Society of the Absurd: A Look at the New South
Watters, Pat
THE SOUTH has continued to change. The Klan and Citizens' Councils were on the wane, were less relevant as the society seemed increasingly in a state of flux from the effect of new and...
...Constance Baker Motley, in one of her many appearances in Southern federal courts as counsel for the Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., of the NAACP (before she became a federal district judge in New York City), delivered the lesson to a United States District judge in Mississippi...
...It don't matter what I do...
...Why, we've even got a Negro on the city council...
...Then, finally, he laughs and then he says, looking around at the terrible little town: "Well, I tell you what...
...Its first riot had an element of simple retaliatory violence, but there was also—and this seems to have been the first instance of it in the nation— the wanton, almost objectiveless property destruction that was later to distinguish the riots of the 1960s from those of previous years when racial conflicts pitted man against man, not man against property...
...All the Southern impulses to irrationality were summoned by the state of flux, and, appropriate to the age, often found expression in the absurd...
...I've seen 'em up in that very tree over yonder on th' courthouse lawn...
...The crippled soul of such wit is close to the Southern laugh and close, too, to that attitude which is at once one of the Southerner's unhealthiest and healthiest attributes, an acceptance of evil as part of the human condition...
...We cannot know to what extent the old original Southern variety has diseased America, or to what extent the proliferation of racism in America is another strain of the virus—which seems worldwide...
...Negroes, not without their own Southern propensity for the superficial...
...But with the changes, the same white person would use all the terms in the course of a 10- or 15-minute discussion...
...It would catch up with the worst, not the best, in race relations...
...Never any trouble between 'em...
...Clearly, we might wander at length in a wryly laughing world of such anecdotage on the Southern anthem alone (the football game crowd in Florida standing as the band plays it, a "liberal" white couple refusing to stand and being berated by the little old lady behind them saying: "After all, when I am up North and they play the `Star Spangled Banner,' I always stand") . A whole book of black humor might be devoted to the psychology of the semantics of race, all the symbolism and surrealism...
...The new legislation and changing racial patterns of the 1960s threw the average white Southerner's pronunciation of the word into wild disarray...
...So you learn to live with ills you have, rather than jump to ones you know not of...
...Charles Silberman cited the rioting in 1963 in that dreariest of all the Southern cities as the harbinger of what was to come to the North.* For all his recognition of the inability of nonviolence to hold the forces churning in great miserable masses of city industrial workers and unemployed people, Mr...
...You know how to say knee," slapping the knee...
...Perhaps this was the way of the future...
...The white man's still the white man, and we can't win...
...He begins to build a poetic image of total absurdity, only his intonations acknowledging that thin line he walks between humor and tragedy with sober argumentation: PAT WATTERS Why, we've always been peaceful here...
...Where there still can be found innocence, delusions, the lost innocence of America, it is most often, .appropriately enough, in the places where the old evil-doing flourished: in the West of the Indian massacres and the South of the slave holdings...
...The picture is unforgettable of a vocal white segregationist and "his" black yard man drinking at dawn together, the two of them sprawled in easy chairs, drawing on long cigars, both drunk as lords...
...T WAS of course the Negro who was first able—and the process has been going on since slavery—to break out of the fatalism of the social system so set against him...
...Th' niggers in this town never have given any trouble...
...the trouble with the jack was fixed, and they rode off to safety...
...It grew out of resistance to sit-ins from white mobs swinging baseball bats...
...Here, in a sense, was man in revolt against man-made environment, against objects and things, as though a personal enemy could no longer be discerned...
...This has, surely, sadly, been part of the mystique, all the flim-flam and sleight of hand that the white South has used mostly by instinct to baffle and intrigue and, perhaps, to seduce their supposedly morally superior fellow countrymen...
...The riot in * Charles E. Silberman, Crisis In Black and White (New York: Random House, 1964), pp...
...But by the late 1960s the old coercive methods of violence and intimidation were manifest mainly in the dwindling rural areas and small towns...
...If th' niggers take this town, they ain't goin' to have much...
...He puts his hat back on his head and lights a cigar, allowing, in the utter stillness of twilight in such a town, the vision of interracial harmony to sink in...
...SOCIETY OF THE ABSURD "Black" or "blacks," not much in usage in the modem South by whites, was once offensive to Negroes as "darky" and "colored" were not...
...The encounter with such a figure offers a sense of America as it once must have been, Mark Twain's America, de Tocqueville's, where all undiscovered and waiting in each look-alike hamlet was richness and wildly flourishing diversity of human character not yet subjected to the forces of personality standardization that were to come to America...
...But the fatalism—so close to the feel of Russian novels describing Czarist times—has lingered...
...Negra was an affectation for them, an attempt (often difficult, as though the tongue were weighted) to say it right...
...Itis printed here with the kind permission of author and publisher...
...You never saw that...
...We had all these-yere demonstrators in jail, and they complained about the overcrowding, so ever day we put them out in the yard [in the full glare of ninety-degree-plus sun] so's they could git a lot of fresh air and exercise...
...it asserts humanity and comments on self, the situation, and the world at large, on the tragedy of life...
...Not fighting...
...cluded an act unparalleled in the North during the next seven years—the firing of rifles into white homes...
...Remarkably, Jacksonville Negroes repeated the rioting, in 1963 in connection with public accommodations desegregation and more white recalcitrance, and, once more, in 1966, in apparent imitation of the season's Northern riots...
...In the North, there seems to be a conspiracy to deny this, a hypocritical willingness to believe all is well in the face of the most sordid evidence that it isn't...
...The "common" sort of white Southerner has employed "nigger" unabashedly...
...But the white Southerner's acceptance of evil is linked to a conditioning in him which is at least in part attributable to his history of defeat and disappointment, and which teaches that any amount of availing against evil is futile, indeed, that the more one might PAT WATTERS tinker with a social structure, the worse it gets...
...Soon, it seemed almost inevitable, the South would catch up with the North—but not in the way we once dreamed...
...In the era of black awareness, Negro ambiguity was to be noted in the interchangeability of their use of the terms, "black" and "Negro...
...The second-generation white leader of a sleepy, unprepossessing little town lets his laughter resound all through the slurred pronunciation of his words as he praises his hamlet beyond all credibility (his and yours and you both know it) for its peacefulness, self-content, good race relations (never any trouble out of the 49 percent plus Negro population, as debased as any in the South), sound resistance to the encroachment of new industry upon the fine old one (sawmilling), and so on...
...The Southerner's laugh—dry, ironic, deeply communicative—stands aside from all his embroilment in evil and human complexity...
...One of the whites kept fumbling with it, hands shaking, and the rest of the group waited in terrible, tense silence—and then the old Negro man laughed...
...The Northern city riots boiled up at least in part out of the importation from the South of a people miserably cheated of any capability to cope with the cruel, complex routines of advanced industrial society...
...But they are also murderous...
...Negroes use "nigger" among themselves—as a term of approbation, or jokingly...
...An extraordinarily tall man, with a solemn, respectable, official's face (belied only by the ironic turn of his mouth and the unruliness of his black forelock), he takes three steps backward and runs at you with the point he is making: "Th' niggers have got to quit lookin' backward, feelin' sorry for themselves...
...An' what," the white is asking, "do you think of all this integration, George...
...Hence the laugh's ability to transcend evil, and suchother paradoxes as the well-known phenomenon of the one Negro friend of each segregationist, usually a servant...
...And great crowds down below waitin' to git 'em, niggers and whites...
...The Reverend Mr...
...SOCIETY OF THE ABSURD The riots did not occur as soon or as frequently in the South for obvious reasons, including (1) the lack in the North of the kind of culture base (churches, extended families, social affairs, community) which, impoverished though its institutions were, long comforted Negro Southerners...
...Someone had flattened the car's tire while the group was attending a clandestine and dangerous voter registration meeting, and local whites had already driven by once, jeering...
...An old Negro man had in it the high degree of appreciation for his own predicament, for the folly of mankind, for the vast vagary of chance that is the cold mechanism of nature and is translated by man into unpredictable and unreliable machinery...
...Drop 'em out, and they'd come flopping down and roost up in th' top of trees...
...If, as fashion in historical writing in the 1960s would have it, America's history has been so full of evil—genocidal tendencies so consistent a dark thread through it—then it must also be acknowledged that this was not the dreary, stale, urban evil of our time, when people have generally lost their innocence, have the knowledge of the good and evil of contemporary historical forces, without the will or power to shape them...
...There's some of us would be happy to get it off our backs...
...Too often, this was true...
...In the cities, things were more nearly on the Northern model—impersonal forces, environmental structuring assuring that the white man would remain the white man and that the Negro had no chance...
...So, too—and this includes familiar history (see the film, Birth of a Nation) as well as current events (the WALLACE FOR PRESIDENT posters carried north in the cabs of the big transcontinental trucks)—has the South's racism been exported...
...They encountered itoften at those middle-class gatherings where, falteringly, whites of moderate and even liberal instincts with little previous contact with the "better sort" of Negro attempt to enter the "interracial" world ("Th' class of niggers we got around here" was a stock-in-trade explanation for lack of Negro advancement in repressive areas by more or less moderate leadership acquainted only with menials of their experience...
...While the riots came first in the North, it is interesting to note that they were foreshadowed in Birmingham, Alabama...
...The late Ralph McGill, publisher of and columnist for the Atlanta Constitution, summed up a gleeful reaction to the riots with this quote from a white Southerner: "Well, for once, we've got the niggers and the Yankees fighting each other...
...One might argue, in the way of white Southerners, with relish for deep involvement in superficiality and with great, raw insensitivity, that "Negra" is the natural way the Southern speech patterns would form the word "Negro," as they transform "tomato" into "t'mater," and in remote places, "'matuh" (as in" 'matuh san'wich...
...he takes his hat off to use as a prop, and leans his large head back...
...nice" people in the past said "colored...
...143-44...
...Far more of a harbinger was the riot that occurred in 1960 in Jacksonville, Florida...
...I don't know what it is th' Negras really want...
...The feeling is of innocence...
...Nigger, git on out of that car," a harried husband says to his wife during the labor and apprehension of moving into a white neighborhood, both of them breaking up their tension with a long laugh at what the anguished, new white neighbors might have made of that...
...In such subtle psychological flavoring of the past, we may find understanding of how it could have been that SOCIETY OF THE ABSURD so much evil was perpetrated in America by people without a sense of evil...
...Well, just put them together and you have—KneeGrow...
...In this instance, we had crossed the Mississippi River only a short distance back...
...Their dark faces shining out in the closeness of choral grouping among a sea of little white ones, the children were happily singing what the music teacher had introduced as a favorite song of Abraham Lincoln's: "Dixie...
...The Klan and Citizens' Councils were on the wane, were less relevant as the society seemed increasingly in a state of flux from the effect of new and contradictory forces at work on it...
...They were the numb reflex of people goaded beyond endurance—by white terrorist bombings and then the onslaught of Colonel Al Lingo's state troopers randomly beating people...
...2) the lack in the North of any hope, a final disillusionment delayed in the South by new laws and visible improvements (where there was so much to improve), and (3) face it, the tradition of fear in the South, the lynch-fear conditioning against violence to whites...
...He shouts...
...Talking at dusk, outlined against an unbelievable sky of purple clouds behind him to the horizon, colors vivid in the grass and bushes and flowers, he gives a virtuoso performance with his Southern propensity for enjoyment of words, the rhythms and complexities of speech, with little regard for meaning, oral tradition itself rendered absurd...
...Leaning back in his chair in the old courthouse (with a John Birch "Support Your Local Police" circular on the wall, a tinted photograph of his sweet-faced children on his desk), he drawls his obscenities, racial and otherwise, in the comforting shadow of the Confederate memorial out on the lawn...
...There were scenes, for example, like that at the end-of-the-year "patriotic" program at a fashionable public school in Atlanta where the son and daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the daughter of his chief stalwart, Ralph Abernathy, were enrolled...
...it merely enables the mind to comprehend, out of the nothingness of the past, facts that are otherwise incomprehensible...
...Never any trouble between the races...
...Do you...
...In the summer of 1967, during the height of such outbreaks as Detroit and Newark, white Southerners peered into your face and said in a strange kind of tone that was part anxious and part comforted, "Things are worse up there now than they are down here, aren't they...
...And George, in all solemn earnestness is answering: "Aw Mister Frank, I don't believe in that stuff at all...
...A A BSURDITY has always been at the core of the whole racial situation in the South, and this has not been lost on most Negro and white Southerners...
...The Southerner seeking change is so conditioned to small hopes that he might grab onto this and encourage the notion that the thing might be avoided in the South if we do thus and so...
...Sometimes the lesson was delivered privately...
...he whispers dramatically...
...In whites it was most often unconscious or subconscious...
...And they'd go after them turkeys, go streamin' after 'em and not fightin' each other at all—climb up them trees, and tear those turkeys apart, limb from limb, a nigger holdin' to a leg, a white man to a wing...
...Expression of this love is often enhanced with the Negro as drinking companion...
...this was possible, of course, precisely because it was set against him...
...I have many a time...
...This article is an excerpt from The South and the Nation, to be published in early 1970 by Pantheon Books, and copyright © 1969 by Pat Watters...
...Their ability to laugh at it and at themselves from both sides of the color line has been at once one of the most subtle, elusive (hard not merely to describe but even to suggest), and at the same time most magnificent of their survival mechanisms...
...Negroes in Jacksonville were talking two years later of how "we controlled this city for six hours," the partpride, part-gleefulness, part-despair of Watts and all the later ones apparent in their talk...
...It seems important to understand the Southerner's laughter, for it is so much of his charm, his genuine charm, particularly the white Southerner's...
...Nothing is necessarily condoned by such understanding...
...It was here, in the ghettos a-building, in the ugly jungles of petty police venality and brutality, sordid, small-time crime, in the erosive little cruelties of welfarism, filth, decrepitness, ugliness, and in the malaise of near-starvation, that the future of Southern race relations was being determined...
...Elements of this were in the young people's beach riots...
...Driving through a landscape of long, flat fields, the traces of cotton culture still marking the towns, an agent's office on a main street with a deer-head staring proudly, a roadside mailbox with the legend Nil Desperandum (a scholarly farmer or a fanciful family name...
...Negra" is most offensive to middle-class...
...Now maybe they'll leave us alone...
...If so, one could only hope that as in earlier times when man found his environment intolerable, his impotent lashing out would give way to constructive and purposeful plans to change that environment, to do more than merely destroy...
...T T HE SOUTHERNER'S LAUGH...
...Negroes enjoy setting them straight...
...We've always gotten along fine together...
...But we cannot overlook this virulent original source...
...In former times, each had his own word for it and stuck to it—"nigger," "Negra," "colored," "Nee-grow...
...there was the strong sense of Twain and limitless possibility of fun and excitement and reward...
...Silberman displayed remarkable prescience, because the Birmingham riots were not really of the sort that came later in the North...
...When the frightened little group began to fix the tire, the jack wouldn't work...
...But there's the temptation of thinking that the laugh somehow makes sense of the nonsense...
...Northern audiences are fascinated by accounts of the minor specimen of rogue politician still encountered up and down Southern highways...
...the tension broke...
...in Negroes it still came out in the lamentations of "apathy" regarding the newly won legal rights...
...He laughed at the malfunctioning jack, at himself, at them, at the white toughs, at all humanity...
...He hawks, he spits carefully into the grass...
...most enjoyably, it would come as an interruption to a speech (urging, no doubt, good race relations, or some specific racial reform) . A celebrated instance of this, part of the folklore, was when Mrs...
...The anomaly of the South's being behind the North in the matter of riots was not lost on Southerners...
...Now I've never had anything against the colored...
...This has been the traditional approach in human relations work in the South —to seize on any motivation, to nurture any sign of wanting to do right...
...This occurred so often in interviews and casual conversations that it clearly emerged as a vivid indication of the ambivalences of individual white attitudes and the regional white mood...
...He was standing by the side of a dirt road with three other Negroes and three white people, all civil rights workers in the heart of the Black Belt, during the worst of the repression of such groups...
...Why Jacksonville behaved so differently from the rest of the South is not known...
...Everything slid into perspective...
...Why, I can remember—do you remember during the Depression when they used to drop turkeys out of airplanes, th' merchants did, to drum up business...
...There were and still are—though on a greatly lessened scale—many instances of genuine love in the servant-master relationship...
...And you know how children grow," with a rapid upshooting motion of the hands...
...It was darkest night, out in the country, with woods behind and a field in front...
...Could it be that this animus against the impersonal was more important than the racial content...
...This was preceded by an endless digression into the vicissitudes of •the town, the state, and the South during and after the Civil War, ostensibly the explanation of why it was impossible in the past for the whites of such a town to help out their Negro fellow citizens as, he implies, they are doing in this happy time...
...Some of these fellows are genuinely witty in their cynical fashion...
...Abernathy, shaking his head and grinning, remarked: "Well if it was good enough for Abraham Lincoln, it ought to be good enough for us...
...the fragility of life was shiningly clear...
Vol. 17 • January 1970 • No. 1
