Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

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In late September of 1976, in the autumn of the Bicentennial year, I began my career as a teacher at the University of Virginia. I had been invited to join the writing program there by John Casey, who was then on leave. I had been lent the book-lined office of David Levin, a historian of Colonial American literature, who was also on leave that year. I had been assigned the status of associate professor of English, untenured, at my own request. I had come to Virginia from a Negro college in Baltimore. I had accepted Virginia’s offer for professional and personal reasons: I wanted to teach better-motivated students and, on a spiritual level, I wanted to go home.

If I recall correctly, 1976 was a year of extraordinary hope in American politics. James Earl Carter, a southerner, was running for the presidency, and people in all parts of the country, black and white, were looking to that region with a certain optimism. Carter had inspired in a great many people the belief that
this
New South was the long-promised one. And there were many of us who had followed the ancestral imperative, seeking a better life in the North and in the West, who silently hoped that the promises made during the Reconstruction were finally going to be kept. While in the “white” American community Jimmy Carter’s candidacy provoked an interest in the nuances of southern speech and in the ingredients of southern cooking, in the “black” American community the visibility of Carter—his speaking in a black Baptist church, his walking the streets of Harlem and Detroit—seemed to symbolize the emergence of a southern
culture
, of which they had long been a part, into the broader American imagination. The emergence of Carter suggested a kind of reconciliation between two peoples shaped by this common culture. His appearance was a signal to refugees from the South—settled somewhat comfortably in other regions—that we were now being encouraged to reoccupy native ground. There were many of us who turned our imaginations toward the ancestral home.

I had left the South at twenty-one, a product of its segregated schools and humanly degrading institutions, and had managed to make a career for myself in the North. Growing up in the South, during those twenty-one years, I had never had a white friend. And although, in later years, I had known many white southerners in the North and in the West, these relationships had been compromised by the subtle fact that a southerner, outside the South, is often viewed as outside his proper context, and is sometimes as much of an outsider as a black American.

Friendships grounded in mutual alienation and self-consciously geared to the perceptions of others are seldom truly tested. They lack an organic relationship to a common landscape, a common or “normal” basis for the evolution of trust and mutual interest. Mutual self-interest—the need of the white southerner to appear “right” in the eyes of sometimes condescending northerners (the South being the traditional scapegoat on all matters racial) and the need of the black southerner for access to somewhat commonly held memories of the South and of southern culture—is the basis for political alliances rather than friendships. To achieve this true friendship, it is necessary for the two southerners to meet on southern soil. And if growing up in the South never presented this opportunity, and if one is still interested in “understanding” that part of oneself that the “other” possesses, it becomes necessary to return to the South. Ironically, while the candidacy of Jimmy Carter represented a political alliance between white and black southerners, the real meaning of the alliance, in 1976 at least, resided in the quality of the personal relationships between these two separate but same peoples on their home ground, in the homeplace. Perhaps this is what I was looking for in the fall of 1976, at Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia.

I remember two incidents from those first days at Virginia, while I sat in David Levin’s book-lined office. An overrefined and affected young man from Texas came in to inquire about my courses, and as I rose from my chair to greet him, he raised his hand in a gesture that affirmed the Old South tradition of noblesse oblige. He said, “Oh, no, no, no, no! You don’t have to get up.”

The second incident was the sound of a voice, and came several days later. It was in the hall outside my office door and it was saying, “I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President, I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President.” The pitch and rhythms of the voice conveyed the necessary messages: the rhythm and intonation were southern, lower-middle-class or lower-class southern, the kind that instantly calls to mind the word
cracker.
Its loudness, in the genteel buzz and hum of Wilson Hall, suggested either extreme arrogance or a certain insecurity. Why the voice repeated Carter’s campaign slogan was obvious to anyone: the expectations of the South, especially of the lower-class and middle-class South, were with Carter. He was one of them. His campaign promised to redefine the image of those people whom William Faulkner had found distasteful, those who were replacing a decadent and impotent aristocracy. These were the people whose moral code, beyond a periodically expressed contempt for black Americans, had remained largely undefined in the years since Faulkner.

The bearer of this voice, when he appeared in my doorway, conformed to the herald that had preceded him. He was wiry and tall, just a little over six feet, with very direct, deep-seeing brown eyes. His straw-blond hair lacked softness. In his face was that kind of half-smile/half-grimace that says, “I’ve seen it all and I still say, ‘So what?’ ” He wore a checkered flannel shirt, faded blue-jeans, and a round brass U.S. Army–issue belt buckle over a slight beer belly. I think he also wore boots. He stood in the doorway, looking into the handsomely appointed office, and said, “Buddy, I want to work with you.”

His name, after I had asked it again, was still Breece Pancake.

There was something stiff and military in his bearing. I immediately stereotyped him as of German ancestry (in the South, during its many periods of intolerance, German names have been known to metamorphose into metaphorical Anglo-Saxon ones, Gaspennys and perhaps Pancakes included). He had read some of my work, he said, and wanted to show me some of his. His directness made me wary of him. While I sat at a desk (in academia, a symbol of power), he seemed determined to know me, the person, apart from the desk. In an environment reeking with condescension, he was inviting me to abandon my very small area of protection.

He asked if I drank beer, if I played pinball, if I owned a gun, if I hunted or fished. When these important
cultural
points had been settled, he asked, almost as an afterthought, if he could sign up to do independent study with me. When we had reached agreement, he strolled back out into the hall and resumed shouting, “I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President! I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President!” I recall now that there was also in his voice a certain boastful tone. It matched and complemented that half-smile of his that said, “So what?” Breece Pancake was a West Virginian, that peculiar kind of mountain-bred southerner, or part-southerner, who was just as alienated as I was in the hushed gentility of Wilson Hall.

The University of Virginia, during that time at least, was as fragmented as the nation. There were subtle currents that moved people in certain directions, toward certain constituency groups, and I soon learned that it was predictable that Breece Pancake should come to my office seeking something more than academic instruction. The university, always a state-supported school, had until very recently functioned as a kind of finishing school for the sons of the southern upper class. About a generation before, it had opened its doors to the sons of the middle class. And during the 1960s it had opened them farther to admit women and black students. In an attempt to make the institution a nationally recognized university, an effort was made to attract more students from the affluent suburbs of Washington and from the Northeast. More than this, an extraordinarily ambitious effort was made to upgrade all the departments within the university. Scholars had been recruited from Harvard and Princeton and Stanford and Berkeley and Yale. The institution claimed intellectuals from all parts of the world. The faculty was and remains among the best in the nation.

But these rapid changes, far from modifying the basic identity of the institution, caused a kind of cultural dislocation, a period of stasis in the attempted redefinition of the basic institutional identity. In many respects, it was like a redecoration of the interior of a goldfish bowl. Many of the sons of the southern gentry, seeking the more traditional identity, began attending Vanderbilt, Tulane, Chapel Hill, and Washington and Lee. And while the basic identity of the school remained southern, very few southerners were visible. One result was the erosion of the values that had once given the institution an identity. Another was stratification by class and color considerations. Preppies banded together. So did women. So did the few black students. So did, in their fraternities and clubs, the remnants of the old gentry.