Deep South

by Paul Theroux

  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.”

  “Who Am Ah?”

  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 o
f 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.”

  “Nu Man, Yanna Weep-Dee We Dan-Ya”

  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 meet
ing 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.