by Paul Theroux
“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.
Mary Hodge: The Burning
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.
Gathering Pecans
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 lik
e 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.
Greensboro: Mayor Johnnie B. Washington
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.
Well-Wishers
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. “May
be 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.
The Horseshoe Farm After-School Program Competition Chart
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.
DE KEVION
JADEN
KEYONNA
QUA-DARIUS
JAIMESA
ANTONETTA
KIMBERLY
COURTNEY
JAKIRA
JAMIKHAEL
RASLYN
DEMARKUS
DEMAIS
TYRESHA
TRINITY
CURTIS
LOGAN
JONATHAN