In Georgia: Plains Revisited

By Reynolds Price

When I first visited Plains, Ga., in December 1976, a month after Jimmy Carter's election, the town was buoyed up by various brands of delight--a native son's handmade personal triumph, the daily spectacle of famous TV news faces bolting along the quarter-mile street between Jimmy's house and the heart of downtown, the onset of Christmas.

The victor's formidable mother, Miss Lillian, was freely available at the old railroad depot, dispensing her startling wit and candor. His brother Billy was cheerfully posing for snapshots at the gas pump, permanent beer can ominously poised. Even the President-elect and his wife were visible, making occasional forays to greet childhood friends or to eat at the nearest restaurants--every forkful watched for significance by a merciless post-Watergate press corps. A sizable slice of the citizenry willingly guided the influx of strangers round the sites--Jimmy's birthplace, his country home, his father's simple grave. (The ambitious monuments in the cemetery are not marked CARTER, however, but WISE and FAUST.)

In those few weeks before the Inaugural, the town and its people seemed --from present hindsight, at least--to be the kind of America promised by Ronald Reagan now. Its virtues and vices were personal. Contact was face to face, and the limits on life were human limits: How much do you need? How much can you get? Where do you come from? What color are you? How much will you bear? Can I help any way? Do I want to try?

In the years that followed. Plains made relatively modest changes. A few new tourist enterprises sprouted, stocked to the ceilings with souvenir assaults on the two archetypes of the Carter presidency--peanuts and teeth, neither of which lends itself to much variety of treatment. On the outskirts of town, the state built a welcome center, with vast parking lot and artificial pond. Public restrooms appeared near the depot. There were two shops dedicated to selling good local crafts, and--miraculously and surrealistically --there was a new, genuine French restaurant in an old chicken house outside town that served one-star meals at half the New York price. Larry Flynt began publishing a weekly newspaper, the Monitor, with a crusading editor imported from Kentucky and a G rating; a few other out-of-staters, widely viewed locally as carpetbaggers, set up various tourist scams. But the supply of post-election tourists dwindled fast, roughly as fast as two facts dawned on the populace--that Plains wasn't going to be the Little White House (presidential visits were scarce as summer rains) and that Plains and Jimmy Carter might not be as intimately connected as they'd seemed at first.

Under the onslaught of its fame, the town behaved with mostly unruffled dignity and hospitality. But after a few patently successful attempts at informal mass communication--the telephone call-ins, the fireside chat in cardigan sweater--Jimmy retreated into his "nuclear" engineer's privacy, screened by a Georgia Mafia who lacked even the abrasive charm of basic good ole boys or the Kennedys' strident boyos. Nobody in Plains was exactly sure why Jimmy stayed away, but there were theories: possible embarrassment at Billy's high jinks, displeasure at the crude local commercialism, or maybe even advice from his pollsters to down-play the small-town Southern roots in favor of a homogenized national image. Certainly a home visit was a summons to pushing crowds, at least half newsmen; and resident family members found it increasingly impossible to appear downtown. (Miss Lillian: "They all wanted to touch me, and if there's anything I hate, it's being hugged and kissed by a woman.") But the peculiarly economical and decorous motions of a farming community, miles from any city, continued. And the splendid flat landscape of fields, thickets and wildlife was intact on all sides--briefly tolerant of the occasional trailer or other frail platform of human hope. Jimmy flew here election dawn to cast his own ballot, already informed of imminent failure; and in a greeting to his home-town supporters at the depot, the break in his voice seemed an understandable response to their continued loyalty in the face of so much bafflement, so many craven defections--"I've tried to honor my commitment to you."

What had that local commitment been? Was it different from his repeated blanket commitment never to lie to the country and to do his own best? If you had lived a great part of your life in so intimate a place, one where sustained deceit is impossible, wouldn't you have promised to make them proud of their share in you, their contribution to the shaping of your faculties? That was surely implicit.

And now, little more than a month after Jimmy's defeat, do townspeople feel the pride of four years ago, the fervent expectancy encouraged in his always fragile Irish tenor at his swearing-in: "That when my time as your President has ended, people might say this about our nation--that we had remembered the words of [the prophet] Micah and renewed our search for humility, mercy and justice ... that we had enabled our people to be proud of their own government once again"?

As I drive out from the Albany, Ga., airport in a rented car, 40 miles north toward Plains, the first clear fact is that the country hasn't changed--not the physical country, not hereabouts. The meticulously tended pecan groves stand on in the clean light; the well-grazed cows are still marching barnward in neatly spaced lines as if in rehearsal for their next state fair. The two crossroad towns, Leesburg and Smithville, show a little new paint on the old stores. But otherwise the stretch looks much as it must have all Jimmy Carter's life--no billboards alluding to his existence, no huckstering.

That begins on the road from Americus to Plains, though with nothing like the quantity or hideousness that is standard issue now for the edges of almost any town. I note the chaste welcome center on my left with only three cars in the lot, then the silos and water tank, and finally the nice row of brick stores that have easily endured their freight of souvenirs and the acid marinade of countless photographs to remain as anyone's icon of small-town America. They are not exactly an architecturally distinguished row, but their variety and fantasy of ornament and color make pictures of Reagan's home street in Tampico, Ill., look dour.

A stop for coffee in the Main Street Cafe indicates that fantasy was not exhausted on the buildings. The menu still offers such sandwiches as "Amy's All American" (peanut butter with optional jelly), "Billy's Road to Recovery" (cold turkey), and a green salad called "Rosalynn's Remedy." Except for the silent caricatures on souvenirs and the now touching postcard photographs of a younger, happier Jimmy and an unharried Billy, that might well be all I'd have seen or heard of the Carters, unless I'd asked.

That's the first surprise, how the subject of Jimmy has vanished like dew. It is literally true that in four days of engaging random citizens and family relations in casual conversation, I never heard the President mentioned until I brought him up. The silence didn't seem a result of gloom, and certainly not of shame or humiliation. Billy's breakfast hangout, the Best Western Inn of Americus, did list crow on the menu of Nov. 5; but that's only consistent with the air of amused and stoic relief that greeted all my inquiries.

Any close observer has seen from the start that Jimmy Carter was from Plains but not of it. His qualities, especially his pride and hunger, propelled him away; and no doubt he .realized long ago that no overachiever is ever thanked at home. Not while he's achieving. Of the registered voters in his home district, 505 voted for Carter, 174 voted for Reagan, Clark or Anderson, and 282 didn't bother to vote at all.

But ask about him and the answer will almost always take the circuitous form of speculation about his future relation to Plains. Will he or won't he live here? Will the Carter Library be here or in Atlanta? Rosalynn, they tell me, has said in a recent interview that they'll keep a place in Atlanta but will mostly be here where Jimmy will be writing; and that Amy will go to public school in the county. It's frequently mentioned that the abandoned Plains high school might make a good site for the presidential library (one look at the tired old building indicates its inadequacy, however nice the thought). Speculations resolve into two camps. The most enthusiastic are from businessmen, who hope for Jimmy's return as a new charge on the tourist magnet (even in the Reagan rout, more than 35 million potential visitors did vote for Jimmy, including a good number of oldtimers who can stop off on their way to winter in Florida).

Others, among them old friends and family, are ambivalent. They're ready for a long dose of Plains' former peace, where the only prying eyes belonged to one's neighbors; and they rather dread the attractions of a former Chief Executive, whatever their feelings for the man they've always known. Steady throughout is the question of Rosalynn. "Rosalynn really loved that job; don't count on her staying home cooking dinner." "Rosalynn's liable to run for something--maybe Vice President to Fritz Mondale."

So they wait to see how much they'll get from their famous son--or how much they'll have to bear. Some of the burdens are already lifting. The carpetbaggers are leaving, Larry Flynt has closed his paper, the junk shops are starving. Jimmy Carter will be the youngest man since Calvin Coolidge to return from the White House; and surely neither he nor his equally impelled wife can predict their own movements or calculate their effects. They have not really lived in Plains for ten years. But though the townsmen are curious, they're not postponing normal life--not even his kin, who though still cautious, seem 50 Ibs. lighter in the duty department and more candid than ever (but off the record).

The whole last day of my visit coincides with the annual Peanut Jamboree, all outdoors on Main Street with maybe 300 souls in attendance, very few of them tourists--a flea market, old-fashioned cakewalks (for homemade cakes, each cook's name revealed so you know your source), bingo, food stands (one white, one black--with integrated patrons), puppets, a pleasantly inept bluegrass trio, somber teen-age gospel singers ("Praising the Lord the best way we can"), an integrated high school song-and-dance team (good enough for the Donny and Marie show), and the best clog dancing I've ever seen from the Muckalee Mudstompers, a local troupe with a world-class clogger in Jeff Moss, a 16-year-old native of Plains. Talk to him and he only talks of dancing--how he loves it, how he practices every minute he can but means to study agriculture in college. Jimmy? "Well, everybody's guessing what he'll do. I guess he won't rest." With that he is called off for a second fling on the cold asphalt.

The skies that have lowered all afternoon are threatening to pour. One young farmer near me points toward the doggers and says, "They may not get to finish this." His partner looks heavenward, grinning in the drizzle, and says, "I need a good rain a lot more'n I need to watch a dance."

Whatever he's forgotten about his native heath in all the years away, all the wins and losses, Jimmy Carter--a watchful and canny man--won't have misplaced the point of that. Most things come and go, however good to watch; a few things stay and matter to the end. Rain, for instance, a few hundred people having harmless fun on a fall afternoon to honor their harvest and to brace against winter. Let him come on back and watch this a long time before he writes a line.

--By Reynolds Price

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.