Soul: Straight Up, No Ice

SOUTH TO A VERY OLD PLACE

by ALBERT MURRAY

230 pages. McGraw-Hill. $7.95.

Albert Lee Murray, a compact, youthful, 55-year-old brown-skinned man, is seated in an Atlanta restaurant, helping a white, country-fresh waitress spell Heineken. Operating on what he calls his "literary radar," not his desegregation fact finder, Murray senses that any embarrassment the girl feels is offset by her relief and gratitude. "What she is really worried about," says Murray, "is some stern-eyed maitre d' and some evil-assed cat back in the kitchen!" It is a pleasure to hear the voice of experience. As an Air Force major, Murray administered a $37 million military budget. He is also a certified intellectual who can whip a line from Sophocles to Bessie Smith, with enough left over to tie down Max Weber, Kenneth Burke and Duke Ellington.

The meaning, feeling and, above all, the style of confidence can be found on nearly every page of South to a Very Old Place, a highly syncopated memoir of youth and a celebration of U.S. Negro culture. It is a perfect companion volume to Willie Morris' North Toward Home, the pair constituting a sort of thank-you gift to Historian C. Vann Woodward for his helpful advice that it is foolish to try to think of the white Southerner without thinking about the black Southerner at the same time. The book, in fact, grew out of an assignment Murray got from Morris when he was editor of Harper's magazine. The idea was to have Murray make a swing through the South to visit leading writers and journalists, take in the down-home atmosphere and check out the desegregation scene.

Geography does not necessarily designate the truth of a place for Murray. It is people who do that. So a subway ride from midtown Manhattan to Harlem, where he has lived for ten years, is really a trip north down home. At Yale, visiting C. Vann Woodward and Robert Penn Warren, Murray gets behind the ivy and the laurels to see these eminent men in terms of the small-town Southern traditions that formed them. He seems equally at home with the Georgia of Ralph McGill, late editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Wherever he finds himself, Murray is constantly in search of that Southern something--a mercurial notion, part Scattergood Baines, part Snopes, part blues, and part Confederate sentimentality. But then change and complexity are what Murray is all about. He is a literary man who never tires of applying aesthetics to the shortcomings of social scientists.

In his previous book, The Omni-Americans, Murray was critical of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's study of the Negro family ("Not once does he cite any Negro assets that white people might find more attractive than black subservience"). He also took off after Kenneth Clark's Dark Ghetto, whose emphasis on black wretchedness, said Murray, "easily exceeds that in most of the books written by white racists to justify segregation."

Murray is not blind to the indignities and hardships suffered by blacks. But he feels that generalizations abstracted from lifeless data, whatever their purpose, have made the U.S. Negro "a victim of sociology." Neither does Murray have sympathetic ears for the rhetoric of black nationalism, particularly when it comes from students: "They are responding to what they read instead of what they know, and yet when you check them out on what they read you find they haven't really read very much."

Murray always views the issue of race as secondary to the subtlest matters of shared experience. His own contains some revealing ironies. As a segregated Alabama high-school student, he had to use cast-off texts from the all-white schools. Latin and French were not what most black students needed at the time, but for Murray, the old books provided what he smilingly calls "the liberal arts education of young princes."

In some of the best sections of his book, Murray recalls his awakening to literature as an undergraduate at Tuskegee Institute. There began his friendship with a music major named Ralph Ellison, who would eventually be known less for his trumpet than for his novel, Invisible Man. "We were talking about the title," Murray recalls, "and Ellison said, 'I guess I'll just have to fight old H.G. Wells for it, and if I'm lucky, people will see how much more I'm trying to do with that metaphor.' "

Murray is always the playful theoretician, a man who can turn a potential identity crisis into a vital style. He can equate the improvisations of Uncle Remus, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong with the existentialism of Camus and Sartre. He can say with complete sincerity that because of his background, learning and contacts, he is more Jewish than West Indian or African.

qedR.Z. Sheppard

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