A Turn in the South. - book reviews

National Review, Feb 24, 1989 by Fred Chappell

SOUTHERNERS ARE famous talkers; generally colorful, whether brash or dignified, humorous or grave, they come into this world of Yankees and outlander pundits explaining themselves. In Santee parish, South Carolina, for example, a gentleman named Jack Leland is describing how his tombstone will look: "It will have my name, the date of my birth, the date of my death. And at the bottom there will be a line: HAVE ONE ON JACK. And I'm leaving $2,000 to the church, so that every year at the spring service they can have wine, whisky, or whatever. I think people will remember me because of that."

In Jackson, Mississippi, a businessman recounts a dialogue with his secretary, whom he a redneck woman." He has explained to her that "the frontier mentality" is no longer viable. "And she said, 'You know, Mr. Campbell, at one time I used to be envious of you. I wanted what you had. But now I feel I'm just different. I'm just born into it. I ain't got nothing, and I know now I ain't going to have nothing.' I said, 'It's because you ain't got the right kind of husband. Why don't you kick your husband's ass?' And she said, 'Oh, Mr. Campbell, I can't do that. He's just an old redneck.' "

Alex Sanders, a South Carolina Supreme Court judge, explains his duties: "The common law is a majestic thing. It has a remarkable capacity to resolve disputes in a way which not only preserves civilization but enhances it. It is not unusual for me to find myself guided in a decision by a decision which a judge made a thousand years ago. I am aware I'm serving a larger civilization. And I know I'm serving it."

So that what the Southerner needs is a good listener. In V. S. Naipaulthe Caribbean native of East Indian descent, proud Oxonian, and celebrated novelist-is to be found, on the evidence of his precise but warmly sympathetic reporting in A Turn in the South, one of the profoundest listeners our time can offer. He hears in the spoken sentence volumes of implication, clues to personal and regional history, inflections that tell everything while keeping the speaker's true privacy intact. He listens artfully and with a fine good will.

Naipaul's Caribbean background aids him in treating the American South with sympathy. His native Trinidad was an agricultural slave colony until 1833 and has had much more in common with the Confederacy than with the Northern states, but Naipaul had failed to see these broad similarities because of the dreadful reputation the South had. "What I had heard as a child about the racial demeanor of the South was too shocking."

A Turn in the South is, then, a kind of reparation for the prejudiced opinion Naipaul had held. At age 28 he wrote his first travel book about the former slave colonies of the Caribbean and South America. "It seemed to me fitting that my last travel book . . . should be about the old slave states of the American Southeast." And though it turns out that the unsavory name the South gained for racial violence was in large measure deserved, this perceptive observer comes to optimistic conclusions. Slavery ended with the Civil War, but freedom came to black people only in 1954; they haveexperienced only thirty years of real freedom. "In those thirty years American blacks have grown to see opportunity; while the larger independent territories of the British Caribbean-Trinidad, Jamaica, Guyana-have in their various ways been plundered and undone."

The book is rounded out with an account of the friendship the author establishes with James Applewhite, whom a few farsighted souls have been proclaiming for decades one of the best Southern poets of the century. Naipaul finds in Applewhite's volume Ode to the Chinaberry Tree some of the most sensitive articulations of Southern consciousness; he admires especially those poems that deal with the cultivation and marketing of toScented and sweetened with rum and

molasses, Rolled into cigarettes or squared in a

thick plug, Then inhaled or chewed, this history is

like syrupy Moonshine distilled through a car

radiator so Me salts Strike you blind Saliva starts in the

body. We die for this leaf

Applewhite's image becomes Naipaul's central metaphor for the Southern dilemma. As Thomas Jefferson predicted, economic dependence upon the poison weed became so deeply rooted that slavery was made an immovable necessity. The staple that maintained the economy killed the society. And now in our generation the dilemma comes back. The South turns to industrialization for its economy, and the factories will kill the culture, the land, and the people just as surely as tobacco did. But now at least the black populace has the opportunity to share in the general destiny, as perhaps it can do nowhere else in America.

A Turn in the South is a troubling book, a searching one. But it is also compassionate and understanding, and without the least smidgen of condescension. It may well be for this last, negative quality that Southerners will most gratefully appreciate it.