ll8
PARTISAN REVIEW
resistance of apathetic CUStomers by slipping iJltO a back room, taking off
his coat, snapping on red arm hands, and donning a comedian's Yiddish
derhy-"I prance up to the customer. Nine times out of ten it gets a
laugh, puts the customer in a good humor." There is the farm wife who
said to the country doctor who had delivered her seventh child: "Doctor
Cain, I've never been able to pay you nothin' for deliverin' my six other
children, so I'll give you this one." There is John Sylvester Hinson, the
negro farmer who says he never saw a toilet or even an outhouse until he
was seventeen, and "I wuz a full grown man 'fore I tasted ice cream or
Coca·Cola."
To one who like myself lives in a big city and has always had enough
to eat, many of these stories seem as remote as tales of some tribe in the
interior of Africa. The African savages, however, live in a comparatively
rational and well-ordered society, in which each individual has his place
in the whole, is useful to it and is therefore always sure of food and shel·
ter. As a social habitat, the jungle has
it
all over the sovereign states of
North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. For most of these thirty-five peo–
ple, life has been a long, tense, nerve-wracking struggle for food and
shelter, a battle in which they never win decisive victories and in which
disaster is always lying in wait to overwhelm them. The catastrophes which
punctuate these narratives, unlike those bizarre disasters which overtake
the wealthy, are monotonous variants of four themes.
"Hard Times":
"Later I bought the store and had it paid for when the depression hit us.
Everything went up in smoke."
Illness:
"The only operation we've had
in
the family was mine, for appendicitis, in Portsmouth, twenty-two years
ago. They charged us sixty-five dollars, and we made payments every year
till we got it paid off."
Old Age:
"We're not making enough on the farm
to live on now and we can't work any longer.... We are both plumb wore
out and about done."
Death in the Family:
"I had to borrow forty-five
dollars from Mr. Bascum to bury her wid. It kept me in the hole all the
rest of the year paying for that casket." The final comment on our present
civilization is that most of these people remember one Golden Age, a
period when they were able to live in some security, like human beings:
namely, the last world war. Then, for once, they had enough to eat. As
George Dobbin puts it: "When I say times was good I don't mean we done
no fancy livin' atall hut we set down to the table three times a day and
always found somethin' on it."
These people, naturally, do a lot of complaining. But it is notable
they rarely see any connection between the social system and their suffer–
ings. Often they blame themselves: " 'Bout all I've got left now is hope
for another life. I've throwed away what chance I had in this one and I
ain't faultin' nobody for it." Or they see it as the natural order of things:
"I've always been poor and I guess I always will he. I ain't saying that's
the government's fault. It's jist a downright truth, that's all." There is no
revolutionary spirit in them. There may he a certain amount of editorial
weighting here, hut the impression is remarkably confirmed by a recent
