He was as good as his word. I recognized him as soon as he came into the Ramada. He was easy, light, friendly. His manner was so easy that I was prepared for general or neutral conversation, at least in the beginning. But as soon as we were in the privacy of his car, and even before we drove out of the Ramada parking lot, he said that in the old days he wouldn’t have been able to live where he now lived. He had helped “integrate” his neighborhood. It turned out to be a modest neighborhood. The houses were small and close together. The surprise, after what he had said, was his yard. It was overgrown, and noticeable among its better-kept neighbors.
Inside, the house was cluttered, close, unaired. He made no reference to the clutter (even a few unwashed cups and plates in the sitting room), saying only that his wife had gone with the children to her mother’s for a few days; and there was a kind of order below the clutter.
On the sitting-room wall were framed enlargements of two old black-and-white studio photographs. They were of his grandparents. The period clothes, the choking up of the neck in collar and ruff, and the stare of the long-held expressions were oddly moving. In the enlargement or the printing the tones of the photographs had been bleached away, so that both the people looked white, with black eyes. The photographs carried the stamp of a studio in Memphis.
Lewis said: “Mississippi people. They went to Memphis. Everybody went to Memphis. My father came back to Mississippi after the war. Do you know what they did? The people in the photographs. Do you want me to tell you? They were servants. Those two people made me. No hate developed in me because they taught me never to hate. The word was never used in their house. ‘Be a good boy.’ That was the motto. ‘Treat everybody nice.’ You heard it every day. I was taught that—to be good, and to be good to everybody.”
It was hot in the sitting room because the air-conditioning unit had broken down. I asked him if he could open a window. He said he couldn’t; the insects would come in. So we sat in the high, warm, musty smell.
He said, “When my grandfather died my grandmother sent some of my grandfather’s clothes to my father. Servant clothes, suits. They were still good clothes, you see. Still some wear in them. And my father left one to me. I put it on one day. Just cloth, but I felt it burn my skin.”
“Do you still have that suit?”
“I don’t know where it is.”
“All this is such a long time ago, though.”
“But the past is always interesting. Knowing the past, I can do a better job. It’s an awakening for me, to think of the past. Sometimes it’s a rude awakening. To think of some of the things that happened—that I couldn’t live where I’m living now, and didn’t even think of it. That I sat at the back of the bus. That my grandmother washed clothes for white people at fifty cents a basket. Why didn’t they pay her more? But I didn’t question it when I heard. It’s a rude awakening now. Still, they shielded me from the hate. It was there. I lived in my black section. They lived in their white section. That hatred was there, all around me, and I didn’t feel it. They saved me from it, my grandparents, and my father after them. I’d hear about killing black men. But my father never allowed us to talk too much of it. And I’ll tell you. Up to the day he died he said to whites, my father, ‘Yes, sir!’ ‘No, sir!’ No matter how young they were.”
“What do you think of that now?”
“It doesn’t bother me. He was my father. He did well for us, his family. So I didn’t say to him, ‘Don’t say it.’ ” He went on, “I myself fight daily to be happy. Every day. It’s the one thing I strive for. To be content, to be happy with myself.”
What did he mean by that?
“I can’t change my surroundings, but I can respect myself. I’ll tell you a story. I went one time to my mother’s sister’s house. Black soldiers used to come to the house across the road, and they would be entertained by the young lady who lived there. One day one of the soldiers complained he had lost his billfold. The policeman who came to deal with this came to my mother’s sister’s house, because the young lady was sitting on the porch there when he came. He walked up to her and said, ‘Gal, did you take that boy’s billfold?’ She said, ‘No, sir.’ He said, ‘Get in the car.’ And when she bent down to get in the car he kicked her hard on her behind. That never, never got away from me.”
“What did you feel about that?”
I wanted to know, because I was no longer certain of the point of some of the things he was saying, the memories he was playing with. It was getting dark, too, in the little choked house—he seemed as indifferent to this as to the airlessness and the clutter—and it was becoming harder to see the expression on his face when he spoke. He was running a number of ideas together. He wished to be happy, content; he had been shielded from pain; and threaded into this was something like admiration for the grandparents who had founded his line and taught him to keep out of trouble in an irrational world.
“What do I think of the policeman and the woman? I don’t know. I was so young. I didn’t talk to anybody about it. I just saw it. It was cruel. But I don’t know what I really felt about the cruelty. Every now and then the incident crosses my mind. Even today. I see it. But I don’t know what I think about it.”
Wasn’t it a little self-indulgent, living so much in the past, especially now that times had changed?
“Yes. I’m enjoying the harvest now. But I don’t think I’ve done much as a fighter, a marcher for freedom.”
“That worries you?”
He didn’t say anything. Then he laughed. “I don’t know how I feel about it. I suppose I am in my own little world. And I suppose I’m selfish, being in my own world. I ought to be mad and angry and fighting. But I don’t get mad.”
“Is this something from religion? Did your grandparents teach you that?”
“I’m not religious. I’m not like many people who go to church every Sunday and want to be deacons.”
“Why do you look back at the past if you don’t know what you think about it?”
“I love to talk about the past.”
How far back did that past go? Did it go back to the days of slavery? It didn’t, of course. The past he liked to talk about was the past he could remember, that curiously sheltered past.
He said, “If my grandmother made fifty cents a day I ought to be happy with what I make now.”
What was it about his grandparents that he now especially remembered and liked?
“Pride. Pride. My grandmother used to sit up in church with her corset on. Very proud, very cultured-like. Very classy lady. I don’t know where she, and the others, got it from. Probably from the whites. Today I don’t see it. They’re nice people, but they don’t have that something. I suppose I don’t have it either. But you must know that I truly respect my past, be it segregated, be it filled with racism, be it whatever. Because I feel I have a place in the world, and I’m going to get it.”
The telephone rang. He took it up in the darkness. He listened more than he talked. He was being rebuked by someone he knew for not keeping an appointment.
He said, when he put the phone down, “I’ll drive you back to the Ramada.” That was where he had told the man on the phone to meet him. “We’ll talk again tomorrow. I’ll come for you at six.”
It was a relief to be out of the house and in the open, warm though the air was.
And now, driving to North Jackson, Lewis appeared to qualify some of the things he had said in his house. In the house he seemed not to have put together his thoughts about the civil-rights movement. Now he spoke with reverence of Martin Luther King.
He said, “If he hadn’t turned it the nonviolent way, they would have killed every black in Mississippi. Every black in the South.”
I heard real panic in the words.
I asked him again about his “little world.” Had it really protected him?
He said, “I suppose I was aware of everything outside. I was frightened of it—I suppose.”
And then, without prompting from me
, he began to talk about God. In the house he had said he was not religious in the way most people were. Now he said that without God he would have done nothing; without God he would have been nothing; without God he didn’t know how he would have endured.
In the parking lot of the Ramada Renaissance he drove to the edge of one of the parking rows. There was a black man in a parked car. Lewis introduced me. The man in the car shrank from me.
Lewis didn’t come at six the next day, or at half past six. No one answered when I telephoned. About eight o’clock he answered. He sounded tired, distant.
“I’ve been ill. I’ve been to the doctor. I didn’t go to work today.”
“I telephoned very often and got no reply.”
“I was a long time at the doctor.”
He asked me to come to see him right away. I took a taxi. The ventilation in his house was better, but the clutter was as bad. He looked extraordinary. He was barefooted, with a dressing gown open over a bare chest and a black net over his hair. The getup was like a black version of the shower cap and white gown of the workers in the catfish plant.
He said, “The net’s to keep my hair curly.”
I began to say polite things about his illness. He brushed the subject aside. He walked barefoot about the sitting room. “I’ll tell you about my grandfather. I think he was the kind of man who knew how to handle people, especially Southern whites. ‘Yes, sir!’ ‘No, sir!’ And tip your hat to them and grin. But he was successful, in his day. Regardless of how mediocre it might seem today or yesterday, it happened. And that’s it.”
“It bothers you that you didn’t do more for the civil-rights movement?”
“The dogs never bit me. Does it bother me? I don’t know. You must decide for me.”
The telephone rang.
It was his friend again, the one of the night before.
Lewis said into the phone, “He’s here. We want your input.” He laughed, and seemed to be getting out of control, laughing into the phone, stamping with his bare feet, and acting a little for me.
He said, when he put the phone down, “My friend is scared of you.” He laughed in his new way. “You must take off that jacket. Take off that jacket, and let me show you how the blacks really live. I will take you to certain places. You will get the smell of corruption.”
He made a gesture with his hand, like a cook suggesting an appealing aroma. And I understood then, putting things together, that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically. The line of development that had begun with his grandfather was ending with him: his own little world, different now from the one he had grown up in.
He began to dress to meet his friend. He said—and I’d hardly arrived—“I’ll take you back to your hotel.”
He put on his trousers and shirt, and we went outside. He left the door unlatched. I pointed this out to him. He said, “I have to do something. I’ll go back inside.”
I waited for him for some time. When he came out there was a white cream on his chin, the white glowing in the dusk and against his blackness.
He said, “Blacks have kinky hair. Do you know about that? That hair grows under the skin. It is very hard to shave. This cream I’ve put on softens it. By the time I come back here I will be ready to shave, and I will get a very smooth shave.”
And that was how he drove me back to the alien white part of the city, with the net on his hair and the white cream on his chin and upper lip.
He gave me another day to meet him. But he couldn’t make it; I wasn’t surprised. He sounded very tired and slow and far away when I telephoned. He asked me to telephone later in the evening. When I did there was no answer.
JUST AS it is hard to comprehend American distances and the heat of the Southern summer until one has experienced them, so in Mississippi and in the city of Jackson it was hard to understand that people of seventy would have lived through many different worlds; that the childhoods of solid citizens would have left memories of frontier life, primitive conditions, and closed communities, things hard now to recapture.
The town of Eupora, in the hills to the east of the Delta, is now on Highway 82. But someone like Judge Sugg, who was born in 1916 and retired from the state Supreme Court in 1983, carries memories from his childhood in Eupora of the time when the Big Black River had no bridge, only a ford. So that when the river was high there was no means of crossing it, and people stayed where they were, in their little communities, until the water subsided.
“We had dirt roads. No electricity. I’ve seen all sorts of wonderful things happen in the world. I enjoy the luxury of modern civilization. Instant television, instant entertainment. Instant everything. I enjoy it all. Life was hard for us in the early days. At the end of the Civil War we were destitute. And the slaves who had been freed had no training. It has taken us a hundred years to rebuild our capital base. Our slaves had no capital. We were an agricultural state.”
Dates are relative. To me 1890, if I apply it to a place like Trinidad, and apply it therefore to the time when my Indian ancestors were just migrating to the New World—to me that date belongs to a period of darkness, something mythical, very far away. Apply it to England, and I think of the modern world: Oscar Wilde, the young Kipling, Gandhi (four years younger than Kipling) studying law in London. In the South dates became relative in this way. And I understood that many of the people of a certain age whom one saw had a special kind of success story to tell. Many of them had started with very little, had started in the wilderness perhaps with only an idea of civilization. (Many of them would have started with as little as my grandparents in Trinidad; but—a further relativity—they had found themselves in a place of greater potential.)
“Everybody was poor. I was fortunate. My father was a merchant. He was also sheriff for one term. He ran a general merchandise store. Merchants lent to farmers. They furnished the merchandise to the farmers, and at the end of the year, when the farmers sold their crops, mainly cotton, they settled. If there was a bad year the merchants suffered with the farmers, because if the farmers couldn’t pay the merchants couldn’t collect. There was nothing in writing, no promissory notes or anything. The saying was, ‘My word is my bond.’ ”
A success story for the judge. But in the seventy or eighty years before his birth it had been a life with little movement forward for his ancestors. That too is worth contemplating.
“My family on both sides came to Mississippi between 1830 and 1840. My Sugg grandfather lost his leg in the Civil War. He could barely read and write. When he came out he saw that a one-legged man couldn’t make a living as a farmer. He went to school for three years, and then taught school for three years. Then he became treasurer of Calhoun County for four years and chancery clerk of Webster County for four years. He bought a farm. He had seven children who grew to adulthood, and some tenant families. The tenants were black, former slaves. I was up there about ten years ago, and I met some old people who were descendants of the tenants my grandfather had. When I left Webster County about a third of the people were black. I’m a country boy, you know. I haven’t become accustomed to living in the city yet.
“Once a year a tent would come. They called them ‘chautauquas.’ They would stay about a week in the town. They would have musical programs; sometimes a man would lecture; and you would have plays, dramas. That was our outside entertainment. They came in by train. That was the only way they could come. On Sunday afternoon a passenger train came through. We had four a day. But on Sunday at two-thirty we had a passenger train that went east. A third of the town would go down to the station to see the train, to see who was on the train and who was getting off, and who was leaving town. Everybody just had a big time—that was something to look forward to.
“I remember when I was real young we received word that the Ringling Brothers Circus was going to come through some time after midnight. About half the town got up to get to see the circus train go through. You could see we were hurting for entertainment. It was over a hundred cars—that’s w
hat it seemed like at the time.”
Unlike the Delta, where there were rich and poor and caste or class distinctions, in the hills there were no social distinctions, except between black and white.
“We didn’t have private schools. Everybody went to church. We didn’t have a society section. We didn’t have a social register. We were just people. We had lots of illiterate whites. In the Depression we had only six months of school for one year; at other times we had eight months. There just wasn’t the money to pay the teachers. Formal education suffered. But many of the older people were self-educated, like my father. He wrote a beautiful hand. He used good English.
“I had a desire to look at the things I had read about. New York to me was just on the map. I just never dreamed I would go there. I knew that China was across the Pacific and Europe across the Atlantic. I never dreamed I would go to these places. Yes, I dreamed of it, but I didn’t think it would become a reality.
“But most people were content to remain where they were. We were a close-knit group of people. We had only about thirteen, fourteen hundred people in the town. The only way you could go anywhere was by rail, and you couldn’t keep a secret in a place like that.
“I believe that closeness is responsible for some of the Mississippi character. When you live that close to people you have to get on with them, or you’d be ostracized. You learn to accept people as they are. We had many eccentrics, rugged individualists. A friend of mine said the other day, ‘We don’t seem to produce characters like we used to.’ I said, ‘We’re the characters now.’ ”
The closeness of that community, deprived and ill-educated, led to violence. People mightn’t feel the need for promissory notes, and mightn’t lock their doors, mightn’t even have keys for some of the doors. But tempers could be quick. There were homicides, crimes of passion.
A Turn in the South (Vintage International) Page 25