by Paul Theroux
I’d heard a snatch of a song by Marcus Delorean Roberts (who raps under the name DeLorean) at the gas station in Gadsden, Alabama, where I met Wendell Turley. His song “Southern Niggas” is, so he says, an assertion of black pride. Brad Terrence Jordan, a Texan who calls himself Scarface, describes himself as “the realest nigga to ever do southern rap.” His hugely successful songs include “Bitch Nigga,” “Funky L’il Nigga,” and “Snitch Nigga.” Another Southern rapper, J. Nics (“Polar Bear Mack”) has defended his fellow rappers by naming one of his mix tapes SNAS, an acronym (described by a music blogger as “addressing the perception that rappers from below the Mason-Dixon line lack the lyrical depth of their Northern counterparts”) meaning “Southern Niggas Ain’t Slow.”
In the profitable business of rap music, the word itself seems to have a high dollar value. A black farmer in Arkansas, speaking of the use of the word in rap and hip-hop music, told me disgustedly, “That word is all about money.” Dr. Dre’s 2001 hip-hop “gangsta rap” CD The Chronic (featuring such tracks as “Bitch Niggaz” and “Some LA Niggaz”) has sold more than eight million copies. Dre himself (his birth name is Andre Romelle Young) has, at the age of forty-nine, become the first rap billionaire.
Money has raised the status of the rappers, not only in their communities but in the Ivy League. While I was traveling in the South, Harvard University established the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship at its prestigious W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. The university’s website explains the archive’s mission: “to facilitate and encourage the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture and responsible leadership through Hiphop.”
Nasir Jones’s rapper name is Nas. Here are some examples of Nas’s lyrics, by which a Harvard student might pursue knowledge, art, culture, and responsible leadership. In “Last Real Nigga Alive,” he advises, “There’s more shit than wanting to be this King of New York shit.” And in “The Message,” one of the messages is “You freak niggas played out, get fucked and ate out.” He praises the high life in “Patience-Sabali,” praises owning many acres, so that he can get a front-row seat and “watch niggas play the game like the Lakers.” This view is modified in “Ether,” where he disparages riches, because “y’all niggas deal with emotions like bitches.”
So rapper Nasir Jones is a pillar of the Harvard community, his made-up name and his vulgar lyrics enshrined as part of the Crimson culture, his association with the university promoted with pride. He is rich, and he can rap, and is possessed of a fleeting fame in Harvard Yard. Not bad for someone from the projects in Brooklyn who dropped out of school in the eighth grade.
When the elevation of Nas to the Ivy League occurred, newspapers and critics of rap saw it as an ill omen. I am inclined to a different view. The fact that Harvard has endowed a hip-hop chair and has made rap and hip-hop scholarly subjects seems to me to signal a decline, if not a termination. Whenever an art form—music, book, drama, song—is dragged into the seminar rooms, it is finished as a force. Nothing is more deadly than the anatomizing of scholarship, since the study of art, any art—even the obscene, semiliterate yawp and grunt of rap—drains the life from it.
Still, even if it is on the wane, such music, such sentiments, such language—deconstructed, embraced, even celebrated by Harvard professors pretending that their slumming is scholarship—is the soundtrack of much of present-day black America, and it is loud in the black areas of the Deep South. But I winced whenever I heard it played, whenever I heard that word.
PART TWO
* * *
Winter: “Ones Born Today Don’t Know How It Was”
Listen, stranger; this was myself: this was I.
—scratched on glass by Cecilia Farmer, in Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun
Ten Degrees of Frost
Beyond the icicles hanging against my Cape Cod window like a row of overgrown crystal carrots, January snow lay thick on the ground—crusty, pitted, and hardened, some of it like the bubbly honeycomb of air-dried sea foam in the tide wrack down at the beach, the sort of snow that stays so long you get used to the intrusion of that world of uninvited white, a hooded subverted landscape, sparkling in the low flame of a sallow sunrise on a winter morning. And half the window itself was whitened and etched with frost.
The knifing wind had whittled the snow into beautiful contours like sculptural drapes, scooped it into folds, clumped it against the house, and wrapped it in scarves and shawls at the lumpy bases of tree trunks. My long driveway was white as well, but granular, with dark imprints, a parallel pair of wheel tracks, pebbles of gravel glazed in ice. The morning was clear and cloudless but cold, ten degrees of frost, a mute visible crackle in the air, like neurons sparking in ice chips, the winter silence broken only by the rasp and clatter of crows, beating the bumps and bandages of snow from the branches with their wings, startled by the crunch of my footfalls in the snow crust and the ker-thunk of my door slam.
Perhaps I am overdoing this. What was lovely to observe and describe was even lovelier to leave, which is perhaps why I was hyperventilating in a wordy way by seeing it as a winter wonderland, a cliché I was trying to avoid. It was an effect of my condition: I was in a mood of farewell. The relief of departure often brings on dishonest praise and grateful exaggeration (“Thanks! I had an outstanding time! Sorry I have to go . . .”). I was freezing and sick of it all. “Hooded”? “Subverted”? “Whittled”? “Sculptural”? Never mind. I was dying to get out of this cold and onto the road.
I set off briskly in sunshine, heading south, and by the time I got to the far end of Connecticut a storm front of solid cloud with a leading edge as blunt and splintery as an old desk drawer slid overhead and shut out the light, giving the sky the illusion of a falling tabletop, with an approaching wall of wicked plaster in the distance. The New Jersey sky sank to the level of my car roof and snow began to fall, light small tumbling flakes, whirled across the road by traffic. At intervals, cars tricked into collisions lay like smashed toys in the breakdown lane. In the evening darkness in Delaware snow poured in fat pellets past roadside lamps. The Beltway was sleety, slick and black, and drifts of snow were heaped all over northern Virginia.
After almost six hundred miles of snowfall I stopped for the night at a motel north of Richmond, and the next morning I continued into sunlight, happy again in the warm, winter-brown South.
This time I knew where I was going.
Lumberton
Caked with streaky layers of salt that frost and road slush had dried and turned into rime, my whitened car had a conspicuous, weather-struck, out-of-state look in the harsh impartial sunlight of North Carolina. And so I swung into Lumberton to clean the thing.
As I approached the wide-open entrance of a car wash and its dripping sprinklers, an old man in a military cap sidled over to me and waved me to a stop. He removed the cigarette from his mouth with a tweezing pair of stained fingers and stooped and leaned at me.
“Don’t use this facility,” he said.
“Is it closed?”
“No, sir. She’s open,” he said. He puffed on the cigarette, then snatched it down again.
“You work here?”
“No, sir, but I’m telling you, this facility is no good.” He smoked awhile. “Use the one down the road. Just reverse and head on over there. You’ll see it when you get close.” He puffed again, then pinched the cigarette out of his mouth and said, “I know I don’t talk good. I’m doing the best as I can, but I didn’t have a real good education, on account of I’m a Lumbee. You know what a Lumbee is?”
And with that, I abandoned the idea of getting my car washed there. I parked and spent the next hour or so having a cup of coffee with this man, Robert Locklear, from Lumberton. He was thin, sallow, ill-looking—his slack chain-smoker’s face lined like a biscuit—and he leaned on a cane to walk. His jacket was too heavy for this mild sunny day, suggesting that his circulation was poor. As soon as we found a bench to sit on with our coffee he became silent, as though embarrassed and exposed. But I was sadde
ned by his yellow, beaky, tragic face.
I remarked on his patrol cap, which was lettered Combat Veteran— Proud to Serve.
“I was in Vietnam in ’68, ’69, the real hot years, in Pleiku, in the Central Highlands, right near Cambodia and Laos. We could walk right into those places, we were so near. And sometimes we did, and had some bad times. But I made it through.
“Come back here and it was the same as always. Lumberton was mainly segregated, not only white and black but Lumbee too. Most Locklears are Lumbees—anyone sees my name, they know who I am and where I come from.
“So, education. It was a problem for me. I couldn’t go to a white school and they wouldn’t let me into a black school. ’Cause I’m a Lumbee. The Lumbees had to be educated at the church. All the Lumbees got churches, and all the churches had a school inside, but it wasn’t much. Look at me. I got nothing. I was fit for the army but nothing else. Coulda got killed in Vietnam. And what for?
“The segregation now is as worse as it was way back, and it was bad then. The Ku Klux Klan came over from Alabama and Mississippi in 1958 and burned some crosses in Robeson County here—they was as mean to the Lumbees as they was to the niggers, meaner when they come here. But that day we run out the Klan, and they were busted and as good as nekkid.”
The Klan incident he referred to, I found, was the so-called Battle of Hayes Pond, in which a Klan Grand Dragon named James “Catfish” Cole led a group of Klansmen in a rally and cross burning in Maxton, twenty-odd miles from Lumberton, in the year that Locklear had mentioned. Small in number, they were overwhelmed and some injured by a larger group of armed and indignant Lumbees, who shot at them and harried them and beat them into the muddy thickets in the swamps at nearby Hayes and Maxton Pond. In the Lumbees’ long history of defeats, this confrontation of the Klan was an event still celebrated every year by the Lumbee people, who are recognized as Native American by the federal government but denied any financial benefits, in part because their descent and ancestry is still a matter of dispute.
“I couldn’t go anywhere, growing up, because of segregation—and look at me, I’m not black. I’m Lumbee,” Robert Locklear said. “But Martin Luther King is a hero to me, and James Brown too. They hated the Lumbees, the people here. Still do. My cousin married a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman, and she come down here and thought she was going to be fine. Well, if you’re a doctor or a lawyer maybe you’re fine, but she takes out a credit card at Walmart, and they see her name is Locklear, and they treat her real bad ’cause they think she’s a Lumbee. After a bit, she’s so miserable here she went away.”
Robert Locklear stamped out the cigarette he’d been smoking and removed his Proud to Serve cap. He inverted it and showed it to me, his thumb on the label inside.
“Look at this,” he said. “Feel it. I was a weaver by trade, made cloth right here. But they closed the mills and sent the jobs overseas. So there’s nothing here anymore. Now check out this label—see? ‘Made in Vietnam.’ And look what the hat says, ‘Combat Veteran,’ and that there is my vet facility.”
The address indicated the name and address of a Disabled American Veterans office and clinic in Lumberton.
“I go there for counseling. I have bad nights. I get bad dreams about ’Nam and about the Klan and what-all. The US government give me that cap ’cause I’m a vet, and the cap is made in ’Nam!”
I sat with him on the bench and tried to offer some consolation. But I was merely a stranger passing through, writing down what he told me. He was silent for a while, then seemed to remember a question I’d asked a moment before.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen. One’s as bad as the other. I almost died in Vietnam and now I have nothing, and I’m wearing this hat, made there—and people hereabouts still hate the Lumbees. Write this down. Nothing’s changed.” He snatched my wrist and stared at me, wetting his lips. “I get nightmeers.”
Back Roads
From Lumberton, where at last I drenched my car and restored its color, I headed by side roads for South Carolina and the old familiar abandoned Route 301, the Doomsday road, where the burned-out motels and deserted Art Deco gas stations and scorched shells of restaurants lay by the roadside. But even in its desolation the road suggested a powerful sense of place, and also the best billboards, one enormous siding lettered: “So they said, ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household.’—Acts 16:31.”
A man in Santee said, “It never snows here.”
His wife said, “We got a little ten years ago.”
Sunny, warm, pleasant, spring-like in January, on the back roads of the Lowcountry. But my pleasure was tempered by the shacks and the rusted trailers surrounded by plastic children’s toys and old bikes and the absence of any industry. The poor in the rural South cast aside and existing like residue.
Sunday Morning in Sycamore
Drifting down the Confederate Highway from Orangeburg and Bamberg for a second visit to Reverend Johnson’s Revelation Ministries, I came upon Sycamore, near Allendale. The church service didn’t start until eleven, so I had time to kill. Some men were having their Sunday-morning coffee in Hardee’s on Railroad Avenue. This being Sunday, the two other diners were closed.
“Set yourself down,” one of the men said, and so I joined them, ten men at the tables. They were most of them older men, roughly dressed; the only young one among them, a man of thirty or so named Barrett, wearing a dark suit, said he had to go. He was taking his mother to church.
The others were Sam, Freddy, Harold, Mose, Buddy, Clarence, Rewall, Charlie, and lastly Henry, who urged me to call him Sonny. They were all local men, they said, and had worked in the various factories in and around Allendale, before they closed.
“I was born right here in 1946,” said Sonny Bryant, “but I spent most of my working life in other places—mainly Atlanta, then up in DC. I came back just a few years ago. I’m living outside Ulmer now with my grandparents. They’re not the Bryant side, they’re Jenkins—my grandfather Henry, my grandmother Sular Jenkins. Sular, it’s an African name.
“We all grew up picking cotton. When I was six, I was picking with my whole family—my grandmother was amazing. She was always picking way ahead of us. By the time I was ten and up, I was picking pretty much five hundred pounds a day, at around fifty cents a pound. That particular cotton was owned by Mr. Kirkland and Mr. Bess.”
Memories of picking cotton: everywhere I was to travel in the Deep South I heard these stories from older people—chopping cotton and picking cotton, of the long days in the fields before the onset of mechanical pickers, dragging a nine-foot pick sack and filling it. And everyone had memories of the amount picked. The 500 pounds that Sonny claimed was an impossible amount. In the 1930s James Agee estimated that the average for an adult male was about 250 pounds a day, and for a grown woman, between 150 and 200 pounds. Most of the people I met mentioned these amounts as their day’s harvest.
But Sonny insisted that he picked a quarter ton of cotton a day. He also said—after mentioning the importance of Allendale in the past, its prosperity before I-95 cast its shadow, its fine restaurants and its nightlife, and his success at school (“It was black schools then, all the way up to high school. Segregation was hard. I seen some things”)—that he had fled Allendale for Atlanta, where he had painted Martin Luther King’s house.
“I met Martin in Atlanta. He talked to me the way I’m talking to you now. He hired me to paint his house. I learned painting from my grandfather Bryant, who was a painter here. He also played guitar. He taught me to play blues.”
“So you were a painter who played the blues?” I asked.
“No, sir. I was a boiler technician for the municipal government in DC. I was away from here for forty years. And I done a lot of other things.”
This seemed a cue for me to encourage him, so I did.
“Cocaine, for one,” Sonny said. “I not only used it, I sold it, I cooked it, I cut it with baking powder, and I s
een some strange things. But I’m here to tell you I made it through. Crack cocaine, I smoked it for years—years! I enjoyed every minute of it.”
“Tell me why.”
“Tell you wah. You think you got wangs. You think you can flah!”
“Crack cocaine. Good stuff, eh?”
“But it’s poison, like a lot of great things you can do. I gave it up fourteen years ago and never took it again. I been with people who’ve been using it, but I just watched—I didn’t take any myself. I just stopped. And I came down here, back home. I should never have left.”
All the men had listened to Sonny’s story, and when he was done, one of them, Sam, said, “Maybe you met Martin in Atlanta. But you never did pick no five hundred pounds of cotton in one day.”
“We Love You—Ain’t Nothing You Can Do About It!”
The back roads were empty on this Sunday morning, empty and beautiful, along the margins of more twiggy cotton fields, many of them puddled and muddy, the ripe tufts—the linty so-called locks—in open sodden bolls and the bushes beaten down by yesterday’s rain. The wet earth steamed in the morning sunlight, tall trees lined the edges of fields, and cows grazed. Small wooden shacks of sunburned cedar, with splintery porches and roofs of curling shingles, crouched and bent over amid groves of enormous beech trees.
I passed through Ulmer and found the church, eager to listen to Reverend Virgin Johnson, who in our previous conversation had been a fund of wisdom and hope and humor. Just down the road, diagonally across from the black church, was the meetinghouse of the Sons of Confederate Veterans at Barker’s Mill. A detailed sign in front memorialized the local militia who skirmished, on February 2, 1865, with the troops of General Francis Preston Blair Jr., whose soldiers were a flank of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea. The Union Army shouldered its way through this farmland, looting and burning houses and firing back at snipers. The fight at Barker’s Mill had not accomplished anything except checking for one day the progress of the victorious army in its crossing of Jackson Branch, a narrow stream that flowed southeasterly. The sign indicated the skirmish, a delay, a defeat, another humiliation, actually; but the meetinghouse was still active, flying the Confederate flag.