by Paul Theroux
“The alumni are against it, and they’re pressuring us,” one girl said. “They’re the ones giving money to the university—and to us—so they have a lot of power.”
“What about the Machine?”
“That’s all secret stuff,” one said, laughing.
That week, the Crimson White published a reflective piece, “In Sororities Integration Is Still Elusive”—not elusive, but absent. Yet there was a laudable determination among the students to change, to defy the alumni, when they cited a “chapter’s letter of recommendation requirements as a reason for the potential new member’s removal.” In one case, at a meeting at Alpha Gamma Delta, “active sorority members . . . began standing up to voice support for the [black] recruit and challenge alumnae decisions.”
“The entire house wanted this girl to be in Alpha Gam,” one of the sisters at Alpha Gamma Delta said. “We were just powerless over the alums.”
The issue was challenged, and discussed, but not solved. The old Southern black-white division remained, yet I could see that the students wanted to make up their own minds and recruit anyone they wanted, including black students. They were embarrassed by the headlines and agitated by my questions. To the obvious question, Why would any student wish to join a sorority where she was not wanted?, the answer was, They were wanted.
But to me there was something inherently farcical in it all. The joining of a sorority or a fraternity, with all its fatuous airs and protocols, seemed to me a ridiculous way of measuring tolerance, since the so-called Greek system was notoriously snobbish and dissolute, a test of clubbability, mingling circus-clown ethics with the secret-society mumbo jumbo of licensed foolery and, very often, Animal House values and hazing worthy of a CIA black site. In an annual poll called Greek Rank, all sororities in the United States were evaluated in the categories of looks, popularity, classiness, involvement, social life, and sisterhood. It was a leering, bottom-sniffing world in which academic achievement was apparently not worth mentioning.
Nevertheless, as a gesture, even as a Byzantine charade, joining a sorority had a meaning on an Alabama campus. Tuscaloosa’s history was a catalog of racial obstinacy and defiant bigotry. Bishop Earnest Palmer had shown me the hangout of the Klan on Union Boulevard on one of my previous visits, and the Klan in Alabama was a recent memory if not a present fact, along with many active hate groups.
Here was a university that needed the National Guard to protect black students when it was integrated under federal orders fifty years ago. A sensible person could not be blamed for thinking that the alumni would be eager to disavow this racist past and promote the idea that a lesson in tolerance had been learned, even in the corny to-and-fro of sorority politics. But the opposite was the case. The alumni went out of their way to demonstrate how they clung to their spiteful stupidity, beneath the gaze of the entire country, under the pretense of tradition.
Sandra Fair: “It’s Getting Worse”
“My son’s friends are black and white,” Sandra Fair told me. “It was so different from when I was growing up. I graduated from high school in 1968, and we had but one black student. I felt real sad for her.”
Sandra was a cheerful, candid, business-minded woman who lived in the small country town of Gordo, in Pickens County, about fifteen miles west of Tuscaloosa. Her husband was a dairy farmer. She was the chief financial officer of the Community Service Programs (CSP) of West Alabama, the nonprofit community action agency in which Cynthia Burton was executive director.
I was seeing Sandra Fair because I had asked Cynthia Burton about CSP’s finances. I was used to traveling in Africa and Asia, where hundreds of millions of dollars were given to aid projects to improve or promote education, create energy sources, offer medical care, even help the tourism industry ($700 million to Tanzania and $350 million to Zambia, for example). I was curious to know the budget for this Alabama organization, which provided services in eight counties in this western part of the Black Belt.
“Our operating budget is about fifteen million,” Sandra Fair said. She went on to say that around half of that went toward salaries for teachers, advisers, construction workers, repairmen, and clerical staff. “And folks apply for loans or grants, or they need money for heat, for utility bills. They need food, they need advice. That costs us around three million.”
“You give the people money to pay their heating bills?”
“No. If they qualify, we make direct payments to the utility company. It’s all income-based. There are poverty guidelines.”
The income criteria seemed severe. Under the “Poverty Guidelines,” a one-person household qualified if the annual income was less than $11,490, a two-person household $15,510, and so forth—not even subsistence incomes. The poverty threshold for a family of four was $19,000. These were very low figures, yet more than twenty percent of this part of the Black Belt—the submerged twentieth—lived below the poverty line and qualified for assistance (the figure was twenty-five percent for Mississippi).
The CSP budget was small by community development standards, but the programs were ambitious. The organization financed programs in housing, education, and “Support Services”—this last included energy assistance and emergency food and shelter. The Juvenile Justice Intervention Project was a program that offered “regularly scheduled sessions to youth who have a first encounter with the Tuscaloosa County Juvenile Court.” The program imparted guidance to first offenders on how to avoid violence, and helped keep juveniles out of trouble by offering them educational alternatives and skills.
For educational assistance, CSP provided “Early Intervention”: Head Start and Early Start programs for poor parents with small children and little access to preschool. Along with this was a recognition that a two-parent family was an objective to encourage. To this end, CSP offered a “Fatherhood Initiative.” “The notion that fathers of children from low-income and high-risk backgrounds always absent themselves from child rearing is erroneous,” in the words of the prospectus. “Head Start’s Fatherhood Initiative promotes concepts and activities that nurture the children’s relationships with their fathers. The Fatherhood Initiative supports and strengthens the roles of fathers in families.”
That cost money too, and Sandra Fair said the results were encouraging: more and more fathers were joining the program.
“We also provide housing opportunities for families,” she said. This was done by building new single-family houses, rehabbing existing ones, and putting up and maintaining multifamily houses and apartment complexes.
“A big chunk of our budget goes to low-income housing,” Sandra said. “Multifamily housing and rentals, and others in lease-purchase arrangements.”
“Is any of this working?”
She smiled ruefully. “The problems are growing. There’s more poor people, more people in crisis. It seems to me it’s getting worse. Every year we see clients we’ve never seen before. New people show up every day in all our offices. We’re helping, we’re doing our best, but it’s not getting better.”
Randall Curb: “My Wings Are Clipped”
The way to Greensboro, into the countryside south of Tuscaloosa, had ceased to be for me the landscape of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or that book’s gloss on it. The book and its fossilized families had been replaced in my mind with the reality of my travel and the people I now knew, many of whom had become my friends. Cynthia Burton’s organization was building or fixing up houses for the poor in Hale County, and so was Pam Dorr’s HERO Project, which in addition had six businesses to fund the housing: pecans, bike making from bamboo, the Pie Lab café, a thrift shop, a day-care center, and Whispers, a line of necklaces made of Italian yarn. (“Exquisite ribbon necklaces and scarves,” advertised one retailer, “that are proudly made in Greensboro, Alabama by women, especially for women and to help women in Alabama’s Black Belt Region combat the rural poverty of the area.”)
Johnnie B. Washington was still mayor and still hoping for a big-box store like Kmart to c
ome to town, Janet May was still poaching eggs for her bed-and-breakfast guests out at Blue Shadows, and Luis was serving tamales at El Tenampa at the edge of town. Reverend Lyles was still cutting hair and preaching. I sat with him for a few hours of reminiscence, and when I left, he said, “Paul, you come from up north. You must know some people with deep pockets. If you do, tell them about Greensboro—send them down here. What we need is investment.”
Reverend Lyles said he was proud of what had been done at the old Rosenwald school, how it had been fixed up and was now a well-attended community center. The Auburn Rural Studio was still building ingenious low-cost houses. It was not the town of Agee and Evans anymore. It was still struggling, but it was improving, and hopeful.
On a single visit I would not have seen this, but over the course of a year, in four seasons, the true condition of the town had become apparent. This was not a trip about my having had a good meal or a bad meal, or my laboring toward a destination in the old travel-book manner. It may have seemed to some people I met that I was headed somewhere, but I was still traveling in widening circles, happily, on back roads, meeting people, and revisiting friends.
The last time I’d seen Randall Curb in Greensboro, he’d revealed to me that he suffered from clinical depression. This was not a casual remark but a considered declaration of a profound medical condition. We had last met at lunch with Mary Ward Brown, a delightful memory with a sad aftermath: soon after, Randall had relayed to me the news of her death.
I met him for lunch at the Pie Lab. Though legally blind, he had all the impressive alertness of his other senses, his whole being radiating attention and understanding. Seeing me, he smiled, he reached, we hugged, and then we talked about Mary T.
“I had an email from her about writing, about her plans,” I said. “Less than two weeks later she was dead. I’m so grateful to you for introducing me to her. I felt an instant liking for her.”
“She liked you too. But then she got ill really fast. She didn’t want to suffer or linger,” Randall said. “I think she realized how badly she was doing, and she refused to struggle. She didn’t eat. She simply lay in her bed and willed herself to death.”
“Remember how she mentioned the book about people who lived to a hundred? She said, ‘I don’t think I want to live that long.’”
“She almost made it to ninety-six,” he said. “That’s pretty good going.”
“When my father died, a friend of mine said, ‘The average life span isn’t really very long.’ And it’s true. What’s seventy, or even eighty or ninety years?”
Randall grew reflective. He was a big, fleshy man with an impressive head, and his contemplation, his lack of response, was all the more emphatic for his conspicuous presence, his bulk at the table, and not a word or a murmur from him.
“I keep thinking how Mary T said of the blacks in Marion, ‘They look at me with hatred,’” I said. “I wanted to ask her more about that. I hardly knew her, and yet I really miss her. She was someone I’d counted on seeing again.”
Randall nodded but didn’t speak. This talk of death over lunch and his silence brought to mind his melancholia. It was too obvious to change the subject abruptly, so I risked the question: How was he doing?
“Not good,” he said. “I was in London earlier in the summer, and then I came back here and I fell into a depression. It was Greensboro, I guess, being back home, this place and its memories.”
“‘Home is so sad,’ as Larkin says. ‘It stays as it was left.’”
Randall nodded. “But it’s not just that. I feel immobilized here after my travel. I feel my wings are clipped.”
“But it seems to me there’s so much happening in Greensboro that’s positive.”
“People come here and like the town and want to make it better,” he said with doubt in his voice.
“Is that a problem?”
Randall was holding his head in reflection, his hair damp and tousled, his face pink in the heat. He had told me a number of times of how he hated the Alabama summer, the months of heat that kept people indoors, the cloak of humidity. I didn’t mind it, but then I was just moving through the South, a bird of passage.
“I grew up in the civil rights era,” he said at last. “Greensboro was incendiary.”
“So doesn’t it give you hope to see that the town, and maybe the South in general, is improving?” I wasn’t sure how much it was changing, but anyone could see that some improvements were being made.
“In that era, people came from the North to promote civil rights. They were called agitators. And that’s how outsiders are seen, even today. People who are stirring things up.”
This was not entirely news to me. Pam Dorr had told me how she ran into opposition and abuse. “They call me names.” And she had laughed, saying, “Now and then someone walks past and spits on me.”
“I don’t know,” Randall said when I asked him whether Pam was seen as an agitator. “But the whole racial issue has been turned upside down. There’s a more hostile racial divide now, because blacks are in power.”
“Wasn’t that the whole point?” I said. “After all, blacks are the majority in this part of Alabama.”
“Whites feel disenfranchised,” he said. “We have a black mayor, black councilors, black judges. And more. Whites believe they’ve been left out. They want to regain political control.”
“Is that likely?”
“Paul, you’ve got to understand,” he said, somewhat exasperated. “The white Democrats have died out. Ninety percent of the people vote on racial lines. Blacks for blacks. Whites for whites. That’s the way it is.”
“Maybe if the right candidate comes along?”
“It isn’t going to happen any time soon.”
After lunch, we walked slowly in the clinging summer heat down Main Street, past derelict shops, and shops and buildings being fixed up, and some doing business. I drove him to his house. “Come back soon,” he said, and we hugged, and he stood in the shade of his porch, waving goodbye, then went inside, to his solitude and his thousands of books.
Brookhaven—A Homeseeker’s Paradise
Headed to the Delta again, I rose early the following morning, sped over the state line to Meridian, in Mississippi, then south to Laurel, and took back roads west through the pinewoods. I stopped at Collins for the night, and the next morning—getting a tire fixed—I met motor mechanics and construction workers, Big William, Little William, and Ray. They said they had been as far north as Pennsylvania. “We was building a Walmart.” Then I drove west on Highway 84, past Prentiss and Monticello, to Brookhaven, another time-warp town, with a weathered sign over Main Street: BROOKHAVEN—A HOMESEEKER’S PARADISE.
Perhaps Brookhaven had been a home seeker’s paradise once, as the Brookhaven-born writer Jimmie Meese Moomaw claims in her memoir, Southern Fried Child: “I’ll never know for sure who or what I might have been or would have been if I had been born in Connecticut or Detroit, but I am now sure that I am who I am in large measure because I was born in ‘Home Seeker’s Paradise’ and lived a Southern fried childhood, complete with horses and healers and heathens and whores and flawed parents who loved me both too much and not enough.”
It seemed to me that few home seekers turned up these days in Brookhaven—even Jimmie Meese Moomaw had departed and now lived in Georgia. The town had been an important railway junction since the 1870s, on the Illinois Central main line from Chicago to New Orleans. The Amtrak express City of New Orleans still rolls through twice a day, the southbound train at noon, the northbound train at four in the afternoon, the route of familiar names, Kankakee, Centralia, Memphis, and Jackson. The atmospheric old railway station is in the middle of town, straddling Main Street, the unadorned new one just a few blocks north.
Once, not even that long ago, I would have hankered to buy a ticket and take those trains anywhere—ditched my car and swung myself aboard the noon express to head south to McComb and the Big Easy, or wait for the afternoon train north to Yaz
oo City and Greenwood. In either direction, for me a true joy ride. But I would have missed so much, and I had become habituated to the spontaneity of my car, the ease of finding any open road, inserting myself into the life of the land by steering myself wherever I wished and stopping often.
What I was doing was so different from being an alien spectator on a train, the traveler I had been in many other countries. But in general those countries (China, India, Russia, Vietnam, Egypt, Argentina, Britain) had been well served by trains and were not road-friendly; the American South had good roads, but train travel was patchy. Once, the South had been crisscrossed by railways lines. Traditionally, these Southern trains provided an inexpensive means, and a route, for blacks to flee the South, in particular in the great black migration of the 1920s, and its terminals gave them specific destinations too, notably Chicago and New York. As a consequence, the trains, and the stations along the way, provided lyrics to the blues and the many tunes that spoke of these northbound trains, a whole songbook of place names and railway journeys out of the South.
So I stopped at the railway station, just to look, and then I walked the streets of Brookhaven. I found the courthouse where, in May 1955, a Brookhaven resident, Lamar Smith, sixty-three, a World War Two veteran and “voting rights advocate,” was gunned down while other Brookhavenites, including the town’s sheriff, stood and watched, did nothing to help. Smith, who was black, had offended local customs and sensibilities by casting his vote in a local election.
I ate lunch at a diner and resumed walking. I lingered at Liz-Beth Pageants, a store devoted to rentals of evening gowns, one of the busiest shops in Brookhaven and a Southern institution.
“Two hundred to rent, five hundred to buy,” Kim, one of the clerks, told me, and in answer to my next question, “Business is real good.”
“Who rents these dresses?”