by Paul Theroux
“If all the other students were white, you must have felt—how?”
“Isolated,” he said. “But it wasn’t too bad. You talk to older people and you’ll hear they had a harder time. I was on the track team, ran the hundred, the two-twenty, the four-forty. I held the school record in the two-twenty, but it’s been broken by now.”
“Isn’t sports one way of distinguishing yourself, getting respect?”
“Track’s funny,” he said. “It isn’t like basketball or football. People don’t pay much mind to it. You don’t get famous for running fast.”
“Anyway, you were headed for college, so you had to study, I guess. Were the teachers helpful?”
“Some were real helpful,” he said. “My English teacher Miss Masuski was encouraging. She asked us to choose a novel, then read it and select a passage from it that meant something to us personally. On the day, we got up in front of the class and explained the passage. I can’t remember the novel, but I recall being in front of all those people and saying, ‘So here’s what it means. It’s just this. We know more than we think we know.’”
“That’s good. Did they like it?”
“Miss Masuski clapped her hands and shouted, ‘That’s my favorite!’ I felt great. It meant a lot to me.” He ate some more, reflecting on this, then said, “There were other times, different times. A football game, would have been around 1967, a home game. We were playing Branchville High—it’s the other side of Bamberg. They had one African American on their team, a running back. He was their star player.”
“You wanted to see how he’d play?”
“Dying to see him,” Wilbur said. “My parents dropped us off. We watched the game, but instead of staying until the end and getting a ride home, we left early. We were walking down the road when some white guys in a car saw us and chased us. We ran!”
“You were fast, though.”
“My running ability helped,” he said. “We ducked into a field and ended up laying for a long time on the field of soybeans.”
“Who were the guys?”
“I’m sure I knew who they were. I hate to think what they would have done if they’d caught us.”
“A beating?”
“Oh, sure—or worse. But you know, just a few wanted to cause problems. The majority were okay. In the early 1970s at the University of South Carolina there were twenty thousand white students and only a few hundred African Americans.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“You know you’re in an environment where you’re not wanted,” he said. He finished his meal and nodded gravely. “I’ll go to my grave remembering it.”
On our way back to his office, in a cubicle in the mobile unit that was parked near the Allendale courthouse, Wilbur talked about how he had come back to Kline and run for the South Carolina legislature and won, and after a political career he’d become involved in nonprofit community development, the small-scale but effective Allendale County Alive. “Housing is what we do, one person at a time.” Around 150 houses had been fixed up or rebuilt in and around Allendale and Fairfax. But there were other needs. In cold weather like this, people asked for space heaters; they also asked for food, shelter, clothing, loans to prevent foreclosures—other agencies in Allendale helped with these things, if the people qualified by having an income that was eighty percent below the median income of the county.
“Many?”
“More than we can handle.”
Talking about hunger and the homeless, of people living in poverty, many with no water or electricity, a vast number without jobs, I was put in mind of what I had seen in Africa and Asia—the talk of funding and the hopes of development, that mood of remoteness and neglect when the world seems distant. Yet this was the real world, a town in crisis on a road that was easily reachable from my home at the other end of it.
“Like I said, I’d like to see some people you’re helping.”
Wilbur picked up the phone and asked his assistant to request permission for me to see some families who’d been helped, and others seeking housing.
“Do people let you do all the work,” I asked, “or do they participate?”
“We have a new initiative,” he said. “In order to get help—as part of getting rehab assistance—people will be required to volunteer in community service.”
“I like that.”
“We’ll make a list of things they can do. Clean up trash. Read to a child. Work at a homeless shelter. Or they might have a skill. If so, share it. We want to make it a requirement: Hey, you’re getting something, so give something back.”
The phone rang. Wilbur picked it up and listened for a moment.
“The people you asked to see, they’re having a hard time. They’re not ready now. Maybe when you come back?”
If this had been Zimbabwe, which it much resembled, I might have said: This is urgent. I don’t know when I can come back. Isn’t there anything you can do?
But I said, “Okay. I’ll come back some other time.”
The Inevitable Mr. Patel
All the convenience stores, the three gas stations, and the one motel in small, unpromising Allendale were each owned by Indians from India, each Indian rejoicing in the same name, the inevitable Mr. Patel, as I had learned on my first visit.
One of the gas stations, decrepit but busy, was also a convenience store full of hand-scrawled signs, a rack of violent black-themed DVDs, cheap T-shirts, gum, candy, and beer. Since beer was sold by the single container, the place was also a hangout for men boozing out of cans or bottles wrapped in brown bags. I had stopped to buy gas. When I went inside to pay for it I got a whiff of the East—incense like scorched sugar and a thick cloud of curry-scented air, which you could break down into fragrant eye-watering aromas, cardamom and turmeric and fenugreek. Mr. and Mrs. Patel.
“I came here two years ago from Broach,” Mr. Suresh Patel told me from behind the counter of his cluttered shop.
Broach is an industrial river city of half a million in the state of Gujarat. Many Indian shopkeepers—dukawallahs I knew in East and Central Africa—claimed Broach as their ancestral home, where the Patel surname identifies them as members of a Gujarati Hindu subcaste. And Mr. Patel’s convenience store in Allendale was identical to the dukas in East Africa, the shelves of food and beer and cheap clothes and candy and household goods, the stern hand-lettered sign NO CREDIT, the same air of frugality with a whiff of incense and curry.
Mr. Suresh Patel could barely speak English, or perhaps his mumbling was caused by the lump of pan he was chewing, the betel leaf and betel nut bundle that is the postprandial digestive favored by Hindus and masticated in a cud-like lump, like a chaw that turns the teeth crimson and produces the gouts and squirts of russet spittle you see staining the multitudinous Indian sidewalks incarnadine, painting the plaster red.
He’d been a chemist in India. “My cousin call me. He say, ‘Come. Good business.’”
Mr. Patel hopped on a plane with his wife and son, and took over the management of a shop and gas station, one of the three shops and gas stations in Allendale now owned by Patels. In the roughly 150-year history of the town, which was the county seat, none of these businesses had ever been owned by an African American.
A week before, on my way down Five Chop Road, near Orangeburg, at another gas station, a man named Evers had said to me, “The whites sold these stores and the gas stations and the motels to the Indians.” He happened to be eating. He swallowed and finished his thought: “Who are taking over.”
Now I understood them a little better, having done some homework. The journalist and scholar Tunku Varadarajan had written a piece in 1999 on this subject for the New York Times Magazine. He had reported the fact that more than fifty percent of all motels in the United States were owned by people of Indian origin, a statistic supplied to him by the Asian American Hotel Owners Association. Yet the Indians who owned and operated these motels were most of them first-timers, many of whom had been either s
hopkeepers in East Africa or farmers in India, or as I had seen in Virginia, immigrant Indian medical doctors who had managed to secure a visa waiver, arriving as physicians, then gravitating to or moonlighting in motel ownership.
An immigrant Italian running a pizzeria, or a Japanese owning a sushi bar, or a Turk opening a kebab stall was a logical linear transition, but an Indian operating a motel was anomalous. American-style motels are so rare as to be almost unknown in India, and so, Varadarajan wrote, “America’s motels constitute what could be called a nonlinear ethnic niche.” He explained this rarefied sociological term: “A certain ethnic group becomes entrenched in a clearly identifiable economic sector, working at jobs for which it has no evident cultural, geographical or even racial affinity.” It’s also known as “occupational clustering,” like the Korean-owned deli in New York or, in the England that I knew, the Greek-owned fish-and-chips shop.
It seems that Indian immigrants turned to the business because the demands of running a non-chain motel (or a mom-and-pop convenience store) did not include a mastery of English or having to answer to an American boss, only the need to work long hours. Running a restaurant was a problem, as another Patel told me later in my trip, because the owner would have to taste the food, and that was out of the question because it might be beef, an abomination to the vegetarian Hindu, who regarded the cow as sacred.
The Hindu kinship system was an advantage. Other Patels, the extended family, might help when a trusted partner or a loan of advance money for a down payment on the business was needed. Investigating the phenomenon more thoroughly, Varadarajan discovered that “70 percent of all Indian motel owners—or a third of all motel owners in America—are called Patel.” That was in 1999. The figure is much higher now.
The domination of one sort of business by one recently arrived ethnic group, unused to such work, seems improbable. Trying to imagine a comparison, I thought of the paanwala, the betel leaf seller, a traditional feature of every city and town in India, and I conceived a situation in which eighty percent of the paanwala shops in India began to be operated by immigrant American Baptists named Smith.
The cash flow was a distinct incentive, but one of the greatest benefits was that a motel included living quarters for the owner. The convenience stores did too (behind the beaded curtains), just as the shop (the duka in the bush) did in Africa. Living on the premises also meant there was no downtime, no commute, and rarely did I see any of these places employing non-Indians, except as menials, clerks, or sweepers in Housekeeping. The typical Patel-owned non-chain motel was usually a modest structure, and many were grubby and inexpensive enough to fit the owlish observation of Charles Portis, in “Motel Life, Lower Reaches”: “There should have been a pair of signs out front, flashing back and forth: NOT QUITE A DUMP—AT DUMP PRICES.”
Indians—in particular the Patels of Gujarat—constitute one of the South’s subcultures, and the deeper I went into the South, the more of them I met, like Suresh Patel in Allendale, nearly always running convenience stores and gas stations and motels. Mention them to some people and they reply, “Like Mississippi Masala”—a movie made in 1991. But the reality was not like that movie at all, which is about a passionate love affair between the daughter of an Indian motel owner and Denzel Washington. The Indian family had been thrown out of Uganda by the dictator Idi Amin, and because of this the father applies his anti-African prejudice to Southern blacks.
The flaw in the film is the assumption that Ugandan Indians are anti-African or anti-black. But I lived among them for six years and got to know them, and they spoke of their pride in having been part of Uganda’s independence struggle. (The same was true for the Indians in colonial Kenya, who helped to bring about Uhuru with money and legal assistance and their own anticolonial press.) They knew Amin to be an aberration. Over several generations, Ugandan-born Indians learned how to adapt, which is why they became so successful in Britain. They were not fazed by being aliens; they had lost so many of their Indian prejudices that they chose to go to Britain rather than to India, a country unknown to most of them. Some have returned to Uganda and their businesses, and have flourished.
Most of the Indians I was to meet in the South had, like Suresh Patel in Allendale, like Hardeep Patel whom I’d met in Virginia, like most of the Patels and Desais I met on my trip, arrived straight from India, were fearful of the new country, and were comforted by their ancient pieties. Virtually all the Patels I met were caste-conscious, mutually supportive, ardently superstitious, highly sensitized to ethnic differences, ignorant of local history, jittery in the presence of blacks, and suspicious of anything or anyone who might represent a threat to their religion or their notions of racial purity. They too might have objected to their daughter’s marrying Denzel.
Some of these nonlinear ethnic niches, in the form of back-roads motels, were clean and well run, but many were dire to the point of disgusting. One of these motels, where I spent a night on Highway 68, near Collinsville, Alabama, was among the filthiest places I have stayed in a life of resorting, out of desperation, to flophouses. Masses of dime-sized brown beetles on the walls of my Travelers Inn room were creeping to the ceiling, where they clustered and dropped in gobs, pinkle-pankling onto my face, disgusting sheets stiff with dirt and stains of unknown origin, the mattress all hogged down and wallered out in the middle (as they said in these parts), a bathroom that had the features and the reek of a vomitorium, an entire floor of dust bunnies—the room was filthier by far than almost any I’ve found in Africa or China, or for that matter India. The desk clerk, Mr. Patel, smiled at my complaints (“I woke up itching”) and boasted that every (filthy) room was occupied.
He had also been a student. More than any other immigrant group I’d ever encountered, Indians had a keen instinct for queue-jumping on the fast track. The complete story of the Indians of the South has not been written; it is secret and subtle, just whispers, emerging now and then when a politically ambitious Indian American becomes a public figure, like Piyush (“Bobby”) Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, or Nimrata Randhawa (Nikki Haley), the governor of South Carolina, both children of Punjabi immigrants, both converts to Christianity, both right-wing Republicans, supporters of the death penalty, and dismissive of welfare programs. And both have distanced themselves from their parents, who are tradition-minded and perhaps a bit too exotic to appeal to Southern voters, even though Sikhs, and many Punjabis, consider themselves Indo-Aryan people.
The Indian shopkeepers and motel owners, many of them now American citizens, were unquestionably hardworking, but many preserved the Hindu caste rules, including the highly developed abhorrence of racial taint. As I had noticed on my first visit, there was something weirdly colonial about the presence of Indians in the rural South, which reminded me of Africa: the Indian shop in the dusty upcountry town, the overpriced and grubby merchandise, the locals squatting under the trees, giving parts of the South an even more dramatic, sleepier, unfixable Third World appearance.
Off the Grid
On my way back to Alabama, I crossed Georgia on the country roads, beginning with the evacuation route out of Allendale and the radioactive road past the Savannah River Site. Emerging from the Talladega National Forest south of Pell City, I took a blissful all-day meandering ride on the back roads, Route 231 to 25, through Childersburg, Wilsonville, and Columbiana, moody in the winter mist under a gray sky.
I stopped at a pawnshop in Calera, a crossroads, and inquired about the guns they stocked.
“We got plenty, but I cain’t sell you one because you from out of state.”
“So what’ll I do?” I said, just to provoke him.
And it worked so well I was sorry for my insincerity, because the man looked pained on my behalf. “I know. You off the grid. You really need one in these parts. Me, I wouldn’t drive around here without one.”
“But it all looks beautiful to me.”
“They’s some strange places here. God, I only wish I could help.”
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p; He did not mean the narrow rolling road through the wooded backland, where the offices of timber companies squatted amid piles of logs and acres of orange sawdust, nor the cattle farms, nor Shelby Springs and its green ponds, nor the cotton fields. He must have meant the sudden settlements, the pockets of dereliction, the house trailers and motor homes that looked like old oversized cigarette cartons, the decaying houses and some outright shacks—the obvious hunger and poverty in the beautiful pinewoods. Seems a land out of time, I had written at a chicken restaurant I’d found at a crossroads, where I fell into conversation with a man on his way to Montevallo. He was a former marine, just retired, wishing to join the Montevallo Police Department. He chose Montevallo because he had children: the high school was small and friendly, and the town quieter than Hoover, where his girlfriend lived.
After the tall, slender, starved-looking pines in the Talladega Forest, and the shacks and poor houses outside Greensboro, traveling down Main Street was like a homecoming to me.
The Rosenwald Gift
At the edge of County Road 16, ten miles south of Greensboro, a white wooden building stood back from the road but commanded attention. It had recently been prettified and restored and was used as a community center. When I inquired, I was told it had started life as a two-room schoolhouse, built for black children in about 1917—and what caught my attention was that all those years ago it had been built at the instigation of a Chicago philanthropist who had somehow seen a need for such a school in distant and deeply segregated Greensboro, rich in cotton but reluctant to teach blacks to read or give them a vote.
“That’s the Rosenwald school. We called it the Emory School,” Reverend Lyles told me when I stopped by his barbershop in Greensboro to ask about it. “I was enrolled in that school in 1940. Half the money came from Sears, Roebuck. Folks here put up the difference. My mother also went to a Rosenwald school, the same as me. The students were black, the teachers were black. If you go down Highway 69, down to the Gallion area, there is another Rosenwald school, name of Oak Grove.”