[T]he machine was obviously going to pieces. . . . The Harrow was not writing, it was only jabbing, and the Bed was not turning the body over but only bringing it up quivering against the needles.
—Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”
For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer?
—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Recently, meditating about poetry, its connection in my head with issues of personal and cultural history generally and class in the American South particularly, I had an urge to look back at W. J. Cash’s classic The Mind of the South. But when I went to my bookshelf, I found that the book, like so many others, had unaccountably vanished. “Oh, no,” I thought, “The Mind of the South is lost!” Convinced that The Mind of the South could be bought cheap, I went to a large used bookstore and asked for it. “The Mind of the South,” said the helpful cashier. “Would that be folklore?”
Badoom-boom went the vaudeville drummer who works the comedy club at the back of my medulla oblongata. But in the small city in western Oregon where I was then living, I was the only one who heard it. “No,” I told the cashier, suddenly caught in my own Spenglerian irony, “The Mind of the South is history.”
And that is where I found it, on the same shelf with Devoto’s The Course of Empire, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Gary Wills’s Under God: Religion and American Politics. But yes, I kept thinking, The Mind of the South would be folklore: would be, would be. Pointless to bring up any of this with the cashier: it takes a connoisseur to blush at classism as subtle as that.
Since I was born and reared in the southeastern region of the U. S. of North America—and since my people, as they say in those parts, were born and reared there too, and their people before them—then I am part of what we talk about when we talk about the mind of the South. My father is a Mississippian; my mother is a Mississippian displaced from Louisiana. My father’s family, past and present, is made up of people intelligent and not proud of it, inflexible and not worried about it, with minds at once narrow and deep; below-out-of-sight serfs, they immigrated from farms in Bavaria in the late nineteenth century, bought farms cheap in the U.S., married farmers, and gave birth to farmers. My mother’s people, on the other hand, are bright, mercurial failures; having lived Southern for generations out of mind, they possess a history of lost minor wealth, a present of white-collar jobs, a future of inertia, and a keen sense of irony. By the late 1930s when my parents met, it was clear enough that my father’s family had transcended its origin and was rising toward middle class, and that my mother’s family was in gradual, but considerable, decline. Their marriage inscribed a neat intersection of socio-economic graph lines, and at that particular statistical crossroad I was conceived and birthed.
Histories, bloodlines, appropriations, decline, fall, earth: it is in such rhetorical territory that any meditation about poetry and class in the South has to start. For me, the central question is whether it also has to end there. Thinking about things southern makes me irritable; my eyes narrow, and my skin begins psychosomatically itching. I do not like to revisit these issues. I do not like to resurrect these conventions. If I say, like Quentin Compson, that I do not hate the South, that is supposed to signify its opposite; what, then, if I say of the South that I do not love it?
And yet, when I meet the automatic assumption—mechanical, bourgeois, sublime—that the mind of the South can only be folkloric, that Br’er Rabbit is the South’s best spokescreature, I begin to itch in other ways. Like anyone, I can pretend to ignore my history only at my peril; at the same time, I cannot afford to be simpleminded about it. Particularly among white southerners such as myself, however apostate, southern-think is a powerful mental machinery, a device of meshed metaphors and narrative patterns that one tends either to accept or deny entire because it is so difficult to dismantle. But I am convinced—to mix a metaphor as precisely as possible—that it is only in the innermost workings of that machine that I can find the ghost to which my past requires me to offer up my bowl of goat’s blood.
*
The summer of 1965, the year I turned fifteen, I spent my time driving a combine, working my uncle’s farm, where many acres had been devoted to a diabolical crop known as the wild winter pea.
Wild winter peas are mostly useless. The pea itself, about the same size and hardness as a black bb, is toxic. If cattle eat the pea, my uncle told me, it makes them sick; if they eat enough of them—which they will do, given a chance—they die. If birds eat wild winter peas—and they often do, gathering in great numbers around grain bins, attracted by the abundant spillage—they become desperately drunk. This was of great interest to me and to the other farmhands; we would stop by the bins at sunset, on our way home from the fields, and watch droves of blitzed doves stagger foolishly, grounded. They were easy to catch; once you had one in your hands, you could feel how completely it had glutted itself, its gullet stuffed and gravelly like a bean bag. Some of us caught them and let them go; some of us snapped their necks and took home as many as we could catch. Doves, even drunk, make a good meal.
My uncle grew wild winter peas because a government farm subsidy program paid him to grow them. In the winter, the wild winter pea made a decent cover crop and reasonably good cold-weather grazing, green like winter wheat through the dead months—but beginning in the spring, it became a dense vine, and by early summer, when the peas themselves appeared, its vegetation covered the earth completely in an impenetrable waist-high tangle. This was the stuff we were supposed to harvest—in spite of the fact that the pea itself was good for nothing but seed. Farmers were paid by the government to grow a product that was only good to sell to other farmers to produce more of the same product, thus using otherwise fertile land to do essentially nothing. The net result, theoretically, was to reduce the production of genuinely useful crops (cotton, corn, sorghum, and soy beans) and keep prices high. My uncle was granted an acreage allotment on which he could grow “real” crops; the rest of his land was given over to the wild winter pea.
I became a combineer that summer by default. A couple of years before, my older brother and my cousin, both of them mechanically-minded people, bought a down-and-out Massey-Harris combine, worked a miracle of repair on its engine and harvesting mechanism, and went into the freelance harvesting business. This enterprise was considered exemplary by my parents, my uncle, and the other farmers in the neighborhood for whom my brother and cousin worked; in fact, the two of them made a local reputation for themselves as agricultural wünderkinder, young Edisons of farm entrepreneurship. Never mind that the Massey-Harris machine was small and outmoded and prone to disastrous breakdown; the fact that they had saved the money to buy it, had done all the repair work, and had put themselves in business made them local celebrities.
In 1963 and 1964, their last two years of high school, they did a flourishing business, working for my uncle and for other farmers not for wages but for a straight share of the crop they harvested. One-tenth of everything they combined was theirs, and they sold their share to brokers just as all the other farmers did. They had become, at a stroke, farmers, businessmen, and technicians. With two of them to drive and service the one machine, they made a fair amount of money—enough to make a hefty contribution toward their educations at the nearby agricultural and engineering university. The business was so lucrative, in fact, that in the summer of 1965, when they both wanted to take summer classes at State, they did not care to do without the money they made from the Massey-Harris; and so, after some negotiation, it was decided that I would take over as driver, with the understanding that we would all share the income equally, each taking a third of a tenth of what the combine harvested.
In spite of the scrupulous equality of the division, I wasn’t really a full partner in the business. For one thing, I didn’t own a share of the Massey-Harris, and thus no responsibility to pay for its upkeep; but because I had no replacement driver, I had to spend more time behind the wheel than either of them ever had, so that made it fair to split the income in straight percentages. Clearly, I was hired help, labor and not management. And nobody thought it should be otherwise, least of all me.
*
In Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” a character known only as “the condemned man” is executed for an unknown crime. Fundamentally he is written to death on a mechanism known as “the machine,” which consists of two parts: the Bed, on which the condemned is restrained, and the Harrow, whose function ought to be self-explanatory. “[T]he Bed vibrated,” Kafka tells us, “the needles flickered above the skin, the Harrow rose and fell.” Kafka’s language is curiously agricultural, harrow and bed delineating, among other things, images of cultivation: the implement that rips, the earth that receives. Like so many of Kafka’s curious existential/allegorical images, this is a multivalent creation—perhaps it is a metaphor for art, but then again, perhaps it more adequately analogizes the action of a society on its members, the character of a culture incised—materially, through language—on the bodies of its citizens.
For certain astrologers, the universe is a vast aetherial clockwork, a machine stamping its influence on souls like a die press on sheet steel. I carry with me the superstition—a materialist or mechanistic version of astrology, perhaps, or a 20th-century American misreading of the doctrine of the karmic turbine—that a person is stamped forever by the character of what surrounds him or her at the moment of birth. This is what passes in me for what writers so often call “a sense of place.”
Given its character and mine, Macon, Mississippi, the town where I was born, must have exerted a particularly unfortunate complex of influences. It was, as I remember it from the dawn of my consciousness in the mid-1950s, mean and ugly. Storefronts had lost whatever original character they might have had in the postwar passion for glass and sheet-metal façades. There were hardware stores full of bolts, lead pipe, wrenches, plumbers’ aids, and copper wiring; there were two banks, each containing identical currency and loan applications; there was a store which was known as “The Bookstore,” even though it contained no books, but traded instead in slick and pulp magazines, stationery, ball point pens, and toys; there were two automobile dealerships (Ford and Chevrolet) and several gas stations (Pure Oil, Gulf, Texaco); there was a courthouse, a jail, a health clinic, a tiny desperate library; there was a garment factory, a Double Cola bottling plant, a cotton gin. Even the few finer houses on the north side of town—ante-bellum reconstructions—only served to intensify the deadness of the rest of it. It was all unremarkable, a 20th-century cliché.
Real proof of its character would require me to make an omniscient catalog of that place, the town and the countryside surrounding it—like Whitman squared and cubed, a treatment of a whole county as complete as James Agee gives the Gudgers’ bedroom in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. What a terrible vision that would be, what an enormity of visionary dreariness: a landscape of rust, of semi-abandoned storefronts and neglected backstreets, of disemboweled engines, of hayhooks and harrows, dead cattle, sheet-tin galvanized rooftops, pickup trucks and beer cans, silos and hay barns and outhouses, fire ants and cottonmouth water moccasins, rednecks and tenant farmers and quasi-aristocrats, dogs living and dead, cats wild and tame, and a lot of children wandering through the contours of that countryside wondering what the hell is this?
That vision, however real, is too grim and shapeless to serve any meditation. Imagine instead a gigantic robot tractor moving across a muddy field, its wheels pressing volumes of mud beneath it as it goes—pieces of flat-pressed clay, each scrap bearing a fragmentary impression of the machine’s treads. Assume that each of those bits of accidentally shaped mud is a consciousness. What will such a consciousness imagine itself to be?
It will notice that it has shape.
It will surmise that the rubble in the midst of which it discovers itself has some meaning.
It will imagine that its shape is a wholeness, or that its shape is the image of a wholeness, like the image reflected by a fragment of a mirror, or that its shape is a particle of a wholeness, like a jigsaw puzzle piece, and that the other fragments which surround it are the other pieces which, reassembled, would make a complete picture.
It will have no notion whatever of the tractor, which by now will be long beyond the horizon and out of sight.
If it ever begins—looking at its situation in the cold light of day and feeling the beginning of a terrible suspicion—to imagine the agency which has given it form, what name would it give its fiction of the tractor?
What difference would it make?
*
It has been often remarked that the word verse, which applies at core to a line of poetry, comes from the Old English word fers, which means to plow a furrow [fers = verse and also furrow thus] and also from Latin versus, which originally means the turning point, when the plowman reaches the end of the row and turns back to begin again. From the New Shorter OED: “verse . . . n. [OE fers corresp. to OFris. fers, MLG, OHG (Du., G.), ON vers, f. L versus turn of the plough, furrow, line, row, line of writing.]”
It is fundamental to my own thinking about poetry that I grew up a farmer among farmers. They were people who understood plowing. They knew fers, then, and they knew versus. On the other hand, they didn’t know a damn thing about verse; and none of them ever taught me how to plow.
Unlike my brother, I had never shown any aptitude for things mechanical; I was considered, not without good reason, a klutz with tools. Our family has a heavy dose of Teutonic genes, and many of my relatives inherited what appears to be an effortless gift at practical engineering. I received absolutely none of that instinct, and living among those so endowed, I was a sort of idiot, like a bad dancer in a family of ballerinas—loved and tolerated and worried about. It was the tail-end of the great mid-twentieth-century age of engineering, the last gasp of the Sputnik era, and, out of it as I was, I was despaired of. I despaired of myself. How could such a person be entrusted with so vitally important a job as plowing?
Clumsily disguised to myself as a white boy, my mental equipment consisted of suspicion and very little else. I was born in that small east-central Mississippi town on Aug. 7, 1950, in a hospital which no longer exists as a hospital. It has been turned into an apartment building; the room in which my mother lay unconscious (in the medical manner of the 1950s) during her labor has now become something mundane and utilitarian—a kitchen, a living room, a bathroom. A stove probably memorializes the spot where I first saw light, perhaps a TV set, sombody’s easy chair, or a toilet.
I know that my mother was unconscious during my birth because she has told me so—with regret, particularly when my now-ex-wife and I were going through Lamaze training for “natural” childbirth. My mother has told me that even after having two children, she was still more or less in the dark about the mechanics of the process of giving birth, at least in its details; obviously, she remembers nothing of either delivery. She submitted herself, more or less unquestioningly, I think, as that was how it was done in 1950, to a biological process about which she knew little, mediated by a set of medical procedures about which she was told next to nothing—a double mystery, twice—and was presented the first time with my brother and the second time with me.
As in most things in the life of my family generally, I was more problematic in my arrival than was my brother; though in this one instance, at least, I can’t be blamed. My parents have different blood polarities—my mother has an Rh negative factor. These days that’s not much of a problem; there are relatively simple medical remedies. In 1950, evidently, that wasn’t the case. Then, there would usually be no difficulty in bringing the first child to term, but with subsequent children there was an exponentially increasing risk. The second child often did not survive. It was, I gather from third-hand reports, not an easy birth.
I have in my mind an imaginatively constructed image of that delivery room in a fifth-rate hospital in Macon, Mississippi, where my mother lay on a delivery table, with her feet up in the stirrups, unconscious. It was August in Mississippi, 99 degrees, 99% humidity, no air conditioning. I imagine sweat beaded on the balding forehead of the doctor, sweat runnelling the faces of the nurses (I see two, one white and one black). The delivery room I create is small and a little shabby in my vision of it, as befits a future bathroom. It was painted medicinal institutional green before the Second World War and is now badly in need of repainting, but why bother if you’re the head physician and you own the goddamned hospital— if you already have plans to build another, bigger one on the other side of town and turn this place into a toilet? There is stainless steel; there’s a scalpel. Episiotomy? Why not? The patient is knocked out anyway—make it easy on the doctor.
And there is my mother, disastrously and angelically unconscious, draped from the waist up, sweating, and streaked with amniotic fluid and blood from the waist down. What does she know? She’s 26 years old; she never went to college. They gave her a powerful drug. How can she defend herself? She’s not only been kept ignorant, more or less—she’s entirely out of it, gone. And yet she’s beautiful there on the table, I think, if you know how to see it under the sweat and under the strain that shows even through general anesthetic. And sooner or later, out of all that stainless steel and gleaming body fluid—it’s astonishing how much liquid comes out of the womb during birth; I saw it when my daughter was born—there I am, blue, clashing with that terrible old traditional green, already loving my mother with the fierce, selfish, absolutely unconscious and completely intractable love that is nothing more than the sheer will of the flesh to live and at all costs to live forever.
*
Prosody is generally understood as coming from Greek, ode [song] plus pros-[toward]: a moving toward song. However, I prefer to think of pros- also in another way: against, as to move toward something until you come right up against it (as in prostrate). It is idiosyncratic, I realize, to think of the root of prosody as meaning to come up against song, but I find that definition useful. So lovers, for instance, face to face—with each other as with their own situations and perhaps with their guilt—come up against song. No, I’m not against evil, goes the old joke; I wouldn’t get that close to it. This is the root of carpe diem poetry; it is also the root of the blues.
As every songwriter and ever poet knows, there’s a place where song and sense don’t gibe. You have in mind to write a complicated narrative about your grandmother and her lover and a gasoline truck and the rain and several dogs, but the music just won’t accommodate all that and still be music—so, in order to fit it into a twelve-bar blues form, which is what you feel you have to write because something in your cultural posture and circumstances point you that way, you leave out the grandmother and the rain and just write about the lover, one of the dogs, and the gasoline truck—you’d rather write about the lover than the truck, but you want what rhymes with truck. (Some experts are of the opinion that the etymologically untraceable word fuck probably comes from an Old English word meaning to plow.) So writing the song is a verse-by-verse line of reversals, a compromise between narrative and lyric, between information and harmonious noise. The product is the result of a vector, of the story’s having more or less survived a coming up against song, of the music’s having survived the impure roughing-up the facts insist on.
Song, in fact, is the reason I was out on that combine in the summer of 1965. If my take for the season amounted to $350, I could buy a good second-hand electric guitar. All that stood in my way was a thousand acres of wild winter peas.
Machinery, though, was the essential problem: gears, bolts, belts, the complex prosody of the combine. For years, I believed that I was constitutionally incapable of concentrating on details. This, I told myself, was the root of my lack of mechanical skill. I could not really focus on a wrench, much less any job a wrench might have to do. My mind wandered, I became clumsy, and then those gracefully intuitive engineers in my family would groan with impatience and snatch the thing out of my hands. To get even, I tried to turn myself into a musician. I did not understand until years later that music was a means of revenge. Sentimentally, I thought it was my destiny. I was not designed to be a mechanic; I was, instead, an artist—thus ipso facto above all that. Just where I came by such a breached vision I cannot say; music would eventually teach me how wrong I was not only about the difference between the class of the artist and the class of the worker, but how stupid I could be about the power of patience with detail. A guitar, after all, is a kind of glorified wrench; if you don’t know how to hold it, you never get anywhere. And the wrench that is language is a mighty lever, a potent loosener and tightener.
*
Real proof of contentions about landscapes, regions, places, small-town America, anybody’s sacred home ground, always requires a powerful rhetoric of detail—unless the contentions are sentimental ones, which by definition require no proof at all. By the time I was fifteen years old, I had collected plenty of sentimental contentions about the place in which I was growing up. That summer, driving my brother’s combine, I began to subject myself to the discipline of proof, the rhetoric of detail.
Operating a large and serious machine requires attention to detail. A machine, in fact, is nothing but a collection of details, minutiae meshed together. This is especially true of combines, which are not sleek and sophisticated creations. A combine is an absurd Rube Goldberg gadget, a great rumbling shambling example of the sheer power of the counter-intuitive. Nothing about the construction of a combine is what a sane human being would expect. A combine is not mysteriously complex, like the cosmos of the old astrologers; a combine is inelegantly complicated. A combine spits in the eye of physicists, who are in love with law, beauty, and charm. A combine rattles and roars; a combine vibrates and stumbles as it goes; a combine devours and farts; a combine, inevitably, breaks down.
To learn my stuff as a combineer, I had warmed up on wheat. Wheat is an easy crop to combine; all you really have to harvest are the heads, and those are high off the ground. The driver raises and lowers a combine’s header—the front end, where the business of cutting goes on—by means of a complex hydraulic system controlled by levers; with wheat, keeping the header at the right height is simple. Also, wheat-stalks are quite easy for a combine’s cutter-bar—the leading edge of the machine, a double row of triangular steel blades that clip like monstrous pinking shears—to deal with. The wheat is dry when you harvest it; the stalks are brittle, and the wheat stalk is structurally uncomplicated. Because it was still late May when the wheat harvest started, my brother was there to walk me through it. It was easy. I logged enough hours to earn the removal of my combineer’s training wheels, and we were in business.
Wheat fields are legendary, mythic: amber waves and all the conceptual baggage thereof. Wild winter peas have, as far as I know, no connotations, and certainly, when they are ready for harvest, no aesthetic appeal. In winter, they are green like wheat, pretty against the dead landscape; in the spring, when the vines are dilating, they produce a small and not unpretty violet flower. By June they’ve gone to seed and the vines are dead. A wild winter peafield ready for combining is a waist-deep chaos of organic cable. Even dried, the vines are pithy and tough; they are also prodigiously voluminous. And the pea-pods—full of those poisonous bbs that would yield up my precious third of a tenth—are not handily located at the top. There is no top. The pods grow along the length of the vine; the vine winds and curls back on itself, weaves in and out of its own mass. The vines may lift their pods two feet off the ground, or lay them on the ground. The upshot is that the vine in its labyrinthine entirety has to go through the combine; anything the combine misses is waste.
Imagine trying to cram a thousand acres of baling wire down your throat.
With peas, my brother had advised me, you want to keep the header very low, no more than an inch off the ground. The hours I logged combining wheat had not prepared me for the demands of this requirement. The difficulty—as I learned instantly when I actually began combining peas—is that the earth is not flat. The earth, a combine will quickly teach you, is a chaotic complex of geometries, disturbed not only by its own vague chthonic inclinations but also by the aggregated industries of crawfish, fire ants, and human beings. A crawfish chimney can jam a cutter bar; a fire ant mound three feet high, hidden like a Mayan ruin in the jungle of pea-vines, can stall a whole combine—and then, if you’re the driver, you have to clear the mess away, remembering that enough fire ant bites can literally kill a child or a calf.
But the most dangerous obstacle of all, the most insidious and profound, is the abandoned turn row. Plowing a field moves soil, and where the plow turns—the enjambment, the versus of the fers—it collects like sediment at the mouth of a river. Years of plowing a piece of land establishes distinct ridges along these lines of demarcation: turn rows.
Archaeologists say that the most permanent way to mark the earth is to dig a hole; its traces remain forever. I would argue that the second most permanent mark you can make is to raise a turn row. The land I was harvesting had been tilled for generations, but recently the fields had changed their boundaries; as the economy moved farming from family subsistence to agribusiness, from labor-intensive to machine-dominated, fields had grown larger. The turn rows, however, remained permanent; agriculture’s speed-bumps, they were permanent testimony of the labor of farmhands long dead, of vanished families, of quaint old John Deeres long gone to the rust heap, of mules generations rendered into glue. Invisible underneath acres of pea-tangle, the old turn rows waited to warp my header, to stall my machine, to bend me, to break me, to tip me over. After awhile, lousy mechanic but budding prosodist, I began to memorize those abandoned line breaks and to intuit their presence even though I could not see them. Arbitrary and ineradicable as blank verse, they made themselves felt.
The poem, insists William Carlos Williams, meaning something else entirely, is a field. Yes: and no ideas but in things.
*
W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South appeared in 1941, the same year as F. O. Matthiessen’s The American Renaissance, and it is to Southern cultural history what Matthiessen’s book is to the study of American literature. Brilliant, passionate, monumental—and, like many monuments, outdated and vaguely embarrassing—each book is a testament to a love affair with history so intense that it is on some level illicit. Cash is the South’s answer to Matthiessen right down to the fact of his suicide; in an odd way he is also the South’s answer to Hart Crane, insofar as his death, like Crane’s, involved a Guggenheim Fellowship, a journey to Mexico City, a superintense fascination with America, alcohol, and, paradoxically, the hope of a significant new relationship. Cash, Matthiessen, and Crane are similar in their obsessions, three wild winter peas rattling in the brittle pod of American Romanticism. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, who wrote the introduction (“The Mind of W. J. Cash”) to Vintage’s 1991 reissue of The Mind of the South, informs us that
In Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949), V. O. Key, Jr., observed that “a depressingly high rate of self-destruction prevails among those who ponder about the South and put down their reflections in books. A fatal frustration seems to come from the struggle to find a way through the unfathomable maze formed by tradition, caste, race, poverty.” Key probably had in mind Jack Cash. . . . (xxxiii)
Manic-depressive, ingenious, driven, Cash imprinted the floor plan of his version of that maze on everyone who comes to ponder the myth of the South seriously.
“[T]he Old South may be said,” Cash asserts, “in truth, to have been nearly innocent of the notion of class in any rigid and complete sense,” but at the same time he claims that “Nowhere else in America, indeed, not forgetting even Boston, would class awareness in a certain very narrow sense figure so largely in the private thinking of the master group” (34). The thread that leads to the Minotaur in the maze is an understanding of the South’s uncanny ability to blur precisely the distinctions between “caste” and race while at the same time remaining largely unaware of the mental machinations necessary to carry out such an operation:
If the plantation had introduced distinctions of wealth and rank among the [white] men of the old backcountry, and, in doing so, had perhaps offended against the ego of the common white, it had also, you will remember, introduced that other vastly ego-warming and ego expanding distinction between the white man and the black. Robbing him and degrading him in so many ways, it yet, by singular irony, had simultaneously elevated this common white to a position comparable to that of, say, the Doric knight of ancient Sparta. Not only was he not exploited directly, he was himself made by extension a member of the dominant class—was lodged solidly on a tremendous superiority, which, however much the blacks in the “big house” might sneer at him, and however much their masters might privately agree with them, he could never publicly lose. Come what might, he would always be a white man. And before that vast and capacious distinction, all others were foreshortened, dwarfed, and all but obliterated.
The grand outcome was the almost complete disappearance of economic and social focus on the part of the [white] masses. [38-39]
A Marxist might have rendered this more plainly, but not more tragically: false consciousness, the natural affinity of laborers in more or less like circumstances obliterated, awareness of class warped in the service of the maintenance of class tyranny. In the end, for better or worse, Cash speaks as a white man who has lived the Southern experience and is in love with it no matter how its deceits and enormities torture him. “Was there ever another instance of a country,” Cash asks in bewildered admiration of this state of affairs,
in which the relation of master and man arose, negligible exceptions aside, only with reference to a special alien group—in which virtually the whole body of the [white] natives who had failed economically got off fully from the servitude that, in one form or another, has almost universally been the penalty of such failure—in which they were parked, as it were, and left to go to the devil in the absolute enjoyment of their liberty?
Answering his own question in advance, Cash had begun this paragraph by declaring, “In this regard, it seems to me, the Old South was one of the most remarkable societies which ever existed in the world” (37).
*
The combine was a patchwork leviathan; it rumbled and smoked and fell apart; and yet it took out an eight-foot swath of field with every pass. It harvested. I sat on the platform ten feet off the ground, breathing an acre of dust a day—this was before cabs and air conditioning—moving the header up and down by hydraulic increments, watching as best I could for all the devils of the field that wanted to bring me down. It was a practical course in paying attention. When the cylinder choked on pea-vines, as it did every half hour or so, I stopped, shut the engine down, and forced the clog through, moving the mechanism with a four-foot iron pipe for a lever. When something broke, I fixed it the best way I could. The alternative was to quit work and lose an hour or a day of combining time. And every wild winter pea that landed in the hopper was a molecule of a solid body electric rhythm and blues guitar.
The truth is that no matter how hard I worked that summer—and I worked my tail off—it was all a kind of luxury. Every penny I made, I could spend however I wanted, and when the harvest was done and September came around, I was through. No matter that W. J. Cash’s Old South was (exactly) a century dead and gone; no matter that Reconstruction was over and the Bulldozer Era was enlarging pea-fields and opening the embryonic Sunbelt’s parking lots: come what might, in the mind of the South I would always be a white man. And in Noxubee County, Mississippi in 1965, that meant about the same thing it had meant in Cash’s prelapsarian Virginia. All the clichés of Southern apartheid still held, the psychic turn rows of a vanishing subculture. Jim Crow sat in the courthouse; public drinking fountains were still labeled white and colored, in defiance of federal court orders (and yes, just like the books say, when I was three years old, I expected rainbow water to come out of the obvious spigot); and the high school I attended was resolutely and absolutely segregated the entire time I went there, in spite of the fact that the population of that county was something like seventy percent black.
If there was a fundamental difference between my South and the one Cash describes in The Mind of the South, it was a pervading certainty of belatedness. In 1965 things were more or less pragmatically as they had been in terms of race and class; yet the handwriting was on the wall, and everybody knew it, no matter what we might have said to each other while we watched the Civil Rights Movement on the evening news. One immediate consequence of this blessed fatalism was that, at least for a time, the color line grew more intense and serious, more absolute, more uncrossable. The mask had begun to slip; as actual enforcement of federal court rulings penetrated deeper and deeper into the heartland (we were among the deepest), folks drew back and waited.
From the platform of the combine where I sweated and swore, it was four hundred miles to Dallas, Texas, and the grassy knoll, and only forty miles to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered not long before. It could have happened anywhere, you might say; but what I knew at the time was that it had happened in my own back yard. Little Rock, Atlanta, Jackson State, Selma: the Movement lit up names all around us, and if for the moment the latest model of W. J. Cash’s Old South Machine was still hitting on all cylinders, there could be no doubt that the engine was about to blow.
So if on a summer evening I took out my alto saxophone—the first instrument I had learned to love—out on the back porch to practice my lame instrumental imitations of “Louie, Louie” and “Be Bop a Lula” or (much better) the horn licks from “Midnight Hour” and “Knock On Wood,” and if I should hear, as I sometimes did, an answering electric guitar riff from a tenant farmer’s house on the next farm, I was forbidden to cross that mile of empty field, sit down on the porch, and say Hey, man, show me how you did that. My people, steamrollered by the leviathan of the Old South and the New, were racists; they raised me a racist. They forbade me; I forbade myself.
The mind of the South is history.
*
What was class in rural Mississippi in the ‘50s and early ‘60s when I was a boy? It was land; it was time; it was money to some degree; above all, it was race.
The aristocrats were those who lived on land they owned and that had been owned by their families for generations, yea even back to the Old South; they might have money or they might not, but if they were white, owned land, and could trace their ancestry back far enough, they were royalty.
Take away the history and you have class two: people who were white and owned land. This is where my family fell—German immigrants on my father’s side, down-and-out Louisiana bourgeois on my mother’s, we owned a modest farm. My earliest experiences are those of an archetypal farm boy—dairy, barnyard, garden were my regions, the usual chores my duty. Though we never moved off the farm, by the late 1950s my father was no longer a farmer; he had joined the Postal Service and become a civil servant. But that signified nothing. We lived on land we owned, and we were white. If we had lived in a northern city on the same income and with the same professional status, we would have been lower middle, one degree (recently removed) above working class. In rural Mississippi we occupied a sort of pale nouveau lower lordship—if not quite “elevated . . . to a position comparable to that of, say, the Doric knight of ancient Sparta,” as Cash puts it, certainly given more than our earned due.
Take away the land and you have class three.
Take away whiteness and you have the rest.
*
W. J. Cash, in the passage cited above, laid bare the meaning of the mechanism whereby class and race—in the Old South, and still in the South of the mid-1950s—were blurred so precisely. For him, this mechanism was an occasion for a kind of horrified wonder; for others of us, it was more bleak and brutal than that.
A memory: it’s a fall day, 1955 or so, probably a Saturday afternoon, since my father has taken me out on the farm to watch him hunt rabbits.
I wonder, now, why my father did this. He was never much of a rabbit hunter—his real love along these lines was quail hunting. But he seemed to feel the need, now and again, to instruct me in these things. And maybe on this particular day he felt some particular restlessness, some need to get out of the house—who knows?
I would have been about five years old on this day (making my father 33—twenty years younger than I am now). We have been walking over fields a mile or so behind the house, flushing rabbits out of frost-killed grass. My father has his .22 automatic rifle; I am of course too young to shoot. I’m present as a spectator only.
I suppose there was some pedagogical purpose in all this. Maybe I was supposed to learn something about the way rabbits behave, which in fact I did learn. Maybe the point was simply to make me accustomed to the concrete fact of killing animals, which I never quite got—partly because of my parents’ own ambivalence about having me learn it. But that’s another story.
At some point, of course, my father does kill a couple of rabbits, and when he’s done this, he is through, and we head home. Now the truth of the matter is, my father doesn’t want the rabbits. He doesn’t want to clean them, and he doesn’t want to eat them. On the whole, my father is not a man who hunts just to kill—he’s not a sportsman but a practical hunter, he tells himself, who eats what he kills (of course he comes out of a tradition of people who hunt for meat of necessity, but has himself ceased to be such a person). So now he has a dilemma—what to do with these rabbits? He doesn’t want to throw them away—that would offend his sense of propriety. He doesn’t want to feed them to his dogs—they are trained bird dogs, and they shouldn’t get the taste for “varmit,” which would distract them from the scent of birds.
About that time we’re passing close by a tenant-farmer’s house—a two-room unpainted tin-roofed shack, in 1955 almost certainly without electricity—where a farmhand named Jim lives with his considerable family. As we pass, we meet a child about my age, one of Jim’s children, who is outside playing. My father sees his opportunity and says to the child, “Here, boy, you want these rabbits?”—holding them up.
Already I’m a little startled by what’s going on. In the first place, at age 5, I’ve rarely been in the proximity of black children—I’ve seen them from a distance but never been allowed to approach them. But even more startling, at the moment, is my father’s voice. He is speaking in a way I’ve never heard him speak—he is speaking pure black English, which of course he learned as a boy when, unlike me, he grew up associating fairly freely and intimately with black children his own age. What has made the difference, from his boyhood to mine, is the certain knowledge that the blurred boundaries of Southern class/race relations are in the process of being dazzlingly clarified.
The child, seeing the rabbits, is delighted. “Yay,” he says.
This, I come quickly to understand, is not shorthand for hooray. It’s simply black English for Yes. I figure that one out because instantly my father becomes furious. He raises his hand—the one with the rifle in it, since the other one is full of dead dangled rabbits—and says (again in the purest Mississippi black dialect, which I can’t even begin to render with phonetic accuracy here): “Don’t you never say yay to me, boy. You don’t say yay to a white man. You say yassuh. You hear me?” Then he drops the rabbits on the ground and we pass on.
But I am deeply shocked by what I have just witnessed. In the first place, I’ve never seen my father exhibit such anger—he is generally a mild and unemotional man. And he’s unleashed this anger on a child of about my own age and size. Furthermore, he’s spoken in a voice I’ve never heard, in a language I’ve never heard him use. Buttons have been pushed, levers moved; wheels are turning. It’s as if there’s another—and dangerous—presence living inside my father, which I’ve never known about. An automaton has risen up inside the flesh and blood man I no longer know in the way I thought I had. Quite possibly, it seems to me at this moment, if I do or say the wrong theing, that presence may manifest itself against me. And for the first time in my life, I am afraid of my father.
*
W. J. Cash writes of “the influence of the Southern physical world—itself a sort of conspiracy against reality in favor of romance.” He has in mind a certain vegetable lushness, or the gloamy haziness of the Smoky Mountains. But the South has many bodies, many material realities. To what extent one give in to this “conspiracy” depends entirely on one’s angle of vision.
My father’s exaggerated anger was no doubt in part an improvised pedagogical act, which must have seemed to him completely natural, designed to teach children—the black child, and his own son—something about the boundary between black and white languages, black and white people. And it was a reality-obscuring veil: I was made to feel the “romance” of the otherness of this child—but was also made to feel that he and I, as children, were similarly powerless to do anything in the face of the anger of a white adult, and at the same time powerless to do anything about the distance between us. This was all embedded in language, of course—but more than language. There was a whole register of symbols, the words, the tone of voice, the shift in tone, the obvious anger, the raised hand with rifle, the rabbits thrown on the ground—even the assumption that black people would welcome the rabbits, food that white people of a certain class would consider marginal.
The black child must learn to fear the white man outside himself; the white child must learn to fear (read “respect”) the white man within.
Class, race, subservience, mastery—or “tradition, caste, race, poverty,” as V. O. Keys makes it: these were cogs in the wheel that drove the social machine in which I was fostered. My own position in that schematic was prepared for me. However much I dismantle it, however desperately I repudiate it, it is my inheritance. Like Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin (Go Down, Moses), for years I have worked to disinherit myself. Still, I am at least in part defined by the energy I have expended in the effort.
“Because it was working so silently,” Kafka says, “the machine simply escaped one’s attention.”
The story could—and in fact, in a certain way, does—end there. But in a universe as insistently impure as ours, there is never only one machine at work. Sweating on my brother’s combine, I was caught on a turning belt that had an infinitely regressive Möbius twist; harvesting a crop that had no purpose beyond raising another identical crop, I was playing out the drama of my own class destiny. As it turned out, there were other realities: other machinery, other fields to sweat in.
*
Sometime in the early 1980s, I went to a bluegrass festival with a couple of musician friends—bluegrass lovers all of us, but after three days of hearing “Rocky Top” and “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” played by amateurs in every campground at the site, we were hungry for something rawer. “What would happen,” one of us said, “if every bluegrass guitar picker in the world would play a G chord at the same time?” Not much, we decided. All it would take would be one Muddy Waters playing a Stratocaster through a Fender Twin Reverb amp to blow the whole lot of ‘em to kingdom come. That’s the kind of apocalypse machine the electric guitar can be.
Though I couldn’t have expressed it so it the time, that’s what I was working for in the summer of 1965.
It has become a truism of histories of rock ‘n’ roll music that all through the 1950s and early 1960s, young white musicians took transistor radios to bed with them and, hiding under the sheets, tuned in certain radio stations: WLS in Chicago, WWL in New Orleans, Nashville’s WLAC. You had to listen late at night, after hours, when the FCC let these stations turn up to their full cosmos-shaking fifty thousand watts. Then it didn’t matter where you were; Toronto, Seattle, Omaha—every part of the continent has produced its artists who tell the same story.
And what were they listening to? You know already, because it’s become a part of American folklore. They were tuning in the blues, and R&B, everything that used to be subsumed under the heading “race music”: Muddy Waters, Big Mama Thornton, Clarence “Frogman” Henry, Wynonie Harris, B. B. King. They listened; it made a difference. And not only to whatever we mean when we say rock ‘n’ roll.
It came out of machines: out through Lucille, B. B. King’s electrified Gibson guitar, through Elmore James’s cranked-up amp, through the vast transmitters of WLS, to a miraculous little cigarette-sized box you could plug right in your ear so that nobody could hear it except you: but it was rocking the firmament. You had to listen late at night because that’s when it was on—but it also felt right to listen then. It was part of the machinery of the night; and especially for many young white listeners, it was illicit. This was not music your parents listened to, nor wanted you to hear. Some of it (Wynonie Harris’s “I Love My Baby’s Puddin’”) was what we used to call suggestive; some of it (The Coasters’s “Riot in Cell Block #9”) was radical. This music was transgressive and everybody knew it. It worked like an abrasive wheel on rusty metal. It scoured. It burned.
The blues is an antidote to anything in the mind of the South that conspires against reality.
Just to provide one prominent example from a distant remove, Robbie Robertson of The Band—the author of perhaps the most moving musical tribute to, and exposé of, Cash’s Old South, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”—was listening from a bedroom in his home town: Toronto. In an interview for Across the Great Divide: The Band and America, Robertson told Barney Hoskyns that when he first heard Southern music, “I found it so heavy in my heart that I couldn’t get around it, you know.” He heard what he has called
the rawest sound, just dirty and up to no good. Dirty to me
. . . meant Bo Diddly and Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarist. They put me over the top. I had no choice but to play guitar. I wanted to be part of that sound. (Great Divide 13-14)
I understand that desire. I shared it in the 1960s and I share it still. It’s a kind of materialist mysticism, America’s favorite kind: to go out “over the top” through the machinery of rhythm and blues—Humbucking guitar pickups, Fender amps, and that godlike radio transmitter—to travel through the atmosphere (exactly like Walt Whitman in “The Sleepers”) and enter all those bedrooms through transistorized portals. Give me an amplifier big enough, the impulse says, and I’ll play a G chord that will blow out the sun. Give me a radio small enough, and I’ll become the most intimate whisper you ever heard. Either way, both ways at once, I’ll tell you what you most want to hear another human being say. Either way, both ways at once, I’ll tell you the true story of humankind. I’ll tell you your own name.
This is a lyric impulse. Here we enter the true domain of prosody, if we define prosody as moving toward song—or as the condition of being up against song.
*
The combine earned me my guitar. I learned to play it, some. In turn, it took me places. It taught me secrets.
What was on the mind of the South in 1965? To know that, you have to tune in to a lot of channels: Fannie Lou Hamer and Aaron Henry, yes, but also Lester Maddox and Ross Barnett—like it or not, it’s all part of a whole. The best way to plug in is through the music of the South, which is the most potent artistic force ever unleashed on the world from below the Mason-Dixon line—Mr. Faulkner, with all due respect, be damned.
Greil Marcus—whose Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music ought to take its place as a work of peculiarly American genius alongside The American Renaissance, The Mind of the South, and The Bridge—has splendidly summarized the power of Southern music. Describing the part of north Mississippi that produced Elvis Presley—Tupelo, ninety miles north of where I drove my combine—Marcus says
It was, as Southern chambers of commerce have never tired of saying, a Land of Contrasts. The fundamental contrast, of course, could not have been more obvious: black and white. Always at the root of Southern fantasy, Southern music, and Southern politics, the black man was poised in the early fifties for an overdue invasion of American life, in fantasy, music, and politics. As the North scurried to deal with him, the South would be pushed farther and farther into the weirdness and madness its best artists had been trying to exorcise from the time of Poe on down. Its politics would dissolve into night-riding and hysteria; its fantasies would be dull for all their gaudy paranoia. Only the music got away clean. (Mystery Train 148)
White musicians owned up to the power of the blues long ago; in honesty, the other artists of my generation, especially the Southern ones, ought to follow suit. It came in through the radio where I listened after hours; it came in through the air, across our field, from that guitar in the tenant house on the next farm, over the hill. It came in, weakly and clumsily, through my own hands when I tried to learn how B. B. King made it—that sound. It taught me lessons in pain and dignity. It taught me something about a form of expression so far down that it was beyond the thought of money, and at the same time beyond any posturing anti-commercial purism. Through it, I began to learn the real meaning of the word genius: nothing any more mystical than all ordinary life is mystical; something you sweat for.
Driving my combine, negotiating the prosodic enjambments of my grandfather’s turn rows, earning my guitar, I was moving toward song. I was up against song. I was looking for the other side of whatever in my world conspired against reality (which was not less than almost everything). I was after a means to burn it all away. And in the air over that field, it was coming together in ways neither I nor anyone else could hear completely: radio waves, cosmic white noise, the stuttering utterance of black holes, the sound of all the machinery of the universe, including my combine and the guitar on the next farm, where somebody knew how to play Elmore James (a mystery I would never, as a musician, fathom).
“A lyric,” according to Daniel Albright,
is a poem in which one notices a certain shiftiness or instability, a certain slipping and sliding of things, a certain tendency to equate a thing with its antiself, a certain evasiveness of being. In other words, a lyric is magical, and the proper history of the lyric is the history of incantation. (Lyricality in English Literature viii)
That was what I heard in, say, Howlin’ Wolf (Smokestack lightnin’/Shining like gold/Don’t you hear me calling?) before I heard the same mysterious resonance in Yeats, Bishop, Brooks—whose voices would reach me by mechanisms at least as covert as transistor radio. I was beginning to learn, that summer, how to listen to the impure, incantatory voices that spoke in the height above our (and every) field, the versus above the fers. That was the sound I craved, and still crave. If I couldn’t get it in one kind of song, I would get it in another.
In the late 1980s, when I was living in England for a year, I heard the Mississippi blues harmonica player Cary Bell—if not exactly a blues great, at least a blues very goddamned good—in a dismal little art bar at the Devon Arts Centre in Exeter. Invited by one of my students, who was a musician in the back-up band, to join Bell for a drink between sets, I discovered that he comes from the same place I do, that he grew up in Macon, where I was born, and went to school there. We laughed about it, joking that we had to come to England to get to know each other. We both knew exactly what that meant. And though we made a joke of it, sincerely enough, it broke my heart, and still does, that I never knew Cary Bell when we were both growing up, that I never knew he was in the neighborhood, that I never played the blues with him.
What prevented our meeting then was the machinery of illusion. In the Mississippi of my childhood, the blurred mechanism of race and class conspired to hide what was real from all of us—most particularly the truth about who and what we were. The self-image I was given from birth—incised on the Bed and Harrow of the South—was a lie. Art, then, was a lyric force in Albright’s sense: an indeterminate power which sought truth in the form of an antiself.
I find that force, as Albright does, in Auden and Dickinson and Yeats; I also find it, powerfully, in the songs of the great Southern musicians—Hank Williams and Jimmy Rogers, yes, but especially in the practitioners of the blues. They are in the air of American poetry still, as surely as Whitman. We want to be part of that sound—raw and impure as a locomotive whistle, descriptive of nightmare and redemption, hopelessness and transcendence.
Robbie Robertson has said that when he first came to the Mississippi Delta from Canada, he realized that this place “was the middle of the wagon of rock ‘n’ roll. . . . Everything was more musically oriented, and I didn’t know if it was coming from the people or just from the air.” His colleague from Arkansas, drummer/vocalist Levon Helm, quotes Robertson in This Wheel’s On Fire as saying that “People [in Arkansas] walked in rhythm and talked this singsong talk. . . . When I’d go down by the river in Helena, the river seemed to be in rhythm, and I thought, No wonder this music comes from here: the rhythm is already there.” The idea that music comes out of air or water—or out of earth, over fields, as it sometimes seemed to me—is mythic, certainly, but like many strong myths it contains its element of truth. I would argue that southern music is in fact a sort of anitmythology, subversive of the chimera-legends of racism: a counterforce like the psychological warnings that so often come from dreams.
If the music I heard rising across our field evening after evening when I was in my teens was mythic, it was a concrete mythology; it had a local habitation and a name. The man who played on his front porch a mile from my house was Walter Outlaw, who worked days as a sewing machine mechanic in the local garment factory and nights as a sideman in a sixteen-piece band that would play a party for twenty-five dollars. He played a solid Elmore James-flavored blues, using a flat pick and one finger pick, and one night between sets in a rural night club where I was not “supposed” to be, he taught me the rudiments of a tune called “Love in Vain.” I bought him a beer, and never saw him again.
*
When the train left the station, it had two lights on behind.
When the train left the station, it had two lights on behind.
The blue light was my blues, the red light was my mind.
All my love’s in vain.
This, of course, is the unkillable Robert Johnson, the Keats of the Delta blues, who here embodies Albright’s thesis so perfectly that it hardly needs glossing—except to point out that, where the incantation of the lyric, for Albright, is the evocation of a magical power that dissolves universes, Robert Johnson’s song is about powerlessness. The singer has taken the love of his life to the train station—even carrying her bags for her—so that she can leave him forever. Nothing can erase that loss. And it is just as he feels the distance opening out—as the mechanical leviathan of the locomotive takes her irrevocably away—that one of the most mysterious utterances in human history finds its voice.
In 1976, at the age of 26, I left the South and did not return for exactly twenty years except to visit. I rode that train. I got away, but I did not, like Southern music, get away clean. No matter how much we may long to be, people are not pure music, any more than they are pure poetry. I could not get away clean; nobody could.
Considerable periods of time go by when the South, as the South, never enters my consciousness. But insofar as I am a poet, I still depend on two things—possibly complementary, possibly contradictory, the one about the labor that is poetry, the other about its heart—that I learned trying to read the mind of the South.
1. A poem is a field of action—W. C. Williams’s words, but changed by the material reality of my own experience—wherein one labors for all one loves, for the self and the antiself, using all the machinery there is, the combine and the locomotive equally, the upright church piano and the blues guitar. But/and: insofar as the selfhood I was given as a boy in Mississippi—a chold in America—was a deliberate, calculated falsehood, 2. All my love’s in vain.
Between these poles, everything happens.
The South, old and new, is justly famous for the power of its narratives. The lyric impulse is also an impulse to power: the power to dissolve realities, to void boundaries, to break through human limits. Defined in Albright’s terms, racism itself is lyric, insofar as it is a kind of bewitchment that resides, at least in part, in language. The narrative/lyric amalgam of the Old South was an incantation of the rawest power usurpation, working, as Cash says of the southern landscape, against reality in favor of a romance of mist and violence. That amalgam survived, mutated, into my childhood, and survives still as one very characteristic chapter of the unfolding memoir of this nation. It still has its echo in the mind of the South, and in the mind of every Southerner, black and white, and in the mind of every American, to this day.
Misused, lyricism is sheer mystification.
The blues, on the other hand, is a counter-spell, a powerful lyric precisely about powerlessness, wedded to a narrative strain that is instinctively occluded because its real substance has to be subterranean. Versus to the fers incised by the Harrow of the white South, the blues is transgressive to the bone. It is a clogging inertia thrown into the augers of force—listen carefully to B. B. King’s “Why I Sing the Blues” while imagining cramming a thousand acres of baling wire down your throat—and at the same time a liberating energy. It is, in fact, exactly what Daniel Albright means when he describes the lyric as
a swerving aside, a lifting at right angles from the usual axis of narrative or logical discourse. . . . Whenever we read a text and say to ourselves Something is missing, whether that something is a recognizably human author, or a customary world representation, or simply sense, we are in the domain of the lyric.
The blue light was my blues, the red light was my mind. The first time I heard those words, I entered the domain of poetry and never returned.
How far do you have to travel to bridge the distance this phrase describes, its horrendous and surgically precise division? To the other side of the field? To Oregon? To England? To the moon? Who has the power to stop locomotives—or lovers, when they choose to ride them, or young men and women, disaffected, estranged from themselves, needing expatriation? What is the blues if, even though it’s “my” blues, it is clearly separate from “my mind”?
Would that be the mind of the South?
Would that be folklore?