Our writer, our economist, our thinker, this person who would bring to Washington and to national affairs some of the order that goes into the making of books or even into the reading of them did at last enter the city with Kennedy, a few to them entered at least. What he was to do there we do not quite know, since government is not a book. We may think of him as wanting to please and yet himself hardened to criticism. A certain ambitiousness makes one forgiving—the sort of ambition that yearns for effectiveness rather than perfection. But if power and the opportunity to observe power were simply a lofty form of office work, no one would want it. It is also tall women in splendid dresses, black limousines at the door, and the lust for the ultimate historical gossip satisfied at last. To know, truly, what the people in power are like: is that not some of the charm, the interest, as well as legislation passed, policy defined?
Our young man—no, our youngish man—a father, long resident of some simpler community than Washington, has a pleasant enough vanity based on his past accomplishments. The little cavities of self-doubt have been filled with the cement of a quick psychoanalysis, the determination of wives, and, with power and fame, women other than wives. Even the poor legislator, and certainly the Washington intellectual personage, find that men at the center of things appear to women in the most affirmative light, creating a climate of assent, of romantic and personal prosperity that sweeten the long work day. (All our presidents, according to the press, rise early.) He finds that she who wishes to buy will not be deterred by small defects. The poor bookworm, the faithful teacher, the economist at his desk had not realized that political power, or even the nearness to it, will make of one the hero of a novel, and there will inevitably be subplots.
History starves many, but fattens a few. All the tortured ambivalence Voltaire felt for Frederick (Macaulay says it was “compounded of all sentiments, from enmity to friendship, from scorn to admiration . . .”) might have been in a more usual country felt by our man. But here where the occasion to serve in the capitol is so rare, gratitude and opportunity will naturally incline one to an unduly full acceptance, and even to considerable suppression or denial of the observing faculties. The real person, the elected man, is, so far as we can learn, nearly always a person of the most rigid contrariness. In the present world he is likely to be exactly the opposite of all the public imagines. Behind the ruddy, folksy downrightness insiders know conceit, anger, vindictiveness. Family men, pictured a million times with their first ladies, die in the arms of their second ladies. Every exalted hill is a loathsome valley. Perhaps this, the final falseness or fraud, is the ultimate reward of our greed for publicity. Because we want to know everything we are told nothing but lies. The president appears like one of those television commercials run over and over again. He is always typecast, wearing his make-up. The opposition always chooses the wrong vices to whisper about. If a man is a drunkard they will tell the voters that he has syphilis. The lie is the only thing we can count on in our image of the president.
But all this is merely “social” and trivial. Serious men do important work—they must whether they wish to or not. They must “save the free world,” save it again and again. Work, crises, trips; our man floats through space with everything petty done for him by a gigantic bureaucracy; the hard work of government is also impersonal. He is a tenor in a chorale that may or may not receive good reviews, but at least he is not always personally accountable. Few people ever quit the movies or political life. These callings, therefore, must not be as “exhausting” as we are told, since so many notoriously lazy persons refuse to abandon them unless met with irrevocable rejection. Speeches, conferences, and confrontations, the satisfaction of ceremonial interludes: to these the dullest and the cleverest creatures assent, grateful, “prayerful,” going forth to them with the help of God. Our writer, our intellectual will be thought by many not to be a “real” writer. It is felt that to the real writer or thinker no harm can come from history; only the private catastrophe, the individual suffering, can give pause to an authentic inspiration. But how are we to judge the melancholy, how to estimate the strain on the heart muscles in the effort to go back once more, to live again with elected American essence, how to know the ulcerative struggle to bring the word to the wordless?
The black limousine draws up in Georgetown, but now it picks up a mortified man with a cramped smile. He who is pursuing his intellectual work in Washington is back again in the little ranch house of political America. All would be disposed to pity. And yet even the true poet, the fiction writer—how will he flee the merciless strength of the American spirit, the cactus that lives without water?
1964
SELMA, ALABAMA
The Charms of Goodness
SELMA, ALABAMA, MARCH 22, 1965
WHAT a sad countryside it is, the home of the pain of the Confederacy, the birthplace of the White Citizens Council. The khaki-colored earth, the tense air, the vanquished feeding on their permanent Civil War—all of it inevitably brings to mind flamboyant adjectives and images from Faulkner. Immemorial, doomed streets, policed by the Snopeses and Peter Grimms, alleys worn thin in the sleepless pursuit of a thousand Joe Christmases, and Miss Coldfield and Quentin behind the dusty lattices, in the “empty hall echoing with sonorous, defeated names.” And as you pass Big Swamp Creek, you imagine you hear the yelp of movie bloodhounds. The cabins, pitifully beautiful, set back from the road, with a trail of wood smoke fringing the sky; the melancholy frogs unmindful of the highway and the cars slipping by; the tufts of moss, like piles of housedust, that hang trembling on the bare winter trees; the road that leads at last to just the dead Sunday afternoon Main Streets you knew were there. We’ve read it all, again and again. We’ve seen it in the movies, in the Farm Security Administration photographs of almost thirty years ago: the voteless blacks, waiting tentatively on the courthouse steps, the angry jowls of the racists, the washed-out children, the enduring Negroes, the police, the same old sheriff: the entire region is fiction, art, dated, something out of a second-hand bookstore. And this, to be sure, is the “Southern way of life,” or part of it—these photographs of a shack standing under a brilliant sky, the blackest of faces, the whitest mansions with front-porch columns, the impacted dirt of the bus station, the little, cottagey, non-denominational churches, standing in the dust, leaning a bit, and the big Methodist and Baptist with yellow brick turrets and fat belfries. If this that meets the eye as an expectation as familiar as the New York City skyline is not the South, what can the word mean? The rest might be anywhere, everywhere—mobile homes, dead cars in the yard, ranch houses shading their eyes with plastic awnings.
Life arranges itself for you here in Selma in the most conventional tableaux. Juxtapositions and paradoxes fit only for the most superficial art present themselves again and again. The “crisis” reduces the landscape to genre. At their best the people who rule over Selma, Alabama, seem to suffer from a preternatural foolishness and at their worst just now from a schizophrenic meanness. Just as they use the Confederate flag, so they use themselves, without embarrassment, in the old pageantry. A tableau which might have been thought up decades ago by one of the Hollywood Ten: the early morning fog is lifting and a band of civil rights demonstrators stands at its post at the end of a dusty street. At just that moment a State Highway truck appears and lets out three desolate Negro convicts wearing black and white striped convict uniforms, uniforms still in use but appearing to the contemporary eye to be a selection from a costume warehouse. The convicts take up their brooms and, heads down, jailhouse and penitentiary hopelessness clinging to them, begin their morose sweeping up. The brooms meet the very shoelaces of the demonstrators, brush against the hem of a nun’s black skirts. Soon the soft melodies fall on the heads of the convicts: We will overcome or else go home to our Lord and be free.
Great, great, we say of the arrangement, the curious, fortuitous performance. Then off the convicts shuffle in their black and white trousers, part of Alabama’s humble devotion
to symbolism.
How do they see themselves, these posse-men, Sheriff Clark’s volunteers, nearly always squat, fair-faced, middle-aged, now wearing helmets and carrying guns and sticks? The state troopers seem one ghostly step ahead on the social ladder. The troopers ride around in cars, their coats hanging primly in the back seat. They might be salesmen, covering the territory, on to the evening’s motel. The posse-men do not appear contented or prideful so much as merely obsessive and meager, joyless, unconsoled. The ignoble posture one observes so frequently in them is a puzzle. This cramped, hunched distance from bodily, even from masculine, grace makes them indeed among the saddest-looking people in the world. Even the hungry, bone-thin poor of Recife do not present such a picture of deep, almost hereditary, depression.
This group of Southerners has only the nothingness of racist preoccupation, the burning incoherence. Their bereft, static existence seems to go back many generations and has its counterpart in the violent, deranged hopelessness of the deprived youth in the cities. Here in the ameliorating sunlight of the Civil Rights Movement, the volunteer posse-men lead one to thoughts of remedial assistance. Who will open the doors of the University of Alabama or Clemson or Tulane to the children of Klansmen?
A poor young man, a native of Alabama, in a hot, cheap black suit, and the most insistent of false teeth clinging to gums not over twenty-one years old, back-country accent, pale, with that furry whiteness of a caterpillar, rimless glasses, stiff shoes, all misery and weakness and character armor, said to me, “When I saw those white folks mixed in with the colored it made me right sick.” And what could one answer: Go to see your social worker, find an agency that can help you, some family counsellor, or perhaps an out-patient clinic? I did say, softly, “Pull yourself together.” And he too shuffled off, like the convicts, his head bent down in some deep perturbation of spirit.
What charity can lift up the young man? There are no students welcomed to sleep on the floor of the racist home, no guitars and folk lyrics transposed to the key of the moment. It is true that these outcasts, men who are not in the state legislature and who do not belong to “nice” white Southern society because they are back-country and ignorant of style, make certain claims. They carry guns and whips and vote for the senators and governors. They try to have influence over who buys the books in the window in Montgomery (Herzog, Les Mots in translation) and subscribes to The New Republic. They keep in line, or try to, those Southern queers who are “mad about Negroes” and who collect jazz records. Their main “influence” is over the black population, an influence their very existence assures. And yet they are a degraded and despised people, even if their ferrety kinsman, Lester Maddox, can get on the ballot in Georgia.
•
The intellectual life in New York and the radical tone of the thirties are the worst possible preparation for Alabama at this stage of the Civil Rights Movement. In truth it must be said that the demonstrators are an embarrassment of love and brotherhood and hymns offered up in Jesus’s name and evening services after that. Intellectual pride is out of place, theory is simple and practical, action is exuberant and communal, the battlefield is out-of-doors and demands of one a certain youthful athleticism that would, in a morning’s work, rip the veins of the old Stalinists and Trotskyites.
The political genius of Martin Luther King is, by any theory, quite unexpected. The nature of his protest, the quality and extent of his success sprang from the soil of religion and practicality most liberals had thought to be barren. Looking back, it is curious to remember how small a part the Negro’s existence played in the earlier left-wing movements. The concentration on industrial labor, white sharecroppers, the Soviet Union and the Nazis left the Negro as only a footnote. That it should with King have come to this was unthinkable: this cloud of witnesses, this confrontation of hymn singers and local authorities. Martyred clergymen, Negro children killed at their Sunday School prayers, the ideas of Gandhi imposed upon restless blacks and belligerent whites—these appear as some sort of mutation of a national strain. “God will take care of you,” they sing, Billy Eckstine style.
In the demonstrations and marches in Alabama you are watching—good people. The foundation is the Civil Rights Movement built by Southern Negroes and into this plot, like so many extras, these fantastic white people have come. On that “hallowed spot,” Sylvan Street in Selma, you feel you are witness to a new Appomattox played out with the help of exceedingly refined, somewhat feminine Yankee clerics, upright people, marching in their prudent overshoes, some of them wearing Chesterfield coats with velvet collars.
The deputy sheriff spoke of these “so-called ministers,” but that indeed was a joke. Even a deputy can see that these are preacher faces. On a Sunday after the white churches had turned away the groups of “mixed worshippers” who had knocked at the doors, a Church of Christ found a verse in the Gospel of Matthew that seemed to explain the refusal of the morning. The verse was put up outside in the announcement box and it read: “When you pray, be not as hypocrites are, standing in the street.”
But of course hypocrisy is as foreign to these people as vice and that, perhaps, is their story. There is no doubt that they have been, before this opportunity to be a witness, suffering from considerable frustration, aching with the shame of a Christian who is busy most of the time ridding the church of the doctrine of the past as he waits for some meaning in the present. The moral justice of the Civil Rights Movement, the responsible program of the leaders, the murderous rage of the white people: this was the occasion at last. For the late-comers perhaps the immediate instrument had to be the death of a young white idealistic Protestant minister.
So, in Alabama the cause is right, the need is great, but there is more to it than that. There is the positive attraction between the people. The racists, with their fear of touch, their savage superstition, their reading of portents, see before them something more than voting rights. They sense the elation, the unexpected release. Few of us have shared any life as close as those “on location” in the Civil Rights Movement. Shared beds and sofas, hands caressing the shoulders of little children, smiles and a spreading comradeship, absorption: this is, as the pilgrims say again and again, a great experience. The police, protected by their helmets, are frightened and confused by these seizures of happiness. The odd thing is that it should not be beatniks and hipsters and bohemians who are sending out the message, but good, clean, downright folk in glasses and wearing tie clasps.
1965
AFTER WATTS
THE DISASTER and then, after a period of mourning or shock, the Report. Thus we try to exorcise our fears, to put into some sort of neutrality everything that menaces our peace. The Reports look out upon the inexplicable in private action and the unmanageable in community explosion; they investigate, they study, they interview, and at last, they recommend. Society is calmed, and not so much by what is found in the study as by the display of official energy, the activity underwritten. For we well know that little will be done, nothing new uncovered—at least not in this manner; instead a recitation of common assumptions will prevail, as it must, for these works are rituals, communal rites. To expect more, to anticipate anguish or social imagination, leads to disappointment and anger. The Reports now begin to have their formal structure. Always on the sacred agenda is the search for “outside influence,” for it appears that our dreams are never free of conspiracies. “We find,” one of the Reports goes, “no evidence that the Free Speech Movement was organized by the Communist Party, or the Progressive Labor Movement, or any other outside group.” Good, we say, safe once more, protected from the ultimate.
It is also part of the structure of a Report that it should scold us, but scold in an encouraging, constructive way, as a mother is advised to reprimand her child. For, after all, are we to blame? To blame for riots, assassinations, disorderly students? The Reports say, yes, we are to blame, and then again we aren’t. Oswald, friendless, and Watts, ignored. Well, we should indeed have done better—and
they should have done better, too.
•
Watts—a strip of plastic and clapboard, decorated by skimpy palms. It has about it that depressed feeling of a shimmering, timeless afternoon in the Caribbean: there, just standing about, the melancholy bodies of young black boys—and way off, in the distance, the looming towers of a Hilton. Pale stucco, shacky stores, housing projects, laid out nicely, not tall, like rows of tomato vines. Equable climate, ennui, nothingness. Here? Why here? we demand to know. Are they perhaps, although so recently from little towns and rural counties of the south, somehow longing for the sweet squalor of the Hotel Theresa, the battered seats of the Apollo Theater? This long, sunny nothingness, born yesterday. It turns out to be an exile, a stop-over from which there is no escape. In January there was a strange quiet. You tour the streets as if they were a battlefield, our absolutely contemporary Gettysburg. Here, the hallowed rubble of the Lucky Store, there once stood a clothing shop, and yonder, the ruins of a super market. The standing survivors told the eye what the fallen monuments had looked like, the frame, modest structures of small, small business, itself more or less fallen away from all but the most reduced hopes. In the evening the owners lock and bolt and gate and bar and then drive away to their own neighborhoods, a good many of those also infested with disappointments unmitigated by the year-round cook-out. Everything is small, but with no hint of neighborliness.
The promise of Los Angeles, this beckoning openness, newness, freedom. But what is it? It is neither a great city nor a small town. Sheer impossibility of definition, of knowing what you are experiencing exhausts the mind. The intensity and diversity of small-town Main Streets have been stretched and pulled and thinned out so that not even a Kresge, a redecorated Walgreen’s, or the old gray stone of the public library, the spittoons and insolence of the Court House stand to keep the memory intact. The past resides in old cars, five years old, if anywhere. The Watts riots were a way to enter history, to create a past, to give form by destruction. Being shown the debris by serious, intelligent men of the district was like being on one of those cultural tours in an underdeveloped region. Their pride, their memories were of the first importance. It is hard to find another act in American history of such peculiarity—elation in the destruction of the lowly symbols of capitalism.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 18