Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South

The Old Dragons Sleep

Through a harsh winter of saber-rattling anxiety, there was almost no good news for America except the final farewells of Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, Jim Crow’s last prominent disciples, Carolina’s last living (barely) monuments to segregation and white supremacy. Followed directly by Trent Lott’s farewell to power, the old dragons’ departure was a small island of hope in a wintry sea of cultural desolation and political regression. The good news for the South is that the last politicians directly implicated in its ancestral sin have been mothballed. Even in extremest senectitude, Helms and Thurmond were the twin towers of Southern reaction, in whose knobby old shadows toxic strains of Confederate nostalgia still bloomed unchecked. A giddy outburst of that nostalgia sealed the fate of their unctuous protégé Senator Lott, who was abandoned by the White House and eaten alive by the national media. The irony is that Lott’s rise to majority leader has been a triumph of media narcolepsy and Republican hypocrisy. “Recent comments by Sen. Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country,” said President Bush, who knows that without George Wallace in 1968, without the cynical, racist-soothing Southern stratThe Old Dragons Sleep 126 egy Wallace inspired, no Republican except Eisenhower would have been elected president in the past seventy years. Trent Lott’s ragged résumé was no secret. Republicans knew exactly what they were getting when they came courting Southerners in the seventies. They were getting the worst of us, and they got plenty— Klansmen, white citizens’ councils, Dixiecrat demagogues, sullen race-baiting reactionaries who had been a chronic embarrassment to the national Democrats. Come to think of it, unless your civil rights credentials are impeccable—unless you marched with Martin, at least—a Southern conservative is a morally indefensible thing to be. It was never a question of whether most Republicans agreed with these Neanderthals. As a minority with an aging, dwindling, monochromatic core of true believers, the Republican Party could not survive without them. It was always a neat trick to feed the fires of racial resentment with one hand and wave the torch of equality with the other, and it fooled most of the press most of the time. It never fooled black voters. A quote I treasure is attributed to J. C. “Buddy” Watts, Sr., whose son J. C. Junior recently gave up his seat as the lone black Republican in the U.S. Congress. “A black man voting for the Republicans,” said Buddy, “makes about as much sense as a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.” The quick clean castration of Senator Lott delighted Southern liberals , black and white; it gave punch-drunk Democrats a rare taste of blood that was not their own. But for the South there was no net gain in this ritual humiliation of one Mississippi mossback. In Manhattan, no one would have blinked if Lott’s wardrobe had yielded a hooded Klan robe. They honestly believe that half of us have one hanging somewhere—not freshly pressed for a rally, necessarily, but at least in the back of the closet, where a man of fashion might hang his old white dinner jacket just in case. I wish I were exaggerating. I’ll bet—though not the ranch—that Trent Lott never owned a hood. What the reporters pulled out of Lott’s closet was his mean old racist mama, Miss Iona, who once wrote the integrationist editor of the Pascagoula paper, “I hope you The Old Dragons Sleep 127 not only get a hole through your o∞ce door but through your stupid head.” Against a mama like Iona, you’d need at least a Senate seat before you could hold your own. Miss Iona, a schoolteacher, was just what knee-jerk New Yorkers needed to renew their Mississippi stereotypes for another fifty years. Change is dramatic in the modern South but very, very recent. You could still fill every seat in Yankee Stadium with fierce old ladies like Mrs. Lott, without beginning to empty the rest homes of Mississippi . The sons they raised know that a racist heritage dies hard. A few Mississippians, like the Greenville editor Hodding Carter, committed their lives to overcoming and overcompensating for it. Trent Lott spent his life exploiting it where he could and hiding it where he couldn’t. Sympathy for the senator is more than I can manage...