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

of service; the idea was for other people. Yet she had spent much time in Atlanta serving the black community.
    “There is a noblesse oblige that separated you but imposed an obligation, but with no person-to-person connection. And I think the reason I’ve spent so much time in the black community in Atlanta is that I was
hungry.”
    “For what?”
    “Hungry for …” She had trouble finding words. “For contact. With people who were living lives that were more real than mine was. We were real cold folks.”
    She meant the decorum, the rigidity, the manners of the family. When she broke away she welcomed even the idea of tears. In the idea of service now, and in the dream of becoming a minister, she had found a new idea of community.
    “But remember,” she said, talking of the identity that had been hers and probably still was, “this is a very specialized herd. White upper-class Mississippi people.”
    And while she was reaching towards a new community, the old way of things she had known was changing. The family was now scattered all over the United States; and the old family house, the “plantation,” was probably “going to disintegrate.” “And my mother is distraught in a way I’ve never known her. Because a lot of her identity is going to go. That house has been the gathering place; many people can stay there. For my mother it’s a sense of place. That house, those trees, that dirt. My aunts talked about the Civil War as though it was yesterday. And the people there show off the old houses, you know. It’s part of the economy of the place. They put on the old costumes and show the houses.”
    I said, “A kind of masque.”
    She said, out of the security of her new idea of community, “It’s more like religion.”
    Identity as religion, religion as identity: it was the very theme of another theology student, a young man from a background quite different, a mountain community in northern Georgia.
    He said, “When I think of growing up, the two things are very much the same thing—family and church. The church was a small church, with about forty-five members, all related. Seven or eight generations ago the first member of our family moved into that area and bought four hundred acres, and we still live on that. It isn’t a plantation. There might have been slaves early on, but that disappeared pretty soon. We were a family of small farmers. My grandfather had fifteen or sixteen brothers, and their descendants all live within three miles of one another. It is very rare that anybody moves away. When you go up there you know people, and you know them as relatives.
    “At the same time it is very easy for your own identity to get lost.But I have since grown to appreciate how wonderful that is: a warm, loving, open kind of family, not just father and mother and brothers and sisters, but cousins, aunts, and uncles.
    “The church is very much the same thing. Family members. The Holiness Church is a very emotional religion, and what struck me early on was how very different people were in church from what I knew of them at home. The emotion they expressed in church was different. There would be a lot of shouting. The preacher would try to work them up to the sinfulness of human nature. There would be moments during the service when people would get up and speak in tongues, and people would try to interpret what was being said. And there were times when people would get saved.”
    “This religion was not a reaching out to the world?”
    “This religion was a calling away from the world, an excluding of the world. I still struggle to find how I relate to all that now. The first year in college I spent alone in my room. I was scared to go out. Then I became angry with some aspects of the faith that had such a rigid view of the world.”
    But now (like the Mississippi plantation, and for the same, economic reason) the mountain world was changing. “A lot of the people have to go away to get work.” They