Some Houses Down There

ALL THIS STUFF--these notes, observations, glimpses and grotesques--need a justification that isn't to be found. It all belongs to the category described by Aristotle, the category of true things which are too much like things in a story to be believed. There's a strange gap between things that seem real and things that seem made up, which is like the gap between present and past. That's the place all these Southern types and extremes come slinking, slouching out of, and anyone, even an outsider, can tell they are sold to people--and not just Yankees--like post cards, to shelter and settle memories and would-be memories under. They really eat it up.

ONE SUMMER I worked for a government housing program in a small Southern city. I'd like to protect it from self-incrimination, to give the town back the ridiculously transparent pseudonym--Exeter--which it first received from a cousin of mine, a famous writer from that state who never used one word if he knew ten, and claimed in his brash youth to have registered in hotels in the area under names like "Benny Johnson," "Eddie Spenser" or "Al Tennyson." (He also described in one of his books "the most notorious whore-house in the state, located on a corner in my home-town where the public library now stands. I guess things have changed that much.")

This city retained the atmosphere of a small town, but it was progressive. It was filled with red white and blue plywood signs listing under what Federal auspices and for how much money such and such a program was being carried out--program referring to the ragged empty lot behind the sign with a couple of stone steps leading up to nowhere.

Downtown, traffic was incredibly misdirected and always stalled, while short wiry policemen with sunglasses and tremendous black women stood on streetcorners as if for some common purpose. Not too far away were what had been the grandest of the old houses in town, three or four large places with New Orleans iron balconies and fan lights over the door, where a judge or banker could have lived. The columns had warped with rot and cracked open. In one of these houses lived a crazy old lady of the Capote/Faulkner stamp, her house full of wilted memories and flowers, whose special craziness was keeping turtles, five or six dime-store turtles in crystalline plastic dishes. She lived in a large place with a cupola and wouldn't let anyone in, even the local landmarks society who wanted to help preserve the house from destruction and her from eviction.

I HAD A SIDEKICK on this job who seemed to have gotten his job by bearing the name of his great-uncle the ex-governor. We went together from house to house in a big white air-conditioned Galaxie--occasionally being mistaken for the truant or probation officer--and telling poor people about how they could buy a nice little brick house from the government for only as much a month as they were paying now for rent. (A split level, which required getting an extra room, was a little more.)

The boss was an old-style Carolina gentleman, revamped. He had gotten tired of his retirement from the realty business, learned to say "Negro" instead of "nigra," at least to black people, and gone to work for the government. His face was red and full, topped by short white hair. His first name was Roscoe, but he very much preferred "R.C." so of course we called him "Arsey." He was continually sucking the life out of a stubby Raleigh--it seemed like he smoked a carton a day.

I COULD GIVE you a brief survey of the variety of beautiful and unusual houses which we found, on the model of the local Garden Club survey, "the ten most beautiful houses of Pleasantville 1957." But today even the Garden Club has an important social role to play. Today when our social order, our communities and our homes are subject to dangers from so many directions, every organization must do its part. Fortunately there is a very active and important Garden Club in Exeter, as the following incident demonstrated.

To the west of town there is a small shopping center and a nice residential area. The center consists of only a grocery store, a drugstore, and a couple of shop spaces which had changed from bakery to pet shop every few months. But one day something different appeared in one of these spaces, something which would not have been out of the ordinary in parts of Atlanta or Washington or somewhere, but which on the outskirts of Exeter was not just extraordinary or inexplicable but downright impossible. How it came to be, no one knows to this day. At its appearance, many residents of the area become concerned, indignant, scandalized, outrageous--or curious. And the curious ones became patrons of this massage parlor.

Decent citizens attempted legal and political action, but to no avail. It was the Garden Club, vigilant and resourceful, which provided a solution. It simply sent observers to record the license plate numbers of cars seen at the parlor, looked up the owners' names and telephoned the wives of the massages. Before long business had declined, the place was forced to close, local homes and gardens were safe once more.

THERE WAS ONE peculiar thing about many of these houses: curious ornaments under their eaves, a kind of gingerbread or lathed dowel work created when the houses were built in the eighties or nineties by, we fantasized, a craftsman who while still a boy had come back from Lee's troops--Lee's Miserables, as one good Baptist preacher punned--or Johnson's, retreating north from Sherman. (Sherman's Memoirs, horribly written, in a thick green volume with the general's stars on the spine, talks about approaching Exeter.)

He had come to the town and taken up the carpenter's trade and produced all this strange variety of ornament: the rising (or setting?) sun shape, the cart-wheel, the star pattern, the pagoda like shapes or one we just called the Spruce St. Variety. There's probably a folk-art monograph and foundation grant in it: "Varieties of the Eave Ornament in the Southeastern U.S. 1880-1920." With color pictures. Out of boredom we began classifying types and snapping a few pictures--to the disbelief and irritation of women on porches who thought we were photographing something going on behind upper story windows.

One place even had castellated edging around the rim of a flat roof and an obviously home-made, handy-andy porch pretending to be a gate-house; every man's home his castle. Note to monograph; Reminiscent of old Mr. Wemmick in Great Expectations with his miniature castle, moat, and drawbridge. Home-made: There were efforts to make house homes like the initialled screen doors on plain white houses the mill had built not far away.

ON ONE STREET of old, run-down houses ten tufts of grass were shared among ten little dirt lots. The houses were on stone pillars that looked like they would buckle any minute. The filthy kids, and ugly yellow dogs dug holes in the yards.

On one of the porches a family sat as if for a portrait, children in parents' laps. But they all had bug-eyes twisted slightly toward the sides of their heads. They seemed unaware of this: The kids had thick glasses, and the smallest girl had light blue pixie glasses with sparkles in them. Behind the glasses her tremendous eyes seemed miles away.--Beside them in the duplex lived a lone man who watched television and gestured angrily at the government with the stump of an arm.

Across the street in a house which was identical except for a large hole in the screen door lived a preacher man. He was only a lay preacher. He was short and tough, with a leathery tan from laying roofing in the sun all day and, on his little bones, big muscles filled out the sleeves of his t-shirt. His kids didn't go to public school because of the busing but in his yard was a large sky-blue bus he drove for Sunday School painted with "Have you read your Bible today?" and a big open Bible that was ready to fly away into the bus's side with the tail of its bookmark flapping behind.

TWILIGHT. Another street, off by itself in the middle of a commercial part of town. Smells of supper in the air. One end of the street opens out on a wide road full of fast traffic coming from burger places down the road. The houses all have porches and many of them have hedges in front or vines trained around their railings.

An old lady says: "Yessir my son he was sittin right on this porch right in that chair where you are and he'd been feeling right down, stayed out of work. Well suddenly he just started vomiting this black blood. He started vomiting and it was all black blood. They took him to the hospital and his heart, it stopped. They hooked him up to one of these machines, heart and lung, you know. He had all these tubes and wires coming out of him. After that they said he suffered from brain damage and now he can't see or hear none."

Toward the other end of the street the houses are not as nice. They don't have lithographs or plates with John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King on them on their mantles. They're on a slope and the back ends have to be held up by rickety-looking stilts. Let one grey weathered house stand for the rest: Inside tall narrow stairs twist back up around a wide chimney. The room is hot and is smoky and full of that sweet sickening smell--like burning beans--peculiar to dirty houses with wood stoves. The plaster is cracking off the walls, revealing in places an old wallpaper from finer days, repeating and repeating a magnolia bordered portrait of your standard columned mansion house, through which irony we may fade to...

FAIRNTOSH, "stately traditional plantation home," whose owner is commemorated by a silver, state-erected plaque on a pole as "one of the state's largest slaveholders before the War." The family had brought the name from their estate in Ireland and assembled here outside of Exeter a couple of hundred slaves and a couple of thousand acres.

How we really got to Fairntosh was along the narrow black road dropping steeply down and then straightening out across a flat stretch of swampy forest where at the end of the day a rich odor of bacon cooking came drifting from some nearby shack or trailer. "They've got it fixed up real pretty," said the man we asked for directions, "with them long white fences goin up the hill and the house is hid in the trees at the top."

Things aren't simple; Fairntosh wasn't white and didn't have columns. It was a beautiful shade of yellow, and beside it was a bed of trained yellow roses, and above it were those tremendous oaks. It was actually built too early to have columns, and its porch stood out instead with sober Federalist dignity.

BEHIND HIS HOUSE, the Reverend Harper, a cracker-barrel oracle in the best tradition, has a little lean-to grocery. He is in his eighties and is well-known and respected for preaching at a different church each Sunday somewhere around the country. He is a type you have met before, in one account or another, or at least he seems to be. He is "always glad to talk to you;" he is full of wisdom.

We first encountered the Reverend one dusty day when we needed something cool to drink. He was napping on the bench in front of the grocery, fishing cap down over age-browned eyes. "Orange soda?" he says as he hands up the bottles from the panting cooler, and if you encourage him he begins telling stories from the Bible, and talking in general about the state of the world. He believes that TV faked the moon landings. We react like Zarathustra, thinking to himself, could it be that this hermit, here in his woods, has not yet heard that God is dead? He paces and leans behind the counter: Ezekiel in the valley of the dry bones, you've red it, I know you have, how the Lord told Ezekiel to speak and then Ezekiel he spoke and the bones took on sinew and the bones took on flesh. Or the tale of Balaam's ass. Or about the devil going to and fro in the earth: Yessir the devil is goin to and fro making his work. Making the work of hell.

You know what hell is?

Why hell ain't nothing but a place of confusion. Even the churches can be hell, when the people start fightin' among themselves. And now all these preachers come out for big money. Some of um have ten thousand a year. But they ain't true preachers unlessen they been called. Now that's right.

Yes its the worst I ever saw. And its gonna get worse before it gets better, Bible says. Government is the worst I ever saw. They's all out for money. Now that's right. And there ain't no way to get money unlessen you steal it or kill a man for it. This wiretapin' shows it. Said in the paper they been stealing since President Jackson. Now that's right.

It's the worst it's ever been, but the Lord says at the 32nd chapter of the book of numbers and the 23rd verse, your sin shall find you out, now that's right. For the justice of the Lord shall follow you everywhere. Now that's right, you know it is, you know it.