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

northeast of the state, which he said was Indian territory, Cherokee territory, until the 1830s, when the Cherokees were sent to Oklahoma along the “Trail of Tears.” Was that what the trail was called then? Possibly not; it was hard and painful to think about now. The settlers who took the Indian land were Scottish and Irish and some Germans, moving down from Carolina and Virginia. And the northeast of the state remained isolated—American history busy about other areas, leapfrogging or skipping over the hills of Appalachia and the communities in the “coves” and “hollows”—until the 1930s and 1940s. There were few blacks; that area was not a “racist society.” But now, with the newcomers from other places, mainly from Florida, he said, there were prejudices among the local people.
    That was the lieutenant governor’s background. His mother came to Atlanta in 1942, when he was ten years old, and she worked for two years at the Lockheed plant. She saved up and took the children once for lunch at the Biltmore Hotel. For two years they stayed in Atlanta, and then they went back to the mountains. And now the lieutenant governor was in the wood-paneled office.
    And to the paneled bar of the Ritz-Carlton later that evening came Atlanta City Council President Marvin Arrington, as concerned with his own past as the lieutenant governor was with his.
    But Marvin Arrington was black. He was heavy and strong, though with noticeable bowlegs. He was forty-six, by profession a lawyer. And his talk, open and unabashed, and fresh still, though he must have spoken the lines a hundred times, was about the difference between today and yesterday, between today, when honor was his, and yesterday, when Atlanta was so segregated that the only place where black people could use the lavatories was the bus station. So that his mother, when she brought the children to town, urged them to use the lavatories there if they didn’t want to walk back the miles to it.
    The black bar attendants, women, were pleased to see Arrington. Smiles came to their faces, though he was not a glamorous man, and had a heavy, long face. He wore a pale-brown suit; he seemed to sit low in his chair. He told Tom Teepen he had lost twenty pounds. But his long day—he had come quite late for our meeting—had exhausted him; and though he had a cranberry juice only, he dipped his large hand into the nut bowl and drew out nuts by the handful.
    We talked about the rich blacks in Atlanta—were they real? He said (as in the reprint of an Atlanta
Constitution
article I had read) that he earned a six-figure salary. But he didn’t think there were all that many rich people among the blacks of Atlanta; and the figures he gave, of salaries and expenses, were really rather modest.
    He said he was sorry he couldn’t talk more just then, but he would like to see me; and he gave me a two-hour appointment in his law office some days ahead.
    “C UT OUT of the herd.” Anne Siddons had used the words to describe one of the anxieties of her Southern upbringing. And I heard almost the same words from a woman at a theology school, where I went to follow up the idea that had been given me in northwestern Georgia of religion and identity.
    The woman who spoke the words—“I didn’t want to be not part of the herd. That’s where my identity came from”—was, like Anne Siddons, from a long-established family, not in Georgia, but in Mississippi. Mississippi, this woman said, had a history of 250 years; her family had lived in the same house for nearly two hundred years.
    “The way my identity was formed was by my family and by who we were in Jackson and in Mississippi. In the Presbyterian church we had our own pew. And that was your identity. My aunt was shocked one day when she went to church and found a stranger in her pew.”
    Didn’t the idea of piety and correctness contain the idea of service?
    No, she said; that idea wasn’t for her family. Other people had the idea