South and West: From A Notebook. Joan Didion

saw that night was a world so rich and complex and I was almost disoriented, a world complete unto itself, a world of smooth surfaces broken occasionally by a flash of eccentricity so deep that it numbed any attempt at interpretation.

      “I guess nobody knows more about the South than the people in this room right now,” my host allowed several times before dinner. We were at his house in the Garden District with the requisite bound volumes of the Sewanee and the Southern Review and the requisite Degas portrait of his great-great-grandmother, and he was talking about his wife and their friend, an architect of good Mobile family who specialized in the restoration and building of New Orleans Greek Revival houses.

      And of course he was talking about himself. “Ben C.,” the others called him, their voices fondly inflected. “You just stop that, Ben C.,” as he bullied the two women, his sister and his wife working together on a Junior League project, a guidebook to New Orleans. Already Ben C. had demanded to know what “athletics” my husband played, and why I had been allowed, in the course of doing some reporting a few years before, to “spend time consorting with a lot of marijuana-smoking hippie trash.”

      “Who allowed you?” he repeated.

      I said that I did not know quite what he meant.

      Ben C. only stared at me.

      “I mean, who wouldn’t have allowed me?”

      “You do have a husband?” he said finally. “This man I’ve thought was your husband for several years, he is your husband?”

      The evening, it developed, had started off wrong for Ben C. It seemed that he had called some of his cousins to come for dinner, and they had made excuses, and he had found that “inexcusable.” It further seemed that the excuse made by one cousin, who it would turn out was a well-known southern writer, was a previous engagement with the director of a Head Start program, and Ben C. had found that particularly inexcusable.

      “What am I meant to conclude?” he demanded rhetorically of his wife. “Am I meant to conclude he’s certifiable?”

      “Maybe you’re meant to conclude he didn’t care to come to dinner,” she said, and then, as if to cover her irreverence, she sighed. “I only hope he doesn’t get too mixed up with the Negroes. You know what happened to George Washington Cable.”

      I tried to remember what had happened to George Washington Cable.

      “He ended up having to go north, is what happened.”

      I said that I wanted only to know what people in the South were thinking and doing.

      He continued to gaze at me. He had the smooth, rounded face of well-off New Orleans, that absence of angularity which characterizes the local genetic pool. I tried to think who had incurred his wrath by going up north and whining.

      “I would just guess that we know a little more about the subject,” Ben C. said finally, his voice rising, “than one Mr. Willie Morris.”

      We ate trout with shallots and mushrooms. We drank some white wine, we drank some more bourbon. We passed the evening. I never learned why the spectre of one Mr. Willie Morris had materialized in that living room in the Garden District, nor did I ask.

      Ben C.’s wife and sister, Mrs. Benjamin C. Toledano and Mrs. Beauregard Redmond, soon to be Mrs. Toledano Redmond, had many suggestions for understanding the South. I must walk Bourbon or Royal to Chartres, I must walk Chartres to Esplanade. I must have coffee and doughnuts at the French Market. I should not miss St. Louis Cathedral, the Presbytère, the Cabildo. We should have lunch at Galatoire’s: trout amandine or trout Marguery. We should obtain a copy of The Great Days of the Garden District. We should visit Asphodel, Rosedown, Oakley Plantation. Stanton Hall in Natchez. The Grand Hotel in Point Clear. We should have dinner at Manale’s, tour Coliseum Square Park. I should appreciate the grace, the beauty of their way of life. These graceful preoccupations seemed to be regarded by the women in a spirit at once dedicated and merely tolerant, as if they lived their lives on several quite contradictory levels.

      —

      One afternoon we took the ferry to Algiers and drove an hour or so down the river, in Plaquemines Parish. This is peculiar country. Algiers is a doubtful emulsion of white frame bungalows and jerry-built apartment complexes, the Parc Fontaine Apts. and so forth, and the drive on down the river takes you through a landscape more metaphorical than any I have seen outside the Sonoran Desert.

      Here and there one is conscious of the levee, off to the left. Corn and tomatoes grow aimlessly, as if naturalized. I am too accustomed to agriculture as agribusiness, the rich vistas of the California valleys where all the resources of Standard Oil and the University of California have been brought to bear on glossy constant productivity. No Hunting of Quadrupeds, a sign read in Belle Chasse. What could that mean? Can you hunt reptiles? Bipeds? There are dead dogs by the road, and a sinking graveyard in a grove of live oak.

      Getting close to Port Sulphur we began to see sulphur works, the tanks glowing oddly in the peculiar light. We ran over three snakes in the hour’s drive, one of them a thick black moccasin already dead, twisted across the one lane. There were run-down antiques places, and tomato stands, and a beauty shop called Feminine Fluff. The snakes, the rotting undergrowth, sulphurous light: the images are so specifically those of the nightmare world that when we stopped for gas, or directions, I had to steel myself, deaden every nerve, in order to step from the car onto the crushed oyster shells in front of the gas station. When we got back to the hotel I stood in the shower for almost half an hour trying to wash myself clean of the afternoon, but then I started thinking about where the water came from, what dark places it had pooled in.