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FORTY-FOUR

A few years ago the BBC wondered if I would do a program on the American South and its families. Incidentally it is only British television that wants to do interesting projects on our native land: with few exceptions, the home team deals only in entertainers if, of course, they can be guaranteed not to entertain. Someone had noticed that although the WASPs are in themselves a small minority in the South they compensate for their fewness in numbers by their webs of cousinage in families which go back to the 1600s like my grandmother Gore, a Kay from South Carolina whose family had emigrated from Bury in Lancashire in the eighteenth century. Since there were so few British settlers in the Southern states there was not much of anyone for these immigrants to marry so they kept marrying into the same families. I have never been able to remember what relation I am to Albert Gore Junior even though his father, a Tennessee senator, once explained it to me on television in San Francisco (no, I don’t recall what he said but he did say that had I been elected to Congress in 1960 “our relationship would have been much closer,” which perhaps says it all).

Once a year the Gores hold a family reunion in northern Mississippi which I eventually attended in the interest of a documentary on me rather than on that white Anglo-Saxon enclave in the Southern states, a project abandoned because the BBC did not want to get involved in the business of race or, as my grandmother Gore liked to say, if any descendant of mine should marry someone colored I’ll come back and haunt ’em. When I was grown I liked to tease her with the knowledge that our blood had been commingled with that of the other race ever since the country began; she would then simply change the subject and complain about how the Civil War was the vengeance of God on a generation of Southern boys who preferred shooting and hunting to going to school. The producers had also been put off by Jimmy Carter himself who had thought the program was to be about me when the subject was about kin and all of us. I had of course sent him a telegram after his disastrous intervention with helicopters in Iran during the hostage crisis, reminding him that honor required his resignation for having disgraced the country. Had he perhaps taken my censure amiss?

Finally, he and I do share a most distinguished ancestor, John Kay of Bury (1733–1764). According to the Dictionary of National Biography, “Kay’s improvements in machinery for weaving continue in use to the present day” (the Flying Shuttle). He was the founder of the first great improvements in the manufacture of cloth by which employment is now given to hundreds of thousands of people while in 1760 his son Robert invented the shuttle drop box. I fear that neither Jimmy nor I have ever lived up to our brilliant heritage.