A Turn in the South

by V. S. Naipaul

  The talk about a black aristocracy was exaggerated, this man said. By the standards of American wealth, blacks in Atlanta were not wealthy; in a list of the richest Atlantans, a black man might come in at number 201. Political power? “Political power without the other sort of power is meaningless.”

  He sipped his wine, my informant, and seemed not at all displeased to have floored me.

  I actually believed what he said. I had felt that the grand new buildings of Atlanta one had seen in so many photographs had as little to do with blacks as the buildings of Nairobi, say, had to do with the financial or building skills of the Africans of Kenya. I had felt that the talk of black power and black aristocracy was a little too pat and sudden.

  I wanted to see for myself, though; and I was hoping to be put in touch with people. But there was no hint from this black man of that kind of help. I might see Andrew Young, the mayor, he said; but Andrew Young probably had about two hundred interviews lined up. (So I might be number 201—a popular number.) I felt about this black man, in fact, that—sipping his wine, looking at me over the top of his glass, enjoying my discomfiture, awaiting my questions and swatting them down—I felt he was being seized more and more by a spirit of contradiction and unhelpfulness and was about to grow quite wild: that soon I would be hearing, not only that there were no moneyed blacks in Atlanta, but that there had never been anything in Georgia, no plantations, no cotton, corn, or taters, that there was only himself in the wide vessel of the black Atlanta universe.

  From my room at the Ritz-Carlton, the view at night of the windows of the big Georgia Pacific building was like a big pop-art print. The windows, of equal size, were all lighted. Each level was like a filmstrip, or a strip of contact prints, of views almost the same. From my room the view changed, level by level. At the lower levels I looked down at the tops of desks and the floor of offices. At eye level I saw the desks silhouetted against the office wall. Level by level, then, the desks vanished. At the higher levels I saw only the lighted ceilings; and at the very top there was only light, a glow in the window. The offices were all empty; the men who sat in them during the day were in the suburbs somewhere. The paintings that hung on the walls of the offices of senior people were like arbitrary symbols of rank, mere rectangles at this distance, quite indistinct, even without color—the way great cities, from very high up, show as smudges below the earth’s swirls.

  A formal society, private lives, a formal view: an introduction was needed to every one of those rooms, and the visitor didn’t know on what door to knock. Where did the news happen? Was it only a production, on the television?

  BUT THEN I read in the newspaper about the affair of Forsyth County. Forsyth County was forty miles or so to the north of Atlanta. In that county in 1912 a young white girl was raped and beaten so badly that she died a few days later. A number of blacks were implicated. One was lynched; two others were tried and hanged. All the blacks of Forsyth were chased out of the county; and since then (so it was said) no blacks had been allowed to live in the county.

  This last fact, about blacks not being allowed to live in Forsyth, became a public issue earlier in the year, when someone organized a “Walk for Brotherhood” in Forsyth in the middle of January, to mark the anniversaries both of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the birth of Martin Luther King. This march was attacked by some local people and Ku Klux Klan groups; it made the news. A second brotherhood march a week later—after all the publicity—was a much bigger affair. Twenty thousand people went to Forsyth to march, and there were about three thousand National Guardsmen and state and local police officers to keep the peace. There were protests nonetheless; fifty-six people, none of them marchers, were arrested.

  The man who had stage-managed the marches, or had made the issue as big as it had become, was a black Atlanta city councilor, Hosea Williams, called simply Hosea by everyone who spoke of him. He was sixty-one, and had been an associate of Martin Luther King’s in the civil-rights movement. Hosea had since brought a lawsuit against some Klan groups for violating the civil rights of the people on the first brotherhood march; and he had also come up with the idea that some claim might be made against Forsyth County on behalf of the blacks who had lost land when they had been driven out in 1912.

  Tom Teepen, of the Atlanta Constitution, with whom I had breakfast one day, spoke almost with affection of Hosea Williams. “A primary force, a rabble-rouser in the tradition of the Paris barricades, and canny.”

  But I couldn’t see Hosea that week.

  Tom said, “He’s in jail.”

  “Jail!”

  “It’s all right. He’s often in jail for some thing or the other. He’ll be out in a few days.”

  When I looked at some of Hosea Williams’s own publicity material, and especially a Who Is Hosea L. Williams? pamphlet, I saw that his jail record mattered to him. There was a photograph of him in a cell. “Rev. Hosea holds the civil rights arrest record for jailings.… He has gone to jail about as many times since Dr. King’s death as during his life (a total of 105 times).”

  He was born in 1926. So for very many years his racial protests and battles would have been desperate affairs. But Hosea had won his war; and (though he was still a brave man: the first march at Forsyth had required courage) I felt that Hosea might now have become licensed, a star, a man on the news, someone existing in a special kind of electronic reality or unreality. And his political life required him to beat his own drum. In The Dimensions of the Man—Dr. Hosea L. Williams—A Chronology, with a photograph of Hosea in an academic gown, apparently receiving an honorary degree from another black man, there was this: “Today he’s not content to watch things happen, HE MAKES THINGS HAPPEN.”

  THE NORTHERN suburbs of Atlanta almost touched Forsyth County. The freeways, which made Georgia look like Connecticut, enabled people to work in downtown Atlanta, where there were blacks in the streets, and then to drive twenty or thirty easy miles (in air-conditioned cars) to their houses in the suburbs, where there were few blacks—this part of Georgia had not been plantation country. There were branches of famous stores in the luxurious suburban shopping malls. The white suburbs could get by quite well without the black-run city center.

  There was a news item in the paper one day that some of these suburbs didn’t want to be plugged into the Atlanta city-transit system, because they didn’t want to be infiltrated by blacks. No Forsyth-like shouting, no Confederate flags, no white hoods and gowns—that wasn’t the way of these new suburbs. A transit official said, “It’s such a subliminal issue that it’s extremely difficult to deal with.”

  A lawyer I met said that, to understand, it was necessary to remember that 120 years or so ago there had been slavery. For poor white people race was their identity. Someone well off could walk away from that issue, could find another cause for self-esteem; but it wasn’t that easy for the man with little money or education; without race he would lose his idea of who he was.

  I spoke about my weekend with Howard and Hetty. Hetty had a strong idea of her racial and family identity, and yet she also had a high regard for Mr. Bowen, whom she considered a good man. Did that mean anything? The lawyer thought not. Southern white people would do anything for black families with whom they had a relationship, but that attitude stopped there; it wasn’t extended to blacks in general.

  We were lunching, the lawyer and I, in a big club in downtown Atlanta. The club had been started in the days when there had been a general movement out of Atlanta, and business people had felt the need for a place where they might meet in the middle of the day. It was part of the bubble in which the white professional people of Atlanta lived: the house, the air-conditioned car, the office (perhaps like an office in the Georgia Pacific building), the luncheon club.

  I asked the lawyer whether he personally felt threatened. He said the feeling was with him sometimes when he was out in the streets. He meant the fear of violence. But he also meant the larger fear of a world grown unstable: the more protecti
ve the bubble in which one lives, the more uncertain one’s knowledge becomes of what lies out there.

  And this was why the lawyer thought it would be good if the black middle class could grow, if the blacks could become more active commercially. But—and like everyone talking about blacks now, he searched for words at once neutral and true—blacks (whatever their yearnings) didn’t have the business sense, the business vocation. In a society that was economically driven, blacks didn’t have the economic drive. But now there were immigrants of a new sort in the United States—Latin Americans, Asians. The lawyer thought that, when the blacks had a better understanding of what the presence of those immigrants meant to them, black racial sentiments might change.

  It was there, then, as Tom Teepen had told me, at the back of everything, however unspoken: the thought of race, the little neurosis, the legacy of slavery.

  The topic came up again when I went to see Anne Rivers Siddons, the novelist. She lived in North Atlanta: hilly plots, tall pines, dogwood, azaleas. The spring I had seen in Howard’s home town was at its peak here, and the houses along the suburb’s curving roads looked quite embowered.

  Anne Siddons had just published a novel, Homeplace, and was doing promotional work on it, at some cost to herself: she had got started on a new book. She was a little withdrawn, living internally, holding on to her new book. She lived in such beauty now; but—as I saw when I looked at her previous book, Fox’s Earth—her thoughts (like those of many Southern people) went back easily to a poorer time.

  She said that Margaret Mead had made an important observation about the South: the relationship of the white man and the black servant woman, man and undemanding mistress, had left the white woman and the black man neutered. The black men, Anne Siddons said, were the disaffected ones.

  And the newspapers—the Constitution and its sister paper, the Journal (“Covers Dixie like the Dew” was the slogan on its editorial page and its delivery vans)—were full of racial items, interwoven with the running serials: Forsyth County, and the ramifying story of the private life of a black politician accused of using cocaine.

  One day there was this story. IBM sent a black executive to Columbia, South Carolina; but there was no room for the black man in the country club, no party invitations for his children. The next day there was this story: a black woman of thirty-one, a mother of two children aged five and two, took a revolver to work and shot herself in her office at Georgia Power. She felt she was being discriminated against by the company and passed over for promotion. She said in her suicide note that she wanted to give the managers and supervisors something to think about.

  Desperation; but there was also the kind of playfulness that a political cause attracts when it has become safe. There was news of a black arts festival. There was news of a mighty piece of sculpture for Atlanta by a New York sculptor, Nelson Mandela Must Be Free to Lead His People and South Africa to Peace and Prosperity. The rock sculpture weighed seven tons and was too heavy for its first site, which could take only a hundred pounds per cubic foot. So the sculpture was going to be moved to Woodruff Park in downtown Atlanta. (Woodruff was the great man of Coca-Cola, running the company for sixty years; Coca-Cola and Gone with the Wind are the two fabulous success stories of post-Civil War Atlanta.) A twelve-foot iron fence, with a working gate, was to be welded into the rock. The gate was to be locked with a real key, and the key was to be given to the city of Atlanta, so that—assuming the key hadn’t been mislaid—the gate could be opened when Mandela was freed.

  From Tom Teepen’s column in the Constitution: Metro Atlanta is a big city of 2.2 million; Atlanta is a medium city of 450,000; black Atlanta is a small city of 300,000. “The black leadership circle is a small town.” A good journalist finds good clear ways of putting things. Tom Teepen also said this: white people in the United States don’t have “leaders”; only black people have leaders. And I felt he had said that because (according to some other columnists in the paper) the current scandals about black politicians in a number of states were being used to run down black people generally.

  I liked the point about leaders. I thought it could be applied to many black or backward or revolutionary countries, where the leader is everything, and where journalists and others from outside, falling unwittingly into a version of the explorer’s attitude (“Take me to your leader”), bestow on the leader alone the dignity that, in another kind of place, they would bestow more widely, on the country and the people. But then I began to wonder whether—since black politics in the United States were still racial and redemptive and simple—black people in the United States couldn’t after all be said to have leaders, people they simply followed. And I wondered whether it was possible in these circumstances for black people to stand apart from their leaders, any more than it was possible for people of the Caribbean or Africa to stand apart from the racial or tribal chiefs whom they had created.

  I HEARD more about identity. Tom Teepen—shedding the suit and tie that he said was regulation office wear, and appearing instead in a many-pocketed vest or gilet—took me one Saturday morning to a century-old Appalachian settlement in East Atlanta: a big old red-brick cotton mill, white frame houses, a cemetery on rising ground beyond a busy road. Mill wages at the beginning had been very low, 5¢ an hour, it was said; but for the mountain people the regularity of the wage had been a kind of security, and the community established around the mill had survived, though many people had gone away at various times, and the mill itself was now closed.

  We went to a community-and-craft center in the settlement. It was run by a woman with the beautiful name of Esther Lefever. She had come to the settlement many years before as a folksinger—a ten-year-old photograph in the Atlanta Constitution showed her as a pretty woman with a guitar. But then, from being moved by the response to her singing—an old woman had got up and done a special dance, and other people had cried—she had become more deeply involved with the Appalachian community, and had even become a city councilor.

  She was small and slender, still attractive and clear-voiced. She was not herself from an Appalachian community, but she understood their closeness. She was a Mennonite from Pennsylvania, the eighth child of a preacher. She spoke of what it had meant to her to move from the strictness of her Mennonite background. She had felt alone, she said. What did it mean to be alone? She said she had the picture of being the last tree on the hillside: the other trees had all been cut down. It hadn’t been easy for her even to give up the bonnet; all her life she had been taught to wear the bonnet out of respect for God and man. Even when she was in her twenties it made her nervous to be in the streets of Chicago. It wasn’t a fear of black men so much as a dread of white men who (according to what she had been told) drank liquor and were gross.

  And then she had discovered the cruelty of the world outside, the cruelty of America. How had she discovered that? She told a story. One of her Appalachian women came to her one day and said she needed a job, “maid work.” Esther Lefever took the woman to see someone, a woman with a lot of blonde hair combed back, a woman (Esther Lefever said) just a step or two above the woman looking for maid work. And the blonde woman said, “Why does she want to do maid work? That’s for colored people.”

  It was a simple incident, I thought; something that should have been passed over. The blonde woman herself (from the story) was as much a sufferer as everybody else. But the incident had many layers of meaning, and Esther Lefever had been upset and humiliated by it. She said, “They want to keep you in the slots they have fixed for you.” Who were “they”? She thought, and said that they were the people who had arranged the system and wanted to keep everyone in his place.

  I asked her in what way identity was important, and whether there was some practical way in which it helped. She said that, if you moved to a new neighborhood or took a new job, and people were not too friendly, then it could be a help if you knew who you were; you could last out the hostility. If you didn’t know who you were—if (and this was
my extension) you were dependent on other people for your idea of your own worth—then you were in trouble.

  She was giving the view from below, the view of the poor people she was concerned about. And from what she said I got the impression that these people had raw sensibilities and lived on their nerves. I found that hard to imagine.

  (And yet, at another level, and with another, half-buried part of myself, I understood. Perhaps in a society of many groups or races everyone, unless he is absolutely secure, lives with a special kind of stress. Growing up in multiracial Trinidad as a member of the Indian community, people brought over in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work the land, I always knew how important it was not to fall into nonentity. In 1961, when I was traveling in the Caribbean for my first travel book, I remember my shock, my feeling of taint and spiritual annihilation, when I saw some of the Indians of Martinique, and began to understand that they had been swamped by Martinique, that I had no means of sharing the world view of these people whose history at some stage had been like mine, but who now, racially and in other ways, had become something other. And eight years or so later, in Belize in Central America, a similar feeling of the void broke through my other preoccupations when I saw the small, lost, half-Indian community of that wretched British colony, coastal timberland poached from what had been the Spanish Empire, peopled with slaves and servants, and then more or less abandoned: New World debris.)

  And I heard more about the ways of identity in the South from a religious scholar. Among the people he instructed were men and women studying for the ministry. I thought that people who wanted to be ministers might have been moved by some religious experience. But that attitude was a reflection of my own temperament and background, my own lack of a religious faith, and my thirty-five years and more in England, where formal religion had all but withered.