Deep South

by Paul Theroux

  Perhaps that is an old man’s response to a long trip, but so what? This trip was not about me, not a journey to There and Back, overcoming obstacles on bad roads, an autobiographical diversion about my moods and petty successes. No one ever got to know me well, and few people asked anything of me. “What sort of things do you write, Mr. Thorax?” I took to be my triumph of anonymity. Only two out of the hundreds of people I met had read anything I’d written. Fine with me. It’s better to be a stranger, without a past; it is a bore and an encumbrance to be conspicuous. Fame is a nuisance, and anonymity is bliss. (Bene qui latuit bene dixit, wrote Ovid. To live well is to live unnoticed.) I did not really mind being singled out by blacks as a cracker, or by whites as an agitator, in either case a controversialist, since those misidentifications helped me understand the mind of the person who saw me that way, and it helped me become, if only briefly, part of the scene.

  But in the travel narrative of struggle, I was not the struggler. I was the bystander or the eavesdropper, recording other people’s pain or pleasure. I knew very little discomfort, never sensed I was in any danger. No ordeals, few dramas. I nearly always felt I was in the presence of friends.

  From state to state, county to county, I breezed along, and this progress was a way of understanding how lucky I was, because the confinement that Southerners feel, their keen awareness of themselves as stereotypes—provincials and yokels, in literature, in life—is something palpable. No wonder, given the obliqueness of Southern fiction (and one way to know a place is through its writing)—the evasions, the jokes, the showy literary metaphors. No wonder the grotesque preponderance of the gothic and the freaks—the reality was too brutal to state baldly, unbearably so.

  Critics and academics extol the South for the abundant wealth of its literature, the region encouraging a storytelling tradition. This praise seemed to me a crock and self-serving. The opposite was the case: there was not enough writing, and what existed, with a few exceptions, was insufficient. Missing was a coherent introduction for the outsider to the South that exists, the South that I saw. Most of the South’s fiction suggests that it’s a broken place, but that’s not news. Anyone who strikes up a conversation there or wanders a little can sense the crack that runs through the South from one end to the other, a crack that began as a hairline fracture in the distant past and widened through its history to an abyss. The broken culture, perhaps unmendable, that Southerners were still trying to reckon with bewildered some people into intransigence and made many others gentler, and needed more chroniclers.

  “Read the books,” people say. “Study Southern gothic and the evocative poems.”

  I say ignore the books and go there. The Deep South today is not in its books, it’s in its people, and the people are hospitable, they are talkers, and if they take to you, they’ll tell you their stories. The Deep South made me feel like a fortunate traveler in an overlooked land.

  Catastrophically passive, as though fatally wounded by the Civil War, the South has been held back from prosperity and has little power to exert influence on the country at large, so it remains immured in its region, especially in its rural areas, walled off from the world. I had not realized until I spent some time there how cruel it was that so many American companies had fled the South for other countries and taken the jobs with them; that the American philanthropists and charities, benevolently concerned with poverty and deficiencies elsewhere, had traveled halfway around the world—was it for the acclaim? for the picturesque? for the tax benefit, for the photo op? for an escape from reality?—to bring teachers to Africa and food to India and medicine elsewhere; they had allowed the poor in the South, a growing peasant class, to die for lack of health care, and many to remain uneducated and illiterate and poorly housed, and some to starve. Though America in its greatness is singular, it resembles the rest of the world in its failures.

  An old man gabbling another language, I was the quintessential stranger, but a welcome one. I made friends. With rare and farcical exceptions, I was treated with kindness by people I met by chance. “Kin Ah he’p you . . . in inny way?” was the rule. I cherished these experiences. In my life they will be fewer and fewer, because I am moving across the earth like the Old Man, to end my days in the sea, my dust to dissolve into undifferentiated mud.

  Lingering, driving slowly and stopping often, procrastinating, I didn’t want this trip to end. The land matched so many images I’d had in my imagination, and I understood what Rebecca West had written in the 1930s of Macedonia, how it was like a vision in the midst of muddled slumber. That was the Deep South for me: a dream, with all a dream’s distortions and satisfactions, “the country I have always seen between sleeping and waking.”

  In a long traveling life, I had always depended on public transport: the clattering train, the slow boat, the tuk-tuk or scooter rickshaw, the overcrowded chicken bus, the careering East African minibus known as a matatu, the shuttling ferry, the trolley, the tram. For the first time I was driving myself the whole way in my own car. What made the experience a continuing pleasure was that, in my car, I never knew the finality of a flight, being wrangled and ordered around at an airport, the stomach-turning gulp of liftoff or the jolt of a train, but only the hum of tires, the telephone poles or trees whipping past, the easy escape, the gradual release of the long road unrolling like a river, like the Old Man itself.

  Except for the fart and flutter-blast of a johnboat below, skidding sideways in the current like a soap dish in a murky sink, I saw no river traffic today from my parking place on Walden’s Landing, on the Arkansas side of Helena Bridge. Beneath the bridge, a truck parked next to a conveyor belt had opened its hopper onto the belt, which was emptying into a moored barge the soybeans of Andre Peer and his fellow farmers, $600,000 worth of beans. In sharp contrast to the geometry of plowed fields on the nearer banks was the curvaceous Mississippi, slipping southerly in languid liquefaction, so brown it was like the solid earth made fluid. A “reminder / of what men choose to forget,” the poet from St. Louis had written of the Old Man rolling along, pulling at the banks that were in places as soft and crumbly as cake, touching lives, stirring the edges of the land in inquiring eddies, squirming through backwaters, fetching up at bungalows and whispering at the fringes of cotton fields, then moving on. I was the river.

  When had I ever felt this way, reluctant to go back to my desk, not wanting the trip to end, this procrastinating sense that, even after a year and a half of being on the road, between the Southern salutations of Lucille’s “Be blessed” at the start and Charles Portis’s “Be careful” at the end, I wished to keep going? That same St. Louis poet had also written, “Old men ought to be explorers.” I could have kept on, easily, on this rare trip that was a cure for homesickness. Because the paradox of it all was that though I had come so far—miles more than I ever had in Africa or China—I had never left home.

  Deep South

  Photographs by Steve McCurry

  In the 1970s, I rode old buses through Afghanistan, evaluating the local hashish and thinking I was roughing it. In 1979, Steve McCurry, dressed in a shalwar kameez, followed a group of five Afghans into the Kunar Valley, during a period of civil war, and photographed bombings and atrocities. He walked for six weeks on mountain paths, living on berries. His were the first photographs to be published in Europe and America of defiant Afghan mujahideen.

  We have been friends since the early 1980s, reporting on many distant places, rarely traveling together but keeping in touch. When I mentioned that I was planning a trip to the Deep South, Steve told me of his family connections there and his wish to travel in the United States as he had in India, China, and Africa.

  I had the same wish. In the South we traveled separately, but now and then our paths crossed. I admire his stamina, his eye, his dedication to photography, and his results.

  Paul Theroux

  I had always wanted to travel the world. As soon as I graduated from college, I decided to go to India. I’d been in Delhi fo
r two weeks when I came down with amoebic dysentery; to worsen matters, at the same time I was getting a series of painful rabies shots. Seeing that I was bored and bedridden, someone handed me Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar. I read it as though my life depended on it.

  Little did I know that one day we would collaborate on my first book, The Imperial Way (1985), about our experiences traveling on Indian trains from the Khyber Pass to Chittagong. A few years ago, Paul and I were talking about the pleasures of traveling in our own country. I told him about my family history, which started before the Revolutionary War, in Georgia and South Carolina. Our family used to make the long drive from Philadelphia to Anderson, South Carolina, every summer. My grandparents lived in an old house in Anderson’s historic district, and during our visits I experienced firsthand the fine art of Southern storytelling, as practiced on the front porch after dinner every night, which caused a certain amount of culture shock.

  I have spent my life photographing far-off places. The process of discovering my father’s South was almost the same, but with an added dollop of connection and sweet familiarity.

  Steve McCurry

  Photographs © Steve McCurry

  Country road in the Ozarks, near Lamar, Arkansas

  Reverend Virgin Johnson of Revelation Ministries Church. “God sends us a storm. I need this storm. What would I do without my storm? It makes me turn to the Lord. And so I say, ‘Thank you, storm!’” Sycamore, South Carolina.

  Ruby Johnson, postmaster, folding the flag at the end of the day, Arcola, Mississippi

  Janet May, the proprietor of Blue Shadows Bed and Breakfast, on her lawn, Greensboro, Alabama

  Andre Peer, a farmer, explaining the frustrations of farming, after supervising the loading of his soybean crop onto a river barge, Helena, Arkansas

  Melvin Johnson on the porch of his family’s nineteenth-century house, which he’s lived in for more than fifty years without plumbing or electricity, Razor Road, Allendale, South Carolina

  Shuquita Drakes with her month-old child, D’Vohta Knight, at the Sam Chatmon Blues Festival, Hollandale, Mississippi

  Jessica Badger in a bedroom of her mother’s house, indicating the leaky roof, Allendale, South Carolina

  Delores Walker Robinson on her farm near Palestine, Arkansas. “I’m looking ten years down the road. I want to build up the herd and do this full time.”

  Mary Ward Brown, writer, in the home her father built, two months before she died, at ninety-five, in Hamburg, near Marion, Alabama

  Abandoned shop by the railroad tracks in Demopolis, Alabama

  Paul Theroux outside the ruin of Bryant’s Grocery Store, Money, Mississippi

  Ernest Cox, Delta farmer, in the early evening after a long day at harvest time, near Marvel, Alabama

  Late afternoon in Natchez, Mississippi

  A decorated window of an old house in Greenville, Mississippi

  Former sharecropper’s shack near the Little Tallahatchie River, Money, Mississippi

  “Most of this community is lower class. All poverty level.” Chester Skaggs in the bedroom of his newly renovated house, Holman Community, Ozarks, Arkansas.

  Abandoned motel, Route 301, Sylvania, Georgia

  Bridal dress shop in the center of Philadelphia, Mississippi

  Massoud Besharat at one of his granite quarries, Elberton, Georgia

  Prison laborers, convicted of misdemeanors, sweeping the streets under a guard’s supervision, Marianna, Arkansas

  Abandoned gas station, Route 301, Allendale, South Carolina

  Lester Carter in front of his shack on a winter afternoon, Cotton Plant, Arkansas. Penniless, unemployed, and hungry: “I got nothing to eat but some rice.”

  Reverend Eugene Lyles in his Greensboro, Alabama, barbershop. “Ones born today don’t know how it was.”

  Reverend Lyles’s annotated Bible, on the desk in his barbershop

  Abandoned garden, Elberton, Georgia

  Paul Theroux and Steve McCurry, Allendale, South Carolina

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to thank the people named in this book, for their candor and for helping me on my way. And for advice, suggestions, assistance, and good will I am indebted to Henry Adams, Jin Auh, Michael Caruso, Larry Cooper, David Dangler, Nicholas Delbanco, Pancho Huddle, Jay Jennings, Doug Kelly, Steve McCurry, Bob Poole, Jonathan Portis, Jonathan Raban, Andrea Schulz, Marcel Theroux, Louis Theroux, Alexander Theroux, Andrew Wylie, and with love to my wife, Sheila.

  Visit www.hmhco.com to find more books by Paul Theroux.

  About the Author

  PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Lower River and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

  Footnotes

  1 It was one they never used to describe themselves. They called themselves Théocloel—the people of Thé, the name of their godlike original ancestor.

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  2 “Nigger (the Word), a Brief History” by Phil Middleton and David Pilgrim, www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/nigger-word-brief-history, 2001.

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  3 Nigger Heaven by Carl Van Vechten, a close friend of Hurston’s, appeared in 1926. Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus” was retitled The Children of the Sea when it was first published in the United States in 1897, and in 2009 an edition was published under the title The N-Word of the Narcissus. The title of Ronald Firbank’s Prancing Nigger was suggested by Van Vechten, who felt Firbank’s title, Sorrow in Sunlight, was unlikely to attract notice—these days the novella is usually folded into other works under the title Valmouth or Five Novels. Ten Little Niggers (1939), by Agatha Christie became And Then There Were None. The comedian and activist Dick Gregory titled his 1964 autobiography Nigger!

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  4 This “Prosecutive Report” is a summary of the FBI’s 8,000-page report of its investigation of the murder, dated February 9, 2006, filed at the Jackson, Mississippi, office. The report also includes the 354-page transcript of the 1955 murder trial of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. See www.emmetttillmurder.com.

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  5 And a life-sized bronze statue of James Meredith was erected on campus, depicting him striding forward. On February 16, 2014, a few months after I visited Ole Miss, three white students vandalized the statue, hanging a noose around the neck of the figure and draping it in an old Confederate battle flag from Georgia. Meredith made a characteristically temperate comment about the incident, but in an interview with the New York Times he spoke disapprovingly of the very existence of the statue: “It’s a false idol, and it’s an insult not only to God, it’s an insult to me.”

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  6 Clemson’s first black student, Harvey Gantt, was admitted in 1963.

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  7 “The Bomb Plant: America’s Three A.M. Nightmare,” National Security News Service, November 2012.

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  8 As of this writing, the daughter had recanted, withdrawn her accusation, and refused to testify. No other witnesses had come forward, the case was still pending, and Bishop Bobby Jones remained out on bail.

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  9 I was eager to return and see this friendly and optimistic man again. But one month later, Mayor Melvin Willis, on a routine visit to the doctor, was diagnosed with cancer. He died shortly afterward, in November 2013, at the age of sixty-five.

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