Long Time Leaving (2 page)

William Faulkner, on the other hand, once said, “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”

A little old lady once asked Faulkner, “Mr. Faulkner, I understand that authors always write themselves into their books. In
Sanctuary,
which character are you?”

“Madam,” said Faulkner, “I was the corncob.”

He wouldn't have said that to Mrs. Folger. Then, too, she wouldn't have asked such a question. Mrs. Folger was a little old lady with sense.

Faulkner, when his daughter begged him to sober up so he could attend her graduation, responded to her as follows: “Nobody remembers Shakespeare's child.”

Faulkner never knew Miz Folger, so he felt entitled not to be nice. He stayed home, and created Yoknapatawpha County, where hell broke
loose in all directions. I had to find a milieu in which I could be nice and think at the same time.

My tenth-grade teacher, a remarkable young lady named Ann Lewis, lent me a stack of
New Yorker
magazines. It was a revelation. As far as I could tell, there had never been a damn Civil “War in there. Or a Crucifixion. Nobody even seemed to go to church. People drank a lot and made cutting remarks, but they were civilized, funny, even high-minded in a cerebral sort of way. My teetotal, faith-based mother wouldn't have liked them, but you could imagine them passing muster with Miz Folger.

In those old
New Yorkers
I smelled a secular heaven. Well, no, there was scant emphasis on smells, except when Joseph Mitchell, a Southerner, was writing about the fish market, so let's say I glimpsed it. First chance I got, I went off up to New York. In 1968 I became a resident. Fatherhood, divorce, joint custody, and going freelance brought me further north to semirural Massachusetts, which
looks
a lot like north Georgia, and I like it (except in February and March), but I'll never entirely settle in.

Here's what happened when I moved to New York. I hadn't unpacked my bag before people started telling me, “You're not from around here.” Didn't I know that? “I see you haven't lost the accent,” they would say severely, as if I were willfully convicting myself of narrow-mindedness with every syllable I uttered.

That was awkward but interesting. As a white Southerner, I had come to terms, on my own recognizance, with being a heartily recovering Mr. Charlie. It kind of tickled me, as we say back home, to suddenly be an
object
of prejudice. Since I couldn't see that it would keep me from doing anything I really wanted to do, it even gave me a kind of edge. Years ago at a New York cocktail party, I was chatting with George “Jerry” Goodman, who wrote and spoke trenchantly about money matters under the name of Adam Smith. Nice guy. Evidently I said something that struck him as halfway cogent (so it couldn't have been about money), because he gave me a sincerely startled look and said,
“You're
not so dumb.” I have to admit, I was surprised. Not so much by his surprise, as by how unselfconsciously he expressed it. He seemed to have been caught more off-guard than I was, so I was able to think to myself,
“You're
not so broad-minded.”

It wasn't a matter of getting the last laugh. I think, in fact, both of us found the exchange amusing, in one way or another, but neither of us laughed. One reason it doesn't take much to get me back down South is that Southerners enjoy laughing more. Sometimes we will get to
whooping
when we laugh. We will build on each other's hilarity back and
forth. On my way to a writer's conference in Oxford, Mississippi, not long ago, I stopped off south of Memphis to eat some fried things for lunch. Those fried things were good, and so were the simmered-with-a-little-fatback things, and the cornbread was crunchy and savory, not sweet. But the best thing was the noise coming from the next table. Eight people, about equally male and female and black and white, were laughing together so hard I thought they were going to fall out on the floor.

“I told him, ‘Well get down off the windshield, at least, 'cause I can't see to drive,’ ” one of them said, and the whole group got so uproarious they were crying.

Southerners
vote
crazy too. Conservatism, it is called.

By the way, if I do sound dumb, it's not on purpose. Alice Furlaud wrote in
The Atlantic
early in the George W. Bush administration that if Bush wanted to be well received on visits to England, he should “exaggerate his Texas-cowboy civility and talk like a character out of
Hee Haw.
(I admit that I act like Mammy Yokum, from Dogpatch, when in England, and it always goes down well.)”

To me, that is going down too easy. Or seeming to. If it weren't so disingenuous, we might call it the Stockdale syndrome—the invincible affability of the character Will Stockdale, an army draftee from backwoods Georgia in the fifties novel and movie,
No Time For Sergeants.
Andy Griffith played him in the movie, but Will is younger and goofier than Sheriff Andy in Mayberry. An army psychiatrist says to Will, “I don't think I would ever want to live in your rotten state. How about that?”

Stockdale replies, “Well, I guess you know where you want to live. Besides that, things is getting right crowded around home anyhow. Some folks moved in not long ago about two miles down the road from us and land ain't cheap as it once was. So it really don't make no difference to me whether you live there or not, not that we wouldn't be mighty glad to have you.” When the psychiatrist can't understand why he won't rise in defense of Georgia, Will says, “I don't live all over it, I just live in this one little place in it.”

That is Will's way, and it drives the psychiatrist nuts. When Will's only buddy demands to know why he doesn't get mad at the Northern GIs who rag on him nastily, Will says, “They don't mean nothin’ by it,” which is a nice piece of de-signifying.

But I went to college, and a little graduate school. I studied the arts and sciences, which are what I believe in today, every damn one of them. Even, say, dance, which I don't know or care anything about—I believe in it anyway. Physics, who knows what's going on there, but I figure those who do are keeping each other honest. There may even be people who
can be helpful with regard to string theory in something like the same way that Baptist man may be as regards glossolalia. Different fundamentalisms for different folks. Let go and let science.

The Enlightenment is essentially what I left home looking for, and I found it. I'm pro-choice, happy for people of the same sex to get married (as P. J. O'Rourke once pointed out, it's not gay marriage that should be outlawed, it's
first
marriages), and against the teaching of creationism and the waging of preemptive war. But I can see how people might be opposed to the preempting of possible little babies, how people might be unable to feature two hairy men walking down the aisle, how people might feel better believing that God made us, and how people will be damned if they'll admit that so many of their young folks have died in a bad cause.

I spent a little over a third of my life, including the presumably most formative years, living in the South. Mathematically, that makes me just about exactly as Southern as the American people, 34 percent of whom are residents of the South. Both sides of my family have been Southern for generations, I sound Southern, and when my local paper in Massachusetts announces a festival to “celebrate the spirit of differently-abled dogs,” I react as a Southerner:

I believe I care as much about dogs’ feelings as anybody. I can't imagine that a dog with three legs minds being called, with all due respect, a three-legged dog.

And a
one
-legged dog would be too well grounded to rally behind either George Bush of Texas or John Kerry of Massachusetts. I voted for the latter all right, but the only people who derived any juice out of his candidacy were his wife and the Bush campaign, both of whom got off on his rigidity. And yet the Democratic Party still has its head up the Northeast. Which looks toward Europe.
^*
In the circles I find myself in, people say things like, “Every European country has a national ID card, why can't we?” How can you realize that you're part of imperialism if you've never entirely gotten over being a colony?

The South is so not Europe. You get down South, you know you're not in old Vienna. These days, however, you may doubt that you are anywhere
in particular. I just wish the South would let me decide what it should change and what it shouldn't. Without my guidance, country music and country comedians have gone smarmy and unfibrous. A Southern magazine is telling people that
y'all
is singular. A man at the University of Georgia has produced reconstituted chicken meat—all white, because that is supposedly what the market calls for today. Even when contemporary chicken retains some resemblance to the animal, it's as globby-breasted as a porn star. My mother said no chicken should weigh more than three pounds, so that none of the pieces is too thick— when you flour them lightly and fry them through, they come out crisp and chewy, browned down toward the bone. Her fried chicken had integrity. You could imagine it strutting around.

The South traditionally is a
bodily
place. Hold on to that, I would urge; just connect a little more directly to the head. I would not redesign the South along strictly Enlightenment lines. I believe in the Enlightenment. I just don't believe it covers everything. I don't even believe it would cover everything if everybody believed in it. And not everybody does. May I repeat: Different people hold different truths to be self-evident. I think blue-state people have trouble getting that through their heads. They want to think that Reason is universal (in politics— everyone knows it's not in personal relations). Red-state people don't care—God and/or Mammon has freed them from having to think about what they think.

These two casts of mind are not as radically different as they, respectively, think they are. You can't believe in reason without a leap of faith, and all the blind faith in the world won't help if you haven't got good sense. Let us consider the matter of national security: Redpeople want to take for granted that America is right; bluepeople, that America is strong. Deep down, everybody knows this: that there's no use being right if you aren't strong and nothing to be said for being strong if you aren't right. Redfolk and bluefolk overlap.

Did you ever see the 1938
movie Jezebel,
set in antebellum Louisiana? Henry Fonda plays Preston (Pres) Dillard, a young New Orleans banker who breaks off his engagement with Julie Marsden, played by Bette Davis, when she defies convention and his better judgment by insisting on attending the Olympus Ball in a bright red dress. Okay, Pres can't talk her out of it, so he takes her to the dance and even makes her take an extended spin around the dance floor with him as everybody else clears out. Her reputation is ruined.

Pres goes off up north for a period, on business. When he returns,
Julie in her magnetic way kneels in a white dress to beg his forgiveness. But it's too late. He has returned with a “little Yankee wife.”

“You can't get away from us, Pres,” Julie pleads. “We're in your blood. This is the country you were born to, the country you know and trust. Oh, it isn't tame, and isn't like the North. It's quick and dangerous, but you trust it. Remember how the fever mist smells in the bottoms, rank and rotten, but you trust that, too, because it's part of you. Just as I am part of you and will never let you go.”

Pres rebuffs her. Julie's willful heart is broken. She tries to start trouble between Pres and Buck Cantrell, a traditional drinking-and-gambling cavalier played by George Brent. Buck, no fool, suspects her motives, but Preston's kid brother Ted—who idolizes Buck—concludes that his family's honor has been impugned. There's a duel. Buck fires into the air. Ted kills Buck. Ted has enough sense to realize what Julie has done, and he hates her for it.

In the end, Julie selflessly redeems herself, as we knew she would. It's a good movie on the thwarted-romance level (Bette Davis got an Oscar), and, of course, we shake our heads over the dumb-ass codes and proscriptions of that old society. But what raises a broader issue, still critical today, is an exchange between Pres and Buck about politics.

Pres is rational. A banker. If it had been up to people like him, there would have been no Civil “War.
^*
And, hey, Pres is Henry Fonda, so you identify with him. But Pres is stiff-necked and loose-rooted. A mensch—if I may use a less loaded term than, say, “good old boy”— wouldn't give Julie the rope to hang herself. When she tries to get Buck to escort her, he quickly refuses. Seeing her in that red dress, he tells her, “kinda gives me the all-overs”—a combination of the hots and the willies. He knows that she's trying to make Pres jealous, and he also knows that she's courting disaster. He knows what he knows, where he lives. In context, Pres is a liberal (more specifically, a Whig), Buck a conservative.

Okay, so the two of them get to arguing about the prospective War Between the States. Buck's thinking is, bring it on. Pres says the South would be foolish to go up against Northern industrial might. That sounds treasonous to Buck.

Pres invokes, without attribution, Voltaire:

“Buck, I disagree with everything you're saying, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.”

That throws Buck for a loop.

“Pres,” he says, “that don't make good sense.”

Am I the only American to whom it seems that both of these men have a point?

These days, Buck's position dominates. The Enlightenment is a far cry from cutting edge. Brain-wave monitoring has established to psychologists’ satisfaction that everybody's politics, blue or red, is based on faith, not objectivity. People need something to root for, and whatever it is, it generally arises from their roots, not from analytical policy wonkery. As the old boy said when asked if he believed in infant baptism (this will come up again in this book), “Believe in it? Hell, I've
seen it done.”