by Paul Theroux
“Notice how it’s desolate here,” Randall said as we drove through the farmland outside of town. Though he was unable to see, he had a clear memory of the flat land, the fields of stubble, the wet clay roads, the thin patches of woods, the absence of any houses, now and then a crossroads. “You’ll know it when you see it. It’s the only house here.”
That was true. After five miles of fields he said, “This must be Hamburg.” Less than a minute later, a white bungalow appeared on the right-hand side of the road, and on the porch—we had called ahead—Mary T and a much younger woman in an apron.
“Is Ozella with her?” Randall said, twisting his head, trying to see. He explained that Ozella was the daughter of the previous housekeeper, Eula Mae Thomas. Ozella was standing next to Mary T, who was tiny, watchful, like a bird on a branch, and smiling in anticipation and fully alive. Very old and upright people have a dusty glow that makes them seem immortal.
“My father built this house in 1927,” Mary T said after we were introduced, and I praised the house.
The modest two-story bungalow was squat and solid, fronted by the bulging porch, a dormer above it, so unlike the shotgun shacks and rectangular houses and pretentious mansions we’d passed at the edge of Marion. Inside, the walls were paneled in dark wood, a planked ceiling, an oak floor. Like Randall’s house, it was filled with books, in bookcases that were fitted in all the inner rooms and upstairs. I paused in front of a painting of two women seated at a window.
“That’s a Crawford Gillis.”
She had three paintings by this artist, done in the 1980s. His was a new name to me. Born near Selma in 1914, Gillis had studied in New York and concentrated on depicting the rural poor, black and white, in a simple, powerful, rather slopy style, slightly distorted for effect, in the manner of Thomas Hart Benton but with gloomy colors. He was a regionalist, associated with the New South School (this pedantry I learned from a gallery blurb), who’d known success in the 1930s, but after the war had become a part-timer and an experimenter. Like Mary T, whose stories I had by now read with enormous pleasure, he was little known outside the South—apparently outside Alabama—yet a painter of considerable gifts, someone she had called a friend.
I told Mary T how pleased I was to meet her. As a short story writer she was the real thing, with a perceptive view of the South today. She wrote about the new tensions, her neighbors and her town, without affectation, in the clearest prose.
The very fact that there is such a person as a Southern writer (and not a Northern writer) seemed odd to me until I spent some time in the South. Southern fiction was an English department category, the most confining and dubious of pigeonholes, and in its stereotype it is filled with grotesque characters and prose so convoluted it was as though there was something the Southern writer found so painful or shameful he or she did not want to state it plainly. I was reminded of Conrad’s Marlow saying (and it has a distinct Faulknerian echo), “It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention”—waffling vaguely because Conrad does not want to write about cannibalism.
I had read Southern fiction all my adult life—not just Faulkner and the gothics but the lesser lights and the poets, the playwrights, the explainers, the apologists, the memoirists—yet for all the reading I had done, few of the books I’d read had prepared me for what I found in the South: the uncomplaining underclass that amounted to a peasantry; the opportunistic newcomers, Northerners and foreigners, taking advantage of the South’s accommodating culture; the powerful few, black and white, animated by their pretensions; the poverty, not the colorful kind of Catfish Row and Tobacco Road, but the grim and seemingly ineradicable hardship of Razor Road and the back lanes of the Delta. It was a region in which books—apart from the Bible—hardly mattered to most people, and why should they, when people spent their days struggling to get by? Freaks and goofballs were well documented in Southern fiction; the working poor not so much.
Mary T opened a bottle of blueberry wine from a winery in Harpersville, and though it was a warm noontime, a fly buzzing behind the hot white curtains in the small back dining room, we stood and clinked schooners of the wine and toasted our meeting, the ancient Mary T, the nearly blind Randall, and me, the disoriented traveler passing through. Something about the wood paneling, the quality of the curtains, the closeness of the room, the sense of being in the deep countryside holding a glass of wine on a hot day—all of it was like being in old Russia. I said so.
“That’s why I love Chekhov,” Mary T said. “He writes about places like this, people like the ones who live here, the same situations.”
Chekhov’s provincial towns, as one of his biographers, Ronald Hingley, has written, “are the scene of inspissated boredom which is only thrown into sharper relief by their inhabitants’ pathetic attempts to diversify lives essentially dedicated to ‘eating, drinking, and sleeping,’ that common Chekhovian formula.” Carson McCullers, who grew up in Georgia, has said that the paradoxes and grotesqueries of the South—they are the stuff of her fiction—resemble those in the fiction of peasant Russia, and she specifically mentions Chekhov, as well as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Gogol, in her 1941 essay “The Russian Realists and Southern Literature.”
“The South and old Russia have much in common sociologically,” McCullers writes. “The South has always been a section apart from the rest of the United States, having interests and a personality distinctly its own. Economically and in other ways it has been used as a colony to the rest of the nation. The poverty is unlike anything known in other parts of the country.” She goes on to speak of the South’s class system, the character traits, the peasant class, and much more as being like old Russia’s—and she makes her point, which is almost like a boast, by Russifying these fields and farms.
“He loved the singularity in people, the individuality,” Eudora Welty said of Chekhov in her Paris Review interview. “He took for granted the sense of family. He had the sense of fate overtaking a way of life, and his Russian humor seems to me kin to the humor of a Southerner. It’s the kind that lies mostly in character. You know, in Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, how people are always gathered together and talking and talking, no one’s really listening. Yet there’s a great love and understanding that prevails through it, and a knowledge and acceptance of each other’s idiosyncrasies, a tolerance of them, and also an acute enjoyment of the dramatic.”
What is remarkable is that what she described almost seventy-five years ago is still pretty much the case today in the rural South—yet another reason why travel in these parts was such a melancholy pleasure.
The sunny day, the bleakness of the countryside, the old bungalow on the narrow road, no other house nearby, the smell of the muddy fields penetrating the room—and that other thing, a great and overwhelming sadness that I felt but couldn’t fathom. Perhaps it was the effect of what Randall had told me, his devastating phrase “paralyzing despair.”
“And Isaac Babel,” Mary was saying. “‘The Story of My Dovecote.’”
Babel, too, wrote of small towns, of back streets, of family life, especially in his autobiographical tales, and of Cossack settlements in other stories. Counterparts to the American South abounded in Russian fiction.
“Have a slice of pound cake,” Randall said, opening the foil on a heavy yellow loaf. “My mother made it yesterday.”
Mary T cut a crumbly slab and divided it among us, and I kept thinking: This could only be the South, but an enlightened and special niche of it, a house full of books, the dark paintings, the loudly ticking clock, the old furniture, the heavy oak table, something brooding and indestructible but looking a bit besieged. And that unusual, almost unnatural tidiness imposed by a housekeeper—pencils lined up, magazines and pamphlets in squared-up piles—Ozella’s hand, obvious and unlikely, a servant’s sense of order.
In Fanning the Spark (2009), a selective, impressionistic memoir, Mary T tells her story: her upbringing as a rural shopkeeper’s daughter, her
becoming a writer late in life—she was sixty-three when she published her first short story. It is a little history of surprises: surprise that she became a writer after so long, a period she called “the twenty-five-year silence”; surprise that her stories found favor; surprise that her stories won awards, the PEN/Hemingway, the PEN/Faulkner, and four others. Later, on the strength of a prize-winning story set in the rural South, “The Cure,” and included in a Soviet-American anthology, The Human Experience, she was chosen to visit the Soviet Union in 1990 with a delegation that included other American writers, one of the highlights of her literary life.
She had been happily married, but it was brief; she was widowed in her forties. Her son, Kirtley, who had fought in Vietnam, had returned to Alabama and become a lawyer in Marion. He was now retired, but teaching at the military academy.
Setting her glass of wine down on the thick disc of coaster, she said, “I’m hungry for catfish”—the expression of appetite a delight to hear from someone ninety-five years old.
She put on a wide-brimmed black hat—the diameter, it seemed, of a bicycle wheel—and a red cape-like coat. Helping her down the stairs, I realized she was tiny and frail, but her mind was active, she spoke clearly, and her memory was good. Her bird claw of a hand was in my grip.
“That redbud is not doing so well. It needs some care,” she said of a tree in the front yard. “We’ll have to futtilize it.”
All the way to Lottie’s diner in Marion, on the country road, she talked about how she’d become a writer.
“It wasn’t easy for me to write,” she said. “I had a family to raise, and after my husband died it became even harder, because Kirtley was still young. I thought about writing, I read books, but I didn’t write. My sister-in-law encouraged me. And I think I had an advantage. I could tell literature from junk. I knew what was good. I knew what I wanted to write. And when I came to it—I was over sixty—I rewrote hard. I tried to make it right.”
I was driving out of what seemed the theoretical settlement of Hamburg—no other houses here—down the empty road that was as narrow as a track, enjoying her reflections, negotiating the occasional crossroads. At one of these crossroads, marked by small green signs, trying to read the name of her road, I asked her what it was.
“They renamed it,” Randall said from the back seat before Mary T could speak. “It used to be Route 2. Now it’s Dr. J. J. Howard Road.”
“He was a quack,” Mary T said.
We were now rolling down Marion’s main street, Washington Street, past the military academy and the courthouse, past Green Street and beyond it Pickens, the site of Mack’s Café—the places associated with the shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson, now on the Black Heritage Trail. We passed churches with stout steeples and arched doorways, the stately white churches; the black churches were tumbledown and smaller, on the back streets. We came to Lottie’s. I parked in front and eased Mary T out of the passenger seat and into the diner.
“I’ve been reading a book about interviews with people who are over a hundred years old,” Mary T said, perhaps reminded of her frailty in her unsteady progress from the car to the door of the diner. “It was called something like Lessons from the Centenarians.”
“What sort of lessons?”
“All sorts. But the lesson to me was, I don’t think I want to live that long.”
People seated at their meals looked up from their food as Mary T entered, and many of them recognized her and greeted her. While Mary T moved slowly along, lifting her hand to greet them, she talked about writing, saying, “Limbic resonance is what you need . . .”
This exalted expression in the humble diner was a bit startling and obscure. I wrote it down, and later found it was defined as “mood contagion,” an instinctive understanding of others’ emotions—in a word, empathy.
Meanwhile, Mary T and Randall had seated themselves and were ordering sweet tea. There followed that menu-perusing silence of hungry diners. Lottie’s offered all sorts of chicken, fried and baked; fried catfish, grilled catfish, catfish fillets; mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, and three kinds of boiled greens. Everyone got a biscuit.
“See, the Yankee’s having the grilled catfish,” Randall said after we ordered. “We stick with the fried.”
I asked Mary T about her childhood, living on the top floor of her father’s general store, the Munden-Ward Store, in the small settlement of Hamburg. She was happy to reminisce, speaking slowly, and I wished I could have recorded it, because she spoke in the accents of a hundred years ago.
“My mother worked in the store. She was too busy to raise me,” she said, pausing after each sentence, a bit breathless. “I was raised by our black housekeeper. She was also the cook. I called her Mammy. I know it’s not good to call someone Mammy these days, but I meant it. She was like a mother to me. I leaned on her.”
“If my mother ever sat and held me as a child I don’t remember, but I do remember the solace of Mammy’s lap,” she had written in her memoir, Fanning the Spark. “Though she was small, light-skinned and far from the stereotype, her lap could spread and deepen to accommodate any wound. It smelled of gingham and a smoky cabin, and it rocked gently during tears. It didn’t spill me out with token consolation but was there as long as it was needed. It was pure heartsease.”
“And you know she may have saved my life,” Mary T told me. “I had colitis. I was just a small child and I was starving, about to die. Mammy understood. She gave me a tablespoon of buttermilk every day, and then more. Little by little she increased it to half a cup, and then a cup. The black people were so poor they couldn’t afford to go to the doctor. They had their own remedies. That was one of them. Buttermilk. It saved my life.”
I mentioned another tradition I’d heard of, so-called potlikker. The broth from boiled greens, usually discarded, was drunk by the poor in the South and was so nutritious it helped keep them healthy, and especially prevented pellagra.
But Randall, his mind on Mammy, was talking about the changes in the South that he knew. That provoked Mary T to indignation.
“It’s all different these days,” Mary T said. “The black people here look at me with hatred. It’s because of the difference. It’s not because of something I did. It’s a resentment. It makes them vote for Albert Turner.” This was Albert Turner Jr., the Perry County commissioner, son of a civil rights leader and Selma marcher.
“What’s his story?” I asked.
Mary said, “He tells people they’re poor because of slavery and the white people who held them down. But is that so? Think of all the people on welfare. You find families where there’s three generations on welfare, who’ve never had jobs, and with children too.”
What will happen here? I wondered.
“Time will help,” Mary T said. Tahm will he’p.
While she talked, people dropped by the table to say hello, in the courteous way that Mary T had mentioned as being a characteristic of Alabama. One woman gave me some pamphlets and mentioned Jimmie Lee Jackson; another introduced herself, saying “Hah, y’all,” and reported on someone Mary T knew (“He’s getting new knees”), and then, “Y’all take care.” Mary nodded and smiled and, after she was out of earshot said, “She’s the upper crust in Marion.” But it was Mary whom they’d gone out of their way to pay court to—Mary the ancient inhabitant, Mary the writer, Mary the witness.
Randall had been frowning at “Time will help.” He said, “I’m a bit hopeful. I mean, I saw the worst of the civil rights struggle—the fighting, the bombs, the demonstrations.” He rested his fork against the feeble and spiny skeleton of a catfish on his plate. “I think about where we were, and it’s seems there’s been considerable progress.”
“But the divisions will always be there—the racial divisions,” Mary T said.
In one of her best stories, “Beyond New Forks,” a white woman is driving her elderly black housekeeper home and is reminded how awkward subjects come up, contrasting their lots in life, black and white:
> And suddenly the whole Pandora’s box of race, with all the unconscious, unintended, even unrecognized withholdings of respect, status, privilege, even rights we never thought about, much less understood at the time, embedded as they were in custom and usage, would open up to silence us completely.
We never tried to examine or explain such things in words, as some claimed to do. We would simply look at each other hopelessly, after which one or the other would change the subject and start getting ready to go.
And I reminded myself that Mary T had been born in 1917. She had been in her twenties during the Depression. She was only six years younger than James Agee, so she had known the poverty and the sharecroppers, the poor whites and the poor blacks, the lynchings of the 1930s in the Black Belt—a harrowing history. The somber Walker Evans photographs of the storefronts and the streets and the white folks of Hale and Perry counties constituted an album of Mary T’s early life.
“Let me tell you about the school,” she said. “When I was growing up, the black people on the farms didn’t go to school. Then, after some years, and they went to school, the schools were poor. They didn’t have much of a start. They were so far behind. So when things changed, we all had to back up.”
“Some people do take education seriously,” Randall said in his earnest and generous way.
“I knew a woman,” Mary T said. “She was a good woman. But the husband was sorry. She drove every day to Marengo Mills in Demopolis to work. Then she went to school and got her degree. She became a nurse. She worked, she studied, she made such an effort. Her husband did nothing at all.”