Deep South

by Paul Theroux

  “Everyone. On account of the proms and the parties. Homecoming courts. Beauty pageants.”

  A “homecoming court,” a new term to me, involved the election of a king and queen at a school, another tradition in a region besotted with hierarchies and pretensions. As for beauty pageants, just that month alone, there were ten in Mississippi. These included Miss Dogwood County, Miss Rankin County, Miss Ebony Sweetheart, Miss Southwest Sweetheart, Miss Dixie Sweetheart, Miss Meridian, Miss Tri-County, and Miss Deep South, among others. “Ages 0 to 11” and “ages 12 and up” were specific categories that had me wondering.

  Cheap sparkly jewelry was included in the rental fee, as well as appropriate shoes. “Little-girl” pageant dresses were popular, and a display of photographs showed winners in Liz-Beth dresses—six- and eight-year-olds, precocious painted ten-year-olds, coquettish twelve-year-olds in sequins and mascara, in come-hither postures. They had the knowing eroticized gaze you associated with older women, and some of them did not look like children at all but like dwarf versions of beauty queens, meretricious bum-wagging munchkins. The oddity was that the child pageants did not emphasize the extreme youth of the entrants but instead sexualized them, presented them in adult clothes and thick makeup, giving them the heavy-lidded, big-doll look of hardened, pimped-out women rather than the freshness and simplicity and innocence of their age.

  Your little girl will steal the show in our custom-designed pageant swimwear—a sign, with pictures of lipsticked nymphets posing (hands on hips) in pink bathing suits, elaborately coiffed, and wearing tiaras on their upswept hairdos, and some—incredibly—had big hair that added ten inches to their height. Little-girl beauty pageants were a feature of the rural South, and Toddlers and Tiaras was a successful reality TV show. I am aware that I sound disapproving in describing this cultural weirdness, but never mind my moralizing; I had the strong suspicion that if an older man downloaded any of those promotional photographs and they were found on his hard drive by the typical snitch at the computer repair shop, he’d risk arrest, or at least serious interrogation, and perhaps his house would be searched for possession of lurid images of underage girls.

  A few doors down, I stopped at Brookhaven Billiards and talked to some of the fellows idling by the pool tables. No one was playing, though, and Billy Temple, the owner, was contemplating the removal of some tables.

  “I thought I was on to a good thing, a billiard place in a small town where people could meet and play games,” he said. “But business is terrible. I’m closing this place and moving on. I sometimes think that we’re coming to a time in this country when no one’s going to have a job. I took over this billiard parlor two years ago. It was a real mess. I cleaned it up, put in some new tables and equipment. You can buy a cue. You can have a soda or a candy bar. No liquor. Should have worked.”

  “Seems a natural business for a town like this—a place to meet,” I said.

  “We did fine for a while. Some of the old-timers would come here at five and sit and wait for someone to play with. There was always someone playing, mainly white folks. Every now and then sixty black guys would show up. At first I’d say, ‘Oh, boy, here we go,’ but we never had a problem. They were fine—just liked to come in large groups.”

  “Maybe they felt safer in a big group.”

  “Maybe so, but they didn’t come often enough. Business went bad. No one’s playing. See all the empty tables?”

  Billy was a man of about forty, muscular, in a black T-shirt and jeans, and as we talked he began maneuvering a wheeled cart under one of the tables and hoisting the table onto it. He did this without any help, manhandling the billiard table. I hovered and questioned him.

  “What’s your plan?”

  “I’m giving up,” he said, grunting under the weight of the table. “Maybe find another town and open a pool room. Not to give anyone competition but just to make a living.”

  “Is this your main business?”

  “No. I’m a fireman, but being a fireman in this town is tough. The pay’s no good. Hey, it’s a young man’s game. You’re sound asleep at the station and the alarm goes off, and you have to go from zero to hero.”

  “Firefighting is risky too, isn’t it? Your life on the line,” I asked.

  He was still jogging the table over the handcart, grunting, yet he answered, calling out over his shoulder, “Imagine what it’s like to carry a two-hundred-fifty-pound person over your shoulder. Heck, even fifty isn’t easy—a fifty-pound sack is something heavy. But multiply that by five and you see the problem. Plus, there’s smoke and heat and fumes. You’re wearing seventy-five pounds of gear. A man of forty like me isn’t up to it, and I’m in good shape!”

  I said, “Brookhaven seems a friendly enough place.”

  “Friendly, but the town is dying. The politicians sold us out—everything shut down. Stuff is made in China and India. We sent jobs there. And the Indians came here. They’re running the gas stations and motels. What do you make of that?”

  “The inevitable Mr. Patel,” I said.

  “I hear that name all the time. It’s some kind of big damn-old family and they’re all over the place.”

  I followed him out of the shop and helped him push the billiard table up a ramp he’d improvised, then onto the bed of his pickup truck.

  “Bless you for helping me with this thing,” he said. “Where are you headed?”

  “The Delta. But I want to go on the scenic route.”

  “Head up a few blocks, hang a left, stay on Five-fifty. It’s real pretty.”

  “Life Is a Highway”

  Yes, it was pretty, another beautiful back road in the Deep South—a narrow road past pinewoods and swamps, the hanks of long grass in the sloping meadows yellowy green in the summer heat. Some orderly farms—a few—were set back from the road, but most of the dwellings were small houses or bungalows surrounded by a perimeter fence, a sleepy dog inside it, and some scattered house trailers detached and becalmed under the gum trees—and shacks too, the collapsing kind that I saw only on roads like these. Every few miles there was a church, no bigger than a one-room schoolhouse and with a similar look, a cross on the roof peak, sometimes the stump of a steeple, and a signboard on the lawn promoting the text for this week’s sermon.

  “LIFE IS A HIGHWAY”

  ISAIAH 35:8

  LORD JESUS HAS THE ROADMAP FOR YOUR JOURNEY

  LUKE 24:13–24

  A large school loomed ahead, in a compound of flat-roofed brick buildings, with a tall flagpole out front, a Confederate flag slightly lifted by the breeze. Or at least that was my perception, traveling at forty miles an hour. It was of course the state flag, which incorporates the Confederate battle flag saltire (or tipped-over cross), the only Southern state that has retained this image on its flag, and somehow fitting on a country road in the depths of southern Mississippi that seemed to be bearing me backward in time, to the 1890s when that flag design was adopted. (A new design with stars instead of the Confederate imagery was put to a referendum in 2001 and heavily defeated.)

  I was driving in full sun on this rolling road and as happy as I had ever been driving in the South. There is a sense of purification that seems to take place in sunshine on a country road, the winking glare in the boughs passing overhead, the dappled light on the hot tar, the glimpses of sky and the stands of trees, wall-like pines in some hollows, enormous white oaks and columns of junipers in others, and a fragrance in the air of heated and slightly decayed leaf litter that has the aroma of buttered toast. Oaks and pine trees lined the road for some miles, which narrowed the road and helped give the impression of this as an enchanted byway in a children’s story, one that tempted the traveler onward into milder light and greater joy. I was loving this ride.

  It was at about this point that the ominous signs began to appear, nailed to the roadside trees. Large lettered signs fastened to the thick trunks, big threatening signs, their messages in black and red letters on a bright white background.

&nbs
p; “PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD”—AMOS 4:12

  “THE EYES OF THE LORD ARE IN EVERY PLACE BEHOLDING THE EVIL AND THE GOOD”—PROVERBS 13:3

  “FAITH WITHOUT WORKS IS DEAD”—JAMES 2:26

  “STRIVE TO ENTER AT THE STRAIT GATE”—LUKE 13:24

  “HE WHO ENDURES TO THE END SHALL BE SAVED”—MARK 13:13

  “REPENT”—MARK 6:12

  In a church of believers, these sentiments, spoken by a pastor in a tone of benign understanding, could be a consolation, but painted in big black and red letters on signs nailed to trees in the shack-haunted backwoods of Mississippi, they seemed like death threats.

  Delta Summer

  I had begun my trip from the North in this season by saying I was chasing summer, seeking the reassurance of sunshine, extending the good mood of fine weather. And through Georgia and Alabama the days had been pleasant and mild, the fruit trees mostly picked clean, the cotton blown open in a mass of tufts awaiting the harvester, some farm laborers in fields mowing hay and bundling it in big folded rolls and bulky bales. But the stifling heat in Mississippi was another story, tasting of dust, with a human odor in it, or a sun-browned meadow of hungry tormented cattle swishing their tails against the clouds of buzzing blowflies.

  The Delta was supine and severe and mournful. I was now and then warned that it was dangerous, but that warning gave it a drama it did not deserve. I never found danger in the Delta; it was troubled and poor. Farther up the Delta, I met a Mississippi man who had a cousin who lived in Natchez and made a monthly trip to Memphis. He had bettered himself, ran a successful business, but remembered his poor upbringing in the black neighborhoods of Jackson.

  “He feels so bad about what he sees, he goes to grocery stores and fills boxes with food in Memphis. On his way home, down Highway 61, he stops now and then, wherever he sees poor people, and he drops off the boxes.” It was the sort of impulsive charity you might hear of in Africa or India.

  Not all the dead flat fields on either side of the straight road that ran through the Delta had cotton in them, and those that didn’t looked exhausted, an effect of the occasional pools and creeks of standing water, overtopped by backlit masses of gnats—golden veils of them—and the pools green and thick with stagnation.

  Like Africa, I scribbled in my notebook when I stopped to piss against a tree. The tourist imagines Africa to be a wonderland of light and big game and wooded hills, but in the savannah, where the animals are found near the water holes, the air is thick with biting flies and a mud-stink just like that rising from the Delta swamp. In contrast to the immensity of the plains, the habitations of humans—the clusters of huts—are mean, shonky, and improvisational.

  Down the dusty roads heading west were the bottomlands, tall trees in the distance and low thickets, and I could see where there was water because of the dazzle of the sunlight skidding against it, the blinding glare amid patches of darkness at the bases of the tree trunks.

  The summer that I had been chasing, I found here, but it was not what I had imagined or wanted, not this heat rising from the bubbling decay of the bayous, not the sunshine on the poor shacks and abandoned houses of the squatter settlements on the roadside between the hard-up towns. Yet I was not deluded by what I’d read—not looking for the Delta of Faulkner, nor the Yazoo City of Willie Morris, nor even the Delta of the great bluesmen. I might take my cues from books and music, but I knew better than to believe that they still applied. Faulkner’s last word on the Delta seemed to be reflected in Ike McCaslin’s judgment in old age, that the whole of it was shrinking, vanishing, giving way to modernity and the money-minded.

  Yes, it was still shrinking, and it was decaying and losing its people; the modern world was nowhere in sight, and no one I saw had any money. The Delta looked abandoned, and worse in the killing heat of buggy summer than it had in the bleakness of the raw winter of empty roads and cold, scoured fields. A dead, defeated depression hung over the whole strip of farmland, and a green haze rose from the river that lay out of sight, and beyond the swamps and bayous.

  And yet, and yet: its very emptiness was an attraction and a liberation, the dead flat land under a dome of sky, the straight road that was so calming to drive, and the knowledge that I’d gained from previous visits that Delta people were not just approachable but unpretentious and friendly to strangers, glad to talk, and especially to talk about the past because they were so uncertain of the future. There was freedom for me in these open spaces. It was only when a town or settlement or roadside trailer camp or a street of houses came into view that the mood drastically altered.

  I say houses—though houses is the wrong word. I had seen them before, but hoped that they were an illusion, not representative of what else was there, that there might be more, something salubrious and hopeful, an example to the rest. It was another reason I’d come back. I drove through Redwood and Rolling Fork and Anguilla, and they were the same as in the other seasons of my visits, melancholy and fallen on hard times, and the houses were only approximations of houses, the house trailers dented, their edges bumped and rusted, the shacks woebegone—though here and there an attempt at gentility, an old wreath on the door, a chipped birdbath, a plastic wishing well planted in the stony yard.

  Chasing summer, I had left the impartial dazzle of the sun of late summer in a landscape exhausted by heat, yellowing and fading, the tickling odors of plants gone to seed, the seed pods emptying, a ripeness and hardening of berries and a dusty blush on the melon vines—a withering was obvious everywhere. And that was what I had found here too. It was always late summer in the Delta.

  The Blues in Hollandale

  Just as I was beginning to think all hope was lost, I swung through Hollandale, which was just as bleak and boarded up as the other settlements on and off the highway, but I heard music, which got louder as I entered the town. It was late afternoon and hot, dust rising in the sunlight slanting out of Arkansas, the broken street full of jostling people, and somewhere nearby, a man, out of sight but audible, wailing, and a guitar twanging, and the thrashing of a drum kit and the shiver of a saxophone: the blues, on the Blues Highway.

  When I hesitated, a big khaki-clad policeman waved me off the road where other cars were parked. I got out and walked toward a stage that had been set up against a stand of trees. This was the limit of the town, and a powerful growly man was singing, backed by a good-sized band.

  “That’s Bobby Rush,” the policeman said to me as I passed him.

  A banner over the stage was lettered HOLLANDALE BLUES FESTIVAL IN HONOR OF SAM CHATMON, and stalls nearby were selling fried chicken and corn, ice cream and soft drinks, and blues festival T-shirts. Bobby Rush was screaming now, but slowly, finishing his last set, one of his signature songs, “Chicken Heads”: “Love that gal / Love them chicken heads too.”

  And then the clatter and smash from the band, and he took a deep bow and waved—a startling sight on a back street of the old town, with the low sun blazing through the tall trees behind him. As Bobby Rush left the stage, to great applause from the people—about two hundred of them—standing in the dust, another group took the stage and began wailing.

  “He got kinfolk here,” a man next to me said.

  A black biker gang in leather stood in a group and clapped. Old women in folding chairs applauded and sang. Children ran through the crowd of spectators. Youths dressed as rappers, with low-slung trousers and hats turned back to front—they clapped too. And so did little skinny sixteen-year-old Shuquita Drakes—half her head shaved, purple braids on the other half, a sweet face, hardly five feet tall—holding her little boy, a swaddled one-month-old infant she had named D’Vohta Knight. And Robin McCrae, a willowy dancer from Atlanta who had family in Hollandale, said, “This is just amazing.”

  But the music was so loud, so powerful, splitting the air, making the ground tremble, conversation was impossible, so I stepped to the back of the crowd, and as I was walking, I felt a hand on my arm.

  It was an old man in a sun-fa
ded shirt and baseball cap.

  “Welcome to Hollandale,” he said. That was the sort of thing that seldom happened to me in a lifetime of travel in the wider world, but it was like a blessing in the Deep South—a stranger approaching me and putting me at ease.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said. “I’m Paul, from up north.”

  “I’m the mayor of this town,” he said. “Melvin L. Willis. How can I help you?”

  And then, of course, I realized that though there were half a dozen whites in the audience, I must have looked like someone from outside the Delta. Or it might have been the fact that I had my notebook open and was writing fast, and also trying to decipher the name “D’Vohta” in Shuquita’s scrawl. Or maybe he was just a mayor trying to do the right thing and working the crowd. Whatever the reason, there and then I felt that Hollandale was a place I wanted to know better.

  Melvin Willis had been born in Hollandale in 1948 and had grown up in segregated Delta schools. But he had persevered, gone to college, and gotten a job teaching in York, Alabama, a small Black Belt town in Sumter County, near the Mississippi state line—I’d passed through it driving from Demopolis to Meridian. He had risen in the ranks and become the high school principal in York.

  “I worked down there in York for forty years, then retired and came back home to Hollandale in 2005,” he said. “I had a feeling I could do something here to better this town. I ran for mayor in 2009 and won. I just got my second term. This festival is an example of the spirit of this town.”

  I asked about Sam Chatmon’s relation to Hollandale.

  “Chatmon wasn’t born here, but he spent most of his life here, playing music in his string band and working at the plantation,” Mayor Willis said. “Everybody knows him now. You see we got Bobby Rush? It’s been a wonderful day. This is a great town, Hollandale, a great place to live.”