by Paul Theroux
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.
The Black Belt
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.
“Ah Mo Buy Me Some Popcorn, Set Me Down, and Watch the Show”
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.”
“White Privilege”
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.”