Free A Turn in the South by V.S. Naipaul

it’s because we sense that the original contract—the contract between parent and child, the contract that says, ‘I will always take care of you,’ and is an impossible commitment—that contract is going to be broken now, and they are going to die soon. That is what I mean by our passions having to be focused.”
    Still, what thought was there now, from her side, about the blacks, people equally obsessed?
    “If we, Southern women, feel strictured, I wonder how the Southern black, who has had so many more overt strictures, must feel about them. Though I suspect that I may have highly romanticized whatever they may feel about them—I have a tendency to do that.”
    “Do you think protest is being so formalized that even black people are beginning to lose contact with what they feel, and often say what they think is expected of them?”
    “I think that rote and rhetoric have replaced outrage. The first thing that happened after the very real shock about the business in Forsyth County—the shock that
it
, the Southern violence, wasn’t dead—what swung into action then was the
perfect
march. And we knew just exactly how to do it. As though some cosmic march chairman pulled all the switches—and, goodness, in a week we had the perfect march.
    “We had the right component of public-safety awareness, the right component of media awareness. The right crowd makeup, a nice balance of young blacks and old battle-scarred lions; and we had the right component of white liberals. You wouldn’t have found an ex-president marching in that first civil-rights march. You know, the organization! The buses appeared, just like that. That’s Hosea. Boy, can he stage a civil disobedience now!”
    Wasn’t it good, though, that protest in the United States could be ritualized like this?
    “I don’t want to sound pejorative. How else would I have it? I am so thankful no lives were lost in Forsyth County, no harm was done. What I miss are the howls of pure outrage that greeted the murder of the three civil-rights workers in Mississippi. In the 1960s. But it was the spilled blood that called out the outrage. And we must not have the blood.”
    But there was this to the formalization of protest: there was an orthodoxy of thought about race and rights. Perhaps people would be censoring themselves sometimes, to appear to be saying the right thing.
    Anne Siddons said, “I guess that happens in all revolutions. They don’t end. They just pass into caricature over the years. And therefore they lose their credibility. The civil-rights movement will lose its energy and peter out into a series of sporadic brush fires, as other things come up. The civil-rights movement began to die as the peace movement and the women’s movement came to life in the sixties. As I said, Americans protest anything. We are protesters. But protest made the country. It’s what we know how to do.”
    We had talked for two hours. And across the road from the Ritz, on the ground floor at Macy’s, smiling uniformed young men and women, like a kind of ceremonial designer-guard for Gloria Vanderbilt, walked lightly—lightly, like dancers—down a walkway between dark-red rope barriers, while a small band played and Gloria Vanderbilt herself—impossible to imagine that a real person possessed the name and actually was at the heart of the fame, the goods, the book, the talk show—Gloria Vanderbilt herself, dark eyes in pale, blooming skin, in the fluorescent light of the department store, the light matching the airconditioning, completing the bubble world, Gloria Vanderbilt sat and signed things for people waiting in line.
    T OM T EEPEN walked me over to the gold-domed Capitol building. In the big central hall, hung with portraits of people famous in the political life of Georgia, there was a display of flags from the Civil War. Tom Teepen said, “A lot of history here.”
    And the lieutenant governor, Zell Miller, was in his wood-paneled office. He was from the