The Strong Old Rhythms of Plains

Despite the new hustling, Carter's home town resists change

Novelist Reynolds Price (A Long and Happy Life, The Surface of Earth) went to Plains, Ga., two years ago to report for TIME on President Carter's home town. A native of North Carolina himself, Price returned to Plains recently to see what change the presidency has wrought.

"I first came down here from Macon County more than 30 years ago to nurse my cousin who was having a baby," says the fiftyish waitress who serves me my first cup of coffee on Main Street. "Now I can't even find the house I came to. Plains has changed that much --and all just lately. I think it's grand."

On my own first visit to Plains two years ago, the town was mostly elated at its sudden fame. The nine old brick stores on Main Street, some disused for years, had opened hastily with a limited stock of Carter souvenirs, all relentlessly featuring peanuts and grinning teeth. The railroad depot, which had been campaign headquarters, was a welcoming center that offered the admirably unpredictable Miss Lillian for several hours each day of autographs and bracingly candid talk with the few bellwether tourists.

Up the way, Jimmy (as everyone called him) was in his own low, rambling house, making Cabinet choices to the accompaniment of comic gallops by the baffled world press up and down the narrow streets to interview job hopefuls, then on to the nearest motels in Americus (ten miles away) for sparse rest and food. The food came, famously, from the now legendary Faye's Bar-B-Q Villa--a good steak served in the Formica rooms of a "double-wide mobile home" parked in a mud lot behind a filling station near some rotting tourist cabins.

Yet for all the excitement, the media cynicism, the physical groanings-at-the-seams, one could strike off alone and explore the town and countryside, finding the various unadorned sites of Jimmy's life and early work. A polite visitor with an anxiety-dispelling Southern accent could even find and talk at relaxed length with members of the presidential family. In a three-day visit--during Christmas rush at that--I had cordial and substantial meetings with Alton Carter (Jimmy's uncle and keeper of the family tales, possessed of an excellent narrative tongue and the sweet will to use it); Gloria Carter Spann (Jimmy's nearest sister, wife to a Plains farmer and the most retiring and impressive of the circle); Miss Allie Smith (Rosalynn's serene but clearly strong mother); and Jimmy and Rosalynn themselves (attentive as radar stations on the DEW line and pleasanter).

Now two years later, midway through the first Carter term, I'm back to see how the place is changed. From the mobbed television scenes of presidential trips back, I anticipate the worst. And the last few miles of the drive are ominous (you fly to Albany, drive 40 miles north). My favorite American road sign is gone now --the darkly mysterious "Dot's Topless Oyster Bar"--but a mange of new signs has broken out, for gift shops, campgrounds, ice-cold Billy beer (all the remains of that sunken venture have drifted hither). Just beyond the agricultural experiment station, a new information center sits by a freshly dug pond with the regulation absurd Old Faithful-type fountain. Just inside the town limits, two new buildings vie in raw gracelessness, both souvenir shops. The rival tour wagons jostle Winnebagos, in flight from the snows of Nebraska, Montana, Minnesota, Illinois and hovering here at the dozen chances to buy a now amplified selection of interchangeable junk mementos -- the grinning peanut in still more awful avatars, Billy T shirts, yardsticks, local cookbooks (revealing how deeply the taste-destroying shortcut has driven in its charge south). Carter family members who have stayed on move more carefully now, cautious of the speed with which packs of strangers can gather at a glimpse.

The newest structure in town is Maranatha Baptist Church, result of a schism precipitated in the Plains Baptist Church by a racial dilemma in the wake of Jimmy's election. The newest organic matter seems to be a small garden given by the citizens of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. In a chill evening wind, the shrubs seem afflicted and huddled in gloom along streets as empty as Sagebrush at midnight. And, I discover as hunger mounts, Faye has closed her restaurant and moved the mobile home. The old Plains may be buried past finding.

Well, no. A night's sleep, a warm bright morning and a big grits breakfast begin to focus facts. The breakfast (paper plate, plastic knife and fork) is at the Kountry Korner Restaurant. I've been advised that a trace of old Plains may be found here. And here indeed is more than a trace: eight middle-aged farmers at one long table talking land, bean planting, the future of Taiwan ("You think the Taiwans got a word to say about it? Think 1 billion can't take 17 million any day they want to?" One man just says, "Viet Nam," ending that), and crime in the county (a man has been shot in a break-in attempt --"Funny thing, he's a married nigger"). None of them pays the least notice to me or the other two strangers eating within earshot. It's their place; we're invisible. While I sense that the N.A.A.C.P. may not wish to pass out brotherhood plaques here, I also smell the first spoor of real life; and the fact that two black policemen and one black councilman work across the street in the town headquarters makes for further fine tuning. (I recall, for instance, that "nigger" in many Anglo-Southern mouths is not a racial insult, but a dialect noun, one used for at least four centuries.)

What begins to seem clear on a second look then is how little is changed, since the Inauguration at least. In a remarkable exercise of control under pressure, the town council has severely limited commercial building. In addition to the two shops mentioned and the church, I could count only one other shop (more souvenirs) and a small grocery store; no neon in sight. The nearest motels are still ten miles away in Americus; and while there are one or two opportunities for respectable snacks in Plains itself (try the Main Street Cafe), the nearest full menu is also toward Americus (including a startlingly good French country restaurant as recompense for Faye's).

The few short streets still show the mildly abraded middle-class homes of the past 90 years. The one long block of South Hudson Street still shows black hovels in what seems permanently frozen collapse. No sign of pork-barrel public works or decor (beyond merciful provision for human excretion), no Carter statues yet, no rumors of veiled Saudi peanut takeovers. And any conversation with a longtime resident is likely to reveal that, under some genuine annoyance with the present, the spiritual structures of the past are standing, for better or worse, and straining to survive till Jimmy is a private citizen (six years at most) and Plains can be a farming town again, with a few dollars now and then from hell-bent consumers of presidential history.

A visitor, however sympathetic, is prone to feel that the hope is deluded. The stripped-down Protestant faith of the townsmen should have readied them for that. Where two or three are gathered together, there first of all is Satan: pride of self, envy, greed. While it seems a near certainty that Plains' magnetism for tourists will diminish (when I was there, I saw a mere 300 a day--lots of parking, no crush), it also seems certain that the green crossroads and its 600 souls can never lapse into pre-Carter life. The cause is not Jimmy or his mother or wife or his sad younger brother or Cousin Hugh, whose recent ragbag memoirs spill prematurely a lot of what seem to be real family beans. The beans, after all, are everyone's family beans, only easier to see: mothers-in-law, problem children, alcohol, a taste for money (as someone told me, "The Carters are not a bit worse than the Kennedys; the Kennedys just have more cashmere sweaters"). No, the deep shifts sensed and regretted by natives are attributable not to one local boy but to history. The outspoken Carters may have speeded ventilation; but the bleeding holes in the oldest foundations are the same holes rammed everywhere in America by swelling population, the spread of wealth, racial change, and an active central Government. Round every hole, the citizens of Plains see what we all see--the quick dissolution of ancient ties of blood, faith and money: the primal mortar of society.

Yet an older mortar is visible, the oldest hope anywhere and still a strong refreshment. Two minutes by car in any direction from the center of town will put you in the fields and woods of Sumter County. So I prowled for hours on the nearly empty roads--bare flats of resting purple earth; gentle folded hills on which naked hardwoods are swallowed in tall pines black in winter green; slow wheeling buzzards, hawks stalled above like statues of hawks, long crepe ribbons of starlings drifting south. The fact that crucial landmarks from the formative years of a man of present immense world power are spaced round at intervals with no signposts may come to seem trivial in the uninsistent grandeur of the place itself, the inhuman place.

But the place is human now for a while at least, clearly Jimmy Carter's home. Anyone with the time to wander the county, to wait for the strong old rhythms of its life to sound their bass beneath the cashbox jingle, will see how the place has added to the man large measures of its own calm, its silent demonstration (at field's edge, in shacks, on more fortunate porches) of the few but urgent needs of human continuance, of--more urgent still --the needs of the earth. You may even come away with something like my own sense that what is regrettable in Jimmy's life now is your and my presence in his native place; the fact that he cannot return here in peace and roam as I've done in absolute stillness past his boyhood house, the neighboring hovels, the empty woods, the acres of graves just up the road at the site of the prison at Andersonville, where almost 13,000 men died in 14 months to feed brands of ignorance and malice still ravenous now as then--or spend a long evening in a house on the edge of town with friends and kin joining other local boys (Mac Lee and "Amos" Austin) in songs new and old to first-class guitar: mainly A Satisfied Mind.

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