The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  “People I’ve talked to say that better housing helps.”

  “It’s fine to have a home, but if you don’t have the subsidies to go with the home, you’re just treading water—but that’s how a lot of people live.”

  “Do people fix up houses?”

  “Very few homes get rehabbed. Most are in such bad shape it’s cheaper to tear them down than fix them. A lot are abandoned. There’s more and more vacant lots.

  “If Greenville happened to be a city in a third-world country, there would probably be lots of aid money pouring in.

  “This was a federal Empowerment Zone—ten years, ten million dollars pumped into the economy.”

  “Ten million isn’t much compared to the hundreds of millions I’ve seen in U.S. aid to Africa,” I said. “I was in Africa last year. Namibia got three hundred five million—sixty-nine million to the Namibian tourist industry.”

  “That’s news to us,” she said. “We do what we can. Things have been improving slowly. There’s Greenville Education Center. They have both day and night classes for people to study.”

  Later I checked the curriculum of the Mississippi Delta Community College, which was part of this program, and found that they offered courses in bricklaying and tile-setting, automotive mechanics, commercial truck driving, heavy equipment operation, electronics, machine tool expertise, welding, heating and air-conditioning, office systems, and much else. But there are few jobs.

  “People get educated and they leave,” she said. “There’s a high rotation in doctors and teachers. We’ve got to come together. It doesn’t matter how. Some healing has to take place.”

  Given the seriousness of the situation and the blight that was general over the Delta, I wondered aloud why she persevered.

  “Me? I was meant to be here,” she said.

  At Hope Credit Union in Greenville, I met Sue Evans and asked her about the local economy. She gave me helpful replies, but when I changed the subject talked about the musical history of the Delta, the blues, the clubs that had been numerous up and down the Delta, she became animated.

  “My mother had a blues club in Leland,” Sue said.

  I had passed through Leland, another farming town on Highway 61, well known for its blues history. “She was a great gal, my mother—Ruby—everyone knew her.” There were still some clubs, she said. There were blues museums. People came from all over the world to visit these places associated with the blues, and to see the birthplaces and the reference points—the farms, the creeks, the railways, the cotton fields.

  “I heard that in Indianola there’s a B. B. King museum,” I said.

  This produced a profound silence. Sue and a colleague of hers exchanged a glance, but said nothing. It was the sort of silence provoked by an unwelcome allusion, or sheer confusion, as though I had lapsed into an unfamiliar language.

  “He was born there, I understand,” I said, flailing a bit, and wondering perhaps if I had overstayed my visit.

  Sue had a mute and somewhat stubborn gaze fixed away from mine.

  “Berclair,” Sue’s colleague said. “But he was raised in Kilmichael. Other side of Greenwood.”

  It seemed very precise and obscure information. I couldn’t think of anything more to say, and it was apparent that this topic had produced an atmosphere in the room, a vibration that was unreadable, and that made me feel like a clumsy alien.

  “Shall we tell him?” Sue’s colleague said.

  “I don’t know,” Sue said.

  “You tell him.”

  “Go ahead,” Sue said.

  This exchange, a sort of banter, had the effect of lifting the mood, diffusing the vibe.

  “Sue was married to him.”

  “Married to B. B. King?”

  Sue said, “Yes, I was. I was Sue Hall then. His second wife. It was a while back.”

  Now that the subject had been raised, Sue was smiling. “One night my mother booked him,” she said. “He kind of looked at me. I was just a kid. I had an idea of what he was thinking, but my mother wouldn’t stand any nonsense or fooling around. He played at the club a lot—a great musician. He waited until I turned eighteen—he waited because he didn’t want to deal with my mother. He was afraid of her.”

  She laughed at the memory of it. I said, “This would have been when?”

  “Long ago,” Sue said. “We were married for ten years.”

  “Did you call him B. B.?”

  “His proper name is Riley. I called him B.”

  I was writing down Riley.

  “Which was confusing,” Sue was saying. “Because Ray Charles’s wife was named Beatrice. We called her B, too. We often got mixed up with the two B’s.”

  “You traveled with him?” I asked.

  “All the time. B loved to travel. He loved to play—he could play all night. He loved the audiences, the people, he lived to talk. But I got so tired. He’d say, ‘You don’t like to hear me,’ but it wasn’t that. I just hated staying up all hours. I’d be in the hotel room, waiting for him.”

  “Are you still in touch?”

  “We talk all the time. He calls. We talk. He still tours—imagine. Last I talked to him he said he had some dates in New York and New Jersey. He loves the life, he’s still going strong.”

  And for that 15 or 20 minutes there was no blight on the Delta; it was a cheery reminiscence of her decade with B. B. King, the man who’d brought glory to the Delta and proved that it was possible and could happen again.

  Epilogue: Arkansas

  A great number of blacks in the Delta who had been farmers and landowners lost their land for various reasons, and so lost their livelihood. Calvin R. King Sr. had spent his life committed to reversing that loss and founded, in 1980, the Arkansas Land and Farm Development Corporation, which is in Brinkley, Arkansas. “When you look at the Delta,” he asked me, “do you see businesses owned by blacks, operated by blacks? In manufacturing? In retail?” He smiled, because the obvious answer was: Very few. He went on, “Compare that to the black farmers here, who are part of a multibillion-dollar business.”

  Through him I met Delores Walker Robinson, 42, a single mother of three sons, ages 22, 18, and 12, in the small town of Palestine, Arkansas, less than 50 miles west of the Mississippi. After more than 20 years of travel with her serviceman husband, and work, and child-rearing, and a sudden divorce, Delores had returned to the place where she’d been born. “I didn’t want my sons to live the harsh life of the city,” she told me as we walked through her cow pasture. “I felt I would lose them to the city—to the crimes and problems that you can’t escape.”

  With her savings as a certified nursing assistant, she bought 42 acres of neglected land. With help from friends and her sons, she fenced the land, built a small house and began raising goats. She enrolled in Heifer International, a charity based in Little Rock devoted to ending hunger and alleviating poverty, attended training sessions, and got two heifers. She now has 10 cows—and, keeping to the organization’s rules, she has passed along some cows to other farmers in need. “I wanted something I could own,” she said. She’d been raised on a farm near here. “I wanted to get my sons involved in the life I knew.”

  She also had sheep, geese, ducks, and chickens. And she grew feed corn. Because the cash flow from the animals was small, she worked six days a week at the East Arkansas Area Agency on Aging as a caregiver and nursing assistant. Early in the morning and after her day at the agency, she did the farm chores, feeding and watering the animals, repairing fences, collecting eggs. She went to livestock management classes. “I made a lot of friends there. We’re all trying to accomplish the same things.”

  Easygoing, uncomplaining, yet tenacious, Delores Walker Robinson had all the qualities that made a successful farmer—a great work ethic, a strong will, a love of the land, a way with animals, a fearlessness at the bank, a vision of the future, a gift for taking the long view, a desire for self-sufficiency. “I’m looking ten years down the road,” she said as we t
ramped the sloping lane. “I want to build up the herd and do this full-time.”

  Many southerners I met asserted—with grim pride, or with sorrow, or misquoting Faulkner—that the South doesn’t change. That’s not true. In many places, the cities most of all, the South has been turned upside down; in the rural areas the change has come very slowly, in small but definite ways. The poet William Blake wrote, “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars,” and the Delta farmers I visited, and especially Delores Robinson, were the embodiment of that valiant spirit. She had shaken herself loose from another life to come home with her children, and she seemed iconic in her bravery, on her farm, among friends. It goes without saying that the vitality of the South lies in the self-awareness of its deeply rooted people. What makes the South a pleasure for a traveler like me, more interested in conversation than sightseeing, is the heart and soul of its family narratives—its human wealth.

  Contributors’ Notes

  Based in Copenhagen, Lisa Abend is a correspondent for Time magazine and a contributing writer for AFAR. She is also the author of The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen of Ferran Adrià’s elBulli.

  Scott Anderson is a veteran war correspondent, a novelist, and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. “Lawrence’s Arabia,” his first piece for Smithsonian magazine, was inspired by the five years he spent researching and writing his international bestseller, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East. “After poring so long over historical documents in archives,” Anderson says, “I was anxious to visit—or in some cases revisit—those places in the Middle East that played a key role in T. E. Lawrence’s story. It was fascinating to see the physical disparity, with some places all but unrecognizable from a century ago while others have barely changed at all.” On a more political level, Anderson discovered a dispiriting change. “There have always been two camps in the Arab world in regard to the Lawrence legend, those who believe he truly did try to help the Arabs gain their independence in World War I, and those who believe he was a scheming agent for British imperialism all along. It’s a measure of how deeply the West is distrusted throughout the Middle East today—a distrust amply earned—that the latter view is now almost universally held.”

  Kevin Baker is the author of five novels, most recently The Big Crowd (2013), set mainly in postwar New York and based closely on the greatest unsolved murder in Mob history. He is also the author or coauthor of a contemporary novel, a graphic novel, two works of American history, and an as-told-to memoir by Reggie Jackson, Becoming Mr. October. Baker is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and has written for many other newspapers and magazines. He is a member of the executive board of the Society of American Historians and lives in New York City.

  Along with two books of travel essays, Guatemalan Journey and Green Dreams: Travels in Central America, Stephen Connely Benz has published essays in Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, TriQuarterly, and other journals. One of his essays appeared in The Best American Travel Writing 2003. He teaches professional writing at the University of New Mexico and leads workshops in travel writing at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference.

  Benjamin Busch is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer. He served 16 years as an infantry and light armored reconnaissance officer in the United States Marine Corps, deploying to Iraq in 2003 and again in 2005. As an actor he is best known for his portrayal of Officer Colicchio in the HBO series The Wire. He is the author of a memoir, Dust to Dust (2012), and his essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, and NPR’s All Things Considered. His poetry has appeared in North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Five Points, The Florida Review, Oberon, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among others.

  Madeline Drexler is an award-winning journalist, author, and travel essayist. She is editor of Harvard Public Health magazine and a senior fellow at Brandeis University’s Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. Drexler’s articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Tricycle, and many other national publications. Her book Emerging Epidemics: The Menace of New Infections (2010) drew wide praise. Drexler began her career as a staff photographer for the Associated Press. She is currently working on a new series of essays based on a return reporting trip to Bhutan.

  David Farley is the author of An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town, which most recently became a documentary by the National Geographic Channel. He’s a contributing writer at AFAR and also writes regularly for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Bon Appétit, among other publications. Farley teaches writing at New York University. Find him online at www.dfarley.com.

  Lauren Groff is the author of the novels Fates and Furies, Arcadia, and The Monsters of Templeton and the short story collection Delicate Edible Birds. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s Magazine, as well as in three editions of the Best American Short Stories anthology and 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

  In 1996, Peter Hessler arrived in China as a teacher with the Peace Corps, and he stayed on for more than a decade, writing a trilogy of nonfiction books about the country: River Town, Oracle Bones, and Country Driving. He is also the author of Strange Stones, a collection of his articles. He currently lives with his wife and twin daughters in Cairo, where he is working on a book about post-revolution Egypt.

  Rachael Maddux is a writer and editor whose essays and features have appeared in Oxford American, The Believer, Guernica, and elsewhere. She was raised in Tennessee and lives in Atlanta.

  Patricia Marx is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her latest book is Let’s Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties (2015). She overpacks for everything, including once for jury duty.

  Tim Neville is a correspondent for Outside, Ski, and Skiing magazines and a frequent contributor to the New York Times travel section. His work has also appeared in The Best American Sports Writing. He lives in Oregon with his wife and daughter. Follow him @tim_neville.

  Maud Newton is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Narrative, Oxford American, Granta, Bookforum, The Awl, and many other publications. She received the 2009 Narrative Prize and is writing a book about the science and superstition of ancestry.

  Adriana Páramo is a cultural anthropologist, writer, and women’s rights advocate. Her book Looking for Esperanza (2012), winner of Benu Press’s 2011 Social Justice and Equity Award in Creative Nonfiction, was named one of the top 10 best books by Latino authors in 2012 by thelatinoauthor.com and the Best Women’s Issues Book at the 2013 International Latino Book Awards, and was also an award winner at the 2012 Book of the Year Awards. She is the author of My Mother’s Funeral, a work of nonfiction set in Colombia. Páramo’s work has won numerous awards and honors, including multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, and it has been noted in The Best American Essays of 2012, 2013, and 2014. She has been named one of the top 10 Latino authors in the USA by LatinoStories.com. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Sun, The Georgia Review, Southern Sin, Brevity, The Fourth Genre, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Going Om, and others. She keeps a travel blog: www.paramoadriana.com/travel-blog.

  Nick Paumgarten is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He lives in New York City. Raised in Australia and a denizen of the East Village of Manhattan for many years, Tony Perrottet is a contributing writer at Smithsonian and a regular at the New York Times, WSJ Magazine, and other publications. He is the author of five books, most recently Napoleon’s Privates: 2,500 Years of History Unzipped and The Sinner’s Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe. He is currently working on a book about adventurers in 1930s China. This is his sixth appearance in the Best American Travel Writing s
eries.

  Lauren Quinn is a writer and teacher currently living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Guernica, The Guardian, and Hazlitt, among others.

  Monte Reel is the author of the books Between Man and Beast and The Last of the Tribe. His essays and articles have appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Outside, Businessweek, and The Believer, among others. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

  Paul Salopek is a freelance journalist who has reported on conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Balkans, and Latin America. His work has appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic, the Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, American Scholar, The Best American Travel Writing, and other publications. His reportage has earned two Pulitzer Prizes. He is currently walking across the world as part of a seven-year narrative project called the Out of Eden Walk; see www.outofedenwalk.com.

  Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, as well as a best book of the year by Time, Washington Post Book World, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and many other publications. He has been selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, and Travel + Leisure, and his books have been translated into more than 20 languages. He lives in New York City. His most recent work is the memoir Little Failure.