A Turn in the South by V.S. Naipaul Page B

saw a small group around a bearded man. It looked so much like what I had seen upstairs that I thought the man was Hosea,giving an informal interview. It was only when I was almost in the group that I saw that the talker wasn’t Hosea, was blacker, differently dressed, without the toothbrush, and that he only had the big stiff beard.
    T HE CONVENTION business was important to Atlanta, and there were many big hotels in the center of the city quite close to one another. It was hard to think that these hotels could all be full at the same time. But it sometimes happened. A girl in the Ritz-Carlton dining room told me one day that an important convention was in town. What was this a convention of? Dry cleaners. And they were important because there were so many of them—as there had to be, if you considered how many dry cleaners there must have been all over the United States—that they had filled the Atlanta hotels.
    No hotel gave off such a company-holiday or convention feeling as the Marriott Marquis. And none was so overpowering. To enter it was like entering a gigantic, hollow, twisted cone. It had an atrium forty-seven stories high: gallery upon curving gallery, following the twist of the cone. That twist was unexpected; the eye was always led upwards. Great red streamers, like something from a Chinese festival, hung down the middle space. And all the time, like fairground conveyances, tall glass-walled elevators, their ribs picked out in lights, slid up and down the atrium wall.
    But the black man who worked for the Hilton (atrium-style there too, with the internal galleries, but not so sensational), with whom I had a talk one evening about the hotels of Atlanta, thought that I had done well by going to the Ritz. He said, “That’s where the ’lite stay.”
    As if in confirmation of this, I heard one day (with what truth I don’t know) that Gloria Vanderbilt was staying in the Ritz and had been seen in one of the elevators.
    She was in Atlanta to do a promotion. Two weeks or so before, in New York, I had caught her on a talk show. She was talking about her life and about the way a woman is defined by the men whom she loves. And I assumed when I heard she was in town that she was here to promote her book. But there was much more to this promotion. “The Enchantment … The Heritage … The Prestige …  MACY’S Proudly Introduces GLORIOUS by Gloria Vanderbilt.… Only a trulygreat fragrance has the power to stir our emotions. Glorious by Gloria Vanderbilt … Gloria Vanderbilt will autograph a complimentary photograph and any Glorious purchase.”
    That was going on in Macy’s, just across the road from the Ritz, on the morning Anne Siddons came to the hotel, to talk to me about growing up in the South. She was as intense and intelligent as I had expected; and though she was a little withdrawn (because of the book she was writing), and though the promotion she was doing for her publisher (on a different scale from Gloria Vanderbilt) was a further depletion, she spoke with a full heart, offering me a little of the experience that was her capital as a writer.
    She was Southern and Georgian, and almost Atlantan. She was born in Fairburn, twenty miles south of Atlanta. Fairburn was an agricultural and railroad town. Her father was a lawyer; though they were not rich, they were comfortably off. Her father was the first of his family to go to college.
    “We came down from Virginia around 1820. Our branch of the family farmed the same piece of land for seven generations. It makes me feel wonderfully rooted. But at the same time I feel it can be a yoke. I feel that we Southerners can be too deeply and narrowly focused into that land.”
    I told her about my trip to Howard’s home town and what I had seen there of black farming families.
    She said, “It’s one thing Southern whites and blacks have shared. We have both been landowners since abolition.” And she told me what Howard and his mother had told me: