Deep South

by Paul Theroux

  TRAYMON

  DAJUAN

  JOLANDRIA

  DAVID

  TASHANTI

  DEVONTAE

  TREVION

  KEONTAE

  DE TYRICK

  NEKENDRICK

  KESHAWN

  ARIANNA

  SKILAH

  ALEXIA

  KIAJIAN

  URIYAH

  RONELL

  TIMIYAH

  TITIANA

  QUINTARIO

  JADA

  SELENA

  SONIJA

  JARMEL

  Mumbling at the window the litany of names to myself, I was reminded of some lines of the schoolteacher narrator in Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book: “Dazzling, in the flash of this last moment’s reason, I question myself eagerly. Is this amusia, aphasia, agraphia, alexia, aboulia? It is life.”

  “Our Own Matlock”

  Another day, walking down Main Street in Greensboro with Mary Hodge, she saw a man crossing the street. She said, “Here comes our own Matlock.”

  A tousled-haired man with a folder of papers under his arm was headed to the Greensboro courthouse, a glorious building of the colonnaded sort I saw all over the South, often the only building in town with a claim to the majestic, yet—to set this majesty in context—nearly always representing a history of injustice.

  The man paused to say hello. We chatted awhile.

  “How’s business?” I asked, and got an unexpectedly long answer.

  “Business is fine,” he said. “But I don’t care about money. The only time I ever consider it is when I have a debt. I pay it and then I go on with my life. What do you do with money otherwise? Fella comes to me and says, ‘Have I got a deal for you! You just put some money in and I’ll do the rest, and I know it’s going to turn out good. What do you say, counselor?’

  “‘You’re not going to like what I’m fixin’ to tell you,’ I said to him. ‘The only thing worse than losing that money would be winning the money and having a big payoff. What would I do with it? I’d just give it away.’

  “He didn’t like what I said. When my son died I had an insurance policy on his life. The insurance company gave me the money. Quite a lot of money. I didn’t need it. I didn’t want it. I gave it away. Hear? I gave it away.”

  With that, he crossed the lawn to the courthouse, clawing at his hair and seemingly deep in thought.

  “It was sad,” Mary said. “A boating accident.”

  Reverend Eugene Lyles, Barber

  Around the corner from Main Street, tucked into a brick building he’d financed himself, was Gene’s, the barbershop of Reverend Eugene Lyles. He was seventy-nine but looked much younger, and not just physically fit but scholarly too. He was seated at a small table peering at his Bible, opened to the Acts of the Apostles, while awaiting his next customer. In addition to his barbershop, Reverend Lyles had his own church, the Mars Hill Missionary Baptist Church, just south of town. Next door to the barbershop was Reverend Lyles’s own soul food diner, nameless except for the simple sign DINER out front.

  I asked him for a haircut. Marking the page in his Bible with a tattered ribbon and shutting it, he went to the shelf beneath the big mirror and plucked his comb and scissors out of a jar of disinfectant. I climbed into one of the two barber chairs and he tied a bib around my neck.

  In answer to my obvious first question, he said, “When I was a boy I bought me a pair of clippers. I cut my brother’s hair. Well, I got ten boy siblings and three girl siblings—fourteen of us. One mother. I kept cutting hair. I started this business sixty years ago, cutting hair all that time. And I got the restaurant, and I got my church. Yes, I am busy.”

  “Tell me a little about Greensboro,” I said.

  He sighed, then took a deep breath before he spoke. “There are good people in Greensboro,” he said. “But the white core is rooted in the status quo. And they have a way of indoctrinating their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. You’ve heard the words ‘separate but equal’? That means separate, not equal.”

  “But that changed, didn’t it?”

  “The school is separate yet,” he said, snipping away at my hair. “When it was integrated the whites started a private school, Southern Academy. There’s somewhere above a hundred there, all white.” He laughed, put comb and scissors down, and spun his glasses off to polish them with a tissue. “History is alive and well here.”

  He sat in the other chair and said, “Very little work here requires marketable skills. There’s no more sharecroppers. The military is a way out—lots of boys here join the army.”

  “Anyone in your family join the army?”

  “Brother Benny,” he said. “I have three other brothers who integrated the white school. This was in the late 1970s. There were no other black students. The law was on their side—no one else was on their side—but the law was distant. They were Amos, Daniel, and Frank, the first guys—and it was very hard. They had fistfights. The white kids would git ’em. Throw bricks at ’em. Call ’em names. My brothers wouldn’t stand for it. They would respond.”

  Reverend Lyles sighed and got out of his chair and began to sweep the cuttings of hair on the floor at my feet, still talking.

  “There was little fear in those days and no one helped them. Not the police. Not the teachers. The teachers were on the side of the enforcers.”

  “Was it like that for you?”

  “I was older. 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. Whites say, ‘All blacks look alike.’ I thought all whites looked alike. I didn’t know any whites until the sixties, when I was in my thirties.”

  I told him that there were many Northerners, even today, who had no black friends and who did not know any blacks. He said that was news to him, and returned in his talk to his childhood.

  “Most of the land in Cedarville was owned by blacks,” he said, saying that he was speaking of the 1930s and ’40s. “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.”

  “Was your father one of those field hands?”

  “My father was a World War One vet,” Reverend Lyles said, speaking slowly in his methodical way. “It happened like this. 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. He bought some land. 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.”

  Now that the floor was swept and the comb and scissors put away, he approached me and turned the barber chair so that I faced the mirror. “How’s that?”

  We went next door to the diner. I ordered baked chicken, collard greens, and 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 in an imploring voice. I reflected on his dignity, the nobility of his life, the integrity of his experience.

  After lunch, he said, “Come back soon. We be waiting for you. I got some stories you won’t believe.”

  The Klan in Philadelphia

  I drifted west through the Black Belt via Demopolis, Alabama, and Meridian, Mississippi, past Collinsville, where I bought a drink at the Piggly Wiggly, noted Chunky Duffee Road and the crossroads at tidy Tucker, and drove toward Philadelphia, a place that had been on my mind for years.

  In June 1964, near this small farming town, three civil rights workers were murdered by a lynch mob of the local Klan. The portion of Highway 19 that I would travel on was named the
Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Memorial Highway, for those activists who’d been killed during the Freedom Summer—a season of voter registration and protest, of running battles and bloodshed. I had missed that tragic time. I drove on this highway almost fifty years later in a spirit of catching up on unfinished business, with a suggestion of atonement, because in that summer I had been so far away, in Nyasaland, preparing to celebrate the independence of Malawi.

  Philadelphia had earned another, later footnote in political history. In August 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan flew there to give the first speech of his campaign, at Philadelphia’s Neshoba County Fair. It seems a wildly out-of-the-way place to kick off a presidential campaign: a small Mississippi town with one distinction in the history books, the site of a triple murder provoked by white supremacists.

  But that was precisely why Reagan was there. He knew what he was doing, making a calculated, ingratiating speech to a large crowd at a county fair, and to white Southern voters in general, reminding them where he stood on the issue of civil rights. He stood squarely with the good old boys and the Klansmen.

  He began by mildly mocking his opponent, Jimmy Carter, then he talked about the economy, and then he got to the point. He said, “I believe in states’ rights, and I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level.”

  He then rubbished the role of the federal government in enacting laws that affected citizens at the state level. Speaking in a town that was the headquarters of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan, he was saying: I’m on your side. Race was a factor in the 1980 election, which Reagan won.

  Reagan was “tapping out the code,” as the New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote many years later. Herbert added a detailed list of Reagan’s opposition to civil rights measures while he was president: “He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.”

  Philadelphia, like many towns in Mississippi, had an old, decaying town center of dusty streets and defunct and picturesque stores, surrounded on a bypass road by a scattering of shopping malls, fast food outlets, the usual Walmart, pawnshops, and gun retailers. It was the county seat, altogether a rather bleak place, much bleaker and nakeder in the glare of noon. On the sunny day that I spent walking its streets I was reminded that Philadelphia is still the headquarters of the Mississippi Klan. I easily found the headquarters and the free leaflets.

  “The Original Knights of America, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is a political activist organization,” one of the leaflets explained. “We follow in the footsteps of our ancestors who were involved in the political process. It’s a Klansman’s responsibility to register to vote, campaign, and vote for conservative pro white candidates who will put America first and defend our nation’s borders.” On another page: “We the Ku Klux Klan have been fighting for the White Christian Race for over 150 years. We are the longest lasting and most respected White Civil Rights organization on Earth. We are no compromise and that’s why we continue to be a feared organization.”

  “Feared” was indisputable, “most respected” was questionable, but it was obvious the KKK was a defiant group and, judging from the heavy inventory in the gun stores in Philadelphia, well armed. I was not there to reform anyone but only to listen.

  “The Ku Klux Klan is . . . more than the embodiment of a tradition,” Frank Tannenbaum wrote in an early and subtle analysis of the South’s hidden impulses, Darker Phases of the South (1924). Tannenbaum was an Austrian-born criminologist, sociologist, Columbia University professor, and political radical who, as a soldier in the US Army stationed in the South, looked closely at the Klan. “[The Klan] expresses a deep-rooted social habit—a habit of ready violence in defense of a threatened social status.” He explained the appeal, the grip, the danger of the Klan: “It seizes upon the monotony of a small town and gives it daily drama. It takes him who lived an uneventful life, one who is nobody in particular, and makes something of him. It gives him a purpose; makes him a soldier in a cause. The very existence of the Ku Klux Klan is proof of emotional infanthood. It would not be possible in a community where the people lived full, interesting, varied lives.”

  The Klan originated in the mid-nineteenth century, not with the poor whites but with the planter class, who used its terror to keep blacks working in the fields, to regulate labor, and to “perpetuate the South’s repressive plantation system,” in the view of the social historian Jonathan M. Wiener, in Social Origins of the New South (1978). But other historians have described how, after a period of relative inactivity, the Klan was revived at the end of World War One, growing rapidly after 1920, spreading north to Illinois and Iowa, because of the arrival there of new migrants, including Italians and Jews, whose religions the Klan abominated.

  The Klan movement—its members convinced it was a stabilizing force—percolated through the classes of whites until it became a form of fantasy and “child’s play” for the poorest whites, who had little else to animate them. Tannenbaum speaks about the double life of a Klansman, an ordinary drudge during the day and a crusader at night, in secret, with robes and hoods and a fiery cross and arcane rituals. “Then there is the opportunity to pry into other people’s lives as a sacred duty.”

  On a maze of rivers and creeks in the wooded northern outskirts of Philadelphia, I found the Choctaw Native American reservation, marked by a large casino and two hotels. As the Pearl River Resort employed many from the tribe, I made a point of looking for some Choctaws to tell me about the land they had been allotted here, and how this gambling enterprise had improved it.

  Without much prodding from me, one of the first men I spoke to mentioned, with a nervous laugh, how the nearby town of Philadelphia was “something else.”

  “Something else in a good sense?”

  “Something else in a Klan sense,” he said.

  He was a solidly built Choctaw man of about thirty, with slicked-back dark hair and an olive complexion. He worked in middle management in one of the hotels. He happened to be in the lobby, and I asked him directions, and then he asked me where I was from. This led to the ambiguous remark about Philadelphia. Glancing around at the other people nearby, he walked me outside, still looking left and right but smiling the whole time. His smile never left his face, and it became brighter as he spoke, as though to fool anyone who saw him talking to me.

  “There’s plenty of them around here,” he said with his mirthless grin. “I went to school with them. They come here all the time.”

  “So you know who they are.”

  “Everyone knows who they are,” he said, and then fell silent. Three men in old clothes passed us, with the customary Southern greeting, pleasantries and nods.

  “Them?” I asked.

  “Could be,” he said, and, still smiling, “It’s not funny.” He was very nervous now; he seemed giddy with apprehension. “Look, I can’t talk anymore, but take my word for it.”

  Last Days on Gum Street

  Larry Franey, a man of about sixty with a pearl-handled, nickel-plated .38 in a holster on his hip, was leaning against a porch post on Gum Street in Philadelphia, fretting. I walked by and said hello. We talked about guns for a while. Then he told me what he had on his mind.

  “I reckon we’re setting on Revelation—book of Revelation—with this election.” The presidential election was two weeks away. “And the last election too. That something bad is coming. That God is behind Obama, that God put him in place to show the End is nigh. We are facing Tribulation. You cain’t see it, but it’s there—most of it out of sight, like a great trail of dominoes, and pretty soon they’ll start
to fall here and they’ll keep dropping and we’ll see where they are, afallin’ from far off. We are facing the End, like it says in Revelation. Pacifically, the Mark of the Beast, the Scripture that says, ‘There will be one world.’ That’s where it’s all leading. China’s gonna call in their debt, all the money we owe them, and then it will be over, sure enough. We’ll be a Third World country, with China the only real country in the world, foretold in Revelation. We will be finished. It will be over.”

  “Is China mentioned in Revelation, Larry?”

  Larry quoted: “‘And they worshiped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?”’”

  “The dragon is China?”

  “You said it.” He rested his right hand on his pistol. “I know people who are stockpiling guns and food, gold and water, and all the necessaries. But it won’t do them any good. We won’t have a chance.”

  Bank Deserts

  I stopped for the night at the Choctaw reservation’s casino and resort, and the next day drove by way of Carthage to Jackson, in time for lunch with some housing development people.

  In Jackson, a city of black paradoxes and white flight and stifling grandeur, with an unavoidable downtown ghetto and back streets of beautiful homes, the housing people encouraged me to look at the Delta, where they were hoping to help create some sort of financial stability.

  “There are bank deserts in the Delta, and many other places,” Bill Bynum, the CEO of the Hope Credit Union, told me. “Communities with no financial institutions. They closed, they went bankrupt, they moved. We buy some of them and help revitalize the community.”

  “Bank deserts” was an expression I had never heard before, not even in the wider world of acknowledged misery. In the small towns of Uganda and Kenya there was always a Barclays bank or a National and Grindlays. Some of the most unprepossessing towns in India had half a dozen banks or lending institutions. I had seen banks at the edge of Fijian cane fields and in the rural towns of Vietnam and the rice-growing hamlets of Thailand. The idea that there were communities in the United States where banks had departed and none now existed—in rural parts of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana—was news to me.