"This man-distracted world"
Issue #12, Diary Notes, April 1966
In this issue, we look back to 1966. Paul and Elizabeth Green are working on the house and grounds they’ve named “Windy Oaks” in Chatham County. Paul celebrated his 72nd birthday on March 17th, and Elizabeth will celebrate hers in a few days. Spring has yet to arrive in full, and Paul is unhappy with the shade of gray that Elizabeth has chosen for the tin roof of the sprawling house. Green is working on a new outdoor drama called “Texas,” spending most days at the typewriter in the cabin that he moved to the Chatham property so that he might continue writing in a space similar to the cabin he had at their Greenwood home in Chapel Hill. (That cabin was moved to the North Carolina Botanical Garden.) As usual, insomnia dogs the writer at night, and Paul is worried about the war in Vietnam, too. Green also references racial tensions in Robeson County between the KKK and members of the Lumbee Tribe. In 1958, Lumbee activists had confronted Klan members at a gathering near Maxton and disrupted the proceedings with great relish. For more on this legendary event, see this online account.
April 1, 1966
Several days and I’ve made no notes. Have been working away at my dramatic material. Also worked out outline for my Friends of the Library talk which I’ve got to give at UNC-G this month.
Put in 7 hours of straight typing today in my cabin. Didn’t stop to eat my paper bag of lunch waiting on the watershelf at the little cabin front door.
Cold and windy. Painters at work on roof of house. The gray color shows up black as the ace of spades. Very ugly and gloomy to my eyes.
“But look,” says Elizabeth strongly, “don’t you see the gray?”
“No, only black. Let’s call the place Funeral Oaks.”
“It’s gray, I tell you, it’s gray,” she almost shouted.
“Well, have it your way,” I said. “After all, you’ve lived with me for forty years and you deserve to see any color you want to see.”
Little sleep at night. Heard the N.Y.-Miami plane go over at 11:30 high in the sky, on time as usual. Then one o’clock, two o’clock, and so on. Got in a lot of reading—two small B[ertrand] Russell books, also an interesting life of Sir Walter Raleigh by Norman Lloyd Williams. Now and then a few errors in it, especially as regards Raleigh’s efforts at colonization on Roanoke Island. He mentioned the little town of Wanchese as being ruined and buried under water. But all in all a book full of wonderful life of the times of Elizabeth and Raleigh.
Saturday, April 2
Still cold and windy. Got in a morning’s work. In later afternoon E. and I watered our newly-set boxwood, lilacs, chinquapins, mountain ash, etc. Dry and danger of forest fires.
At night read two Quaker publications I got the other night when I went to the little meeting house on the Raleigh Road near the Institute of Government building—A New China Policy and Peace in Vietnam, both making good sense so far as I could tell. At this meeting attended by 19 gentle and solemn people, Russell Branson of the AFS [American Friends Service] spoke quite at length about the Friends’ work in different parts of the world. He told of their work in birth control and of a new device which could be inserted in a woman and kept there permanently. He said that, for instance, during their recent field work in the slum sections of Hong Kong, they had made so and so many thousands of insertions. A boy of 12 or 14 years sitting across from us—the only child in the “congregation”—listened gravely and with the wise countenance of a judge.
I was warmly welcomed at the meeting, and Dudley Carroll said to those around him, “Paul here’s a Quaker but he won’t acknowledge it.” I truly believe in the Quaker faith, but the unimaginative ritual gets me. As we sat in a long silence at the opening of the meeting I kept expecting my belly or someone else’s to start growling in rebellion.
Sunday, April 9
Got in a good morning’s work—21 typed pages. In afternoon E., Caro Mae [Green’s sister] and I went to Harnett County. Stopped off at Hugh’s [his brother’s] to leave some pictures I had had copied for him by Foister’s here in C.H….While there, Clyde Green, Dan Green, Matt Connelly [relatives]and others showed up. How young they looked compared to me, though some of them were as old as or older than I. Left Caro Mae at Mary’s and E. and I went to the old MacAllister home site near the town of Godwin, 12 miles north of Fayetteville, to see if we could get some wild plants. Dug up four or five little shoots of the devil’s walking stick and packed them in containers with plenty of dirt around their roots. Back at Mary’s—Bill and Mildred came for supper. We had good talk about Bill’s recent restraining order against the Ku Klux Klan’s meeting in Robeson County where the Lumbee Indians had threatened possible violence against their meeting. Was pleased that he was considering the question of a permanent injunction from a statesmanlike point of view and seemed to see clearly the separation of the judicial requirement from the executive requirement.
Back home late—after listening to some good talk from Gladys, Hugh and Mary, too.
Clear moonlight. Read late, late. At 2 A.M. a drizzling rain began to tap on the roof but it didn’t amount to much.
Just before we started out for Harnett in the afternoon, H.R. Totten came bringing us some chrysanthemums, periwinkle, and snakes whiskers for planting. We stood around and talked a long while, and he and I went down to the little bog N.E. of the house and just in front of the old Pendergraft house where he waded out in the water and pulled up some samples of a little leek-like plant.
“This is isoetes (Quillwort),” he said, “and there’s only one other place in this region where it grows. I hope you won’t fill the bog up.”
“No, I won’t,” I said, “now that you’ve shown me this plant.”
“If you’ve got any other boggy places on your land, I hope you’ll transplant some of it there.”
I promised I would. Then we stood around for a while, and he told me much of his early student days at UNC and of how Johnny Booker had helped him a great deal in his English courses.”
Saturday, April 9
Carl and I worked laying off rows in the garden and cleaning up….To the McCall’s in the late afternoon. Much talk. Freddy** showed us a citation given him by his students from the law department. We all expressed our pleasure for him. “Yes,” he said. “I don’t believe in hiding my ‘bushel under a mess of lights.’” Then, taking his cat tenderly in his arms, he said, “You know how old she is, Paul?” Remembering from former times, I said, “Eighteen.”
“Going on nineteen,” he said, eighteen on March 13.” While he showed his affection for his cat he agreed with Henry Cheney apropos of some words on the Vietnam War***, that “what we ought to do is drop a nuclear bomb on Hanoi—wipe’ em out. We did it at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it stopped that war. It’d stop this one,” etc. I felt very sad to think how many millions of Americans believe the way Henry and Freddy do, believe so at this hour with every proof in the world staring them in the face that this is the way not to believe.
Yes, the future does begin to look dark for this man-distracted globe.
NOTES:
*Henry Roland Totten (1892-1974), a contemporary of Paul Green, was “a dedicated teacher of general botany, pharmacognosy, dendrology, and taxonomy. Professor Totten helped train two generations of pharmacists. His research interests were in the fungi, ferns, and vascular flora, while his primary interest was in the taxonomy of the woody plants of the southeastern United States. His outstanding publications include Trees of the Southeastern States.” —From NCpedia, entry by William S. Powell
**According to another entry in NCpedia, by William B. Aycock: “Through unwavering interest and devotion, and a sustained and painstaking approach, Frederick Bays McCall (1893-1973) was for many years the premier authority on North Carolina law in the fields of real property, wills, and decedents' estates….Fred McCall had a great capacity for loyal friendships. A gentle man, he could be firm in expressing his thoughts on controversial matters but always sought ways to avoid giving personal offense.”
***The CIA issued a report in 1966 on the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam: if the United States did so, it would face “widespread and fundamental. revulsion that [it] had broken the 20-year taboo on the use of nuclear weapons.”