by Paul Theroux
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.
The Submerged Twentieth
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.
Dot Indians
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.”
Big Stone Gap
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, an
d 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 Drugstore 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.
Gun Store
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.’”
Asheville: “This We Call the Block”
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.