A Turn in the South (19 page)

“Does the name Stepin Fetchit mean anything to you?”

It certainly did. Stepin Fetchit was adored in my childhood by the blacks of Trinidad. He was adored not only because he was funny and did wonderful things with his seemingly disjointed body and had a wonderful walk and a wonderful voice, and was given extravagant words to speak; he was adored by Trinidad black people because he appeared in films, at a time when Hollywood stood for an almost impossible glamour; and he was also adored—most importantly—because, at a time when the various races of Trinidad were socially separate and the world seemed fixed forever that way, with segregation to the north in the United States, with Africa ruled by Europe, with South Africa the way it was (and not at all a subject of local black concern), and Australia and New Zealand the way they were—at that time in Trinidad, Stepin Fetchit was seen on the screen in the company of white people. And to Trinidad blacks—who looked down at that time on Africans, and laughed and shouted and hooted in the cinema whenever Africans were shown dancing or with spears—the sight of Stepin Fetchit with white people was like a dream of a happier world.

It wasn’t of this adored figure that Jack Leland was speaking, though. He had another, matter-of-fact, local attitude. He said, “The ambitious people went north, and we were left with the Stepin Fetch-its.” Now there was a movement back; not big, but noticeable.

I said, a little later, that it was my impression that the blacks of South Carolina were very black people, not as mixed as black people in the Caribbean islands. He said there had been little mixing of the races. The planters thought it demeaning to have relations with a slave woman. There was a story that after the war the Union soldiers didn’t have those scruples. But there were not many mixed people.

Did that make for more difficult relations between the races?

No; it made for easier relations. “Mulattoes and quadroons and those are the angry people.”

Later, some way up the highway, we turned off to have a look at a spectacular old oak avenue, partly in ruin: the kind of avenue with which Marion Sass’s father had begun his nostalgic recall of plantation days. And when we drove on, the sea was on our right, hidden by forest; and the river was on our left. Salt and fresh: where the land was
salt, cotton had grown in the old days; where the water was fresh, there had been rice. Now, along one stretch of road, there was a large kiwi-fruit plantation.

We turned into a side road then, and suddenly, in overgrown ground, attached to a Presbyterian church of 1696, there was a little cemetery, where, Jack Leland said, some of the first settlers were buried.

We were entering sacred territory.

Beyond a certain creek the old plantation of Walnut Grove began. It was the ancestral property, acquired in 1832 and sold during the Depression, in 1935. Still with us, the roadside woodland. And, now, the black village where after the Civil War blacks had been given plots of plantation ground.

“When the children were small,” Jack Leland said, “and we crossed the creek, I stopped the car and made them get out and bow three times to the east. Sacred territory.”

“What did the children think of that?”

He laughed. “They got a great charge out of it. They still do it when they come here. And I do it with them. People see us bowing. They probably think we’re crazy. We probably are. But it’s a nice craziness.”

And now, driving through his territory, memory overcoming him at certain spots, he filled out some of the things he had told me earlier. They had been poor, with little money coming in. But they had never been short of food. “Shrimps, crab, oysters. Clams. Fish. Venison. Wild turkey. Ducks, roes, partridges. There was just a wealth of wild food to be had. And, of course, my father had the farm where he grew the food.” And when on a morning he, Jack Leland, went out with the shotgun, the birds he shot were for the table. The hunting life—it was important here (to blacks as well); and when you saw the land you understood. And the land concealed something else. There was a creek at some distance with very pure water. The creek was called “the branch”; visitors would be offered bourbon and branch.

We turned off into a narrower road. We passed a house in a wooded garden.

“That’s a cracker house. Backwoods whites, poor white trash, as they say. And that’s another cracker house, I would say. About seventy years old, perhaps. They’re part of the picture. You can’t leave them out.”

He had the local eye—just as in Malaysia the local people can distinguish a Chinese house from a Malay one, purely by the way the surrounding ground is used. The houses he had described as cracker houses had seemed to me attractive, with trees and shade and shrubs.

He said, “They have a certain charm. But a lot of junk around. You can tell a cracker house by the trash, and the generally unkempt look of the place. Half a dozen defunct automobiles, say. That was very typical at one time.”

The crackers, like the blacks, had their own place in the local caste system.

“When I was growing up we went to high school and grammar school with them. But we did not socialize. Our social lives were entirely different. Most of the crackers were Baptists, Methodists, or Pentecostal Holiness—that’s the shouting religion. Whereas my family and the other families up here were Episcopalian mainly, and Presbyterian, and they were top of the heap.

“I will tell you. At Walnut Grove we had a summer cottage, where my father’s younger brothers and their friends stayed during the summer. A four-roomed house on the river. This was shortly after 1902—my father had just married and brought his bride back. He was the eldest of eleven children.

“One day my father got up early in the morning, at six, for his usual cup of coffee. And he saw some of his horses standing by the gate, saddled but with their reins cut. After a while the younger brothers and their friends showed up, walking. They had been to a square dance out in the swamps, where the crackers lived. They hadn’t found their horses afterwards, and they had had to walk back. And my father warned them not to go back. Because, he said, this—the cutting of the horses’ reins—is the crackers’ way of warning you not to meddle with their women. ‘The next time they will take more drastic action.’

“But they didn’t listen. They went again. They were riding back through a trail in the swamps when the crackers dropped out of the tree limbs above them with knives. Like the Indians. One of the men with my uncle was killed. It was in the night. Nothing could be proved against anybody. Nobody was brought to justice. It was the law of the swamps. You just did not socialize with those people. My father always said he preferred having the Negroes living on his property, rather than those crackers.”

The blacks looked down on the crackers, and the crackers hated the
blacks, because the blacks were in direct competition with them. But the crackers were as exploited as the blacks, Jack Leland said; and were probably treated worse by white employers because there was less feeling of responsibility towards them.

“The crackers began to increase in number after the Civil War. Before the Civil War in this plantation area there were only planters and Negroes, and nobody in between except perhaps the overseers.”

There was a church that Jack Leland wanted to show me, the family church, the one connected with Walnut Grove—St. James, in Santee parish, Santee the name of the river. It lay along the King’s Highway—the name coming down from colonial days, indicating a road made at the king’s orders, at a time when most people traveled by water. The road was unpaved. If there had been the usual amount of May rain, it would have been difficult; but it was easy. And soon we were there: an old red-brick church with a portico. There was another portico at the back. The church was meant to serve French and English, but the portico for the French, at the back, was now blocked up. The red brick had the appearance of something neglected in a damp tropical climate.

“Come,” he said suddenly, moving briskly in spite of his bad ankles, leading me in through the fence. “Come, let me show you where I’m going to be buried.”

It was hot, no wind, and there was a hum of mosquitoes. All around, in the pines, were the cries of birds of various sorts. In the small churchyard, dry, full of brown leaves and fallen pine needles, were tombstones.

“All these people are relatives.”
Jonah Collins Born 1723 Died 1786
. “He’s the son of the man who brought the sea chests from Barbados.”
William Toomer 1866–1955
. “My mother’s uncle. A lawyer and a judge.” His sprightliness at being near the site of his burial place took me aback, then imposed reverence on me.

“There.”

An ordinary, bare spot of earth, a little vacant space between the headstones. That was where he was going to be buried.

“I want to be buried with a flat-topped marble tomb, right here by Jonah Collins. 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 two thousand dollars to the church, so that every year at the spring service they can have wine, whiskey, or whatever. I think people will remember me because of that.”

The mosquitoes and other insects were a nuisance. He had expected them; he had come with a can of insect repellent. Without a breeze the heat was oppressive, scorching the head. But there was often a wind, he said.

“There’s no sound like the sound of the wind soughing through the pine trees. And that’s where I want to be buried, so that I can listen to it forever.”

Inside, the church was very plain, with the mustiness and shut-up smell of a building not often used by people, without that warmth. The church had been built in 1763. (So the Pompion Hill chapel had been built in the same year.) It had a rough, tiled floor, and the building materials were brick and stucco and timber. There was no stone in these parts; and the windows had timber surrounds, dressed like stone: local work, local trees, slave work, perhaps. The pews were enclosed; a family in its pew would have been hidden, as if in a high-walled box, open at the top. Perhaps, Jack Leland said, the pews had been built like that to keep the children in, or perhaps in cold weather they were easier to heat, with the warm bricks that were used for that purpose.

How had he got the idea of death and celebration?

“There was a Professor Ogg of Oxford University in England. He came over twenty-five years ago. He told me a story I’d never heard of. There was a rice-planter’s son, a Mr. Trapier, who was visiting Oxford in the 1830s. The son of a rice-planter from Georgetown, South Carolina—making the grand tour in the 1830s. He was being entertained by the dons”—Jack Leland spoke the word precisely—“of New College. I believe it was New College. And he asked for a mint julep. They’d never heard of a mint julep. So when he came back he had a sterling pitcher made and sent back to the college as a gift, with money for mint juleps.”

We went on to McClellanville, on the sea, the summer resort of the family. And it was still, literally, a family resort. There were cousins or relations in almost every house in the white part of the village. Most of the blacks lived outside the village proper. Jack Leland knew the history of every house. That magnolia tree had been planted by his father in 1892, in what had then been Jack Leland’s grandmother’s yard. His father had brought the seedling over from Walnut Grove in his saddle bag. And Jack Leland himself had planted a line of oaks on the street in front. He had done that in 1934, the year before his father
had had to sell Walnut Grove. They were now very big trees. But that planting had been part of a federal program—and they contained a reminder of the poverty of those days. A woman ran the federal tree-planting program. She employed about fifteen high-school boys, and they were paid a dollar a day.

We had lunch at a restaurant on the highway, not far from McClellanville. The very young waitress turned out to have the name of Leland; she was a cousin.

I read him the words from the Confederate Memorial in Columbia. He was affected by them.

He said, “I think it’s great.”

Did he still have feelings about the Civil War?

He did. “When I was a boy there was a story in my family about the burning of one of the family plantations after the war was over. The place belonged to one of the drafters of the ordinance of secession. That was in 1860. And that, of course, brought on the war. After the Civil War this whole area was under martial law, and the colonel in charge of the area of Christchurch parish was a Colonel Beecher, a brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. They were great abolitionists from New England, and I think I can say that that book,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, did more than any other single thing to provoke the war. It irritated the South, where only thirteen percent of the people owned slaves, and it worked powerfully on people in the North.

“The story is that the wife of Colonel Beecher went around in Christchurch parish burning plantation houses. I grew up thinking it was perhaps a folk story. But in recent years a diary has come to light of a Dr. Marcy, who was a Union Army surgeon. He was one of the people authorized to take books, art treasures, and what not out of the houses down here and ship them north. And my daughter—she is doing research out of Middleton Place: she is part Middleton—got a copy of this diary. In it she read of the burning of Laurel Hill. That’s the house owned by the drafter of the ordinance of secession. There was proof there, in that diary. She burned perhaps twenty houses, Mrs. Beecher. Torching people’s houses. The Beechers were Puritans. These people have a mentality that is very hard to understand. When they sent missionaries to Africa the first thing they did was to make the Africans wear clothes, cover up.”

Early afternoon. On the road again, we passed black church congregations dispersing, driving away in cars. I asked about blacks and cars,
remembering that in Trinidad ownership of cars among blacks became widespread only after the second war. He said that for some years blacks weren’t allowed to drive cars; they were thought to be reckless drivers. “And they were.” And in the old days, he said, black churches had their Sunday services in the afternoon, because many of the black women would have been at work in the morning in white houses, cooking lunch.