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9 Farewell to First Love “As a means of helping the [poetry] pot to boil” once again, Pinckney wrote “They Shall Return as Strangers,” an allegory about southerners losing touch with their land which was accepted by the Virginia Quarterly Review in April 1934. Pinckney’s story was her contribution to the on-going discussion about the impact of industrialization on the South and its people. Pinckney rejects the Agrarian’s romanticism about life on the land and substitutes the wise Sea Island Gullah for the noble yeomen. Drawing on the experience of her own ancestors, she also corrects the widespread assumption that southern planters were enemies of capitalism. The great planters labored over their ground with “a hoe in one hand and a bunch of high-grade bonds in the other,” she observes.1 Pinckney sets her narrative in the 1930s and begins the action with her protagonist , young Henry Fairfield, scion of an old Low Country family, hunched over his typewriter (the typist having become synonymous with alienated modern man), alone in a cubicle at the Richbourg Radiator Company. He has come to New York to escape the languishing South, intent on “grabbing success by the throat.” He stops to mull an interesting letter from a developer who wants to buy April Island, the last of his family’s ancestral holdings, to stock with exotic animals for a hunting preserve and tourist attraction. Since he has never even seen this property, left to him by an uncle, he takes some vacation time to return to the Carolina coast. This journey to the sea islands takes him back in time to a place without clocks, cars, schedules, a cash economy, or competition. He cannot even communicate with the Gullah-speaking locals, ancestors of the slaves who once cultivated the valuable sea island cotton. After a few draws of local corn whiskey at lunch time, the young man fantasizes about returning to this island, giving up the rat race, perhaps becoming a poet. But as the hot sun rises in the sky, he is sobered by the realization that unlike his forefathers, he has no other source of income as hedge against the boll weevil or decline in the market. Plantation life could never be recreated anyway because that “personal compact” between master and slave had been forever broken in “a new and free world” (556). Slowly Fairfield understands that through his neglect (he had never even bothered to collect the paltry rents from his black tenants), he has forfeited his spiri- 154 | A Talent for Living tual right to the land. Land demands to be tilled “not agriculturally, but humanly” and bedewed with “his thought, his love, and his duty.” Fully a creature of the modern world, he has become a stranger to his own past. The real owners, he finally understands, were the small colony of blacks, ancestors of the slaves who worked that land, who really comprised “the genius of the place” (546). Fairfield had momentarily let the “egotism of the blood” fool him into believing that “the accomplishments of his distinguished family had somehow been mystically dowered to him” (544). Returning to his nine-to-five life seems his only choice. April Island was “a place of pure magic” reserved for the giants of the earth. And he is a typist, not a king (557). Pinckney had been in an introspective mood when she wrote her story. April Island is a thinly veiled surrogate for Pinckney Island, General Cotesworth Pinckney ’s favorite home in Port Royal Sound, near Hilton Head. The property had been in her family since the days of Eliza Lucas Pinckney. When the relative who inherited the island was forced to sell during the Great Depression, Pinckney’s own depleted finances prevented her from keeping the island and its unproductive acres in the family, although she managed to hold on to Eldorado and her brother to Fairfield. As in the story, General Pinckney’s mansion house with its library and collection of scientific instruments had indeed washed out to sea decades before, a fitting metaphor for the end of the Age of the Pinckneys and of the South as a center of liberal thought. As Pinckney had hoped, “They Shall Return as Strangers” piqued the interest of publishers. Clifton Fadiman of Simon and Schuster inquired if she was working on a novel. Her answer was yes. Earlier, Pinckney had admitted to Allen Tate, “I have momentarily abandoned poetry...

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