Books: Where Stars Fell

STARS FELL ON ALABAMA—Carl Carmer —Farrar & Rinehart ($3).

Alabama is home to 2,700,000 U. S. citizens, but to Carl Carmer, a Yankee who lived there six years, it is also a queer place. Says he: “The Congo is not more different from Massachusetts or Kansas or California.” His book, an anecdotal narrative of some of his experiences in Alabama, goes far toward bearing out his thesis. But Alabamians would have to be thin-skinned indeed to object to the tone of Author Carmer’s remarks. Though he makes many an explicit criticism, points silently at some grim conclusions, he also tosses many a bouquet, with a grace that does credit to his hosts.

Author Carmer went to the University of Alabama, near Tuscaloosa, as associate professor of English. He was greeted hospitably, despite the fact that he was born in New York State. On his first evening in Tuscaloosa he made the acquaintance of the Southern vin du pays, corn whiskey. He never learned to like it, calls it “as vile and as uglily potent a liquor as ever man has distilled.” One day in class he made the innocent mistake of comparing Tuscaloosa’s picturesqueness with a North African city. “On the next day six serious young men waited upon me with a petition asking me to retract the state ments I had made with regard to their native city. . . .” It did not take him long to learn to refer to “The War Between the States.”

With various Alabamian friends as guides he wandered over most of the State: through the Black Belt, studded with old plantations; the Red Hills, where the mountaineers still have no use for Ne groes or revenuers; the swampy Cajan country. He watched a Ku Klux meeting, was on the fringes of a lynching, visited with moonshiners, asked an old conjure woman for professional advice, heard a fiddlers’ contest, listened to Negro preachers, attended a footwashing service of Hardshell Baptists. He discovered why the roads in Winston County are worse than their neighbors’: the mountaineers there were still being punished for their refusal to send men for the Confederate army. He listed many a fiddle-tune, quilt pattern,, mountain and Negro superstition, collected some Brer Rabbit tales not to be found in Joel Chandler Harris. He heard of a legendary Jim. “the stud nigger,” whose boss hired out his services to a far-away plantation. When Jim learned that he would have to travel 500 miles each way, that there were 200 girls on the other plantation, he said: “Well, boss, I’ll go. But it seems a mighty fur piece for just a few days’ work.” Carmer calls Mobile “loveliest … gayest of American cities,” thinks its charm has been less commercialized than New Orleans’. He says not a word about its legendary high-flying eagles.

Readers who have thought William Faulkner fetches his tales from a morbid distance will think again after reading some of Author Carmer’s corroborating reports. One of his visits was to a broken-down plantation home where a Southern lady kept up a pathetic pretense of dignity in one side of the house while her husband lived in the other with his mulatto mistress. He heard a Negro, after being beaten by his white boss, remark: “Mist’ Gilmore’s a good man to wuk foh. He don’t mean nothin’ by it.” He spent the night with a man who hired all his house servants and the labor for his sawmill from a convict camp.

Under the easy-going charm, the chivalry, the civilized leisure of Alabama, thinks Author Carmer, lies a volcano of passion, always ready to erupt. The shootings, lynchings. religious hysteria that punctuate the mild pleasantness of Alabama’s life are the result, he thinks, of a “fateful compulsion.” Alabama is a strange place. Long ago, stars fell there. . . .

The Author. Son of a school superintendent. Carl Carmer was born (1893) in Cortland, N. Y. He finished collecting his degrees (from Hamilton College and Harvard) just in time to enlist as an infantry private in 1917, did not get overseas but emerged a year later as a first lieutenant of field artillery. After teaching public speaking and English literature at Hamilton, Rochester and Syracuse he went to the University of Alabama in 1921. His researches in Southern folklore got him an honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa, turned him from academic paths. He left the University of Alabama to write for the New Orleans Morning Tribune, then worked on the staffs of Vanity Fair, the Golden Book, Theatre Arts Monthly. Married to a Southerner, Elizabeth Black, Author Carmer lives in Manhattan, is now busy getting together material for a book on New York State. He has also written Deep South, French Town (with Artist Frederick Hicks’), many a poem. Stars Fell on Alabama is the July choice of The Literary Guild.