The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  “It seemed to me a prime opportunity to start a community again,” Pam said. “We have thirty-three people on the payroll and lots of volunteers. HERO is in the pie business, the pecan business—we sell locally grown pecans to retail stores—the bamboo bike business, the construction business. We have a daycare center and afterschool program. A thrift store.”

  Some of these businesses were now housed in what had been a hardware store and an insurance agency. They had redeveloped or improved 11 of the defunct stores on Main Street.

  “I worked free for two years,” Pam said. “We got a HUD grant, we got some other help, and now, because of the various businesses, we’re self-sustaining.”

  She was like the most inspired and energetic Peace Corps volunteer imaginable. Upbeat, full of recipes, solutions, and ideas for repurposing, still young—hardly 50—with wide experience and a California smile and informality. The way she dressed—in a purple fleece and green clogs—made her conspicuous. Her determination to effect change made her suspect.

  “You find out a lot, living here,” she told me. “Drugs are a problem—drive along a side road at night and you’ll see girls prostituting themselves to get money to support their habit. Thirteen-year-olds getting pregnant—I know two personally.”

  “What does the town think of your work?” I asked.

  “A lot of people are on our side,” she said. “But they know that change has to come from within.”

  “Reverend Lyles told me you had something to do with fixing up the Rosenwald School here.”

  “The Emory School, yeah,” she said. “But we had help from the University of Alabama, and volunteers from AmeriCorps—lots of people contributed. Reverend Lyles was one of our speakers at the reopening dedication ceremony. That was a great day.” She took a deep calming breath. “But not everyone is on our side.”

  “Really?”

  This surprised me, because what she had described, the renovation of an old schoolhouse in a hard-up rural area, was like a small-scale development project in a third-world country. I had witnessed such efforts many times: the energizing of a sleepy community, the fund-raising, the soliciting of well-wishers and sponsors, engaging volunteers, asking for donations of building material, applying for grants and permits, fighting inertia and the naysayers’ laughter, making a plan, getting the word out, supervising the business, paying the skilled workers, bringing meals to the volunteers, and seeing the project through to completion. Years of effort, years of budgeting. At last, the dedication, everyone turned out, the cookies, the lemonade, the grateful speeches, the hugs. That was another side to the South, people seeing it as a development opportunity, and in workshops talking about “challenges” and “potential.”

  “So who’s against you?” I said.

  “Plenty of people seem to dislike what we’re doing,” Pam said. She rocked in her clogs and zipped her fleece against the chilly air. “Lots of opposition.” She laughed, saying this. “Lots of abuse. They call me names.” Once, she said, someone spit on her.

  Part Three: Mississippi

  Hardly a town or a village, Money, Mississippi (pop. 94), was no more than a road junction near the banks of the Tallahatchie River. There, without any trouble, I found what I was looking for, a 100-year-old grocery store, the roof caved in, the brick walls broken, the facade boarded up, the wooden porch roughly patched, and the whole wreck of it overgrown with dying plants and tangled vines. For its haunted appearance and its bloody history it was the ghostliest structure I was to see in the whole of my travels in the South. This ruin, formerly Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, has topped the list of Mississippi Heritage Trust’s Ten Most Endangered Historic Places, though many people would like to tear it down as an abomination.

  What happened there in the store and subsequently, in that tiny community, was one of the most powerful stories I’d heard as a youth. As was so often the case, driving up a country road in the South was driving into the shadowy past. AMISSISSIPPI FREEDOM TRAIL sign in front of it gave the details of its place in history. It was part of my history, too.

  I was just 14 in 1955 when the murder of the boy occurred. He was exactly my age. But I have no memory of any news report in a Boston newspaper at the time of the outrage. We got the Boston Globe, but we were subscribers to and diligent readers of family magazines, Life for its photographs, Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post for profiles and short stories, Look for its racier features, Reader’s Digest for its roundups. This Victorian habit in America of magazines as family entertainment and enlightenment persisted until television overwhelmed it in the later 1960s.

  In January 1956, Look carried an article by William Bradford Huie, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” and it appeared in a shorter form in the Reader’s Digest that spring. I remember this distinctly, because my two older brothers had read the stories first, and I was much influenced by their tastes and enthusiasms. After hearing them excitedly talking about the story, I read it and was appalled and fascinated.

  Emmett Till, a black boy from Chicago, visiting his great-uncle in Mississippi, stopped at a grocery store to buy some candy. He supposedly whistled at the white woman behind the counter. A few nights later he was abducted, tortured, killed, and thrown into a river. Two men, Roy Bryant and John William “J.W.” Milam, were caught and tried for the crime. They were acquitted. “Practically all the evidence against the defendants was circumstantial evidence,” was the opinion in an editorial in the Jackson Daily News.

  After the trial, Bryant and Milam gloated, telling Huie that they had indeed committed the crime, and they brazenly volunteered the gory particularities of the killing. Milam, the more talkative, was unrepentant in describing how he’d kidnapped Emmett Till with Bryant’s help, pistol-whipped him in a shed behind his home in Glendora, shot him, and disposed of the body.

  “Let’s write them a letter,” my brother Alexander said, and did so. His letter was two lines of threat—We’re coming to get you. You’ll be sorry—and it was signed, The Gang from Boston. We mailed it to the named killers, in care of the post office in Money, Mississippi.

  The killing prompted a general outcry in the North, and my brothers and I talked of little else for months. Yet there was limited response from the authorities. The response from the black community in the South was momentous—TILL’S DEATH RECEIVED INTERNATIONAL ATTENTION AND IS WIDELY CREDITED WITH SPARKING THE AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, the commemorative sign in front of the Bryant store said—and the response was unusual because it was nonviolent. On December 1 of that same year of the Till trial, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a city bus. She was arrested for her act of disobedience, and she became a symbol of defiance. Her stubbornness and sense of justice made her a rallying point and an example.

  Though the Jackson Daily News editorialized that it was “best for all concerned that the Bryant-Milam case be forgotten as quickly as possible,” the paper also had published a robust piece by William Faulkner. It was one of the most damning and gloomiest accusations Faulkner ever wrote (and he normally resisted the simplifications of newspaper essays), and his anguish shows. He must have recognized the event as something he might have imagined in fiction. He wrote his rebuttal hurriedly in Rome while he was on an official junket, and it was released through the U.S. Information Service.

  He first spoke about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the hypocrisy of boasting of our values to our enemies “after we have taught them (as we are doing) that when we talk of freedom and liberty, we not only mean neither, we don’t even mean security and justice and even the preservation of life for people whose pigmentation is not the same as ours.”

  He went on to say that if Americans are to survive we will have to show the world that we are not racists, “to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front.” Yet this might be a test we will fail: “Perhaps we will find out now whether we are to survive or not. Perhaps
the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive.”

  And his conclusion: “Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.”

  Nowhere in the piece did Faulkner use Emmett Till’s name, yet anyone who read it knew whom he was speaking about.

  Forget him, the Jackson paper had said, but on the contrary the case became a remembered infamy and a celebrated injustice; and Emmett Till was eulogized as a hero and a martyr. Suppression of the truth is not merely futile but almost a guarantee of something wonderful and revelatory emerging from it: creating an opposing and more powerful and ultimately overwhelming force, sunlight breaking in, as the Till case proved.

  Near the ghostly ruin of Bryant’s store, I walked around in the chill air—no one outside on this winter day. I drove east down Whaley Road, past Money Bayou and some narrow ponds, hoping to find Dark Ferry Road and the farm of Grover C. Frederick, where the little house of Emmett’s great-uncle, Mose Wright, had stood, where he’d worked as a sharecropper and where the boy stayed during his visit. But my map didn’t help, and there was no one to ask, and some parts of the past had been erased, but negligible parts. Night was falling when I drove back to Money, the same sort of darkness into which Emmett Till had been dragged. The next day I visited the Emmett Till museum in nearby Glendora, in a forbidding former cotton gin.

  Rowan Oak

  Oxford, where Faulkner had lived and died, was the university town of Ole Miss. Off well-traveled Route 278, the town vibrated with the rush of distant traffic. There is hardly a corner of this otherwise pleasant place where the whine of cars is absent, and it is a low hum at Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s house, which lies at the end of a suburban street, at the periphery of the campus and its academic splendors.

  The road noise struck an odd and intrusive note because, though Oxford resembles Jefferson in Faulkner’s work, the town and its surroundings are in all respects as remote from Faulkner’s folksy, bosky, strife-ridden, plot-saturated, and fictional Yoknapatawpha County as it is possible to be. The town is lovely. The university is classically beautiful in the Greek Revival southern style, of columns and bricks and domes, suggesting a mood both genteel and scholarly, and backward-looking.

  And for a century this esteemed and vividly pompous place of learning clung to the old ways—segregation and bigotry among them, overwhelming any liberal tendencies. So here is an irony, one of the many in the Faulkner biography, odder than this self-described farmer living on a side street in a fraternity-mad, football-crazed college town.

  Faulkner—a shy man but a bold, opinionated literary genius with an encyclopedic grasp of southern history, one of our greatest writers and subtlest thinkers—lived most of his life at the center of this racially divided community without once suggesting aloud, in his wise voice, in a town he was proud to call his own, that a black student had a right to study at the university. The Nobel Prize winner stood by as blacks were shooed off the campus, admitted as menials only through the back door, and when their work was done told to go away. Faulkner died in July 1962. Three months later, after a protracted legal fuss (and deadly riots afterward), and no thanks to Faulkner, James Meredith, from the small central Mississippi town of Kosciusko, was admitted as its first black student.

  Fair-minded, Faulkner had written in Harper’s Magazine: “To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.” But he asked for a gradual approach to integration, and, as he wrote in Life magazine, he was against the interference of the federal government—“forces outside the south that would use legal or police compulsion to eradicate that evil overnight.” We’ll do it ourselves, in our own time, was his approach; but, in fact, nothing happened until the federal government—the South’s historical villain—intervened.

  Restless when he was not writing, always in need of money, Faulkner traveled throughout his life; but Oxford remained his home, and Rowan Oak his house, even when (it seems) a neighborhood grew up around the big, ill-proportioned farmhouse previously known as “the Bailey Place.” He renamed it Rowan Oak for the mythical powers of the wood of the rowan tree, as the docents at the house helpfully explained to me.

  This street—orderly, bourgeois, well tended, tidy, conventional—is everything Faulkner’s fiction is not and is at odds with Faulkner’s posturing as a country squire. On this road of smug homes, Rowan Oak rises lopsidedly like a relic, if not a white elephant, with porches and white columns, windows framed by dark shutters, and stands of old, lovely juniper trees. The remnants of a formal garden are visible under the trees at the front—but just the symmetrical brickwork of flowerbed borders and walkways showing on the surface of the ground like the remains of a neglected Neolithic site.

  He was anchored by Oxford but lived a chaotic life; and the surprising thing is that from this messy, lurching existence that combined the asceticism of concentrated writing with the eruptions of binge drinking and passionate infidelities, he produced an enormous body of work, a number of literary masterpieces, some near misses, and a great deal of garble. He is the writer all aspiring American writers are encouraged to read, yet with his complex and speechifying prose he is the worst possible model for a young writer. He is someone you have to learn how to read, not someone anyone should dare imitate, though unfortunately many do.

  Some of Faulkner’s South still exists, not on the land but as a racial memory. Early in his writing life he set himself a mammoth task, to create the fictional world of an archetypical Mississippi county where everything happened—to explain to southerners who they were and where they’d come from. Where they were going didn’t matter much to Faulkner. Go slowly, urged Faulkner, the gradualist.

  Ralph Ellison once said, “If you want to know something about the dynamics of the South, of interpersonal relationships in the South from, roughly, 1874 until today, you don’t go to historians; not even to Negro historians. You go to William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren.”

  I walked through the rooms at Rowan Oak, which were austerely furnished, with a number of ordinary paintings and simple knickknacks, a dusty piano, the typewriter and the weird novelty of notes puzzling out the plot of A Fable written by him on the wall of an upstairs room. Notes clarifying the multilayered, if not muddled, plot were, for Faulkner, a good idea, and would serve a reader, too. Nothing to me would be more useful than such handwriting on a wall. Baffled by seven pages of eloquent gabble, you glance at the wall and see: “Charles is the son of Eulalia Bon and Thomas Sutpen, born in the West Indies, but Sutpen hadn’t realized Eulalia was of mixed race, until too late . . .”

  “We’ll be closing soon,” the docent warned me.

  I went outside, looked at the brick outbuildings and sheds, a stable, and meandered past the plainness of the yard, among the long shadows of the junipers in the slant of the winter sun. From where I stood, the house was obscured by the trees at the front, but still it had the look of a mausoleum; and I was moved to think of Faulkner in it, exhausting himself with work, poisoning himself with drink, driven mad in the contradictions of the South, obstinate in his refusal to simplify or romanticize its history, resolute in mirroring its complexity with such depth and so many human faces—all this before his early death, at the age of 64. No other region in America had a writer who was blessed with such a vision. Sinclair Lewis defined the upper Midwest, and showed us who we were in Main Street and Elmer Gantry; but he moved on to other places and other subjects. Faulkner stayed put, he achieved greatness; but as a writer, as a man, as a husband, as a delineator of the South’s arcane formalities and its lawlessness, his was a life of suffering.

  Pearl Handle Pistols

  Natchez is dramatically sited on the bluffs above the wide brown Mississi
ppi facing the cotton fields in flatter Louisiana and the town of Vidalia. A small, well-kept city, rich in history and river lore, architectural marvels—old ornate mansions, historic houses, churches, and quaint arcades; its downtown lined with restaurants. But none of its metropolitan attributes held much interest for me.

  The cultural event that got my attention was the Natchez Gun Show at the Natchez Convention Center. It was the main event in town that weekend, and the size of the arena seemed half as big as a football field, with a long line of people waiting to go in.

  Entering was a process of paying an admission of $7 (CHILDREN 6 TO 11, $1), and, if you had a firearm, showing it, unloading it, and securing it with a plastic zip tab.

  After that lobby business, the arena, filled with tables and booths and stalls, most selling guns, some selling knives, others stacked with piles of ammo. I had never seen so many guns, big and small, heaped in one place—and I suppose the notion that they were all for sale, just lying there waiting to be picked up and handled, sniffed and aimed, provided a thrill.

  “Pardon me, sir.”

  “No problem, scoot on bah.”

  “Thank you much.”

  No one on earth—none I had ever seen—is more polite, more eager to smile, more accommodating and less likely to step on your toe, than a person at a gun show.

  “Mississippi is the best state for gun laws,” one man said to me. We were at the coffee and doughnut stall. “You can leave your house with a loaded gun. You can keep a loaded gun in your car in this state—isn’t that great?”

  Most of the gun-show goers were just looking, hands in pockets, sauntering, nudging each other, admiring, and this greatly resembled a flea market, but one smelling of gun oil and scorched metal. Yet there was something else in the atmosphere, a mood I could not define.

  Civil War paraphernalia, powder flasks, Harpers Ferry rifles, spurs, canes, swords, peaked caps, insignia, printed money, and pistols—a number of tables were piled with these battered pieces of history. And nearly all of them were from the Confederate side. Bumper stickers, too, one reading, THE CIVIL WAR—AMERICA’S HOLOCAUST, and many denouncing President Obama.