Sterling A. Brown's a Negro Looks at the South by Sterling Allen Brown

Author:Sterling Allen Brown [Brown, Sterling Allen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Literary Collections, American, African American & Black, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, African American & Black Studies
ISBN: 9780195313994
Google: eH88DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2007-02-03T21:14:22+00:00

NO TIES THAT BIND

I saw other historical cities: Lynchburg, Virginia; Augusta and Athens, Georgia; Nashville, Louisville, Montgomery, Mobile, and Vicksburg. Although called a “valley of humility between two mountains of conceit,” North Carolina still cherishes its old homesteads like its neighbors. In New Bern I saw the well-preserved homes and churches that resembled those of far-off Salem, Massachusetts, with whom the town traded, more than they do those of nearer Williamsburg and Charleston. In the Salem part of Winston-Salem, the compact and rugged dwellings and churches, graced with the hooded entrances that the Moravian settlers brought down from Pennsylvania, had a warm dignity that pleased me more than the ostentatious homes of the tobacco barons in the suburbs of Winston.

Throughout the South almost every town had one or two showplaces. Sometimes on a back road an old columned big house would suddenly loom at the end of an avenue of cedars or out of a grove, or from high grown scrub pine. I saw many houses falling to pieces, the paint peeling or gone, the floors sprung, the roofs sagging, the blinds askew. In the towns, several decaying mansions took in poor whites or Negro roomers; I found two that were colored Y.M.C.A.s, and one that was an old folks’ home.

I saw the many styles that varied so from the hackneyed idealizations. I saw homes more beautiful than Hollywood sets, but I also saw the gimcracked ornateness that Mister Big, Major Huge, and Colonel Vast needed to bolster their egos. Many of the most imposing colonial mansions were those recently built by the South’s new rich on the outskirts of the cities. And I saw a large number of old homesteads that were merely overgrown farmhouses, some of them with incongruously pompous columns in front of frame structures that would hardly be noticed as anything special elsewhere. I saw some Georgian masterpieces, but I also covered many states. I knew that there were many more examples than those I saw, that big houses were off the beaten highways, and I allowed for the destruction of the Federal armies and the long years. But I also am sure that mansions were not the chief features of the antebellum landscape. Even if they were as numerous as the legend counts them, they were still the graceful, charming homesteads of the few who were on top of the heap.

Looking at old manors and baronies is not the same as looking at the historical Old South. I sensed quite as much history on seeing the sooty brick buildings of the Tredepan Ironworks on the canal at Richmond; the dirty aged but still busy tobacco warehouses at Lynchburg; Factors Row and the docks of Savannah, Cotton Row, Augusta; and the wharves at New Orleans.

And even more a part of the historic landscape I knew were the notched log houses. If climate dictated the piazzas of Charleston, the balconies of New Orleans, and the high-ceilinged spacious rooms of Nashville, climate and material also dictated these homesteads

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