It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future

by Saul Bellow

  Between the new and the old Shawneetowns there is a deep rivalry; the two factions express pity and contempt for each other. Old Shawneetowners tell of many who are held against their will up there, people whose children prevent their return. Some have moved back from the new town, bored by its newness and aridity. Nothing is happening up there. Sensible new Shawneetowners reply, as a fine portly woman with spreading short blond hair did, “If they want to degenerate down there and play hero”—a strange combination of terms—“that’s their own fool business. I have cleaned house after floods too many times. And if you saw what it looked like after the water has been in it! Six inches of silt on the carpets, and just like a swamp. I sat down and cried.”

  In old Shawneetown a retired railroad man whom I met on the levee said that his wife was old enough to recall how the victims of ’84 were laid in rows on the sitting room floor. “Right in here,” he said, and showed me the red, ancient house. It had belonged to the first president of Shawneetown’s bank, the very bank that had refused Chicago’s request for a loan.

  “We live here in the summer now,” the railroad man explained. “This here is our little grandboy. We raised him up ourselves.” And raised him all too well, I should have said, for at the age of eight he must have weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds. He looked at me with precocious significance, as if the manitou of this place had entered his fat little body.

  The trodden earth of the levee makes you feel safe. Below, the river is fire blue. The summery Kentucky shore is green. The banks look supple and full as they decline toward the water. A new bridge of orange steel hangs in the air. The child says, “Three guys fell off it and got kilt.”

  “Oh, mercy.” His grandfather laughs. “Only one was, because he hit a barge. The others went into the water and was saved. Three falling is not bad for as big a bridge as this one is.”

  From this old man I heard the first sensible explanation of the stubbornness of the old Shawneetowners. He said, “When you have grown up here and see the river every day of your life, it isn’t so easy to move away and do without. And especially only a few miles away.”

  Between the Ohio and the Mississippi, Egypt lies low and hollow. Its streams are sluggish, old, swampy, and varicose. Spring floods bring fresh topsoil to many areas, and the corn is thick. Toward Cairo the farmers make good cotton crops. We are here farther to the south than Richmond, Virginia. To a Northern nose, the air is slightly malarial. People’s faces and their postures are Southern, and you begin to see things for which no preparation is possible. A young Negro woman, her head tied up in a handkerchief, drives by in a maroon convertible; on her shoulder sits a bull terrier. That is a pleasant thing to see and all the better because of the slight start it gives you. In a river town, a place whitened by the local lime-burning, is a small bar and restaurant. You enter on a calm Sunday afternoon and see what appears to be a clan of working people eating and drinking. Anyone who wants beer may work the pulls for himself. Sliced bread and ham are on the bar, and a woman is drinking beer while her baby nurses. North of Vandalia you are not likely to see a child at breast. And yet this is a sight which has no business to be remarkable.

  On a road in Egypt a warm wind was booming across the flashing sky and turning the white clouds round, the corn leaves were streaming, and I saw a roadside marker that read Old Slave House. An arrow pointed, as roadside arrows sometimes will, skyward. It said Equality. Two spring-breaking and stone-embedded ruts under low willow branches led finally up to a bald hill on which a corn crop sadly petered out in gullies, ashes, old flivver bodies, and various cast-iron relics. On the summit of the hill stood the old mansion or slave house, once the property of John Crenshaw: a brown structure, formerly white.

  Because you know it is a slave house it looks evil, dangerous; it also looks trashy; its brown color is disheartening. The evil is remote because slavery is dead. A sort of safe thrill passes through the liberal heart. But then, the evil is not altogether remote, because nothing has been done to make the house historic. There are no exhibits in glass cases. In a great vacant room, the slaves’s shackles lie on the linoleum-covered floor. The white form of a washing machine stands in the background. Its present owners live in the old mansion, and it is both domicile and museum.

  Slaves were imprisoned at the top of the house, in narrow cells no larger than closets. Runaways or freed slaves were kidnapped by Crenshaw, so the story goes, and resold in the markets of the South. Long sheets of foolscap framed on the walls give the history of the place. The writing is old-fashioned, the ink faded; the details are sinister. Crenshaw tortured his captives on crude devices made of heavy beams. These still lean against the walls. This is a dismal, chalky, low-pitched, aching garret. Many hands have left signatures on the plaster. The wind drives against the walls; the corn stoops in the bald, runneled clay.

  The lady of the house has a great deal to tell about it. She is a Southerner and evidently a lover of legend. Mr. Crenshaw, she says, was a fearsome man. It is possible that he had to leave England for his sins, and he became a great power in Illinois. His abuses of the black people were so horrible he was attacked by one of his own slaves and wounded in the thigh. The slave was cast alive into a furnace, said the lady, but Crenshaw lost his leg. Her catalogue of horrors is very long; possibly endless. Crenshaw bred his captives. Made pregnant by studs, the slave girls brought higher prices. And yet, she said, Abe Lincoln was a guest in this house. She told me this with an air of triumph. When he campaigned against Douglas he came to visit Crenshaw, who was a Democrat. “Politics!” she said.

  “And did he know what sort of a man Crenshaw was?” I said.

  “Everybody knew. And he was waited on by slaves. But he was here to get the votes. Now looka here at the family pictures.” Brown and yellowed people seemed to return my gaze from the framed portraits. Their hair and garments were heavy, their faces long, severe. In our day we have learned something about charm, the art of self-presentation, and are told to look sunny when we are photographed; but there is nothing to mitigate the austerity of these slave owners. They were masters and looked like masters; they scorned to enliven the expression of their eyes, the sullenness of their mouths. But why should they, the overlords, have looked so dull and sullen? “Now, here,” said my guide, “is Crenshaw’s daughter. She was waited on hand and foot, and never even had to brush her own hair until after the Civil War was over.” I must say that she sounded a little envious. Was she not the present lady of the house?

  Egypt belongs not merely to the South but to the Deep South. Cairo is as Southern a city as Paducah, in Kentucky across the river. But even in Lincoln’s own county of Sangamon I heard things said against him. In Sangamon the pioneer village of New Salem has been restored. New Salem was Lincoln’s home before it was abandoned circa 1840. He had already moved to Springfield, eighteen miles away. In 1837, he helped to establish Springfield as the state capital.

  There is a residue of old grievances still in Sangamon County, for North and South meet here. Northern Illinois was settled by New Englanders, the southern part by Kentuckians and Virginians. Slavery and its enemies, Union and Secession, struggled here. Sangamon County may be said to have been at the very center of this conflict, and despite the public worship of Lincoln’s memory you meet people who say, the feuding blood still running strong in them, “We knew him here. Yes, they called my granddad Copperhead hereabouts, but what of it? Lincoln was for the big cities and the banks.” But it is nothing but a residue. Most of the old differences have long since been composed; it is mainly the historical (feuding) sense that preserves them.

  Israel: The Six-Day War

  (1967)

  In Israel’s Eyes, It’s a Crazy World

  Newsday, 12, 13, 16 June 1967.

  Tel Aviv, 12 June 1961—Day and night the armored columns came down the main street of Tiberias, turned left at the Lake of Galilee, and continued northward past the Mount of the Beatitudes, where Jesus preached.

 
From the mountains on the Syrian side, the road was often shelled at night. One could see the fields blazing, set afire by artillery, and hear the deep growling of bombs. Tiberias was blacked out. People sat by the water and listened to the news, exchanging rumors and predictions.

  Nasser had resigned, the Egyptian announcer had sobbed, but the Egyptians were free weepers. Nasser had not resigned, said someone else. By then he no longer mattered; his army had been torn to pieces in the Sinai Desert. It was the Syrians who mattered now. The invasion had begun that morning. The Israeli armies appeared to be on their way toward Damascus. The Russians were threatening to break off diplomatic relations. No one seemed much disturbed by this.

  Apparently Israelis decided that they need not concern themselves with the great powers since the great powers had apparently decided to let the Arabs have their way.

  The great powers had allowed Nasser, Hussein, and the Syrians to mobilize and to threaten to run the Israelis into the sea, to drown them like rats, to annihilate everyone. Now, Nasser, one Israeli told me, was clearly a lunatic. Yet the Americans had given this lunatic wheat, and the Russians had given him arms and military advice. The French courted him; the Yugoslavs believed that he headed the progressive elements of the Middle East; the Indians sympathized with him. Though shrewd, he was perhaps also crazy. Therefore these leaders who let him lead the world to the brink of a wider war shared his dementia.

  These views at this moment do not appear to be farfetched. On Saturday morning, northern Israel was filled with troops, armor, and artillery. The tanks were decorated with flowers and photographs, captured flags and female dummies modeling the latest Arab fashions. In the mountains, the shelling and bombing continued. The jets screamed by invisibly, and shortly afterward one heard the thump and saw the smoke on the mountaintops. But in the kibbutzim, parents now felt that it was safe to bring their kids out of the shelters where they had been kept for days.

  The Syrians had been shelling the frontier settlements heavily on Friday. The kibbutz I visited had also been attacked. The attackers had left some of their dead in the orchards. But now Israeli troops were here, and the settlers carried their kids up from the shelter. At seven in the morning, Kibbutz Resem resembled a community-service working-class camp in New Jersey, with baby buggies and playthings in the shabby sandy yard and small children in Denton pajamas and fleece slippers. But there are shell holes and corpses in the woods, and now and then one smells explosives and burned oil; and just below the trees there is an armored column. The soldiers are picking apples from the trees, and this—soldiers, apples, kids in sleepers, tricycles—is what the war looks like on Saturday morning.

  The soldiers want to chat with foreign journalists. One, with studious thick specs, fought the Jordanians two days ago. With another, to my surprise, I find myself speaking in Spanish. He comes from Málaga, has lived eleven years in “the land,” is a welder by trade and at present slightly wounded. His head is bandaged.

  With great satisfaction the Israeli-Spaniard points below to the first Syrian prisoners. They are squatting in a gravel pit, slight brown men in high boots looking up at their guards. “The first,” says my Jewish Spaniard. He spoke of them as though they were minnows. The big fish yet to come.

  Then, grinning at my seersucker coat, he said I must be an American. Who else would be so oddly gotten up at the front? Some of the European correspondents were in full jungle camouflage. My seersucker was like the Denton sleepers, but it has all been like that. From the comfortable veranda and the smooth grounds of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, guests watched the violent fighting last Monday in the Old City. One eyewitness told me that he had just finished his breakfast when he went to look at the battle. He saw an Israeli serviceman hit by a mortar, blown out of his boots; just a moment before, the man had been reading a newspaper.

  Later, within sight of Mount Hebron, I stood with a party of journalists looking down into the valley where armored columns maneuvered. We could hear artillery and heavy machine guns and see the bombs exploding. Accompanying one of the foreign cameramen was an English chick in purple slacks, Carnaby Street boots gladdening her feet. It was, of course, no fault of hers that men were being killed below. The boyfriend had said, “Come along,” so she came.

  In Tel Aviv, there are ultramodern buildings, but in Gaza, with in a few miles there are Arab tents that look like the moulted husks of dung beetles. They are patched with dirty sheets of plastic and pieces of cardboard. One rides through rich orchards, and suddenly the irrigation ends. Waves of sand gush across the road. One leaves a tourist hotel with every modern luxury and an hour later sees Egyptian soldiers swollen in death along the roads of the Sinai Peninsula, black and stinking in the desert sun, and all about them are the most modern machines—Russian—burned out and useless. But these puzzling contrasts will not affect an Israeli at this moment. To him the questions are clear. His existence was threatened, and he defended himself.

  Sinai’s Savage Sun Fits Its Scenery

  Somewhere in Sinai, 13 June 1967—A concrete emplacement built by the Egyptians in the square of Gaza is now manned by an Israeli with a machine gun. Tanks control the main avenue and, from the rooftops, soldiers are watching.

  Hot. Dull. The streets stink with fermented garbage. Corrugated roofs are weighted with rocks and old truck tires. Elderly women in black cover their somber, mannish faces with black veils, and some of the men go about in striped pajama trousers, suggesting sleep. The Arab music, too, induces torpor with its endless sweetish winding and its absurd insinuations and seductions. One not only hears it but feels it distressingly in the bowels, like a drug.

  The rubble is being swept from the sidewalks near Israeli headquarters by men in drooping white trousers, and an Egyptian doctor tells us that he has been given plenty of food and medical supplies by the army. He has a Nasserish look, even the Nasser mustache, and he smiles, but his mouth turns down at the corners, and when he is silent his face is heavy.

  Leaving Gaza, we see the first of the tanks, vehicles, guns, and supplies abandoned by the Egyptians—some smashed and burned, but most of them intact. The lettering on the new trucks informs you that they were made in the Gorkvsky Autozavod. A fine investment for the Russians. It gives you confidence in the judgment of great powers when you see the Sinai Peninsula filled with millions of dollars’ worth of machinery run off the roads into the sand and the dead bodies of Egyptians alongside.

  Many of the dead are barefooted, having thrown off their shoes in flight. Only a few have helmets. Some wear the headdress. After leaving Gaza, I saw no live Egyptians, except for a group of captured snipers lying bound and blindfolded in a truck. The tent dwellers had run off. Their shelters of old sacking and tatters of plastic were unoccupied, with only a few dogs sniffing about and the flies, of course, in great prosperity. The jackals would be along presently, someone said.

  A veteran of the 1956 Sinai campaign told me that the Egyptians had done much better this time. They had prepared their positions skillfully. They had extensive trenches. Their Russian or Nazi teachers—for there are, said my informant, a good many Germans in Egypt who settled down to a useful life after World War II—had some reason to feel encouraged, but without air cover, the Egyptian army was helpless, and Israel had knocked out the Arab airfields, even those supposedly out of range, blasting the runways, then returning to shoot up the planes. If they had not done this, the war would have been long and bloody.

  No military expert, I know nothing of the caliber of guns or the thickness of armor. What I am aware of is the enormous scale of the victory and the wreckage, the heavy strength of the sun and the heavy odor of death. Burned trucks overturned, artillery shells spilling from boxes, clothing, shoes, bedsprings, smashed furniture, letters, Arab newspapers, stretchers, bandages, duffel bags, and a scattering of gas masks.

  I particularly observed the destruction of automobiles. For an American, the car is something of an icon, and the fate of cars in war therefore
has a singular interest. The hood and the trunk of a struck car flap open as if in surrender, and what is left of the glass becomes opaque. Some of the grayish cars left behind by the UN force are flattened and dismembered.

  The Egyptian dead lie where they have fallen. No attempt has been made to gather them. The first dead Egyptian I saw was on his belly, raised from the ground by bloat. Legs spread taut, the swollen bodies resemble balloon figures in a parade. Faces blacken and are obliterated by the sun. Corruption is rapid in this heat, and the skull soon stares through. One feels the bristling of horror, not pity. The sour-sweet, decayed-cardboard smell becomes a taste in the mouth.

  For once, as a nonsmoker, I am glad to have people about me puffing cigarettes. Some of the corpses lie charred and curled up near their tanks. Others, in groups, are seen in the trenches on hillsides, in the hollows. Presently one stops looking. You simply know by the slant of the figures that they are there.

  Near the airport of Al Arish, the Israeli boys are playing soccer, performing calisthenics, resting. Two have found easy chairs and are lounging, chatting, eating rye bread. Behind them at a siding are burned-out railroad cars, black metal plates loosened from their rivets and springing out. One looks, trying to find relief from omnipresent death.