Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking by Jessica Mitford

required, of course, of their white classmates, which leads one to speculate whether the old phrase “separate but equal” is being supplanted for the blacks by the concept “together but vastly superior.”
    TRIP NOTES
Montgomery. At last people have stopped saying, “This isn’t the real South.” My favorite sort of houses everywhere, white frame, two or more stories, most with nineteenth-century gingerbread trim. Even in the better suburbs, none of this split-level streamlined modern that gets so tiresome in wealthy California ... everything half-hidden by the rampaging vegetation, a Corot-Monet-Manet land ... the frescoes round the walls of the cupola in the State Capitol, incredibly like the worst examples of Soviet art, depicting scenes of Montgomery history ... one, titled “The Golden Years,” shows a group of happy slaves toting bales of something, each with delighted smile on face. No postcards of this available, to my sorrow, as I should have liked to tease my friends at home with them ... the Elite Café, Fine Food (pronounced “Eelight Cafe, Fan Fude”).... Weeds pushing up all over the tennis courts in the immense public park; a couple of years ago blacks won a court decision granting them use of the park, so the city authorities closed it up for everybody ... noses and faces being respectively cut off and spited all over ... they disbanded the zoo, too, and now if you want to take the kids to the zoo you have to go all the way to Birmingham—where the zoo is integrated!
    Social gatherings in Montgomery are full of echoes of the past. The food in private houses tends to be in the shape of things—ice-cream boats or hearts, fish-shaped aspic salads—and almost everything is creamed, not only creamed but served with cream sauce. The fare is as mild and gentle as the ladies themselves, no bitter or pungent taste to offset the bland, no crisp consistency to contrast with the soft. The very form of conversation seems more nineteenth century than contemporary. At ladies’ lunches the talk proceeds like a croquet game, with three standard opening moves: (1) the weather: “Well, is it hot enough for you?” (2) the food, about which someone is bound to declare pretty near the beginning that Rosie-Belle’s whatever-it-is is just simply out of this world, (3) the frontal-assault type of compliment where somebody declares that my you get younger-looking every day and how in the world do you manage it, and goes on to bet your husband doesn’t like to let you out of his sight for one single minute. (This sort of remark may as well be delivered to a matron of fifty as to the latest bride, and trips off the tongue as readily.) Exaggeration as a way of life may confuse the auslander. My hostess answers the telephone and is heard to say, “Why Janie, that’s just about the nicest thing I ever heard in my whole life”; upon being asked later what the call was about, it turns out that Janie has invited us over for a drink. No use to comment that my hostess must have had a rather thin time if that was really just about the nicest thing she ever heard in her whole life; she merely stares uncomprehendingly.
    As conversation warms up—which of course it does, eventually — the sense of the past is intensified, for so much of it deals with endless ramifications of family history and gossip about old times. One thing leading to another, the long-ago romances of Aunts Willie-Jo and Sarah-Marie, Cousins Robbie-Lou and Marigold, are brought out for examination and speculation. Anecdotes often end, “And the thing of it was he simply up and took a shotgun and blew his brains out.” “And of course she was found in the river. We all felt so bad and no one ever did exactly get the right of what happened.” “The poor feller just actually took to the bottle (well you know he did, and of course it’s in the family, his father died an alcoholic) and well anyway I declare one day they found him in the garage hanging