Deep South

by Paul Theroux

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “But I’ll tell you, very little has changed.”

  This cotton gin building had provided the seventy-five-pound fan that had been wired to Emmett Till’s corpse to sink it in the river. A similar gin fan was on view, along with farm paraphernalia—just old tools, but they looked sinister and brutal in the context of the murder: barbed wire, hammers and pitchforks, axes and sickles. One display was an old Ford pickup truck like the one the abductors had used. Another was of Emmett’s bed and bedroom, and one a mock-up of Bryant’s storefront. In a macabre tableau, a life-sized replica of Emmett Till lay in his coffin, his smashed and mutilated face modeled in plastic. Much of this was appropriately gory, but the details of the crime and its chronology were also set out: it was a worthy memorial and an essential footnote to history.

  “It was a terrible thing,” said Benjamin Saulsberry, the curator of the museum. Saulsberry was just twenty-nine, but knowledgeable about the crime, and about the area. He directed me to a part of the museum that was devoted to the life and career of the bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson, who’d been born on a plantation near Glendora a hundred years ago.

  “Do you get many visitors?” I asked.

  “Ten or twelve people a week.”

  Fewer than two a day, another melancholy number. Cherraye Oats had driven away, the dust from her car had settled, and apart from Benjamin and me, there was no one else in the building. This look of abandonment lent an added ghoulishness to the exhibits. A stack of leaflets offered fifteen-dollar day tours to places associated with the Till murder, the store, the house site, the courthouse, the river—places I’d already seen. There were no takers this morning, and the only signs of life were a short walk away, near the shops at Glendora: the derelicts and drunks and, at the edge of this poor village, their flyblown and malodorous shacks.

  “People Are Buying Guns That Never Wanted No Guns”

  In the early darkness of the Mississippi winter, the towns north of Glendora, Batesville and Southaven, were a blaze of lights, rising from the roadside as sudden and sprawling communities, bursting with life—or seemed so. In the South such places might look like important metropolises, but that was misleading; in reality they were no more than overbright blights of fast food joints, discount outlets and malls, and enormous parking lots, glittering in the darkness, yet empty.

  Southaven, one of these dazzling mirages, is so far north in Mississippi it is like a suburb of Memphis. I easily found a motel there. I was wearing a US Army camouflage patrol cap as I idled by the front door, wondering where to eat.

  “Whereabouts you hunting at?” a man asked me, approaching from the parking lot. He had a similar cap.

  I said I wasn’t hunting. But he was—duck hunting. He had just arrived from Tennessee with three small boys and a rifle in a carrying case. He named the lake where he’d be tomorrow.

  “I’m here for the gun show,” I said.

  “That’s real popular,” he said. And he said I was smart to go, because ammo was in short supply, but they might have some at the show.

  Another gun show for me, and for a better reason than just gawking, though gawking was my usual pastime. Gun laws were in the news, because six weeks before, on December 14, 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, a heavily armed twenty-year-old named Adam Lanza had murdered twenty children and six teachers with an assault rifle before shooting himself in the head. When the mayhem ended, it was discovered that he’d killed his mother that same morning before leaving home. He had used his mother’s guns, and it was she who had taught him to shoot—an odd choice of skill for a mother to impart to a child who was troubled, solitary, withdrawn, hated to be touched, perhaps delusional, subject to explosive fits of temper, and housebound. Knowing that her son was borderline insane, she gave him a gun.

  One of the deadliest episodes by a solitary shooter in US history, the Sandy Hook school killings had reopened the gun debate in Congress and caused a rash of assault rifle purchases. The news was that, far from discouraging the buying of guns and ammo, the condemnation of weapons had created a panic among gun owners and potential buyers. So many guns and so much ammo were bought in the aftermath that the rumor had gone around (as the hunter at the motel had told me) that there was a national shortage, especially of Bushmaster assault rifles, like Adam Lanza’s, and supplies of the .223-caliber ammo that went with them.

  The Tri-Lake Gun and Knife Show, the weekend event at the Southaven Arena, was the boast of the town. It was similar to the other gun shows I’d seen, and the arena also resembled many of the larger churches I’d passed on Sundays in the South, the same three or four acres of parked cars, the same industrial, church-like building resembling a warehouse topped with a steeple, a thousand unwavering believers inside, and a friendly buzz of welcome.

  The Southaven crowd was orderly, pacing among the hundreds of tables that were stacked with rifles, handguns, and knives. Other tables stocked miscellaneous items: Tasers, leather goods, and signs such as Because of the Cost of Ammo There Will Be No Warning Shot—No Trespassing.

  Almost the first voice I heard was that of a man, bouncing with anger beside his table, ranting about the school shooting.

  He was saying, “If someone had had a weapon, they could have stopped him! Teachers should have been armed.”

  Because I had seen that gun shows were attended by well-armed, well-behaved people, any show of excitement drew a crowd, and this man had attracted listeners and a chorus of murmurers.

  One man: “Schools should have marshals as a regular thing.”

  Another man: “Bet your life.”

  A third: “They weren’t prepared.”

  Most of the men were wearing a sidearm, but conforming to gun show regulations, they were empty of any magazine and the firing mechanism was secured with a plastic zip tie.

  This was my third gun show, and I now realized that in spite of the improvisational, flea-market appearance, there was a pattern that repeated in each show: the tables of rare and elegant guns—engraved shotguns, fowling pieces, dueling pistols; the back tables piled with old handguns; the array of assault rifles; the sign sellers, knife sellers, and Nazi memorabilia sellers; the purveyors of army surplus—old canteens, belts, mess kits, gas masks, trenching tools; the specialists in ammo clips, many of them the thick, curving, high-capacity thirty-shot magazines that were illegal in most states. And there were the automatics, the simplest and meanest of which was the AK-47, essentially a machine gun, something you might need if you were waging war or taking out a detachment of Taliban fighters.

  But the AKs I’d seen three months before for $1,500 cost almost $2,000 here—the same gun. I remarked on this to the dealer.

  “It’s because of Obama,” he said. “See this baby?” He lifted a plastic assault rifle and handed it to me. “This used to be two hundred bucks. After the ban it went up to five hundred. All this talk about the school shooting, it’s fixing to go higher. It’ll be a thousand ’fore you know it.”

  The interest was intense, gun-show-goers shuffling from table to table, remarking on the qualities of the weapons: “That’s the limited edition,” “That thing’s air-cooled,” “Look at the engraving on that little beauty,” “That’s the broomhandle Luger—sweet.” They clearly loved looking at the guns on view, but not many people were buying. The parking lot of the Southaven Arena would have given the reason for slow sales. It was filled with old pickup trucks, muddy cars, and dented SUVs, and the shuffling people—men mostly—were poorly dressed country people, garage mechanics with black-rimmed fingernails, farmers in bib overalls and feed store caps or in hunter’s camouflage. There was a smattering of well-turned-out men, more eager buyers than the others, perhaps looking to pick up the newest Sig Sauer 9-millimeter beavertail, which was also in Adam Lanza’s—or his mother’s—arsenal of weapons.

  A man standing behind his stall of Civil War percussion pistols was talking loudly into his cell phone as he sur
veyed the crowd: “Jes’ walkin’ around, lots of people, no spending.”

  I walked from table to table, reminded again of the extreme courtesy and politeness that prevailed at gun shows. A zapping noise from an adjacent table got my attention. Two black men—the only black men in the huge hall of perhaps a thousand people—were demonstrating Tasers and stun guns, one of them holding a Taser in each hand and squeezing off a cluster of bright blue electric shocks between them.

  I talked with them for a while. Business was poor, they said, but it would pick up later.

  “Those are illegal in Massachusetts,” I said.

  “But you’re not in Massachusetts now,” one of the men said, working a Taser, shooting sparks. “So maybe time to pick up a few. Give some to your friends.” Zap, zap. “Check out that voltage. That would knock down a big dude.”

  “My name’s Paul,” I said.

  “Matisse,” the man said, and before I could comment, he added, “Yes, like the painter.”

  These Tasers and stun guns were made in China, they said, which was why they were so cheap. And unlike the gun sellers, most of whom were local, these men, from Jackson, Mississippi, went from gun show to gun show, peddling what they called “products for personal protection.”

  “There’s a show every week or so.”

  I said, “Excuse me, but I don’t see any other black people here.”

  “Black people don’t sell their guns,” Matisse said, laughing softly.

  “’Deed they don’t,” the other man added.

  The tables at the back were stacked with old weapons and manned by eager-to-bargain young men, but in the center of the hall and up front were the larger concessions of bona fide dealers, supervising the filling-out of paperwork for registering their guns.

  I tried to purchase a gun from one of these dealers and my request was politely declined: “If you’re from out of state, I can’t sell you a handgun.”

  But at the back tables the young men hung on. “This Glock is in good shape. I’ve fired it myself. Three hundred and it’s yours. Okay, two seventy-five, and I’ll throw in an extra mag and a box of shells.”

  “I’m from out of state,” I said, to let him down gently.

  “Private sale. This is for personal protection. Make me an offer.”

  I went to one of the many tables stacked with ammo, surrounded by a dozen men, and got into line.

  “I hear there’s a shortage,” I said to the man in front of me wearing a camo jacket.

  “Hell, I got enough ammo to last me until the next Civil War,” he said.

  I said to the dealer, “I’m interested in hearing about the ammo that’s scarce.”

  He didn’t hesitate. “No twenty-two long rifle. No two-two-three. I’m low on nine-millimeter. People probably hoarding. But I got everything else. What do you want?”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “If you’re not buying, do me a favor and step aside, sir.”

  In the prevailing politeness and good humor of a gun show, his stern tone was like naked aggression.

  “The Democrats are scared,” one stallholder was saying a few tables over, standing in front of his array of handguns. “They’ll back down or else there won’t be a Democrat in the whole of Washington. They blame the guns!”

  “It sure ain’t the guns,” another man said.

  “A guy on parole gets a gun and kills someone,” this dealer said, “and they blame the gun dealers! Why not look at the whole foolish parole system? They’re penalizing the wrong people. The mental health lobby is even worse—they blame the gun people too! They’re scaring Americans and putting the prices up.”

  “People are buying guns that never wanted no guns!” the other man said. “They’re buying guns because they think it’ll be impossible in the future to own a firearm, and now it’s all panic buying. Where will it end?”

  It was a bazaar, and like any bazaar it was also a social occasion, with men swapping stories over paper plates heaped with cheese fries. Some stalls sold T-shirts, others raffle tickets, and one was operated by gun rights advocates, soliciting signatures and offering to explain the fine print in state gun laws.

  The tribal air of like-mindedness, which was also an air of grievance, was something I’d seen at other gun shows: the defiance of people who care less about shooting guns than owning them, and indignant that their rights are being threatened—more change in a region that hates change, and among people who have had to accept changes, and now the federal government coming after them again.

  Yet I loved being at the gun show for what it said of the South. I was a stranger here, I didn’t know a soul, and so it was a relief to step inside this building and be welcomed among so many people. I could have struck up a conversation with any of them, because it was assumed we were all in agreement on guns, and therefore in agreement on everything else—politics, war, religion, hunting, child rearing, food choices, TV shows. In that way it resembled a large, hospitable church. For a traveler, this meant a great deal. I was not there to challenge them in their beliefs but only to watch and listen.

  At the Southaven gun show I saw how white Southerners needed to gather, to remind themselves who they were and what they stood for, how in the tribalism and monotony of their beliefs and the convulsions of their history they felt compelled to affirm that they were not like other Americans. They were more social than people I grew up with in the North, and families—fractured as they were—mattered more than the community. The whites felt like a despised minority—different, defeated, misunderstood, meddled with, pushed around, cheated. Blood mattered, so did history and old grievances and perceived injustices—all the themes of Faulkner, who grew up near here, in Oxford, Lafayette County.

  I decided to drive there.

  Rowan Oak

  Oxford, where Faulkner had lived and died, was the university town of Ole Miss, just an hour’s ride from Southaven, twenty-five miles east of Interstate 55. Off well-traveled Route 278, the town vibrated with the rush of distant traffic. There is hardly a corner of this otherwise pleasant place where the whine of cars is absent, and it is a low hum at Rowan Oak, the house of William Faulkner, which lies at the periphery of the campus and its vividly pompous splendors.

  The road noise struck an odd and intrusive note because, though Oxford is “Jefferson” in Faulkner’s work, the town and its surroundings are in all respects as remote from Faulkner’s folksy, bosky, strife-ridden, plot-saturated, and fictional Yoknapatawpha County as it is possible to be. Oxford is unexpectedly mild and lovely, and though everything standing near this busy highway tingles in the continual hum of passing road traffic, the university is classically beautiful in the Greek Revival Southern style, of columns and bricks and domes, evoking a mood both genteel and scholarly, and backward-looking.

  And for a century this esteemed place of learning clung to the old ways, segregation and bigotry among them, overwhelming any liberal tendencies. So here is an irony, one of the many in the Faulkner biography, odder than this self-described farmer’s living on a side street in a fraternity-mad, football-crazed college town.

  Faulkner, one of our greatest writers and subtlest thinkers—a shy man but a bold, opinionated literary genius with an encyclopedic grasp of Southern history, impossible to ignore for anyone traveling the South—lived his whole life at the center of this racially divided community without once suggesting aloud, in his wise voice, in a town he was proud to call his own, that a black student had an immediate right to study at the university. All in good time was his view. The Nobel Prize winner stood by as blacks were shooed off the campus, admitted as menials only through the back door and, when their work was done, told to go away. Faulkner died in July 1962. Two months later, after a protracted legal fuss (and deadly riots afterward), and no thanks to Faulkner, James Meredith, from the small central Mississippi town of Kosciusko, was admitted as the University of Mississippi’s first black student.5

  Half a dozen years before the James Mere
dith showdown, Faulkner had written in Harper’s Magazine, “To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.” The racism he saw over the admission of Autherine Lucy to the University of Alabama he regarded as “a sad commentary on human nature.” Yet he asked for a gradual approach to integration, and as he wrote in Life magazine, he was against militant integrationists or the interference of the federal government—“forces outside the South that would use legal or police compulsion to eradicate that evil overnight.” We’ll do it ourselves, when we want to, was his approach, but nothing happened until the federal government—the South’s historical villain—intervened and Meredith was escorted onto the campus by US marshals.

  Faulkner’s 1844 house is a little older than the famed Lyceum, the university’s oldest building. The beauty of the campus, the harmony of its architecture, was a surprise to me. And its newness too: it’s a mid-nineteenth-century university that did not have a large student body, or many buildings, until the turn of the twentieth century, about the time the Faulkner family moved there in 1902 from New Albany, Mississippi, when little Billy was turning five.

  Restless when he was not writing, always in need of money, Faulkner traveled throughout his life. But Oxford remained his home, and Rowan Oak his house, even when (it seems) a neighborhood grew up around the big, ill-proportioned farmhouse (“the Bailey Place”). He renamed it Rowan Oak for the powers of the wood of the rowan tree, as the docents at the house helpfully explained to me. The first owner and builder of the house was Robert Shegogg—the odd name, slightly altered, recurs in The Sound and the Fury, where Reverend Shegog is a black preacher from St. Louis, whose robust sermon makes Dilsey cry.