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Others, among them old friends and family, are ambivalent. They're ready for a long dose of Plains' former peace, where the only prying eyes belonged to one's neighbors; and they rather dread the attractions of a former Chief Executive, whatever their feelings for the man they've always known. Steady throughout is the question of Rosalynn. "Rosalynn really loved that job; don't count on her staying home cooking dinner." "Rosalynn's liable to run for something—maybe Vice President to Fritz Mondale."
So they wait to see how much they'll get from their famous son—or how much they'll have to bear. Some of the burdens are already lifting. The carpetbaggers are leaving, Larry Flynt has closed his paper, the junk shops are starving. Jimmy Carter will be the youngest man since Calvin Coolidge to return from the White House; and surely neither he nor his equally impelled wife can predict their own movements or calculate their effects. They have not really lived in Plains for ten years. But though the townsmen are curious, they're not postponing normal life—not even his kin, who though still cautious, seem 50 Ibs. lighter in the duty department and more candid than ever (but off the record).
The whole last day of my visit coincides with the annual Peanut Jamboree, all outdoors on Main Street with maybe 300 souls in attendance, very few of them tourists—a flea market, old-fashioned cakewalks (for homemade cakes, each cook's name revealed so you know your source), bingo, food stands (one white, one black—with integrated patrons), puppets, a pleasantly inept bluegrass trio, somber teen-age gospel singers ("Praising the Lord the best way we can"), an integrated high school song-and-dance team (good enough for the Donny and Marie show), and the best clog dancing I've ever seen from the Muckalee Mudstompers, a local troupe with a world-class clogger in Jeff Moss, a 16-year-old native of Plains. Talk to him and he only talks of dancing—how he loves it, how he practices every minute he can but means to study agriculture in college. Jimmy? "Well, everybody's guessing what he'll do. I guess he won't rest." With that he is called off for a second fling on the cold asphalt.
The skies that have lowered all afternoon are threatening to pour. One young farmer near me points toward the doggers and says, "They may not get to finish this." His partner looks heavenward, grinning in the drizzle, and says, "I need a good rain a lot more'n I need to watch a dance."
Whatever he's forgotten about his native heath in all the years away, all the wins and losses, Jimmy Carter—a watchful and canny man—won't have misplaced the point of that. Most things come and go, however good to watch; a few things stay and matter to the end. Rain, for instance, a few hundred people having harmless fun on a fall afternoon to honor their harvest and to brace against winter. Let him come on back and watch this a long time before he writes a line.
—By Reynolds Price