Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1052
... And, goodness, the rain.... Yes, all that.... Youdon’t believe it. But it is all that. Still. Sufficiency farming.... No, part-time part-scholarship farming. At its best....
§
And then — I stop to ask a question of this long, painfully thin, ragged fellow, hoeing tobacco near the road... a mile and a half from the town.... I ask him why in all this country which I can see from this terrace there are nothing but geometrically green patches — striped green triangles of corn, uniform green parallels of tobacco; more corn, more tobacco, more corn, more tobacco... one field of peas, more corn, more tobacco.
I say: This is alluvial soil in a limestone region, isn’t it? Why isn’t there any truck gardening? It is ideal truck-gardening land, isn’t it?
He smiles an effaced smile, but yet as if I were foolish.
Don’t I know he’s a share-cropper?... He doesn’t know about alluvial soil in a limestone region. But he does know that the landowner for whom he share-crops is mortgaged up to the hilt to a chain-goods store corporation. They have threatened to foreclose if there’s any truck grown on the property...
§
Round the court-house in the little town, to the delight of Biala, the square is draped and festooned with friezes of coloured people.... I don’t like to see coloured people; they spoil the South for me.... Yet, on the rades of the Mediterranean there is nothing gives me more pleasure than to see the shining, ebony, always grinning troops in their scarlet fezzes and slashed faces stroll past the cafés against the azure of the sea. So don’t call it race feeling....
Incidentally the patient New Yorker is like a geyser of indignation. In the whole little town you can buy no vegetables except of chain-stores: except of chain-stores! — dim, wilted vegetables that will putrefy in your throat and be poison to your intestines. It is not for me to comment on the interior politics of a country not my own.... But in France I can say that... it isn’t right! The French chain-store that has rights over the property in the Ile de la Barthelasse in the Rhone that I thought of buying had the right to stipulate that I should grow fourteen acres of peas... and then they could refuse the crop except at any price they chose to give.... The Tates here had last year three acres of peas below this porch. The chain-store — one of three or four which was the only available purchaser — offered them something derisory — a cent a pound — for their crop. Shucked! So they fed them to the hogs.... You can’t buy country ham in that little town.... You have to take chemical-cured ham from Illinois.... And the truck comes from chain-store-owned farms in New Jersey... Am I mad?... It does not seem right....
I mean on the Ile de la Barthelasse.... Not here, of course.... After I had had that experience on the Rhone I wrote about it impassionedly to the local paper and the article was copied into a Paris paper.... I don’t mean to say that it did much good. There has not been a great movement to suppress the chain-stores who do those things. A question or so has been asked in the Chamber.... But France is enamoured of American methods just now. The chain-stores make great progress every day. They tell you you don’t know what you are talking about if you object to eating peas out of a can.... Another instance of the travelling of civilization along the Great Route.
§
According to Types of Farming, there are practically no truck-farms in Tennessee. Fifty round Memphis — a patch of them to the North. None anywhere else. None at all.... But a good patch in Alabama.... Yet negroes and the poorer whites make admirable truck-farmers.
§
I don’t know. This seems on the Tates’ balcony an earthly near-paradise. A perfect climate, a magnificently fertile soil. “And all the birds in Heaven there nest in company.”... The humming-bird over the trumpet-ash — bignonia grandiflora, I don’t know what they call it here — has been joined by three others. They are very beautiful. You do not here need jewels.... And it is peaceful and lovely and hospitable and kind.... I was right when in my youth I said that it is here that I should be.... At the farthest west.
But I can’t help having in the back of my mind how I came here. Perhaps not on this journey.... On another.... I forget.... Bundling slowly through Alabama between Chattanooga and Corinth... on the North fringe of the State with the dogwood blossoms climbing all up the gentle hills, as startling and as beautiful as the almond blossom on the Rhone.... The same climate, you know....
And you go by drab village after drab village with dark people draped on the steps and doorsteps and before the gauze doors of the stores.... And mules and hogs are a feature on the surface.... A landscape dotted with slow-moving hogs and oxen and motionless dark forms.... And you bundle through a township. It is famous the world over.... Lead-coloured, with a world-famous court-house.... And you wonder. And your chest is oppressed.... And you bundle along and you come to a village that sparkles with white paint... Woodford, I think. And the village green is as green and tidy as a green in English Sussex and bright chintz dresses flit along it.
And you lift up your heart and you say: We’re still on the Great Route.... And the next village is falling into ruins.... And you see a procession of families wheeling perambulators, carrying bird-cages, straggling, limping.
... And you say: Heavens, this cannot be Flanders in 1914, can it?... You remember what we saw at Ploegsteert that the Tommies called Plug Street.... And someone in the carriage says they are evicted share-croppers....
And along the Rhone the young vines run parallel, with their fluffy bouquets of green leaves like the inverted skirts of ballet dancers. And the corridas at Nîmes are beginning and all the festivals of the Month of Mary.... And this is the same climate,.. and a soil more fertile.... Why, then? Why not have, the whole girdle of the earth round, a land like Provence, where the vines give their juices and the beneficent trees drop their soothing gums and oils and the heart is always glad... as in Avignon?... Or Washington?... Welcome Nobles.... And the little hills are full of game and the streams peopled with fish....
§
The Tates say there are none but garfish in the Cumberland here... only fit for making soup.... Did you ever eat soupe de poissons at Aiguës Mortes?... And I hear the echo of the voice of Caroline Gordon say: “Who wants your mouldy old Provence? What’s an olive to a sugar-tree? Lynch him, girls.... Sick the dogs on him, Cousin Alick.”... The charming farmer who last year was so gay about the fortune he was making in Alabama with turkeys and hogs has been sold up by the sheriff....
§
I don’t know. It is all very complicated. Let me rest my mind with the contemplation of literature. On the corner of the great balcony, thrown down, is a limp copy of the literary supplement of a New York paper.... Thrown down in contempt! New York and its literary doings are here anathema maranatha.... Nothing less....
No, this is not a coincidence. You don’t find much but paragraphs like this in the literary papers nowadays:
“Just to be just, we should remember the lynching citizenry of the South usually is the ignorant, hot-blooded trash, the leavings of the collapse of the old South’s culture mixed with the scum of the North that emigrated to a conquered and defenceless land after the Civil War. Anyone who will question mob members can learn that many lynchers are children of Northern brethren who adopted our land because the stealing was good....”
“The author,” says the reviewer who quotes in the literary supplement that passage from Mr. Street’s Look Away: A Dixie Note Book—”the author saw his first lynching at the age of fourteen. He has seen eighteen others... and he hates lynching with a feeling few Northerners can know.”
I repeat that I picked that review up quite by chance. I don’t want to read: “In this book the shadow of the rope and the flicker of the flame are a continuously horrible background.”... And I don’t want to see the poor white stumble across the landscape below this porch, so emaciated by the hookworm that his flesh, peering through his rags, is almost transparent.... I want to think of this place as in the Golden Age — jewelled with humming-birds and laced with the scarlet streak of the cardinal’s flying wings.
... It might be.... You could make it so.... It’s not my job. I’ve got to go to Baton Rouge to defend New York against the flower of the Intelligentsia of the Deep South.
§
I will, for what it is worth, of my own observation make this note.... I do not think the structural character of society in the South has much changed as regards the negro. If you have the luck to be attached by any ties to any sort of white family of any standing at all, you will be all right. Your people will see that you have fairly comfortable circumstances; they will be untiringly good to your children; they will develop a devoted affection for some elderly female of your family who will be allowed to bring up all their children.... I am pretending that you are a negro. It would do us all good if from time to time we pretended to be negroes. Or poor whites.... You will be able to be gay, languorous, ineffably lazy; ineffably dishonest to every one else in the world but to the members of the family of your overlords. They could, for instance, leave the Koh-i-noor on your kitchen table and you would not touch it.... But you would annex the loose cash of any of their guests. They will see that you have a good cabin; they will pay for its being painted. They will pinch themseves so that you go well shod and with a full belly; they will almost ruin themselves to protect you from all process of laws. You will in short, be better off than any hundred-per-cent Anglo-Saxon worker in Pittsburg, Cleveland, or Detroit.
But if you cannot, by service, by name, by tradition — by blood even — hitch on to some such family.... Well, then.... Look out.... The shadow of the rope and the flicker of the flame will be for you a continuously horrible background. And, alas, you will love her, your Deep South.... Otherwise it costs little — or you could work your way — to Liberia. Or to Paris, where there is no race feeling. Or to Tarascon, where to-day the admirable, courteous, and efficient mayor is a negro.... Or, if you are on the P.L.M. running down to Marseilles they will listen to your political opinions with deference; they will lend you spare cushions for your curled head; they will offer you wine to drink from the mouths of their own bottles.... And let their wives drink after you.... I have done that.... Moi qui vous parle.... But that was for Senegalese lumps of ivory speaking a French more exquisite than that of the actors of the Comédie Française.... I don’t want to be Pharisaic.... I have in my time gone through agonies in the effort to prevent female members of my family from shaking hands with the most cultivated negro of the United States to-day, on a social occasion.... And, quite rightly, it is at this moment (1936) on the cards that I may be killed in an African quarrel.... Have you heard of Sanctions? Perhaps it would have been better if I or you or the policeman at the corner had discovered America. I don’t think that our first quest would have been a port from which slaves could be exported.... And, if it could only have been Sir Lancelot....
§
It is insupportably hot in a large greyness. I don’t know where this great upper room is... with an outlook through tall, mournful windows on the cranes and gas-containers of a bank that I know is holding off the Mississippi. I have been speaking for an hour and three-quarters defending New York. I am too tired to remember where I am. It is a great room with a lot of hostile souls in it. It is darkened — more darkened than a London room in November — darkened by the continent of North America hurrying overhead to throw itself into the Gulf of Mexico.... And the dust, and the heat and the Figure of Mr. John Gould Fletcher from Little Rock, Arkansas, prowling at the back of the audience asking them why they do not lynch me. And Caroline Gordon starting with indignation at my every second word; and Mr. Tate looking intently at the ground.... And the President, Penn Warren, of the University of Louisiana, at my side, asking me if I could keep it up for another half-hour... to fill in the schedule before the next Meeting.... And, of course, I am the guest of Mr. Huey Long....
§
I go on speaking.... You must have a distributing centre for books. What distributing centre have you in the South?... What has New York done to you all? Your Southern books Jill the reviewing pages of all the Literary Supplements.... Enthusiastically heralded to an enthusiastically waiting public.... But New York has done something to them.... Something unspeakable. Something not to be defined in words.... I hear my voice going on and on.... The cranes along the Mississippi bank — levee is the local word... are motionless black silhouettes against the driving clouds of dust....
Oh, yes, this must be an upper room in the Hotel Something.... Something Deeply Southern.... Yes, we were at the lunch just now where Mr. Huey Long made the astonishing speech.... Well, then, you must set up a distributing centre of your own. Say Richmond, Virginia.... A deep voice growls: Damn the State of Virginia. We should not have been beaten if she had come in earlier.... We should have had Kentucky and Maryland with us....
Do you believe the beaten forget?... Oh, yes, then Charleston. Or Baltimore. Or New Orleans....
§
Yes, this is the Something Hotel’s Assembly Room.... We lunched up at the University.... Coming back inthe car, Mr. John Gould Fletcher says to me over my shoulder from a rear seat that Mr. Wells has said nice things about me in his autobiography. I say: “Oh, yes, I am told he says I have no education.” Mr. Fletcher does not answer.
I gather he thinks that is nice enough for me.... It is not merely a local product, jealousy.
§
It is really stifling. Would someone kindly open a window?
... You can’t because of the dust from Nebraska.
The Southern book-distributing centre could not be Baltimore.
... Because Maryland could not come into the war. And Charleston? Not so bad.... But Charleston is a seaport.... Cosmopolitan... that is what she would be. The cosmopolitan taint must be kept out.... And New Orleans?... Oh, by heavens, not New Orleans.... Don’t you remember that you are speaking in Baton Rouge?... They fall into arguments amongst themselves — editors from Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, Nebraska.... I stand panting.
§
Mr. Huey Long is rather a remarkable man.... Not in looks. He might be one of the early heroes of Mr. H. G. Wells.... Kipps.... Or the autobiographical narrator of Tono Bungay.... Just anybody.... But he made two speeches this morning. One to a gathering of up-State farmers.... In a dialect I could not understand. But the speech was cheered to the echo and one of the farmers who spoke spoke just the same dialect. So I suppose Mr. Long was local enough.... And impassioned. And convincing.
And then, at the University lunch, he addressed a gathering of University professors, foreign diplomats, naval officers, and the Intelligentsia of the South. And he spoke in exactly the dialect, with the vapidity, with the images — and even some of the accent — of a Cambridge — England — Head of a College addressing his staff on a not very important occasion.
I do not remember him as having said anything very striking. He said he had been accused of interfering with the affairs of that University. But, said he, without any passion, he did not. If he did why shouldn’t he? It was his University. He personally paid for it almost altogether. But he had not interfered and he was not going to....
Quite quietly and indifferently....
A remarkable man.... But the crane or something in the fable mistrusted the something else who could blow both hot and cold....
§
It is growing darker and darker. I can hardly see my audience. I have figured it out that if erosion of the soil of this continent goes on as fast as it is going not only will all the great power dams be silted up for good but there will only remain — in fifty years — one arable acre per head of the population.... In the South!...
My voice is going on talking.... I can hear it.... What the devil is it saying?... I must pull myself together. I say:
“In conclusion I will tell you a story.... On Lobden Moorside, which lies between Yorkshire and Lancashire in England, there is a hamlet of sixty inhabitants called Boggarts’ Ho’ Clough. They speak a language that is spoken by no soul outside the Clough. The story I am going to tell you is in that language. Listen:
“Keawr tho’ deawn i’ th’ ingle an lettn hae a goodly pow. Twar weet.... Twar weeter ‘n’ weet. T’Deluge was a dreeth aside yon dee. T’cook stoo i’ t’ kitchen ‘n’ ostler a coom in.... Tho’rt weet now seeays cook, the cont nobbut be weet. Fot me a bucket o’ watter....” And I kept it up for a long time — that Nordic invasion of Dixie ears.... It can be made a long story.... In short, it is the tale of a cook in her kitchen who said to a stable-boy who came in dripping with wet out of the rain: “You are wet now. You cannot be anything but wet. Fetch me a bucket of water.” The stable-boy fetched the water. He poured it over the cook and remarked: “Tho’rt weet now. the cont nobbut be weet. Fot it thi’sel.”... You’re wet now. You can’t be anything but wet. Fetch it yourself....
