MAGNOLIA MYSTIQUE
Canzoneri, Robert
MAGNOLIA MYSTIQUE by ROBERT CANZONERI Robert Canzoneri, a cousin of former Governor Ross Barnett, was born in Mississippi and has taught at colleges in the South as well as at Stanford. This...
...I have heard Northern do-gooders argue that the Negro is not to blame for his lack of knowledge, skill, ambition, or what have you: it is his cultural background that is to blame, and said background is the product of the Southern white man...
...The golden past: If it were not for today's do-gooders, socialists, integrate) Copyright 1965 by Robert Can-zoneri) tionists, Communists, and the Federal government, who are destroying the sweet order and clean simplicity that used to be, what a fine world we would be living in...
...Go down to the courthouse square, get a crowd, and begin berating the President, the nine old Communist judges of the Supreme Court, the policies of Congress...
...The Southern white man, however, has no excuse...
...They had heard such speeches before...
...The same is true of property rights and states' rights, the two prime legalisms that underlie the Southern excuse for segregation...
...and in our hearts we know both are, separately, true...
...And beneath the Yankee accent we discover a familiar Southern tune—the superiority of the white man, who is human and responsible, over the black man, who is really not quite human and so not responsible...
...Anyone in Mississippi preoccupied with fear of the Federal government's taking away his rights is like a man so concerned about the matches in the pocket of the hired man in the barn that he instinctively withdraws further into his burning house...
...The problem of the historical past, the cultural past, the individual past is extremely complex, but we often make it more difficult to comprehend than necessary by confusing it with popular psychology as a means of excusing ourselves and laying the blame on others...
...The Negro, on the other hand, was said to be in a nearly hopeless condition, as compared to the white man, because he had no culture...
...Canzoneri, from the background of his own experience, explores and interprets conflicting Southern attitudes toward racial problems...
...Absolutely blank...
...All right," I said finally, "if you want to discover which government it is you're really afraid of, try it out...
...Name one right the Federal government has taken away from you...
...Time and again I have been told that a man should have absolute freedom to do what he wants to with his property, and told it (in buildings erected on zoned land according to building codes) by people who so strongly object to the thought of some young man's running his privately owned mobile property over a spot on which they happen to be standing that they loudly advocate local, state, and Federal laws against teen-age drivers...
...To states' rights advocates, not only does the "or to the people" phrase dim out of the Tenth Amendment*, but the reasons for hating and fearing a strong centralized Federal government vanish when strong centralized state governments are considered...
...The gray and guilty past: If it had not been for,New England slavers, if it had not been for abolitionists, if it had not been for the industrialization of the North, if it had not been for Reconstruction, we would have no troubles today...
...This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, I Do So Politely, where Mr...
...The Federal government —quite conceivably capable of taking away rights too—was merely removing illegal force against a citizen who had as much right as any other citizen to attend the school his taxes were supporting...
...lefthand pocket, the past was perfect...
...The students could think of no specifics, but they knew, as we all generally do, that their position was nevertheless sound, and that if they could just get the facts they could prove it...
...The two ideas often exist in the same head, and they provide a handy device for argument—the man with alternate pasts can switch grounds at the turn of a question...
...Jefferson even forgot to mention it when, in the Declaration of Independence, he limited himself for rhetorical balance to three elemental rights back when everything was orderly and clear if you were not there fighting your friends and countrymen...
...He blamed white people for not accepting the Negro without any effort...
...In Mississippi local government advocates have given the governor an enlarged highway patrol and power to send it as a police force into any county or city without invitation and against the will of the local authorities and local populace...
...Then," I said, "go to the opposite side of the square, and stand up and say aloud that you believe segregation is wrong and that you believe the United States Supreme Court ruling must be enforced...
...I tried to point out the difference in the white person's being free either to go to Ole Miss or to stay away from it, whereas Meredith had been, by the state government, forced to stay away...
...The Federal government is to be feared because it is bureaucratic and threatens to take away our rights, Mis-sissippians say...
...Blank faces...
...He didn't swap, but then I suppose that neither of us knew how, and I really didn't want to anyway...
...It is just as possible to be integrationistically as segregation-istically illogical and patronizing...
...There was no need to go further...
...I offered the young man my own culture, that of white Mississippi, in exchange for his...
...The students still sat without moving, but their faces turned very pale...
...Eventually I began to ask, "Which rights...
...They listened, wondering but unmoved...
...The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people...
...Some while back a very bright and disillusioned young Negro revealed a few continuing illusions about "culture...
...The principle is not limited, however, to the Southern mind...
...My students used constantly to declare that "the Federal government has taken away all of our rights...
...To be right and acceptable the white man had, not to overcome, but to obliterate his cultural background...
...And further, no citizen had the right, anyway, arbitrarily to exclude his fellow citizens from a public school...
...It seems never to occur to him that the sweet order had its slave trade which led to disorder, nor does he ever argue that it is the do-gooders who helped destroy the slave trade which was so evil...
...His cultural background has nothing to do with it...
...The Republican candidate for governor in 1963 was reported as producing evidence that Mississippi has more employes and more agencies per capita than does the Federal government...
...the government could not take away a right which was not a right to begin with...
...Of course private property is a right, but only one of many rights, none of which in this world can be absolute...
...The Editors rriHE abstract tapestry of South-ern and quasi-Southern political thought is confused in part by two dominant and distinct colors of the past...
...Say anything disparaging you can think of, especially against integration...
...Right-hand pocket, the past was evil and to blame for our present ills...
...A boy did once reply that the government was taking away his right to go to a school without such people as James Meredith...
Vol. 29 • June 1965 • No. 6
