Stephen Fry in America

by Stephen Fry

  We descend over a wood and move along at tree height. I pluck a maple leaf from the topmost branches.

  Rick is actually a futures trader. He can do all that at home on the internet in the North Carolina countryside. In his spare time he can look down on the state that gave aviation to the world and smile with satisfaction at how much lovelier mankind’s first form of flight continues to be. For all that I am glad when we set down in the driveway of someone’s house. Terra firma beats terror every time.

  SOUTH CAROLINA

  ‘And finally I arrive at that coastline. Nothing has prepared me for the rapturous loveliness of Beaufort and the Low Country.’

  And now, for the first time, I really feel I am in the South. In West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky and North Carolina the accents told clearly enough which side of the Mason–Dixon line I was on, but it was still a landscape dominated by the Appalachians and their daughter ranges. South Carolina is a whole other world, or a whole nother world as they would say.

  The national tree is the Cabbage, or Sabal, palmetto: there are plenty on view as I travel along the highway through Low Country South Carolina, past Hilton Head and towards Beaufort (pronounced ‘Bewfort’, much as our Beaulieu is pronounced ‘Bewley’). It is an attractive palm, native all the way from North Carolina down to the southernmost tip of the United States at the Florida Keys. There is Virginia pine to be seen too, usually given the more undignified name of ‘scrub pine’. I mention the trees because, the greater part of my time being given over to driving, they are the most noticeable feature of the roadside landscape. The bright autumnal leaves of New England were dazzling and absolutely particular, their interplay with the sun as I drove kept the long journeys interesting while I was in the North, and now the different varieties of tree down here tell me a story of the South. The palms hint at something tropical while the oaks and cypresses especially share an extraordinary Southern quality. They are all festooned with Spanish moss. This flowering plant, not actually a moss at all, drapes itself like some strange decoration over the branches of the trees, especially the great oaks. Thick beards of it hang everywhere. It lends a faintly spooky air to the landscape that combines with the sultriness and humidity of the atmosphere to give the South its characteristic air of languor and Gothic mystery.

  Something else is different too: the architecture. I am not talking about great plantation houses–I have not seen any of those yet–I mean just the ordinary houses. And the shops too. They are so unusually low and squat and new and metallic and…then I understand. Here, close to the Atlantic shore in South Carolina we are in the heart of hurricane country. In 1989 Hugo caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage and many lives were lost. Buildings have to take account of the great tropical cyclones that are generated out in the South Atlantic and scream their way towards the coastline. The lower the profile they present to the storms the better.

  And finally I arrive at that coastline. Nothing has prepared me for the rapturous loveliness of Beaufort and the Low Country. Everywhere there are bodies of water and islands connected by bridges and cause-ways, Lemon Island, Bluff Island, Goat Island, Horse Island, Otter Island, and the very piratical Morgan Island and Port Royal.

  Beaufort sunset.

  It seems like a kind of paradise. An unspoiled historic old town set in enchanted waterways.

  It is unlikely, for all its beauty, to have created that impression in the captured Africans who arrived here as slaves.

  It is impossible to be in the South and not think of slavery. That is not to say the South can never ‘rise again’ freed of its own historic shackles, but the completeness of the slave economy and the ensuing trauma of the Civil War and its aftermath have left an indelible imprint.

  The Gullah

  I have my first meeting with Miss Anita under oaks heavy with Spanish moss. I join her on a bench and we look across the water, over the islands and towards the far Atlantic horizon. Thousands of miles ahead lie Cape Verde and Hurricane Alley where the storms are born and beyond which the Slave Coast stretches down from Nigeria to Angola.

  Miss Anita explains the history of the Gullah.

  ‘Now I hear you’re something of a film star, Miss Anita?’

  ‘Who told you that? Shame the devil.’

  ‘That’s what they’re telling me.’

  ‘I was in that movie Forrest Gump, which maybe you saw…we was in the choir. They shot it just over there. And GI Jane they shot on that island. And The Jungle Book.’

  ‘The Jungle Book? But that’s a cartoon, surely?’

  My hand is slapped. ‘Not that Jungle Book, th’other one.’

  Miss Anita is a leading representative and historian of the Gullah people. In my shameful ignorance I knew nothing of who they were until I met her.

  ‘We think the word comes from Gola, which also gave its name to the country of Angola. The Gullah people, we’re African-Americans, but we kep’ our own language and our own ways.’

  ‘And what is that language?’

  ‘It’s what they call a Creole. African, Native American and English, all mixed up like a good salad.’

  The Gullah are mostly to be found in the Low Country of South Carolina and the Sea Islands of Georgia. Anita explains the reasons for this.

  ‘We the descendants of slaves who were set to work on the only crop that could make it here, where the land is all…what’s the word?’

  ‘Waterlogged?’

  ‘That’ll do. Waterlogged. The slaves brought with them–all the slave ships did–the mosquito. Now in the other parts, in the land where cotton grows, Mr Mosquito he couldn’t survive, but down here in the Low Country, he loved all them marshes. And Mr Mosquito he flourish and the malaria was bad. The Africans had the resistance and fore you knew it South Carolina had a larger black population than white!’ Miss Anita chuckles at this curlicue of history. ‘They have a word in the cotton fields–“de-Africanise”. The cotton slaves were de-Africanised good, but here in the rice paddies things it was different. Not so many whites around so the slaves weren’t never so integrated into the white world.’

  ‘Entirely captivated.’

  The Masser, he angry…

  ‘So that’s how your African language and music lasted longer here?’

  ‘That’s how it was.’

  ‘But you were Christianised.’

  ‘Praise the Lord, that we were.’

  Whatever one may think of that, and whatever the oddities of celebrating the enforced religion of their slavemasters, one cannot deny that the Christianisation of the slaves gave birth to that wonder of world music, the spiritual.

  ‘“Michael Row The Boat Ashore”. You know that song?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘That was born right here. Right here in Beaufort.’

  We sit and watch the sun set over the islands. I part, promising to return later in the evening to watch the rehearsal of a show she has devised.

  The Show

  The rehearsal takes place in what we would call a village hall, the cast consisting of fifteen or so of Miss Anita’s friends and family ranging from toddlers to silver-haired old ladies and gentlemen. I am prepared to be horribly embarrassed by an excruciating display of amateur dramatics.

  The moment the company open their mouths to sing I find myself transported. I am listening to what used to be called in my schooldays ‘negro spirituals’ sung in the place where they were created by the descendants of those who created them. And sung in that language. This is what astonishes me. I have assumed for years now that the kind of slave talk that pronounces ‘river’ as ‘ribber’ is unacceptable Uncle Remus minstrel-speak and cannot be countenanced. Here the Gullah embrace it.

  The pageant Miss Anita has devised tells the story of a group of slaves who escape one Christmas on the ‘underground railway’, the organisation established by freed slaves and white abolitionists that sprang slaves from captivity and transported them secretly via a network of sympathisers to the North. Her
dialogue is full of references to ‘the Masser’ and ‘white folks’ and the ‘birthin’ of babies’, the sort of Mammy-talk which is straight out of Butterfly McQueen’s famous lines in Gone with the Wind and which I had thought so politically incorrect as to be virtually illegal. It is rather liberating to know that this language has been reclaimed by its originators and to hear it spoken with such gusto and relish. The aura of taboo is lifted and one is allowed to recognise once more what a wonderful and rich kind of English it is.

  Every now and again another song is sung. ‘Amazing Grace’, ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I See’, ‘Swing Low’. I am entirely captivated.

  As with the bluegrass in Tennessee I am reminded once more of the extraordinary power that comes from music that is played in the place where it was born.

  I decide that I like the South. Which is just as well, for there is a lot more of it to come…

  * * *

  SOUTH CAROLINA

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  SC

  Nickname:

  The Palmetto State

  Capital:

  Columbia

  Flower:

  Yellow jessamine

  Tree:

  Cabbage Palmetto

  Bird:

  Carolina Wren

  Dance:

  Shag

  Motto:

  Dum spiro spero (‘While I breathe I hope’) & Animis opibusque parati (‘Ready in soul and in works’)

  Well-known residents and natives: Jesse Jackson, Jasper Johns, William Gibson, Dizzie Gillespie, Chubby Checker, Eartha Kitt, James Brown, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Joe Frazier, Andie Macdowell, Mary-Louise Parker, Chris Rock, Stephen Colbert.

  * * *

  GEORGIA

  ‘I am a guest of a remarkable lady called Mrs Nancy Shmoe. Her family, including her sister, Aunt Snead, have gathered for Thanksgiving.’

  I leave Beaufort, South Carolina and head towards the southern state line. The Savannah River forms the boundary with Georgia and gives its name to an extraordinary town.

  Savannah, GA is perhaps the most perfectly preserved of all the Southern cities, certainly the most glamorous and upscale. Famed for its twenty-four residential squares, its grand antebellum townhouses, lush gardens, eccentric charm and bohemian atmosphere, the ‘Hostess City of the South’ leapt to popular consciousness in 1994 with the publication of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a book that went straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for most of the year. It charted real-life steamy and deadly goings-on amongst Savannah’s social elite; there was a hustler, an antiques dealer, a drag queen called the Lady Chablis and a cast of sundry other wild and exotic blooms. A few years later the book was made into a film with Kevin Spacey playing the antiques dealer and featuring Jude Law as the gay lover he apparently murders. Jim Williams, the real-life counterpart of the character Spacey played, was cleared, after an unprecedented four trials, of all murder charges but died just months after this final exoneration.

  Just a cotton-picking moment.

  Historic Savannah

  Jim Williams was important for reasons aside from the scandal that led to the book and film that led in turn to the great boom in Savannah’s tourist industry that goes on to this day. He was more than an antique dealer, he was one of the first to embark on the project of saving, renovating and restoring the great old houses and squares of Savannah, for bringing the town to its current pitch of splendour and charm.

  In all of Savannah today I do not suppose there is anyone who knows more about the houses of the historic district than Celia Dunn, the town’s best known realtor, or ‘estate agent’ as we would say in British English. I spend a delightful three hours in her company, unlocking the doors of grand houses for which she has the key and finding myself in closed worlds of tasteful grandeur and graceful splendour that are almost too perfect to be bearable.

  Everywhere we go Celia is stopped and greeted. She is as well known a landmark in Savannah as Monterey Square and quite as grand. As we leave our last historic house, someone calls out from the street, ‘Happy holiday, Celia!’ and I am reminded with a shock of where we are in the calendar. Today is the third Wednesday in November, which can only mean that tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day. I have a two hundred-mile drive ahead of me, in holiday traffic too. Better hustle, Stephen.

  Thanksgiving at Blackwater

  I drive past the cotton fields, becoming more and more astonished by them until I just have to stop and look closer. What an insane plant. It really is just an ordinary, woody weed with no distinguishing characteristics except that it has cotton wool pads on top of it. It is not as if there are other plants that are slightly like it, or whose development tends towards suggesting that one day a cotton plant might exist. It just seems to have arrived full-born in the world with this ridiculous gift. Without it, what on earth would I be wearing? Without it, would there be such an impressive driveway as now I point the taxi down? Without it, would there be a true South?

  I am a guest of a remarkable lady called Mrs Nancy Schmoe who, at the age of ninety-one, runs the Blackwater plantation house and estate in Quitman, southern Georgia, very close to the Florida border.

  Her family have gathered around her for Thanksgiving. Included are her three daughters, two of her grandchildren and her older sister, ninety-eight-year-old Aunt Snead, who runs her own estate further south. As you would hope from their names, these are remarkable and captivating women.

  In the kitchen of the big house I find a group of three sisters, African-American, who are cooking up the great Thanksgiving Feast. It is hard not to feel slightly embarrassed talking to these loyal black servants. They have grown up and lived here all their lives, they helped bring Mrs Schmoe’s children into the world and their language and loyalties seem to belong to another world. From what I can observe, unacceptably sentimental or patronising as it may appear, these women are very happy and would not want to be anywhere else. They are getting towards pensionable age but the family will not get rid of them. All very patriarchal and disgraceful no doubt, but it puts me in mind of an occasion in New York many years ago. I was having dinner with a pair of well-known novelists, one of whom was married at the time to a Southern girl who began to get rather angry at the occasional glancing references to the red-necked, right-wing South being made by the white New York literati around the table.

  * * *

  GEORGIA

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  GA

  Nickname:

  The Peach State

  Capital:

  Atlanta

  Flower:

  Cherokee rose

  Tree:

  Live oak

  Bird:

  Brown thrasher (hurray, not a Cardinal again)

  Motto:

  Wisdom, Justice and Moderation

  Well-known residents and natives: Jimmy Carter (39th President), Martin Luther King Jr., Newt Gingrich, Joe Kennedy, Doc Holiday, Joel Chandler Harris, Margaret Mitchell, Carson McCullers, Alice Walker, Bill Hicks, Oliver Hardy, DeForest Kelly, Charles Coburn, Kim Basinger, Holly Hunter, Julia Roberts, Laurence Fishburn, Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Dakota Fanning, Jessye Norman, Johnny Mercer, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Gladys Knight, Michael Stipe, The B52s, Kanye West, Bobby Jones, Sugar Ray Robinson, Hulk Hogan.

  * * *

  ‘Damn you!’ she shouted suddenly. ‘You all go on about the South and how racist we are, but how many of you have got any black friends? There are black folks in Tennessee into whose arms I run whenever I go back and we hug and kiss each other and cry for joy. We grew up together and we love each other. None of you even knows a single black person!’ At which she rose and left the table, choking back tears.

  A Tennessee Bolting horse.

  The relationship began with the enforced slavery which everyone can surely agree was a wicked and monstrous institution. Today, however, there is economic
segregation instead for most African-Americans, offset by a rising black middle class in areas like Atlanta and ‘the New South’ as they call it but, even now a few pockets exist, as here, of a strange co-dependent relationship which may look patriarchal and patronising to our eyes, but which is a real relationship nonetheless and surely beats the hell out of life in a drug-infested ghetto.

  Well, I am not here to judge or to presume to understand. I am here to eat. But first, horrible to relate, the subject of riding is brought up.

  A Tennessee Bolting Horse

  Outside the Spanish moss profusely drips, as it should, from the live oaks and distant cypresses; all is as it ought to be at a plantation house in the Deep South. Except that I am expected to get on a horse.

  Blackwater has a celebrated (apparently) stable of Tennessee Walking Horses, a breed of animal unfamiliar to me.

  ‘Oh they are so gentle and docile and sweet!’ ‘Docile’ rhymes with ‘fossil’ in American, which makes it sound even gentler. ‘You will adore them!’

  ‘Yes, but they won’t adore me,’ I whine.

  ‘Nonsense! They are the kindest, calmest horses in the whole wide world. You’ll see.’

  We go round to the stables where a large horse called Shadow is being saddled for me.

  ‘Look,’ I try to explain, ‘for some reason horses really, really don’t like me. No matter how calm and friendly I am they…’

  ‘Nonsense!’ they giggle.

  I step up from a block and just manage to get my feet in the stirrups before the sweetest, gentlest, most dossil horse in the whole wide world screams, bucks and bolts. The family are all so astonished it takes them some little while to realise what has happened. A ‘some little while’ that is filled by me shouting ‘Whoa!’ and pulling as hard on the reins as I dare as below me a ton of mad jumping flesh gathers its hindquarters and prepares to charge a wooden fence. A last desperate yank on the lines and the crazed beast slows down enough to give the others time to catch up and grab it.