This morning, cup of coffee in hand and enjoying an open
window’s breeze for the first time since last fall, I finished up the last few
chapters of The Store, T.S. Stribling’s
1933 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The book (the second in a trilogy) takes
place in Alabama two decades after the Civil War, and centers on a middle-aged
protagonist named Miltiades Vaiden. Vaiden is a man out of time; prior to the
war he was a respected and wealthy plantation owner. Known as a fair man, he
treated his slaves well.
He treated his slaves well.
Vaiden isn’t a particularly good man, come
post-reconstruction, though not a particularly bad one, either. He has a
certain insular honor and suffers from his many losses; post-conflict he finds
himself relatively poor, married to a woman he doesn’t really love or admire,
and generally wistful about the past. He misses the approbation he used to
have, back in the days when he led the local chapter of the Klan.
When he led the local chapter of the Klan.
The plot of the novel revolves largely around Vaiden’s
attempts to recover an old debt, to rekindle an old romance, and to adjust to a
world changing under reconstruction—particularly with regard to the ways in
which the white population suffers the reality of a negro population just
beginning to comprehend its own freedom. The Alabama whites answer in their
time-worn way.
Suffers the reality of a negro population.
***
Across the scores of Pulitzer winners there are many that
touch upon war, and quite a few of those address the Civil War and post-Civil
War eras. Andersonville, Gone with the Wind, and The Killer Angels are three of the most
widely read, and all include—as they must—accurate renderings of the time’s
racial attitudes. But there has always seemed a clear delineation between the
depiction of racism as presented by the author in service of a story, and the
sense that the author himself (or herself) was comfortably racist. Stribling strikes
me as residing in the latter class, as when he casually has Vaiden remark how
he intends to “jew down” the price of some goods he wishes to buy or, as in
this example taken from near the novel’s end, when an octoroon (described in
the book as a “white negro”) presses a legal point against Vaiden, something never
before attempted:
A drunken cry floated
through the open window.
“Lemme git to that
black bastard, I’ll show him!” More controlled voices interposed, “Let him
alone! Let him in! Time enough when he comes out again!”
There was laughter
from below. It was on the whole a fairly good-natured crowd.
The crowd gets him eventually, and in the end he hangs from
a tree. That fairly good-natured crowd.
***
The novel made me decidedly uncomfortable, and not only for
the obvious reasons.
It’s easy to argue that such books and their authors are merely
of their times. Stribling, after all, was born in 1881 and grew up in Alabama
(later moving to Tennessee). His own family could have been the Vaidens, and
there are certainly characters (including the young lawyer, Sandusky, who stirs
up much of the plot’s conflicts) modeled on people Stribling knew.
Nevertheless, reading the words results in a certain distaste.
It’s that “distaste” that bothers me today, that sense that
we are somehow better, that we’ve
grown beyond the world that Stribling unfortunately limns so well.
We’re not better. Racism remains essentially unchanged.
***
Just a little more than a week ago an African-American man,
Walter Scott, was shot to death while running away from a North Charleston
police officer named Michael Slager. Video clearly shows the salient points;
Scott was in no way a threat to Slager, who shot the fleeing man in the back.
Slager, justifiably, has been charged with murder.
The story had legs—as do all the numerous other stories of
white officers killing African-Americans that seem today in constant eruption. Among
the many stories cast across the 24-hour news cycle, one in particular caught
my attention, this one just a couple of days ago on Good Morning America. The brief piece included the particulars of
the incident (what we used to call the “facts”), but then went on to
speculation, the modern media drug of choice.
We found out, for example, that Scott was well behind in his
child support payments and may have been running to avoid arrest and jail. We
also heard the news reporter’s expressed curiosity at the passenger in Scott’s vehicle,
providing us with just the smallest of intonational hints that something unknown could very well mean something suspicious. No conclusions were reached,
of course; like a faulty boomerang the ideas were just thrown out there, never
to return.
And then the piece ended, leaving us not with final thoughts
about the shooting, but final thoughts about what might have precipitated Scott’s
flight, a different story altogether, and one implying that, perhaps, if he
hadn’t run, he would still be alive. That it might be, just a little bit, his
fault.
As if anything
might justify an armed police officer shooting someone in the back.
The story should have ended with the facts. Shot in the
back. No excuse. End of report.
But it didn’t.
It was at that moment when I realized there is essentially
no difference between the post-Civil War racism depicted in The Store, and the post-modern racism
depicted on Good Morning America. In
both cases the stories go on a beat too long, a beat designed to remind us that
when an African-American—or a black, or a negro, or a nigger—does something
whites don’t like, then somehow he shares responsibility for his own downfall.
His own assassination. His own lynching.
Racism remains, in very fundamental ways, unchanged from
Stribling’s time. We just pretend more these days.
Read since last post:
- Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow (1976)
- One of Ours, Willa Cather (1923)
- Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis (1926)
- Early Autumn, Louis Bromfield (1927)
- The Store, T. S. Stribling, (1933)
- Lamb in His Bosom, Caroline Miller (1934)
- Empire Falls, Richard Russo (2002)
- The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, Robert Lewis Taylor (1959)
Currently reading:
- The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
- Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)
Count: 77 read, 10 to go
