In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on a hot Sunday morning in early October, I sat in my car in the parking lot of a motel studying a map, trying to locate a certain church. I was not looking for more religion or to be voyeuristically stimulated by travel. I was hoping for music and uplift, sacred steel and celebration, and maybe a friend.
I slapped the map with the back of my hand. I must have looked befuddled.
“You lost, baby?”
I had driven from my home in New England, a three-day road trip to another world, the warm green states of the Deep South I had longed to visit, where “the past is never dead,” so the man famously said. “It’s not even past.” Later that month, a black barber snipping my hair in Greensboro, speaking of its racial turmoil today, laughed and said to me, in a sort of paraphrase of that writer whom he’d not heard of and never read, “History is alive and well here.”
A church in the South is the beating heart of the community, the social center, the anchor of faith, the beacon of light, the arena of music, the gathering place, offering hope, counsel, welfare, warmth, fellowship, melody, harmony, and snacks. In some churches, snake handling, foot washing, and glossolalia too, the babbling in tongues like someone spitting and gargling in a shower stall under jets of water.
Poverty is well dressed in churches, and everyone is approachable. As a powerful and revealing cultural event, a Southern church service is on a par with a college football game or a gun show, and there are many of them. People say, “There’s a church on every corner.” That is also why, when a church is bombed—and this was the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of the sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where four little girls were murdered—the heart is torn out of a congregation, and a community plunges into pure anguish.
Her voice had been so soft I had not realized she’d been talking to me. It was the woman in the car beside me, a sun-faded sedan with a crushed and cracked rear bumper. She was sipping coffee from a carryout paper cup, her car door swung open for the breeze. She was in her late forties, perhaps, with blue-gray eyes, and in contrast to the poor car she was dressed beautifully in black silk with lacy sleeves, a big flower pinned to her shoulder, wearing a white hat with a veil that she lifted with the back of her hand when she raised the coffee cup to her pretty lips, leaving a puckered kiss-daub of purple lipstick on the rim.
I said I was a stranger here.
“Ain’t no strangers here, baby,” she said, and gave me a merry smile. The South, I was to find, was one of the few places I’d been in the world where I could use the word “merry” without sarcasm. “I’m Lucille.”
I told her my name and where I wanted to go, the Cornerstone Full Gospel Baptist Church, on Brooksdale Drive.
She was quick to say that it was not her church, but that she knew the one. She said the name of the pastor, Bishop Earnest Palmer, began to give me directions, and then said, “Tell you what.”
One hand tipping her veil, she stared intently at the rim of her cup. She paused and drank the last of her coffee while I waited for another word.
“Shoot, it’s easier for me to take you there,” she said, then used the tip of her tongue to work a fleck of foam from her upper lip. “I don’t have to meet my daughter for another hour. Just follow me, Mr. Paul.”
I dogged the crushed rear bumper of her small car for about three miles, making unexpected turns, into and out of subdivisions of small bungalows that had been so hollowed out by a devastating tornado the previous year, they could accurately be described as fistulated and tortured. In the midst of this scoured landscape, on a suburban street, I saw the church steeple, and Lucille slowed down and pointed, and waved me on.
As I passed her to enter the parking lot, I thanked her, and she gave me a wonderful smile, and just before she drove on she said, “Be blessed.”
That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome. I had found it often in my traveling life in the wider world, but I found so much more of it here that I kept going, because the good will was like an embrace. Yes, there is a haunted substratum of darkness in Southern life, and though it pulses through many interactions, it takes a long while to perceive it, and even longer to understand.
I sometimes had long days, but encounters like the one with Lucille always lifted my spirits and sent me deeper into the South, to out-of-the-way churches like the Cornerstone Full Gospel, and to places so obscure, such flyspecks on the map, they were described in the rural way as “you gotta be going there to get there.”
After circulating awhile in the Deep South I grew fond of the greetings, the hello of the passerby on the sidewalk, and the casual endearments, being called baby, honey, babe, buddy, dear, boss, and often, sir. I liked “What’s going on, bubba?” and “How y’all doin’?” The good cheer and greetings in the post office or the store. It was the reflex of some blacks to call me “Mr. Paul” after I introduced myself with my full name (“a habit from slavery” was one explanation). This was utterly unlike the North, or anywhere in the world I’d traveled. “Raging politeness,” this extreme friendliness is sometimes termed, but even if that is true, it is better than the cold stare or the averted eyes or the calculated snub I was used to in New England.
“One’s supreme relation,” Henry James once remarked about traveling in America, “was one’s relation to one’s country.” With this in mind, after having seen the rest of the world, I had planned to take one long trip through the South in the autumn, before the presidential election of 2012, and write about it. But when that trip was over I wanted to go back, and I did so, leisurely in the winter, renewing acquaintances. That was not enough. I returned in the spring, and again in the summer, and by then I knew that the South had me, sometimes in a comforting embrace, occasionally in its frenzied and unrelenting grip.
A week or more before I’d met Lucille, past ten o’clock on a dark night, I had pulled up outside a minimart and gas station near the town of Gadsden in northeastern Alabama.
“Kin Ah he’p you,” a man said from the window of his pickup truck. He had that tipsy querying Deep South manner of speaking that was so ponderous, fuddled beyond reason, I half expected him to plop forward drunk after he’d asked the question. But he was being friendly. Stepping out of his darkened, oddly painted pickup and gaining his footing, he swallowed a little, his lower lip drooping and damp. He finished his sentence, “In inny way?”
I said I was looking for a place to stay.
He held a can of beer but it was unopened. He had oyster eyes and was jowly and, though sober, looked unsteady. He ignored my appeal. I was thinking how now and then the gods of travel seem to deliver you into the hands of an apparently oversimple stereotype, which means you have to look very closely to make sure this is not the case—the comic, drawling Southerner, loving talk for its own sake.
“Ah mo explain something to you,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Ah mo explain the South to you.”
In my life as a traveler this was a first. From a great blurring distance, people sometimes say, “This is how things are in Africa,” or “China’s on the move,” and similar generalizations, but close-up never something so ambitious as, “I’m going to explain this entire region to you,” promising particulars.
“I’m just passing through. Never been here before. I’m a Yankee, heh-heh.”
“Ah knew that from your way of talking,” he said, “and from the plates on your vehicle.”
I told him my name and he extended his free hand.
“Ahm Wendell Turley. Ah have a business here in Gadsden. This vehicle is mah beater. Ah done that mahself.”
He was referring to the body of his old olive-colored pickup truck, stenciled all over with brown and green maple leaves.
“Camo,” he said. “This here I use for hunting deer.”
“Many deer around here?”
“Minny.”
And now I noticed that the pocket of his shirt was embroidered Roll Tide Roll, the slogan of the University of Alabama football team, passionately supported by Alabamians, some of whom I’d seen with the scarlet letter A tattooed on their neck, in homage. This seemed a way of reclaiming the true meaning of the word “fan,” which is short for “fanatic.”
“What were you going to explain to me about the South, Wendell?”
“Ah mo tell you.”
To a traveler, a stranger in this landscape, and especially one who is hoping to write about the trip, a man like Wendell is welcome and well met—patient, friendly, expansive, hospitable, and humorous in his manner. The man was a goober and a gift, especially late at night on a back road.
“What the hail …”
Before he could say more, a low-slung and rusted Chevrolet drew up beside us, loud hip-hop blaring from the open windows, and I caught the line “Have these niggas just waiting for a favor …”
A man in a greasy hat with its visor turned sideways swung his legs out and stood, leaving the engine running and the door open, so the music was amplified by the gaping doorway. Coarse tufts of stuffing were visible in the burst-open upholstery of the driver’s seat.
Wendell widened his oyster eyes and said softly, as though to reassure me, “Ah know that there man.”
The man was red-eyed and unshaven and looked menacing, but seeing Wendell, he saluted clumsily and showed the gaps in his teeth.
“What’s going on?” the man said, but kept walking.
“How y’all doin’?” Wendell said, and went silent.
“It’s all good, brother.”
“I hear ya.”
We waited, the noise from the car washing over us, echoing in the night-black trees around the parking lot, and waited more until the man in the twisted cap left the minimart with a six-pack of beer, heaved himself into his car, reversed into the darkness, and took the howling with him.
“You were saying, Wendell?”
“Ah’ll tell you,” he said, “ ’bout the South.” He leaned toward me, speaking close to my face and very slowly. “We good people. We not educated people like you people up north. But we good people. We God-fearing people.” He squinted and seemed to search his memory for an example, then said, “It takes some education to ask questions like, Do God really exist?”
“I suppose so.” And I thought, He did not say edjumacation.
“Nemmine! We don’t ask no questions like that in the South. But we good people.” He braced himself and stood a bit taller to deliver another thought, which he did with deliberation. “Not one person in the South, black or white, will allow y’all to leave they home without offering y’all something to eat—a meal, or a sandwich, or peanuts, or anything.” In a slow and certain voice he said, “They will feed you, sir.”
“Tell me why.”
“ ’Cause it’s the only right thing to do.”
“That’s hospitality,” I said.
“That’s hospitality! And when y’all come back to Gadsden, you stop on over and see me and Sandy, and we’ll eat something.” He put his free hand on my shoulder. “Ah only just met you, but Ah can tell y’all an educated man. You are good folks. Ah mo head on home right now and tell Sandy.”
And then he warned me against staying the night in Gadsden, but to drive on to Fort Payne, where I’d find a better-quality motel, but that when I came back, he and Sandy would be happy to host me.
“Which direction is Fort Payne?”
Wendell raised his head, faced the darkness and the obscured on-ramp, and pointed with his lips.
“Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”
What Wendell had said, and even the way he had clamped his hand on my shoulder, had made an impression, put me in mind of the much-quoted lines (it’s a Canadian, Shreve, who’s speaking) from Faulkner’s Absolom, Absolom!—to which Faulkner, the master of decorous obliquity in a whole long shelf of books, attempts various replies. But I felt Wendell had an answer, and I drove into the night happier.
The poor, having little else, keep their culture intact as part of their vitality, long after the well-off have dumped it. This was one of the many encounters that showed me how a traveler may arrive and slip into the rhythm of life in the South, the immersive power of its simple welcome amounting to a spell.
Most travel narratives, perhaps all of them, even the classics, describe the miseries and splendors of going from one remote place to another. The quest, the getting there, the difficulty of the road, is the story; the journey not the arrival matters, and most of the time the traveler—the traveler’s mood, especially—is the subject of the whole business. I have made a career out of this sort of slogging and self-portraiture, and so have many others in the old laborious look-at-me way that informs travel writing. As V. S. Naipaul shrewdly explained in A Turn in the South, the traveler is “a man defining himself against a foreign background.”
But traveling in America is unlike traveling anywhere else on earth. Early on in my trip to the Deep South I stopped at a convenience store in a small Alabama town, aiming to buy a soft drink. But I had really stopped because the store sat on its own small slab of cement, on a side road, and was made of weathered boards, a rusted Coca-Cola sign nailed to the wall. On the front porch—a roof over it—was a bench where I could sit and drink and make notes. A store with a homely, enduring look like that had to be run by someone who’d talk.
A man of sixty or so, standing behind the counter wearing a baseball hat, greeted me when I entered. I took a bottle of soda from the cooler, and paying for it, I saw that the counter was crowded with glass bowls—like goldfish bowls—filled with small loose pieces of wrapped candy. It was a glimpse of my youth: Sam’s Store, on the corner of Webster and Fountain streets in Medford (circa 1949), the countertop of jars brimming with penny candy.
“When I was a boy … ,” I said, and the man listened politely to my memory. I finished saying, “We used to call it penny candy.”
“Road candy,” he said. “Eat it while you’re driving.”
Road candy seemed to me a perfect summing up of the pleasures of driving through the Deep South. What I saw, what I experienced, the freedom of the trip, the people I met, the things I learned: my days were filled with road candy.
Breezing from place to place on wonderful roads seemed so sweet, so simple. Such travel is full of deceptions, though—especially that one, that the great roads are proof of prosperity and make America easily knowable. The paradox is that many roads in America lead to dead ends. The arrival is the object and the challenge, often in unexpected ways, in a country with an improvisational culture that makes a fetish of despising regulation. I was to discover that America is accessible, but Americans in general are not; they are harder to know than any people I’ve traveled among.
The ease of travel in America is so complete that any conventional narrative cannot be about the journey at all, not about locomotion, the ordeal of getting from one place to another, which is often the heart of the travel narrative. The American road is so well made and lacking in obstacles that it disappears from the traveler’s tale, except when it is thanked as a benefit, with the same gratitude as that of Prince Husayn, of his magic carpet: “mean to look at, but such are its properties that should any sit thereon and wish in mind to visit country or city, he will at once be carried thither in ease and safety” (Richard Burton, Supplemental Nights).
A dangerous or difficult road can be the subject of a journey; the magic carpet isn’t. The classic travel story is a tale of risk, often a quest, a retelling in trekker’s gear of the Odyssey, and concerned with enduring the vicissitudes of a quest, and then getting home safely. Such a book becomes a mimicry of many legends, but particularly of the traveler beset by obstacles—demons, witches, bandits, whirlpools, the temptations of sirens, a chronicle of delays. “We walk through ourselves,” Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses, summing up the travel experience, “meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.” The torments of the road are the tale, and the getting there is the subject of most travel books, from the seventeenth-century Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North and Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (1849) to the great travel books of our own day: the vomiting camels of Thesiger’s Arabian Sands, the muddy Congo paths of Redmond O’Hanlon’s No Mercy, the flitting and plodding of Bruce Chatwin in Patagonia—and, I should add, to a lesser degree, nearly everything in travel that I have written. The travel book is, typically, about struggling to a destination.
But in America the journey is a picnic: traveling anywhere, particularly in the empire of the open road, is so easy as to be superfluous to write about. The challenging fact is that, because of our superior connectedness, one cannot write about the United States in the way one does any other country—certainly it is cheating to pretend that it is any sort of logistical ordeal.
“The land was big and varied, in parts wild. But it had nearly everywhere been made uniform and easy for the traveler,” V. S. Naipaul writes in his book of Southern travels. “One result was that no travel book (unless the writer were writing about himself) could be only about the roads and the hotels.” He goes on to say that America is not alien enough, which is questionable: in his trip through the South Naipaul concentrated on the larger cities, and his stated theme was the lingering effects of slavery (Slave States was a provisional title for his book). In a helpful insight he adds, “[America] is too well known, too photographed, too written about; and, being more organized and less informal, it is not so open to casual inspection.”
That is, unless you’re deliberately creating obstacles or indulging in mock heroics, in a narrative based on a Victorian model of what travel writers are supposed to do—suffer, be afraid, overcome hardships, endure privations and bizarre rituals, find the Heart of Darkness, meet the Jumblies, converse with God-botherers and Mudmen, observe the Anthropophagi and the Men Whose Heads Do Grow Beneath Their Shoulders, be heroic, and survive to tell the tale. Many do, even in this happy land. I think of their books as mock ordeals.
Some narratives of travel in America succeed in a small way because they purport to be frightening, dangerous, risky, life-or-death adventures—a domestic version of the struggle against the odds that is a commonplace in books of foreign travel. This posturing, Walter Mittyish tendency might have begun with Henry David Thoreau, who, literary genius though he proved to be, lived a jostling existence with his parents, like many so-called cellar dwellers today, after he graduated from Harvard, rarely venturing far from the family home. He suffered from ill health for most of his short life (he died at the age of forty-four). He was not attempting hyperbole when he wrote in his journal, “I am a diseased bundle of nerves standing between time and eternity like a withered leaf.”
He was twenty-six at the time, plagued by chronic bronchitis, mood swings, and recurrent narcolepsy. He celebrated the outdoors, he extolled hiking, yet he was anything but robust. In his experiment with independence at the age of twenty-eight, building a small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, he is often depicted as a lone witness, living a hermit-like existence in the wild. Yet he was a mere mile and a half from his mother, who baked him pies and washed his clothes. Huckleberry parties occupied his Walden summers when he wasn’t writing or reading.
One of the books Thoreau read at Walden was Melville’s just-published Typee, subtitled A Peep at Polynesian Life. This highly colored account of Hawaii and a Pacific whaling voyage describes Melville’s jumping ship with another crew member at the remote Marquesas Islands and his idyllic romance with the sylph-like island beauty Fayaway: “Fayaway and I reclined in the stern of the canoe, on the very best terms possible with one another; the gentle nymph occasionally placing her pipe to her lip, and exhaling the mild fumes of the tobacco, to which her rosy breath added a fresh perfume.”
Henry, who was two years older than Herman, could not have known that Melville prettified his island experience and exaggerated his time in the Marquesas, where he’d spent one month—he claimed it was four months. He made his reputation with this book, and its notoriety and its exuberant adventures in this distant, unspoiled, and unknown portion of the world (cannibals, water nymphs, nakedness) made a powerful impression on the celibate, bronchitic man at Walden (rejected some years before by the only woman he’d ever loved), who, after a year on his own, felt the pressing intimations of cabin fever.
Partly as a response to Typee, and out of an ardent desire to achieve a wilderness adventure of his own, something original to write about and lecture upon, Thoreau went on a shuttling journey to Maine: took a train to Boston, another train to Portland, a steamboat up the Penobscot River to Bangor, and there he met his cousin and two lumber dealers. The four went by jolting stagecoach to inland Mattawamkeag. From there, by canoe for about twenty-five miles, where they arrived at North Twin Lake. The abounding forest thrilled Thoreau, who found it “savage and impassable,” the way it must have looked to “the first adventurers.” The region had “a smack of wildness about it as I had never tasted before.”
Overwhelmed in authentic wilderness, he had at last discovered something wild, primitive, and dangerous to rival Melville’s Marquesas. The group hiked through the woods to the lower slopes of Mount Katahdin. Thoreau climbed the mountain alone, feeling (he said) like Prometheus. The Katahdin climb inspired him to brilliant description: “Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled [unpenetrated] globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever.”
This was a jolly two-week jaunt, four men on a mere woodland walk. Thoreau made it into an epic journey, a voyage of discovery. Later he claimed that the wilderness he had found in Maine was more primitive, more difficult of access, than anything Melville had experienced in the remote Marquesas, and he went on deludedly believing that it had been an ordeal.
This occurrence of the mock ordeal became a feature of travel narratives in America that has persisted to our own time. To his credit, Henry James, who wrote about taking lengthy train journeys from Boston to San Diego, never complained of hardship but only of New York’s “pin-cushion profile,” the “visual ugliness” of some cities, and the “confined & cooped-up continuity” of the Pullman car. He was glad to return to London.
“I think it impossible, utterly impossible, for any Englishman to live here, and be happy,” Charles Dickens wrote after the trip he recalled in American Notes (1842). As proof of Dickens’s judgment, here are four English travelers who took bus rides in America:
“New York City’s vast Port Authority Terminal is a terrifying place in which suddenly to find oneself coping on one’s own,” the prolific and otherwise imperturbable Ethel Mannin laments in American Journey (1967), about the start of her bus ride. She goes on, “It is important to resist the temptation to sit down and weep.”
Mary Day Winn, in The Macadam Trail: Ten Thousand Miles by Motor Coach (1931), describes her suffering the ordeal in Arizona of an armed man stopping her luxury coach. “At the first sight of the drawn pistol the girl behind the driver—she of the over-worked make-up—screamed shrilly.” Instead of robbing them, the gunman turns this holdup into farce, insists on kissing six of the women on the bus and, before he takes leave of the anxious twenty-seven passengers, says, “I couldn’t go another day without I kissed a pretty gal.”
A hardship for the English writer Ernest Young, in San Antonio, Texas, is having to wake up early to catch a bus, for his North American Excursion (1947): “My first day’s journey, of 430 miles, about the distance from Berwick to Land’s End, necessitated another of those early risings, which I always make with reluctance. A hasty breakfast in a roadside hut, with rain and foggy gloom outside, was not the best beginning to a lengthy bus ride.”
“People of a score of races who came to America to be rich … have stayed on to live like unpampered animals,” James Morris writes in Coast to Coast (1956). He goes on, “In such a climate of existence, racial prejudices thrive, and you can often catch a faint menacing rumble in a bus or on a street corner—a drunken Negro cursing the white people as he slumps in his seat, a white man arrogantly pushing his way through a group of Negro women.”
Though Morris’s book is otherwise good-hearted and generous, it is also a chronicle of timid reflection. “Violence is an ever-present element in American life,” he writes. And later, recounting storms, floods, the Rio Grande in spate, and a high wind (he calls it a “typhoon”) in Vicksburg, Mississippi, “You are never far from brutality.”
“You can sense the underlying savagery, restrained of course, but present, at many gatherings of respectable business people, [even] among the Elks or the Kiwanis” is another of Morris’s assessments. His trip itself is dainty; certainly no savagery is visited upon him, though he remarks, “At other times, gentlemen would buttonhole me with dark questions.” A sex change a dozen years later turned James into Jan, and she bought an apartment in New York, a city she came to praise. “British journalists named Clive, Colin, or Fiona,” Charles Portis comments, “scribbling notes and getting things wrong for their journey books about the real America, that old and elusive theme.”
It must be said that none of these travelers is climbing a mountain or bushwhacking through a forest or crossing a desert on foot. They are fiddle-faddling on good roads in comfy buses or cars. But they are not alone in their dramatic exaggerations. Many American writers have succumbed to the mock ordeal, re-creating the struggle of traveling on American roads. “The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one,” John Steinbeck writes in Travels with Charley (1962). And here is an example of this danger: “About fifty yards away two coyotes stood watching me … ‘Kill them,’ my training said.” An investigative journalist, Bill Steigerwald, followed Steinbeck’s journey and proved, in Dogging Steinbeck (2012), that the soon-to-be Nobel Prize winner did not actually travel to half the places he described, that much of the time he was swanking with his wife in excellent hotels, and that a great deal of what he wrote was flapdoodle, fudged and fictionalized, and perhaps there was no coyote.
In The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1944) Henry Miller writes about his road trip (late 1940 into 1941) from New York to Los Angeles. “I felt the need to affect a reconciliation with my native land,” he writes at the start, but later calls it “this lugubrious trip across America.” His book is filled with complaints, the tedium of driving, the terrible food (an entire indignant chapter is devoted to the poor quality of American bread), and the dreadful cities.
For Miller, St. Louis is a particular horror: “The houses seem to have been decorated with rust, blood, tears, sweat, bile, rheum and elephant dung. Nothing can terrify me more than the thought of being doomed to spend the rest of my days in such a place.” California is just as bad: “The real California began to make itself felt. I wanted to puke. But you have to get a permit to vomit in public.” One year after this ordeal, Miller took up residence in California, first in Big Sur; he ended his days in Los Angeles, a happy man, as he said, “always merry and bright.”
Arduous America, alone in the elements, is the subject of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness—facing the bleak elements alone. “A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles,” but he failed to disclose that he had a car, and, “Wilderness. The word itself is music,” he wrote. In his celebration of solitude and his lonely communing with nature in southern Utah, Abbey does not mention that for one five-month period he was living in a trailer with his third wife, Rita, and their young son, not far from his drinking buddies and a town with a saloon.
In Old Glory: An American Voyage (1981), my good friend Jonathan Raban describes his trip in a small powerboat down the Mississippi River. One of the great descriptive writers of travel, a shrewd analyst of manners, he is insightful and witty in the book and, as an outsider, sees much of this country that Americans miss. Though there is minimal mock ordeal in his wonderful book, at one point he becomes fearful of a flock of birds. “On the Illinois side there was a dead tree which seemed to function as a skid-row hotel for a gang of large ne’er-do-well birds.” He is terrified of the birds. “I dug my dark glasses out of my grip, possessed by the thought that the first thing they’d try to peck out would be my eyes.”
Menacing though they seem, the birds do not peck out the English traveler’s eyes. He endures periods of bad weather, a failed love affair, and a near-drowning, but arrives in New Orleans unscathed. Another, more recent—but lazier, less ambitious—traveler sailing down the Mississippi, Mary Morris, in The River Queen, makes a meal of the mock ordeal. The boat is not to her liking, the cocaptains, Tom and Jerry, irritate her. The food disgusts her. Her ordeal can be summed up in one of her rants: “I hate pizza. I hate all that doughy stuff. I want a meal, shower, amenities.”
Hiking the Appalachian Trail one would have thought to be a bracing and satisfying experience for a healthy pedestrian. Many have accomplished it. Bill Bryson, who traipsed it with a friend for his book A Walk in the Woods (1998), includes a classic mock ordeal, his encounter with a bear while camped one night near a spring in Virginia. A bear—possibly two, all he sees are the eyes—wanders near for a drink. “I sat bolt upright. Instantly every neuron in my brain was awake and dashing around frantically, like ants when you disturb their nest. I reached instinctively for my knife.” He has no knife, he has fingernail clippers—the deflating beauty of this episode lies in its self-mockery. “Black bears rarely attack,” he goes on. “But here’s the thing. Sometimes they do … If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want.”
“Finally, this being America,” Bryson says at another point, “there is the constant possibility of murder.”
The bears leave him alone, he is not murdered, and apart from sore feet, he is hardly inconvenienced in what is, for all its mock ordeals, a likable book.
“Call me crazy,” Elijah Wald writes at the beginning of Riding with Strangers (2006). “I’m standing at a highway rest area outside Boston, in the rain, trying to get the first ride in yet another cross-country trek.” But this hitchhiking book is surpassed in both self-mockery and hilarity by John Waters, who, on a whim, bummed rides from Baltimore to San Francisco, resulting in Carsick (2014), which is filled with mock ordeals, most of them (as he freely admits) the delusions of the fearful and fevered brain of a wealthy gay movie director who can easily afford to fly first class, but who longs for an ordeal, to endow his laborious trip with some squalid glamour.
There are many other similar books, hundreds, perhaps thousands, but each in its peculiar, even revelatory way is an approximation of travel in far-off places, reimagining the United States as a foreign, hostile landscape, making travel into a risky exertion, a deadly sport, or a dangerous stunt.
Their exaggerations aside, some of these are worthy books, but what is missing is the plain fact that the United States puts very few delays in the path of the traveler. In walking, boating, hitchhiking, and camping these travel writers set out to make the business harder and to call attention to themselves, but nothing is easier than traversing this country by road. The car journey is celebrated in Larry McMurtry’s Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways (2000), a meditation on motoring: “What I want to do is treat the great roads as a river, floating down this one, struggling up that one.” This satisfying essay on driving across the country recounts the idiot joy of talking to oneself at the wheel, the reverie of the road, recalling books, old movies, reflections on the past: “blank driving, accompanied by minimal thought.”
“My old friend the 90,” McMurtry writes of one highway. On another ride, “Then I’m in Alabama for an hour,” and he seems airborne. He speaks of a 770-mile drive, Duluth to Wichita, remarking how “I never had to go more than one hundred yards off the highway for food, gasoline, or a restroom,” and, he might have added, a motel. His book accurately reflects what I feel in traveling in America—the solitary road trip that is in many respects a Zen experience, scattered with road candy, unavailable to motorists in any other country on earth.
But there are obstacles to travel in the United States, or at least obstacles to penetrating the country. We are a naturally welcoming people, but with too strenuous a response from the stranger, the welcome wears off, it shreds, it cools, it vanishes and becomes wary and reluctant. We are full of opinions, but we are temperamentally inhospitable to opposition or to searching questions—and the best traveler has nothing but questions. Americans will talk all day, but they are terrible listeners and have an aversion to probing or any persistent inquisitiveness by a stranger.
Americans share with the simple furrow-browed villagers in the folk societies of the world a deep suspicion of personal questions. We say we tolerate dissent, but the expression of a strongly held contrary view can render you undesirable, or even an enemy. A difference of opinion is often construed as defiance. You would not know that from our obsessive self-congratulation and our boasts of liberty and freedom. New Americans, refugees, people fleeing the horrors and tyrannies of their homelands, who have come to the United States for its freedoms, are often the most narrow-minded and censorious. We tolerate difference only when we don’t have to look at it or listen to it, as long as it doesn’t impact our lives.
Our great gift as a country is its size and its relative emptiness, its elbow room. That space allows for difference and is often mistaken for tolerance. The person who dares to violate that space is the real traveler.
Driving south, I became a traveler again in ways I’d forgotten. Because of the effortless release from my home to the road, the sense of being sprung, I rediscovered the joy in travel that I knew in the days before the halts, the checks, the affronts at airports—the invasions and violations of privacy that beset every air traveler. The discouragement and indignity of this querying casts a pall over the whole experience of travel—and this is before any forward progress can be made. All air travel today involves interrogation, often by someone in a uniform who is your inferior.
Once, you slipped away unseen, showed your ticket, boarded the plane, your luggage and peace of mind intact; you set off undisturbed. Earlier in my traveling life, this was my happy lot.
There is so much disturbance in travel itself, it is intolerable that it begins so quickly, even before you leave. These days the airport experience is not only a disagreeable foretaste of all the insults to come on the trip, but also an annoying way of reminding the prospective traveler that he or she is an alien at home, and not just a stranger but someone perhaps to be feared, a possible danger, a troublemaker if not a terrorist—the hoo-ha, shoes off, belt off, no jacket, denuded and simplified and subjected to screening while tapping your feet, eager to get away; all this while still in a mode of predeparture, scrutinized, needing to pass inspection before you can even think of the trip ahead.
An airport is an obstacle course, and because of that it can sour you on the whole notion of travel. By degrees, over the years, the airport experience has become an extreme example of a totalitarian regime at work, making you small and suspect, depriving you of control. Such is the clumsy questioning of motives that one’s usual response is the sort of suppressed rage that was the traveler’s emotion in Soviet-era Eastern Europe with its bullying policemen. Travel was once a liberation; now it is the opposite—air travel, that is. Younger travelers have no idea what has been lost.
The sense that you’re agreeing to this intrusion, that you’re collaborating (“It’s for my own good”), is worse than demeaning; it combines all the excuses and evasions that helped to create the oppressive dictatorships and tyrannies of the past. The stripping, at all airports, of the traveler’s dignity, forcing the traveler to submit, is the antithesis of what one seeks in travel. Yes, we live in dangerous times, but if that means surrendering all our rights to privacy, then it is hardly worth the misery of leaving home.
There is a remedy, but it is for the lucky few, those who live in a vast country like ours who have the option of avoiding all airports: those who stick to the open road. Even the lowest jalopy is better than a first-class seat on a plane, because to get to that seat you are forced to submit to the indignities of official scrutiny and a body search. But no one has the right to question your slipping into a car and driving away at high speed. There is no prologue, only the bliss of a sudden exit.
The dubious achievement in travel these days is enduring the persistent nuisance of a succession of airports in order to arrive at a distant place for a brief interlude of the exotic, maintaining the delusion that it is travel. This is the equivalent of being measured like a projectile and being shot out of a cannon, and that’s how most of us feel in such a state, like a human cannonball, dazed and confused, in the company of other cannonballs.
There is a better way, a truer way, the old way—the proud highway, the rolling road.
Traveling without a specific destination, I had left home on Cape Cod, early on a morning autumnal and damp, steering my car south, dropped down past New York City and skirted Washington, D.C., keeping on until way past sunset, and drove into Front Royal, Virginia, in the dark. It was October. I was headed for the Deep South, so I still had a way to go. But already I knew the pleasant trance-like state of long-distance driving, the onset of highway hypnosis and white line fever in the long empty stretches: the satori of the open road, the ordinary experience of driving transformed into a higher spiritual path.
Normally I felt a tremor of anxiety before I set off on a long trip. This time I felt only joy, an eagerness to start, no passport, no security check, no plane to catch, no crowds. I felt a thrill throwing a jackknife into my bag. I loaded up with books; I had a tent and a sleeping bag just in case. I emptied out the refrigerator and had a bag of food too—juice and hard-boiled eggs, a container of homemade chili, cheese, fruit, and bottles of wine.
I was in the Deep South because I hardly knew it, and for the sheer pleasure of driving my own car, for the freedom of not having to make onward plans, because only in America can you travel in confidence without a destination: the humblest town has a place to stay, probably on its outskirts, probably a beat-up motel; and a place to eat, at best a soul food diner, but probably a Hardee’s, an Arby’s, a Zaxby’s, a Lizard’s Thicket, or a disenfranchised chicken place reeking of hot oil, but friendly. Typically it was a small eatery with a counter that displayed an anthology of fried food—catfish, chicken, burgers, corrugated French fries, even fried pie—peasant food eaten by everyone. A deep tray of okra, as viscous as frog spawn, next to a kettle of sodden collard greens looking like stewed dollar bills. You were always offered a wet biscuit, and often a blessing. I stayed away from the big cities and the coastal communities. I kept to the Lowcountry, the Black Belt, the Delta, the backwoods, the flyspeck towns.
In the presidential debates during the election campaign of 2012 the candidates made constant reference to America’s middle class—how it was under siege, overtaxed, burdened by debt and uncertainty, and how each candidate was going to save the middle class—and appealed for their votes. On the way down, in New Jersey, I heard on the radio that fifty million Americans lived in poverty, not many where I was coming from, a great number where I was headed. Sixteen percent of Americans were classified as poor—and it was twenty percent in the South, in places where the income gap was growing wider than at any time in history. The presidential candidates did not allude to saving the poor.
“They avoid using the word ‘poor,’ ” a social worker in Alabama told me early on in my trip, and explained, “ ‘Poor’ is shorthand for ‘black.’ ”
I was curious about the poor in the South. It is impossible to travel the country roads of the South and not be in regular contact with America’s underclass. I was traveling for my usual reasons, out of restlessness and curiosity, to look at places that were new to me. We travel for pleasure, for a door-slamming sense of “I’m outta here,” for a change of air, for edification, for the big vulgar boast of being distant, for the possibility of being transformed, for the voyeuristic romance of gawping at the exotic.
“You’ve been everywhere,” people said to me, but that’s a laugh. My wish list of places is not only long, but in many cases blindingly obvious. Yes, I had been to Patagonia and the Congo and Sikkim, but I—an American—hadn’t been to the most scenic American states, never to Alaska, Montana, Idaho, or the Dakotas, and I’d had only the merest glimpse of Kansas and Iowa. I had not traveled in the Deep South. I wanted to see these states, not flying in but traveling slowly on the ground, keeping to back roads, and defying the general rule of “Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never play cards with a man called Doc.”
Nothing to me has more excitement than the experience of rising early in the morning in my own house and getting into my car and driving away on a long, meandering trip through North America. Not much can beat it for a sense of freedom—no pat-down, no passport, no airport muddle, just revving an engine and then “Eat my dust.” The long, improvisational road trip by car is quintessentially American, beginning with reliable autos, early in the last century.
The first cross-country road, the Lincoln Highway, was inaugurated in 1913. Linking New York and San Francisco, this notional thoroughfare, pieced together from an assortment of east-west–trending roads, was not a US government project but rather an idea seen through to completion by private businessmen. These men, all of whom were associated with the automobile industry, were supervised by Carl G. Fisher, who manufactured car headlights in Indianapolis. (He also built the Indianapolis Speedway.) An accepted north-south route was established at around the same time. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald took a celebrated trip on it in a 1918 Marmon Roadster, from Connecticut to Alabama in 1920, three months after their marriage. Scott wrote a jaunty account of it in The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, one of the earliest American car journey narratives.
Many other road books followed: Henry Miller’s, Kerouac’s, Steinbeck’s, and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways being the notable ones. The road trips Nabokov took all over America with his wife at the wheel, seeking butterflies, resulted in Lolita, a novel that is also incidentally a road trip. Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South is one of the great road trip novels, starting in Arkansas and ending in Honduras, a wild ride, played for laughs, and wise too: “The car ran well and I glowed in the joy of solitary flight. It was almost a blessed state.”
Ever since the advent of the motorcar people have turned road trips into narratives, both in America and in Europe. Rudyard Kipling was an early motorist, and bought a Rolls-Royce in 1910 in which his chauffeur drove him around England while he made notes. Edith Wharton was an enthusiastic car owner; she took her first ride in 1902, bought a Panhard-Levassor in 1904, and later a black Pope-Hartford. Wharton wrote A Motor-Flight Through France (1908), its first sentence, “The motor car has restored the romance of travel.” Like Kipling she had a chauffeur, and her bachelor friend Henry James was often her passenger. James loved her cars and called her new one the “Vehicle of Passion.”
“James grew to admire her and wonder at her energy,” Colm Tóibín wrote in Vogue of “the Master.” “During a heat wave on one of his stays at The Mount”— Wharton’s estate in Massachusetts —“the only relief James found was in ‘incessant motoring.’ They motored, Wharton wrote, ‘daily, incessantly, over miles and miles of lustrous landscape lying motionless under the still glaze of heat. While we were moving he was refreshed and happy, his spirits rose.’ ”
While all roads in America are pretty much the same, and predictably smooth, American places and its people are distinctly different and pose other problems. The roads in general represent effortless and standardized pleasure, even with the traffic, which no one wants to hear about. This makes the abrupt arrivals, and encounters, somewhat surrealistic—in one day, driving from my house on Cape Cod, an abode of familiarity, and on that same road, at nightfall, finding myself in an utterly different landscape, among people who, while polite enough, did not want to be known.
In Africa and China and India and Patagonia, the locals seem grateful to be visited by a stranger. This is the drama, the color, the encounter in the familiar travel book. But in the United States, a visit by another citizen is not an occasion to rehearse traditional hospitality, or to utter the Arabic formula “Salam aleikum ya dayf al-Rahman! Peace upon you, guest of the Merciful One!” or the Hindi version, “Welcome! Atithi devo Bhava! The guest is God!”
One is more often greeted with suspicion, hostility, or indifference. In this way Americans could be more challenging, more difficult to get acquainted with, more secretive and suspicious and in many respects more foreign, than any people I have ever met.
Traveling in a spirit of inquiry, I was in the South because I had hardly been there and knew so little about it. Everyone knows that in the smugger pockets of the South there is wealth and stylishness and ease—estates, horse farms, fine dining, salubrious cities, upscale suburbs, some of the finest real estate in America.
But that is the Old Magnolia South, and away from it, though not far away, there is hunger and squalor and great poverty. The poorest parts of America can also be found in these sunny states, in the most beautiful parts of the South, the rural areas: the Lowcountry of South Carolina, the Black Belt of Alabama, the Mississippi Delta, the Ozarks of Arkansas. These poor folk are poorer in their way (as I was to find) and less able to manage and more hopeless than many people I had traveled among in distressed parts of Africa and Asia. Living in the buried hinterland, in fractured communities and dying towns and on the sidelines, they exist in obscurity.
Poor Americans, who have very little, still have their privacy—in many ways it is their last possession, and they resist losing it. That is a challenge for a traveler who is curious to know: What do people do when they don’t appear to do anything?
The traveler, by selecting a singular route, invents the country, but the truthful traveler cannot invent experiences, and these experiences are the stuff of the narrative. Many books have been written about the conspicuous excitements of the South, but I made it my habit to drive past the buoyant cities and obvious pleasures in favor of smaller places and huddled towns, to meet the submerged twenty percent.
On the road out of Front Royal (“Ain’t got but one”) and a detour (“Cain’t miss it”) along Skyline Drive through Shenandoah National Park, spectacularly beautiful on this sunny autumn day, the brittle curled leaves aflame in russets and yellows, blowing and twisting like shredded rags across the narrow winding road along the ridge, the valley below seen from three thousand feet, I thought of Africa’s Great Rift Valley.
An American cannot travel the world without returning home and making comparisons. East African imagery ran through my mind all day as I dawdled past New Market and Harrisonburg and Wytheville, thinking of thorn trees and the highlands and villages and shops and Indians who’d inserted themselves all over East Africa as shopkeepers and traders known as dukawallahs. The Great Rift Valley, blighted by recent tribal massacres and filled with refugee villages, was puny compared to this majestic landscape.
I drove all day in a mood of bliss through these golden hills and sifting-down leaves and the tufted-mulch odors at the window.
At nightfall in Bristol, in the southeast corner of Virginia, the edge of Appalachia, I stepped into the lobby of an inexpensive motel and was hit with the sharp aroma of incense partially cloaking the odor of curry, the smell of every interior of India, every Indian duka in Africa.
“Yes?”
A small, frowning man brushed through the beaded curtain hung across the door to the back, another Indian touch, bringing more aromas with him, the smells suggesting the particularities of a whole narrative, sticks of incense smoldering to the gods behind the curtain, also masking other odors, the perfume that makes your eyes itch.
In a landscape of whites and blacks, the most conspicuous person I saw was this man, my first Indian in the South, the owner-manager of a motel, a dot Indian with a caste mark on his forehead rather than a feather Indian. Motels, gas stations, convenience stores: they had a lock on them, and the first one stood for so many I was to find. One of the whispers in the South is that whites sold these businesses to Indians as an act of defiance, in order to keep them out of the hands of blacks. I met hundreds more Indians, nearly all of them from the state of Gujarat in western India, many of them recent immigrants.
His name was Mr. Hardeep Patel, from Surat, in Gujarat. Gujaratis, looked down upon by Punjabis, are Indians plain and simple: the shopkeepers of East and Central Africa, the store owners and operators of sub–post offices on the high streets of Britain, the motel owners of the South. Mr. Patel had immigrated to Canada, stayed a few years, then crossed the border to settle in the States. You first think: This poor man laboring alone in his business! But they are the first to reveal that they are related to all the other Gujaratis in the town or district, the Patels and Desais and Shahs.
“I knew some people—other Indians, running motels. They helped me.”
“Are there other Indians in Bristol?”
“Fifteen families.” Interesting: he spoke of families, the Indian social unit, and not of individuals.
In the morning, after the seven or eight Budget Inn rooms had been vacated, it was Mr. Hardeep Patel whom I saw pushing a laundry cart from room to room, piling it with bed linens and used towels. After almost forty years, it seemed he still cleaned the rooms and, this morning at least, had no menials or housekeepers to help him. Did this indicate that business was poor and Mr. Patel hard-pressed? No, it perhaps explained the new Lexus parked in front.
There is another category of Indian immigrant in the South. For a number of years Indian doctors could access the fast track to a US visa by agreeing to work in the poorer parts (designated “underserved areas”) of America. Now this program is called the National Interest Waiver.
Beginning in the 1990s, thousands of visas were handed out under this preferential program. But the subsequent history of the successful visa applicant was never checked. Many of these visas were issued from the US consulate in Madras to doctors in Tamil Nadu State, and also to ones in Hyderabad in adjacent Andhra Pradesh, with the understanding that the recipient would serve for a period of years in certain designated needy areas, Appalachia in particular.
Not long after this program was begun, a specialized form of visa fraud developed: many of these Indian doctors filed, through the Immigration and Naturalization Service, for “physician’s assistants” to come to the United States on temporary worker (H-1B) visas to work in their offices. These alleged assistants were invariably doctors themselves who wished to gain US citizenship. Authorities noticed patterns of deception in the filing process, which led to the discovery of a fraud ring.
Neither the workload nor the income of the doctors in Appalachia justified the need for these “assistants.” It was obviously a means for the doctors to get to the States and then seek ways to adjust their residency status while they were here. Many of the Indian doctors (largely Hyderabadi, a number of them involved in a visa fraud scam) did end up in Appalachia, at least for several years, and then they moved on to more lucrative practices in urban areas, either legally or when they could slip under the radar.
Though he was well educated, Mr. Patel was not one of those doctors. His wish all along was to rid himself of India and settle in America. As we talked, I heard an older woman giggling into the phone behind the beaded curtain, Mrs. Patel perhaps. This man and wife lived in the motel in the same way East African Indian families lived at the back of their shops. The Patels had three daughters, all married.
“You arranged the marriages?”
“Love match,” he said, wobbling his head. “American way.”
There were no pictures of his daughters on the wall of family photographs—that would have been slightly indecent. Grandchildren were shown, the largest photo his sixteen-year-old son, whom Mr. Hardeep Patel described proudly in three words: “He plays golf.”
I first heard the name Big Stone Gap forty-odd years ago, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The first time I was eleven years old, staying for a summer with my uncle, a military doctor, at Fort Lee, Virginia, adjacent to Hopewell, on the Appomattox River. The nearby town of Petersburg was famous for the Battle of the Crater, a Union defeat, and the ensuing eight-month siege of the town by Union soldiers, ending in its surrender. Of the summer of 1952, I remember visits to the battlefield, the small signs on the doorjambs of restaurants lettered WHITE (explained to me by my whispering uncle), the red clay roads, a ride on a handcart on a rural railway, and a sight that has never left my mind: an enormous tooting calliope on a wagon, a gilded organ with red-painted scrollwork, a tall smoking chimney and steam-spouting pipes wobbling as it rolled, being played by a white man ostentatiously seated before it in a top hat and frock coat. And when the colorful front of the calliope passed by, a view of the back: a black man in ragged overalls, his wide-apart legs braced on a platform, his face gleaming with sweat, shoveling coal into the fiery furnace of the boiler. Even then, just a boy, I saw this calliope as a powerful social metaphor.
In Charlottesville, twenty years later, my second time in the South, I taught writing for one semester. I was filling in for the vacationing writer-in-residence, Peter Taylor. Taylor was an accomplished short story writer, a friendly man, and a sympathetic teacher. His roots were in Tennessee, where his grandfather had served both as a governor and later as a US senator. Peter Taylor was respectable and, as he was quick to point out, a member of the Southern gentry, and with this elevated ancestry came a defiant backward-looking provincialism that made me smile. In conversation, this otherwise nice and subtle man had all the conventional conceits of the South: a canting view of the Civil War, a sly mockery of Yankees, a defensive position on obscure Southern crotchets, a deep suspicion of the disruptions of the civil rights movement, and an innocent or credulous notion (commonly held in the South) that white Southerners understood blacks in a highly subtle way that Yankees never could. I was unable to account for him except as a self-conscious Southerner, suspicious of outsiders.
The difference in our ages might also have been a factor. I was a rebellious young man whose books were selling; he was twenty years older than me, an appendage to academia, out of print and enjoying a professor’s salary. He seemed to view me, with wry amusement, as some Southerners did then, as an upstart from another country, the cold, iron-dark North.
To my utter bewilderment, a number of faculty members were slyly mocking of William Faulkner, another outsider, who had been a writer-in-residence in Charlottesville ten years before and whose late-life passion in Virginia (he had only a few more years to live) was horsemanship—hacking and fox hunting. His portrait was painted, Faulkner looking like a posh Englishman, in the riding habit of the Farmington Hunt Club. But the mockery was envious, the sort that is brought to a bitter pitch by academics, and was noted by one of my colleagues, Joe Blotner, who later mentioned it in his biography of Faulkner. Blotner wrote, “Some in Charlottesville, aesthetes and intellectuals, sneered at what were to them affectations unworthy of a great writer.”
By chance, in a hospital lobby in Charlottesville, I met a disconsolate couple, very poor, who had come there to seek treatment for their afflicted child. They lived, they said, in Big Stone Gap. I forgot their name, but I remembered the name of their town, and it became one of those evocative place names that I kept in my head and vowed to seek out someday—an alluring name, like Zanzibar and Patagonia, the sort that beckons to a traveler.
Big Stone Gap is in Virginia, the edge of it, lying at the mountainous convergence of Kentucky and Tennessee, and North Carolina is only twenty-five miles away. I drove there from Bristol on a road that circled around steep hills and cut through a river valley—the wooded slopes so pretty, the towns along the way so mean, many of them trailer settlements and scruffy roadside bungalows and the poorest shops: “Thrift Store,” “Discount Store,” “Family Dollar Store,” “Budget Store,” “Affordable Stone Monuments.” Here and there among the trailers and the scattering of old wood-frame farmhouses were a few solitary mansions of red sandstone and granite, most of them the pompous residences of coal barons. Coal is the industry here, and neatly lettered signs nailed to telephone poles announced: SUPPORT COAL.
Big Stone Gap appeared at the end of the flattening road, a few cross streets set in a sudden valley, wrapped by two forks of the Powell River, most of its stores defunct or sitting moribund in the noon sunshine.
One storefront advertised itself as a craft shop, pottery and homemade jewelry and paintings for sale. I stopped in because I could not see any other shops. It was staffed by Mrs. Moore, who made jewelry. I asked her about the coal mines.
Mrs. Moore, who had lived in Big Stone Gap for twenty-four years, said, “I don’t know where they are—they’re all private.”
In the bright and empty town, the brick storefronts were shuttered, though Mrs. Moore said that on the coming weekend Mountain Empire Community College would be holding a Craft Day. “There’ll be storytelling and bluegrass music.”
The center of social activity in Big Stone Gap was the Mutual Drug-store on East Wood Street, a place that was not only a pharmacy and convenience store but also a cafeteria, with a menu chalked on a board. Lunch Special—Chicken strips—Mashed Potatoes, Green beans, Apple Pie, Cream Pie. It was a meeting place too, people in work clothes ducking in and out of booths, “How y’all doin’?” and “If I knew you were coming I’d let you buy me lunch. Heh.”
In spite of the apparent emptiness of the town, there was an air of contentment, mingled with resignation, a slow and certain way of walking, leaning forward as stout people do, burdened by the swollen belly, or skinny and loping, throwing one leg ahead of the other.
I asked about Indian doctors.
“There’s a couple of Hindu doctors here.”
Two in Big Stone Gap, Dr. Karakattu (a Kerala name) and Dr. Gupta, and one in the town of Appalachia, Dr. Tarandeep Kaur. Of the thousands who had received visas under the National Interest Waiver, for most it seemed their interest had waned.
I did not see a black face in Big Stone Gap, none in the town, none on the way, nor any in Weber City, on the Tennessee state line, which I passed through. I did not know then what I learned later, the racial geography of the South: the towns and villages in the mountains and hills are mainly white, and in the Lowcountry, the great sprawl of flat agricultural land where cotton and tobacco were grown, they are mainly black—the persistence of history.
I stopped at a gun store on my way into nearby North Carolina. It was, like most of the other gun stores I saw, also a pawnshop, since the most costly and pawnable item in a hill country household is a firearm. Pawnshops revealed a great deal about possessions in the rural economy—I could verify the things that people pawned or sold, guns mainly, but also TV sets, VCRs, computers, obscure car parts, wristwatches, but not much jewelry. In many pawnshops there was a tray of Civil War memorabilia, or arrowheads dug up locally, or knives. A large, rusty, and greasy category was building equipment—drills, block and tackles, sickles, wrenches, hammers, pressure gauges, pipefitting contraptions, nail guns, and band saws, all of them well used, the tools of the trade of men who were no longer employed.
Because they were buyers as well as sellers, gun shop/pawnshop owners were usually chatty, which was helpful to me. Whenever I stopped at such a place, I inquired about buying a gun, explaining that I was a Yankee, far from home, with no local residence.
The clerk inevitably looked pained at the idea of someone like me traveling through the South without a weapon.
“I can’t sell you a handgun,” the man at this gun shop said. “I can sell you a long gun, though—any long gun you see, ammo too. An AK-47, if I had one.”
This seemed preposterous to me then, but a few months later, in Mississippi, I saw two Romanian-made AK-47s for sale at a gun show.
Pressing him, I said, “I was hoping to buy a handgun, maybe a Glock?”
“Cain’t do it. Anyway, only the jigaboos have them.”
Do I challenge him in his racial abuse? No, let him talk. I said, “It’s strange, I haven’t seen many black people around these parts.”
“Yep. Nice, huh?”
Hearing this, at a nearby counter, a young salesclerk—a fat white woman—and a just as fat policeman hee-hawed and covered their mouths, wheezing laughter into their hands.
Encouraged by their reaction, the man said, “I was in Columbus, Ohio. Place is full of jigaboos. But up in Ohio they said to me, ‘You’re a hillbilly. You got one leg shorter than the other from stepping around the side of the hills.’ ”
He demonstrated this by raising one leg and canting his body sideways and hopping a little, as though negotiating a steep slope.
“Took it as long as I could—just put up with it,” he said, of the term “hillbilly,” which is not the conventional jokey aside of television humor but contemptuous and bitter in the hill communities of Appalachia, implying poverty and ignorance. “Finally I couldn’t take no more. I says to these Ohio boys, ‘You got one leg shorter than the other too, from stepping off the sidewalk into the gutter’ ”— and he demonstrated this with his legs —“ ‘to let the niggers go on by.’ ”
I left Big Stone Gap and drove via the gun shop into North Carolina, slipping from road to road, heading for Asheville, where I wanted to verify something that had been preying on my mind. My friend the late, well-known American painter Kenneth Noland was born in Asheville, and lived there from 1924 until 1942, when he enlisted in the US Army. After his discharge, he returned to attend freewheeling and experiment-obsessed Black Mountain College, fifteen miles up the road from his home.
In time, Noland became part of the vanguard of the 1960s Color Field movement, painters of pure color in blobby, random, or geometric shapes—many of Noland’s paintings, the size of a garage door, resemble archery targets, or chevron badges for the epaulets of giants. Color Field painters regarded figurative artists as old hat. “Picasso is shit,” Ken Noland used to mutter to me with a smile, and he fully believed that the mission of modern painting was to drench the canvas in bright color, to eliminate meaning and emotion by drowning them in dumb and untelling paint. For much of his work Noland used a long-handled foot-wide paint roller, and he worked it on a canvas laid flat on the floor, like a man waterproofing a deck. I never saw him hold a brush. He told me that he could not draw a rabbit. Not surprisingly, Noland became the darling of interior decorators, who spruced up rooms for wealthy clients using his paintings as accents, to tone with the color schemes of their chintzes; in their fussy parlance, the primary colors of his simple staring canvases “drew a room together.”
Many of Noland’s paintings and most of his theories seemed to me a crock, but the man himself was a lovable grump, and we often went fishing together in Maine, where he lived. In tranquil moments he reminisced about the South. One day over a drink, speaking to me of his youth in Asheville, he said, “Know what? I had a paper route. I went all over, even delivered papers in Niggertown.”
To tease him, I said, “Who lived there, Ken?”
“Who do you think lived there? Niggers.”
“What did they call that part of town?”
He frowned in bafflement and began gabbling. He had no idea, but quickly saw the absurdity of a black person in Asheville identifying this district that way. He used the word now and then, but he was not a racist. He had grown up in segregated Asheville. He called himself a hillbilly, but even so, he was indignant when he told me stories of how blacks in Asheville were condemned to sit in the balcony of the downtown movie theater. “And you’d never see one in a restaurant or even walking down the sidewalk of the main street—they wouldn’t dare.”
He was speaking of the 1930s and ’40s, and by 1950 (when race relations were just as bad and backed up by laws requiring racial segregation) he had left Asheville for good, and spent the rest of his life in the North. But when he referred to the place, speaking of his youth, he sometimes lapsed into the language of the past, and over that distance he did not see blacks, he saw “niggers,” living in “Niggertown.”
Asheville, which prospered as a spa town, sited in the healthful air of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is home to ten colleges and even more hospitals and sushi bars. For people living within hundreds of miles it is a cultural center. The town is of course the obsessive subject of Thomas Wolfe, who was born there and is buried there. In my travels it was, or so it seemed to me, one of the happiest, most habitable and well-heeled towns I saw in the South.
I was headed to the Deep South, but I had something on my mind that I wished to settle when I got to Asheville. I fell into conversation with a man at the town’s museum and asked him where the black population historically lived—where Ken Noland had delivered newspapers as a teenager in the 1930s.
“Take a right,” he said, pointing out of the front of the museum, “and another right. Keep going.”
I followed his directions, heading through the main square, then downhill, in what was after ten minutes’ walk clearly the black part of Asheville. “He came slowly over past the fire department and the city hall. On Gant’s corner, the Square dipped sharply down toward Niggertown, as if it had been bent at the edge,” Wolfe writes in Look Homeward, Angel. “Niggertown,” a forbidden and sultry aspect of Asheville’s underworld, figures often in the narrative. One of the dramas in the novel concerns Eugene Gant’s paper route in Niggertown, which was also Thomas Wolfe’s paper route. What a coincidence! It occurred to me that in claiming to have delivered papers in this part of Asheville, Ken Noland—habitual teller of tall tales, casual assumer of other artists’ experiences—might have been appropriating a bit of Wolfe’s personal history.
Strolling downward, I plunged from a precinct of granite buildings in a sunlit plaza to narrow, leafy streets and humble wooden houses, walking in the shade. And seeing me approach, a man waved hello to me as he stepped back from a picture he was painting on a city wall, a large portrait of a basketball player in the stars-and-stripes uniform of the Harlem Globetrotters. His name was Ernie Mapp.
“Nice picture,” I said.
“Bennie Lake,” Ernie Mapp said, and indicating the athlete’s uniform he added, “Born in Asheville. He was a Globetrotter. And he was a good soul.”
Seeing us talking, a man wandered over to join us. This was Tim Burdine, stout and bearish in a heavy coat and wool hat, his arm in a sling. “I busted it,” he explained. Tim was about sixty, Ernie much younger.
“I’m a stranger here, and a little lost,” I said after we’d chatted a bit. “What do you call this part of town?”
“This we call the Block,” Tim said.
“Or the East End,” Ernie put in. “Everything below Eagle Street and over to Valley Street.”
Ernie’s picture on the wall of the abutment below Market Street was part of an urban art project, the Triangle Park Mural Project, memorializing local people, most of them black, and historical events in seven-foot-high panels. The Triangle Park Mural Project’s website described it as “a collaborative community mural commemorating the history of the Block, Asheville’s historic black business district.” The painters and organizers were all local too, both black and white, bursting with civic pride.
“That’s Nina Simone in that picture,” Tim said, leading me to another part of the wall. The singer was depicted with her hair drawn back in her iconic Nefertiti profile, and she was surrounded by musicians.
“Those guys playing are from the group Bite, Chew and Spit,” Tim said. “You must have heard of them. House band of the Orange Peel. The Kit-Kat Club was just up there, Market Street.”
On this chilly late afternoon, other painters were absorbed in working on separate panels of the mural.
“Who you suppose that guy is?” Tim Burdine asked me, pointing to a slender young black man in stylish dark glasses, a jaunty tam-o’-shanter on his head, striking a pose, life-sized, in one of the murals. Tim walked over and leaned against the painted figure. “Me! Big glasses—I was skinny, I was cool! Eighteen years old. High school kid.”
A car swung by, music blaring—James Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing”— and, parking it, a heavyset woman got out, leaving the music playing.
“This is Bubbles,” Tim said, giving her a hug with his good arm. “She’s one of the artists too.”
“I try,” Bubbles said, and bopped to James Brown. She was smiling, a motherly presence, about Tim’s age, and walking through Triangle Park, this large woman, bulking in her heavy winter coat, seemed to possess it.
“She’s president of our club, ain’t you, girl?” Tim said, following her.
“What club is that?”
“We call it the Just Folks Club.”
We sat down at a picnic table, Tim and Bubbles and I, as Ernie went back to dabbing at his mural with a long-handled brush.
“Yes, uh-unh, we watched movies from upstairs in the theater,” Tim said, answering one of my questions, “and it lasted a long time. Segregation didn’t end in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act. It kept on into the 1970s.”
“And later,” Bubbles said.
“It’s over,” Tim said. “No one’s angry. No hard feelings. Everyone gets along.”
When I got up to leave, Tim said, “You come back in a few months, this project’s going to be finished. We’re fixing to have a ceremony. You’re welcome.”
On my way out of Asheville the next day, on the back roads of camphor groves, where in the dooryards of some houses the scuppernong vines dangled clusters of fruit, and through Flat Rock (where Carl Sandburg lived for the last twenty-two years of his life on his goat farm, Connemara) and the hamlet of Zirconia, and over the state line into South Carolina and Greenville, I had the radio on: the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man.”
I began to ruminate on how you might attempt to ramble in the rest of the world, but there are always obstacles, and sometimes serious risks, and many dead ends. In America you are free to travel without a destination, simply circulating. This suited my mood of restlessness and my love of the road and was a relief from the uncertainty and suspense I had felt on trips elsewhere—my last in Africa, for one. And even in the poorest places in America, where there are shacks and rotting house trailers, the roads are wonderful.
I spent the night in Greenville, South Carolina, youthful and buzzing with activity on this Saturday evening, its downtown thronged with restaurants and bars. Less than fifty years ago it was heavily policed and reserved for whites, the main streets off-limits to blacks, who were forbidden to use the public library or eat in any of the restaurants or stay in any of the hotels. In my lifetime, and the lifetimes of many in Greenville, the racial restrictions have been lifted and the laws overturned. I was traveling on the fiftieth anniversary of the civil rights movement, usually referred to as a struggle, but it seemed to me—and to some blacks I spoke to—more like a war, with many battles and many bombings and many deaths. But you would not know that from the festive streets of Greenville today.
In the morning, I drove to Columbia, circling the city, looking for a place to have lunch. I settled on a Southern option, Lizard’s Thicket. Its motto was “Real Country Cooking,” and on the menu chicken and dumplings, fried chicken livers, liver and onions, pulled barbecue pork, meatloaf, biscuits and gravy.
As I was getting out of my car, a stout man approached the car next to mine from the direction of the restaurant. He had the sleepy, satisfied, slightly winded look of someone who had just eaten a huge meal.
“Hi there. How you doing?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Hungry, though.”
“Have the liver and onions,” he said. “It’s delicious. It’s on special today.”
“Thanks for the suggestion. I’m passing through. I’m from Massachusetts.”
“What church are you affiliated with?”
I had never been asked this before by a stranger, in the United States or anywhere else in the world. I got it so often in the South I became curious about the mystical beliefs of the people there. The question was often phrased as, “What church do you fellowship with?” People asked it out of the blue, and because I did not have a simple answer, they would fill the silence with “I’m Hope Chapel” or “We’re AME”— the African Methodist Episcopal, a church founded more than two hundred years ago by free blacks in Pennsylvania. Or “Shubach Deliverance World Ministries.” Or someone would preface his introduction with “We’re fellowshiping with Heaven on Hah.”
The question made me look closely at the man. He was pale and fat and short of breath, with thinning hair, lightly freckled, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a striped tie. He was perspiring and postprandial, squinting at me in the bright sun. He had an unhealthy, somewhat clerkly look, three pens in his breast pocket, but a mild, hospitable manner. I think he was surprised by my hesitation at his question about my religion.
“I am an unaffiliated Baptist,” he said, as though to encourage me. “You look like a teacher, something to do with books or teaching. I’m Al McCandless, nice to meet you. I was in insurance, still deal with it a bit, but it’s funny, I always wrote poetry. I’d get a thought and turn it into a poem. When I was forty years old I found out I was adopted. My grandmother told me accidentally. We were talking about something one day, something to do with my brother, who was misbehaving, I think, and the old woman said, ‘Well, you know you’re adopted, like your brother.’ I knew he was adopted, but I thought I was a natural child. I asked my folks about it, but all they said was ‘Who in hell told you that?’ That wasn’t really an answer, so I asked them again, and they said, ‘You’re ours, you’re all ours, you’ll always be ours.’ But I knew what they meant, and after they passed away I found my birth mother. She was eighty, living just a few miles away from where I grew up. She had but a second-grade education. She had a few more children—so I had a real sister and two half-sisters. I had three years with her until she died. But I also thought about my other mother, and my brother the adopted one, and where I grew up. I didn’t know what-all to do, so I wrote a poem about it.”
Through this he had been gasping, mopping his sweat-beaded face, blinking at me—his damp eyes and pale eyelashes. He had a big square mouth and a lazy tongue, but his suffering expression might have been an effect of the sun, the glare and the heat.
“I called the poem ‘Who Am Ah?’ ”
“A big question,” I said.
He opened wide again and his mouth went square. “ ‘Who Am Ah?’ ” And then he said, “You’ll like the liver and onions.”
Inside Lizard’s Thicket, a gray-haired black man in a baseball cap was just leaving, saying, “Ah mo just leave mah money heah fo y’all,” and he tipped his hat and said, “I came to see y’all, say hello to y’all, make mahself feel better.”
I was learning that throughout the South it was possible to meet many people casually, and the merest hello might provoke a torrent of reminiscence, like Al McCandless’s lament. But some folks were hard to find and reluctant to confide their business, especially if their business was survival and they were living below the poverty line, in silence and shadows.
What inspired my trip through the Deep South was the notion that as a traveler the people I had been meeting in Africa and India and elsewhere were more and more familiar to me. I am not speaking about their common humanity but their circumstances. Many Americans were just as poor as many Africans, or as confined in rural communities as many Indians; they were as remote from anyone caring about them, too, without access to decent housing or medical care; and there were portions of America, especially in the rural South, that resembled what is often thought of as the Third World.
The name Bernie Mazyck was given to me as that of a man who might provide an introduction. Bernie was the founding president and CEO of the South Carolina Association of Community Development Corporations, about which I was curious, but I was also curious about his name. Bernie Mazyck was the friend of a friend. I had driven to Columbia to meet him and seek his help.
The South Carolina Association of Community Development Corporations describes itself as “a state-wide trade association of non-profit, community-based development corporations within the state’s economically distressed communities,” adding, “The SCACDC places particular emphasis on promoting development in communities that have been left out of the economic mainstream, especially minority communities.”
Its mission was “to raise the quality of life for low-wealth families,” of which there were many in South Carolina. In one of the poorest parts of the United States the word “poor” was never used by bureaucrats, perhaps because it seemed demeaning or stigmatizing. But it seemed to me a powerful word that was studiously avoided. The organization helped the “low-wealth families” by loaning money, offering advice, and guiding people through the paperwork. It also encouraged the passive poor to educate themselves and to become leaders. In a previous interview Bernie Mazyck had said, “For South Carolina, leadership is often viewed as the property of a certain select group of folk,” and he hoped to change that. “Select group,” when spoken in the South, is shorthand for “white.”
Bernie, dressed formally in a white shirt and silk tie, was waiting for me at one end of a gleaming, twenty-foot-long boardroom table. He looked up from a stack of papers, and if he was surprised by my street clothes—blue jeans and a long-sleeved polo shirt—he did not betray it. He seemed right at home in the boardroom; I looked like a janitor. I took him to be in his fifties, an intense, serious, compact man who spent his life going from board meeting to board meeting. He handled his papers with an economy of gesture, and had the restrained, almost clerical manner of someone who was often in the position of having to explain his work to people who had no idea of what his sort of development entailed. I was not surprised when he told me later that he was pursuing a master of divinity degree (“with an emphasis in urban development”).
“We take a community-based approach, to create permanent economy,” he said to me. “In this new model of development, there are assets to be leveraged …”
He went on in this abstract vein, describing economic uplift, emphasizing the importance of housing in giving people a sense that they had equity and a stake in the community. Old houses could be “rehabbed and retrofitted” and made energy efficient. He talked about “economic justice” and “partnerships” and “resource development.”
This was the sort of bureaucratic jargon about policy and development I had heard in Africa, often at similarly well-appointed boardroom tables, in well-carpeted rooms, in comfortable chairs, while outside—out there somewhere—low-wealth people needing help were houseless and scavenging.
I admired Bernie Mazyck’s earnestness, his serious manner, and even the opaque language of his mission fascinated me, because I could understand so little of it. Most of all I was intrigued by something else, and after we talked for a while I told him this.
“May I ask you about your name?”
He smiled, he relaxed, he took off his glasses, he smoothed his mustache with the back of one finger, and he pushed his chair away for comfort. For the next forty-five minutes he talked about his name, his family history, his relatives, his mother, his church.
It was a Southern manner of introduction, the assertion of rootedness and local experience. Though we met as strangers, we had a friend in common. He had been persuasive when talking about development plans, and he was an optimistic man, full of ideas; but what truly animated him and gave him authority was his telling me about his family, his life in South Carolina—he was a native of Charleston—and his unusual name.
Pronounced “mah-zeek,” it was a Huguenot name, he said. One of the earliest settlers in Charleston had been Isaac Mazyck, who’d arrived and founded the first Huguenot church in the port city in the late seventeenth century. I later checked and found that the name Mazyck originated in Belgium, in the town of Maeseyck or Maaseyek or Maaseik, in which case his was a nom de terre and probably—though Bernie did not say so—the name of a slaveholder, since slaves usually took the name of their owner.
We talked about his extended family, his roots, about his sense of African identity, his strong feeling of being a descendant of the Akan people of what is now Ghana but historically one of the great empires of coastal West Africa, the Kingdom of Ashanti. Bernie saw Akan resemblances in family relationships, in the matrilineal way he’d been raised, even in certain religious practices that had persisted in Christian churches in the South. And he said with feeling, “You need God on your side. The church is the center of my life.”
And I began to understand in a little more detail how in the South the past still mattered, partly because it cast a long shadow, but also because there was so much frustration in the present. The past was easier to understand, more coherent, and it helped to explain the present.
Gullah, for example. Many people in South Carolina alluded to this black culture that retained its Creole language and traditions on the coast. But Bernie could quote the language. “Kumbayah”— as in the song—was a Gullah expression, meaning “Come by here.” He told me how his mother would use Gullah expressions to teach him. Gullah penetrated everywhere, as a private language, as an enduring culture.
“My mother used to say, ‘Nu man, yanna weep-dee we dan-ya!’ ”
Meaning: “No, man, you’re up there and I’m down here,” a way of emphasizing class distinctions, high and low.
His mother’s name was Seypio, which was a version of her grandfather’s name, and his was Scipio, as in Scipio Africanus, the great Roman general, conqueror of Hannibal in the Battle of Zama (thus his title, Africanus).
Talk of slavery and sacrifice led Bernie to explain the conflicting views of the past. As an example, he told me about the African-American History Monument near here in Columbia, on the grounds of the state capitol—how it was years in the planning, and that in all the preliminary discussions it seemed impossible for anyone to agree on how the South Carolina black experience should be depicted on the bronze panels. A proposed panel showing the Ku Klux Klan lynching blacks was shelved. A great fight ensued about images of the Confederate flag. And there was the question of what to do about the stirring figure of Denmark Vesey, a slave who, having won a lottery, had bought his own freedom and in 1822 led a slave revolt in the state. It was the largest insurrection ever organized on behalf of slaves in the United States, involving thousands of plotters, much larger than Nat Turner’s in Virginia. But the plan was betrayed, and Vesey was hanged, along with many others in Charleston. To South Carolina blacks, and to historians generally, Vesey was a man ahead of his time, in the mold of Haiti’s revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture (whom Vesey admired): an enduring image of rebellion, a hero, and an inspiration.
“That was almost two hundred years ago,” Bernie said. “But they wouldn’t show his face on the monument.” He smiled and said, “See, we got a ways to go.”
We talked about the coming presidential election, the vexed question of the hated voter ID law. This restrictive law, which posed serious obstacles to voters, was advocated by the South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley, who was the daughter of immigrant Sikh parents. Having immigrated to Canada, the Randhawas had percolated over the border from Vancouver and had worked as schoolteachers in the tiny hamlet of Bamberg (pop. 3,604), the same size as Pandori Ran Singh Village (pop. 3,624), outside Amritsar in the Punjab, where the Randhawas were raised. In Bamberg they had started a successful clothing company, Exotica International, which ceased doing business in 2008. Less than two years later, Nikki (by then married to a white Southerner and converted to Methodism) was governor and her parents were living in luxury in Hilton Head.
“Odd,” I said, “a second-generation Indian American elected governor of this state.”
“An awful lot of people didn’t know she was a person of color,” Bernie said. “She looked white in her political posters. She doesn’t have an Indian name. She’s a Christian. She’s a right-wing Tea Party Republican. She hates the unions. And she kept her folks way in the back. Her daddy’s turban would have been a problem for a lot of white voters here.”
“That’s funny.”
“It’s really sad,” Bernie said. “How can I help you?”
I said, “I’d like to see some of the places you’re working to help develop”.
“Anything special?”
“The poorest.”
He nodded and poked some numbers into his phone.
Go to Allendale via Orangeburg, Bernie had said. But I got a late start, because I wanted to see the African-American History Monument at the statehouse that Bernie had mentioned—and the Confederate flag still flying on the grounds (it had been moved from the capitol dome after decades of objections). On meandering roads past twiggy fields of tufted white, the blown-open cotton bolls brightening the spindly bushes, I came to the town of Walterboro and saw a booth with a signboard that read INFORMATION. Though I now had a map to Allendale, I asked directions, merely so that I could talk to the old woman who supervised the booth and handed out pamphlets to local points of interest: the Verdler House, Bonnie Doone Plantation, the museums and galleries, Frankie’s Fun Park. Or Wally’s Tow Service:
BLACK OR WHITE
DAY OR NIGHT
YOU CALL
WE HAUL
“I have worked here for twelve years and no one has ever asked me how to get to Allendale,” she said.
“That seems unusual.”
“No,” she said. “No one ever goes there.”
And once I’d found the right road, Route 301, what she said seemed true. It was a ghost road of astonishing decrepitude—weird to look at, shocking to reflect upon.
In a lifetime of travel, I had seen very few places to compare with Allendale in its oddity, and approaching the town was just as bizarre. The road, much of it, was a divided highway, two broad side-by-side roads amounting to an old-fashioned turnpike, split by a grassy median, a central reservation much wider than I was used to—wider than many sections of the great north-south interstate, Route 95, which is more like a tunnel than a road for the way it sluices cars in both directions at great speed.
But this proud highway I was on, a substantial dual carriageway cut through low empty hills, was devoid of traffic: a royal road amid the green landscape and farms so fallen and abandoned they seemed like mere sketches of former habitation. The great rolling road was like a road to nowhere. No other cars on it today, no towns that I could see, no gas stations, no motels, no stores, like a road leading to the end of the world.
From the 1930s into the late 1960s this highway was the most important road through the South. A well-traveled thoroughfare, Route 301 was once the way from Delaware to Florida, the highway that the earliest Northern drivers took to find sunshine and ease, and that Southerners took to seek work, and a life, in the North.
It is usual in traveling through the developing world to find roads under construction—wide roads, narrow roads, highways, toll roads, and the clattering machinery, tracked excavators and bulldozers, clawing at the soil and disfiguring the land. It is rare in those places (I am thinking of Africa and India) to find finished roads, in good shape, totally neglected or unused. But throughout the rural South there were such roads, great gleaming highways that seemed to lead nowhere, and this one, Route 301, in this poor midsection of South Carolina, was one of them—startling in its strangeness.
Approaching the outskirts of Allendale, I had a sight of Doomsday, one of those visions that make the effort of travel worthwhile and proved to me that my setting out for the South had been an inspired decision. I had no idea that I would find what I saw that day of blue sky and sunshine, a mild breeze in the pines.
It was a vision of ruin, of decay, of utter emptiness, and it was obvious in the simplest, most recognizable structures—motels, gas stations, restaurants, stores, even a movie theater, all of them abandoned to rot, some of them so thoroughly decayed that all that was left was the great cement slab of the foundation, stained with oil or paint, littered with the splinters of the collapsed building, its rusted sign leaning. Some were brick-faced, others made of cinderblocks, but none of them was well made, and so the impression I had was of devastation, as though a recent war had ravaged the place and destroyed the buildings and killed all the people.
Here was the corpse of a motel, the Elite—the sign still legible—broken buildings in a wilderness of weeds; and farther down the road, the Sands and the Presidential Inn, collapsed, empty; and the restaurants empty too, one unmistakably the curved roof and distinctive cupola of a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, another just a wreck but with a gigantic sign, its peeling paint promising LOBSTER. And another fractured place with a cracked swimming pool and broken windows, its rusted sign, CRESENT MOTEL, the more pathetic for being misspelled.
Most of the shops were closed, the only functioning ones owned by Indians. The Art Deco single-screen movie house, once the Carolina Theater, was boarded up. The wide main road was littered. The side streets, lined by shacks and abandoned houses, looked haunted. I had never seen anything quite like it, the ghost town on the ghost highway. I was glad I had come.
The presence of Indian shopkeepers, the heat, the tall dusty trees, the sight of plowed fields, the ruined motels and abandoned restaurants, the inactivity, a somnolence hanging over the town like a blight—even the intense sunshine was like a sinister aspect of that same blight—all these features made it seem like a town in Zimbabwe. It looked as though the colonizers had come and gone, the settlers had bolted, most of the local people had fled, and the place had fallen on evil days. Lingering at Mr. Patel’s shop, I saw a succession of black customers buying cans of beer and going outside to sit under a tree and drink.
All this was a first impression, but it was a powerful one. Later, just outside Allendale proper, I saw the campus of the University of South Carolina at Salkehatchie, with eight hundred students, and the old main street, and the handsome courthouse, and a small subdivision of well-kept bungalows. But mostly, and importantly, Allendale, judging from Route 301, was a ruin—poor, neglected, hopeless-looking, a vivid failure.
On a back road of sunny, bleak Allendale, in an office tucked inside a mobile unit, resembling a static house trailer and signposted ALLENDALE COUNTY ALIVE, I found Wilbur Cave. Bernie Mazyck had given me his name as someone who was involved in county revitalization, general counseling, and housing improvement.
After we shook hands, I mentioned the extraordinary weirdness of Route 301.
“This was a famous road once, the halfway point from up north to Florida or back,” Wilbur said. “Everyone stopped here. And this was one of the busiest towns ever. When I was growing up we could hardly cross the road. I remember we couldn’t cross the road without an adult. All the motels had No Vacancy signs. There were lots of stores—people driving through needed to shop for food or clothes. Lots of garages and repair shops. The town was booming!”
But there were no cars today, or just a handful. “What happened?”
“Route Ninety-five happened.”
And Wilbur explained that in the late 1960s, when the interstate route was plotted, it bypassed Allendale forty miles to the east, and like many other towns on Route 301, Allendale fell into ruin. But just as the great new city rising in the wilderness is an image of American prosperity, a ghost town like Allendale is also a feature of our landscape. Perhaps the most American urban transformation is that very sight—that all ghost towns were once boomtowns.
“Nowadays, this is as country as it gets,” Wilbur said.
“Country” was one way of putting it. Another might have been “This is what the world will look like when it ends.”
Poor Allendale’s nearness to wealthy towns was another surrealistic feature (but that too was an American trait). In South Carolina’s smallest county (also called Allendale, with a population of 12,000), on the Savannah River and the Georgia state line, the town was less than two hours from the mansions and gourmet restaurants of Charleston; it was about the same distance to salubrious Augusta, Georgia, and no more than an hour and a half to Hilton Head, where for more than thirty years the wonks, the wise, the well-heeled, and the sententious gathered every year on Renaissance Weekend to declaim uplifting messages and debate the future of the world. All these luminaries and sages really needed to do was to spend a few days in Allendale County and they would perhaps understand that the theories of Hilton Head denied the realities here: every development problem I have ever witnessed in fifty years of traveling the world existed in Allendale as a persistent agony.
But as the woman in the information booth had told me, no one goes to Allendale. And this was why Wilbur Cave, seeing his hometown falling to ruin—its very foundations devolving to dust—decided to do something to improve it. Wilbur had been a record-breaking runner in his high school, and after graduation from the University of South Carolina at Columbia, he worked locally and then ran for the state representative’s seat in this district. He was elected and served for six years. He became a strategic planner, and with this experience he joined and reenergized the nonprofit Allendale County Alive, which was committed to helping provide decent housing to local people. The town itself had a population of 4,500, three-quarters of them black, like the county.
“It’s not just this town that needs help,” Wilbur said. “The whole county is in bad shape. In the 2010 census we are the tenth-poorest county in the United States. And, you know, a lot of the others are Indian reservations.”
The funding was minimal, an initial budget of $250,000 annually at the outset, but had been decreasing over the years because of cuts and economies and lack of donors. Compared to US-funded housing programs I had seen in Africa and South America, this was a piffling amount. It was, by any measure, a small-scale operation that depended more on ingenuity, innovation, and good will than on money.
“In 2003, I was the new sheriff in town,” Wilbur said. “I thought this might be a cruise to retirement. How wrong I was!” Then he smiled. “But we persevere.”
Wilbur Cave was sixty-one but looked ten years younger than that, compact, muscular, still with the build of a running back, and energetic, full of plans. He dressed informally in an open-necked shirt and blue jeans. On the walls of his tiny office in the small unit that served as his headquarters were family photos, upbeat slogans, and graphs showing a steady increase in home ownership in the county.
Wilbur’s family had lived in the area for many generations. His mother had been a schoolteacher at Allendale County Training School. “The black school,” Wilbur explained. “The white one was Allendale Elementary.”
The Allendale schools were finally fully integrated in 1972. Whenever someone in the South mentioned a date, I tried to recall where I’d been at the time. Invariably I’d seen myself in a distant place, marveling at the exoticism of it all. In 1972, when Allendale was struggling to emerge from nineteenth-century notions of segregation and separate development, I was in England, planning my Great Railway Bazaar trip, in search of more colorful differences.
I remarked on how recently social change had come to the South.
“You have to know where we come from,” Wilbur said. “It’s hard for anyone to understand the South unless they understand history—and by history I mean slavery. History has had more impact here.”
Without realizing it, only smiling and tapping a ballpoint on the desktop blotter, he sounded like one of the wise admonitory Southern voices in Faulkner, reminding the Northerner of the complex past.
“Take my mother’s family. They were cotton farmers for generations, right here in Allendale County. They had a hundred acres or so. It was a family activity to pick cotton. The children did it, the grandchildren. It was a normal after-school job. I did it, I sure did—we all did it.”
The small cotton farms, like those belonging to Wilbur’s family, were sold eventually to bigger growers, who introduced mechanical harvesters. That was another reason for the unemployment and the decline in population. But farming was still the mainstay of Allendale County, where forty percent of its people lived below the poverty line.
“What are the problems?” he said, in answer to my obvious next question. “Drugs—crack cocaine mostly—health, crime, guns, and the school dropout rate, almost fifty percent.”
There was hardly any work. There were no visitors, as in years past. Once there had been textile factories in Allendale, making cloth and carpets. They’d closed, the manufacturing outsourced to China, though a new textile factory was scheduled to open in a year or so, he said. The local industry was timber, but the lumber mills—there were two in Allendale, turning out planks and utility poles—did not employ many people.
I was to hear this story all over the rural South, in the ruined towns that had been manufacturing centers, sustained by the making of furniture, or appliances, or roofing materials, or plastic products, the labor-intensive jobs that kept a town ticking over. Companies had come to the South because the labor force was available and willing, wages were low, land was inexpensive, and unions were nonexistent. And so a measure of progress held out the promise of better things, perhaps prosperity. Nowhere in the United States could manufacturing be carried on so cheaply. And that was the case until these manufacturers discovered that however cheap it was to make things in the right-to-work states of the South, it was even cheaper in sweatshop China. The contraction and impoverishment of the South has a great deal to do with the outsourcing of work to China and India, Even the catfish farms—an important income-producing industry all over the rural South—have been put out of business by the exports of fish farmers in Vietnam.
The current debate fiercely fought in the state legislature was not about jobs or outsourcing, but voting rights: the South Carolina voter ID bill, a restrictive law that would make it impossible for a person to vote unless he showed a photo ID, even though his name was listed on the voter roll. In the absence of a driver’s license, it would be necessary to obtain a birth certificate to apply for an ID—not an easy matter if you happened to have been born in another county or state.
“This makes it feel like the sixties all over again,” Wilbur said. “I mean, proving who you are is an obstacle, a way to prevent a person from voting. The excuse is ‘preserving the integrity of the system,’ eh? But I have an aunt who’s ninety-six who’s having trouble getting a copy of her birth certificate, and she was born right here in Allendale.”
Wilbur went on to say that one of the keys to development (and I’d heard this from Bernie Mazyck too) was home ownership. Having a house was a way of grounding people, obligating them in positive ways and imposing responsibilities that helped them to grow; it produced visible changes and sometimes attracted outside funding.
“Public education is underfunded,” he said. “But you can’t make money improving education, or health care—they’re not income-producing. Come on, let’s look around.”
He drove me through the back streets of Allendale, saying, “Housing is important,” as we passed along the side roads, the lanes, the dirt paths on which stood two-room houses, some of them fixed up and painted, others no more than wooden shanties of the sort you might see in any Third World country, and some shotgun shacks that were the emblematic architecture of Southern poverty.
“That’s one of ours,” Wilbur said of a tidy white wood-frame bungalow on a corner. “It was a derelict property that we rehabbed, and now it’s part of our inventory of rentals. That’s income for us to rehab other houses.”
People qualified for a rehab if their income was eighty percent below South Carolina’s median income. A one-person household with an income of less than $27,000 was designated as poor; a three-person household with less than $34,000 income; a four-person household with less than $38,000. Not only was this a small amount of money to live on; half the people subsisted on much less. But with an improved house came a better life and brighter prospects.
“We also have a homeowners’ education program,” Wilbur said. “We teach the intricacies of buying and owning a home. After that we may give some down-payment assistance, and the house might cost anywhere from twenty-five to seventy-five thousand.”
To attract businesses and create a climate for investment, the look of the town and the county had to be improved, which was another reason for the intensive drive to fix up the shacks.
“My feeling is, if South Carolina is to change, we have to change the worst,” Wilbur said as we passed a small weathered house of sun-blackened planks and curling shingles, an antique that was beyond repair. But a man had lived in it until just six months before, without electricity or heat or piped water.
I asked if I could see inside that one, or perhaps the next one, which was a shack with a hole in the roof, a family of eight (four generations) living inside.
“We’ll need permission,” Wilbur said. “It might take time. You’ll have to come back another day.”
I said I wanted to come back.
“You hungry?” Wilbur asked.
I said I was, and he took me on a short drive to the edge of town, the Barnwell Highway, to a local diner, O Taste and See, sought out for its soul food, fried chicken and catfish, biscuits, rice and gravy, fruit pies, and friendliness. The owner, Mrs. Cathy Nixon, with a child on her lap, explained, “It’s from the Bible.” And she quoted: “ ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man that trusteth in him.’ ” The very existence of good food in this poor town seemed strange, but I found it to be a feature of the South: even the most distressed town usually had a soul food restaurant, a family place, often one small room on a back road, simple cooking and a warm welcome. Mrs. Nixon was seventy-three and had seven great-grandchildren.
“You’re a traveler,” Wilbur said, after he said grace—another ritual, strictly observed in the soul food diner.
“Oh, yes.”
He had not read anything I’d written. If my name rang a bell at all, I was taken to be Henry David Thoreau—he was a Yankee too, wasn’t he? Most of the Southerners I encountered had no more than a nodding acquaintance with books, and that gave them either an exaggerated respect for authorship or an utter indifference to it. When there was an exception, and I came across a handful, often in the unlikeliest places, the reader was passionate, with a house full of books, like an isolated bookworm in a Chekhov story.
Being unrecognized as a writer was a distinct advantage. I was more easily summed up as an older man from the North, probably retired, who had driven here with a lot of questions. I had no history, no reputation, no aura, no persona, no news, nothing attached to me. And I enjoyed being the foreigner, Mr. Paul with the hard-to-spell last name—the stranger—because that was how I viewed these people I was traveling among in this unusual place, some parts of the South as odd and remarkable as any I had seen in my traveling life.
When Wilbur alluded to my traveling, I took it as an opportunity to say that I had been in Africa not long before, and that in Namibia I had discovered that the US government had granted $360 million to improve Namibia’s education, energy, and tourism sectors. Around $67 million had been earmarked for tourism alone, though it was mainly European tourists, not Americans, who visited Namibia. I mentioned this because parts of rural, underdeveloped Allendale County resembled parts of rural, underdeveloped Africa. And Allendale itself—sleepy, decaying, unemployed, with defunct motels, Indian shops—was reminiscent of an upcountry farming town in Kenya that had gone to the dogs. And Kenya, too, got hundreds of millions in US development aid.
“Money is not the whole picture, but it’s the straw that stirs the drink,” Wilbur said. “I don’t want hundreds of millions. Give me one thousandth of it and I could dramatically change public education in Allendale County.”
His operating budget was $100,000, and his organization was self-sustaining thanks to the income from the rented houses they’d rehabbed.
Wilbur said that he didn’t begrudge aid to Africa, but he added, “If my organization had access to that kind of money, we could really make a difference.”
“We could focus our energy and not worry about funding. We could be more creative and get things done.” He smiled. “We wouldn’t have to worry about the light bill.”
With nowhere to stay in sunny, desolate Allendale—all the motels abandoned or destroyed—I drove up Route 301, the empty, once-glorious thoroughfare, for forty-five miles to Orangeburg. It was a small town, its main street a collection of sorry shops, boarded-up stores, and gloomy churches, but its outskirts were near enough to the interstate (the highway to Charleston) to have motels and diners. The poorer motels and beat-up restaurants were in town, a threadbare remnant here, but still alive.
The town was kept buoyant by its schools and colleges, well-known ones, among them Claflin University (founded in 1869) and South Carolina State University, both of them historically black (and still with mainly black student bodies). And there were some others: a Methodist college, a technical school, private academies, and public schools.
Walking along the main street the day after I arrived in Orangeburg, I fell into step with a man and said hello. And I received the glowing Southern welcome. He wore a dark suit and carried a briefcase. He said he was a lawyer and gave me his card, Virgin Johnson Jr. Attorney at Law. I inquired about the town, just a general question, and received a surprising answer.
He said, “Well, there was the massacre.”
“Massacre” is a word that commands attention. This bloody event was news to me, so I asked for details. Virgin Johnson told me that in spite of the fact that the Civil Rights Act had been in force for four years in 1968, Orangeburg was still segregated. A bowling alley on the main road (All Star Bowling Lanes) refused to allow black students inside—and it was the only bowling alley in Orangeburg.
On a day in February ’68, objecting to being discriminated against in the bowling alley and elsewhere, several hundred students held a demonstration at the campus of South Carolina State across town. The event was noisy but the students were unarmed, facing officers from the South Carolina Highway Patrol, who carried pistols and carbines and shotguns. Alarmed by the jostling students, one policeman fired his gun into the air—warning shots, he later said. Hearing those gunshots, other policemen began firing directly at the protesters, who turned and ran. Because the students were fleeing, they were shot in the back. Three young men were killed, Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith; twenty-eight were injured, some of them seriously; all of them students, riddled with buckshot.
“What did you think?” I asked Virgin Johnson.
“I was twelve years old,” he said in the country way, twel’. “I didn’t think much. Later on, people talked about it.”
“What do people say nowadays?”
“It’s not a big subject,” he said. “There’s a memorial service every year, but as for the issue itself, I don’t know how far it extends beyond the campus.”
Most Americans know of the killings at Kent State in Ohio, which took place in 1970—four students murdered during an antiwar demonstration. “Kent State” is an expression loaded with implication: innocent protesters gunned down by panicked National Guardsmen. The Boston Massacre of 1770 is well known—five colonists killed by British troops on King Street; my father used to show us the massacre memorial on Boston Common. We knew the curious name of one of the victims, Crispus Attucks, a mixed-race black and Wampanoag resident of Boston, a sailor perhaps. The murder of the men helped stir revolutionary passion; almost 250 years later, their graves in the Granary Burying Ground are garlanded and solemnly contemplated, the men regarded as martyrs and heroes.
For anyone outside Orangeburg, the town’s name summons up no images of repression or the shedding of innocent blood. The eight policemen who fired on the crowd were tried for causing the deaths but acquitted, and the only person who found himself in prison was one of the demonstrators, Cleveland L. Sellers, who was convicted on a charge of riotous assembly. Sentenced to a year, he served seven months, with time off for good behavior. Some of these facts I learned not from Virgin Johnson but later from a detailed account of the incident, The Orangeburg Massacre, by Jack Bass and Jack Nelson, published in 2003. Though he was African American and an Orangeburg resident, Johnson could not offer many details, saying he’d been too young to understand, and “it was a long time ago.” Another explanation for his amnesia was that the Orangeburg Massacre had been overshadowed by greater atrocities of 1968, a year of violent incidents—the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, riots in Washington, Baltimore, Chicago, and elsewhere—a year of death and mayhem.
I mentioned Kent State to Johnson, how everyone knew the name.
He smiled. He said, “But you know those kids that died were white.”
Virgin Johnson’s profession as an attorney surprised me, because he seemed so vague about the massacre. I’d expected a lawyer, especially a local man, to have more facts, and yet he was forthcoming and helpful about this forgotten episode.
“I can introduce you to some people who were there,” he said. And he recommended the book by Bass and Nelson, which I later read.
I thanked him for his assistance, and before I went on my way, I said how odd it was to me to be holding this conversation with someone I’d met by chance, simply asking directions on a public street. I added that where I came from, such a casual encounter would have lacked both warmth and information. I was grateful for his taking the time with a stranger who had so many questions.
“People here understand how it is to need help,” he said. He meant black people; he meant himself. He added, “To be neglected.” And he went on, “It’s the whole environment—it’s not easy to get away from it. They go through it all the time. That’s why they can sympathize and relate.”
“Do you feel that way?”
“Sure do,” he said, and tapped the business card I’d been holding. “You let me know if you want to meet some people who know more than I do. Why not stop in to my church this Sunday. I’ll be preaching.”
“Your card says you’re an attorney.”
“I’m a preacher too. Revelation Ministries over in Fairfax. Well, Sycamore, actually. This is the South, there’s a church on every corner. Come on down see us.”
“Where’s Sycamore?”
“Nearby Allendale. You familiar with Allendale, Mr. Paul?”
With a few days to kill, I went to Charleston. Compressed in its narrowing spit of land, lapped by its placid harbor, tumbled into its tiny islands, Charleston is a city of rich cultural history and architectural marvels—old ornate mansions, churches, and forts—its downtown lined with gourmet restaurants, all the metropolitan attributes that held no interest at all for me.
Tourists visit Charleston to go sightseeing (Fort Sumter, plantations), to eat, and to listen to anecdotes of the Civil War and tales of Gullah and Geechee lore. I found the city, like most tourist cities, pleasant enough, but glittering and impenetrable, class-conscious and house-proud, perhaps justifiably smug. I was there to go to a gun show.
One of a handful of good gourmet meals I ate during my travels in the South I had in Charleston, but really it was not much better than many I’d had in the soul food diners or barbecue joints I found in nearly every small town, nothing to compare for friendliness and good food with tiny O Taste and See in Allendale or Dukes in Orangeburg or Lottie’s in Marion, Alabama; not with Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, Mississippi, or the fried chicken and catfish buffet at Granny’s Family Restaurant in West Monroe, Louisiana, where a sign cautioned, “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” As for the Charleston museums, churches, mansions, and gift shops: nothing for me.
The cultural event that got my attention was the Gun and Knife Expo I’d seen advertised the previous week, to be held at the Charleston Area Convention Center, in North Charleston. I drove there from Orangeburg on a rainy weekend—gun shows are generally two-day affairs—and was surprised to see the size of the arena, half as big as a football field, with a long line of people waiting to go in and the enormous parking lot crammed with cars. From the moment I arrived I was struck by the order and politeness of everyone—staff, traders, gun-show-goers, hot dog and popcorn sellers—and a vibration, too, a sense of anticipation, eagerness, pleasure.
Entering was a slow process of paying an admission of eight dollars and, if you had a firearm, showing it. Many of those entering were armed—pistol on a belt holster, rifle slung on a shoulder—but personal weapons had to be unloaded and tagged at the entry desk. At the end of these checks and inspections, entrants were issued with the sort of plastic identity bracelet you get at an emergency ward and finally shuffled past the greeters and food carts, staying in line, just a few mutters, everything orderly.
After that lobby business, the huge arena was filled with tables and booths and stalls, most selling guns, some selling knives, others stacked with piles of ammo. Just the sight of it seemed to make the attendees smile and swallow, jittery with joy, as though the array of all these naked weapons, pistols and rifles, amounted to gun porn. I had never seen so many guns, big and small, heaped in one place, and I suppose the notion that they were all for sale, just lying there waiting to be picked up and handled, sniffed, and aimed, provided a thrill.
“Pardon me, sir.”
“No problem, scoot on bah.”
“Thank you much.”
No one on earth—none I had ever seen—is more polite than a person at a gun show; more eager to smile, more accommodating, less likely to step on your toe. Among so many weapons there are no insults; there is only patience, sweetness, and occasional joshing. In a place where everyone is armed, good manners are helpful, perhaps essential. But that demeanor didn’t seem forced: everyone was glad to be there. Happiness amounting to rapture was the prevailing mood of the gun-show-goers—good humor and exquisite manners.
Muffled cries of “Look at that” and many educated questions. That was something else that struck me: the plainspoken and roughly dressed but very knowledgeable crowd. These men were living proof of Christ’s words in Luke 22:36, a verse many could probably quote: “He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.” A man who seemed adrift and lost, scruffy camo cap, bearded, in a greasy jacket and worn-down boots, asked a stallholder with a table of vintage assault rifles, “That underfold-stock AK-47, is that the Zastava variant?”
“No, this the WASR, pre-ban. Flash suppressor. All the standard features.”
“I got an assortment I could show you. And it comes with a bayonet. See the lug?”
The inquiring man rubbed at his frizzy beard with the back of his fist. “I heard loose mag wells are a problem.”
“Not with this one. I’ve shot it plenty.”
“How much is that AK?” I asked, chiming in.
“Fifteen hundred.”
“I could buy that?”
“If you got the money. Cash. Private sale.”
In spite of this knowledge of the weaponry that bordered on connoisseurship, most of the gun-show-goers were just looking, hands in pockets, sauntering, nudging each other—admiring, dazzled by the size and rarity of the guns, as though they had gone there to gape, swap stories, meet old friends, drink coffee, and walk among the tables the way people do at flea markets. And this greatly resembled a flea market, but one smelling of cleaning oil and wood polish and a dustiness of scorched steel and gunpowder. They were at the show, man and boy, less to buy than to be reassured by the firepower.
Yet there was something else in the atmosphere, a quality of mood I could not define as I walked among the weapons; it was an attitude, a vibration, a buzz. As I strolled and listened, and registered the pulses of the air and the postures of the men, the feeling became more apparent. I could not at first understand what it was that I felt.
“Thank you much.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“Go right ahead, sir, pick that bad boy up.”
The long tables of knives were the least visited, but they showed every sort of blade, from exquisite penknives to machetes to iron hackers, some of them engraved, with bone and ivory handles—and swords and bayonets too. At other tables, military memorabilia, Nazi blades. “That’s an Ernst Röhm dagger,” one side of the broad blade etched Alles für Deutschland, the motto of the Sturmabteilung (SA) that Röhm cofounded with Hitler, as the seller explained to me. After Röhm was arrested for treason by Hitler on the Night of the Long Knives, in 1934, he was executed. As for these daggers that he had distributed to his Brownshirts, the inscription In Herzlicher Kameradschaft Ernst Röhm was obliterated from the blade with a stone grinder.
“See? They got rid of the Röhm business. If your knife had it showing, you’d be in trouble. This is highly collectible.”
Gas masks, helmets, belts, harnesses, badges, flags, all with swastikas, and many 9-millimeter Lugers.
“That’s a working gun. You could fire that. But don’t dry-fire it here.”
Civil War paraphernalia—powder flasks, Harpers Ferry rifles, peaked caps, insignia, Confederate money, and pistols—a number of tables were piled with these battered pieces of history. Nearly all of them were from the Confederate side. Bumper stickers too, one reading The Civil War—America’s Holocaust. Another, Hey Liberal, You’re the Reason We Have the 2nd Amendment, and many denouncing President Obama: NObama, Obummer, Obamanation, and Advocates of Gun Control: Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Obama.
“My uncle has one of them powder flasks.”
“If it’s got the apportioning spigot spout in working order, your uncle’s a lucky guy.”
Many of the rifles and pistols at other tables were old muzzle-loaders, percussion varieties, or big, mean revolvers that shot black powder ammo. Because they were antiques, and theoretically unworkable, they could be sold to anyone. But black powder ammo, though rare, was obtainable, and any one of these old weapons could still open a fatal hole in a man or a beast.
“That there’s museum quality,” a seller said of a musket with an engraved barrel and a beautifully carved stock. I had the impression that many of these gun guys had brought their best weapons as boasts, in the boyish, proud, show-and-tell manner of collectors, and would not have parted with them for anything.
But a greater number of the stallholders looked hard-up and desperate to sell the stack of battered guns and tarnished magazines and parts lined up in front of them. At one of these tables, alongside a plastic Glock and a .22 plinking rifle, I saw a German World War Two–era .32-caliber Mauser pistol. I picked it up and hefted it.
“Three hundred fifty bucks and it’s yours. I got extra mags that go with it.”
“Don’t matter. Private sale. Okay, three hundred even.”
Not every sale was private. Half a dozen sectioned-off areas were authorized dealers, and inside the enclosure scowling men sat at smaller tables, filling out applications for background checks, while staff members swiped credit cards through machines. These were registered guns, better quality, more of them. A background check would not take more than thirty minutes, I was told.
Some were reenactors: one man in a Confederate uniform, another dressed in period cowboy costume, looking like a vindictive sheriff, black hat and tall boots and pearl-handled pistols. He saw me staring.
“Howdy, partner.”
One of the tables was set up like a museum display of World War One weapons and uniforms, as well as maps, books, postcards, and framed black-and-white photos of muddy battlefields. This was a commemorative exhibit put up by Dane Coffman, who had driven down from Leesburg, a hundred miles away, and rented eight tables to mount a memorial to his soldier grandfather, Ralph Coffman, who had served in the Great War. Dane, who was about sixty or so, wore an old infantryman’s uniform, a wide-brimmed hat, and leather puttees, the getup of a doughboy. Nothing was for sale. Dane was a collector, a military historian, and a reenactor; his aim was to show his collection of belts and holsters, mess kits, canteens, wire cutters, trenching tools, and what he called his pride and joy, a machine gun propped on a tripod.
“I’m here for my grandfather,” he said. “I’m here to give a history lesson.”
Throughout the gun show, I saw a mixture of private and commercial, mostly poor or out-of-work-looking men in cracked boots and faded hats, but there were a few well-heeled buyers, some obvious cranks, and loiterers. A few people were selling flags and patriotic items and comical signs: Warning—I’m a Bitter Gun Owner Clinging to My Religion, which was an echo of what Barack Obama had said when campaigning for president; No Trespassing—Violators Will Be Shot—Survivors Will Be Shot Again; and Gun Control Is Being Able to Hit Your Target.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” a man leaning on a fat black assault rifle expostulated. “If that damn vote goes through, we’re finished.”
“Oh, yeah. They’re fixing to change this whole bidniss,” another man added. “You can kiss your AR goodbye.”
This made the first man indignant. “I would like to see someone try and take this away from me. I surely would.”
Others were ranting quietly, but not many, because there was no disagreement in the hall. These were all gun guys, gun owners, gun rights people—men and women, whole families—all on the same side. It was my first glimpse of a large gathering of white Southerners, and some observers have commented that white Southerners are like an ethnic group, similar to Irish or Italians —“a culturally distinct group.”
“I’m just a country boy from bottom-line caste, born and raised in Estill, Hampton County,” Virgin Johnson told me a week later, over the daily special at Ruby Tuesday, up the road in Orangeburg, where he lived. Estill was the sticks, he said, deep country, cotton fields. Never mind. He smiled; he had a way of showing two prominent front teeth when he smiled, as if to demonstrate he was being ironic. Then, with a mock-resigned sigh, he said, “Po’ black.”
Still in his dark suit, he sipped at his iced tea and told me about his life. This was another man speaking, not the Sycamore preacher, not the shrewd Orangeburg trial lawyer, but a quiet, reflective private citizen in a roadside restaurant, reminiscing about his life as a loner. I told him I’d been to a gun show in Charleston.
“I got guns,” he said eagerly. “I got all sorts. I got an AK-47, I got so many. The legitimate gun owners don’t cause the deaths—it’s the illegal guns that are the problem, the criminals. Tell ya, I want some protection. This can be a dangerous place.”
“Give me an example,” I said.
“My father ran for a county council seat in Hampton in 1968. Virgin Johnson Senior—he was a stonemason, and later a teacher and a county councilor. My grandfather picked the name, it seemed special—Virgin Mary, virgin soil, virgin anything. My son is Virgin the Third.” Virgin Johnson leaned toward me and tapped the table. “ ’Sixty-eight was not a good year for a black man to run for anything. He got a message in the mailbox. It said, ‘If you win, we will kill you.’ ”
“Did he drop out of the race?”
“Didn’t stop him,” Virgin Johnson said. “But know why he lost? Because people knew about the message, and the ones who liked him—and there were many—voted against him. Didn’t want him to dah. He ran again, years later, and won. My daddy was at my service today. He’s ailing, but he always comes. He’s a popular man in these parts.
“I was born in 1954. In 1966, the year of what they called ‘voluntary integration,’ I was the only black student at Estill Elementary School. Happened this way. There were two buses went by our place every morning. I had said to my daddy, ‘I want to get the first bus.’ That was the white bus. He said, ‘You sure, boy?’ I said, ‘I’m sure.’ ”
It was so odd to be here, in a busy restaurant—whites and blacks together at booths and tables—almost fifty years later, as Virgin Johnson recalled this episode that left such a mark on his life, the matter of a black student on a white bus.
“The day I hit that bus, everything changed. Sixth grade—it changed my life. I lost all my friends, black and white. No one talked to me, no one at all. Even my white friends from home. I knew they wanted to talk to me, but they were under pressure, and so was I. I sat in the back of the bus. When I went to the long table for lunch, thirty boys would get up and leave.”
He sipped his tea, nodded, and smiled ruefully. The Ruby Tuesday waiter led prospective diners to a booth beyond, and the three glanced at the well-dressed man—the only man in the restaurant wearing a suit and tie.
“I was twelve,” he said. “The funny thing is, we were all friendly, black and white. My grandfather was beloved by all. Oncle Henry, they called him—Henry Frazier. We played together in and around Estill. We picked cotton. My daddy and uncle had a hundred acres of cotton. Uncle Clayton still farms cotton, corn, watermelon. I picked a hundred or a hundred twenty-five pounds a day with my family and my friends. But when I got on the bus, it was over. I was alone, on my own.
“When I got to school I knew there was a difference. There was not another African American there—no black teachers, no black students, none at all in the elementary school. Except the janitors. The janitors were something, like guardian angels to me. They were black, and they didn’t say anything to me—didn’t need to. They nodded at me as if to say, ‘Hold on, son. Hold on.’
“So I lost all my friends, and I learned at an early age you have to stand by yourself. That gave me a fighting spirit. I’ve had it since I was a child. It’s destiny. What happens when you let other people make your decisions? You become incapable of making your own decisions. They were not all bad days. In those days you had to earn respect. Nowadays no one cares about respect. It’s more of a political show.”
We continued to eat our meal, and he went on talking, reminiscing. He was a reflective man, pausing between thoughts, punctuating sentences with silences, so it was easy for me to take notes and go on eating.
“When I was thirteen I had a job pulling string for a surveyor. He was white. I liked the job. This was the summertime, the sixties. We were surveying a farm, the man and me. We pulled up on a property and started our work.
“Then I hear a voice: ‘I don’t want that boy on the property!’
“The owner of the property, see. He took out his shotgun and shot it in the air. I was thirteen! So we left, the white surveyor and me. That was in Hampton County, and this man’s daddy was in the Klan. But they all had that mentality because of him.
“I was the first African American to go to law school from my side of the county. University of South Carolina at Columbia. I was in a class of one hundred—this was in the eighties. I was the only black person. Passed the bar in 1988. Got a license to preach.
“There’s no contradiction for me. I’m happy doing both. I just wish the economy was better. This area is so poor. They got nothin’— they need hope. If I can give it to them, that’s a good thing. Jesus said, ‘We have to go back and care about the other person.’ ”
In the silences that followed I asked about Orangeburg and Sycamore and Fairfax, and especially about Allendale, which seemed to me so woebegone.
“These are friendly places—nice people. Good values. Decent folks. Next time you come down here, pay us a visit at our church, Revelation Ministries. Promise you will.”
“I promise,” I said, and the notion of returning made me happy.
“We have issues—kids having kids, for one, sometimes four generations of kids having kids. But there’s so little advance. That does perplex me, the condition of this place. Something’s missing. What is it?”
And then he made a passionate gesture, flinging up his hand, and he raised his voice in a tone that recalled a preaching voice.
“Take the kids away from this area and they shine!”
The narrow country road through the fragrant yellow pinewoods I saw on my map was named Atomic Road. A back road, it branched as Route 125 from dear, dilapidated Allendale and doom-laden Route 301 with its ruinous motels, and it followed the course of the Savannah River, which was the South Carolina–Georgia state line, to Augusta. “Atomic Road” was just too tempting a name to pass by. Seeing a big fence and a sentry box, I stopped to ask what was behind the fence.
“Turn your car around, sir, and keep going.”
“I just wanted to ask a few questions.”
“Did you hear me, sir?”
It was too late to stop at the nearest town, Aiken, to make inquiries, but I thought: The next time I come this way—when I visit Revelation Ministries—I’ll look closer. But I knew that the fence enclosed the Savannah River Site, a nuclear facility known locally as the Bomb Factory.
That was another thing that distinguished this trip from others I’d made in my life. In Africa or China I never said, I’ll come back in a few months and continue. Instead, I pushed on to a destination and then went home and wrote about it. But in the South I traveled in eccentric circles, in and out of the fourth dimension, always hopeful, making plans to return, and saying to myself, as I did that day on Atomic Road: I’ll be back.
On the way through Georgia to Tuscaloosa, I met Kelly Wiggly at an Alabama rest stop. He was with his wife, taking a breather. I saw he was towing a beautiful Harley-Davidson three-wheeler on his flatbed trailer, and asked him about it. A stout, white-haired man in his mid-sixties, in bib overalls and boots, he was a biker, but a kindly one, so mild-tempered as to be beatific.
“We’re on our way home from Hatfield, Arkansas, on the Oklahoma state line, where we had a meeting of the Christian Motorcyclists Association,” he said. “We ride for the Son—Son of God. We had three thousand bikers there from all over the country, other places in the world too. One biker from South Africa. We get together every year to witness, bless bikes, and to pray.”
“You see any Hells Angels?”
He laughed and said, “We welcome the Hells Angels, the Banditos, anyone. It doesn’t matter that they’re dirty or violent—we have bikes in common. We say, ‘Come on over for coffee. Four in the morning? That’s okay. Any time is fine, you’re welcome. Then we talk to them about Jesus, and maybe we share a little about the Bible, pray some, fellowship a little, no pressure.”
“Do you make many converts?”
“They’re pretty rough but they can be saved. Hey, some of them just got out of prison. All they have to do is listen and witness. I know we can bring them around. All you need is a Ride Plan. Step one: Pick your road. Step two: Consider your destination—we’ve all taken wrong turns. Step three is: Realize your dilemma—everyone’s spiritual ride ends at the Canyon of Sin and Death. But God made a bridge over it, and that’s Step four: Cross the bridge today—make a decision to cross that bridge, with the help of God.”
“How was your weekend?”
“It was beautiful. All of us were camping there in Hatfield. Camping and witnessing. And you know what? This movement of Believers on Bikes started with one man, some years ago. It has grown tremendously. Listen, I’m about to retire, and when I do, my wife and I are going to ride this Harley all over the country, camping and witnessing.” He thought a moment. “Maybe out of the country too. Know the fastest-growing Christian country in the whole world? It’s China.”
“I wonder why.”
“ ’Cause they want to be saved. Gotta go now, off to Scottsboro. Bless you, brother.”
I drove to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to get my bearings, to go deeper south, into Hale County and Greene County.
Tuscaloosa is a college town—more than half the town is the campus of the University of Alabama, celebrated as having the best football team in the country and the highest-paid coaches. It is the home of the Crimson Tide, the scarlet letter, the enlarged italic of the Alabama A on cars and clothes and often showing as a bold red tattoo.
I arrived on a Friday night, and the next day Tuscaloosa was in the grip of something more intense than a carnival. A riotous hooting tribal rite possessed the whole town, because of the University of Alabama football game that day in a stadium that held more than 100,000 people. I remarked on this and on the fans—everyone in Tuscaloosa was a fan. A man said to me, “This is a drinking town with a football problem,” and winked to show he was joshing.
That idle quip has been made of many college towns, but is football a problem in Tuscaloosa? It seemed to me a chronic condition, and perhaps not a problem but a solution. The town is consumed by the sport. It is funded by football, and it prospers. Football is the town’s identity, and the game makes its citizens happy—resolves their conflicts, unifies them, helps them forget their pain, gives them membership in a cult of winners—and it makes them colossal, monologuing, and rivalrous bores.
“Football’s a religion here,” some Tuscaloosans also say, and smile in apology, but they are closer to a complete definition in that cliché than they perhaps realize. Even the most basic of psychological analysis can explain why that neat formula is so fitting. Not any old religion, certainly not the mild, private, prayer-muttering, God-is-love creed that informs decisions and gives us peace. The Crimson Tide football religion is one that is awash in fury, something like Crusader Christianity reared on bloodthirstiness, with its saber charges and its conquests, or like Islam in its most jihadi form, the blazing, red-eyed, uncompromising, and martyring faith; an in-group cohering around the sport to demonize and vanquish an out-group. In Tuscaloosa it is a public passion, a ritualized belief system, a complete persona. It is why in Alabama some men have the A tattooed on their neck, and some women on their shoulder: a public statement, a commitment for life, body modification as proof of loyalty and cultural differentiation, like a Hindu’s caste mark or a Maori’s tattoo or the facial scarring of a Sudanese Dinka.
Most towns are justifiably proud of their sports teams—a winning team always improves the mood of a place—but the Saturday crowd in Tuscaloosa, the processions of cars flying battle flags, the whooping and the costumes (and every seat in the enormous stadium spoken for) convinced me that this in-group mattered in a much more complex way than in other places I’d been. Its nearest equivalent in terms of tattoos, finery, and chanting was a traditional ceremony enacted by a defiant people who had once been colonized, asserting their tribal identity.
In Alabama football, fan loyalty bolstered self-esteem, not just of students but of almost the entire state. This group behavior is explained in “social identity theory,” an encompassing proposal of the British psychologist Henri Tajfel, who described the sympathies and reactions of persons choosing to attach themselves to a social class or a family or a club—or a football team—and become a member of an in-group. The groups to which people belong are, Tajfel writes, “an important source of pride and self-esteem. Groups give us a sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the social world.”
The sports fan is an example of someone engaged in group membership, for whom association and affiliation matter so greatly you could say it gives him or her a purpose in life. You develop a group membership by identifying yourself with a team and participating in “in-group favoritism.” Such membership builds self-confidence and self-worth; you’re invested in cheering for the team and raising its status. You’re more than a passive member; you’re an active booster, helping to make the team bigger and stronger. And it’s good for your esteem, too. In Tajfel’s view, “In order to increase our self-image we enhance the status of the group to which we belong.”
To say that when your team wins you feel you’re a champion is a pretty straightforward definition of the appeal of fandom. People often laugh self-consciously when they talk about their loyalty to a team, their pride in its success, but in Alabama, where fandom fervor is multiplied a thousandfold, no one laughs. There’s nothing funny about chanting “Roll Tide, roll!”— the devotion is dead serious, and at times (so it seemed to me) defiant, hostile, verging on the pathological.
The power figure on any team is the coach. In Alabama folklore it is Paul Bryant, nicknamed “Bear” because as a youth in Arkansas he reputedly accepted the challenge of wrestling a captive, muzzled bear (and was mauled).
The three biggest funerals in Alabama history define the state’s contending loyalties, I was told: George Wallace’s, Martin Luther King’s, and Bear Bryant’s.
As a coach, Bear Bryant was a towering figure, statistically the most successful in the history of college football, who guided Alabama for twenty-five years and whose beaky profile and funny checkered snap-brim hat are emblems. His name is emblazoned on Tuscaloosa streets and buildings and on the vast stadium. Charismatic, noted for his heavy drinking and his toughness (he played on a broken leg in a college game in Tennessee), he was renowned as a motivator. He avoided recruiting black players for years, but in 1971 he brought in his first one, Wilbur Jackson, offering him a football scholarship. Thereafter the team became a career path for black athletes and a rallying point for the races.
Among his achievements, Bryant won six national championships for Alabama. But the present coach, Nick Saban, in just four seasons has won three national championships, and his contract runs until 2018. Saban, who is beloved for his victories and his rapport with players, presently earns $6.9 million a season, the highest-paid college football coach in the nation.
It is natural for a nonbeliever to cluck about the money, but college sports is a business—colleges need this national attention as a way of creating a cash flow. Donors, alumni, and booster clubs provide money to augment salaries; ticket sales are a strong source of revenue. And there is the licensed merchandise. Much of the logo paraphernalia is traditional—the numerous styles of caps, T-shirts, banners, and flags. But a great deal of it is culturally Alabama-specific: Crimson Tide trailer hitch covers, valve stem caps, a sexy lady’s satin garter with lace picked out in “Roll Tide,” baby slippers, garden chairs, “pillow pets,” “child’s hero capes,” wall-sized “man cave flags,” Crimson Tide car chargers, dog jerseys, puzzle cubes, games, watches, clothes, luggage, garden gnomes, table lamps, bedding, drinking glasses, gas grill covers, golf gear, car accessories, toothbrushes, and vinyl boat fenders, each carrying the Roll Tide logo or an enlarged and unambiguous A.
All this contributes to substantial football-related revenue, which in 2012 was $124 million, and $45 million of that was profit. Added to this is the improved status of the university itself, resulting in increased enrollment, higher teachers’ salaries, and an expanded campus. Alabama’s eminence as a university of football champions attracts nonresident students: more than half the students are from out of state, paying three times the in-state tuition.
The financial return is indisputable. The benefit in self-esteem is harder to gauge, but it is palpable. And perhaps it is predictable—the simple feel-good inevitability of identifying with the team and the elaborate costuming and imagery to go along with that identification—that it amounts to a complete lifestyle. This sort of social behavior has its counterpart in the enclosed in-groups of the world, especially the folk cultures, epitomized by the glorious and assertive “sing-sing” you’d see in the western highlands of Papua New Guinea: the Goroka Show, the convergence of Asaro Mudmen and jungle-dwelling warriors fitted out with pig tusks and nose bones, with its extravagant finery, headdresses, weapons, beads, feathers, face painting, jitterbugging, spear shaking, mock charges, drumming, and hollering.
Reflecting on the Crimson Tide, I ceased to think of it as football at all, except in a superficial way; it seemed much more like another Southern reaction to a feeling of defeat, with some of the half-buried emotion I’d noticed at gun shows. In a state that is so hard-pressed, with one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, with its history of racial conflict, and with so little to boast about yet wishing to matter, it is natural that a winning team—a national champion—would attract people in need of meaning and self-esteem in their lives, and would become the basis of a classic in-group, The Tide was robust proof of social identity theory.
“Please sign in,” said the woman in the bright yellow dress, and then she looked closer at me and gave me the warmest smile. “I know you. You’re Mr. Paul.”
“How do you know that, sister?”
“You was at our service yesterday.”
That was true. I was the sinner sitting among the publicans, well behind the Philistines, in a back pew. I was not normally a churchgoer, but what made a Sunday in the South complete was a church service, a gun show, or a football game.
“How kin Ah he’p you?”
“I’m here to see Miss Burton.”
“I’ll tell her you’re here. Please sign the visitors’ book.”
Next to the names in the visitors’ book, in a column headed Reason for Visit, I saw “Food” and “Clothes” and “Water” and “Light bill”— people seeking help in desperate inky scrawls. I signed my name and wrote, “Miss Cynthia Burton.”
She greeted me a moment later, an imposing but wounded-looking woman of about sixty, walking unsteadily but determinedly on bad knees, supporting herself with a walker. She was the executive director of Community Service Programs of West Alabama. Moving slowly, shoving the walker ahead of her, she showed me to a large room with bare walls where a bare table dominated the space.
We began by talking about the football game that had enlivened the Tuscaloosa weekend.
“It’s all football here—football mad, football disease,” she said. “I understand that football is an economic engine, but absolutely everything is built around it. There’s far more important things in life than winning a football championship.”
“I think it’s about more than football,” I said, but resisted explaining how I felt it created a social identity.
“Some of the athletes profit from it,” she said. “From a coach’s attention especially. Because of the lack of a male head of household, we’ve lost two generations. Drugs—your mother’s got two jobs and she’s dog-tired. You see that someone makes money selling drugs, so you do it and you become addicted. A lot of these kids need a coach.” Then she smiled and asked, “How did you find me?”
I said that a mutual friend had given me her name when I’d mentioned that I was planning to travel in the South. Cynthia Burton was involved in community development, he’d said, and added, “She knows everyone.”
“Your receptionist recognized me,” I said. “That made my day. She’d seen me at her church service at Cornerstone Baptist.”
“That’s nice, but I’m a Catholic,” Miss Burton said. She was settling herself, making notations in a thick appointment book. “It’s kind of an interesting story why I’m a Catholic.”
“Please tell me.”
“I was born in Gadsden,” she said. “My parents were poor but very hardworking people. And decent people. My father worked for Goodyear Tire Company. My mother was a nurse. She had little education, but she got experience from the hospital, and learned nursing on the job.”
Miss Burton sighed and hitched herself forward, and seeing that I was writing in a notebook, she tapped her finger near the notebook and spoke emphatically.
“My mother didn’t want me to go to segregated schools, as she had to, so she and my father saved their money to find me a better school. They asked around, what to do. The local nuns, Daughters of the Holy Ghost, suggested that she send me north, to Connecticut, to attend Putnam Catholic Academy. This was 1961. Segregation.”
She let this sink in. I said, “Your parents sound amazing.”
“Listen, my parents were so far-thinking for their generation. My father only got to the fourth grade, my mother to the sixth grade. But they wanted the best for their kids and they were willing to make sacrifices. My high school, Gadsden High, was not integrated until 1968.”
And I thought: Four foot-dragging years after the Civil Rights Act.
“They got their money together and I went up north to Putnam. I was the only black student at the academy. But there were five black families in the town of Putnam. They adopted me, sort of. They looked after me. It was not a normal education. Those little rich girls taught me. One day, in assembly, the top ten students were shown to the others. I was one of them—I was second, very proud.”
Miss Burton began to chuckle softly, remembering, and she tapped her finger again near my notebook.
“The mother of the girl who came third called the nuns and challenged my grades. I was very upset. I called my mother. She said, ‘Stand your ground—I can’t come up there, so you’ll have to do it. But remember to work and study. Cynthia, you must always be ahead of that girl.’ And I did study, and stayed on top.”
“This sounds like an exclusive private school,” I said. “How did you get along with the girls?”
“Very well. Those girls were so rich. They were picked up in Rolls-Royces and Bentleys to take them home. And they were very nice and friendly to me, nothing they wouldn’t do for me. I was the only black student. I was like a pet to them! They invited me to their homes—huge homes, mansions. I recall the time we went to Philadelphia. Five of us girls went in the limousine. We were all hungry when we got there, and the girl whose home it was called to the kitchen for food. ‘Got something for us?’ We went down, by and by, and there were three servants making our meal.”
“Were you tempted to stay in the North? Lots of Southerners find more opportunities there.”
“I loved the North,” she said. “I became a Catholic there. I went to Loyola in Chicago, but I had to come back to Alabama. My mother needed me. And more than that, I felt I was blessed with so much that I had to share. I decided to be impactful with a large group of people. I’ve been with this agency for nine years. We have an $18 million budget for eight counties—maybe a million people. Most are federal funds, some are grants. We have five hundred units—affordable housing, both rentals and home ownership. And we help people in other ways.”
“How is it working?” I asked.
“There’s a lot of social conservatism here. I am a firm believer in self-sufficiency. Some people need help more than others, but people also need to help themselves.”
“How does your agency help?”
“With housing, home ownership, rentals, all sorts of ways,” she said. “Want to hear a strange thing? Some of our people have large holdings—lots of acreage. They don’t want to subdivide. They’re land rich and property poor. It’s not unusual for someone with a large amount of land to live in a shack and go to food pantries and get energy assistance.”
“You see them?”
“We get them here,” she said, her voice rising. “They might come for food. Or help with their heat or electricity bill. That allocation is Low-Income Heating Energy Assistance, what we call LIHEAP. You need to be income-eligible. They get assistance for the heating-cooling cycle. There’s also a weatherization program, for sealing the house. The largest parcel I know is about two hundred acres, and the people are poor. Not a lot of people in that situation, but some.”
“Poor, with lots of land?”
“Yes, sir. They won’t sell their land. In the African-American community the goal is to own rather than be owned. And because farming has become an organized business, it’s hard for these people to compete. Some grow cash crops. But some grow corn or vegetables—peppers, cabbages, squash—and hay. They keep cattle. The land is passed on through the generations. Or they might just leave it there, lying idle, choosing not to grow food.”
Or, because the land had been handed down in the family, it devolved into fractionated ownership (to use the legal term), with so many names on the deed the land was unsalable. So-called Indian land suffers the same consequences; in six generations a parcel might be owned or shared by more than two hundred people.
“It’s an odd dilemma, like you say.”
“So many folks here are behind the eight ball.”
“I’ll put you in touch with them,” she said. “And with people who are trying to improve things.”
The church has always been the centerpiece of the rural South,” Bishop Palmer said. He was someone Sister Cynthia said I ought to see. “I’m from Birmingham, but I went to school here at Stillman College, historically black, but now it has some white students.”
He was a big man, impressively built, barrel-chested, white-haired, with a white beard trimmed into a Vandyke, a power figure, a patriarch with kindly eyes and a booming laugh. That was when he was in his pinstripe suit, before I saw him in his purple bishop’s robes; at his lectern, tapping the text with his bear paw of an authoritative hand, he looked like an Old Testament prophet.
We drove in his car to Stillman and around the walled-off campus, weaving among the tidy buildings and the sports fields.
“There’s one. There’s another.”
White students, hurrying past. Bishop Palmer smoothed his beard against his great jaw and tapped his chin. His features made his profile judge-like, and I was thinking how some men, physically, look born to lead.
“You have the perfect name for a preacher. Earnest Palmer.”
“A man of faith, carrying a palm,” he said.
“I think of a palmer as a pilgrim, bringing a palm from the Holy Land. Like the line in Chaucer.”
He slowed the car and glanced over at me.
I said, “Canterbury Tales. ‘Palmers for to seken straunge strondes.’ ”
He smiled as people sometimes do when hearing an unintelligible language brazenly spoken, or a dog with an odd bark.
“ ‘To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes,’ I recited. “Palmers—pilgrims searching.”
He laughed. It seemed like news. He drove out of the campus and changed the subject. “When I was here we had a sit-in at Ed’s, a restaurant over there. Up that street. They wouldn’t let blacks eat there. Man, those white boys beat us up.”
“Was it worse here than in other places?”
“Tuscaloosa was the headquarters of the Alabama Klan,” he said. “The leader, Robert Shelton, had an office on Union Boulevard. He was also a printer. While I was a student, I went there to get some things printed once. My friends said, ‘You went where?’ ”
Robert Shelton, judged “a truly evil man,” also a factory worker and tire dealer and the Imperial Wizard of the Alabama Knights of the Ku Klux Klan when Earnest Palmer was a student at Stillman, eventually was bankrupted and put out of business by a lawsuit that arose from a Klan lynching in Mobile. Shelton died of a heart attack in 2003 at the age of seventy-three.
Meeting Bishop Palmer made me want to visit his church, and so I did the following Sunday. That was the morning I met Lucille, who drove ahead of me to the church to show me the way. Lucille, who had said to me sweetly, “Be blessed.”
The Cornerstone Full Gospel Baptist Church was larger than it seemed when I approached. It lay in a hollow of a low, poorish neighborhood of small houses near a narrow creek, Cribbs Mill Creek.
“Black Southerners find in their churches a unifying focus and respite from a hostile (or strange) majority culture,” John Shelton Reed writes in The Enduring South (1972), adding, “as immigrant ethnic groups do.” Bishop Palmer’s congregation resembled just such an ethnic group, like-minded, looking for solace. The warm-up prayers were impassioned and delivered by a deep-voiced woman greeting the faithful, who were filing in, formally dressed, women in hats and gloves, men in suits. Two women took seats in front of me, so beautiful that my gaze kept drifting toward them, and even when I was looking away the fragrance of their perfume warmed my face and made me smile, as though I was breathing their beauty.
“The devil is a liar this morning!” the preaching woman said from her podium at the front of the hall, reminding me that I was sinning in my heart. “Say the name of Jesus! He is great! He is the great ‘I am’! Behold the triumph of Zion … !” She was singing, she was chanting, she filled the church with her voice.
Twenty minutes of this exhortation and then the choir ranged along the stage, fifteen men and women and a seven-piece band, rocking a hymn.
Our God reigns!
He reigns!
More music, stirring the congregation, which now occupied every seat in the church. But they were all standing, swaying, smiling, now into a third hymn.
You are the help
Of the hopeless and broken …
And then we sat and listened to announcements of events. This order became familiar to me from other churches I was to attend: the warm-up, the hymns, the announcements: news of schools, of classes, the “Women’s Retreat—Restoring Body, Mind, and Spirit,” and the seminar called “How You Livin’?”
A man came forward, smooth-voiced, reassuring, a deacon in a pinstripe suit. “There were two men on a desert island,” he said, and raised his hand, indicating that we must listen carefully. “One of the men was frantic. ‘We lost, brother! What we gon’ do?’ He was beside himself, he was a mess.” The cautioning hand went up again. “The other man was very calm—just settin’, just smilin’, not a care—though the island was far away and it all seemed there was no hope. The first man, the worried man, he say, ‘Whah?’ ‘Tell you whah,’ the calm man said. ‘I’m a tither. I earn ten thousand dollars a week. I ain’t worried. My pastor will find me.’ ”
There was laughter and the soaring notes of an organ—most of the preaching was accompanied by theme music. A procession of ushers appeared at the side of the church, and they hoisted buckets.
“What time is it? It’s givin’ time!”
The buckets were filled, with crumpled bills, with stiff white envelopes, and they were passed back to the ushers.
And then the music stopped, and in this hush Bishop Palmer entered from the side, in a purple and gold robe, holding his Bible. A big man, he was even bigger in his robe, and though he moved slowly and statesman-like, and I expected his voice to boom, his first words were soft and reassuring.
“Good morning, brothers and sisters,” he began. And then, after a lengthy pause, “God wants you back.”
That was his theme, a return to faith, a renewal of belief in the love and compassion of God, and from the moment he began he held the attention of everyone.
“In the slave period here, one of the things that was prominent was the song—how the songs extolled the glory of God,” he said. “You know that. They needed it. Some people were so low they had to look up to see the ground. Where were they living? On the other side of the tracks. But what will God do? God will build a bridge over the tracks for me to get across!”
It was a sermon with the theme that times are hard, but don’t despair. Have faith—things will get better. If you’re wavering, remember that God wants you back. The bishop was preaching hope and forgiveness and the acknowledgment that everyone is having a hard time. The Bible is full of hard times, and blessed with salvation.
“Just because your billfold is empty doesn’t mean you won’t have a blessing. And remember, it’s not only raining on you—it’s raining on everyone. Look at Isaiah forty-three, verse one to six. ‘When you walk through the fire you will not be scorched. Do not fear.’ ”
He again harked back to slavery for consolation, to compare, to demonstrate that hard times always end. He appealed to us to remember that.
“The plan of God is never been that you will remain in bondage to anyone, or anything,” he said in his reassuring voice, sounding like a doctor telling a patient she’d get better. “You will be freed.”
Someone called out a halloo of thanks, and others chimed in.
“My friends, my fellow saints,” Bishop Palmer said, “God wants me back—and God wants you back.” And now he pointed, the sleeve of his robe sweeping the air like bunting. “God knows where you are. He knows what you’re going through. Consider Psalm Thirty-seven, verse twenty-five. ‘I had been young and now I am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.’ Meaning?”
He took a step back and straightened his bulk, his robe rippling across his arms, a thick finger plumping his Bible.
“Meaning this,” and he shouted: “You might eat baloney now, but you’ll have rib eye later!” There was laughter. “In the meantime, Hebrews thirteen, verse five. ‘Make sure that your character is free from the love of money—being content with what you have.’ ”
He went on in this vein, urging moderation, belief, and patience, and delivering a message of hope, nearly always in his reasonable voice, but from time to time in his voice of booming reassurance.
“ ‘Close it down, Palmer,’ ” he said at last, speaking to himself softly. And replied, “Yes, Lord.”
We stood and sang, and the two lovely women in front of me were beaming, their heads thrown back, singing into their veils, their bodies twitching with pleasure beneath their silken dresses, and I had to remind myself that I was in church.
At the end, after more hymns, Bishop Palmer invited everyone to come forward and drink some juice, and to take a piece of fruit from the pile of oranges and apples and grapes on the table.
“The Lord commanded, ‘Fruit of the vine.’ ”
Bishop Palmer seemed exhausted when I said goodbye, but—it was no illusion on my part—the congregation seemed fortified, encouraged, in good humor, embracing, reassured, going back to their lives with a little more hope. It was touching to see how some serious tinkering with Scripture could lift people’s spirits.
Tuscaloosa is a cluttered urban island in a great soft rural sea: the misleadingly serene surfaces of the South—low hills, grassy swales, cotton and bean fields, swamps humming with flies, dejected woods. But the city is not unusual in that way. It exemplifies the Southern pattern of settlement, where most towns and cities are islands. Asheville and Greenville, Columbia and Charleston, Augusta and Atlanta, Birmingham and Tuscaloosa—all are insular, with a certain level of prosperity, an agreed-upon identity, a well-heeled area and a poor section, places where “the other side of the tracks” is not an abstract metaphor but a specific place as well as a condition and a social class.
Yet the cities do not relate to each other and do not in the least resemble anything in the surrounding countryside. It has been argued (by, among others, John Shelton Reed in The Enduring South) that the cities of the contemporary South have “nothing distinctly Southern about them.” You have to leave them to know the true tensions of the region. The last houses at the city limits in these island-like places seemed to define the contours of a shoreline, and after that it all dropped off. Beyond, the landscape was like an ocean, with a simple and usually empty horizon, people living in flyspecks in radically different ways—always much poorer and often speaking a different language, or so it seemed to me, an outsider both in the clutter of the urban island and in the empty green sea of the hinterland.
Greensboro, only thirty miles south of Tuscaloosa, lies under the horizon in that green sea, a small, pretty, somewhat collapsed town, much of its elegance strangled by poverty. Up the road from Greensboro, around Moundville, lies the farmland and still-substandard houses where James Agee and Walker Evans spent the summer of 1936 collecting material. Originally this work was planned as a Fortune magazine profile of three poor white families of tenant farmers. The twenty-thousand-word story was long, convoluted, and depressing; the photographs were melancholy; it was all too truthful to be publishable in a money magazine; and so the whole business was rejected. But Agee was from Tennessee. He knew the South and, passionate about his subject, expanded the text over several years and made it a substantial and somewhat experimental book. Published under the title Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941, it sold a mere six hundred copies. Its commercial failure contributed to Agee’s heavy drinking and early death at the age of forty-five.
The book had been inspired, and eventually overshadowed, by You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a shorter and more straightforward book with a text by Erskine Caldwell and photographs by Margaret Bourke-White. But that book, once a seminal text of American radicals because of its portrait of Southern poverty, had long been out of print. Odd things happen in publishing. Twenty years after Let Us Now Praise Famous Men first appeared, it was republished, and in the early, more socially conscious 1960s it found many more readers and admirers, who understood its innovations. It was valued for its density, obliqueness, and poetic descriptions—whole chapters on old clothes, for example; pages of leaky roofs; lofty renderings of the textures of planks and shingles, of patches and slop buckets.
As a college student, I had a copy, and it pained me to think that I had such difficulty reading it. I could manage to get through it only by reading it aloud to myself, like a dim person struggling with literacy. I found the narration overwrought and self-consciously lyrical and wanted it (this was 1963, year of Southern strife) to tell me more about racial conflict. The photographs were tortured and memorable, classic images of poverty, but the text had too much Agee in it and not enough strife. The author in the foreground: that was a plus in the assertive sixties. Blacks were all but invisible in the text, and hardly mentioned. The manuscript of Agee’s rejected piece was such a concentrated account of rural poverty that it is easy to see why it was turned down as a magazine article.
Cherokee City, in the book, is Tuscaloosa, and Centerboro is Greensboro, thirty miles south, the subject of some of Evans’s photographs and where I was eventually headed. Agee’s book had led me here to the middle of Alabama.
Agee and Evans had spent their time in Hale County and Greene County, in the Black Belt. Cotton country.
“Black for the fertile soil, black for the people,” Cynthia Burton had told me. “The greater the number of farms, the more slaves that were needed—that’s the reason for the high proportion of blacks in the area that starts south of Tuscaloosa and extends across the state.”
The past wasn’t dead, nor past. She herself was black, and was explaining the demographic of the Black Belt today by referring to slavery, still a visitable memory because of the persistence of its effects.
Rolling south out of Tuscaloosa, past Moundville and Havana, I had the idea of seeing some people in Eutaw at short notice. I called ahead and said I would meet them at a certain time in the afternoon, an hour apart, and then I allowed myself to be bewitched by back roads with lovely names—Raspberry Road, Finches Ferry Road—and a succession of small cemeteries, vegetable patches, and empty sunlit fields bordering on the Black Warrior River, named for the paramount chief Tuscaloosa.
And the town of Eutaw was beautiful too, a tiny place on a close grid of streets with a modest town hall and county courthouse. The town was named for the Battle of Eutaw Springs in South Carolina, commanded by General Nathanael Greene, whose name had been given to this county, Greene County. Eutaw’s old street-front shops were quiet or abandoned, and hardly any pedestrians cast shadows on this hot afternoon except a few shoppers heading for the Piggly Wiggly grocery store. I drove in circles, sizing the place up, thinking how the sunshine made the mostly deserted town seem more melancholy.
I stopped at the town hall. Cynthia Burton had urged me to see the mayor, whose name was Raymond Steele. He was Eutaw’s first black mayor, elected in 2000. He had served three terms and had been hoping for a fourth.
“But I lost the last election,” Mayor Steele told me. He wore a baseball cap and a windbreaker. “I’m out of here in a few weeks, after twelve years. No matter. I have a good dry-cleaning business. Mr. Paul, I was in the military for twenty years. I was in the first Gulf War, in battle. Seen me some things. I have me a Bronze Star.”
He suggested we drive around. He would show me the town and the plans he’d had for a new airport, for a playground, for a new sports field. No one had paid any mind to his plans. Twelve years as mayor: the voters felt he’d overstayed his welcome.
“This town of Eutaw is in the Black Belt. Black soil, black people—eighty percent black. Rich soil, more enslaved people as a result. My opponent was black, from the city council. But look what I’ve done. Enlarged that park. They never had no park. Put up lights on the baseball field. Got the housing going in 2007 and 2008. The first new houses since 1974. Low income, rent to own.”
We drove up and down the side streets of Eutaw.
“Rosie Carpenter Haven—thirty-three new houses,” Mayor Steele said. “Carver Circle—thirty houses.”
The houses were well built and nicely kept, with small front lawns, brighter than the town itself.
“Business is not too good,” he said. “We got the box factory, RockTenn boxes. We got the roofing company. We got catfish, SouthFresh catfish. You got catfish all over Greene County.”
“But I heard catfish is going down.”
“Going way down,” Mayor Steele said. “Ain’t no doubt about it. We losing citizens every day. It’s now nine thousand, down from twel’ thousand. That was part of my problem in the election. Our population has been regressing. But there were other problems.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the election was dirty.” He said his opponent had put up signs saying MAYOR STEELE HAS CASHED IN, and the S was a dollar sign. “Like I’d done something crooked. Which I hadn’t, course.”
“Now you can run your dry-cleaning business and let someone else try to solve Eutaw’s problems.”
“Exactly right. Ah mo buy me some popcorn, set me down, and watch the show.”
I had one more visit to make in Eutaw. After a spell with Mayor Steele, who was instantly warm and forthcoming, I had the feeling that I was in for another friendly welcome. I was wrong. But that mistake, like many mistakes I made in the South, proved to be illuminating.
When I knocked on the door of the small office that fronted the sidewalk, and entered, I sensed an isolating darkness fall over me. It was an intimation that I was about to step into a hole or perhaps already stepped in one.
Two young women sat at desks, staring at computers in an alarmed way that suggested they were too terrified to look up. I said hello and, untypically—this was tiny, amiable, highly recommended Eutaw—there was no response.
“Who are you?”
I heard the demand before I saw the speaker, who was an older woman scowling under a mass of wild corkscrew curls, fierce-faced, wearing glasses that distorted her eyes. Her posture was that of someone repelling a threat, and her tone a bit too shrill, and her whole presence electrified and menacing.
I said my name, mentioned that I had made an appointment, emphasized that I was grateful that she was seeing me at short notice—and glancing around, I saw a man who could only have been the husband who had been described to me, seated silently at a desk in the corner.
“You’re late,” the woman said. “Why are you late?”
I began to extol the back roads, the groves of trees, the golden fields, the cotton bursting open, but I did not get far in this appreciation.
“You could have called,” she said sharply, a note of menace in her voice.
“I did—to make an appointment.”
“You didn’t call to say you’d be late.”
“I’m fifteen minutes late,” I said, half laughing at the absurdity of this, appealing to the room—the women at the computers, the man in the back. (Was he at work, or was he cowering?)
I was standing in the center of the room, the fierce woman in front of me, now howling at me, berating me in a way that I could not remember ever enduring before—perhaps in the fourth grade, at the Washington School, by Miss Cook, for whispering while she was reciting the Twenty-third Psalm (“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …”). In this office in Eutaw, in midafternoon, I was receiving a scorching denunciation, and I was so surprised I compounded my error by continuing to smile.
“You think I’m just going to sit here and wait for you to show up whenever you want to?” she said, and she made her mouth square so that I could see all her teeth.
My lateness did not seem serious enough for an apology, nor so serious that it merited this incessant bollocking from the woman standing before me.
So I said, “I’ll leave then. Never mind.”
She didn’t want this. She wanted to continue. Scolders never want you to go away.
“I call that ‘white privilege,’ ” she said, her voice remaining shrill, and now her screech and her wild corkscrew curls gave her a gorgon-like aspect.
I took out my small notebook from my shirt pocket and clicked my pen. “White privilege,” I said, writing slowly. “Hmm.”
“I’m sensitive to white privilege. Do you know what I mean by that?”
“Please tell me,” I said, my pen poised.
“By that I mean you arrived late and were in a position to notify me ahead of time. But chose not to, because you assumed I’d be available”— I started to protest but she talked over me —“as I’m black.”
She was not black at all. She could have been biracial, she could have been Sicilian, she could have been—and probably was—part Cherokee or Choctaw. “I’m black” seemed half protest, half boast.
“Who are you, anyway?”
I repeated my unusual name, and spelled it.
“ ‘Paul Theroux’ means nothing to me. I don’t know who you are. I’ve never heard of you.”
“That’s why I’m here, to introduce myself,” I said, suppressing another smile at her outbursts, which seemed as much for my benefit as for the benefit of the terrified typists and the man at the desk, who I now decided was cowering. I could see his apprehension: he held a big apple in his hand, the way a psychic holds a crystal ball. He merely studied it, scrying hard, seeming to discern an ominous visual, making no attempt to eat it.
“Paul Theroux!” The woman said in a fearsome way, making my name a poisonous substance. “You could be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. How do I know you’re not?”
Affecting horror and disgust, she succeeded only in appearing truculent and unhappy.
“You could read one of my books, any of them,” I said, “and I think you’d discover pretty quick that I am not a member of the Klan.”
“I’m busy!” she said. “I have to stand vigil. I have to be watchful. My freedom as an individual is not guaranteed.”
“Yes, it is, by the Constitution.”
“That’s just a document.”
“It’s legislation,” I said. “And by the way, as I said, I’m a writer. Do you mind if I write down what you’re saying?”
“Go ahead.” Her tone was do-your-damnedest, yet she had an air of helpless melancholy that furious people often have. “The Constitution is just a piece of paper. Where’s the protection here? We have to provide proof of identification everywhere we go. My daughter showed a policeman her ID driver’s license. The man said, ‘How do I know that’s who you are?’ ”
“I’m noting that,” I said, writing in my notebook, flipping pages, because she was talking fast.
“All these papers, all these questions, all this bureaucracy—to keep us down.” She shook her finger in my face. “That’s why we’re still poor!”
“And that is why you’re still poor,” I said, in an echoing and intoning way, still writing, and when I finished I clapped my notebook shut.
“White entitlement, that’s all we get. Now what do you want?”
I took a step back and said, “I think you’ve told me everything I need to know.”
The man with the apple rose from his desk and crept nearer.
“This is my husband,” the woman said.
The man winced but said nothing. He then performed an extraordinary act—to my mind at least. Facing me, he raised his apple and chawnked a big bite of it and chewed, with bits of apple flesh and juice gleaming on his mouth. This obvious eating—the chewing noise, the tooth-grinding, the pulpy noise, and his audible gulps and swallows—seemed more hostile by far than my being howled at by the woman, his wife. I could not remember anyone ever eating like that in my presence, defiantly masticating with such noise, with such spittle-flecked lips.
Both seemed a bit deflated when I said I’d be going, but before I left I drew their attention to what had just happened.
“I suppose this is a cultural difference,” I said. “In the North it’s considered bad manners to berate someone, especially a harmless stranger, in front of a roomful of people.” I nodded to the terrified secretaries. “And it’s really an insult to eat in front of a visitor without offering some.”
“I wrote a book once,” the woman said, but in a milder way, trying to get my attention, but by then I was half out the door and still shaking my head. She was well-off, well dressed, well educated, a businessperson and an organizer. She seemed to be doing very nicely. “That’s why we’re still poor” did not apply to her, though it could have been true of those cringing secretaries. But I couldn’t condemn her. I suppose she was giving me a taste of the bumps and slights she’d received in her life.
We talked for a while, but to no purpose. The woman was offended. What I took to be the easygoing mood of the South had deluded me. It had never occurred to me that I would be perceived as entitled to be late because I happened to be white. But I also had the sense that she wanted to wipe that smile off my intruding face, seeing me as a throwback to the 1960s, a period that for her persisted in all its injustice to the present.
“She’s paranoid—she hates white people,” someone who knew her well told me later. “She always wants an argument. But I don’t gee and haw with her.”
Anyway, it was a good lesson to me, that for some, old wounds were unhealed. And she was a good example of the warping influences of the South.
Some wounds were not old.
In Greensboro I met Mary Hodge, who showed me around—the library, the town hall, the churches. Mary was a beaming woman in late middle age, well dressed in a reddish suit and white blouse, proud of her daughter’s recent law degree, eager for me to understand Greensboro, but the mention of the Klan cast a shadow over our talk, as she shook her head slowly.
“They’re not gone,” she said in a near-whisper. “Our church was burned by the Ku Klux Klan in 1996. The police first called it an accidental fire, but we knew it was arson. And the thing is, it was meant for Mrs. Singleton’s church, not ours, Rising Star Baptist. Mrs. Singleton’s is William Chapel, and it’s a place that influential people visit all the time. And some people don’t like that, a church that gets visited by influential people. No they don’t.”
“Wasn’t the fire investigated afterward?” I asked.
“The police said it was electrical wiring, but surely it wasn’t. The fire came at two o’clock in the morning. No one was there. How could it be electrical? It came out later that the Klan were involved, but that they hired other people to do it. One of the drivers taking out the fish truck saw them getting away.”
“That’s terrible—it must have been so demoralizing,” I said. The act seemed so fiendish only platitudes came to mind.
“Not at all,” Mary Hodge said, and smiled. “Volunteers came from all over to help us rebuild the church—from town, from the state, from the North. They stayed at my house for a long time. They did a great job. They were good people. I still hear from them.”
I asked whether anyone had been arrested for starting the fire.
“The police never got to the true bottom of it all,” Mary said. “My husband was a deacon at the church. He said it was no accident.”
And it was, she said, the ninth Alabama church that year that had been either burned or vandalized. “There’s this sense out there that [church burnings are] something that happened a long time ago, something that occurred during the battles of the civil-rights era and even earlier,” activist Tim McCarthy said in Harvard Magazine in 2008. “It hasn’t stopped. There are, on average, several dozen church-burnings per year.” A church burning tore the heart out of a community, because a church was traditionally a meeting place, a source of joy and welfare, of social events and counseling, of hope. A burned-out church was an act of violence that a Northerner could scarcely comprehend, though many organizations in the North came to the aid of such wounded congregations.
Passing some tall trees bordering a meadow, Mary Hodge and I saw a woman slumped in the grass under those trees. She appeared to be in distress, so I pulled off the road and called out to her.
She was seated on the ground but canted forward, and now I saw that she was slowly clawing at the grass, her legs flung out like someone reenacting a Southern version of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, down to the large and seemingly unattainable house in the distance. Her straw hat was askew. She looked helpless, aimlessly combing the grass with her fingers. An elderly white woman seated awkwardly in a big field was not a common sight in Greensboro.
“I hope she’s all right,” Mary said.
“Hi there!” the old woman said, and we began to talk. She was Doris Torbert, gathering pecans that had fallen onto the grass, using both hands, bumping along on her bottom, and now I saw the bucket she was filling.
“I’ve been here all morning,” she said. “We planted these trees about forty years ago. I got no one to help me, but I don’t need help. I’m doing this for fun. And I can sell them at the market for seventy-five cents a pound.”
“They have these pecan pickers,” Mary suggested, and made a gesture with her hand, as though working an implement.
“I don’t have any use for them. Fred at the hardware store has one. He declares that it picks them up fast, but I had two of them and I didn’t like them. I’d rather pick them up this way with my hands. Anyway, those metal pickers cost forty dollars.”
She went on scrabbling and grubbing, now and then flinging up one hand to adjust her sun hat.
“Crack some and eat them. You’ll see they’re real tasty. These are lovely trees, pecans.”
Mrs. Torbert was friendly—that was her huge house in the distance, a white building with a row of tall white columns supporting the spacious porch.
“It’s a good piece of land,” she said. “We have about a hundred acres.” But land and prosperity had not kept her from hopping and crawling in the grass, gathering pecans.
Behind his tidy desk, in his small windowless office, wearing a ball cap and a windbreaker—it seemed the uniform of the rural Southern mayor—and looking more like a baseball coach than a politician, sat Greensboro’s first black mayor, Johnnie B. Washington, known to the town as “JB.” He gestured for me to sit and asked me what I wanted to know.
I had heard a bit about him from local talk. He had become mayor in 2004, and served briefly, but after some turmoil—accusations of voter fraud and a closer examination of absentee ballots revealing forged signatures and dubious postmarks—he had ultimately been disqualified by the findings of a team of handwriting experts. Campaigning again in 2008, he won fairly. In his mid-seventies, he was tall, slender, with the Cherokee features of his grandfather and a way of turtle-bobbing his head at most of my questions, as if enjoying a mild joke. He had made his living as the owner of a successful Greensboro funeral parlor, Washington and Page Mortuary, at the edge of the woods northeast of town on Highway 25. Easygoing, but with a soft courtesy—his reassuring mortician’s manner—he gave me some background on the town.
“This is the Black Belt. The city and Hale County are both sixty-eight percent black,” he said. “The town is divided into three groups.” He counted by flipping his long fingers. “Black Greensboro. White Greensboro. And white—old guard.” He chuckled, folded his fingers, and went on. “The old guard wants a bed-and-breakfast town, and whenever I come up with something to raise us economically, like a shopping center or a Walmart or any big store, there’s pushback. They won’t have it.”
“You think a Walmart is the answer?” I asked.
“They’d bring jobs,” he said.
“There’s got to be another solution,” I said, because Walmart had destroyed, not helped, many small towns in the South. I’d seen, up in Brent, an example of Walmart blight. In that town of four thousand in Bibb County, about thirty miles north of Greensboro, the huge hulking Walmart, which had wrecked most of the other local businesses, had closed and become a vast gray collapsing building in the empty, ghostly town. A mile away, a much bigger Walmart Supercenter had opened, sucking the rest of the life out of Brent, and in its ugliness looking like the source of a poisonous virus, which in a way it had been. Now, apart from the Soviet-looking Walmart, the only other employment in Brent was a state prison, the Bibb County Correctional Facility. It was one thing to believe that a Walmart might solve your problems, but it was a monster that crowded out all other enterprises. And sometimes the unthinkable happened: after the Walmart had destroyed a town’s businesses, the Walmart itself closed, and the town was finished.
I suggested this to Mayor Washington. He turtle-nodded at my explanation.
“Course, there’s still some agriculture here—cotton, soybeans. And you see the water tower?” Greensboro’s water tower was lettered CATFISH CAPITAL OF ALABAMA. “But catfish is going down, because the Vietnamese are exporting fish to the US. We cain’t compete. It’s farm-raised catfish, and there’s a processing plant here and at Heartland over on 69. Used to have chickens. Massengale’s chicken-processing plant went down in the 1970s. The meatpacking plant, Golden-Rod Broilers, closed a few years ago. Couldn’t compete with the big chicken people.”
All this was bad news, I said.
“The city is polarized, though lots of the whites support me, but secretly—they don’t want the others to know. We had black and white schools. The East Campus of Greensboro High was black, the West Campus was white. They combined the schools. This caused white flight, the white kids going to school in Moundville, which is more white.”
“When was that?”
“Four or five years ago, when they integrated.”
“Is your main problem the economy?” I asked.
“Our main problems?” Mayor Washington said with a kindly smile. “How much time do you have? A day or two, to listen? It’s lack of revenue, it’s resistance to change, it’s so many things. But I tell you, this is a fine town.”
It seemed a fine town to me. Even mummified and peeling, the houses were beautiful, many of them antebellum mansions, like most in the South, of huge and superfluous dimensions and frivolous amplitudes. The churches were numerous and ranged from the brick Episcopal church in the center of town to the modest but well-kept wood-plank chapels on the side streets. The quiet, old-fashioned Main Street still had a hardware store, a furniture shop, and some clothing stores, but many were empty, collapsing, in need of repair.
Some Greensboro shops were being fixed up, put back into business, by a nonprofit organization called the HERO Project, the acronym standing for Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization. Though hardly changed architecturally since Agee and Walker’s visit in 1934, and beautiful in a solemn, skeletal way, Greensboro was struggling. Its lovely bones, its weird time-warp quality, attracted well-wishers and volunteers, community development people by the score (including Cynthia Burton’s housing activists), the Auburn Rural Studio (low-cost housing), and Project Horseshoe Farm (“tutoring, mentoring, and enrichment programs”), with a clubhouse in a restored shop on Main Street. HERO was larger than any of the other groups, and it was harder to define because it was involved in so many areas of Greensboro life. But the aim of all these groups—their primary movers newcomers to Greensboro—was uplift.
“You need to talk to Pam Dorr,” I was told by several people in Greensboro. “She runs HERO. Those people are making a huge difference here.”
But Pam Dorr was away—no one knew where.
I wandered Main Street, where some of the old shops were being renovated, one a thrift shop, another a workshop making bicycles from locally harvested bamboo, and a third, equipped like a schoolroom, with twenty or more youngsters in it, and a few adults—some of the youngsters performing, perhaps a recitation, perhaps a play.
“What’s happening in there?” I asked a worker at HERO, an earnest young woman who was entering the altered shop space for this late-afternoon class. Half the children were standing, some seemed to be reading aloud from printed sheets; the others were seated in chairs and on the floor. They were clearly engaged in some sort of lesson.
“Those are kids in the after-school program,” the worker said. “Maybe not a good idea to interrupt. When are you coming back?”
It was always assumed that I was merely drifting, and I suppose in a sense I was, but not “merely.”
“In a few months, I guess.”
“Maybe you can see Pam then.”
I smiled at the “maybe.”
This premise—that I would come back eventually—was one I kept hearing. I took it to mean that the traveler in the South, no matter who, would never light for any length of time, but keep returning, tumbling from one place to another. It was a conflicted assumption, perhaps the product of the aggrieved Southern feeling that the South was a place apart, deemed unworthy, weakened, misrepresented, hard to explain, but proud. The South was not a conventional destination, not a place where an outsider would fit in or a traveler would linger. The South was static, but gave the appearance of flux, offering a set of occasions to satisfy the wanderer’s curiosity, and though the traveler might circle back for a bit, it was unthinkable that anyone would put down roots. We’d never understand the complexity of it. We were, all of us, just passing through, peering through windows.
Peering through the window of the renovated shop front on Main Street, I noted the names on the board, listing the children in the program, and it seemed to me a chant.
Mumbling at the window the litany of names to myself, I was reminded of some lines of the schoolteacher narrator in Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book: “Dazzling, in the flash of this last moment’s reason, I question myself eagerly. Is this amusia, aphasia, agraphia, alexia, aboulia? It is life.”
Another day, walking down Main Street in Greensboro with Mary Hodge, she saw a man crossing the street. She said, “Here comes our own Matlock.”
A tousled-haired man with a folder of papers under his arm was headed to the Greensboro courthouse, a glorious building of the colonnaded sort I saw all over the South, often the only building in town with a claim to the majestic, yet—to set this majesty in context—nearly always representing a history of injustice.
The man paused to say hello. We chatted awhile.
“How’s business?” I asked, and got an unexpectedly long answer.
“Business is fine,” he said. “But I don’t care about money. The only time I ever consider it is when I have a debt. I pay it and then I go on with my life. What do you do with money otherwise? Fella comes to me and says, ‘Have I got a deal for you! You just put some money in and I’ll do the rest, and I know it’s going to turn out good. What do you say, counselor?’
“ ‘You’re not going to like what I’m fixin’ to tell you,’ I said to him. ‘The only thing worse than losing that money would be winning the money and having a big payoff. What would I do with it? I’d just give it away.’
“He didn’t like what I said. When my son died I had an insurance policy on his life. The insurance company gave me the money. Quite a lot of money. I didn’t need it. I didn’t want it. I gave it away. Hear? I gave it away.”
With that, he crossed the lawn to the courthouse, clawing at his hair and seemingly deep in thought.
“It was sad,” Mary said. “A boating accident.”
Around the corner from Main Street, tucked into a brick building he’d financed himself, was Gene’s, the barbershop of Reverend Eugene Lyles. He was seventy-nine but looked much younger, and not just physically fit but scholarly too. He was seated at a small table peering at his Bible, opened to the Acts of the Apostles, while awaiting his next customer. In addition to his barbershop, Reverend Lyles had his own church, the Mars Hill Missionary Baptist Church, just south of town. Next door to the barbershop was Reverend Lyles’s own soul food diner, nameless except for the simple sign DINER out front.
I asked him for a haircut. Marking the page in his Bible with a tattered ribbon and shutting it, he went to the shelf beneath the big mirror and plucked his comb and scissors out of a jar of disinfectant. I climbed into one of the two barber chairs and he tied a bib around my neck.
In answer to my obvious first question, he said, “When I was a boy I bought me a pair of clippers. I cut my brother’s hair. Well, I got ten boy siblings and three girl siblings—fourteen of us. One mother. I kept cutting hair. I started this business sixty years ago, cutting hair all that time. And I got the restaurant, and I got my church. Yes, I am busy.”
“Tell me a little about Greensboro,” I said.
He sighed, then took a deep breath before he spoke. “There are good people in Greensboro,” he said. “But the white core is rooted in the status quo. And they have a way of indoctrinating their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. You’ve heard the words ‘separate but equal’? That means separate, not equal.”
“But that changed, didn’t it?”
“The school is separate yet,” he said, snipping away at my hair. “When it was integrated the whites started a private school, Southern Academy. There’s somewhere above a hundred there, all white.” He laughed, put comb and scissors down, and spun his glasses off to polish them with a tissue. “History is alive and well here.”
He sat in the other chair and said, “Very little work here requires marketable skills. There’s no more sharecroppers. The military is a way out—lots of boys here join the army.”
“Anyone in your family join the army?”
“Brother Benny,” he said. “I have three other brothers who integrated the white school. This was in the late 1970s. There were no other black students. The law was on their side—no one else was on their side—but the law was distant. They were Amos, Daniel, and Frank, the first guys—and it was very hard. They had fistfights. The white kids would git ’em. Throw bricks at ’em. Call ’em names. My brothers wouldn’t stand for it. They would respond.”
Reverend Lyles sighed and got out of his chair and began to sweep the cuttings of hair on the floor at my feet, still talking.
“There was little fear in those days and no one helped them. Not the police. Not the teachers. The teachers were on the side of the enforcers.”
“Was it like that for you?”
“I was older. I went to segregated schools. I grew up in the countryside, outside Greensboro, ten miles out, Cedarville. Very few whites lived in the area. I didn’t know any whites. Whites say, ‘All blacks look alike.’ I thought all whites looked alike. I didn’t know any whites until the sixties, when I was in my thirties.”
I told him that there were many Northerners, even today, who had no black friends and who did not know any blacks. He said that was news to him, and returned in his talk to his childhood.
“Most of the land in Cedarville was owned by blacks,” he said, saying that he was speaking of the 1930s and ’40s. “There was a man, Tommy Ruffin, he owned ten thousand acres. He farmed, he had hands, just like white folks did, growing cotton and corn.”
“Was your father one of those field hands?”
“My father was a World War One vet,” Reverend Lyles said, speaking slowly in his methodical way. “It happened like this. He ran away from here in 1916—he was about twenty. He went to Virginia. He enlisted there in 1917. After the war, he worked in a coal mine in West Virginia. He came back and married in 1930, but kept working in the mine, going back and forth. He gave us money. I always had money in my pockets.
“Finally he migrated into Hale County for good. He bought some land. He was advised by a white man named Paul Cameron not to sell any of that land to a white person. Sell to blacks, he said, because that’s the only way a black man can get a foothold in a rural area.”
Now that the floor was swept and the comb and scissors put away, he approached me and turned the barber chair so that I faced the mirror. “How’s that?”
We went next door to the diner. I ordered baked chicken, collard greens, and rice and gravy. Reverend Lyles had the same. His younger brother Benny joined us.
“Lord,” Reverend Lyles began, his hands clasped, his eyes shut, beginning grace in an imploring voice. I reflected on his dignity, the nobility of his life, the integrity of his experience.
After lunch, he said, “Come back soon. We be waiting for you. I got some stories you won’t believe.”
I drifted west through the Black Belt via Demopolis, Alabama, and Meridian, Mississippi, past Collinsville, where I bought a drink at the Piggly Wiggly, noted Chunky Duffee Road and the crossroads at tidy Tucker, and drove toward Philadelphia, a place that had been on my mind for years.
In June 1964, near this small farming town, three civil rights workers were murdered by a lynch mob of the local Klan. The portion of Highway 19 that I would travel on was named the Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Memorial Highway, for those activists who’d been killed during the Freedom Summer—a season of voter registration and protest, of running battles and bloodshed. I had missed that tragic time. I drove on this highway almost fifty years later in a spirit of catching up on unfinished business, with a suggestion of atonement, because in that summer I had been so far away, in Nyasaland, preparing to celebrate the independence of Malawi.
Philadelphia had earned another, later footnote in political history. In August 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan flew there to give the first speech of his campaign, at Philadelphia’s Neshoba County Fair. It seems a wildly out-of-the-way place to kick off a presidential campaign: a small Mississippi town with one distinction in the history books, the site of a triple murder provoked by white supremacists.
But that was precisely why Reagan was there. He knew what he was doing, making a calculated, ingratiating speech to a large crowd at a county fair, and to white Southern voters in general, reminding them where he stood on the issue of civil rights. He stood squarely with the good old boys and the Klansmen.
He began by mildly mocking his opponent, Jimmy Carter, then he talked about the economy, and then he got to the point. He said, “I believe in states’ rights, and I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level.”
He then rubbished the role of the federal government in enacting laws that affected citizens at the state level. Speaking in a town that was the headquarters of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan, he was saying: I’m on your side. Race was a factor in the 1980 election, which Reagan won.
Reagan was “tapping out the code,” as the New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote many years later. Herbert added a detailed list of Reagan’s opposition to civil rights measures while he was president: “He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.”
Philadelphia, like many towns in Mississippi, had an old, decaying town center of dusty streets and defunct and picturesque stores, surrounded on a bypass road by a scattering of shopping malls, fast food outlets, the usual Walmart, pawnshops, and gun retailers. It was the county seat, altogether a rather bleak place, much bleaker and nakeder in the glare of noon. On the sunny day that I spent walking its streets I was reminded that Philadelphia is still the headquarters of the Mississippi Klan. I easily found the headquarters and the free leaflets.
“The Original Knights of America, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is a political activist organization,” one of the leaflets explained. “We follow in the footsteps of our ancestors who were involved in the political process. It’s a Klansman’s responsibility to register to vote, campaign, and vote for conservative pro white candidates who will put America first and defend our nation’s borders.” On another page: “We the Ku Klux Klan have been fighting for the White Christian Race for over 150 years. We are the longest lasting and most respected White Civil Rights organization on Earth. We are no compromise and that’s why we continue to be a feared organization.”
“Feared” was indisputable, “most respected” was questionable, but it was obvious the KKK was a defiant group and, judging from the heavy inventory in the gun stores in Philadelphia, well armed. I was not there to reform anyone but only to listen.
“The Ku Klux Klan is … more than the embodiment of a tradition,” Frank Tannenbaum wrote in an early and subtle analysis of the South’s hidden impulses, Darker Phases of the South (1924). Tannenbaum was an Austrian-born criminologist, sociologist, Columbia University professor, and political radical who, as a soldier in the US Army stationed in the South, looked closely at the Klan. “[The Klan] expresses a deep-rooted social habit—a habit of ready violence in defense of a threatened social status.” He explained the appeal, the grip, the danger of the Klan: “It seizes upon the monotony of a small town and gives it daily drama. It takes him who lived an uneventful life, one who is nobody in particular, and makes something of him. It gives him a purpose; makes him a soldier in a cause. The very existence of the Ku Klux Klan is proof of emotional infanthood. It would not be possible in a community where the people lived full, interesting, varied lives.”
The Klan originated in the mid-nineteenth century, not with the poor whites but with the planter class, who used its terror to keep blacks working in the fields, to regulate labor, and to “perpetuate the South’s repressive plantation system,” in the view of the social historian Jonathan M. Wiener, in Social Origins of the New South (1978). But other historians have described how, after a period of relative inactivity, the Klan was revived at the end of World War One, growing rapidly after 1920, spreading north to Illinois and Iowa, because of the arrival there of new migrants, including Italians and Jews, whose religions the Klan abominated.
The Klan movement—its members convinced it was a stabilizing force—percolated through the classes of whites until it became a form of fantasy and “child’s play” for the poorest whites, who had little else to animate them. Tannenbaum speaks about the double life of a Klansman, an ordinary drudge during the day and a crusader at night, in secret, with robes and hoods and a fiery cross and arcane rituals. “Then there is the opportunity to pry into other people’s lives as a sacred duty.”
On a maze of rivers and creeks in the wooded northern outskirts of Philadelphia, I found the Choctaw Native American reservation, marked by a large casino and two hotels. As the Pearl River Resort employed many from the tribe, I made a point of looking for some Choctaws to tell me about the land they had been allotted here, and how this gambling enterprise had improved it.
Without much prodding from me, one of the first men I spoke to mentioned, with a nervous laugh, how the nearby town of Philadelphia was “something else.”
“Something else in a good sense?”
“Something else in a Klan sense,” he said.
He was a solidly built Choctaw man of about thirty, with slicked-back dark hair and an olive complexion. He worked in middle management in one of the hotels. He happened to be in the lobby, and I asked him directions, and then he asked me where I was from. This led to the ambiguous remark about Philadelphia. Glancing around at the other people nearby, he walked me outside, still looking left and right but smiling the whole time. His smile never left his face, and it became brighter as he spoke, as though to fool anyone who saw him talking to me.
“There’s plenty of them around here,” he said with his mirthless grin. “I went to school with them. They come here all the time.”
“So you know who they are.”
“Everyone knows who they are,” he said, and then fell silent. Three men in old clothes passed us, with the customary Southern greeting, pleasantries and nods.
“Them?” I asked.
“Could be,” he said, and, still smiling, “It’s not funny.” He was very nervous now; he seemed giddy with apprehension. “Look, I can’t talk anymore, but take my word for it.”
Larry Franey, a man of about sixty with a pearl-handled, nickel-plated .38 in a holster on his hip, was leaning against a porch post on Gum Street in Philadelphia, fretting. I walked by and said hello. We talked about guns for a while. Then he told me what he had on his mind.
“I reckon we’re setting on Revelation—book of Revelation—with this election.” The presidential election was two weeks away. “And the last election too. That something bad is coming. That God is behind Obama, that God put him in place to show the End is nigh. We are facing Tribulation. You cain’t see it, but it’s there—most of it out of sight, like a great trail of dominoes, and pretty soon they’ll start to fall here and they’ll keep dropping and we’ll see where they are, afallin’ from far off. We are facing the End, like it says in Revelation. Pacifically, the Mark of the Beast, the Scripture that says, ‘There will be one world.’ That’s where it’s all leading. China’s gonna call in their debt, all the money we owe them, and then it will be over, sure enough. We’ll be a Third World country, with China the only real country in the world, foretold in Revelation. We will be finished. It will be over.”
“Is China mentioned in Revelation, Larry?”
Larry quoted: “ ‘And they worshiped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?” ’ ”
“The dragon is China?”
“You said it.” He rested his right hand on his pistol. “I know people who are stockpiling guns and food, gold and water, and all the necessaries. But it won’t do them any good. We won’t have a chance.”
I stopped for the night at the Choctaw reservation’s casino and resort, and the next day drove by way of Carthage to Jackson, in time for lunch with some housing development people.
In Jackson, a city of black paradoxes and white flight and stifling grandeur, with an unavoidable downtown ghetto and back streets of beautiful homes, the housing people encouraged me to look at the Delta, where they were hoping to help create some sort of financial stability.
“There are bank deserts in the Delta, and many other places,” Bill Bynum, the CEO of the Hope Credit Union, told me. “Communities with no financial institutions. They closed, they went bankrupt, they moved. We buy some of them and help revitalize the community.”
“Bank deserts” was an expression I had never heard before, not even in the wider world of acknowledged misery. In the small towns of Uganda and Kenya there was always a Barclays bank or a National and Grindlays. Some of the most unprepossessing towns in India had half a dozen banks or lending institutions. I had seen banks at the edge of Fijian cane fields and in the rural towns of Vietnam and the rice-growing hamlets of Thailand. The idea that there were communities in the United States where banks had departed and none now existed—in rural parts of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana—was news to me.
For eighteen years, the Hope Credit Union had been trying to improve the situation in which many people had no access to a financial institution. Its large budget was funded by a combination of private and government agencies. But this was working capital. They needed to double in size to be sustainable, and were now trying to raise twenty million dollars.
“Say they need a loan for a car, and can’t get it,” Bynum said. “If you don’t have a car in these places—rural Arkansas or the Delta—you’ve got a problem. You can’t move, you can’t work, you stay poor. I tell you, some of the communities here are dying on the vine.”
Mississippi was number one in the United States for people who had no bank account. Even where a bank existed, it was a forbidding thing.
“People—the poor,” he said, “don’t feel welcome in a bank. They’re unused to entering a bank. They feel rejected and are very intimidated.”
So what’s the answer? I asked.
“We try to overcome that with the Hope Credit Union,” he said. “In Utica a bank was going to close. It had twenty-three branches. We bought those bank branches and they became Hope Credit Unions. Our focus is business development in the Delta and first-time home buyers. We grant an average of about two hundred mortgages a year.”
He added that thirty percent of the people who open an account have never had a bank account before.
“I took Assistant Treasury Secretary Cyrus Amir-Mokri down from Memphis,” Bynum said. “We passed through Tunica, Mound Bayou, and Clarksdale, and ended up in Utica. Through the Delta. He just sat and looked sad. He said he could not believe such conditions existed in the United States.”
Another of the men at the meeting then spoke up. “It’s no good our telling you that thirty percent of the people in Utica live below the poverty line,” he said. “You have to see for yourself.”