by Paul Theroux
For eighteen years, the Hope Credit Union had been trying to improve the situation in which many people had no access to a financial institution. Its large budget was funded by a combination of private and government agencies. But this was working capital. They needed to double in size to be sustainable, and were now trying to raise twenty million dollars.
“Say they need a loan for a car, and can’t get it,” Bynum said. “If you don’t have a car in these places—rural Arkansas or the Delta—you’ve got a problem. You can’t move, you can’t work, you stay poor. I tell you, some of the communities here are dying on the vine.”
Mississippi was number one in the United States for people who had no bank account. Even where a bank existed, it was a forbidding thing.
“People—the poor,” he said, “don’t feel welcome in a bank. They’re unused to entering a bank. They feel rejected and are very intimidated.”
So what’s the answer? I asked.
“We try to overcome that with the Hope Credit Union,” he said. “In Utica a bank was going to close. It had twenty-three branches. We bought those bank branches and they became Hope Credit Unions. Our focus is business development in the Delta and first-time home buyers. We grant an average of about two hundred mortgages a year.”
He added that thirty percent of the people who open an account have never had a bank account before.
“I took Assistant Treasury Secretary Cyrus Amir-Mokri down from Memphis,” Bynum said. “We passed through Tunica, Mound Bayou, and Clarksdale, and ended up in Utica. Through the Delta. He just sat and looked sad. He said he could not believe such conditions existed in the United States.”
Another of the men at the meeting then spoke up. “It’s no good our telling you that thirty percent of the people in Utica live below the poverty line,” he said. “You have to see for yourself.”
Natchez Gun Show
I went by back roads, past pines, swamps, shacks, the small towns of Lorman and Fayette, a school flying a Confederate flag, and down one road on which for some miles there were large lettered signs with intimidating Bible quotations nailed to roadside trees: “Prepare to Meet Thy God—Amos 4:12” and “He who endures to the end shall be saved—Mark 13:13” and “REPENT”—Mark 6:12.” Finally I arrived at the lovely town of Natchez.
Natchez is dramatically sited on the bluffs above the wide brown Mississippi, facing the cotton fields in flatter Louisiana and the transpontine town of Vidalia. It was my first glimpse of the river on this trip. Though the Mississippi is not the busy thoroughfare it once was, it is impossible for an American to see this great, muddy, slow-moving stream and not be moved, as an Indian is by the Ganges, a Chinese by the Yangtze, an Egyptian by the Nile, an African by the Zambezi, a New Guinean by the Sepik, a Brazilian by the Amazon, an English person by the Thames, a Quebecois by the St. Lawrence, or any citizen by a stream flowing past his feet. I mention these rivers because I’ve seen them myself, and written about them, but as an alien, a romantic voyeur. A river is history made visible, the lifeblood of a nation.
I feel a more profound connection to my own rivers, the Mystic River in Medford, flowing mystically into Boston Harbor and the sea, which filled my head with fantasies of travel and made me want to leave my hometown. The Mississippi meant everything to me, as a symbol, as a source of discovery and literary inspiration. It is the “strong brown god” of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Dry Salvages”; the “great river road” that enabled Lewis and Clark to travel to the Northwest; the military access route for Union soldiers to outflank the Confederates and lay siege to their towns; the river of Huck Finn, who’s got to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest”; a vision of liberation and the central artery of our country; and a symbol of self-belief, as Eliot, the poet from St. Louis, declared: “The river is within us.”
The history of the river is like a metaphor for the South: the level is dropping, river traffic has slowed, riverside commerce has diminished, and the river towns and villages are struggling. The meretricious hotels and floating casinos represent the last gasp of commerce, gambling on riverboats that look unseaworthy and stay moored in the mud in Mississippi towns such as Natchez.
Natchez was once a French stronghold, Fort Rosalie, built with the forced labor of the Natchez Indians, whom the French had subdued in 1716. But when, thirteen years later, the Natchez regrouped, rose up again, and took control of the fort (and of course their own land), they were savaged so badly by the French and some loyal Choctaws that the Natchez as a people were exterminated. In the mid-1700s their name was given to the town. All that remained of the people was this word.1
A small, well-preserved city (because unlike defiant, besieged Vicksburg, Natchez surrendered to the Union Army and remained unburned); a city rich in history and river lore and architectural marvels—old ornate mansions, historic houses, churches, and quaint arcades; its downtown lined with restaurants; none of these metropolitan attributes held much interest for me. Here is a shrewd observation by Charles Shelton Aiken, writing about the Southern landscape and Faulkner: “One of the grandest creations of the New South was a mythical concept of an Old South.” What people take to be an epoch was a matter of mere decades of pretension and an exercise in irrational nostalgia.
As in Charleston, South Carolina, the cultural event that got my attention was the Gun and Knife Expo I’d seen advertised the previous week, to be held at the Natchez Convention Center, in the middle of town. It was the main event in Natchez that weekend, and the arena was bigger than the one in Charleston. The same formalities at the entrance: eight dollars per adult, one dollar for children six to ten years of age, no loaded guns on the premises, but it was okay to carry them if they were secured with a plastic tie.
“Mississippi is the best state for gun laws,” one man said to me soon after I entered. We were at the coffee and donut 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?”
“Ever been to Arizona?” another man said. His beard and bib overalls were sprinkled with powdered sugar from the donut he held close to his face. “I was in a gun shop in Arizona. Man says, ‘You interested in a gun?’ There was a state trooper by the gun case. Trooper says, ‘If you don’t have a gun, I’ll buy you one.’ Ha!”
The Natchez show was almost identical to the one in Charleston and others I would see later in Southaven, in Laurel, in Jackson. At most of the shows I found the same people: the enormously fat man who sold ammo and sat among his crates and boxes; the handcrafted-knife man from Hot Coffee; the Taser stall; the Nazi memorabilia man, who was a New Zealander living in the middle of Mississippi; the old bearded man selling an assortment of his own leather holsters, who told me at one show that he always traveled with fifteen of his favorite guns (“This is my two-shot over-and-under, this is my Beretta nine millimeter”) and at another show said, “That’s my Judge. Forty-five caliber. That’s for snakes—lots of cottonmouths in the country where we live.”
Some men, too poor to hire a table, wandered the floor, conspicuously carrying a gun, looking like hunters, and in a way they were, hunting for a buyer, hoping to sell it.
“Can I have a look at that?”
“Sure thing. Aim it over there. Careful. It’s single-action. Don’t dry-fire it, hear.”
One private seller had a thirty-year-old weapon, made of wood and stainless steel, a Sturm, Ruger .223-caliber Mini-14 assault rifle with a folding stock, the sort you see being carried by sharpshooters and conspirators in plots to overthrow wicked dictatorships.
“This is my baby,” the man said, handing it to me. “I hate to sell it, but I have to. It’s elegant, it’s reliable, never jams. And it’s pre-ban. They don’t make them now. They’ll never make them again.”
“Seems very well made.”
“She’s a beauty. Not many of them around and none as nice. It’s yours for twelve hundred cash. Private sale. Just take care of my baby.”
I heft
ed the gun. It gleamed in my hands in an oddly sculptural way. I am not a gun nut, but as a Boy Scout, Troop 24 in Medford, Mass., I had a Mossburg .22, and though I have never killed an animal for sport, I have owned some sort of target-practice firearm ever since. This rifle tempted me to the point where I felt I should level with the seller.
“By the way, I’m from Massachusetts.”
His face fell. He sighed, took the gun from me with meaty hands, and folded the stock flat, so that now it looked like a superior sort of pistol. “I wish you hadn’t told me that.”
“Oh, well.”
“And how do I know you’re not trying to set me up?”
“I’m not trying to set you up.”
“You’re not from around here.”
“Right. I’m from up north. I’m just traveling—”
“The government’s all over the place!” Now the man was talking to some bystanders who had watched me yanking the slider and cocking the rifle. “They’re trying to shut us down!”
As I walked away, I heard him mutter, “God damn,” not at me but at regulation generally—authority, the background checkers and inspectors and paper chewers, the government, Yankees.
That was when I began to understand the mood of the gun show. It was not about guns. Not about ammo, not about knives. It was not about shooting lead into perceived enemies. The mood was apparent in the way these men walked and spoke: they felt beleaguered, weakened, their backs to the wall. How old was this feeling? It was as old as the South, perhaps, for all they talked about was the Civil War, and they were oppressed by that and everything that had happened since, a persistent memory of defeat.
For the gun-show-goers the Civil War battles might have happened yesterday. Perhaps that’s how it is with defeats, how they rankle, how the bitterness of humiliation never subsides. A person snubbed in childhood often carries the hurt through a whole life. The civil rights movement was another defeat for these Southerners who were so sensitized to intruders and gloaters and carpetbaggers, and even more so to outsiders who did not remember the humiliations of the Civil War. The passing of the plantation was another failure, as was the rise of opportunistic politicians, the outsourcing of local industries, the sinking of catfish farms, the plunge in manufacturing, and now this miserable economy in which there was so little work and so little spare money that people went to gun shows just to look and yearn for a decent weapon that they’d never be able to buy, an illusion of protection, a symbol of independence.
Over this history of failure was the scowling, punitive shadow of the federal government, hovering like a predator. “They’re fixing to change this whole bidniss,” as the man at the Charleston gun show had said—to take away the last vestige of Southern manhood. The general attitude wasn’t one of defiance; what I sensed was the frustrated scowl and shallow breathing of people who felt lost and trifled with. The gun show was the one place where they could be themselves, like a clubhouse with strict admission and no windows. Yet the atmosphere was unmistakable: it was airless, self-conscious, rueful, watchful, and impoverished. Even putting on a brave face, the gun-show people radiated the feeling that throughout their history they had been beaten by outsiders and made to conform to laws that had no precedent and half the time caused more problems and required more laws—their world turned upside down.
The gun show wasn’t about guns and gun totin’. It was about the self-esteem of men—white men mainly, the dominant ethnic group of the South, animated by a sense of grievance (“the heart of the Southern identity,” according to one shrewd historian)—who felt defeated and still persecuted, conspired against by hostile outside forces, making a symbolic last stand.
Mrs. Robin Scott: “To Save My Children”
You hear talk of people fleeing the South, and some do. But I found many instances of the South as a refuge. I met a number of people who had fled the North for the South, for safety, for peace, for the old ways, returning to family, in retirement. A waiter taking a break outside a Mississippi restaurant said to me, “I’m from Detroit. My father got murdered there—he owned a little liquor store, the Pavilion. A man came to rob him. When my father gave him the money, the man shot him in the leg—femoral artery. He tried to drive himself to the hospital but he bled to death on the way. My mother had a breakdown because of it, so I took her here—she’s got some kinfolk. It’s better here, safer, happier, and my mother’s improving day by day. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back north again.”
I heard something similar at a laundromat in Natchez, doing my weekly wash. The efficient and friendly woman in charge changed some bills into quarters for the machines, sold me a cup of soap powder, and with a little encouragement told me her story.
Her name was Robin Scott, in her middle fifties, a brave woman with a powerful mothering instinct. She said, “I came here from Chicago to save my children from being killed by gangs. So many street gangs there—the Latin Kings, La Raza, Latin Eagles, the Popes, the Folk Nation, and more. At first where I lived was okay, the Garfield section. Then, around the late eighties, early nineties, the Four Corner gang and the BGs—Black Gangsters too—discovered crack cocaine and heroin. Using it, selling it, fighting about it. There was always shooting. I didn’t want to stay there and bury my children.
“I said, Gotta get out of here. So I quit my job and rented a U-Haul and came down here where I had some family. I always had family in the South. Growing up in Chicago, we used to visit my family in North Carolina, a place in Halifax County near Rocky Mount.”
I knew Rocky Mount from my recent drives, a pleasant place east of Raleigh, off I-95, where I sometimes stopped for a meal. It is also the birthplace of Thelonious Monk.
“I had good memories of Rocky Mount,” Robin said. “It was country—so different from the Chicago streets. And my mother had a lot of family here in Natchez. So I knew the South was where I could save my kids. My first jobs here was all kinds. I worked at the casino dealing blackjack, but after a time I got rheumatoid arthritis. It’s an autoimmune disease. It affected my hands, my joints, and my walking. It affected my marriage. My husband said, ‘I don’t want a cripple,’ so he left me.
“Antibiotics are terrible for me, the way they affect me. I just can’t get sick. I kept working, though, and I recovered from the rheumatoid arthritis, and I raised my kids. I got two girls, Melody and Courtney. Courtney’s a bank manager. My boys are Anthony—the oldest, he’s an electrician—and the twins, Robert and Joseph. They’re twenty-one, at the University of Southern Mississippi. I’m proud of my kids. The twins used to talk to each other in their sleep!
“Natchez is a friendly place. I’m real glad I came. It wasn’t easy. It’s not easy now—the work situation is hard, but I manage. The man who owns this laundromat is a good man.
“I got so much family here. My grandmother was a Christmas—Mary Christmas. Her brother was Joseph. We called my grandmother Big Momma and my grandfather Big Daddy. I laughed when I saw that movie Big Momma’s House.
“Mary Christmas was born on a plantation near Sibley. They were from families of sharecroppers. My grandfather was Jesse James Christmas. He passed, but when he was alive he used to get mail from a man in Vidalia across the river, by accident, also called Jesse James Christmas. So he’d save ’em up and then he’d go across the river to give the letters that were sent to him by mistake. That other Jesse James Christmas was a white man.”
I mentioned Faulkner’s Light in August and Joe Christmas, and how I’d always found the name faintly preposterous, heavy with symbolism. I told her the plot of the novel, and how the mysterious Joe Christmas, an orphan and bootlegger of black ancestry, passes for white.
In the novel, the foreman at the planing mill in Jefferson, speaking of the stranger, says, “His name is Christmas.”
“His name is what?” one said.
“Christmas.”
“Is he a foreigner?”
“Did you ever hear of a white man named Christmas?” the foreman said.
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“I never heard of nobody a-tall named it,” the other said.
And that was the first time Byron remembered that he had ever thought how a man’s name, which is supposed to be just the sound for who he is, can be somehow an augur of what he will do, if other men can only read the meaning in time.
Before I could continue with the tale of Lena Grove and her child and the Christian theme, Robin broke in.
“Joe Christmas is my uncle,” she said. “He’s ninety-two. He lives in a care home in Natchez. It’s a common name in these parts.”
The Delta: The Round Table
In my ignorance, I had believed the Delta to be solely the low-lying estuary of the Mississippi River, round about and south of New Orleans, the river delta of the maps. But it isn’t so simple. The Delta is the entire alluvial sprawl that stretches northward of that mud in Louisiana, the floodplain beyond Natchez, emphatically flat above Vicksburg, almost the whole of a bulge of western Mississippi, enclosed in the east by the Yazoo River, all the way to Memphis. It is a definite route, as well; it is Highway 61.
Continuing up that highway, past Fayette and Lorman again, I swung through Port Gibson, a town boasting that at least one road “looks much as it did in 1863,” and some buildings too—General Grant spared it, saying the town was “too beautiful to burn.” This was not the case with Vicksburg, just up the road, like Natchez a town on a bluff, but unlike Natchez it had been besieged, shelled constantly from Union barges on the river, in an assault that lasted forty days. And the siege ended in a significant defeat, a humiliating surrender.
