LETTER. FROM THE SOUTH
77
become the menial or the criminal or the shiftless, the Negroes whom
segregation has produced and whom the South uses to prove that
segregation is right.
In Charlotte. too, I received some notion of what the South
means by "time to adjust." The NAACP there had been trying for
six years before Black Monday to make the city fathers honor the
"separate but equal" statute and do something about the situation
in Negro schools. Nothing whatever was done. After Black Monday,
Charlbtte begged for "time": and what she did with this time was
work out legal stratagems designed to get the least possible integration
over the longest possible period. In August of 1955, Governor Hodges,
a moderate, went on the air with the suggestion that Negroes segregate
themselves voluntarily-for the good, as he put it, of both races.
Negroes seeming to be unmoved by this moderate proposal, the Klan
reappeared in the counties and was still active there when I left. So,
no doubt, are the boys on the chain gang.
But "Charlotte," I was told, "is not the South." I was told, "You
haven't seen the South yet." Charlotte seemed quite Southern enough
for me, but"
in
fact, the people
in
Charlotte were right. One of the
reasons for this is that the South is not the monolithic structure which,
from the North, it appears to be, but a most various and divided
region. It clings to the myth of its past but it is being inexorably
changed, meanwhile, by an entirely unmythical present : its habits
and its self-interest are at war. Everyone in the South feels this and
this is why there is such panic on the bottom and such impotence
on the top.
It must also be said that the racial setup in the South is not,
for a Negro, very different from the racial setup in the North. It is
the etiquette which is baffling, not the spirit. Segregation is unofficial
in
the North and official in the South, a crucial difference that does
nothing, nevertheless, to alleviate the lot of most Northern Negroes.
But we will return to this question when we discuss the relationship
between the Southern cities and states.
Atlanta, however,
is
the South. It is the South in this respect, that
it has a very bitter interracial history. This is written in the faces of
the people and one feels it in the air. It was on the outskirts of Atlanta
that I first felt how the Southern landscape-thll trees, the silence, the
liquid heat, and the fact that one always seems to be traveling great
distances-seems designed for violence, seems, almost, to demand it.
What passions cannot be unleashed on a dark road in a Southern
night! Everything seems so sensual, so languid, and so private. Desire
