—the Australian—that might be wrong. A better answer, perhaps even the correct one, would have been Headley, the black Jamaican, or Constantine, the black Trinidadian.

  The name of George Washington Carver was associated in my mind with that elementary school, and the subterranean racial pride of the black teachers. I remember a little film that must have been shown one day during class hours: a frightened black family in a hut, white horsemen outside. I wasn’t sure what the story was: the memory of the film is faint. With this film there was a lesson about George Washington Carver, a black scientific genius, who had done wonderful things with the common peanut, and found uses for every part except the shell or hull.

  The wonderful things he had done with the peanut I took on trust. But his inability to use the peanut shell had always interested me. Why—since bamboo pulp could be used for paper—hadn’t the peanut shell been used for paper? It seemed to me to have the texture of bamboo pith (I was thinking of very rotten bamboo). And the question was there, the George Washington Carver association—why hadn’t something been done with the shell?—every time I shelled a peanut. Just as the Booker T. Washington story was associated with the making up of beds.

  But—no doubt because of the path my studies had taken—I had never heard of George Washington Carver in the wider world. I had never heard of him outside that elementary school of mine; and I had grown to feel, not that he was a black fantasy figure, but
that he was someone whose achievements had been exaggerated by local pride, just as the Trinidad Guardian exaggerated the doings of local people in metropolitan places.

  I had never associated George Washington Carver with Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee. And now they were both there, both real, in a wonderful physical setting, with a whole museum named after George Washington Carver. It was in 1941 that the museum had been opened; in 1941 that Henry Ford had come and made the offer of the elevator; and that would almost certainly have been the year in which, in my elementary school in Trinidad, when I was eight or nine, I had seen the frightening film (probably provided by the American consul) about the black family in a hut and the white horsemen outside.

  All now cleared up, as I read the leaflets of the U.S. National Park Service, which had taken over both the Carver Museum and the Booker T. Washington house as historical sites. He had been born a slave, this George, and he had belonged to a man called Carver. He had been born in 1861, perhaps, during the Civil War; and he had been kidnapped, together with his mother, by people who kidnapped slaves in one state and sold them in another. George had been recovered from the kidnappers and returned to the Carvers, but George’s mother was never found. George educated himself. In 1897 he came to Tuskegee, and there he stayed for the rest of his life.

  In addition to his agricultural research, he collected clays for paints; painted pictures; did needlework. He taught Sunday school. He had a high, feminine voice. In the museum there was a recording you could listen to of Carver reciting what was said to be his favorite poem:

  Figure it out for yourself, my lad.

  You’ve all that the greatest of men have had:

  Two arms, two hands, two legs, two eyes,

  And a brain to use if you would be wise.

  Photographs showed him to be tall and thin, spare-faced, handsome, unusual.