Deep South

by Paul Theroux

  Pronounced “mah-zeek,” it was a Huguenot name, he said. One of the earliest settlers in Charleston had been Isaac Mazyck, who’d arrived and founded the first Huguenot church in the port city in the late seventeenth century. I later checked and found that the name Mazyck originated in Belgium, in the town of Maeseyck or Maaseyek or Maaseik, in which case his was a nom de terre and probably—though Bernie did not say so—the name of a slaveholder, since slaves usually took the name of their owner.

  We talked about his extended family, his roots, about his sense of African identity, his strong feeling of being a descendant of the Akan people of what is now Ghana but historically one of the great empires of coastal West Africa, the Kingdom of Ashanti. Bernie saw Akan resemblances in family relationships, in the matrilineal way he’d been raised, even in certain religious practices that had persisted in Christian churches in the South. And he said with feeling, “You need God on your side. The church is the center of my life.”

  And I began to understand in a little more detail how in the South the past still mattered, partly because it cast a long shadow, but also because there was so much frustration in the present. The past was easier to understand, more coherent, and it helped to explain the present.

  Gullah, for example. Many people in South Carolina alluded to this black culture that retained its Creole language and traditions on the coast. But Bernie could quote the language. “Kumbayah”—as in the song—was a Gullah expression, meaning “Come by here.” He told me how his mother would use Gullah expressions to teach him. Gullah penetrated everywhere, as a private language, as an enduring culture.

  “My mother used to say, ‘Nu man, yanna weep-dee we dan-ya!’”

  Meaning: “No, man, you’re up there and I’m down here,” a way of emphasizing class distinctions, high and low.

  His mother’s name was Seypio, which was a version of her grandfather’s name, and his was Scipio, as in Scipio Africanus, the great Roman general, conqueror of Hannibal in the Battle of Zama (thus his title, Africanus).

  Talk of slavery and sacrifice led Bernie to explain the conflicting views of the past. As an example, he told me about the African-American History Monument near here in Columbia, on the grounds of the state capitol—how it was years in the planning, and that in all the preliminary discussions it seemed impossible for anyone to agree on how the South Carolina black experience should be depicted on the bronze panels. A proposed panel showing the Ku Klux Klan lynching blacks was shelved. A great fight ensued about images of the Confederate flag. And there was the question of what to do about the stirring figure of Denmark Vesey, a slave who, having won a lottery, had bought his own freedom and in 1822 led a slave revolt in the state. It was the largest insurrection ever organized on behalf of slaves in the United States, involving thousands of plotters, much larger than Nat Turner’s in Virginia. But the plan was betrayed, and Vesey was hanged, along with many others in Charleston. To South Carolina blacks, and to historians generally, Vesey was a man ahead of his time, in the mold of Haiti’s revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture (whom Vesey admired): an enduring image of rebellion, a hero, and an inspiration.

  “That was almost two hundred years ago,” Bernie said. “But they wouldn’t show his face on the monument.” He smiled and said, “See, we got a ways to go.”

  We talked about the coming presidential election, the vexed question of the hated voter ID law. This restrictive law, which posed serious obstacles to voters, was advocated by the South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley, who was the daughter of immigrant Sikh parents. Having immigrated to Canada, the Randhawas had percolated over the border from Vancouver and had worked as schoolteachers in the tiny hamlet of Bamberg (pop. 3,604), the same size as Pandori Ran Singh Village (pop. 3,624), outside Amritsar in the Punjab, where the Randhawas were raised. In Bamberg they had started a successful clothing company, Exotica International, which ceased doing business in 2008. Less than two years later, Nikki (by then married to a white Southerner and converted to Methodism) was governor and her parents were living in luxury in Hilton Head.

  “Odd,” I said, “a second-generation Indian American elected governor of this state.”

  “An awful lot of people didn’t know she was a person of color,” Bernie said. “She looked white in her political posters. She doesn’t have an Indian name. She’s a Christian. She’s a right-wing Tea Party Republican. She hates the unions. And she kept her folks way in the back. Her daddy’s turban would have been a problem for a lot of white voters here.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “It’s really sad,” Bernie said. “How can I help you?”

  I said, “I’d like to see some of the places you’re working to help develop”.

  “Anything special?”

  “The poorest.”

  He nodded and poked some numbers into his phone.

  Route 301: “No One Ever Goes There”

  Go to Allendale via Orangeburg, Bernie had said. But I got a late start, because I wanted to see the African-American History Monument at the statehouse that Bernie had mentioned—and the Confederate flag still flying on the grounds (it had been moved from the capitol dome after decades of objections). On meandering roads past twiggy fields of tufted white, the blown-open cotton bolls brightening the spindly bushes, I came to the town of Walterboro and saw a booth with a signboard that read INFORMATION. Though I now had a map to Allendale, I asked directions, merely so that I could talk to the old woman who supervised the booth and handed out pamphlets to local points of interest: the Verdler House, Bonnie Doone Plantation, the museums and galleries, Frankie’s Fun Park. Or Wally’s Tow Service:

  BLACK OR WHITE

  DAY OR NIGHT

  YOU CALL

  WE HAUL

  “I have worked here for twelve years and no one has ever asked me how to get to Allendale,” she said.

  “That seems unusual.”

  “No,” she said. “No one ever goes there.”

  And once I’d found the right road, Route 301, what she said seemed true. It was a ghost road of astonishing decrepitude—weird to look at, shocking to reflect upon.

  In a lifetime of travel, I had seen very few places to compare with Allendale in its oddity, and approaching the town was just as bizarre. The road, much of it, was a divided highway, two broad side-by-side roads amounting to an old-fashioned turnpike, split by a grassy median, a central reservation much wider than I was used to—wider than many sections of the great north-south interstate, Route 95, which is more like a tunnel than a road for the way it sluices cars in both directions at great speed.

  But this proud highway I was on, a substantial dual carriageway cut through low empty hills, was devoid of traffic: a royal road amid the green landscape and farms so fallen and abandoned they seemed like mere sketches of former habitation. The great rolling road was like a road to nowhere. No other cars on it today, no towns that I could see, no gas stations, no motels, no stores, like a road leading to the end of the world.

  From the 1930s into the late 1960s this highway was the most important road through the South. A well-traveled thoroughfare, Route 301 was once the way from Delaware to Florida, the highway that the earliest Northern drivers took to find sunshine and ease, and that Southerners took to seek work, and a life, in the North.

  It is usual in traveling through the developing world to find roads under construction—wide roads, narrow roads, highways, toll roads, and the clattering machinery, tracked excavators and bulldozers, clawing at the soil and disfiguring the land. It is rare in those places (I am thinking of Africa and India) to find finished roads, in good shape, totally neglected or unused. But throughout the rural South there were such roads, great gleaming highways that seemed to lead nowhere, and this one, Route 301, in this poor midsection of South Carolina, was one of them—startling in its strangeness.

  Approaching the outskirts of Allendale, I had a sight of Doomsday, one of those visions that make the effort of travel worthwhile and proved to
me that my setting out for the South had been an inspired decision. I had no idea that I would find what I saw that day of blue sky and sunshine, a mild breeze in the pines.

  It was a vision of ruin, of decay, of utter emptiness, and it was obvious in the simplest, most recognizable structures—motels, gas stations, restaurants, stores, even a movie theater, all of them abandoned to rot, some of them so thoroughly decayed that all that was left was the great cement slab of the foundation, stained with oil or paint, littered with the splinters of the collapsed building, its rusted sign leaning. Some were brick-faced, others made of cinderblocks, but none of them was well made, and so the impression I had was of devastation, as though a recent war had ravaged the place and destroyed the buildings and killed all the people.

  Here was the corpse of a motel, the Elite—the sign still legible—broken buildings in a wilderness of weeds; and farther down the road, the Sands and the Presidential Inn, collapsed, empty; and the restaurants empty too, one unmistakably the curved roof and distinctive cupola of a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, another just a wreck but with a gigantic sign, its peeling paint promising LOBSTER. And another fractured place with a cracked swimming pool and broken windows, its rusted sign, CRESENT MOTEL, the more pathetic for being misspelled.

  Most of the shops were closed, the only functioning ones owned by Indians. The Art Deco single-screen movie house, once the Carolina Theater, was boarded up. The wide main road was littered. The side streets, lined by shacks and abandoned houses, looked haunted. I had never seen anything quite like it, the ghost town on the ghost highway. I was glad I had come.

  The presence of Indian shopkeepers, the heat, the tall dusty trees, the sight of plowed fields, the ruined motels and abandoned restaurants, the inactivity, a somnolence hanging over the town like a blight—even the intense sunshine was like a sinister aspect of that same blight—all these features made it seem like a town in Zimbabwe. It looked as though the colonizers had come and gone, the settlers had bolted, most of the local people had fled, and the place had fallen on evil days. Lingering at Mr. Patel’s shop, I saw a succession of black customers buying cans of beer and going outside to sit under a tree and drink.

  All this was a first impression, but it was a powerful one. Later, just outside Allendale proper, I saw the campus of the University of South Carolina at Salkehatchie, with eight hundred students, and the old main street, and the handsome courthouse, and a small subdivision of well-kept bungalows. But mostly, and importantly, Allendale, judging from Route 301, was a ruin—poor, neglected, hopeless-looking, a vivid failure.

  Allendale County Alive

  On a back road of sunny, bleak Allendale, in an office tucked inside a mobile unit, resembling a static house trailer and signposted ALLENDALE COUNTY ALIVE, I found Wilbur Cave. Bernie Mazyck had given me his name as someone who was involved in county revitalization, general counseling, and housing improvement.

  After we shook hands, I mentioned the extraordinary weirdness of Route 301.

  “This was a famous road once, the halfway point from up north to Florida or back,” Wilbur said. “Everyone stopped here. And this was one of the busiest towns ever. When I was growing up we could hardly cross the road. I remember we couldn’t cross the road without an adult. All the motels had No Vacancy signs. There were lots of stores—people driving through needed to shop for food or clothes. Lots of garages and repair shops. The town was booming!”

  But there were no cars today, or just a handful. “What happened?”

  “Route Ninety-five happened.”

  And Wilbur explained that in the late 1960s, when the interstate route was plotted, it bypassed Allendale forty miles to the east, and like many other towns on Route 301, Allendale fell into ruin. But just as the great new city rising in the wilderness is an image of American prosperity, a ghost town like Allendale is also a feature of our landscape. Perhaps the most American urban transformation is that very sight—that all ghost towns were once boomtowns.

  “Nowadays, this is as country as it gets,” Wilbur said.

  “Country” was one way of putting it. Another might have been “This is what the world will look like when it ends.”

  Poor Allendale’s nearness to wealthy towns was another surrealistic feature (but that too was an American trait). In South Carolina’s smallest county (also called Allendale, with a population of 12,000), on the Savannah River and the Georgia state line, the town was less than two hours from the mansions and gourmet restaurants of Charleston; it was about the same distance to salubrious Augusta, Georgia, and no more than an hour and a half to Hilton Head, where for more than thirty years the wonks, the wise, the well-heeled, and the sententious gathered every year on Renaissance Weekend to declaim uplifting messages and debate the future of the world. All these luminaries and sages really needed to do was to spend a few days in Allendale County and they would perhaps understand that the theories of Hilton Head denied the realities here: every development problem I have ever witnessed in fifty years of traveling the world existed in Allendale as a persistent agony.

  But as the woman in the information booth had told me, no one goes to Allendale. And this was why Wilbur Cave, seeing his hometown falling to ruin—its very foundations devolving to dust—decided to do something to improve it. Wilbur had been a record-breaking runner in his high school, and after graduation from the University of South Carolina at Columbia, he worked locally and then ran for the state representative’s seat in this district. He was elected and served for six years. He became a strategic planner, and with this experience he joined and reenergized the nonprofit Allendale County Alive, which was committed to helping provide decent housing to local people. The town itself had a population of 4,500, three-quarters of them black, like the county.

  “It’s not just this town that needs help,” Wilbur said. “The whole county is in bad shape. In the 2010 census we are the tenth-poorest county in the United States. And, you know, a lot of the others are Indian reservations.”

  The funding was minimal, an initial budget of $250,000 annually at the outset, but had been decreasing over the years because of cuts and economies and lack of donors. Compared to US-funded housing programs I had seen in Africa and South America, this was a piffling amount. It was, by any measure, a small-scale operation that depended more on ingenuity, innovation, and good will than on money.

  “In 2003, I was the new sheriff in town,” Wilbur said. “I thought this might be a cruise to retirement. How wrong I was!” Then he smiled. “But we persevere.”

  Wilbur Cave was sixty-one but looked ten years younger than that, compact, muscular, still with the build of a running back, and energetic, full of plans. He dressed informally in an open-necked shirt and blue jeans. On the walls of his tiny office in the small unit that served as his headquarters were family photos, upbeat slogans, and graphs showing a steady increase in home ownership in the county.

  Wilbur’s family had lived in the area for many generations. His mother had been a schoolteacher at Allendale County Training School. “The black school,” Wilbur explained. “The white one was Allendale Elementary.”

  The Allendale schools were finally fully integrated in 1972. Whenever someone in the South mentioned a date, I tried to recall where I’d been at the time. Invariably I’d seen myself in a distant place, marveling at the exoticism of it all. In 1972, when Allendale was struggling to emerge from nineteenth-century notions of segregation and separate development, I was in England, planning my Great Railway Bazaar trip, in search of more colorful differences.

  I remarked on how recently social change had come to the South.

  “You have to know where we come from,” Wilbur said. “It’s hard for anyone to understand the South unless they understand history—and by history I mean slavery. History has had more impact here.”

  Without realizing it, only smiling and tapping a ballpoint on the desktop blotter, he sounded like one of the wise admonitory Southern voices in Faulkner, reminding the Nort
herner of the complex past.

  “Take my mother’s family. They were cotton farmers for generations, right here in Allendale County. They had a hundred acres or so. It was a family activity to pick cotton. The children did it, the grandchildren. It was a normal after-school job. I did it, I sure did—we all did it.”

  The small cotton farms, like those belonging to Wilbur’s family, were sold eventually to bigger growers, who introduced mechanical harvesters. That was another reason for the unemployment and the decline in population. But farming was still the mainstay of Allendale County, where forty percent of its people lived below the poverty line.

  “What are the problems?” he said, in answer to my obvious next question. “Drugs—crack cocaine mostly—health, crime, guns, and the school dropout rate, almost fifty percent.”

  There was hardly any work. There were no visitors, as in years past. Once there had been textile factories in Allendale, making cloth and carpets. They’d closed, the manufacturing outsourced to China, though a new textile factory was scheduled to open in a year or so, he said. The local industry was timber, but the lumber mills—there were two in Allendale, turning out planks and utility poles—did not employ many people.

  I was to hear this story all over the rural South, in the ruined towns that had been manufacturing centers, sustained by the making of furniture, or appliances, or roofing materials, or plastic products, the labor-intensive jobs that kept a town ticking over. Companies had come to the South because the labor force was available and willing, wages were low, land was inexpensive, and unions were nonexistent. And so a measure of progress held out the promise of better things, perhaps prosperity. Nowhere in the United States could manufacturing be carried on so cheaply. And that was the case until these manufacturers discovered that however cheap it was to make things in the right-to-work states of the South, it was even cheaper in sweatshop China. The contraction and impoverishment of the South has a great deal to do with the outsourcing of work to China and India, Even the catfish farms—an important income-producing industry all over the rural South—have been put out of business by the exports of fish farmers in Vietnam.