Deep South

by Paul Theroux

  “In the South there’s a church on every corner,” Reverend Johnson had said to me when I’d met him in Orangeburg and he’d invited me to his church service. Today, sixty cars or more were parked in the muddy field in front, and in the foyer I was greeted with a hug and asked to sign the visitors’ book. A group of older men, formally dressed in neatly pressed suits and sober ties, welcomed me and introduced themselves as deacons and ushers. One usher escorted me into the church, where a woman in a frilly dress and a big white hat was seated at an organ, repeatedly planting her splayed-out fingers on the keys, playing urgent music as an emphatic background to the earnest preaching of a woman in a purple gown. The church hall was full, about three hundred people, the majority of them women and children.

  Over the stage, a scroll-shaped sign in gold: REVELATION MINISTRIES—“REVEALING GOD’S WORD TO THE WORLD—WE LOVE YOU—AIN’T NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!”

  This reminded me of the sign that had thrilled Henry Miller on his Air-Conditioned Nightmare trip through the USA in 1940: GOOD NEWS! GOD IS LOVE! I had been in a handful of Southern homes, poor ones mostly. I had been in busy pawnshops and rowdy bars. They had been revelatory. And the gun shows had left a powerful impression of a prevailing mood of bitter defeat. These experiences helped reveal to me the texture of the South. But I did not come to a full understanding of the sense of community in the rural South until I entered a church. A church was more than a church; it was the beating heart—the vitality, the hope—of a Southern community.

  And knowing that, I had some sense of what a devastating event it was when a church was blown up, as happened often in Southern history, and significantly almost fifty years before, on September 15, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, when sticks of dynamite planted by Klansmen killed four small girls and wounded twenty-two others. That Baptist church was not merely a place of worship, a gathering place for friends, it was a meetinghouse for civil rights leaders and voter registration activists, and it was a resource for welfare and guidance. The dynamite in that church, a landmark event in the civil rights movement, had created martyrs and heroes, and hastened civil rights legislation.

  A church burning or bombing might devastate a congregation, but it was a desperate act. The church was always rebuilt and was stronger afterward, as a necessity, because people attended church to find hope, dignity, love, consolation, fellowship, and advice. The church was central to life here in a way I had never seen elsewhere in the United States—certainly not where I was born. A church in the South resembled the life around a mosque or a temple in India or Africa.

  Shortly after the service began, my name was announced (“Mr. Paul, visiting from Boston”)—they’d gotten it from the visitors’ book—and the service was suspended for me to be greeted by almost every person in the church in turn, man and woman, young and old, with a hug or a handshake. They were beautifully dressed, women in satin, many wearing hats and gloves, most holding Bibles, and men in well-cut suits, and even the children squirming on seats or chasing each other in the aisles were formally attired. They lifted their arms and smiled, approaching me, crushing me in an embrace.

  “Welcome, brother.”

  A man read announcements about activities for the coming weeks, spiritual, social, gustatory: welfare projects, church outings, get-togethers, visits to neighboring churches. Then the rousing music played again, and for the next hour or so a chorus of women in silken dresses sang and preached, and one of them—singing a blues song—riffed on her life, which had been one of tribulation and spiritual renewal, and she punctuated her mellifluous narration with asides of “Thank you, Lord!”

  This was all prologue, an opening act that settled the crowd, theme music to the filing in of stragglers and latecomers. When the church was full, the familiar dark-suited figure of Attorney Virgin Johnson Jr. rose from his high-backed, throne-like chair, and in his Sunday role as Reverend Johnson he began to preach, a well-thumbed Bible in his right hand, his left hand raised in admonition. He was only partly the man I’d met on the street in Orangeburg—the lawyer helping a stranger. Today he was a preacher, with a commanding voice that occasionally was liltingly persuasive, with Deep Southern tones.

  “Hear me today, brothers and sisters,” he began, and lifted his Bible to read from it. “Luke one, thirty-seven. ‘For nothing will be impossible for God.’ Now look at Mark nine, twenty-three. ‘Everything is possible for him who believes.’”

  They were simple, lucid texts that gave hope, offered reassurance, spread some balm in an uncertain world. He repeated them and let his words sink in.

  “And consider Jeremiah twenty, nine–eleven.” Reverend Johnson’s voice was reasonable and encouraging. “‘I know the plan is a plan for yo’ welfare—not disaster.’” I could not tell whether he was quoting or paraphrasing Jeremiah—it didn’t matter anyway. I looked up the verse in the Bible at my pew and found he was paraphrasing: “But the Lord is with me as a mighty terrible one: therefore my persecutors shall stumble and they shall not prevail: they shall be greatly ashamed,” etc. He had taken charge of the congregation, as the authority figure, the explainer, the exhorter.

  “Tell yo’ neighbor: God has a plan for you!”

  The woman in front of me, the man beside me, even the video camera operator who was ten feet away, took turns to say to me in a grand gulping tone of delivering good news, “God has a plan for you!”

  “The children of Israel had been taken into captivity in Babylon,” Reverend Johnson went on, his voice rising. “The prophet Jeremiah sent a letter to them. It said”—and now he was leaning toward us and enunciating carefully—“it said, ‘Even though it look like stuff mess up in yo’ life, it gon’ be all right after a while! Stop distressing, stop worrying. Even though yo’ circumstances don’t look prosperous, you gon’ be all right!’

  “That’s Jeremiah. And I’m here to tell you it’s gon’ be all right.” Gesticulating, his tissuey Bible pages fluttering, he said, “It’s irrelevant what’s gon’ on. If you connected to God, it’s gon’ be all right. My life is not dependent on whether the president is right or wrong. Because why? Because Ah mo put my trust in Jesus. God will not fail you! In the midst of slavery and oppression—the children of Israel in Babylon—Jeremiah said—what did he say? He said: ‘It gon’ be all right! God gonna make a way out! God gon’ work it out. All signs are positive!’”

  Now some women in the congregation were calling out “Yes!” and “Thank you, Jesus!” Other men and women rose to their feet to clap and sing.

  “Some of us are enslaved in our mind—in our lives and in our addictions. Nemmine! God says, ‘Ahm gon’ give you a future and a hope. My future is gon’ to be better than my today.’ Because you can only see today. But God can see the future!”

  “Tell it! Tell it!”

  “Get ready, because you gon’ to know tomorrow. God says, ‘Hold on till you get there!’”

  “Yes, Lord! Hold on!”

  “There’s three parts of this, three parts of ‘God has a plan for your life.’ Num’ one. God’s plan may not be your plan. Submit and obey God’s plan.”

  “Oh, yeah! Praise Him!”

  “Num’ two. Yo’ may not understand God’s plan. But accept what He tells you. You may think”—and Reverend Johnson paused to mask his face with a scowl of befuddlement—“Why this happenin’ to me?” He smiled and propped himself on the lectern and said, “Listen, be patient. Stop hurryin’ to mess up! Think real hard!

  “Think of the eagle and the buzzard in famine times. The eagle says, ‘I’m not used to waitin’.’ But what does the buzzard say? He say, ‘I’m used to waitin’!’ Jes’ wait! Because num’ three is this: God has his own time! Your time and His time may be different.”

  “Praise His name!”

  Now many people were standing and swaying and crying out, and the woman in the big white hat playing keyboards was leaning forward and slapping at the keys and squeezing out blurting chords. A
drummer had joined her and was rattling his sticks on the cymbals, and a man playing the electric guitar was canted back, worrying the strings on his instrument with his clawing fingers.

  Reverend Johnson, continuing to preach, reminded me of Reverend Shegog at the end of the Dilsey section (“I seed de first and de last”) of The Sound and the Fury, preaching on Easter Sunday (“I got de ricklickshun and de blood of de Lamb”), and in preaching—gaining in inspiration and becoming more colloquial as he spoke—Reverend Johnson turned into a prophet, conveying the voice of God, and God’s message of hope and love, as Bishop Palmer had done in Tuscaloosa, sounding just as certain as the prophets he was quoting, Jeremiah and Isaiah.

  And when Reverend Johnson said, “Thus sayeth the Lord,” it made sense, because he was a resonant and oracular and vatic presence, all confident encouragement now, in his Deep South accent, “po’ boy” as he described it to me, the message of “Don’t hurry” and “God has a plan” and “Don’t give up.”

  “What did Jeremiah say to the children of Israel? ‘You gon’ be all right!’”

  Then the music began in earnest and the whole church was rocked in song. Envelopes were passed out; we folded money into them; men wearing white gloves carried chunky baskets up and down the aisles and collected the envelopes. Still there was singing, and in the singing I picked up a Bible and looked for a passage in Proverbs I remembered from long ago: “These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood. A heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief. A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.”

  Words to live by.

  Then we all hugged again and filed out into the sunlight, rejoicing. The small children twisted and slipped past our legs, running ahead of us like scalded rats.

  Lucky

  The next day, somewhere on the back roads, I glided through a junction and missed the turn to Orangeburg. When I pulled over to reverse direction, I saw a freestanding store, a shed really, set back under a spreading tree of bare boughs, with a hand-lettered signboard, LUCKY’S GUN REPAIR, a woolly sleeve of smoke twisting out a rusty chimney pipe and flattening in the chilly breeze.

  People who dealt with guns were generally talkers, I’d learned. Usually they had a gripe with the government and strong views on neighbors or crime, and felt put-upon and slighted. A man with a weapon was a man with something on his mind.

  So I parked and went in.

  A man in a black cowboy hat, a greasy shirt, and a thick vest sat behind a workbench, metal pieces spread out, pistol parts, but no whole gun visible anywhere. His hands were as dirty as the greasy parts, and he was holding a pistol’s trigger assembly.

  “Help you?”

  “I’m looking for the road to Allendale.”

  “That way.” He gestured with the trigger assembly. “Down about six miles. Left at the gas station. Keep going.”

  “Thanks. Are you Lucky?”

  “Uh-huh. I’m Lucky.”

  “You sell guns?”

  “Fix ’em. I don’t have the capital to keep any inventory.”

  “So you don’t have a gun?”

  He smiled. “I got plenty of guns. Over in the house.”

  “Thinking of selling any of them?”

  He pondered a moment, more than a moment, perhaps mentally ranging over his gun collection.

  “Got me a nice forty-five I’ve been fixing to sell.”

  “That’s a big gun.”

  “Big and useful.” He shoved his chair back. “I’ll fetch it.”

  I said, “I’m not sure.”

  “Have a look. No obligation.”

  He walked across a weedy field to a large decaying house, overhung by tall trees, while I sat in the shed among disassembled pistols, a catalog, a calendar, jam jars filled with rusted screws, a tin tray of small oily tools, the woodstove clucking and crackling.

  A few minutes later he stepped through the door and passed me the gun. It was heavy in my hand, a deadly heaviness, a thick handle. It was scratched and bumped and looked unloved.

  I said, “Thanks. It’s too big for me.”

  “Won’t know that until you shoot it,” he said.

  “Where would I do that?”

  “Over there,” he said, and pushed the door open and walked past a torn-open sofa and a tipped-over barrel of punctured oil cans. I followed. He was wearing battered cowboy boots and high-stepping through the trash.

  “How much for the gun?”

  “Three hundred. But you want to shoot it first.” As he spoke, he took a bullet the size of a peanut, or so it seemed to me, out of his shirt pocket. “Aim over there.”

  He indicated a six-foot-high pile of old truck tires. We were no more than fifty feet from the main road, cars going past, the occasional truck, a school bus, a motorcycle with high handlebars, the rider sitting with his feet straight out as though in a barber’s chair. I sensed derangement in the neighborhood of poor houses. But here I was with Lucky, who was friendly and holding a serious gun.

  Instead of filling the magazine, he slipped the bullet into the chamber and handed the gun to me. “Aim at the middle of the pile, the fat part.”

  I did so, gripping the pistol with both hands and holding it so the kickback of the recoiling slide wouldn’t take my thumb off. And then bam, and as my head rang, the pistol became weightless and lifted in one bounce.

  “What do you think?”

  “Nice. But I don’t need a gun this big.”

  “Everyone needs a gun this big, or bigger.” He fed another bullet into the chamber. “Blow some more lead, buddy.”

  I shot again, and again. Then he took two shots, nailing a Coke can that had been tossed in the tire pile. I remarked that the gun did not move in his hand when he fired. He showed me a trigger squeeze that was almost imperceptible and kept the pistol motionless.

  “How’d you get the name Lucky?”

  “Not from my daddy. From other people.” He looked rueful. “You don’t give yourself names like Lucky.”

  “Nice name.”

  “Effen it was true.” He laughed. He hefted the gun in his hand, holding it like a dangerous toy, which it was. “Make me an offer.”

  Instead of making one, I changed the subject. I asked him about Allendale. He said, “It’s tough down there,” and then with a smile, “Tough everywhere. I got no money, never had no money, I worked my whole damn life. But no one got any money—no one I know. No sense complaining. But if you buy that gun I’d have me three hundred dollars.”

  I left without the gun. I felt that I had wasted his time, and I said so. But I had just dropped in, which was permissible in the South. It was strange to be firing this big weapon so near the road, into a stack of old tires, cars going past. He had not given it a thought: walk a few steps and bam bam bam. He let me pay for the ammo and said, “Come back, you hear? We’ll shoot some more lead.” He said he owned plenty of guns; I had expected a gun nut with a grievance, but, hard-up like everyone else, Lucky seemed to be a reasonably happy man.

  “The Future Is a Faded Song”

  I had last seen Allendale in sunshine, people in the streets greeting each other, children playing. It had looked like the end of the world, but there it was, animated by conspicuous citizens. On a winter morning, a sky threatening rain, no one strolling or even sitting under trees, the town looked utterly desolate. Yet studying its ruination I saw it was the same, really: three months had wrought no alteration. It was then I realized that part of the appeal of my traveling in the South was that I could return and pick up where I left off, because in the rural parts where I had chosen to look, nothing changed. If anything, much of it was sliding slowly backward, the past persisting, and “the future is a faded song.”

  Because of this shrinkage, the slipping into greater poverty, people—many of the ones I spoke to—had a clear memory of the past, of how things h
ad been long ago, and what their hopes had been.

  Wilbur Cave was waiting for me. I had called ahead and suggested we meet for lunch at the soul food diner O Taste and See.

  “How’s things?” I asked, over baked chicken and beans and cornbread, after he finished saying grace.

  “We’re still at it,” he said. “Trying to make a difference.”

  “If possible, I’d like to meet some families—people you’ve rehoused or helped. Or people behind the eight ball.”

  “I’ll make some calls. Can’t do much unless I get their permission,” he said.

  Saying so, he made a note on a memo pad. I thought of all the people I’d buttonholed in my traveling life, the doors I’d knocked on, the confrontations, my history of intrusions. And how, here in my own country, where I spoke the language and posed no threat, where I presumed to be one of them, I needed an intermediary, and more than that, needed to make an appointment. But of course I was not one of them, and I was a stranger.

  “What’ve you been doing?” Wilbur asked.

  I told him I’d recently attended Reverend Johnson’s church service, and from that casual piece of information flowed the familiar topics: religion, music, race, guns, unemployment, poverty, the past.

  “I’m older than Reverend Johnson,” he said—he was sixty-two—“so in 1966 I was in the ninth grade in Barnwell High School, living up the road in Kline. You could call it an integrated school—what Reverend Johnson would call ‘voluntary integration.’ It was known as ‘freedom of choice.’ Pretty big high school, and there were five of us, African American, but I was the only one in college prep.”