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on the verandas. Sometimes there is a little white church with a crooked steeple. There are frequent swamps, dark and mildewy, with gloomy trees standing in water. The plantation mansions are sometimes magnificent, but often in depressingly bad repair.
    I called at one such house for a talk with its owner, and found it no more than a sad echo of a munificent past. Three generations ago the Parker plantation embraced some 10,000 acres, and was one of the great estates of the region. Now it is whittled down to about 150 acres, of cotton, tobacco, sweet potatoes and corn. The drive up to the house is a narrow one between pine trees, unpaved; a cloud of dust rose up behind us as we drove along it. Near the road there were a couple of small wooden shacks, one of them inhabited, for there was a string of washing outside it, the other filled to the eaves with straw; and far at the end of the drive stood the big house, crumbling and classical. It had a wide and splendid porch, with four pillars. Mrs Parker thought that only Washington or Thomas Jefferson could really do justice to it, but I felt myself better qualified to sit there when I noticed that its broad steps were rickety, that the frame of its front door was sagging, and that high in its roof there was a dormant wasps’ nest. Inside, the house was agreeably untidy; in the hall, which ran clean through the building front to back, there was an elderly harmonium, with a large hymn book propped on its music stand.
    The planter, fresh from a tussle with his tractor, had greasy hands and wore a toupee and an open-necked shirt. But like most Southern gentlemen he had a talent for hospitality, and soon we were sitting on the balustrade of the porch, sipping long cool drinks and looking out through the pines. He told me that he ran the plantation almost single-handedly, with only a single full-time employee. His children go to the local public school and his wife does the housework. The five cabins on the estate are let to Negro families whose men work elsewhere, and ‘The Street’, the double row of uniform cottages where the slaves used to live, is empty and tumble-down.
    While we were talking on the porch a great cloud of dust approached us from the drive, and there emerged in stately motion two large mules. They were pulling a kind of sledge, a cross between a bobsleigh andCleopatra’s barge, and sitting on it, very old and wrinkled, very dignified, was a Negro in a straw hat. Round the corner he came in imperial state, the mules panting, the sledge creaking, the dust billowing all round us; and as he passed the porch he raised his hat by its crown and called: ‘G’d evening, boss, sir; g’d evening, Missus Parker.’ ‘Good evening, Uncle Henry,’ they replied.
Chicago
    I travelled to Chicago on the Twentieth Century Limited from New York, and remembered the nineteenth-century English visitor who was told, as he rode his train into the city: ‘Sir, Chicago ain’t no sissy town.’ This impertinent piece about the Chicago of 1953 was the first of several – I was to write a new essay about the city in each subsequent decade of the century.
    On my first evening I was taken down to the waterfront to see the lights of the city. Behind us Lake Michigan was a dark and wonderful void, speckled with the lights of steamers bringing iron ore from Duluth or newsprint from Canada. Until you have been to Chicago – crossing half a continent to reach it – it is difficult to realize that it is virtually a seaside city. It has its sea-storms and its rolling waves, its sunny bathing beaches, its docks; you can board a ship for Europe in Chicago, and see the flags of many nations at its quays. So wide is the lake, and so oceanic in aspect, that more than once I have been compelled to walk down to its edge and reassure myself that it really contains fresh water, not salt.
    So, with this queer land-locked sea behind us, we looked that evening at the city lights. A glittering row of