Memories of a Caroloregian: the Kingsport pages

Jean Nicaise

Translator's note: Square brackets [ ] enclose clarifications or explanations.  [Sic] means the previous word appears as per the original. Italics show when Nicaise himself uses English.

Bible Belt

          Churches play a leading role in the social life of the United States. They provide insurance, make loans at low interest, and help out families with financial or emotional problems. Atheists are lumped together with communists as the worst of the worst. Even though it comes at the end of the century [when Nicaise was composing the memoir] the following anecdote applies. In his famous TV broadcast Inside the actors' studio, James Lipton interviews famous personalities of stage and screen. On the show he goes for the real stuff, so that one star might admit to him his alcoholism, or another his homosexuality. At the end of his interview with the "famous" (according to him) Bernard Pivot, James Lipton's last question is one that everyone has heard before: "If God existed, what would you like to tell him when you die?" Such a doubt as to the existence of God is not something that would be said on the air in front of millions of Americans. Instead the question would be, "If heaven exists, what would you like God to tell you when you get there?"

          The people living in the region where we are staying are particularly devout. We are in the Bible Belt. In Tennessee, the Butler Law of 1921 made it illegal to teach Darwinism in the public schools! A young teacher who broke the law, Thomas Scopes, was fined 100 dollars, which was half his monthly salary. During our stay, the Tennessee section of the [American] Association of University Professors tried to get the backward law repealed, not because science demanded it but because it was "opposed to the freedom of thought and speech guaranteed by the Constitution." Their request was rejected, even in 1959! The Court's reasoning affirmed in writing that "the theory of evolution is contrary to the teachings of the Holy Bible and to our Christian way of life." The Butler Law was finally repealed in 1967. But in 1981, still, a powerful fundamentalist lobby in Arkansas succeeded in passing a law imposing the teaching of Creationism together with evolution. Thus, in spite of the latest findings in cosmology, paleontology, and biology, the public schools would have to teach that God created the universe in six days and all living things in their current form. All mankind is descended from the one Adam, thus the name Adamism that is given to this idea. Fortunately, the law was rejected on Jan. 5, 1982, as being contrary to the Constitution's first amendment clause regarding the Establishement [sic] of religion.

          A poll of the Southern Focus Poll reported, in 1996, that 66 percent of Southerners still believe that the Bible is "scientifically, historically, and literally true."

          [Here, in a note, Nicaise writes, "Distinguished Israeli archeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman support the contrary idea that such events as the flight from Egypt and the conquest of Canaan are legends compiled in the 7th century B.C. Their 432-page book The Bible Unearthed: Archeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel was translated from English and published in 2002 by Editions Bayard."]

          Even more surprising is that some university settings profess the same opinion, if one is to believe Guy Sorman, who reports that "at Cornell, a leading university, opinion polls regularly conducted among students in biology show that three-fourths of them believe either in a strict Creationism as per the Bible, or that evolution has a goal.

          In addition to Darwinism, race-mixing is also contrary to the way of life in Tennessee.

          [Here an uncaptioned photo shows two men walking past two bathroom doors, one marked "MEN" and the other "COLORED."]

          Erskine Caldwell's novel The Weather Shelter effectively describes the hatred that the "Brave Men of Tennessee" (the ironic title of the French translation) have for a white man, Grover Danford, who has a child, Jeff, by a "negress," Kathlee. She is in fact a mixed-race schoolteacher who is almost white. "The Bible does not allow a White to lie down with a Black," proclaims the village preacher, who must've had a hard time reading the Holy Bible. He rouses members of the Ku Klux Klan to hunt down the teenager in order to lynch him. Black racism appears as well in the reaction of Kathlee's father: he refuses to shelter his fleeing grandson.

          The reality matches the fiction, as was shown in 1959 by another court action, this time in Nashville, the state capital, which is well-known for its full-sized concrete replica of the Parthenon, and which has become famous for its country music and the number and quality of its recording studios. Myles Horton, the founder-director of a public school, was prosecuted following the complaints of scandalized witnesses. A photographer projected before the Court a film showing -- as reported by the newspaper whose clipping I have right now in front of me -- "different activities of the school, near Monteagle, notably Negroes and Whites swimming together in the school's lake." Oddly, the photographer was an agent of the Education Commission of Georgia, a neighboring state.

          In his testimony, the same spy recounted a litany of attitudes "disastrous for the country." For example: whites and Negroes having a group discussion in the library. He added, "Southern tradition has taught me that it is necessary to separate the races at school, church, and Sunday school." Another witness expressed "his belief that the director of the school was intimately associated with people who advocated the destruction of the United States as we know it." The ideas of McCarthy are still very much alive, even though the famous and malevolent Catholic senator who persecuted numerous artists accused of being Communist sympathizers was disavowed by his own party and censured in 1954 by the Senate. Too late for someone like Charlie Chaplin, who had already left America for good.

          Another farcical example comes not from Tennessee but from Alabama. A children's comic strip for children under five told the story of the marriage of a rabbit with white fur to a rabbit with black fur. The state ordered the public libraries to remove the book from their open stacks because the simple tale violated the principle of segregation!

          It's easy to be derisive about these attitudes when someone is from a country that is all one race. Racism and xenophobia lie at the deepest levels of human nature. It's the animal concept of "territory."

          In 1950, while looking for a place to live in Chatelet, I was looking through the ads and saw a few offering apartments for rent that specified "Italians stay away." Of course, I stayed away as well! Then, starting in the 1980's, when African immigrants or Turks moved into those parts of our cities where unemployment was widespread, violent racist demonstrations were widespread throughout Europe. In the beautiful Mediterranean region that attracts so many tourists, a fourth of all voters chose a party whose only platform was "France for the French! Immigrants leave!" We Belgians have little reason for complacency when a similar proportion of the people in Anvers were seduced by the slogan of the neo-fascist party Vlams Belang [Dutch for "Flemish Interest"]: "Flanders for the Flemish." In Germany fanatics have set fire to homes occupied by Turks, their gangs operating on the same model as the hateful Ku Klux Klan!

          Yes, we are racist, too. Too often do you hear someone say, "I'm not racist, but …" This is hypocrisy! I prefer to say, "I'm racist, like the rest of the world, but I realize it and I'm healing myself." Thus, when I see a couple made up of an ebony-colored Black man and a White woman, a certain something shocks me. The thought occurs -- quickly suppressed -- that the woman has chosen her companion poorly, that she hasn't found someone of her own color. Has such a thought never occurred to you, O Reader? Or, as Baudelaie wrote, "My reader, my fellow hypocrite!" Come on now, let's be frank. I just confessed, didn't I?

[Translated from the French by Jud Barry]