The South That Was

IT is something, in these standardized, apartment-housed days, to read of that time not so long ago when in the South a breed of Americans were establishing a way of life which now seems almost too good to be true.

THE SOUTH THAT WAS

To anybody with four good tires or a sailboat, Tidewater Maryland, by Paul Wilstach (BobbsMerrill, $5.00), is an appetizer for a trip. Without being guidebookish, it lures along. Without being unduly antiquarian, it touches up the past. It should delight the lovers of old Maryland, especially those who relish the cult of the Eastern Shore. Cruising along its pages from Havre de Grace to Baltimore, Annapolis, Rose Hill, and Marshall Hall, we were reminded of a summer moment of our own, down on one of those shaky Chesapeake ‘landings’ where you tread with caution or go down between the slats.

Mr. Wilstach has done real justice to those admirable seafood waters, and to the red earth of those shores. He has done justice even to the seagoing Chesapeake dog, that duck-minded amphibian retriever, who uses his eye as a land dog uses his nose. And as for racers and race-goers, gardens and garden growers, history and history makers, fine old houses and line old builders, Maryland cooking and Maryland cooks (including menus) —indeed the book is rich.

It is valuable also in adroitly dished-up town records. Before we are aware that we are being fed with documents, we know our colonial worthies, their wills and their wardrobes, their clubs and ‘assemblies’ and epitaphs, their ’big house, little house, colonnade, and kitchen,’quite by heart. A seasonable feature is the closing chapter about George Washington’s comings and goings between Philadelphia and Mount Vernon, along those narrow white oyster-shell roads.

Another choice contribution to region portraiture is Caroline Conper Lovell’s account of The Golden Isles of Georgia (Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown, $3.00), that string of coastwise tiny continentsin-themselves where Spaniards, Franciscans, pirates, Highlanders from the Stuart revolution, Englishmen retired from Wellington’s army, Huguenots, Moravians, noblemen fleeing from the French Revolution, all sorts of refugees for liberty (and from ‘liberty’), held the isles pro tem. What colorful lore about them is treasured here, notably about the heyday of rice and cotton! Because of her relationships with the older island families and her access to their papers, Mrs. Lovell has been able to let us see those hospitable plantations from the masters’ view. Fragrant with jessamine and heliotrope and ‘ninety-six varieties of roses,’alight with myrtle-berry candles and fireflies, no wonder the place seemed to Audubon like fairyland.

Less lyrical observers are faithfully quoted, too — Charles Wesley, who retired in disorder after he had ‘beaten the air’ in these convivial islands ‘for 20 days’; Aaron Burr, who participated in a hurricane; Fanny Kemble, who married a slave owner and tried to reconstruct him. If you married these islands to reform them, you were simply asking for trouble, like the Englishman who disapproved the long gray moss on the trees and spent his time combing it off with a rake, almost as fast as-it grew.

Nobody but a niece of the islands could have culled so many flavorsome stories, many of which must take place with the permanent folk tales of the land. One is about the aged Negro mammy, Flora, too old to work. Her master, believing in a task for all, told his head man to provide Flora with a goose, and the goose with a leading string, so that every day Flora might ‘graze the goose for half an hour.’ We have always wondered what we shall do when we retire, and now we know. We’ll graze a goose.

But the exotic savor of the book is best suggested by yet another legend, about two old French nobles, the Marquis de Montelet and the Chevalier de la Horne. They had faith that these islands of their exile would somewhere yield wild truffles; so up and down the precincts they led a pig on leash. The Chevalier would say, ‘I think, Alphonse, we shall one day find them.’ And the Marquis would answer wistfully, ‘I would that we might, for the eating of truffles makes men more gay and women more tender, and in this country ire need them. Mon Dieu!’

FRANCES LESTER WARNER