Tobago Tobacco Trinidado

Naipaul's last chapter of A Turn in the South--entitled "Smoke"--is about eastern North Carolina. Now and then he draws parallels between aspects of the American South and his native Trinidad and Tobago. Here's one such digression.

THE WORD "tobacco" is thought to have come from Tobago [doubtful!], the dependency or sister island of Trinidad. And before "Virginia" became the word in England for tobacco [huh?], tobacco was sometimes called "Trinidado," after the island of Trinidad, part of the Spanish Empire since its discovery by Columbus in 1498. Tobacco was a native Indian crop. But after the discovery and plunder of Mexico in 1519-20 and Peru fifteen years later, the Spaniards were interested only in gold and silver; they were not interested in tobacco. It was the English and the Dutch and the French who went to Trinidad to load up with tobacco. 'there were hardly ever more than fifty Spaniards at a time in Trinidad in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Gulf of Paria, between Trinidad and Venezuela, a vast safe harbor, was nearly always full of foreign ships. An English explorer and diplomatist, Sir Thomas Roe (who later went to the Mogul court at Agra in India as the representative of King James), came to the Gulf of Paria one year and saw fifteen English, French, and Dutch ships "freighting smoke." Another English official reported that the tobacco trade might in time be worth more than all the Spanish gold and silver from the Americas.

The trade was illegal, however--even though crops were grown in Trinidad with the complicity of the Spanish governor. Under Spanish law only Spain could trade with a Spanish colony. Occasional sweeps were made by the Spanish navy against foreign interlopers in the Gulf of Paria; and foreign sea captains and sailors who were caught could be hanged on the spot. And the Indian tobacco fields--tobacco a crop requiring such great care, as I was to see in North Carolina--were flattened: part of the process by which in three hundred years both the native Indian population and tobacco were to be rooted out from Trinidad.

The island that the British captured (without a shot) in 1797 was a sugarcane slave colony. And it was to work in the sugarcane estates that, thirty years or so after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, Indians were brought over from India on indenture. It was sugarcane that gave a rhythm to the life of rural Indian communities. Tobacco was no longer a local crop.

I would have been disbelieving, and delighted, to be told as a child that Trinidad had once been known for its tobacco. To me tobacco was glamorous, remote, from England (in absurdly luxurious airtight tins), or American (in soft, aromatic, cellophane-wrapped packets), something from an advertisement in Life.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 278-279.

Here are a few additional tidbits from the Webster's Dictionary Online entry for tobacco.

The Foolish Dictionary (1904) defines tobacco thus: "A nauseating plant that is consumed by but two creatures; a large, green worm and--man. The worm doesn't know any better.

A "Special Definition" adds more history about the plant, including this bit.

Bright Tobacco

Prior to the American Civil War, the tobacco grown in the US was almost entirely fire-cured dark-leaf. This was planted in fertile lowlands, used a robust variety of leaf, and was fire cured or air cured.

Sometime after the War of 1812, demand for a milder, lighter, more aromatic tobacco arose. Ohio and Maryland both innovated quite a bit with milder varieties of the tobacco plant. Farmers around the country experimented with different curing processes. But the breakthrough didn't come until 1854.

It had been noticed for centuries that sandy, highland soil produced thinner, weaker plants. Abisha Slade, of Caswell County, North Carolina had a good deal of infertile, sandy soil, and planted the new "gold-leaf" varieties on it. When Stephen, Abisha's slave, used charcoal instead of wood to cure the crop, the first real "bright" tobacco was produced.

News spread through the area pretty quickly. The worthless sandy soil of the Appalachian piedmont was suddenly profitable, and people rapidly developed flue-curing techniques, a more efficient way of smoke-free curing. By the outbreak of the War, the town of Danville, Virginia actually had developed a bright-leaf market for the surrounding area in Caswell County, North Carolina and Pittsylvania County, Virginia.

Danville was also the main railway head for Confederate soldiers going to the front. These brought bright tobacco with them from Danville to the lines, traded it with each other and Union soldiers, and developed quite a taste for it. At the end of the war, the soldiers went home and suddenly there was a national market for the local crop. Caswell and Pittsylvania counties were the only two counties in the South that experienced an increase in total wealth after the war.

So "bright" tobacco is God's gift to Piedmont farmers with bad soil, just as moonshine is God's gift to mountaineers who don't have the roads to get bulkier products of their corn to market. And then, of course, there's the opium poppy, the coca leaf, etc.

Well, this topic could go on and on, so I'll just close with a few startling items from Gene Borio's fascinating tobacco timeline.

• 1633: TURKEY: Sultan Murad IV orders tobacco users executed as infidels. As many as 18 a day were executed. Some historians consider the ban an anti-plague measure, some a fire-prevention measure.


• 1634: RUSSIA: Czar Alexis creates penalties for smoking: 1st offense is whipping, a slit nose, and transportation to Siberia. 2nd offense is execution.

Those New World tobacco plantations were the Afghan or Burmese poppy plantations of their day. Three centuries later, however, Turkish tobacco was king.

By 1911, even though Duke's American Tobacco Co. (ATC) controlled 92% of the world's tobacco business, most popular American brands were Turkish blends, with names like Fatima (L&M), Omar (ATC), and Zubelda (Lorillard), to be followed in 1913 by Camel (RJR), which by 1923 had captured 43% of the US market.

Good Soldier Outlier: Induction

The Army recruiter in Charlottesville had sent word to the induction center at Richmond that he was sending them a couple of hippies. But my brother and I had shaved off our beards and trimmed our hair before arriving there.

We entered the Army on the same day in April 1969. My brother, younger but more precocious than I, had dropped out of high school, and then finished his GED in the States. After I had dropped out of college, we had whimsically decided to head for Mexico in my little Studebaker Lark, with hardly enough cash to pay for the gas.

We were broke by the time we got to New Orleans, so we worked as day laborers until the engine broke down. Dad would only send us money to fix it if we promised to come back home--which we did, and then began negotiating with the local Army recruiter. After taking a battery of aptitude tests, I signed up for language school and my brother for warrant officer flight school--flying helicopters.

Somewhere on the induction questionnaire I had tried to salve my pacifist conscience by opining that I was signing up for language school in hopes of eventually helping to increase international understanding rather than making war--or words to that effect. Well, somebody must have actually looked over our answers, because my brother and I were both called in for questioning, separately, and forced to affirm that we would indeed obey orders.

After the usual induction procedures--standing in line nearly naked while medics jammed their fingers into our crotches and asked us to turn aside and cough; holding our arms still so the immunization guns wouldn't draw blood; demonstrating whether or not our bare feet were flat--we were herded onto a train, me as far as Ft. Benning, GA, my brother to Ft. Polk, LA.

I had grown up riding trains in Japan, but this was only my second train ride in the U.S. (The first was from Martinsburg, WV, to San Francisco, CA, on the way to Japan when I was one year old.) People were playing dollar-ante poker at the far end of the car; while we were playing nickel-ante poker at our end. I was on a winning streak, but my brother was the one losing the most, and I had to extend him credit. Whenever I was up a few dollars, I would buy a round of beers.

The next morning we got off the train at Columbus, GA, some of us more broke than others, and waited for the bus from Ft. Benning to come pick us up. When a Drill Sergeant finally arrived, one trouble-seeking punk from Georgia asked him whether Drill Sergeants worked bankers' hours. He later paid dearly for that remark.

We were still innocent then of how fearsome a Drill Instructor (DI) could be, but we would begin to find out as soon as we reached the other end of that bus ride.

Naipaul's Nashville: Baptists

Naipaul titles his chapter on Nashville, "Sanctities": referring to both religion and music.

The magazine in my hotel room, mixing its metaphors, said that Nashville was "the buckle of the Bible Belt." Churches took up twelve pages of the Yellow Pages directory. The Tennessean had a "religion news" editor, and there was a weekly page of "religion news," with many advertisements for churches (especially Church of Christ churches), some with a photograph of the stylish-looking pastor or preacher. Most of the Protestants in Nashville belonged to the fundamentalist frontier faiths; the predominant denomination was the Southern Baptist.

The classier churches, the Presbyterian and the Episcopalian, looked at this Baptist predominance from a certain social distance, without rancor or competitiveness.

Dr. Tom Ward, the Episcopalian pastor of Christ Church, said that the Southern Baptists who sometimes came to his church found it too quiet: "'Y'all don't preach.' The Baptist ethos is the preached word. Which is the ethos of the Christian church in the South. Preaching meaning the emotional speech rather than the learned essay of the Church of England--preaching the word and counting the number of saved souls. But I have to say this. To say, 'I'm a Southern Baptist,' is another way of saying, 'I'm a Southerner.' What I mean is that that is the ethos, religiously. What is buried in their psyches is the fear of hellfire and damnation. My father was read out of the United Methodist Church in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1931--when he was seventeen--because he went to a dance. That's the Methodist Church. A lot of the Ku Klux Klan literature is Christian. Revivalism--why? To rekindle the spirit. What spirit? One bad step; many bad steps; and you have the Ku Klux Klan."

The Presbyterian pastor of Westminster, K. C. Ptomey, agreed that the Southern Baptist identity was in part the Southern identity. "That's very accurate. You see, a Southern Baptist distinguishes himself from an American Baptist. American Baptists are much more open-minded; they are not so rigid. I would add about the Southern Baptists: it has to do with sharing biblical literalism; it has to do with morality. For example, to be a Southern Baptist is to be a teetotaler. Morality, dancing, drinking--it encompasses the whole of life."

I asked him about the revivalism. "The revivalist mind-set is 'to get back to God.' You often hear the words used."

"'Back'?"

"'Lost' is the word they use. And what they mean by that is 'damned.' And therefore they need to be revived."

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 233-234.

Naipaul's Nashville: Music

Naipaul interviews Nashville songwriter Bob McDill.

No amount of questioning, no amount of explaining, even from someone as willing to talk as Bob McDill was, could take one to the magic: the calling up and recognition of impulses that on the surface were simple, but which, put together with music, made rich with a chorus, seemed to catch undefined places in the heart and memory.

Mama said, don't go near that river.
Don't go hangin' round ole Catfish John.
But come the mornin' I'd always be there
Walkin' in his footsteps in the sweet delta dawn.

Almost nothing at first. But then the images and the associations come: Mama, river, catfish, footsteps, delta, dawn.

Bob McDill said he had had to learn the subculture. But the Southern images and words of his best songs are far from the stylized motifs of a good deal of country music. And though he makes much of writing in an office in a matter-of-fact, day-to-day way--and perhaps because he talks in a matter-of-fact way, since the mystery cannot be described--it is probably true that, when moved, he writes with that most private part of the self with which Proust said serious writers write.

He says that his best song is "Good Ole Boys like Me."

When I was a kid Uncle Remus he put me to bed,
With a picture of Stonewall Jackson above my head.
Then Daddy came in to kiss his little man
With gin on his breath and a Bible in his hand.
And he talked about honor and things I should know.
Then he staggered a little as he went out the door....
I guess we're all gonna be what we're gonna be.
So what do you do with good ole boys like me?

Every detail there was considered. His aim, he said, was to get as much of the South as he could in a few lines. And the song has become very famous; many people I spoke to referred to it; the mood of the song spoke for them. A "good ole boy" ... was a redneck; but it was also a more general word for an old Southerner, someone made by the old ways. The song might seem ironical, then celebratory. But below that it is an elegy for the South, old history and myth, old community, old faith.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 247-248.

U.S. Army Deserter Charles Jenkins Talks

NK Zone links to a Far Eastern Economic Review story on Charles Jenkins that is the most sympathetic portrait I've read so far--engineered by his very capable military lawyer apparently.

Kudos to Jeremy Kirk of the Far Eastern Economic Review for getting the first interview with U.S. defector Charles Robert Jenkins. He is now in Japan with his Japanese wife Hitomi Soga (who as a young girl was abducted to N.Korea), and is wanted for desertion by the U.S. military. Several interesting things came out of the interview:

- He plans to turn himself in to the U.S. military, to "clear my conscience." He pleads guilty to at least 1 of the four charges against him.
- He was beaten frequently by another U.S. defector, James Dresnok (who will soon be profiled in a documentary as noted recently by NKzone).
- He suffers from panic disorder as a result of the way he was treated in North Korea.
- He once attempted to leave N.Korea by requesting asylum at the Russian embassy.
- He says he and his wife Hitomi shared a hatred for the North Korean regime.
- He says that earlier this year, Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi had offered to take him back to Japan. He declined because North Korean authorities had threatened him.
- He is offering the U.S. government information about other foreign nationals used as spies in exchange for an agreement in which he would be sent home to his family in the U.S. rather than to prison.

Here are a few snippets from a longer FEER article linked via Oranckay.

Jenkins arrived in North Korea already a service veteran. He dropped out of school in North Carolina in the seventh grade, not long after the death of his father, and in 1955, at 15, he entered the National Guard. After an honourable discharge in April 1958, he enlisted in the regular Army. By August 1960 he had begun a 13-month tour in South Korea, during which he was promoted to sergeant; he was returned for a second tour in September, 1964. Then, on a bone-chilling night early the following January, on patrol along the Demilitarized Zone, the 24-year-old sergeant with an unblemished nine-year service record vanished. The U.S. government considers him a deserter, saying that he left behind letters stating his intention to defect; members of his family in the U.S. have said they are convinced that he was captured by the communist state....

Now that he's left the country, Jenkins no longer disguises his bitterness at the North Korean regime. His legal defence is based in part on the notion that he learned to feign fealty to a regime he despised to avoid death and keep his family together....

What he wants now is an end to a nearly four-decade Odyssey, as he prepares to turn himself over to the Americans. He has no interest in getting a civilian attorney. "The American Army has supplied, assigned a very capable man to me, to help me, bring me to military justice. I don't think I need no civilians. All I want to do is clear myself with the American Army."

I don't know why I feel any emotional investment in this story. Maybe it's watching a stoically emotional Hitomi Soga with a camera in her face on so many Japanese news stories. Maybe it's wanting to get beyond the absolutely idiotic fixation on Vietnam in the current U.S. presidential campaign.

Please, can we just forgive Clinton and Cheney and Brokaw and Matthews and O'Reilly and Russert and everyone else who avoided military service altogether, and Bush and Gephardt for taking the National Guard route, and Gore and Safire for taking the military reporter route (and me for taking the language-school route), and Kerry for bailing out on his Swiftboat "Band of Brothers" just as soon as he got his third purple heart? Jenkins wasn't a politically ambitious officer. And he was very far from being a Yalie. He was a hardscrabble, ill-educated NCO, who seems to have done something very stupid nearly 40 years ago. He's willing to face military justice--as he should--and to pay a price to keep his family together.

Could we please just concentrate a bit more on current atrocities and continuing atrocities?

The Mississippi Frontier

Naipaul's chapter on Mississippi is entitled "The Frontier, The Heartland." Until reading him, I had never considered Mississippi to be a frontier state. But it is, at least in part. And I should have remembered from reading Frederick Law Olmstead's The Cotton Kingdom many years ago.

"My mother and father used to tell me about when they would hang people in the courthouse square. Legal hangings, not lynchings. That was when my father and mother were children. And my daddy was born in 1897. And that was just abhorrent to me--and it was to them. These were stories that people would tell you as you were growing up. I think we've come a long way. It seems like people are becoming more civilized, I hope."

The stories told to Ellen as she was growing up were frontier stories; that was how I regarded them. They had echoes of any number of Western films; and it was remarkable to hear them from someone who had just turned sixty. In one lifetime, then, it seemed that she had moved from frontier culture, or the relics of a frontier culture, to late twentieth-century Jackson and the United States. It gave a new cast to my thoughts, and a new cast to my conversation with people....

Ellen's thoughts, just before we separated, were of her father, who had died when she was thirteen. "My father told me you never got ahead by stepping on somebody's back. We all need to come up together."

That had been the great discovery of my travels so far in the South. In no other part of the world had I found people so driven by the idea of good behavior and the good religious life. And that was true for black and white.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), p. 164.

I must confess a family scandal. One of my great great uncles was hanged as a horse thief in Wyoming (via Texas) in 1878, a fact which so scandalized my maternal grandfather as to cause him to scratch his middle name (which he shared with that uncle) out of the family Bible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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].

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stepin Fetchit in Trinidad

"Does the name Stepin Fetchit mean anything to you?"

It certainly did. Stepin Fetchit was adored in my childhood by the blacks of Trinidad. He was adored not only because he was funny and did wonderful things with his seemingly disjointed body and had a wonderful walk and a wonderful voice, and was given extravagant words to speak; he was adored by Trinidad black people because he appeared in films, at a time when Hollywood stood for an almost impossible glamour; and he was also adored--most importantly--because, at a time when the various races of Trinidad were socially separate and the world seemed fixed forever that way, with segregation to the north in the United States, with Africa ruled by Europe, with South Africa the way it was (and not at all a subject of local black concern), and Australia and New Zealand the way they were--at that time in Trinidad, Stepin Fetchit was seen on the screen in the company of white people. And to Trinidad blacks--who looked down at that time on Africans, and laughed and shouted and hooted in the cinema whenever Africans were shown dancing or with spears--the sight of Stepin Fetchit with white people was like a dream of a happier world.

It wasn't of this adored figure that Jack Leland was speaking, though. He had another, matter-of-fact, local attitude. He said, "The ambitious people went north, and we were left with the Stepin Fetchits." Now there was a movement back; not big, but noticeable.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), p. 109.

Marshallese Spelling Reforms

The public renunciation by several media giants of spelling reforms promulgated in Germany less than a decade ago has generated some discussion in the blogosphere, notably on Rainy Day, Crooked Timber, and a Fistful of Euros, the last two with wide-ranging comment threads.

To take the discussion a little farther afield, I'd like to add a glimpse of what teachers and writers of two Micronesian languages are up against. In Marshallese and Yapese, spelling reforms promulgated in the early 1970s have yet to take hold. (I use "promulgated" to mean 'imposed by specialists whose expertise is unimpeachable, but whose vision is clouded by thoroughly impractical ideals'.)

In both cases, the new orthographies suffer from two major drawbacks. (1) The only major literature written in each language has been the Bible. One tampers with holy scripture at one's peril. Just witness how many Christians still stick to the King James Bible or to Latin liturgy. (2) Linguistic experts were overzealously committed to the "one phoneme, one symbol" principle of orthography design. Among all the languages I've dabbled in, Marshallese, Yapese, and possibly Nauruan seem the most resistant to any orthography that places that principle above all others.

Here's a bit of a glimpse at Marshallese. Yapese will follow in another post.

Marshallese can be analyzed as having only four vowel phonemes that differ by height, but whose roundness (oh-ness vs. eh-ness) or backness (uh-ness vs. eh-ness) depend on their neighboring consonants. For instance, the vowel phoneme /e/ can sound like eh (open e), uh (schwa), or oh (o). In the textbook Spoken Marshallese (1969) the vowels are written i, e, a, & (yes, ampersand, but it was later replaced with an ę). The linguist Mark Hale refers to these four phonemes as cup of coffee, telephone, yinyang, and soccer ball, presumably because each word or phrase contains the varying sound values of the respective abstract phoneme.

Marshallese consonants distinguish only three main positions of articulation: lips (p, m), tongue tip (t, n), and tongue back (k, ng). Voicing (t vs. d, p vs. b) is not distinctive, but three secondary articulations are: "light"/palatal (py, my, ly), "heavy"/velar (p, m, l), and rounding (kw, ngw, lw). The parenthetical examples are not orthographic, but only intended to hint at pronunciation differences. One solution is to write the "heavy" consonants as if they were voiced: b, d, g vs. p, t, k, but that doesn't help with the nasals: m, n, ng (the latter also written g).

The "light" consonants front the neighboring vowels (e > eh), the "heavy" consonants back them (e > uh), and the round consonants round them (e > oh). Two different consonant types on either side can pull the vowel in two different directions, creating dipththongs.

Examples of "improvements" in the 1969 textbook orthography:

• 'Hello'
  Old: Yokwe yok
  New: Yi'yaqey y&q


• 'I'm going to Ailinglaplap / Jaluit'
  Old: Ij etal ñan Ailinglaplap / Jaluit
  New: Yij yetal gan Hay&l&gļapļap / Jalw&j

Since Marshallese makes too many distinctions for the standard keyboard, a linguistically optimal solution to facilitate literacy in Marshallese could go in either of two directions. The first direction seems by and large to prevail.

• Write more vowels than strictly necessary in order to keep them less abstract and because vowel diacritics are easier to keyboard, while relying on the neighboring vowels to show some of the consonant distinctions. This allows people to write with lower levels of linguistic or computer literacy.


• Write only the minimal (four) vowel distinctions, and add diacritics to distinguish all the consonants in order to show the full beauty of the underlying phonological system. This requires higher standards of linguistic and computer literacy before people can write their own language.

I would suggest that a socially optimal orthography might get by with even fewer alphabetic distinctions. People could write fewer vowels and consonants than would be optimal in isolation, while relying instead on sentential, semantic, or social context to reduce ambiguity. But this approach would make linguists feel rather less useful.

A revised Marshallese Bible was published in 2002. I'm not sure which of the several previous orthographic practices it relies on. Marshallese editions of (portions of) the Bible go back to the the 1860s, after the first missionaries had arrived, some of them from Hawai‘i.

Sample PDFs of Marshallese materials in a vowel-rich, consonant-poor orthography are accessible from the Pacific Area Language Materials website.

SOURCES: Heather Willson, A Brief Introduction to Marshallese Phonology (PDF, UCLA); Byron Bender, Spoken Marshallese (Hawai‘i, 1969); R.W.P. Brasington, Epenthesis and deletion in loan phonology (PDF, U. Reading, 1981).

UPDATE: David at Rishon-Rishon examines the question of "social optimality" at greater length, with evidence from Russian and Hebrew, noting that Russian writes consonantal palatalization on the vowels, while Hebrew writes velarization on the consonants.

U.S. Dialect Survey Map and Results

Like so many of the old Anglo-immigrant stock along the coasts from Cape Cod to Chesapeake Bay, I say ahnt and peeKAHN. I alternate between UMbrella when I'm not thinking about it and umBRELLA when I stop to think. And, although I pronounce poem in two syllables, my reduced vowel ("barred i") always elicits correction from my daughter. What these dialect survey results show is how mixed-up, scattered about, and network-based U.S. dialects really are. The old regions overlap all over the place.

Protest: "It's what we know how to do."

V.S. Naipaul interviews a white liberal activist southern woman in Atlanta in 1987.

"Do you think protest is being so formalized that even black people are beginning to lose contact with what they feel, and often say what they think is expected of them?"

"I think that rote and rhetoric have replaced outrage. The first thing that happened after the very real shock about the business in Forsyth County--the shock that it, the Southern violence, wasn't dead--what swung into action then was the perfect march. And we knew just exactly how to do it. As though some cosmic march chairman pulled all the switches--and, goodness, in a week we had the perfect march.

"We had the right component of public-safety awareness, the right component of media awareness. The right crowd makeup, a nice balance of young blacks and old battle-scarred lions; and we had the right component of white liberals. You wouldn't have found an ex-president marching in that first civil-rights march. You know, the organization! The buses appeared, just like that. That's Hosea [Williams]. Boy, can he stage a civil disobedience now!"

Wasn't it good, though, that protest in the United States could be ritualized like this?

"I don't want to sound pejorative. How else would I have it? I am so thankful no lives were lost in Forsyth County, no harm was done. What I miss are the howls of pure outrage that greeted the murder of the three civil-rights workers in Mississippi. In the 1960s. But it was the spilled blood that called out the outrage. And we must not have the blood."

But there was this to the formalization of protest: there was an orthodoxy of thought about race and rights. Perhaps people would be censoring themselves sometimes, to appear to be saying the right thing.

Anne Siddons said, "I guess that happens in all revolutions. They don't end. They just pass into caricature over the years. And therefore they lose their credibility. The civil-rights movement will lose its energy and peter out into a series of sporadic brush fires, as other things come up. The civil-rights movement began to die as the peace movement and the women's movement came to life in the sixties. As I said, Americans protest anything. We are protesters. But protest made the country. It's what we know how to do."

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 44-45.