by Paul Theroux
“Back aways, my brother—you wouldn’t have spoken to him particular like you did, I mean a white person. You’d never say a word. That changed when blacks began to get into public office and began to mingle with other people and realize that you and I might have similar views.”
“So things are changing?”
“Some. I’ve seen some changes made tremendously. But if there’s going to be real change, you have to find the people to make that change with. And so therefore someone goin’ to have to reach out. We can’t just sit back and hope there’s a change. Number one is finding the resources to make a change. If you don’t find the resources, you have to find an individual with the kind of commodity that it takes. Also, if he has the resources, then he has to seek my labor.”
“It seems to me that you spent your life being self-sufficient, doing your own thing.”
“I’m the builder of this building—brick building, well made. It took me months and months. I went to the mayor to get a permit. Wasn’t easy. And once I obtained a permit, then I had to go through all kinds of struggles and straining.”
“How did you borrow money?”
“Wasn’t easy at all. I went to bank after bank after bank. Finally a banker told me, he said, ‘I’ll look into it.’ It was 1962. I was in my twenties. The man who loaned me the money, his statement to me was ‘Those people would rather see anything happen than for you to be economically supportive in Greensboro.’ He was an older man. White. He said, ‘They would rather see you fail.’”
“But you succeeded.”
“I was a barber. I wanted a barbershop of my own. I bought all new chairs. I wanted what I’d seen in other cities. I said to myself, ‘I’d like to see this in Greensboro.’”
“Do you have any other white customers?” I asked, because the previous day I’d stopped in as Reverend Lyles was shaving an older white man. This was a sight, because the man was not white but pink, and plump, seventy or more, seemingly one of the Greensboro old guard, and he lay slightly supine in the chair as Reverend Lyles, his fingers poised on a cutthroat razor, scraped his neck slowly with the glittering blade, with the concentration of the mutineer Babo shaving the captive Benito Cereno on the deck of the San Dominick, witnessed by Captain Delano in the Melville tale. But this was pure fantasy on my part.
“That man you saw yester morning—might be his fifth time. But he’s lived here his whole life. The change comes with time. Since the last two-three years, some whites come here. Time makes the difference. Used to be a barbershop on Main Street that was white. No mo’.”
“Did you ever go there?”
This made Reverend Lyles laugh hard and shake his head. “Man, I couldn’t even stand in front of that barbershop. They didn’t allow it, no standing on that sidewalk, no talking, nothing—wouldn’t allow it when I was young. That’s the change that I lived.”
“How did you feel?”
“It made me angry.” He frowned, remembering. “So when the time came for voter registration, we was on the front lines. But if you don’t have blacks and whites now talking together, and with a vision, it’s going to be no business and stores closed and no work. We have blacks on the city council, the county commission. Our congressman is black—Terri Sewell.”
Terrycina Sewell, representing Alabama’s 7th District—much of it in the Black Belt—was a highly educated woman of fifty, born in Huntsville and raised in Selma, where her parents were closely involved in the civil rights movement. A graduate of Princeton, with postgraduate degrees from Harvard Law School and Oxford University, Sewell had worked for ten years at a Wall Street law firm before returning to Alabama as a partner in a firm in Birmingham specializing in public finance. She became Alabama’s first black congresswoman in 2012 after winning a landslide election.
“That was the objective of the civil rights movement, to have equal representation in government,” I said. “It’s been achieved. And now there’s more financial hardship than ever. So what next?”
“These people have to sit down and start brainstorming what is the most feasible thing they can do economically to make a change,” he said. “But many people oppose business in Greensboro today. Old families have the status quo mentality—quite a few of those old families are in the white race. The mind-set that they have is that if business comes to Hale County that offers a fair price for labor, it forces them to offer more for their labor. Also, this is a farm area, and they would like to keep it that way. Cattle, soybeans, catfish.”
CATFISH CAPITAL OF ALABAMA was painted in tall letters on Greensboro’s water tower. Catfish was regarded by some as an economic engine, but for others it was the plantation all over again, as an Alabama journalist, Patricia Dedrick, observed in 2002 in the Birmingham News: “At Southern Pride [Catfish Company, in Greensboro], unskilled men, single mothers and inmates from the state prison ranch in Faunsdale make up the bulk of the work force. The company also buses in Hispanics from Tuscaloosa and beyond, deducting the cost of transportation from their pay.” The pay was poor, and the whole business, especially that detail of convict labor, smacked of the outlawed nineteenth-century practice known as peonage, an abuse widely found in the South.
“Still got some catfish,” Reverend Lyles said. “But you have a plant here already close less than a month ago. It’s a high-risk business, though. When Mercedes came to Tuscaloosa, it was a shot in the arm for Hale County. We need something closer to town.”
I was about to leave when I saw that he had a book on his reading table, where he usually studied his Bible. He showed it to me: Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964–1972 by Susan Youngblood Ashmore, an American history professor at Emory University. He had met the author on her visits to Greensboro and shared his civil rights–era experiences, which had been nightmarish.
Looking through the book, I came upon the description of an incident in Greensboro in July 1965 when a Ku Klux Klan demonstration against a peaceful protest march erupted on Main Street. Local white men banded together with robed Klansmen carrying signs: Fight Communism, Fight Race Mixing, Protect the American Way. These men had attacked the marchers with sticks, rubber hoses, and hammers. Seventeen people were taken to the hospital, all black. Two black churches were burned. By the end of July, 435 black protesters had been jailed on a number of charges relating to illegal assembly and breaches of the peace.
“We were afraid to come out at night,” Reverend Lyles said. “And much later the whites were worried too. Even today they’re worried yet, thinking, The blacks you beat back then might recognize you. So that keeps people apart, that fear.” He shook his head. “Ones born today don’t know how it was.”
“Our Randall Curb”
One morning at my Blue Shadows breakfast, rolling her eyes and with a surrendering sigh at my many questions, Janet May said, “Do you know our Randall Curb?” Her tone indicated that since I was a writer I must know this man, who was also a writer. I said I hadn’t heard of him.
Then I smiled. “But maybe he’s heard of me.”
She screamed, “Paul, you are a stitch!”
She began to think hard. She had a habit when ruminating of clapping her hands to each side of her done-up and wound-around hair, like a Sikh straightening his turban, and she did that now for a few moments, then said, “He’s a historian. He can answer all your questions.”
I said fine. She got him on the phone and handed the phone to me. We talked a little bit and, in the Southern way, Randall Curb said I was welcome to drop in anytime. He gave me his address.
“How about later this morning?”
“Perfect. I’ll be looking out for you.”
Just before I left Blue Shadows, Janet hummed to get my attention and said, “Randall’s pretty much blind, and it slows him down, but it doesn’t stop him none.”
The white house with the shutters at the corner of First and Main, near the center of town, with the screened-in porch, as he described it, was easy to f
ind. I parked on his lawn, at his suggestion, and he came to the door the moment I knocked. Randall Curb was a big, pale, slightly breathless man, about sixty, with a full face, boyish in its openness, with blue widened eyes and the eager, slightly off-center gaze of someone nearsighted. He searched for me with his outstretched arms and found my hand, and, shaking it warmly, tugged on it.
“You’re Paul,” he said. “Now, you come on in.”
I was at once among many books, and smiling, recognizing the names of writers and titles I loved on the packed shelves. And we were just passing through the foyer; there were more bookshelves beyond. This was unusual. I had not so far met any readers on my trip; none of the houses I’d been in had books on view, though many had had bookcases. The shelves usually held mementos and souvenirs, like Janet May’s dancing frogs and plaster pigs and painted saucers.
This was why, whenever I mentioned I was a writer, most people smiled in what I took to be pity, as though I had just disclosed a personal failing, but a lovable, forgivable fault. Because to nonreaders a book is a riddle and a challenge; and not knowing what to say next, and baffled, they mildly blame me for putting them on the spot, the way a dinner guest among carnivores takes a seat at the table and says, “By the way, I’m a vegan.”
Another feature of meeting Randall was that, in what became a year and a half of my traveling in the South, and hundreds of encounters, he was the only person I met who knew my name or had read any of my books. This was an advantage: anonymity is freedom.
In my traveling life, it had never been a hardship for me as a writer to live among illiterates. For most of the years I spent in Africa, I lived contentedly with people for whom books were little more than unfathomable but potent fetishes. The unlettered person has other refined skills and is often more watchful, shrewd, and freer in discussion than the literate person with a limited experience of literature, who believes that all the answers to life’s questions can be found in the pages of the Bible, say, or the Koran. And then there are the laziest and most presumptuous of people, those who can read but who don’t bother, who live in the smuggest ignorance and seem to me dangerous.
A reader meeting another reader is an encounter of kindred spirits. The pleasure of such a joyous event is impossible to describe to a nonreader, and why would I bother? But you, with this book in your hand, are familiar with the phenomenon, and so it is not necessary. I have written about this elsewhere, of my chance meeting with the great scholar Leon Edel on a beach in Hawaii. Leon had written one of my favorite books, his five-volume biography of Henry James. I had resigned myself to the insularity and philistinism of Hawaii: there was so much else to enjoy on the islands, the delicious food, the beautiful weather, the marine sunlight, the mounting surf, the emblematic rainbows.
So I was content in Hawaii, satisfied with sunshine and my own work. But when I met Leon Edel, who, like me, was married to a local woman, I realized that there was a part of my brain, an area of my experience, a way of expressing myself, an entire possible conversation, the language of books, that I was again able to use. It was as if (I wrote later) I were meeting a fellow alien from my home planet: we were two people who looked like everyone else, yet we were from the great race of readers, and spoke the same language. I met Leon often after that, for lunch, over drinks, and when he died, I grieved for him and for myself, isolated again under the sunny skies of Oahu, chatting in Pidgin, or basic English, in rubious generalities about nothing much.
It was a satisfaction to me that on one shelf of Randall Curb’s library there rested the five thick volumes of Leon Edel’s Henry James. And seeing them gave me an opportunity to tell him my Leon Edel story and to say what a pleasure it was to meet another reader.
“I reviewed your Mosquito Coast, way back when it came out, for the paper in Birmingham,” he said. “I could actually read then.”
We were now seated on a sofa in his parlor, among more books, and paintings—nineteenth-century landscapes—and decorative glassware and cushions. Classical music was playing, the first classical music I heard in any home in the South. And sunshine filtered through lace curtains struck the ruby vase on a polished mahogany table and gave it life in the form of crimson pulsing in its depths and catching on its gilded lip.
“I was born legally blind, with optic atrophy,” Randall said. “I can’t read anymore, but I still buy books. I like to hold them, I like to feel them.” He was holding one now, a life of George Orwell. He’d listened to an audio version of the book and talked a little about it. Then he asked me what I was doing in Greensboro.
“A little like Orwell,” I said. “Think of The Road to Wigan Pier, or Down and Out in Paris and London. I’m visiting the South, driving around, sticking to rural areas.”
“I’ve never been able to drive, though I love to travel. I’m so envious of your driving around.”
“You were born here?”
“Yes, I was. In a doctor’s clinic on Main Street, and never left, though I spend long periods of time in England every summer—London, Oxford, all over.”
“How do you manage to travel with limited vision?”
“I get some help. But the wonderful public transport system in London makes it real easy. The summers here are unbearably hot. London is freedom to me. You’re a traveler, so you know that.”
“Janet May describes you as a historian.”
“That’s Janet hyperbole. Isn’t she sweet? Greensboro’s full of characters like her,” he said. “One dear old lady from a distinguished family on the other side of town was afflicted with a severe case of coprolalia, swearing every time she opened her mouth. She published a book of poems—very good ones,” he said. “I’ve written some things about the town. I edited a book, Historic Hale County. It was published locally about twenty years ago.”
“It was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that gave me the idea of looking at the South and visiting Greensboro.”
“Oh, yes, other people say that. They come here and they’re disappointed that they don’t find sharecroppers.”
“I’m not disappointed. This is my second trip. I aim to keep coming back.”
“Lots of people pass through Greensboro and like it so much they buy a house,” Randall said. “In some cases, they stay. In others, the charm wears off. They sell, they lose money on the mansion they fixed up, and they move away.”
“Some of the houses are really grand, though a little faded,” I said. “They must have been beautiful in Agee’s time, but he leaves them out of his book.”
“He concentrated on the sharecroppers, the poor whites. But this was a very wealthy area before the Civil War. It was the center of the cotton industry. These big houses were the town houses of the cotton barons. They also had big houses on the plantations. Early on, the plantations were right here, next to the town.”
We talked about James Agee. Randall was steeped in the lore of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and I was thinking, as he talked, how you meet such men as Randall in Chekhov’s stories. Indeed, you meet a great number of Southerners who seem Chekhovian—not only the provincial and isolated intellectuals who gather for tea, but the common ruck of poor country folk, as near to peasants as anyone in the United States: struggling smallholders, people living in shacks, with the folk memory of Southern slavery, like the folk memory of Russian serfdom. (The dates of the emancipations are close—Lincoln’s of the slaves in 1863, Tsar Alexander II’s of the serfs in 1861—and both are linked to wars, the Civil War and the Crimean War.)
Randall was like a scion of a former landlord, Reverend Lyles the descendant of slaves—both intensely evocative of the complex past. Reverend Lyles was passionate, wronged, godly, forgiving, and still hopeful; Randall was kindly, generous, even sweet, eager to share his knowledge of Greensboro, of which he was the unofficial historian. Both men grateful for a visitor.
I tried to explain to Randall my feelings about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, how, because it is so self-conscious, digressive, and determined to be
innovative, it remains a literary artifact rather than a reliable document of the condition of sharecroppers. In what seems sheer perversity, Agee ignored the existence of blacks, who were being lynched in Hale County when he visited. And blacks would have been in the majority then.
What I admired about the book, I said, was the way it incorporated the vignettes of concentrated close-ups: the descriptions of people’s clothes, the floorboards of the shacks, the frugal meals, the feral children with tangled hair and in rags. Walker Evans captured these in his images too. In parts it was an inspired book; as a whole it seemed off-kilter, mannered, and highly wrought. No surprise that it sold poorly, but fared better when it was reissued twenty years later, which was when, as a college student, I first read it and was struck by—in a William Blake phrase—its “articulation of minute particulars.”
My criticizing its prose style provoked Randall to say, “I find it incantatory. I read it aloud and it makes more sense.”
“Incantatory” seemed just right, the repetitive prose like the words of an ancient chant, and as Agee was as much a poet as a prose writer, this remark would have pleased him. Agee was a brilliant man but a fitful writer, deeply conflicted, self-destructive, alcoholic, abusive to his three wives. Because he was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, his writing a book about this corner of the South meant everything to him, though it was out of print, as was everything he’d written, by the time he died, of a heart attack at the age of forty-five, believing he was a failure. The notion of the book began as a magazine article, but the long piece he wrote for Fortune, where he was a staff writer, was turned down by the editor. That piece, published as the short book Cotton Tenants in 2013, is a model of clarity and quite unlike the larger book that grew out of it.
Some of the descendants of those white sharecropping families, which Agee had named Ricketts, Woods, and Gudger (whose real names were Tingle, Fields, and Burroughs), still lived a bit north of Greensboro, near Akron. From time to time (notably in an atoning Fortune piece by David Whitford in 2005), reporters have returned to the area to discover that the families are angry because of what they considered the stigma of Agee’s characterization—his making them famous—feeling that they’d been misrepresented in their poverty and violated in their trust of the two strangers in whom they’d confided. It was “a tribal shame,” Whitford wrote, “still keenly felt, both by the families Agee wrote about and Evans photographed, now spread several generations wide, and by those of another class who knew the families, and considered them white trash, beneath contempt.”