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Executive Editor, Journals Dept. University of Hawai‘i Press
by | 3 September 2004 · 5:55 pm

Naipaul Asks Welty about Rednecks

And it was of the redneck, the unlikely descendent of the frontiersman, that I talked to Eudora Welty when I went to call on her. I had arrived early, and waited on the street below the dripping trees. She was ready early, and could clearly be seen through her uncurtained front window. But I was nervous of knocking too soon….

The frontier was so much in her stories: a fact I had only just begun to appreciate. And she was willing to talk of the frontiersman character.

“He’s not a villain. But there’s a whole side of him that’s cunning. Sometimes it goes over the line and he becomes an outright scoundrel. The blacks never lived in that part of the state. They came over to work on the plantations. Most of the rednecks grew up without black people, and yet they hate them. That’s where all the bad things originate–that’s the appeal they make. Rednecks worked in sawmills and things like that. And they had small farms. They are all fiercely proud. They dictate the politics of the state. They take their excitement–in those small towns–when the politicians and evangelists come. Scare everybody, outwit everybody, beat everybody, kill everybody–that’s the frontiersman’s mentality.”

I told her the story Ellen had heard as a child about the rednecks to the south of the town where she had spent her summers: the story of traveling salesmen who had been roughed up and hitched to a plow and made to plow a field. Ellen had said that this story had come down from the past; and I had thought of it as a romantic story of the wickedness of times past, an exaggerated story about people living without law. But Eudora Welty took the story seriously. She said, “I can believe the story about the salesmen. I’ve heard about punishing people by making them plow farms.”

We talked about Mississippi and its reputation. “At the time of the troubles many people passed through and called on me. They wanted me to confirm what they thought. And all of them thought I lived in a state of terror. ‘Aren’t you scared of them all the time?’ A young man came and said that he had been told that a Mr. So-and-So, who was a terrible racist, owned all of Jackson, all the banks and hotels, and that he was doing terrible things to black people. It was a fantasy. It wasn’t true. The violence here is not nearly as frightening as the Northern–urban–brand.”

A frontier state, limited culturally–had that been hard for her as a writer, and as a woman writer? The richness of a writer depends to some extent on the society he or she writes about.

She said: “There is a lot behind it, the life of the state. There is the great variety of the peoples who came and settled the different sections. There is a great awareness of that as you get older–you see what things have stemmed from. The great thing taught me here as a writer is a sense of continuity. In a. place that hasn’t changed much you get to know the generations. You can see the whole narrative of a town’s history or a family’s history.”

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 213-214.

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by | 2 September 2004 · 5:47 pm

Good Soldier Outlier: Coping with the Draft

I started college, without much enthusiasm, in the fall of 1967 at the University of Richmond, Virginia. I dropped out in the middle of my sophomore year, in delayed culture shock after having spent most of my childhood in Japan. My academic advisor had talked me into taking ROTC the first year, but I dropped it in order to take a journalism class during my sophomore year. Journalism and German were the only two classes I had any interest in that semester. My German professor called me to ask why I didn’t bother to show up for the exam. (The only exam I showed up for was a required religion class, “The Bible as History,” which I had prepared for half my life, not just half a year.)

Something similar happened to three out of four childhood friends of mine from the Southern Baptist missionary community in Japan. All of us who dropped out ended up in the military, one in the Navy and two in the Army. In Virginia, at least, conscientious objector status was only granted to those who belonged to established religions that espoused pacifism. You couldn’t personally pick and choose which–if any–wars you cared to fight in.

Family History

My father was raised a Quaker, but became a Baptist, and spent World War II on a ministerial deferment at the University of Richmond, graduating in 1945. Four of his five brothers–likewise Quaker-raised and Baptist-converted–served in the military, the youngest in the Navy during the Korean War. (He visited us in Japan.) None was an officer, none died, and none really talked about what he’d been through.

The same goes for my mother’s two brothers, raised Presbyterian in the Shenandoah Valley, who enlisted for World War II. One spent his time in B-17s out of Thule, Greenland, protecting convoys in the Atlantic. His plane went down near Bermuda in 1945, losing half the crew, but he managed to survive after several weeks in hospital. The other served in Co. A, 314th Infantry, 79th (Cross of Lorraine) Division through Normandy and the Vosges, then across the Rhine, and finally into Czechoslovakia. He was a very taciturn man, and never talked about the war, not even to his wife, until he attended a D-Day anniversary in Normandy in 1994, when he broke down and wept.

The tradition goes back even further. Two great grandfathers fought in the Civil War, on the wrong side. I’m very glad their side lost–and I’m even gladder that they both survived. In each case their last battles were against Gen. Custer. One, a private in the 45th Virginia Infantry, was taken prisoner after Custer’s flank attack at Waynesboro in February 1865, the last battle of Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign. The one in the 11th Virginia Infantry was WIA in April 1865 at Five Forks, where Custer helped turn Lee’s flank and drive him out of Petersburg. I’d love to know how each of them reacted when they heard about Custer’s death at Little Big Horn in 1876.

Personal History

Among the three of us baby-boomer agemates from Japan who enlisted, only one ever saw combat–the one who joined the Navy, oddly enough. Enlisting in the Navy was one way to minimize direct exposure to hostile fire, although it required four years on active duty, rather than the two-year minimum required by the draft. Unfortunately, the Navy man ended up guarding ammo depots in Cambodia in 1969-70, where he suffered lifelong disabilities after leaping out of a guard tower during a firefight and shattering his ribs and spine. Vietnam has defined the rest of his life.

The two of us who ended up in the Army enlisted specifically for a noncombat military occupational specialty (MOS). The other friend became a radio technician and spent most of his enlistment at Ft. McPherson, Georgia, where he helped record the Calley trial. He went on to become an award-winning TV producer and pioneer in High Definition TV.

After taking a battery of aptitude tests, I enlisted in April 1969 with a contract for language school because there weren’t any openings in journalism. (Army reporter Al Gore enlisted in August 1969.) Of the 8 languages on my list, the Army in its wisdom picked number 7, Romanian. Kurdish was number 8, but that probably required Special Forces or CIA status. I chose languages that would keep me in school for 9-12 months of my 3-year enlistment. I started with Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Russian–but avoided Vietnamese and Southeast Asian languages.

Language school helped turn me toward linguistics and away from journalism. Thanks to the GI Bill, work study, grad assistantships, and a variety of part-time and full-time jobs, I was able to finish a doctorate with only $2,000 in student loans, which I paid off early. On balance, I’d have to say the Army did more for me than I did for it.

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by | 2 September 2004 · 6:37 am

Good Soldier Outlier: Introduction

So many people these days seem to be fighting the Vietnam War all over again, and so few politicians, journalists, and pundits–and fewer and fewer academics–have any military experience at all. So I thought I’d seize the opportunity to share a few of my own impressions about what it was like to be in the Vietnam Era military. There are far more Vietnam Era Vets than there are Vietnam Vets. I’m one of the former. I never got close to combat. Never even left the States. True war heroes may be reluctant to talk about their experiences, but a bookish clerical soldier like me should be able to prattle on and on.

If you get nothing else out of it, I hope at least you come away with a feeling that people in the military are just people, in all their diversity, and not some strange subspecies of robotic sociopaths, as so many antiwar protestors seem to assume.

The thing that most disturbs me about so many of my politically active colleagues in academia is their visceral revulsion at all things military, and their tendency to demonize anyone connected with the military. It’s even worse than the casual bigotry one finds on American campuses toward anyone with a marked Southern accent, or anyone who openly professes Christianity.

Maybe I’m overly sensitive. I was raised among expatriate Southerners in Japan, but consciously worked to erase any traces of a Southern accent, while teasing friends who kept theirs. Now my daughter teases me for the traces her finely tuned ear picks up, while I get defensive about the South. I was also raised among Christian missionaries, although I abandoned the faith during adolescence. By now I’ve also abandoned my old resentment toward the church.

My lofty rationale for indulging a story-telling whim, then, is to help counter one kind of antimilitary bigotry that seems so widespread among those inclined toward pacifism. Perhaps I might also help counter a bit of the promilitary mythologizing that seems so widespread among hawks.

The first installment will follow this evening.

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by | 30 August 2004 · 5:39 pm

Naipaul on W.E.B. and Booker T.

In two chapters of A Turn in the South entitled “The Truce with Irrationality” (I and II) Naipaul interviews mostly black Southerners in Tallahassee, Florida, and Tuskegee, Alabama. The title comes from Naipaul’s gloss on a literary quote.

“The most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality.” The words by James Baldwin (among the most elegant handlers of the language) had stayed with me since I had read them, nearly thirty years before…. But now, in the South, in the middle of my own journey, I began to wonder whether the truce that every black man looked for hadn’t in fact been with the irrationality of the world around him. And the achievement of certain people began to appear grander.

Besides interviewing living people, Naipaul rereads famous works by two famous men, and examines their literary and educational legacies.

Tuskegee was still a going concern. It had a devoted community; and it still had heart. Its financial predicament was the predicament of black schools generally; and it was better off than some. Its physical condition was very far from that of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where in parts the campus looked ruined. There was a melancholy bronze statue there too, at Fisk, meant to set the seal on glory, but now seeming to watch over the ruins. The statue was of W.E.B. Du Bois, the rival and critic of Washington….

The quarrel or debate between the two men, Du Bois and Washington, both mulattoes, is famous. Du Bois might seem closer to contemporary feeling. But his best-known book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a collection of essays and articles, is a little mysterious….

If Booker T. Washington can make a darky joke, Du Bois can speak of “the joyous abandon and playfulness which we are wont to associate with the plantation Negro”; can say, “Even today the mass of the Negro laborers need stricter guardianship than Northern laborers”; and he can ask, “What did slavery mean to the African savage?”

But we can read through both the Du Bois way of writing and the Booker T. Washington manliness to the facts of Negro life of the time, and see the difficulty both men would have had in defining themselves, and establishing their own dignity, against such an abject background. As if in resolution of that difficulty, Du Bois’s book seems lyrical for the sake of the lyricism. It can appear to use blacks and ruined plantations as poetic properties. It deals in tears and rage; it offers no program.

In this beginning of Du Bois there was also his end. He lived very long, and towards the end of his life–facing irrationality with irrationality–he left the United States and went to live in West Africa, in Ghana, a former British colony that had in independence very quickly become an African despotism, and was soon to revert to bush and poverty, exporting labor to its neighbors.

At the very beginning of the century, in Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington, in his late-Victorian man-of-the-world style, had cautioned against just that kind of sentimentality about Africa. “In the House of Commons, which we visited several times, we met Sir Henry M. Stanley. I talked with him about Africa and its relation to the American Negro, and after my interview with him became more convinced than ever that there was no hope of the American Negro’s improving his condition by emigrating to Africa.”

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 120, 151-153.

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by | 30 August 2004 · 5:25 pm

Up from Slavery: "A painful coded work"

On this journey I read [Booker T. Washington’s] Up from Slavery twice. On the second reading, after I had been nearly four months in the South, I found that the book had changed for me. It became more than the fabulous story of a disadvantaged man’s rise. I began to see it as a painful coded work, making separate signals even in a single paragraph to Northerners, Southerners, and blacks.

I also began to see the book as the work of a man constantly concerned to raise funds for his school. That should have been obvious to me always, but it hadn’t been; that had been swept away by the power of the fable. Below that primary appeal, however, there were others: the man of the world appealing knowledgeably to the very rich on behalf of the wretched, representing himself as honorable and worthy and manly and educated; yet at the same time taking care to do the contrary thing, and making it clear that as a black man he knew his place.

Hence his confident, socially knowing talk, like any solid late-nineteenth-century citizen, of the “best people” and the “vices” of “the lower class of people.” But he is mortified when, on a train journey from Augusta to Atlanta in Georgia, in a Pullman car “full of Southern white men,” two ladies from Boston, “ignorant, it seems, of the customs of the South,” insist on inviting him to supper. The meal seems very long. As soon as he can, he breaks away from the ladies to go to the smoking room, where the men now are, “to see how the land lay.” It is all right; the men know who he is and are anxious to introduce themselves to him.

In England he develops a high regard for the aristocracy and the time and money they devote to philanthropic works. He is impressed by the deference of servants, who are content to be servants all their working life and, unlike American servants, use the words “master” and “mistress” without any constraint. In that ambiguous observation there are consoling messages both for blacks and Southern whites. He becomes friendly, he says, with the Duchess of Sutherland. She is a famous beauty. But as a black man he will be out of place to say so directly. He writes, “I may add that I believe the Duchess of Sutherland is said to be the most beautiful woman in England.”

So many snares; so many people to please; so many contradictions to resolve; so many possibilities of destruction. The achievement was great. But at what cost. He died at the age of fifty-nine.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 153-154.

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by | 29 August 2004 · 12:31 pm

Yapese Spelling Reform: "That Damn Q!"

Like Marshallese speakers at the eastern end of Micronesia, Yapese speakers at the western end seem to be resistant to spelling reforms designed by outside linguists.

The most recent Yapese Bible orthography makes do with only 5 vowels, but writes all the consonants. However, it spells glottal stop inconsistently. A glottal stop is implicit between any two adjacent vowels in a word, as in gaar ‘to say’, which has two syllables with a glottal stop in between. People used to use the same device to indicate final glottals, as in pii ‘to give’, but the most recent Bible orthography now writes the final glottal with an apostrophe, thus pi’. Except on a handful of grammatical forms, like u ‘at’, i ‘he, she, it’, glottal stops are predictable on words written with initial vowels, just as they are in English or German, so the Bible orthography doesn’t write them at all.

In the new orthography, however, the glottal stop is everywhere spelled with a q, and resistance to the new orthography centers on “that damn q” in new spellings like Waqab ‘Yap’, girdiiq ‘people’, qarcheaq ‘bird, bat’, and even Qapriil ‘April’ and Qaawguust ‘August’. (Imagine German Qach, du lieber Qaugustine!)

The decision to use q in place of the apostrophe for glottal stop was motivated by the fact that the apostrophe was already used to indicate a glottalized release on consonants. Yapese, like Navajo, has a whole series of glottalized consonants in addition to plain equivalents in initial, medial, and final position within the word, thus:

p, t, k vs. p’, t’, k’

m, n, ng vs. m’, n’, ng’

f, th, vs. f’, th’

l, y, w vs. l’, y’, w’

So, in theory, it is possible that rung’ag ‘to hear’ might be ambiguous between rung+’ag and the nonexistent forms *ru+ng’ag or *rung’+ag. In practice, this seems to be an awfully weak justification for introducing “that damn q.”

Writing more vowel distinctions, on the other hand, seems well motivated. Yapese distinguishes among 8 long vowels, with a further possibility of 8 short vowels–although length is partially predictable from the position of the vowel in the word. All eight long vowels show up in the following minimal octet, so convenient for linguistic analysis: miil ‘to run’, meel ‘sail rope’, meal [æ] ‘rotten’, mael [a] ‘war’, maal [a] ‘taro type’, mool ‘to sleep’, moel ‘adze handle’, muul ‘to fall’. Using digraphs to write vowels, of course, precludes the old reliance on adjacent vowels to indicate glottal stop.

Examples of the old and new renditions of the most common greeting exchange follows.

  • ‘Where are you going?’

    Old: Ngam man ngan

    New: Nga mu maen ngaan

  • ‘I’m (just) going over there’

    Old: Nggu wan ngaram

    New: Ngu gu waen nga raam

The Pacific Area Language Materials website gives a sample of what the Japanese story Momotaro looks like in the new orthography. Look at all those paragraphs beginning with Q, especially on Qeree ‘and then’, which in the Bible is written Ere.

Once again, a socially optimal orthography in actual use can get by with even fewer alphabetic distinctions than a linguist might desire for the purpose of distinguishing each word in isolation from the sentential, semantic, and social context in which those words are normally used. A simpler, underspecified writing system would allow more Yapese to write their own language without having to run everything by someone with sufficient linguistic training to understand the New Orthography. It would take literacy out of the hands of experts and give it back to the people who need it most.

SOURCES: John Thayer Jensen, Yapese Reference Grammar (Hawai‘i, 1977; out of print) and Yapese-English Dictionary (Hawai‘i, 1977; out of print); Thin Rok Got nib Thothup [‘Word of God that’s Holy’ = the Bible].

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by | 28 August 2004 · 8:42 pm

Identity as Religion, Religion as Identity

Naipaul interviews theology students in northern Georgia.

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 came back, it was true; they never lost touch. But: “The twentieth century is pouring over the mountain.”

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 48-49.

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by | 28 August 2004 · 8:37 pm

Politics as Identity, Religion as Community

Mountain family, old planter family: old ideas of community no longer served, and the descendants of those families were finding a new community in the ministry. But it hadn’t been quite like this for Frank. He grew up in a blue-collar white urban neighborhood. It wasn’t “ethnic,” and it had no sense of community. It was Southern, but the Southern history and Southern past that were bred in the bones of the mountain boy and the plantation girl had had to be learned, studied, by the boy from the city. Because he had been born into a crowd, his early ambitions had been different.

“I wanted to be an individual, a nonconformist, a person with his own rights, opinions. But at the same time I did want an identity. And I found that in the Democratic Party. It started at high school. I got into the Democratic group and quickly became a leader of the teen Democrats. It became my religion, because I evaluated everything according to the party’s success or failure. When I left school I went straight into the party organization. The party became my community. But it wasn’t a real community. It didn’t have the caring that a Christian community should have. In the Navy I had the sense of meeting Christ in reading the Scriptures, and I was touched by that. But it was isolated until I came here, which makes real on earth this relationship with God. I have found the real community here, in theology school.”

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 49-50.

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by | 27 August 2004 · 6:15 pm

Muslim WakeUp: Progressive Muslim Voices

Muslim WakeUp, a site I just discovered via One Hand Clapping, has a couple of stories with nice ironical twists.

The first concerns a young Muslim woman, whose singing is banned in North America but welcome in Southeast Asia.

If anyone needed a reminder about how far out of sync the American Muslim establishment is even from most Muslims in the world, then this is a good example.

A few months ago, Ani, a Los Angeles-based American Muslim artist who has produced some of Malaysia’s top music albums and worked with top performers from around the world, decided to make an album that expresses her faith as a Muslim and a message of empowerment for young people and women. The album (whose title and title track was inspired by our website) is called Ummah Wake Up, and MWU! was the only American Muslim site to feature it.

She reached out to American Muslim distributors, American Muslim music festivals, American Muslim websites. The response she got almost across the board was, Sorry, but women’s voices are awra, religiously prohibited due to their allegedly harmful effects on public morals. Effectively, her work was banned by North American Muslim institutions, including the recent Muslim Fest in Canada.

Now Ani is in Malaysia where she is embarking on a major media blitz there and headlining several concerts, including a huge stadium show to celebrate Malaysia’s National Day on Monday and a benefit Concert for Palestine on Saturday, September 4th at Kuala Lumpur’s Renaissance Grand Ballroom where she will be joined by Raihan, the country’s top nasheed group. Then she’s off on a similar itinerary in Indonesia.

In both countries, Ani will be appearing on over a dozen major TV and radio programs promoting her album’s official release in Malaysia and Indonesia….

So once again, what’s good enough for some 200 million Muslims “over there” is not good enough for 6 million or so Muslims “over here.” Shame on the self-appointed Islamic morality police in Los Angeles and Toronto and Indiana and Illinois. Ummah Wake Up indeed!

The other article, entitled Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: The Hollywood Pagan Islamic Sajdah, explains an Olympic moment misunderstood by many non-Muslims.

Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco won the Gold in the 1,500 meters race at the Athens Olympics….

But we are not here to talk of sports. The San Francisco Chronicle sports page has a large headline about the event that reads “A Gift from God.” There is also a giant picture of El G doing a post race sajdah. The picture caption says that Hicham is kissing the track. He is not!

So here is a little trivia for the non-Muslim readers of MWU! Muslims perform a particular prayer ritual five times a day called the salat (or namaz in Persian/Urdu/Turkish speaking areas). The sajdah is one of the physical motions that make up the salat. The movements of the salat are performed in simple cycles. You can think of movement as a very simple cycle similar to yoga’s sun salutation. Strict Muslims would probably find this analogy a little annoying.

The sajdah is performed by men just as Mr. El G is doing in the picture. The women do a slightly different version, keeping their elbows and butts a little lower. The forehead and often the bridge of the nose touch the ground. The lips never do.

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by | 26 August 2004 · 7:48 pm

Confederates and Shias

Naipaul interviews the scion of a former plantation owner in South Carolina.

The North was now very concerned with all its minorities. It might have been thought that they would have considered the South a minority area. But they didn’t. The official Northern view could be put like this: “The white Southerner is not a minority. He is a backward fellow American who oppresses a minority, the Negro.”

Had he looked at his father’s book about the plantations recently? No, not recently. But he knew the book well, and he had some of the feeling for the old plantation life.

I said, “But you can’t feel nostalgia for what you don’t know?”

“Although I didn’t grow up with any knowledge of the working life of the plantation, still, life on the plantations–when we went to visit them when I was a child–it was more like the old Southern countryside, even though we didn’t have slavery. It was the old easygoing rural life, and relations between the races were much more what they had been. So I can feel nostalgia for a past.”

He was as concerned, even obsessed, as his father had been by the superficial destruction of the South–the highways, the fast-food chains–and pained by the alienation of some of the plantations to people and firms from outside.

The past as a dream of purity, the past as cause for grief, the past as religion: it is the very prompting of the Shias of Islam to nobility and sacrifice, the dream of the good time of the Prophet and the first four caliphs, before greed and ambition destroyed the newly saved world. It was the very prompting of the Confederate Memorial in Columbia. And that very special Southern past, and cause, could be made pure only if it was removed from the squalor of the race issue.

When–again as in a stage set–we got up from our chairs and went inside, for a salad provided by our hostess, I said I felt he was dealing in emotion without a program. He agreed; but then he said the program was being created….

He told me because of the developments of the 1950s his father had ended as a Southern separatist; and that was where he himself was now. The defeat of the South, the surrender of Lee, was for him an unappeasable sorrow, I felt.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), p. 106-107.

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