by Paul Theroux
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.”
“What would you do?”
“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.”
Orangeburg and the Massacre
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?”
Charleston: Gun Show
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; m
ore 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.”
“What kind of mag?”
“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.”