The Web and The Root (35 page)

G
EORGE
W
EBBER HAD
observed that there is no one on earth who is more patriotically devoted—verbally, at least—to the region from which he came than the American from the Southern portion of the United States. Once he leaves it to take up his living in other, less fair and fortunate, sections of the country, he is willing to fight for the honor of the Southland at the drop of a hat, to assert her supremacy over all the other habitable parts of the globe on every occasion, to speak eloquently and passionately of the charm of her setting, the superiority of her culture, the heroism of her men, and the beauty of her women, to defend her, to protect her, to bleed and die for her, if necessary—to do almost everything, in fact, for dear old Dixie except to return permanently to her to live.

A great many, It must be owned, do return, but most of those are the sorrier and more incompetent members of the tribe, the failures, the defeated ones—the writers who cannot write, the actors who cannot act, the painters who cannot paint, the men and women of all sorts, of all professions, of all endeavors from law to soda water, who, although not wholly lacking in talent, lack in it sufficient degree to meet the greater conflict of a wider life, the shock of open battle on a foreign field, the intenser effort and the superior performances of city
life. These are the stragglers of the army. They hang on for a while, are buffeted, stunned, bewildered, frightened, ultimately overwhelmed by the battle roar. One by one they falter, give way, and, dispirited, bitter, and defeated, straggle back to the familiar safety and the comforting assurance of the hinterland.

Once there, a familiar process of the South begins, a pastime at which the inhabitants of that region have long been adept—the subtle, soothing sport of rationalization. The humbler members of the routed troops—the disillusioned soda-jerkers, the defeated filing clerks, department store workers, business, bank, and brokerage employees—arrive rapidly at the conclusion that the great city is “no place for a white man.” The unfortunate denizens of city life “don’t know what living really is.” They endure their miserable existences because they “don’t know any better.” The city people are an ignorant and conceited lot. They have no manners, no courtesy, no consideration for the rights of others, and no humanity. Everyone in the city is “out for himself,” out to do you, out to get everything he can out of you. It is a selfish, treacherous, lonely, and self-seeking life. A man has friends as long as he has money in his pocket. Friends melt away from him like smoke when money goes. Moreover, all social pride and decency, the dignity of race, the authority of class is violated and destroyed in city life—“A nigger is as good as a white man.”

When George was a child, there was a story that was current over all the South. Some local hero—some village champion of the rights of white men and the maintenance of white supremacy—told the gory adventure of his one and only, his first and last, his final, all-sufficient journey into the benighted and corrupted domains of the North. Sometimes the adventure had occurred in Washington, sometimes in Philadelphia or New York, sometimes in Boston or in Baltimore, but the essential setting was always the same. The scene for this heroic drama was always laid in a restaurant of a Northern city. The plumed knight from below the Mason-Dixon line had gone in to get something to eat and had taken his seat at a table. He had progressed no further
than his soup, when, looking up, he found to his horror and indignation that a “big buck nigger” had come in and taken a seat opposite him, and
at his own table
. Whereupon—but let the more skillful small-town raconteurs of twenty years ago complete the tale:

“Well, ole Jim says he took one look at him and says, ‘You black son-of-a-bitch, what do you mean by sitting at my table?’ Well, the nigger begins to talk back to him, telling him he was in the North now, where a nigger was just as good as anyone. And ole Jim says, ‘You black bastard you, you may be as good as a Yankee, but you’re talking to a white man now!’—and with that, he says, he ups with a ketchup bottle and he just busts it wide open over that nigger’s head. Jim says he reckoned he killed him, says he didn’t wait to see, he just left him laying there and grabbed his hat and walked out. He says he caught the first train going South and he’s never been North since, and that he don’t care if he never sees the God-damn place again.”

This story was usually greeted with roars of appreciative and admiring laughter, the sound of thighs smitten with enthusiastic palms, gleeful exclamations of “’Oddam! I’d ’a’ given anything to’ve seen it! Whew-w! I can just see ole Jim now as he let him have it! I’ll betcha anything you like he killed that black bastard deader’n a doornail! Yes sir! Damned if I blame him either! I’d ’a’ done the same thing!”

George must have heard this gory adventure gleefully related at least a hundred times during his childhood and the adolescent period of his youth. The names of the characters were sometimes different—sometimes it was “ole Jim” or “ole Bob” or “ole Dick”—but the essential circumstance was always the same; an impudent black limb of Satan entered, took the forbidden seat, and was promptly, ruthlessly, and gorily annihilated with a ketchup bottle. This story, in its various forms and with many modern innovations, was still current among returned wanderers from the Southland at the time when George first came to the great city to live. In more modern versions the insolent black had been annihilated on busses and in subway trains, in railway coaches or in moving picture theatres, in crowded elevators or upon
the street—wherever, in fact, he had dared impudently to intrude too closely upon the proud and cherished dignity of a Southern white. And the existence of this ebony malefactor was, one gathered, one of the large contributing reasons for the return of the native to his own more noble heath.

Another, and probably more intelligent, portion of this defeated—and retreated—group had other explanations for their retreat, which were, however, derived from the same basic sources of rationalized self-defense. These were the members of the more intellectual groups—the writers, painters, actors—who had tried the ardors of the city’s life and who had fled from it. Their arguments and reasons were subtler, more refined. The actor or the playwright asserted that he found the integrity of his art, the authentic drama of the folk, blighted and corrupted by the baleful and unnatural influence of the Broadway drama, by artificiality, trickery, and cheap sensation, by that which struck death to native roots and gave only a waxen counterfeit of the native flower. The painter or the musician found the artist and his art delivered to the mercy of fashionable cliques, constricted with the lifeless narrowness of æsthetic schools. The writer had a similar complaint. The creator’s life was menaced in the city with the sterile counterfeits of art—the poisonous ethers of “the literary life,” the poisonous intrigues of the literary cliques, the poisonous politics of log-rolling and back-scratching, critic-mongering and critic-pandering, the whole nasty, crawling, parasitical world of Scribbleonia.

In these unnatural and unwholesome weathers of creation, the artist—so these rebellious challengers asserted—lost his contact with reality, forgot the living inspirations of his source, had been torn away from living union with what he had begun to call his “roots.” So caught and so imperiled, held high, Antæus-wise, away from contact with his native and restoring earth, gasping for breath in the dead vapors of an enclosed and tainted atmosphere, there was only one course for the artist if he would be saved. He must return, return to that place which had given him life and from which the strengths and energies of his
art had been derived. But must renounce utterly and forever the sterile precincts of the clique, the salon, and the circle, the whole unnatural domain of the city’s life. He must return again to the good earth, to affirmation of his origins, to contact with his “roots.”

So the refined young gentlemen of the New Confederacy shook off their degrading shackles, caught the last cobwebs of illusion from their awakened vision, and retired haughtily into the South, to the academic security of a teaching appointment at one of the universities, from which they could issue in quarterly installments very small and very precious magazines which celebrated the advantages of an agrarian society. The subtler intelligences of this rebel horde were forever formulating codes and cults in their own precincts—codes and cults which affirmed the earthly virtues of both root and source in such unearthly language, by such processes of æsthetic subtlety, that even the cult adepts of the most precious city cliques were hard put to it to extract the meaning.

All this George Webber observed and found somewhat puzzling and astonishing. Young men whose habits, tastes, and modes of thought and writing seemed to him to belong a great deal more to the atmospheres of the æsthetic cliques which they renounced than to any other now began to argue the merits of a return to “an agrarian way of life” in language which was, it seemed to him, the language of a cult, and which assuredly few dwellers on the soil, either permanent or returned, could understand. Moreover, as one who was himself derived from generations of mountain farmers who had struggled year by year to make a patch of corn grow in the hill erosions of a mountain flank, and of generations of farm workers in Pennsylvania who had toiled for fifteen hours a day behind the plow to earn a wage of fifty cents, it now came as a mild surprise to be informed by the lily-handed intellectuals of a Southern university that what he needed most of all was a return to the earthly and benevolent virtues of the society which had produced him.

The summation of it all, of course, the fundamental characteristic of this whole defeated and retreated kind—whether intellectual or
creative, professional or of the working group—was the familiar rationalizing self-defense of Southern fear and Southern failure: its fear of conflict and of competition in the greater world; its inability to meet or to adjust itself to the conditions, strifes, and ardors of a modern life; its old, sick, Appomattoxlike retreat into the shades of folly and delusion, of prejudice and bigotry, of florid legend and defensive casuistry, of haughty and ironic detachment from a life with which it was too obviously concerned, to which it wished too obviously to belong.

So much, then, for these defeated ones—these too tender and inept detachments of the rebel horde who could not meet and take the shock of battle, and who straggled back. What of the others, the better and the larger kind, the ones who stayed? Were they defeated? Were they swept under? Were they dispersed and scattered, or routed in dismay and driven back?

By no means. Their success, in fact, in city life was astonishing. There is no other section of the country whose city immigrants succeed so brilliantly when they do succeed. The quality of the Southerner’s success in city life is derived, to an amazing degree, from the very nature of his handicap. If he prevails, if he conquers, he is likely to do it not only in spite of his provincialism but because of it, not only in spite of his fear but by means of it, and because that terrible and lacerating consciousness of inferiority is likely to drive him on to superhuman efforts.

The Southerner is often inspired to do his best when the odds are the heaviest against him, when he knows it, when he knows further that the world knows it and is looking on. The truth of this was demonstrated again and again in the Civil War, when some of the South’s most brilliant victories—it is possible also to say, when some of the South’s most brilliant defeats—were
won
under these circumstances. The Southerner, with all that is sensitive, tender, flashing, quick, volatile, and over-imaginative in his nature, is likely to know fear and to know it greatly. But also, precisely on account of his sensitivity, quickness, imagination, he knows fear
of
fear, and this second kind of fear
is often likely to be so much stronger than the first that he will do and die before he shows it. He will fight like a madman rather than like a man, and he will often attain an almost unbelievable victory against overwhelming odds, even when few people in the world believe that victory is possible.

These facts are true, and they are likewise admirable. But in their very truth there is a kind of falseness. In their very strength there is a dangerous weakness. In the very brilliance of their victory there is a lamentable defeat. It is admirable to win against terrific odds, but it is not admirable, not well for the health and endurance of the spirit, to be able to win only against terrific odds. It is thrilling to see men roused to such a pitch of desperation that they fight like madmen, but it is also thrilling to see them resolved and strong in their ability to fight like men. It is good to be so proud and sensitive that one is more afraid of showing fear than of fear itself, but these intensities of passion, pride, and desperation also take their toll. The danger is that though they may spur men to the feverish consummation of great heights, they may also drop them, exhausted and impotent, to abysmal depth, and that one attains the shining moment of a brilliant effort at the expense of the consistent and steady achievement of a solid and protracted work.

The transplanted Southerner is likely to be a very lonely animal. For that reason his first instinctive movement in the city is likely to be in the direction of his own kind. The first thing he does when he gets to the city is to look up old college chums or boys from his home town. They form a community of mutual interests and mutual self-protection; they build a kind of wall around themselves to protect them from the howling maelstrom of the city’s life. They form a Community of the South which has no parallel in city life. Certainly one does not find a similar Community of the Middle West, or a Community of the Great Plains, or a Community of the Rocky Mountain States, or a Community of the Pacific Coast. There are, perhaps, the faint rudiments of a New England Community, the section which, after the South, is most
definitely marked by a native identity of culture. But the New England Community, if it exists at all, exists so faintly and so sparely as to be almost negligible.