George Washington, never so versatile and wide-ranging in his interests as Thomas Jefferson, was nonetheless a man of many parts who knew well how to employ his leisure time. Firmly implanted in the American mythology is Washington the solemn, taciturn soldier and statesman, the Rembrandt Peale portrait of the postage stamps; less well known is the pre-Revolutionary Virginia planter who was devoted equally to horse racing and the theater and who regularly traveled the hundred and fifty miles south from Mount Vernon across the somnolent Tidewater to Williamsburg—then the capital of the colony—where he placed bets on the horses by day, and by night attended performances of Shakespeare by troupes imported from London. If today one should wonder how that Tidewater countryside appeared to Washington's eyes, the answer is: much as it does now. For to a degree largely unmatched in America, the region resembles in topography its ancient, earliest configuration.
It is the oldest part of our country, and suffered its upheaval and exploitation not in the nineteenth century like New England nor in the present century like California, but decades before we became a nation. Recklessly overcultivated in tobacco for more than a century, the once-rich bottomlands and green fields became fallow and depleted, so that even by the time of Washington's later years the abandoned farms and pastures were becoming reclaimed by new growths of woodland—oak and ash and sycamore and scrub pine. Long before the invention of the steam locomotive, much of the region—especially in the northern reaches, in the area just south of the Potomac and bordering on Chesapeake Bay—had subsided into the lazy sleep of a depopulated backwater, lacking either industry or productive agriculture, and for this reason (somewhat rare in the pattern of American regional growth), the absence of factories and railroads and great superhighways left the landscape mercifully unmarked. For this reason, too, the Tidewater has retained, generally speaking, a unique, unspoiled loveliness. Of course, architectural styles have changed the face of the landscape; shopping centers and split-level houses, indistinguishable from those elsewhere in America, have set their imprint here and there upon the land, and one should not visit the Tidewater in the expectation that each small town will yield a glimpse of something resembling Colonial Williamsburg or a Christopher Wren church. Also, the sprawling industrial and military complex that has grown up around Norfolk and Hampton Roads does not represent the quality of the Tidewater of which I speak.
Nevertheless, the old mansions and the eighteenth-century courthouses and churches still exist, their weathered brick rising out of the countryside from behind a grove of oaks in the most pleasantly disarming way. Such great old manor houses as Westover and Brandon and Carter's Grove still reign in lordly and stunning elegance along the banks of the James (these are the homes that H. L. Mencken, in outrage over the encroachment of all that was hideous in American architecture, described as the most perfectly proportioned dwellings ever fashioned by man).
Yet beyond all these noble relics of the past, there is the landscape itself, sometimes unspectacular and ordinary (cornfields, pine woods, country stores) but more often possessing a sorrowing beauty—everywhere lovelier and more mellow and melancholy and fledged with green than the hard-clay country that dominates the higher elevations of the Upper South. All this has to do, of course, with the rivers, the noble waterways that indent the face of the Tidewater and give the region so much of its character, including, indeed, its very name. Rarely here is one more than a few miles from a great brackish tideland stream, like the Rappahannock or the York or the James (and these are monumental rivers, too, in breadth if not in length: the James at its mouth is nearly six miles across, one of the widest estuaries in America), so that what is specifically Southern becomes commingled with the waterborne, the maritime. Thus the vistas of the solitary stands of pinewoods and barren cornfields, the sawmill in a remote clearing, the sudden immaculate and simple beauty of a freshly painted clapboard Negro church in a sunny grove are combined with a sense of broad, flat reaches of tidal shallows, mighty river estuaries, fish stakes and oyster boats, inlets and coves and bays, wild sudden squalls blowing out of the Chesapeake, the serene magnificence of sunrise coming up over the mouth of the Rappahannock, blood-red through the milk of morning mists. This is a low, drowsing, placid topography, literally half drowned. From the exhausted land the people have turned to the water for sustenance—river and estuary and bay. There is an odd truth in the remark that every native of the Tidewater is a skilled boatman, even if he is a farmer.
I love the place-names of the Virginia Tidewater—that juxtaposition of the Indian and old England, which is more mellifluous and striking than any other place in America. The names of the counties alone are resonant with the past: Essex and Middlesex and York, Isle of Wight and Sussex, King William, Surry, Prince George, King and Queen. These are mingled with the ancestral names of the red men, who still exist in diminishing numbers, isolated on small reservations, where they make a modest living by fishing for the fat shad that still teem in the rivers bearing their tribal names: Pamunkey and Mattaponi, Chickahominy, Powhatan and Kecoughtan, Chuckatuck and Corotoman. Names like these have a lazy beauty, corresponding to the meandering pace of a bygone era.
Yet at the same time, no place of comparable area owns such an abundance of curiously or fancifully named hamlets and villages—Ark, Rescue, Ordinary, Naxera, Shadow, Zuni, Lively (the posted speed here is five miles an hour), Bumpass. These are often nothing more than a crossroads, a general store with a post office, and here one is most likely to hear the throaty, slurred Tidewater speech—beyond doubt the speech of the Father of His Country. Encapsulated in time and space, the natives of the remoter reaches of this part of Virginia still use the phonetic forms of a language spoken two and a half centuries ago by their ancestors, settlers from Devon and Dorset. Its quality cannot be fully savored unless heard, but it may be suggested by noting that in the Tidewater you never go out but “oot,” and that “house” rhymes less directly with “mouse” than with “noose.” Still occasionally heard is the “yar” sound, in which “garden” becomes “gyarden,” “far” turns into “fyah,” and that old family name of Carter, one of Virginia's most illustrious, is transmuted into “Cyatah.” This locution was, in my childhood, largely the property of old ladies fragrant with lavender—usually Daughters of the Confederacy—and still hovers in my memory as the quintessential sound of Southern womanhood and good breeding. Alas, it is dying out and will soon be gone forever, absorbed into the flattened-out tonality of Basic American.
Neither the Tidewater nor the rest of Virginia is, of course, the Deep South, but the underlying quality of the region remains, ultimately, distinctly Southern, adumbrated by the memory of a tragic past. Some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War were fought on this soil, the selfsame soil to which there was brought for the first time—at Jamestown, in 1619, in the form of a handful of African slaves—the institution that became, in large part, the basis for that awful conflict. The legacy still remains. A majority of the Tidewater counties is heavily populated by Negroes; in many counties Negroes outnumber whites in a ratio resembling parts of Alabama and Mississippi. Here, as elsewhere in the South (and the North), there are grievous inequities; it is not in order to minimize those inequities that I reflect on the fact that no part of the South where such a racial composition is found has been so free of friction or strife. The Ku Klux Klan has never found a welcome here; the reign of terror that swept the South in the 1920s and 1930s—the decades of blazing crosses and lynchings—would have been unthinkable in the Tidewater.
I suggest that over the reach of decades a certain way of life may produce attitudes—a sense of fair play, an abhorrence of violence, a respect for the dignity of men—that supersede all other considerations and come to dominate moral conduct. However strongly it may be argued that this is not enough, it remains a tradition to be reckoned with, and the Virginia Tidewater lays justifiable claim to such a heritage. The region possesses the shortcomings common to all places, but the land and its people have achieved a certain harmony. Perhaps more than in any other comparable part of America, men have learned to get along with one another. It would be a pleasant irony if the land where the American dilemma began—close by the shores of the tranquil and lovely James, with its memory of black chained cargoes—should by its way of life come to embody an answer to that same dilemma.
[McCall’s, July 1968.]