I don’t know how far the Alleghanies stretch. They are the small patch of brown, half-way up the map of America on the right-hand side. They consist of parallel ranges, and cover, I suppose, more area than the British Isles. They are not very distinguished as mountains go. They are relatively low, and tree-clad. They have no violence, but abundant charm. How should they not? They pass through Virginia, where charm is laid on so thick you could saw it off in chunks and export it.
Here, in Virginia, is none of the restless energy, the determined modernity, the revolutionary fervour, which in retrospect I see to have characterized my own country. I crossed the Atlantic from the passionate antagonisms of Salisbury traffic on a market day, to the controlled, silence of New York in a rush hour. New York traffic flows in a tide too full for sound or foam, and is peaceful by comparison. I thought then that the allegedly horrifying pace of American life was a European invention; and when I got to Virginia I was certain of it. Shout at Virginia, shake it, slap its face, jump on it — Virginia will open one eye, smile vaguely, and go to sleep again.
Our base of operations is Hollins, a rich girls’ college, lapped about by fields, and set down in a fold of the Alleghanies. It is ineffably peaceful. Wherever you look, there are hills looped along the skyline. Every circumstance pleases, woos, soothes, and makes comprehension difficult. We arrived during the Indian summer, when every blade of grass, every leaf, was loaded down with cicadas, each of which seemed to be operating a small dentist’s drill. Eagles and buzzards floated a thousand feet up in the hot air. Blue jays played in the fields and a delicately built mocking-bird balanced on the white fence by our window like a lady with a parasol on a tightrope. On the day of our arrival, a mountain bear — probably walking in his sleep — wandered into the nearby town, saw himself in the glass door of the library, panicked, woke up the neighbourhood, was anaesthetized and taken home again.
Hollins sits among its mountains and fields, remembering the eighteenth century. There is a sulphur spring in the grounds, surrounded by a sort of bandstand. In the old days, mammas would take pallid or spotty daughters here to have them cleared up; and the place became a spa. Judging by the pictures of strolling ladies and young bloods driving curricles, it must have been a thriving marriage market — an activity which it has never wholly lost. But in the 1840s the mammas left, social rooms and dormitories were built, and the place became a college.
Hollins, set in its estate of several hundred acres, grew to be an enclave of colonial architecture, all white pillars and porches, grouped round a quadrangle of grass and splendid trees. Lately, a most expensive chapel has taken the place of the old one. A magnificent library building has been added, modern to the last air-conditioned, glass-fronted detail, where the bookstacks have a most generous expanse of working space round them. It is typical of the almost parody southernism of the place that the laboratories are still inadequate. But I have to admit that this choice of what things come first seems splendidly liberal to me, who have suffered from the contrary conception.
Here, then, we work gently, with cushions under us, and plate glass between us and the rest of the world. It is pleasant to contemplate the clock on the administration buildings, by which we regulate our affairs. For the clock is a Virginian clock. The minute hand toils up, lifting the heavy weight of the hour until it totters upright. Then, as if that effort had exhausted the mechanism, the hand falls down to half past three and stays there, collapsed. Long may it continue so to make a mock of the arbitrary, enslaving time-stream! It is as useless and decorative as the carillon which tinkles out Mozart minuets, or hymns, or snatches of old song, from the chapel spire.
Under the trees, along the cemented paths, go the drifts of girls, sympathetic and charming, giggling or absorbed, shy of the bearded foreigner behind his plate glass, but courteous to the helplessness of old age. Some of them are northerners, but the most part southern, and some are from the deep South. Like all women students, they are inveterate, comically obsessive note-takers, who hope by this method to avoid the sheer agony of having to think for themselves. Often they have an earnestness before the shrine of this unknown god Education, which seems at odds with their careful make-up and predatory scent. They will propose a scheme of studies which leaves them no time to eat in the middle of the day; but 40 per cent of them leave to get married before they reach the end of their studies. They are intimidating, ingenuous, and delightful; and about the realities of life in the world at large they know absolutely nothing at all.
Yet how should they? Problems are smoothed over, and have the sharp edges blunted for them by space, prosperity, and the American capacity for presenting any situation in a series of ready-made phrases. Even that problem in the South, which has made such a stir in the world does not occur here so acutely, since the coloured population in this neighbourhood is only about 10 per cent of the whole. Certainly it exists; and an Englishman, who sees everything at one remove, understands not only the discourtesy of meddling with it, but the difficulty of dealing with the problem precisely because it is not acute. Hollins is an enclave, an educated and liberal one. It has preserved almost as an archaeological relic what was inoffensive in the white/black pattern, without perhaps noticing what was going on.
Across the field outside our window is a wood, under Tinker Mountain. In the wood, and partly visible, is a hamlet, a red church with a white, clapboard spire. This is a Negro village. In the old days, when girls came to Hollins, they brought their body slaves with them, and sometimes these slaves stayed on. They settled in the hamlet, and now provide the servants for the college. I see them every afternoon, making their dignified way across the field, large, comfortable women in bright clothes, young men who go whistling and with a dancing step. As your eyes grow accustomed to the light of this ancient country, you begin to see that the man who empties your ashcan is coloured; so are the men who sweep your road or work in the powerhouse, so are the girls who clean or wash or sew, or serve in the canteen. Yet at Hollins, because of its isolation, the relationship is a historical relic. What keeps a girl out of Hollins is not a colour bar but an economic one. It costs more than £1,000 a year to keep a girl there.
For the problem is smoothed over, is down out of sight. The servants, like college servants everywhere, have a long tradition of service. They seem proud of the college and the college is proud of them. Here, embalmed, is a tiny section, a left-over bit of history, which loyalty, education and kindliness have minimized until it has a sort of willow-pattern charm. Yet north of us is an area where the public schools have shut down to avoid integration. South of us, the railway has segregated waiting rooms.
The problem is at once too foreign, too vast, and too muted for my comprehension. At least there is a fund of human goodwill here, which makes the cheap jibes flung from outside seem blunted weapons. Let me do no more, therefore, than record a scene, before the adjustments, the manoeuvres, the shrugs of history have taken it away for ever. I emerged the other day from a book-lined room to the shock of autumn’s air on the campus. A dozen coloured men stood by leaf-piles, with brooms and rakes in their hands. Some of them talked, and pushed the leaves about. Others stood motionless, leaning on rakes. They wore bright blue and red, rich brown. They worked, when they worked, with inspired slowness, under the Virginian clock. Silhouetted against the white columns, among thick trunks and clattering leaves, standing among drifts of girls who tinkled here and there with laughter, the dark men seemed a still life. They seemed happy to do this, as the girls seemed happy to do that. Passing among them in the brisker air, some obscure compulsion made me speak to the oldest man of all. He was small and gnarled, dressed in bright blue, his black face startling under a stubble of white hair. I made some inane remark about the weather, which woke him up. He laughed and crowed, and his body jerked. ‘Yas-suh!’ he said; and we both knew, with one of those psychic flashes that are so often wrong, that we were taking part in some ripe old comedy of the South — ‘Yas-suh!’
I reeled on, conscious at last of my solid presence in this mild, foreign land, and struck myself a shattering blow on the invisible glass door of the library. I tottered inside as the carillon tinkled out a minuet by Mozart; and sank into a seat among the girls who were studying the mythological sources of Oedipus and Hamlet, or surveying Spanish Literature, or reading The Rights of Man.
For the problem has not yet come consciously to Hollins. Perhaps it never will, but be by-passed. Yet the enclave is not secure. As the town expands, the value of the Hollins land goes up and presently there will be pressure to sell. Moreover, now that America has inherited an ancient mantle, exotic students are coming to Hollins; Indian and Korean, like the business interests pressing south into Virginia, they are a sign of things to come. They are a colourful sight, in the national costume which is their only defence against the ancient intolerance of the countryside. Moreover, an inter-State highway is advancing across the land, majestically shouldering hills out of its way; and like it or not, that road will divide the estate not half a mile from the campus.
Yet for today, preserved, there stands the pattern; the friendly faculty, the girls, the tall, colonial columns, the dark servants and the quiet sun.