Spring Gothic and MLK

The other day Jane and I saw SELMA. We were both extremely moved, and I was brought back to those difficult days of apartheid in the South. Growing up in Maine, going to college in western Massachusetts, I was very far away from the South and all the madness, but later, I was there for a sad, sad day. This story was written after I returned from a trip to Mississippi and Louisiana in 1968.

 

Spring Gothic: a True Story

 

I have saved quite a few pictures from the spring of 1968, when I made a pilgrimage to the South. A photograph in my bookcase contains shots of William Faulkner’s grave; Rowan Oak, his ante-bellum house in Oxford; a mule and two horses peering out of a barn in Tennessee; a dog, dead, on the side of a Mississippi highway; Louisiana slum children in New Orleans; and a hand-lettered sign by the door of 618 Frenchman Street, which, with the letters decreasing in size as the painter ran out of room, and with the S’s drawn backwards, advertises the FIRST PENTECOSTAL ONEWAY HOLYNESS CHURCH OF GOD MEETING SIRVICE START AT 6:30 ON THURSDAY AND SUNDAY. WILL PRAY FOR THE SICK. EVANGELIST MARTIN.

I chose the word “pilgrimage” deliberately, for my trip was a Chaucerian blend of the spiritual and the secular. I had recently read Absalom, Absalom!  Like Shreve, the roommate at Harvard, I wondered why Quentin Compson, with that insane intensity, so hated the South:

“I don’t hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I don’t hate it,” he said. I don’t hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!

Shreve was a Canadian; I am a product of that very iron New England dark, having been raised in Boston and later in Maine. How could either of us understand? Nonetheless I wished to try. Also I was headed for New Orleans, and music, and Bourbon Street strippers, naked.

In the spring of 1968, I was finishing my second year teaching in Evansville, a city at the southern tip of Indiana, almost South but not quite, ambivalent in this respect because it sits north of the Mason-Dixon line but south of, say, Louisville, Kentucky – a sort of finger thrust down Dixie’s craw. It is a melting pot, a gateway to and from the South, facts that did not escape many a black runaway’s notice during the time of slavery, nor later, Jim Crow’s either, as he took a back seat in southbound Greyhounds or sat up front on ones headed for Indianapolis and points north. All this I knew, but distantly. In 1968, blacks could be anywhere on buses; and moreover, Faulkner was dead seven years.

So on Sunday, March 31, I drove from Evansville to Oxford, Mississippi, in about seven hours. Despite the drizzling gray day, as I went farther south, the roadside, banked by clay and honeysuckle, brightened – the clay growing redder, the honeysuckle lusher, greener. Every other barn in the South is a billboard either for Mail Pouch Tobacco or for Ath-O-lean for Athlete’s Foot. I took the interstate beltway around Memphis, worked my way to Mississippi Route 7, and finally found Oxford. At three o’clock I parked in view of the back of the courthouse, in front of a decaying hotel, the Colonial. Carrying my Instamatic in my jacket pocket, I walked to the town square, which was just like the one in Requiem for a Nun:

A Square, the courthouse in its grove, the center; quadrangular around it, the stores, two storey, the offices of the lawyers and doctors and dentists, the lodge-rooms and auditoriums above them; school and church and tavern and bank and jail each in its ordered place…

Around in front of the courthouse stood a granite Confederate soldier, both hands on his rifle, staring blankly at the slate sky. (In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner lifted one of the soldier’s arms to a salute, and the statue “gazed with empty eyes beneath his marble hand into wind and weather.”) He was placed atop a twenty-five-foot pedestal, dedicated with an inscription from the unrepentant hands of proud men: THE SONS OF VETERANS UNITE IN THIS JUSTIFICATION OF THEIR FATHERS FAITH.

Returning from the square, I entered into the dark lobby of the Colonial Hotel. Leather chairs, cracked and shiny, were arranged around a blank television set. I approached the desk, behind which stood a large woman, somehow amorphous in a flowing, flowered cotton dress and a blue sweater.

“Yes?” Her voice was chipped flint. She did not smile.

“I’d like a room.”

“How long are you planning on staying?”

“Just a couple of days.”

She slid a card and a pen toward me. “It’s four dollars a day.”

“Would you like the money now?”

“As you prefer.”

I paid for two days. The money seemed to soften her face fractionally. “You’re from the North, aren’t you? What brings you to Oxford?”

“I want to meet people who knew one of your local writers.”

“Oh? Who?”

‘William Faulkner.”

The softness vanished. “Huh. His grandfather wrote better books.” She handed me a key attached to a piece of black plastic. “Number twenty-seven. Up the stairs on your right.”

Alone, I carried my suitcase to my room, which was furnished in the style of post- World War II Army Surplus: squeaky twin beds with iron heads and feet, a small wooden table between them, a dresser, and an aluminum lawn chair – all painted olive green. There was a washbasin in one corner. The dull ivory walls were patched and peeling. I set my suitcase on the lawn chair and went out to find something to eat.

I returned to the hotel shortly before eight o’clock. Several people, old men mostly, had gathered around the television set in the lobby. They watched and chatted quietly, paying varying degrees of attention to the screen, and no one gave me any notice at all as I sat in a brown leather armchair on the fringe of the group.

A slight, white-haired lady, leaning on an ebony cane, came into the room. She wore a long black dress and gold-rimmed glasses. She perched on the edge of a black chair next to me, precisely, fastidiously. Gazing about the room, she came to me and smiled, her head very slightly cocked. “Why, hello, young man. Are you staying here at the Colonial?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I was trying to develop and accent that, if not exactly Mississippi, would at least sound soft Yankee.

“There’s a young man living here who’s attending the University. Are you at the University?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Oh.” She seemed disappointed. “Then you are visiting here in Oxford?”

“Yes, ma’am. I‘m trying to learn something about William Faulkner.”

“Oh, that’s marvelous. William was a wonderful man.”

“Did you know him?”

“Why, yes. Such a gentleman. I knew him quite well. My name is Miss Coxe. C-O-X-E. My father knew William’s father intimately. I believe they had some sort of business dealing in common.”

As I introduced myself, the presidential seal flashed over the television screen, and a voice said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.” Then Lyndon Johnson’s face appeared.

“Perhaps I can help you, young man,” Miss Coxe said. “If you were to talk to Mr. Reed or Colonel Cofield, I’m sure they could tell you a great deal about William. They were close friends of his. Mr. Reed runs the Rexall drugstore on the square, and Colonel Cofield has a photography studio just off it.”

“Thank you, Miss Coxe. That is very helpful indeed. Is it all right if I tell them that you sent me?”

“Well, you can, of course,” she said doubtfully. “They may not remember me, though. I’ve been out of town for many years and only recently returned.”

“And you’re living here at the Colonial?”

She looked shyly around at the old men sitting in the old armchairs. “Well, temporarily. It’s difficult to find a place which is suitable, you know. But I’ve been out in California, and now I’m so glad to be back in the South at last.”

Through her words I thought I could hear President Johnson’s drawl: “… and so I have decided not to seek re-election to this office in November.”

“Did you hear?” I asked Miss Coxe. “Did he say he’s not running? I don’t believe it. Isn’t that wonderful?”

“I don’t know,” she replied firmly.

The next day, April 1, I searched out Gathright and Reed’s Rexall store. Mr. Reed greeted me warmly enough. He lent me a three-year-old memorial edition of the Oxford Eagle, dated April 22, 1965, filled with reminiscences of Faulkner. “The paper’s just what I’d tell you anyway,” he said. “Please bring it back when you’re finished, though. That’s the only copy I have.”

“Thank you.” I carried it back to the hotel. There, I found some tantalizing biographical tidbits. Faulkner apparently loved hunting, having killed his first deer when he was sixteen. Uncle Ike Roberts, and old hunting companion, had given him understated homage: “He’ll pick up the smutty end of a stick quick as anyone when the fire needs attention.” Somehow, upon reflection, I felt the praise sounded vaguely equivocal, like complimenting a housewife for cleaning a toilet bowl.

Mr. Reed himself was quoted on page two, to the effect that, in the years prior to the Nobel Prize for Literature, which came in 1949, Faulkner owned but one dictionary and that a French-English one. Interesting, I thought, but inconclusive; was it big enough to contain all those Latinate words – “manumission,” “repudiation,” “inviolability,” “transmogrification”? So, feeling dissatisfied, a bit April-fooled, I returned the paper to Mr. Reed. We chatted for a moment and I asked him how to get to Faulkner’s house. He had begun a fairly complicated set of directions when a soft voice broke in. “I’m heading that way, Mr. Reed. He can follow me.”

We turned to the speaker, a girl, auburn-haired, perhaps twenty years old.

“Why, Frances,” Mr. Reed said, “that would be nice. This young fellow is interested in Bill Faulkner. This is Frances Darden. She’s studying at the University.”

I murmured my name and thanks for her offer. Thanking also Mr. Reed, genial Pandarus, I followed my new guide out of the store. Frances in her car led me in mine to Rowan Oak. We parked on the road and walked in together. Puddles from last night’s rain glistened along the tree-lined drive; a Negro maid swept the verandah as we approached the house, white with tall pillars. The neatly trimmed lawn was mottled with sunlight and shadows from the cedars. The front door swung open and another woman, this one white, stepped out.

“That’s Miss Dot,” said Frances. She is, or was, Mr. Faulkner’s sister-in-law. She lives in the house now, and gives tours. Hello, Miss Dot.”

The woman, tall and angular, approached us. “It’s the Darden girl, isn’t it? Who’s that with you?” Her voice, quite deep, washed us with suspicion.

“This is a friend of my who’s come down from the North to learn about Mr. Faulkner,” she said. Turning to me, “This is Miss Oldham.”

“How do you do?” I asked.

“Fine, thank you. Frances – that is your name, isn’t it? Yes? – I just haven’t the time to show the young man around today. You know I only arrange tours in advance for groups. I’m sorry young man. You understand.” Not waiting for my reply, she nodded sharply at Frances and strode off toward a garage.

Frances watched her go, then suddenly smiling at me, asked, “Can I show you any of the other sights of Oxford?”

“Yes. I’d like to see his grave.”

“Is that all?”

“No, other things, too.”

“Good. Come on.”

I left Oxford the next day, having seen some ante-bellum houses, some Negro slums, the library, the jail, the University, and, alone by this time a Frenchman Bend-like community called – so help me God – Coontown Crossing.

When I checked out of the Colonial Hotel, the woman at the desk asked me if I had learned much about Faulkner. “Some,” I replied cautiously. “Miss Coxe, the lady who’s staying here, gave me several names. The people were quite helpful.”

“Her? She’s crazy as a bedbug. Hasn’t a penny to her name.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

 

Two days later, on April 4, I was in New Orleans, having a picnic with a girl whose name and face today I frankly can no longer remember. She was nice, I recall, a student at St. Mary’s Dominican College, a friend of a friend, not as pretty as Frances Darden perhaps, but as pleasant and as kind. The sky had clouded over in the morning; and just as we got to the park by the levee where we were going to eat, rain began to fall. We decided to return to her apartment.

By the time we got back, the rain was coming hard. Her apartment was dark and musty. It was around three-thirty, but it seemed later. I turned on the television set. Dr. Martin Luther King, winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, had been shot and killed at a Memphis motel. For a long while we sat quietly, watching the luminescent screen. Then the telephone rang.

The girl answered it. “Hello. Yes. No, she’s not here. There was a long pause. “Yes. I’ll tell her.” She hung up.

I turned from the television. “That was my roommate’s parents,” she said. “They live in New Orleans. They want her to call home as soon as she gets in. They’re having a party celebrating the assassination. Drinking daiquiris.”

I looked at her closely. It was quite dark in the room, but I could see that swept up in shame and rage, she was silently, furiously weeping.

 

Story originally in HAP, no. 2, Spring 1974, pp. 7-13. Text © John A. Gould