Long Time Leaving (3 page)

Red-staters hold their truth up high and wave it at everybody else. They're freed up to root. Blue-staters get huffy and point to logical inconsistencies. Deliver us, please, from an Age of Zeal, which obtains already in the Middle East and has suited the Bush administration's bloody mission. Deliver us, too, from an Age of Dither.

Me, I would advocate an Age of Allowances and Edging Ahead. An Age of Pushing the Envelope of Perceived Good Sense. That doesn't mean crossing science with religion—you've got to draw the line somewhere, and science has its hands full coming to terms with business. It does mean taking on board that there are a lot of practical-minded Americans who find that going to church regularly fits right in with their personal and business concerns. They aren't so dumb. And they have the right to vote.

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity,” said Kant, “no straight thing can ever be made.” In the Northeastern circles I generally find myself in, people find that objectionable. Back home, they find it obvious. To me, it's both. What is a golf shot or a field goal kick or a wedding vow, and what was, say, the Emancipation Proclamation, but a straight lick hit with a crooked stick? Maybe there's a religious paradox in there, along the lines of what the pregnant young wife in the movie
Junebug
says to her husband, who is terrified of growing up: “God loves you just the way you are but too much to let you stay that way.”

After Mark Twain turned his back on the South, he had a little flutter with the party of Lincoln, but then he became a Mugwump, rising above party loyalty. High-minded or market savvy? I am a hard-shell relativist
Democrat.
^*
And it has not escaped my attention that everybody elected president in the last forty-five years has either come from the South (which is
okay
with me but which I would just as soon not have to keep justifying) or condescended to it (which pisses me off).

The moment I knew Michael Dukakis would not be elected president in 1988 was when Bernard Shaw asked him, on television, what his reaction would be—given his opposition to capital punishment—if somebody had raped and murdered his wife. That was what I would call an obscene hypothetical. What Dukakis might justifiably have replied was, “Bernie …Your mama!”

At any rate, he should have taken personal offense. Then he should have pointed out that it's not up to the victim's husband to judge the perpetrator. That's why we have laws and courts. Having said that, then he could have explained the injustice and ineffectiveness of capital punishment. What Dukakis did, instead, was swallow hard (actually, not even all that hard) and reply abstractly. I swallowed hard and voted for him abstractly.

In 2004, I liked John Edwards of North Carolina, not because he was Southern but because he had been Southern and could move on from there,
^†
whereas Kerry was Northeastern and had to keep hedging it. After hearing Edwards lay down a good line of talk to a small gathering in New York, I asked him how he would have answered that question, the one about, excuse me, rape and murder of wife.

“Yeah,” said a woman behind me. “I'd like to hear what he says to that.”

“I'd've said it didn't matter what I thought about capital punishment, I'd've killed him myself,” said Edwards.

The woman behind me seemed pleased. She turned out to be Mrs. Edwards.

Edwards had a distinct, maybe simplistic (so that's out of order now?), well-taken theme: that we should start favoring work over wealth instead of vice versa. He might not have won—people point out that he wouldn't even have carried his home state. But Kerry didn't carry North Carolina either. Edwards would have carried Kerry's home state, and maybe some others Kerry didn't—Ohio, for instance. As the Republican
convention was celebrating their official nomination of the incumbent Bush, the network I was watching cut to an Edwards-Kerry rally in Ohio. Edwards had worked the crowd up to a palpable heat. Then he introduced Kerry. Who began his remarks by alluding to a local sports team and then saying how pleased he was, for his part, that his Red Sox were only a game and a half out of first place.

In Ohio. Kerry was happy for the Red Sox. Because they were running second. From there he droned on for a while, and the crowd unrallied. Kerry was the Democratic Thomas Dewey, the tall man on the wedding cake. Howard Dean had oomph, and he had a point when he advocated reaching out to the real interests of working-class whites (which are the interests of black workers as well), but he stated it badly—invoking the Confederate flag, which is sort of like a dude from the East dancing with the sheriff's sheep: you'd better really love her, and be prepared to face the sheriff, and hope word of it doesn't get back home.

The timber I grew up among was knotty, all right. People shrugged their shoulders at manifest racial injustice while fetishizing spotless-ness. Pressed and shamed, they yielded on civil rights. And the realization settled in that the local timber was, after all, like real chicken, a mixture of dark and light. But you know what made that movement go? Brave local black (and a few white) Christians, outside idealists, dumb-ass local opponents, national media relativists, and, belatedly, federal force. Strange bedfellows.

In
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
Huck and Jim see a house being swept downriver by floodwaters, so they paddle out to it and climb in through a window. The house is disorderly (there's a dead man in one room, for one thing), but, as has been said of many a disorderly book, there's a lot of good stuff in it. “We got an old tin lantern, and a butcher knife without any handle…, and a gourd, and a tin cup, and a ratty old bed quilt off the bed…, and a hatchet and some nails, and a fishline as thick as my little finger…, and Jim he found a ratty old fiddle-bow, and a wooden leg. The straps was broke off of it, but barring that, it was a good enough leg, though it was too long for me and not long enough for Jim, and we couldn't find the other one, though we hunted all around.”

“The South,” to me, is like that leg. It's an artificial construct, and yet it strikes a chord. Most people don't really need it, it doesn't quite suit either black person or white, and yet anybody with sense would be loath to throw it away. I keep thinking—although in one sense this makes no sense—that it's part of a set.

This is not a book about the South. Nothing, except a book about the North, could be more boring. It's about the set. Half of the contents
derive from the “Gone Off Up North” columns I have been writing for fourteen years in
The Oxford American,
the “Southern Magazine of Good Writing” edited by the redoubtable Marc Smirnoff. Most of the rest consists of considerably revised and expanded articles that have appeared in several other estimable publications:
The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times
(its book review, its magazine, and its op-ed page),
Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post Book World, American Heritage, Life, Southern Living, The Southern Review,
the Vanderbilt alumni magazine,
Men's Journal, Best Life, Spy, Parade,
the Web site
Salon, Atlanta
magazine (in which I wrote regularly under the rubric “The Blount Edge” for a few months, until
Atlanta
got the willies—“sounds like the Unibomber,” I was told—over the column that has evolved into the last chapter of this book) and
Travel and Leisure Golf.
How's that for strange bedfellows?

For lagniappe, I tossed in some things that have never appeared in print. This introduction includes remarks I delivered as the emcee of a PEN-Faulkner fund-raising event at the Folger Shakespeare Library (which made me think of Faulkner, Shakespeare and Miz Folger) in Washington. I worked on pulling this collection together during a balmy month at the Rockefeller Foundation retreat at Bellagio (see “Babel to Byzantium”). I was hoping to write this introduction there, so I could have a cool Continental note at the bottom:

—Bellagio, Lake Como, Italy, Europe, 2003

But then I visited Milan on Liberation Day, the annual celebration of Italy's being freed from dictatorship by American troops. People were selling T-shirts that showed Bush and Mussolini side by side, doing the Fascist salute. I still had a long way to go.

My title comes from the great Roger Miller song “I've Been a Long Time Leaving (But I'll Be a Long Time Gone)” (the one in which he's hitchhiking out of town and the trucks go by and make the legs of his Levi's go
whup-whup-whup-whup).
I met Roger, not long before he died, when we both appeared on my old friend Garrison Keillor's admirably reconstructive public radio show,
A Prairie Home Companion,
which brings together ice fishing, the Grand Ole Opry, klezmer, gospel, the blues, Norwegian bachelor farmers, liberalism, and common sense. Roger went around backstage saying, “I need to get a second wind. I broke the first one;” “My father had the Midas touch. Everything he touched turned to mufflers;” “If I had my whole life to live over, I wouldn't have time.”

W
hen it comes to ideal jobs, I fall between two pedestals: too little education to be a Supreme Court justice (not that this crowd would get behind another Long Dong Silver fan anyway), too much to be a folk artist.

I can almost see the visionary mural I'd paint: “Some Day the Lord God Almighty Will Take Notice of Some of These Things Going On and Say ‘WHAT? WHAT!!??’ and Then, Look Out! And Don't Look at Me, Then, 'Cause I'm Telling You Now.”

Title too wordy? Not for this painting: stark, big-brushy strokes, liberal in sentiment. Make the forces of darkness jump for a change. I'd toss Karl Rove in there, being rolled in crushed cornflakes preparatory to baking.

I never get going on it, though. One thing is, I can't paint. I just get it all over myself. It's like trying to work with Saran Wrap: I can never get the wrap around anything before it starts to self-adhere at various points, and soon, as if by magic, it is all wadded up unto itself. So go with that? Create a whole new medium? No, it wouldn't be right.

“That biggest glob there is interesting,” people would say. “It's a reductio ad absurdum of the role of packaging in the world today, isn't it? Is there …a decomposing body in there?”

And I'd have to say, “Aw, naw, I can't lie to you. I was just trying to wrap up a damn peach.”

It's hard to be an artist when you can't keep a secret. But my main shortcoming—here I go again—is that I'm not spiritual enough. We hear spirituality bandied about so loosely today. “My journey from eBay addict to luggage consultant has been an almost spiritual experience.” Almost? It's enough to make me think of spirituality as the feeling we get when something makes us really start to think, and then we stop. I may stop, too, but I won't feel good about it. Call this excessive spiritual humility—spiritual prudery, even—if you will, but when I feel revelations coming on, I tend to flinch and shake them off. No one would say of me, alas, what Peter Schjeldahl, in
The New Yorker,
has said of El Greco:

I hear that. I keep trying to tell people up here in Massachusetts, we ain't ever going to reclaim the nation's imagination, assuming we ever had it, as long as we keep thinking that thinking will make it so. Even intellectuals should have learned by now, post-postmodernism, that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs. In the South—this is the region's key cultural distinction, for good and ill—nobody ever thought it was.