I suggest that over the reach of decades a certain way of life may produce attitudes—a sense of fair play, an abhorrence of violence, a respect for the dignity of men—that supersede all other considerations and come to dominate moral conduct. However strongly it may be argued that this is not enough, it remains a tradition to be reckoned with, and the Virginia Tidewater lays justifiable claim to such a heritage. The region possesses the shortcomings common to all places, but the land and its people have achieved a certain harmony. Perhaps more than in any other comparable part of America, men have learned to get along with one another. It would be a pleasant irony if the land where the American dilemma began—close by the shores of the tranquil and lovely James, with its memory of black chained cargoes—should by its way of life come to embody an answer to that same dilemma.
[McCall’s, July 1968.]
The James
In the early 1940s, despite my mediocre record at Christchurch School, my father set about to find a place where I might consummate my higher education. My wretched grades at Christchurch—by that I mean I had, I recall, flunked trigonometry four times in a row—made a scholarship anywhere out of the question, and since my father was paying the ticket, he felt (with great justification, I now realize) that he could determine the school I was going to attend. Anyplace north of the Potomac was unthinkable, since although my father was not really an unreconstructed Southerner (having married my mother, a lady from Pennsylvania), he was born in North Carolina only twenty-odd years after the Civil War; until his dying day his own father, my grandfather, limped from a knee wound obtained at Chancellorsville, and thus his mistrust of Yankee education was abiding and considerable. He resolved, then, that I should enroll in a college either in his native state or in Virginia, which was mine. Any institution farther south he regarded as primitive, and totally unfit for a lad of my ancestry and upbringing.
He narrowed the choices down. The University of Virginia, the most obvious option, was immediately cast aside; its reputation in regard to alcohol was more horrendous then than it is now; there were freshmen there, he had heard on good authority, who had been apprehended wandering the streets of Charlottesville in the throes of delirium tremens, and since my father sensed my own incipient predilection for the bottle, he was not about to throw me into the lion's den. Then there was William & Mary. So close at hand to my hometown, William & Mary seemed another obvious choice. But the school was eliminated on the grounds of what he called intellectual vacuity—a condition which had prevailed there ever since the founding of Phi Beta Kappa in 1776. Likewise, Washington & Lee was rejected. He found the place effete and frivolous, lacking in depth of concern for the examined life, and with some reason: after a brief visit to Lexington, he was profoundly offended by the hundreds of uniform seersucker suits and white buckskin shoes. He called them “Lightweights!” Finally, then, my father and I traveled up here to Hampden-Sydney, whose Presbyterianism and strictures about alcohol my father regarded happily. I hope you will not take it as all loose flattery when I say that I was so totally beguiled by this serene and lovely campus (it remains so, I'm happy to say, to this very day) and by the splendid easygoingness of the place, and by so much else in the human sense that was wonderfully attractive, that I said to myself: This is where I want to be. My father, I could tell, was also not immune to the charms of the school, physical and otherwise; but he was even more of a pushover for honorifics (it was one of his venial sins), and when he was informed that this venerable institution had contributed, on a per capita basis, more biographic subjects to Who’s Who in America than any college in the country, he had all but had me enrolled. But soon after this, fate intervened—fate in the form of those four consecutive F's at Christchurch. To my intense disappointment I was turned down, and so I went to another Presbyterian college—Davidson, in North Carolina, which inexplicably overlooked my academic shortcomings and gained the indifferent student that Hampden-Sydney had prudently shunned. I was not a good scholar at Davidson either.
—
A short time ago, while brooding on this melancholy tale, I was naturally led into thoughts of Virginia. Despite my longtime residence in the North, my native state still compels a strong hold on me. If it is true that an artist's world is largely determined by the experiences of the first two decades of his life, and this is a theory held by Sigmund Freud, Ernest Hemingway, and myself, then the Virginia which I so vividly and poignantly recall from my early years worked on me a lasting effect, made me in large measure the writer that I am. And so, as I cast about for a theme which might be appropriate to talk about, I hesitated, wondering if the simplicity of the idea that struck me might not, in its very simplicity, be inadequate. On the other hand, what I had in mind did seem to represent something profoundly important, even critical, in its significance not only for Virginia but for the future and the quality of all our lives.
I am speaking of a river, one that flows less than forty miles north of here. A nearby stream, the Appomattox, is its tributary, familiar to all of you. I am referring, of course, to the James. To the north, as it winds through Buckingham and Albemarle counties, and past the old plantation of Bremo in Fluvanna, the James is a modest and pleasant stream, a mere trickle of an unfledged watercourse meandering through the Piedmont. But down on the east bank of the lower Peninsula, where I was born and reared, the river is nearly six miles across at its widest, a vast and lonely expanse that makes up one of the broadest estuaries of any river in America. More than anything else, the James River was the absolute and dominating physical presence of my childhood and early youth. As I envision how a child growing up on the flanks of the Rockies or Sierras must ever afterward be enthralled to the memory of mountain peaks, or as I recollect how a writer like Willa Cather, brought up on the Nebraska prairies, was haunted for life by that majestically unending “sea of grass,” so for me the sheer geographical fact of the James was central to my experience, so much a part of me that even now I wonder whether some of that salty-sweet water might not have entered my bloodstream. A good deal of this, of course, had to do with the omnipresent spell of the river's prodigious history. No river in America was ever compelled to carry such an onerous burden, and we little tykes were never allowed to forget it as we sat in our classrooms overlooking the sovereign waterway itself, informed by one schoolmarm after another that yonder—just there!—Captain John Smith sailed past on his momentous journey, while just there, too, in 1619, another ship lumbered upstream with a different cargo to make the James the mother-river of Negro slavery for the whole New World. And nearby were the great river mansions—Carter's Grove, Westover, Shirley—populated with ghosts of bygone centuries.
—
But if the James was the past, that past coexisted with the present—and what a vital present that was! Winter, summer, spring, and fall—the river was rarely out of my sight; its presence subtly intruded on all my other senses. When I woke up on spring mornings the first thing I smelled was the river's brackish odor on the wind, a rich mingling of salt and seaweed and tidal mud, of organic matter in benign dissolution. There was the music of the river, too, diurnal sounds which wove themselves into the very fabric of village life—the cry of gulls; waves thrusting, lapping; the flapping of sails as they luffed at the pier; boat horns; and always the singsong voices of Negro oystermen as they labored above their tongs. We swam in the river from April until October; the water—partly fresh, partly oceanic—was faintly saline on the tongue, and in July it was as warm as mother's milk, and just as reassuring. The salinity, of course, accounted for the quality of the oysters; cousins to the Lynnhaven variety, they were the size of small saucers and utterly luscious to swallow; and then there were crabs. The crabs were not simply abundant; they existed in such flabbergasting profusion as to seem almost menacing. In midsummer we netted swarms of them with absurd ease from the village pier, using hunks of gamy meat for bait. When I was eleven or twelve I was a soft-shell-crab businessman; the delicious little creatures wer
e so numerous in the mudflats of low tide that I could fill a market basket in less than an hour and then peddle these—layered with fragrant seaweed—at the back doors of the village houses, where the ladies grumbled at my exorbitant price: three cents apiece, an inflationary penny more than the previous year. I loved this big, fecund, blowsy, beautiful, erotic river. It was erotic, and I achieved with it a penultimate intimacy by nearly drowning in it in my thirteenth year, when the little boat in which I was learning to sail capsized and sank. Still, I loved the James, and in memory its summertime shores are tangled with all that piercing delight of youthful romance; recollecting the moonlight in huge quicksilver oblongs on those dark waters, and the drugstore perfume of gardenia, and boys’ and girls’ voices. I no longer wonder why the river had such a lasting effect on my spirit, becoming almost in itself a metaphor for the painful sweetness of life and its mystery.
[Excerpted from a commencement address at Hampden-Sydney College, May 23, 1980.]
Children of a Brief Sunshine
If the accident of birth caused you to spend most of your early life, as I did, on what is known as the Virginia historic peninsula, you were apt to grow up with a ponderous sense of the American past. As a boy I was made constantly aware of the trinity of national shrines—Jamestown, Yorktown, and Williamsburg—which even then, in the 1930s, brought tourists flocking to that seventy-mile oblong of somnolent Tidewater lowland that juts southeastward from Richmond between two of the country's most venerable rivers, the York and the James. But at that age, proximity and familiarity breed, if not contempt, then a certain callow indifference, and I don't recall being at all thrilled by the greater part of my admittedly august surroundings.
Jamestown was merely a boring landing on the river, heavy with melancholy and ancient, illegible tombstones. Yorktown, for me, possessed no glamour, none of the allure of a world-class battleground on the order of Waterloo or Hastings, but was simply a river beach where we went to gorge ourselves on hot dogs and to swim in the soupy tidal water, thick with jellyfish. For some reason verging on the heretical, Colonial Williamsburg never captured my fancy; it seemed even then a place largely contrived and artificial, and it left me cold. But part of my spirit was always mysteriously drawn to the James River mansions. They spoke to me in a secret, exciting way that other landmarks could never speak, and I still consider them among the state's truly captivating attractions.
Westover and Brandon. Shirley and Carter’s Grove. There are other fine Colonial structures in the Tidewater, but these four remain the exemplars of the noble species of dwelling that the early planters built on the banks of the James, creating, from native brick and timber, likenesses of the country houses of England they had left behind, but in each case, out of some quirky genius, imparting to the whole an individuality that remains arrestingly American. The mansions have of course undergone much restoration since the mid-eighteenth century, when they were built. (William Byrd's Westover, perhaps the most splendid of the group, was badly mutilated by fire during the Civil War.) But one of the remarkable things about these houses is the way they have escaped the look of having been prettified by the embalmer's hand. Although they are linked in spirit by their obviously Georgian origins, part of the charm of each lies in its almost defiant distinctiveness—Shirley, with its absence of wings, having a lofty solidity, in contrast, say, to the dignified horizontal expansiveness of Brandon and its rectangular wings attached to the center by connecting passageways. Each is unique, and a surprise.
There are perhaps few habitations anywhere that ever so successfully fused aesthetic delightfulness with unabashed commerce. The plantation houses were really the headquarters for complex business enterprises. Their situation on the river happened not primarily because of the ingratiating view, but because the James was the means whereby each estate's golden harvest of tobacco was shipped back to the insatiable pipe smokers and snuff dippers of England and the Continent. What strikes one, then, is that the homes—created by gentlemen for whom profit was a paramount concern—are so fastidious yet so sensuous in their elegance, so satisfying in terms of all those components that make up the nearly perfect human abode. And all of this took place on the breast of a raw and primitive continent whose often violent settlement had begun not many years before.
How easy the temptation must have been to erect something tacky and utilitarian and to make one's getaway; the banks of the waterways of the earth have been littered by exploiters’ shameless eyesores. But Virginia planters like William Byrd and his fellow proprietors, entrepreneurial though they were, made up a rare breed whose sense of environment was subtle and demanding. We know from the records they left that they responded with passion to the music of Purcell and Lully, to the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil; why should they not be determined that their surroundings be imbued with equal serenity and refinement?
Among other things, these fog-dampened Britons were plainly intoxicated with the flowering of Virginia's lush and sun-drenched countryside. And so what impressed me as a boy, perhaps unconsciously, impresses me now with logic and force; the harmonious connection between the mansions and their natural surroundings, each of them seeming to grow like an essential ornament in a landscape of huge, hovering shade trees, boxwood-and-rose-scented gardens, and a sumptuous lawn undulating to the river's edge. Two hundred and fifty years later this mingling of elements has a flowing integrity and authenticity. Also, humanity and wit.
Look for humanity and wit almost everywhere in one of the James River mansions. In the great downstairs hall, the visitor will see how two doors facing each other allowed guests to arrive from opposite directions: by way of a tree-lined carriage road or, for people coming by barge or boat, across the lawn from the bank of the river. In the solitude of that barely civilized wilderness, guests were welcomed and fussed over, and they came incessantly. Isolation made hospitality more than a ritual: It was part of a hungry need for communion, and the splendidly paneled rooms that give off the main hall saw manic activity: dancing and reading aloud; parlor games; music played on spinet and mandolin and harpsichord; gossip, flirtation, and seduction; card games; much drinking of local applejack and fine Bordeaux wine around fireplaces that were everywhere and fueled from inexhaustible sources of Tidewater timber. Early on, Virginia developed a serious cuisine. At tables in the big dining room, the food—usually supplied from outside cookhouses—was served to the household and to the endless stream of visitors in orgiastic plenty that still makes one marvel.
No time or place is without its woes and discomforts, and surely the planters often worked hard and were besieged by problems, but a nimbus of hedonism surrounds our vision of the James River mansions in their heyday. Both the inhabitants and the crowd of callers must have had a lot of fun. Set down as they were in a delectable backwater where their only excuse for being was to supply their countrymen with a mildly euphoric weed they extracted from the fat land with absurd ease, the planters were among the favored few in history for whom the circumstances of life had produced a vast amount of enjoyment and relatively little adversity. Although the American Revolution would eventually produce friction and discontent, the proprietors appeared blissfully free of political anxieties. The pestilences that had decimated Jamestown had subsided. War—both European and domestic—was many comfortable miles away. The local Indians had been pacified years before. The low-church Episcopal God whom the planters sometimes worshipped was forgiving and tolerant of their voluptuous pleasures, leaving the burden of sin to be suffered by the Puritans, far north in icy New England. In the long and disorderly chronicle of the West, with its chiaroscuro of serenity and dark agony, they were children of a brief sunshine.
One discordant presence was usually forgotten, or overlooked, even then. As the present-day visitor looks out across the tidy beds of flowers bordered by boxwood and traversed by brick walls, his gaze may linger on the outbuildings (or the spot where they once stood), and they too will seem to fall symmetrically into place. These
smaller buildings—servants’ quarters, cookhouse, tannery, and smokehouse, carpenter's shop, all decently contrived and of honest and workmanlike construction—were, of course, the demesne of the black slaves, whose toil had been essential to the creation and success of the mansions, and continued to assure their perpetuation. The “people,” as they were so often called, had been generally treated with care and kindness, so it is understandable that the planters suffered vexation over their common plight and cursed heaven for their predicament. However, not knowing what else to do, they allowed the problem to pass into the hands of later generations, who resolved the matter in one of the most murderous wars ever fought. Meanwhile, the beautiful mansions endured, and still endure.
[Architectural Digest, March 1984.]
Race and Slavery
This Quiet Dust
You mought be rich as cream
And drive you coach and four-horse team,
But you can't keep de world from moverin’ round
Nor Nat Turner from gainin’ ground.
And your name it mought be Caesar sure
And got you cannon can shoot a mile or more,
But you can't keep de world from moverin’ round
Nor Nat Turner from gainin’ ground.
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