Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  I had no eventual plan except to return to Mississippi, to go back to the native soil. Still I lingered. The skies grew bluer, the air warmer. Rome burst into flowers and sidewalk living.

  We grew more acquainted with a friend John had made previous to meeting me. This was Gloria Scala, who had come to Italy from Chicago to renew family ties with her relatives near Turin. From some cousin or friend she had acquired a car, one of those tiny Fiats everybody of modest means drove. Generously, she would ferry the two of us out to Fregene, a favorite Roman spot on the sea. We would rent a bathhouse, change, and swim in the crisp water, lunch on bread and wine, cheese and salami, at outdoor tables in the pine grove. Skins tingling with salt and sun, we would drive back to Rome in the dusty afternoons.

  All this time we were growing closer. I think back on the many ways of falling in love, a good number of which I can report on firsthand, and I conclude that the falling part may sometimes happen too fast for savoring the experience, or doing anything to stop it in case of danger signals flashing with lurid force. This latter kind is rather like Alice down the rabbit hole, only with no time even to snatch a jar of marmalade from a shelf. I think the best way of falling may be in slow motion, extended over (not too much) time, taking in many hitches, little and big, quarrels and even fights, with reconcilings to follow, and the ever-heightening joys of choice occasions and good friends. Many threads get woven in; for a long time you may not know what to call it.

  Karl Shapiro returned to Rome en route to lecture in India. Friends from Ole Miss days began to pass through on their way home from Greece, or on summer tours in Europe.

  September had nearly come before I could bring myself to face facts: I had to leave.

  The last Italian Line boat to sail from Naples was the Conte Biancamano. I booked passage without enthusiasm. I felt that my venturing days were done.

  “Arrivederci, Roma.” No one needed to make things worse by singing that. When I took the train to Naples, John, who had come to see me off, stood in the middle of the platform sadly waving his familiar rolled newspaper, the London Daily Mail. Long after his tall figure had vanished from my sight, I kept seeing it. I cried all the way to Naples. The Atlantic grew much saltier from that passage.

  Had I done right to leave such a happy relationship, to leave Italy, and return to native things instead of marrying into an uncertain life abroad? Of course, I had. I knew I had.

  25

  HOMECOMING

  AFTER two years away and so much that had happened in my small world, I had good hopes about returning to Mississippi. I had written long, single-spaced, multiple-paged letters home, telling of every sort of occurrence—people, places, trips of every description. My improving health was a constant subject; the progress of my work was frequently mentioned.

  I had a problem ahead in that I wished to spend some time in New York to find a better publisher in case the new novel looked promising enough to merit that. My feeling, shared by many, was that Dodd, Mead, a small and rather unimpressive house, could be left for greener pastures.

  My mother had written that my father wished to help me! He would be glad to see that I got to New York, she wrote, to do whatever I needed to do. She further said, thinking no doubt of my recent illness, that they did not see why I should work at all! By this I took her to mean that I should no longer seek to hold a regular job.

  I knew that my father had now achieved a state of real affluence. He had acquired large properties—a seven-hundred-acre farm in the rich Delta country, a cattle farm near Carrollton, in addition to many other parcels of land and smaller moneymaking ventures. He was a founding member and prime mover in a hunting club on the river near Greenville. He and others of prominence in the state had banded together to acquire a beautiful pre-Civil War mansion, called Belmont, which they used as a lodge, inviting many from other parts there for the various hunting seasons, and for fishing in nearby Lake Lea. They also owned an extensive island, formed in the river during one of its changes of riverbed, where they hunted deer and other game in season.

  Through the years my father had dispensed large sums to see my brother through medical school, to support his wife and child, to establish him in practice. He was now giving lavish support to his grandson. Though he had generously met hospital and other medical expenses during my illness, I had so far not seen much of a profit from being a daughter. But I reasoned that everyone’s turn does come round, and I was happy to feel that this, by all I was told, was now occurring.

  I reached home in the still-lingering high temperatures of a Deep South September. After two years abroad when I’d had little extra money to refurbish my wardrobe, my clothes no doubt looked worn, and the presents I brought, though all I could afford, were scarcely impressive. But none of the above could quite have been the cause of the fierce rejection I encountered.

  There is little to be gained, such a long time later, in recounting all that transpired. I was brought up short in every passing comment. I might as well have been eight years old and told to go sit in a corner. Italy, an unimportant place full of Eye-talians, should not be mentioned. My work was not discussed.

  Nearby, not many miles over in the Delta, and quite near my father’s farm, a terrible thing had just occurred. A boy named Emmett Till had come from Chicago to visit relatives. He was black. He had whistled at the attractive wife of a man who ran a small highway grocery. That evening her husband and her brother-in-law had taken him out for a whipping. They had finally let him go—or so they said. However, the mutilated body of a boy identified as Till was recovered some days later from the Sunflower River. He had evidently been beaten to death and his body weighted down with a hundred-pound metal fan, a piece of gin machinery, tied around his neck.

  For years my father had been a source of pride in my thinking. Though difficult and autocratic and many times lacking in any understanding of my feelings, he had at least been forward-looking about racial matters. He had deplored the strict segregationalist bent of my uncle, who though vastly humane in his feelings, based all his theories of race on Southern tradition. To him history had established a set of values not to be betrayed.

  My father, however, subscribed to and read Hodding Carter’s liberal paper, published in Greenville, the Delta Democrat-Times. On the place he had bought during the 1940s and had worked steadily to bring to a high level of production, he had held contests for the black tenants to improve their gardens and houses. He had based his actions on an oft-stated principle: “We’ve got to treat them just like white people. Nothing else will do now.” He encouraged those who wanted to “go North” to go right ahead if they thought they could do better.

  It was to this fair-thinking person that I thought I was speaking when I deplored the murder of Emmett Till.

  Everybody around Carrollton and elsewhere in our part of Mississippi was on edge after this crime. Every day was scorching hot, and the news of the murder and the talk of it and the refusal to talk of it seemed to be throbbing intensely in the air. My mother in her anxiety often said that “something ought to be done to those men.” She did not say what should be done. She would then go on to say “that boy may have been just fourteen but he was grown, he was a man, and he shouldn’t have been looking at any white woman.”

  My father reacted to the crime the way a stone wall might if hit by a BB gun. He refused to discuss it or to hear any discussion of it. He said that “we had to keep things in hand.” The attitude of the business communities, now forming themselves more and more into the so-called citizens councils, was that the principal task of the white community was to “maintain order.” So far as anyone could see there was no threat whatsoever to order, but stories revealed that the councils were vigilantes bent on keeping blacks from registering to vote. For even attempting to register, a black man could lose his job.

  My cousin May Spencer, she of always delightful memories, called up, wanting to see me. She had taught grammar school when she stayed with us years before,
but she now had a doctoral degree in history and was visiting her family in Winona. I did not, I realized, dare to ask her home. Of course she would have been welcome. My parents loved her dearly. But she was a thinking relative, good for exchange of ideas, for excited talk over books, for speculation on current situations, whether political or otherwise. We would be dying to talk about Emmett Till and the present climate of thinking at Ole Miss and in other Southern states. She would also want to talk with me about my work, and ask many questions about Italy.

  If she had come to dinner or even for a longer visit we would not have been allowed any exchange at all. We agreed to meet at a highway restaurant and have our catching-up. The encounter was welcome and restored some equilibrium.

  But the fact remained that things got so bad at home that my mother suggested I go up to Oxford and visit some of my friends at Ole Miss. I knew that she was nervous and anxious, not only for me. She felt her accepted ideas were being threatened by an event that could only serve to dramatize what was there already. (I’m convinced to this day it wasn’t so much the Emmett Till case that upset everyone—who really cared very much if this uppity black boy from Chicago had got himself killed?—but what it brought into the public glare for all to see.) But I also knew my mother was aware of what had been promised me and would intercede for me with my father.

  So it was that after two years away, I found it necessary to leave home after two days.

  When I went up to Oxford for a visit, my ears were still ringing with parental abuse. The visit was a pleasant one, Oxford being much the same in its quiet sense of fine things, good talk, open-hearted welcome. My dear friend Morton King, head of the sociology department at Ole Miss, was cordial in finding a whole empty apartment for me. Ella Somerville extended open arms. The English department head, Alton Bryant, was ready to offer me a teaching place once more.

  William and Elizabeth Willis talked earnestly to me. Of course, I would see the Till murder in terms of tragic mistakes that happened in many societies. Of course, I would see every reason for coming back to the fold with those I loved. Of course, I thought, of course … Even the redoubtable A. Wigfall Green, our scholarly Renaissance lecturer, unbent enough to tell me I would need to be thinking of a house of my own in the wooded hills nearby.

  All this, I had every reason to feel happy about. But I had unfinished business to attend to—my unrevised novel, not yet under contract, my hopes for seeing the work through in New York. The slow labor of two years was tucked away dormant in my mind, just as the actual typescript was packed, tied and still unwrapped, in the corner of my baggage.

  I went back to Carrollton but things were pretty much the same. My mother had indeed argued with my father on my behalf. His pronouncement finally came: He would give me two thousand dollars in cash for going to New York. After that was spent, he didn’t know what I would do. I took it at once, as I was so glad to leave. I didn’t myself know what I would do when it was spent, but whatever it was, it would be done without further reference to Luther Spencer or to Carrollton, Mississippi.

  Yet it took a while for me to come around to verbalizing the extent of what had happened. I knew it in my bones, in the sick empty feeling there inside long before I could say to myself what I had been given to understand.

  You don’t belong down here anymore.

  26

  LEAVE-TAKING

  MANY a black person had already taken the train ride that I took north in that fall weather of 1955. Many of both races in the years just beginning would follow. Mississippi was pulling inward, the wagons were making a tight little circle, the feather had showed up behind the rock, every night sound was a threat. The closed society was bolting and barring every door and chinking every window.

  On the road ahead lay the forced integration of Ole Miss, when the state government refused to obey a federal order to admit the one black student, James Meredith, who had dared to apply. The refusal led to President Kennedy’s decision to send in federal marshals. The Ole Miss riots were the result.

  Also ahead, in the years coming swiftly on, lay the Freedom Riders, the murders of Medgar Evers and the civil rights workers, and the personal turmoil that came into every family, everywhere. All unsuspecting, I had walked early on into the opening pages of a conflict as lengthy and ramified as those depicted in Gone with the Wind or War and Peace.

  Many were determined to hold on to, defend, the dear old South, Mississippi the way it had always so beautifully been. What of the other Southerners open to a new and better future?

  My friend Morton King, then firmly in place at Ole Miss, resigned the year following my own return from Italy. He served on the student-faculty committee directing the annual Religious Emphasis Week. An Episcopal priest from Ohio had agreed to come and speak on “Religious Insights in Modern Drama.” A state legislator, learning he had contributed to the NAACP, demanded the invitation be withdrawn. The committee refused, but the chancellor overruled them. Morton resigned forthwith.

  Later, when the Ole Miss riots occurred, William Willis was one of the faculty members in their midst, attempting to maintain reason and civic order. In one nasty episode he was almost dragged down by a mob from the foot of the Confederate soldier’s monument on the Oxford square. He and Rev. Duncan Grey, the Episcopal rector of St. Peter’s Church, were trying to address a crowd. The entire Willis family, seeing the enormous expense of time, effort, and feelings always demanded, at last decided to leave Mississippi behind forever.

  James Silver, chairman of the history department and prominent among those favoring the Meredith admission, exerted himself tirelessly. He was constantly abused and misquoted in the press. He, too, finally resigned and accepted an appointment elsewhere.

  In later years I was to learn that Dr. McDill of Belhaven memories had left for much the same reason. When pressed, he had announced in favor of integration. “I could take threats to myself,” he told me, “but when my wife and children were threatened, I felt it time to leave.”

  No wonder William Faulkner spoke of “the human heart in conflict with itself.” In his or her heart of hearts, the Southerner who was wedded to tradition hoped that someway, somehow, the day would never arrive when black would have to be accepted on an equal basis with white. When U.S. marshals first seemed about to enter Oxford to implement the federal court order, William Faulkner vowed that he would be out there in the street shootin’ at ‘em. He later took back his statement: “No sober man would have said it; no sane man would believe it.” In other words, I was drunk but you are crazy. Yet the feeling was there.

  But in the long run Faulkner came through publicly with great force, and his eloquent cry “What are we afraid of?” condemned the prevailing attitude in the state.

  Now the truth is, I don’t know whether I was struck down to ground zero in my own family specifically because of ideas about racial equality. The typescript of The Voice at the Back Door was never taken from its package, nor was it discussed. What was repeatedly said was that I had “gone off to Italy and gotten hold of some funny ideas,” but whether this applied to racial matters or to other ideas all across the board, or to any ideas at all, was never clear. Nothing was to be discussed.

  James Silver later wrote a book about the insurrection at Ole Miss. He called it Mississippi: The Closed Society. A passage from his book is revealing:

  The best of Mississippi’s men born between 1820 and 1845 were lost on the field of battle. Many of the more ambitious who survived went north and west, and they have been going ever since. … In fact, ex-Mississippians today play a role similar to that once performed by migrants from poverty-stricken Scotland—to a surprising degree they have achieved positions of eminence in all phases of American life. The only native to reach the pinnacle of renown while remaining in the state was William Faulkner, and I have personal reason to believe that he would have completed his removal to Virginia if he had lived another year….

  The exiles are among the most ambitious, the
ablest, and the most adaptable to change of all Mississippians. Such constant attrition of potential leadership is generally regarded as one of Mississippi’s great unsolved problems and must be a major cause for the state’s unwillingness to give up its ancient folk-ways… . Mississippi has for more than a century been driving away a substantial proportion of its brightest young people who might otherwise have played a leading part in bringing the state abreast of the times. The professor who sorrowfully departed from the University in 1963 as a protest against the workings of the closed society was in effect banished from the community, as surely as the sensitive youngster who, having had his eyes opened to the outside world by an inspiring teacher, decides that he would prefer to live in that world.

  … One can but wonder to what degree Mississippi’s story might have been different if a sizeable number of those thousands of bright, perceptive natural leaders among the men and women who have been forced from the state had in some way found it possible to return.

  Another side of the question may well apply to the whole South. No less devout a Southerner than Allen Tate has thrown light on this subject. What, really, about art and the South? What does the South feel about the many fine talents she has nurtured?

  Times in this respect have certainly changed. Once William Faulkner was safely in his grave, having won the Nobel Prize and also having become a world figure, Oxford people found they had always cherished him. It may seem mischievous to mention that they now found him a source of increased income. Many visitors came from everywhere. Genial stories multiplied. People were invited to go on platforms to tell all about him. It is all so folksy to paper over the real story. But William Faulkner was a recluse in the years I was in Oxford, and the hatred of him personally and of the things he was said to be writing—though probably few who criticized so violently had bothered to read him—was widespread.