There is a great deal of insecurity these days. A lot of people (myself included) are wondering how they will make rent over the next few months if these pandemic lockdowns continue. And should we be required to? After all, we cannot go out and sell our labor. If the government has undermined the foundation of a contractual, voluntary society, why should ordinary people take the brunt of a decision they had no part in?
This insecurity — where will I live? what will I do? — is not a new feeling for human beings, but it is certainly more intense for people today. If evicted, where would most of us go? What do we have to fall back on?
For the reporter Ben Robertson, it was an easy question to answer:
“The past that Southerners are forever talking about is not a dead past — it is a chapter from the legend that our kinfolks told us, it is a living past, living for a reason. The past is a part of the present, it is a comfort, a guide, a lesson. My Grandfather Robertson was captured in 1865 and walked after the war was over from a prison camp on the Hudson River all the way to South Carolina, a hard long journey in those days. He was ragged when he got there. Sixty-two years later, during the depression of 1932, I was working in New York, and I said to myself I need not worry too much if I lost my job — what my grandfather could do in 1865, I could do in 1932. I had the same valley to return to that he had. Both of us had the hills and the fields and home.”
Robertson came from middling farmers in Upstate South Carolina. They made their cash off cotton, raised their own food, took out no mortgages, and lived very comfortably but frugally. It is a way of life basically anathema to all of our own habits today. To live like that would be both a relief and a devastating shock to us.
But why? Perhaps because we do not remember. The past is Somewhere Else, or more importantly, it is Someone Else. It is not us. We see no image of ourselves in the past and, even more significantly, we see none of the past in ourselves. We miss the accumulated lessons that are built up over generations like the deepest forest humus, lessons which are there to sustain rich and renewing life, but only if you know where to set the roots down.
For Robertson, it was clear where his roots were. And from that, his bread and the roof over his head whenever he needed it. His family would never begrudge him coming back to what he was. All problems had been experienced before and in the structure of the family and the community, all such problems accounted for. The living past is the greatest foresight.
Of course this touches deeply at our own insecurity. Almost none of us have a farm or long-standing community to return to if we were to lose our jobs and homes. The real matters of feeding, clothing, and sheltering ourselves are, paradoxically, even more acute in this age of unrivaled prosperity. Our blessings are thoroughly counterbalanced by the enormity of our possible fall.
I think this is a legitimate concern, this lack of a place that can persist through the crises of civilization without losing its life-sustaining ability. But let us not forget that we still have the ability to remember, to turn over the weathered face of that living past and see its real reflection. Perhaps we are not descended from Confederate soldiers who, even in their advanced years, could sleep out under the stars wherever night found them. Perhaps we could not walk all the way home. But that may not be our own past reflected in us. There are other sources of strength from our inherited past, instances of fortitude in the face of awful odds that can instruct us. And we should listen to those as much as take inspiration from others. We must do what is in our own nature to do. Therein lies our chance.
If you have not read “Red Hills and Cotton,” I would highly recommend it. Having gone to college nearby, I can attest that it captures that distinct feeling you get from rural Upstate South Carolina — the land of Walhalla and Pumpkintown. If you do buy a copy, please consider doing it through Bookshop.org — it supports independent booksellers and if you follow the link, I get a little cut (helps keep the lights on and the whiskey flowing).