A Turn in the South

by V. S. Naipaul

  “It was at that time I met a man that told me about Christ. He was a minister. He was a black minister. In his early sixties. He was also a musician. I went to the office to meet my wife, and I met this man. And when I met him his countenance was like there were lights coming from his eyes—just glowing. The smile just cut right through me. He looked at me with so much love. And at the same time I felt his countenance was drawing me to him. But inside I felt dirty and unclean and ashamed. And I wanted to go in another direction. All this was in the office of the insurance firm where he worked and my wife worked.

  “All he said was, ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I’ve heard so much about you.’ He was a saxophonist, but he told me he only played hymns, and he asked if we could get together and play some hymns on the saxophone. Inside I had no desire, no intentions of doing that. But I told him yes.

  “Before he came, about a week later, he sent me a Bible. It was a Living Bible. Up front it had selected scriptures that addressed specific issues. And one was: What does the Bible say about success? It gave all the scriptures relating to success and what to do when you are distressed and frustrated. All those scriptures related to trust in the Lord. Trust, and He would do. The emphasis is on He. All my life the emphasis was on I. I would do, or I can do. Or I have done.”

  And at the thought of that I having done, Danny laughed, as though he had made a joke.

  “When I got together with the old musician, I accepted Christ. He shared Christ with me. He opened the Scriptures up to me.

  “He came to my house a week after he had sent the Bible. My wife wasn’t there at that particular time. He came with his saxophone. We played a little. And he really became interested in my singing. And he shared Christ with me. We had prayers. And I knew—but it was primarily reading the Bible for myself and seeing that where I had been carrying the burden of living, being successful, being happy, carrying that burden on my own shoulders—I knew, I saw through the Scriptures, that God, through Christ, offered everything I had been in pursuit of.

  “So I prayed and invited Christ to come into my life. I believe that God became human to take on our sins so that we could live in the righteousness of God. There was a scripture pertaining to that that really grabbed me. It was Galatians 5:22. The Living Bible put it this way: The Holy Spirit wants to produce fruit in you. ‘Fruit.’ Singular, but plural. Fruit, which are: love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, meekness, and self-control. That really grabbed me. To be successful is to have all of that living within me, because it wouldn’t be my circumstances that would determine my happiness, but my relationship with God. So to be successful no longer depended upon personal achievements, but just simply having the peace and joy of knowing that God loves you. So much so that he would forgive me for all the things I have done.

  “That very night, after the prayers with the old musician in my house, I went to a jail with him and participated in a worship service. And this became a nightly thing—visiting the jails. He would preach and I would sing.”

  “What did you think about the people in jail, the prisoners? How did they look upon you?”

  “I loved them. I began to see people. All my life all I had ever seen was myself. My love was a self-directed love. I began to see that people had a lot more to offer me than I had to offer them. In other words, I began to see people in the way that I saw God.

  “At this particular time I was still playing with a band at the weekend. But my songs changed. I started turning the secular words to songs about Jesus. I started preaching onstage.”

  “How did people take that?”

  “As a joke.”

  “Black audience or white audience?”

  “Mixed. I started having Bible studies on the way to the gig, as we called it. With the musicians. Bible studies during the breaks. And the group was becoming more popular than ever before. At the same time the gentleman who had led me to Christ was patiently—and lovingly—telling me that there would come a time when I would have to make a decision—to absolutely surrender to Christ.

  “And that’s when I wrassled—I struggled. Because I told the Lord day after day, night after night, that I could be a witness in a nightclub, because people there don’t go to church and don’t want to go to church. But I kept reading scriptures, and hearing in my mind, ‘Be you separate. Come ye from among them. What fellowship has light with darkness, or righteousness with unrighteousness?’

  “That’s when, one night, my wife and I were at home. And I had a vision. I was in my home town in Texas. About two hundred yards from our house there is a pond. It is my favorite place, even now. Where I go to fish, to shoot my rifle, to swim. And I saw myself walking through the field going to the pond. When I heard a voice calling me Moses. And I looked up, upwards. And I recognized the voice. I knew that it was the voice of God, saying: ‘You’ve gone as far as you can go.’ Immediately I closed my eyes and lay down in the field. And suddenly another image that was transparent at first grew out of the image laying in the field. This image was muscular. I could see the intensity of the veins in my arms and muscles as it popped the shirt open. And on my face was self-determination, ambition, very powerfully prideful. And I continued walking towards the pond, each step growing more intense, ambitious, and confident. When suddenly again I heard a voice saying, ‘Moses, this is as far as you can go.’ This time I looked up with resentment. In my mind I was saying, ‘No, you can’t stop me now. I’m almost there. I can make it.’

  “The power that came from above suppressed me into the field, the power which all the time I was fighting. As I was on my knees, still fighting, my skin began to melt and my bones began to melt also, till finally I was a horrible-looking creature, like something in a scary movie. But I continued to resist until there was nothing but liquid—I was a liquid mess. And then another image, transparent at first, grew out of that image on the ground. This time I was peaceful—this image had peace on its face, my face, and there was love and joy in my heart. Submissive, willing to be obedient and to trust in the voice that was directing my path.

  “When I woke up I was—in the vision—touching my feet in the water. And my wife woke up as I was sitting in the bed with tears running down my face like water, chill bumps racing all up and down my body. And the power that was present woke my wife up as I was sitting up in the bed. My wife woke up in fear, and she was crying. ‘Honey, what’s wrong? Honey, what’s wrong?’ And I began to sing: ‘Nothing is wrong. God is calling me.’ And she immediately lay down and went back to sleep.

  “Shortly after that I surrendered totally and entered the ministry. Walked away from what was potentially a hit record. Knowing that the love of God and being submissive to God’s will is success.

  “It was some time later, on my thirty-fourth birthday, that I promised the Lord that I would go where he sent me and do what he wanted me to do. And he led me to the Methodist church, where I became a candidate for ministry. Now, this church insists that one has to go to seminaries. The college I chose, in my home town, is very, very expensive. And I didn’t have a dime. I went there. I was rejected. I was told I had to have money to come to that college. The person who rejected me was a minister on the council. He said, ‘Sir, you have some nerve coming here. And you don’t have a dime.’ I said, ‘The Lord sent me.’ ”

  Danny, telling this story of his rejection, laughed.

  I asked, “What did he actually say?”

  “He said something to this effect: ‘Let the Lord give you some money, then come back.’ ” And Danny laughed again, as though he understood how tempting it had been, to someone in the minister’s position, to reply like that.

  Danny said, “He was rough. That was on Friday. That Sunday I directed the choir and played a saxophone song in our church. The district superintendent came by that Sunday. He was impressed after hearing that I was a candidate for ministry. On Monday morning I received a call from the gentleman who had sent me away. He said, ‘God must have sent you. We a
re going to get you in school.’ And all my schooling was paid. Over twenty thousand dollars so far. That was three years ago.”

  I asked about the old musician.

  “He is still my closest friend. I love him. I call him my father, my brother, my friend. I tell this story, and would like it known, so that some people might be touched by Jesus.”

  2

  CHARLESTON

  The Religion of the Past

  THE INTERSTATE highway goes right into the Charleston peninsula. So you arrive quite easily in the historical area. And after Atlanta it was like arriving in Toytown. The people in the hotel lobby were in tourist clothes; their footsteps and voices ricocheted off the walls and the marble floor and hung in a roar above the extravagant chandelier, at which from time to time a new arrival aimed a camera, as though this too was part of tourist Charleston, together with the many shops of the hotel lobby; and the Slave Mart and the Confederate Museum in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century streets outside; and the renovated old market with its many stalls and boutiques, and with grave black ladies sitting out on the pavement and weaving baskets. The tourist Charleston not only being the eighteenth-century town, and slavery and the Civil War, but also having something of the tourist Caribbean of today.

  In the historical area the horse-drawn tourist carriages moved up and down all the time, and the horses had “diapers,” to catch the droppings. Other visitors walked about and looked. And others again—in curiously ritualistic postures, appearing to lean slightly backwards—pedaled themselves about, two at a time, in their pedal carriages, a new tourist style.

  The historical area is small. It doesn’t seem possible that anything real can survive. But Charleston does have its pretty eighteenth-century streets and churches and graveyards; and in the historical area there are still people who carry the names commemorated in the names of the streets. (“What are they doing now?” a tourist asked his horse-carriage driver late one morning. He was asking—in his innocence still believing in the completeness of the world to which he had bought a tourist ticket—about the old families in the old houses they were passing. And the driver, living up to his role as a retailer of wonders, said, “Why, they haven’t got up yet.” The exchange, as it happened, was picked up in one of the houses. That was where I heard it—as an illustration of the little distance that can exist in downtown Charleston between the tourist and the thing toured.)

  It is in fact the tourist trade that keeps historical Charleston in working order, keeps the old families where they are; though it is possible in a foreseeable future that the tourist trade, by pushing up property values, might drive some away. The story in Charleston is that money has begun to come back to some of the old families; and money, it is said, has become a motive where once people were content with the antiquity of a name. Names—they are really what is celebrated in the plaques on some of the buildings. The events themselves are small, colonial, not memorable to a visitor.

  In this tourist Charleston the visitor soon stifles. But there is a larger town. There are the rich suburbs outside the peninsula. There is the Charleston of the naval station. And there are the various black areas. There is a large and pretty middle-class area, acquired and consolidated during a time of white panic. In the center, on what must have been the site of old houses, there are black housing projects, bald brick buildings going baldly down to scuffed earth, buildings that drive people out of doors and expose them and their children and their washing lines, so that the impression of slum, of many people living publicly in a small space, is as unavoidable as the impression of black faces. The east side of Charleston is also black. The houses there—some looked after, many not—are old, in the old Charleston style; but there are no tourists. So, after the Toytown aspect of the rest of old Charleston, the blacks seem like squatters, intruders at the Charleston ball. Yet they are as old as the old families.

  It is only when you cross over from peninsular Charleston to what were once the slave plantations, the town’s vast hinterland, that the slave past becomes vivid—though there is now just forest for the most part.

  The land is flat and marshy, and it goes on for miles. The forest—oak, gum, maple, pine, sycamore, magnolia: tall forest—speaks of the fertility of the soil. The flatness and easiness and the extensiveness of the land make clear the need in the old days for abundant slave labor; and they also make painful the thought of that labor.

  Now all is peace. From time to time there is a gateway in the forest, indicating land acquired by a big company; there is an old church; and there are black settlements. These settlements have a history. Most of them are on the site of old plantations that were taken by the federal government after the Civil War and broken up into sixty-acre plots for former slaves. Old property now, historical, some of the houses good, some poor; but after 120 years of land being passed on without wills or deeds, most of the titles are impossible.

  I saw this coastal South Carolina forest on a Sunday morning. My guide was Jack Leland. He was a retired Charleston newspaperman, and he was of an old family. All this land and forest—so much the same to the visitor—was known to him in detail. This vegetation was the vegetation he had known as a child; it was still magical to him. Very few of the plantations now grew anything. Cattle were raised on some. Wealthy Yankees had bought others and turned them into hunting preserves.

  “This second Yankee invasion, as my father called it, began in the 1880s, and continued to the 1930s. And it was a good thing, because it preserved the old buildings and gave jobs to the local Negroes and added a lot to the economy.”

  The land and the black people who worked on it, the memorializing of the past—these were still among Jack Leland’s concerns, though his own family plantation had been alienated more than fifty years before. And our Sunday-morning excursion had a memorializing purpose.

  We were going to Middleburg Plantation. A chapel of ease there that was more than two hundred years old, and was in danger of being washed away, had had its foundations consolidated with the help of a federal grant. There was to be a service in the chapel that morning—a special spring service, but also one of thanksgiving. Middleburg Plantation had been in the possession of the Gibbs family until six years before; and old Mr. Gibbs, Jack Leland’s father-in-law, had sent out invitations for the service to people who he thought would want to attend. Afterwards there was to be a picnic in the grounds of the plantation house. That house had been restored by the estate agent who had bought the property.

  The chapel of ease was at the end of a long lane in the forest. The lane was unpaved, soft; there were very bright spots of sunlight on the ground. It was cool in the forest shade; in the open sunlight the heat was immediate. The chapel was called Pompion Hill Chapel; in the flat coastal land of South Carolina a hill was anything a few feet high. The chapel stood beside a marsh where rice had once been cultivated. The surface of the water was in patches bright green. The original rice fields of this part of South Carolina had been created by Dutchmen who had learned about rice and dykes in the East Indies. Now the water level in the marsh had risen, because of some dam or hydraulic works some distance away; and it was this rise in the level of the water that had threatened the 1763 chapel of ease. With the grant from the federal government a rock revetment had been constructed around the “hill” at the water’s edge.

  The cars bumped down the soft lane to the chapel. Old Mr. Gibbs, in a jacket with a big check pattern, welcomed each, and directed each to its parking place.

  The chapel was a single-chambered red-brick building, entered by the two side doors; whitewashed inside, undecorated; and, except for the baroque dome and pilasters at one end, without architectural flourish. The floor was tiled; paving tiles, Jack Leland said, were especially hard for colonials to make. The only notable furnishing was the pulpit, of local cedar, which was contemporary with the chapel and was the work of a Charleston cabinetmaker whose name was still known. IHS, the piety of the planter and slave-owner; now the sign of
another kind of piety. And, indeed, after old Mr. Gibbs had been recognized and had shuffled up along the paving tiles and had spoken his thanks to everyone who had helped with the preservation, the theme of the sermon—a noisy motorboat racing about on the marsh from time to time, but its waves were now striking harmlessly against the gray rock revetment—the theme of the sermon was religion as a binding together of people. Community now with a special meaning, at once diminished and grander.

  Then we went on to the plantation house. Brick pillars, green gates, a gateway without a wall, led from the road to a very wide avenue of oaks. The oaks were 150 years old; and these oak trees of South Carolina had the shape and spread of the saman trees of Central America, which had been introduced in the Caribbean islands as a shade tree for certain crops—cacao and coffee—and had been taken on from there to places as far away as Malaysia; so that tropical plantations and colonies of the imperial time acquired a similar look, with the vegetation that had been brought together from different parts of the world. Here, in South Carolina, was something like the saman trees of Trinidad.

  And again the bright sunlight, coming through the foliage, fell in dazzling spots on the shaded ground. But then, after this long wide avenue, the restored plantation house was quite modest, a white-painted wooden building with three rooms upstairs and three rooms downstairs. This was upsetting to one’s ideas about the grandeur of plantation life. Jack Leland said the house was small because the builder had been a Huguenot. English planters, when they did well, could become flamboyant; the Huguenots remained economical and austere, investing and reinvesting in land and slaves. (And the very first plantation house, according to the booklet about the restoration, had been even more modest, with a sitting room and a dining room alone on the ground floor, without a veranda or a back porch.)

  Separate from the main house was a “dependency,” as an ancillary building was called; and this dependency, more or less in order, was a cookhouse with a brick chimney. Another dependency had burned down, and nothing remained now but its brick chimney. Black servants were careless, Jack Leland said. It was because of this carelessness that in Charleston there had been regulations forbidding the building of wooden dependencies. The main house could be of wood; the dependencies had to be of brick.