“Notice how it’s desolate here,” Randall said as I drove outside 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 houses, now and then a crossroads. “You’ll know it when you see it. It’s the only house here.”
After 5 miles of fields, he said, “This must be Hamburg,” and a white bungalow appeared, and on the porch—we had called ahead—Mary T and a much younger woman, wearing an apron.
“Is Ozella with her?” Randall said, trying to see. He explained that Ozella was the daughter of a previous housekeeper. Ozella was standing closely next to Mary T, who was tiny, watchful, like a bird on a branch, and smiling in anticipation. Very old and upright people have a dusty glow that makes them seem immortal.
“My father built this house in 1927,” Mary T said when I praised the house. It was a modest two-story bungalow, but squat and solid, fronted by the bulging porch, a dormer above it, so unlike the shotgun shacks and rectangular houses 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 the bookcases that were fitted in all the inner rooms and upstairs.
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 myself, the 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—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.”
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.
“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 a peculiar and special niche of it, a house full of books, the dark paintings, the ticking clock, the old furniture, the heavy oak table, something melancholy 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 had told her story: her upbringing as a rural shopkeeper’s daughter; her becoming a writer late in life—she was 61 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 25-year silence”; surprise that her stories found favor; surprise that her stories won awards.
Setting her glass of wine down on the thick disk of coaster, she said, “I’m hungry for catfish”—the expression of appetite a delight to hear from someone 95 years old.
She put on a wide-brimmed black hat the size, it seemed, of a bicycle wheel, and a red capelike coat. Helping her down the stairs, I realized she was tiny and frail; but her mind was active, she spoke clearly, her memory was good, her bird claw of a hand was in my grip.
And 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 my son Kirtley was still young. I thought about writing, I read books, but I didn’t write. 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 more than sixty—I rewrote hard. I tried to make it right.”
At last we were rolling down Marion’s main street, Washington Street, then past the military academy and the courthouse, and over to Pickens Street, the site of Mack’s Café—the places associated with the shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson. 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 one hundred years old,” Mary T said, perhaps reminded of her frailty. “It was called something like Lessons from the Centenarians. 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. Though Mary T was moving slowly, she lifted her hand to greet them.
“See, the Yankee’s having the grilled catfish,” Randall said, after we seated ourselves and ordered. “We stick with the fried.”
“My mother worked in the store—she was too busy to raise me,” Mary T said over lunch, pausing after each sentence, a bit short of breath. “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 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.”
Randall began to talk about the changes in the South that he knew.
What will happen here? I asked.
“Time will help,” Mary T said. “But I think the divisions will always be there—the racial divisions.”
And I reminded myself that she’d been born in 1917. She had been in her teens during the Depression. She was only seven years younger than James Agee, and so she had known the poverty and the sharecroppers and the lynchings in the Black Belt.
“I did my best,” she said. “I told the truth.”
After, I dropped her at her remote house, the sun lowering into the fields; she waved from the porch. I dropped Randall in Greensboro. I hit the road again. The following week Mary T sent me an e-mail, remarking on something I’d written. I wrote again in the following days. I received a brief reply, and then after a week or so, silence. Randall wrote to say that Mary T was ill and in the hospital; and then, about a month after we met, she died.
Traveling in America
Most travel narratives—perhaps all of them, the classics anyway—describe the miseries and splendors of going from one remote place to another. The quest, the getting there, the difficulty of the road is the story; the journey, not the arrival, matters, and most of the time the traveler—the traveler’s mood, especially—is the subject of the whole business. I have made a career out of this sort of slogging and self-portraiture, travel writing as diffused autobiography; and so have many others in the old, laborious look-at-me way that informs travel writing.
But traveling in America is unlike traveling anywhere else on earth. It is filled with road candy, and seems so simple, sliding all over in your car on wonderful roads.
Driving south, I became a traveler again in ways I’d forgotten. Because of the effortless release from my home to the road, the sense of being sprung, I rediscovered the joy in travel that I knew in the days before the halts, the checks, the affronts at airports—the invasions and violations of privacy that beset every air traveler. All air travel today involves interrogation.
Around the corner from Main Street in Greensboro, Alabama, tucked into a brick building he’d financed himself, was the barbershop of the Reverend Eugene Lyles, who was 79. He
was seated at a small table peering at the Acts of the Apostles, while awaiting his next customer. In addition to his barbershop, Reverend Lyles was a pastor at the Mars Hill Missionary Baptist Church just south of town, and next door to the barbershop, Reverend Lyles’s soul food diner, nameless except for the sign DINER out front.
Marking the page in his Bible, and shutting it, then climbing onto one of his barber chairs and stretching his long legs, he said, “When I was a boy I bought a pair of clippers. I cut my brothers’ hair. Well, I got ten boy siblings and three girl siblings—fourteen of us. I kept cutting hair. I started this business sixty years ago, cutting hair all that time. And I got the restaurant, and I got the church. Yes, I am busy.
“There are good people in Greensboro. But the white core is rooted in the status quo. The school is separate yet. When it was integrated the whites started a private school, Southern Academy. There’s somewhere above two hundred there now.” Reverend Lyles laughed and spun his glasses off to polish them with a tissue. “History is alive and well here.”
And slavery is still a visitable memory because of the persistence of its effects.
“I went to segregated schools. I grew up in the countryside, outside Greensboro, ten miles out, Cedarville. Very few whites lived in the area. I didn’t know any whites. I didn’t know any whites until the sixties, when I was in my thirties.
“Most of the land in Cedarville was owned by blacks. There was a man, Tommy Ruffin, he owned ten thousand acres. He farmed, he had hands, just like white folks did, growing cotton and corn. He was advised by a white man named Paul Cameron not to sell any of that land to a white person. Sell to blacks, he said, because that’s the only way a black man can get a foothold in a rural area.
“My father was a World War I vet. He ran away from here in 1916—he was about twenty. He went to Virginia. He enlisted there, in 1917. After the war, he worked in a coal mine in West Virginia. He came back and married in 1930, but kept working in the mine, going back and forth. He gave us money. I always had money in my pockets. Finally he migrated into Hale County for good and bought some land.”
We went next door to Reverend Lyles’s diner. I ordered baked chicken, collard greens, rice and gravy. Reverend Lyles had the same. His younger brother Benny joined us.
“Lord,” Reverend Lyles began, his hands clasped, his eyes shut, beginning grace.
The Gift
At the edge of County Road 16, 10 miles south of Greensboro, an old white wooden building stood back from the road but commanded attention. It had recently been prettified and restored and was used as a community center.
“That’s the Rosenwald School. We called it the Emory School,” Reverend Lyles told me. “I was enrolled in that school in 1940. Half the money for the school came from Sears, Roebuck—folks here put up the difference. My mother also went to a Rosenwald School, the same as me. The students were black, the teachers were black. If you go down Highway 69, down to the Gallion area, there is another Rosenwald School, name of Oak Grove.”
Julius Rosenwald, the son of German Jewish immigrants, made a success of his clothing business by selling to Richard Sears, and in 1908 became president of Sears, Roebuck and Co. In midlife his wish was to make a difference with his money, and he hatched a plan to give his wealth to charitable causes but on a condition that has become common today: his contribution had to be met by an equal amount from the other party, the matching grant. Convinced that Booker T. Washington’s notion to create rural schools was a way forward, Rosenwald met the great educator and later began the Rosenwald Fund to build schools in backlands of the South.
Five thousand schools were built in 15 states beginning in 1917, and they continued to be built into the 1930s. Rosenwald himself died in 1932, around the time the last schools were built; but before the money he had put aside ran its course, in 1948, a scheme had been adopted through which money was given to black scholars and writers of exceptional promise. One of the young writers, Ralph Ellison, from Oklahoma, was granted a Rosenwald Fellowship, and this gave him the time and incentive to complete his novel Invisible Man (1952), one of the defining dramas of racial violence and despair in America. Rosenwald Fellowships also went to the photographer Gordon Parks, the sculptor Elizabeth Catlett (who later created Ellison’s memorial in New York City), W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and many other black artists and thinkers.
The schools built with Rosenwald money (and local effort) were modest structures in the beginning, two-room schools like the one in Greensboro, with two or at the most three teachers. They were known as Rosenwald Schools, but Rosenwald himself discouraged naming any of them after himself. As the project developed into the 1920s the schools became more ambitious, brick-built, with more rooms.
One of the characteristics of the schools was an emphasis on natural light through the use of large windows. The assumption was that the rural areas where they’d be built would probably not have electricity; paint colors, placement of blackboards and desks, even the southerly orientation of the schools to maximize the light were specified in blueprints.
The simple white building outside Greensboro was a relic from an earlier time, and had the Reverend Lyles not explained its history, and his personal connection, I would have had no idea that almost 100 years ago a philanthropic-minded stranger from Chicago had tried to make a difference here.
“The financing was partly the responsibility of the parents,” Reverend Lyles told me. “They had to give certain stipends. Wasn’t always money. You’ve heard of people giving a doctor chickens for their payment? That’s the truth—that happened in America. Some were given corn, peanuts, and other stuff instead of cash money. They didn’t have money back in that day.” Reverend Lyles, who came from a farming family, brought produce his father had grown, and chickens and eggs.
“My grandfather and the others who were born around his time, they helped put up that school building. And just recently Pam Dorr and HERO”—the Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization—“made a plan to fix up the school. It made me proud that I was able to speak when it was reopened as a community center. My grandfather would have been proud, too.”
He spoke some more about his family and their ties to the school, and added, “My grandfather was born in 1850.”
I thought I had misheard the date. Surely this was impossible. I queried the date.
“Correct—1850.”
So Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) was younger than Reverend Lyles’s grandfather. “My grandfather wasn’t born here but he came here. He remembered slavery—he told us all about it. I was thirteen years old when he passed. I was born in 1934. He would have been in his nineties. Work it out—he was ten years old in 1860. Education wasn’t for blacks then. He lived slavery. Therefore his name was that of his owner, Lyles, and he was Andrew Lyles. Later on, he heard stories about the Civil War, and he told them to me.”
Fruit Pies and Bamboo Bikes
A corner shop on Main Street in Greensboro was now called PieLab, a café associated with HERO and well known locally for its homemade fruit pies, salads, and sandwiches.
“The idea was that people would drop in at PieLab and get to know someone new,” Randall Curb had said. “A good concept, but it hasn’t worked out—at least I don’t think so.” Shaking his head, he had somewhat disparaged it as “a liberal drawing card.”
The next day, quite by chance, having lunch at PieLab, I met the executive director of HERO (and the founder of its Housing Resource Center), Pam Dorr.
The more appealing of the skeletal, fading towns in the South attracted outsiders, in the way third-world countries attracted idealistic volunteers, and for many of the same reasons. With a look of innocence and promise, the places were poor, pretty, and in need of revival. They posed the possibility of rescue, an irresistible challenge to a young college graduate or someone who wanted to take a semester off to perform community service in another world. These were also pleasant places to live in—or at least seemed so.<
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The desperate housing situation in Greensboro, and Hale County generally, had inspired student architects of the Rural Studio (a program of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture at Auburn University) to create low-cost housing for needy people. The Auburn houses are small, but simple, and some of them brilliantly innovative, looking folded out and logical, like oversized elaborations of origami in tin and plywood. The studio determined that in Greensboro the right price for a small, newly built house would be no more than $20,000, “the highest realistic mortgage a person receiving median Social Security checks can maintain.”
Hearing about the Auburn Rural Studio, Pam Dorr had traveled from San Francisco to Greensboro 10 years before to become an Auburn Outreach fellow. It was a break from her successful career as a designer for popular clothing companies, including Esprit and the Gap and Victoria’s Secret (“I made cozy pajamas”). She had come to Greensboro in a spirit of volunteerism, but when her fellowship ended, she was reluctant to leave. “I realized there was so much more I could do,” she told me at PieLab, which grew out of an entrepreneurial group she was in. Another idea, to make bicycle frames out of bamboo, resulted in Hero Bikes, one of the businesses Pam has overseen since starting the Housing Resource Center in 2004.
“We build houses, we educate people on home ownership, and working with nontraditional bankers we help people establish credit.” Local banks had a history of lending mainly to whites. Blacks could get loans but only at extortionate rates—27 percent interest was not uncommon.
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