by Paul Theroux
The siege was still a memory. I joined eight strangers for lunch at the family-style Round Table at the Walnut Hills Restaurant in Vicksburg. Anyone at all could sit at the Round Table, among strangers or friends, and eat together. This bungalow on a side street had been recommended for its home cooking. Introducing myself, I said where I’d come from.
“Set yourself down,” one man said.
But an older woman muttered in a resentful way, “You know what you did to us?”
The memory had become a taunt. The others at the table, all of them local, and most of them strangers to each other, though chatting amiably, went silent, waiting for my reply. They knew she was referring to the long siege of Vicksburg by the Union Army in 1864.
By then I’d toured the town of Vicksburg, with its lovely antebellum houses and landmarks of the war; the battlefield took up most of the town, and I heard about the suffering. “This whole city is a grave,” Natasha Trethewey writes in her poem “Pilgrimage,” about a visit to the place. So I didn’t take the woman’s accusation lightly. I said, as though to a cranky child, “I personally did not do anything to you. The South seceded. The North responded. All’s well that ends well.”
“You starved us,” the woman said. “You made us eat rats.”
This sort of response—sometimes heartfelt, sometimes a bitter joke, sometimes spoken with defiant nostalgia—is so commonly uttered in the South, always by whites, to a Northern visitor, that I learned not to say, “That was a hundred and fifty years ago,” but instead listened with sympathy, because conquered people feel helpless, and the proof of this is the monotony of their complaint. Their nagging on this point, ancient to me but fresh as today in their minds, gives the North—of which I was the embodiment that morning—a fiendish magnitude.
So I commiserated, and asked some other questions. For example (I suggested), if the South had won the war, what would the national boundary of the Confederacy look like, and where would it end? How would we trade? Would the South have endured and still be backward-looking, with slaves and an aristocracy and a standing gray-uniformed army? How would that army have responded to international events, like the Spanish-American War and the Great War? And, assuming Hawaii had become a Union territory, how would the Confederate South have reacted to the bombing of Pearl Harbor?
Yet logic seldom overcomes the feelings of profound loss, or sentiment, or wounded pride. Much of the South still hurts because a great part of the South is still poor; and the air of defeat that I sensed keenly at gun shows was like a reminder of the Civil War—the losses, the deaths, the gratuitous burnings, the surrender. The sense, too, or the delusion, that a golden age had ended with the war—of ease, of mansions, of slavery—when what had happened was that the vigor of the South had been exhausted in its failed bid to be separate, turning it upside down and impoverishing it, making it a bitter place of tombstones and memorials and ruins.
“The South was created by the need to protect a peculiar institution from threats originating outside the region,” the Southern historian Sheldon Hackney writes in his essay “Southern Violence” (1969). Consequently, “the Southern identity has been linked from the first to a siege mentality.” Being Southern, he says, “involves a feeling of persecution at times, and a sense of being a passive, insignificant object of alien or external forces.” Among these forces he lists abolitionists, the Union Army, carpetbaggers, Wall Street, civil rights agitators, the federal government, feminism, socialism, trade unionism, Darwinism, communism, atheism, daylight saving time, “and other by-products of modernity.” And writers like me, nature’s own subversives.
I often reflected that in the heart of Thomaston, Maine, under the tall maples and broad oaks, a Civil War soldier stands brooding on a granite block, and under him on the plinth, the inscription, To the Memory of Soldiers and Sailors 1861–1865, and One Country—One Flag. The 20th Maine Regiment, under the command of Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, in a heroic and decisive downhill bayonet charge against thousands of Confederates in the Battle of Little Round Top, helped turned the tide at Gettysburg. There are more than 150 such Civil War memorials in Maine towns, and a similar number in Massachusetts.
Virtually every community of any size in New England has a war memorial. One of the oldest, erected in 1866, is the stark obelisk that stands on the green in Centerville, on Cape Cod, the four sides of the base listing the names of dead soldiers—this tiny seaside fishing village, just a few hundred souls then, lost thirty-one men in the Civil War. My town of Sandwich on the Cape, with a population of 4,500 in 1861, sent 240 of its young men to that war. Fifty-four of them were killed and many wounded. One of the Sandwich veterans was a black man, Joseph Wilson, a freed slave, who fought with the 54th Massachusetts Regiment (the first to have black soldiers) at the siege of Vicksburg, and found his way back to Cape Cod after the war, to tell the tale.
But there is hardly a person today in Thomaston, Centerville, Sandwich, or elsewhere in New England who will mention that war, or even draw a visitor’s attention to the melancholy memorials on the village greens.
After the woman had vented her feelings, I said something of this, and quoted the Chinese sage Lieh Tzu: “The reputation of a general is made on the corpses of ten thousand men.”
When a Mexican in Charles Portis’s novel Gringos complains that the Yanquis took half his country in 1848, the narrator, Jimmy Burns, says, “They took all of mine in 1865. We can’t keep moping over it.”
A younger woman said, “I was up north once. They talk a lot about the Revolutionary War up there. We never mention it here.”
“War is hell,” I said, and became acutely aware of the general I was quoting. I was glad when the conversation turned to food, and antiques, and the weather.
We all ate together. That was a tradition of the Walnut Hills Round Table. There was room for a dozen people around the big table. Anyone could sit down, and the food was served buffet style on a lazy Susan: bowls of fried chicken, bowls of stew and potatoes, rice and gravy, platters of fried fish, bowls of beans and collard greens. The turntable meant that a degree of consideration had to be observed toward your fellow diners. And as I had learned in my travels elsewhere, eating together is an occasion that humans have made into a peacemaking ritual; sharing food is sharing friendship, and so the talk of war subsided, and we spoke of the news of the day.
Unemployment was a topic. “Jobs are scarce,” someone said.
One of the diners was a man whose business had been selling farm machinery. He was retired now. He said, “Mechanization has taken away all the jobs. I sold cotton pickers. The early ones only picked one row at a time, but even so, they did the work of forty men. These days they can do six rows, your spindle picker. Some can do twelve rows. How can any field hand compete with that?”
“And tell them what they cost,” his wife said.
“Half a million dollars, some of ’em. Some a lot more.”
“That’s why no one’s working here.”
The woman who had said “You made us eat rats” asked me if I’d traveled outside the United States. I said yes, and I recognized this question as a cue for me to respond by returning it, asking about her European travels, because a person—and especially a traveler—asks a question in order to give information and state an opinion. “Ever been to Bhutan?” means “I have been to Bhutan and I would enjoy telling you about my trip for the next hour or so.”
“I’ve been over there,” the woman said. “Paris. London.”
“What was it like?” one of the younger women inquired with enthusiasm.
“Hated it. It was nothing.” The woman made a face. “America’s lots better.”
Delta Autumn
When I told a shopkeeper in Vicksburg that I was headed up Highway 61, he said to me, “Make sure you got a full belly and a full tank of gas. Don’t stop on any account,” which made me smile, because it was the sort of thing I’d heard all the time on the back roads of East and Central Africa: Keep on
going, it’s dangerous to stop, there’s some hungry people on that road, they want what you have, and if you hit someone they’ll snatch you and make life hell for you. But in this case it was the Blues Highway, the great river road.
“Soon now they would enter the Delta,” runs the first line of Faulkner’s story “Delta Autumn,” from Go Down, Moses. It continues, “The last hill, at the foot of which the rich unbroken alluvial flatness began as the sea began at the base of its cliffs.” This story, set in 1940, is a memory of deer hunting, an account of the passing of generations, of present events and past history—the reality of the war in Europe, mentions of Hitler and the intrusions of modernity, neon signs, big cotton gins, locomotives, “countless shining this-year’s automobiles,” the erosion and disappearance of the wilderness, the shrinking of hunting land, mentions of “Negroes” who worked the land. Near the remote hunting camp, the old Delta remains as deep woods and “the tall tremendous soaring of oak and gum and ash and hickory which had run to no axe save the hunter’s.”
Along with the philosophical musing about hunting by the patriarch Ike McCaslin, who is pessimistic about the future, there is an impasse at the center of the tale regarding race, a love story. This is the alliance between one of the hunters, Carothers (“Roth”), and a nameless light-skinned black woman, who is the mother of his child. She lives near the camp and shows up with their child, intending to see him. But he has risen early to hunt—to hide, it seems—and has guiltily left some money with Ike for him to hand over to her. As in much of Faulkner there is a great deal of genealogy and mingled blood behind this meeting, but in essence it represents the two branches of the McCaslin family, white and black, converging in the story.
Ike gives the woman the money and tells her to marry “a man in your own race.” Justifiably indignant, because he has not considered the possibility that Roth and she were in love, she delivers the best line in the story. “Old man,” she says, “have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you don’t remember anything you ever knew about love?”
As she is taken away—to Leland, to board the train north to a new life—Ike regrets the change in the Delta, the destruction of the wilderness: “deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations.” And in the present decline of the Delta he sees a much worse future: bankruptcy, miscegenation, people living “like animals.”
Fiction often highlights a landscape and suggests a future, but fiction can be misleading. A good reason to travel is to put fiction in context. For Ike, the Delta was being destroyed by big money, intermarriage, and intensive farming—in a word, by Yankee culture, something Faulkner seems to have detested. The deforestation that Ike laments was occurring in the period when Faulkner wrote the story, and the tree cutting continued, the cotton fields sprawling farther to the margins of the swamps and backwaters, much as the landscape looks today. Ike (seeming to speak for Faulkner) predicts a conflict of races, ambitions, and commercial interests. What happened was simpler and more devastating: mechanization put field workers off the land and left them unemployed.
“When I was a boy, in the later 1940s and 1950s, we used to get up before dawn,” a man named Will Thompson told me later, in Georgia. “This was in Jackson. A big truck picked us up and drove us in the darkness to the Delta, and we worked all day. I was just a kid, so young I couldn’t pick any cotton at first. I was the water boy, going up and down the rows with a bucket and a dipper. After dark we were driven back to Jackson.”
After high school, Will joined the army and served in Vietnam.
“One of my buddies was killed, and I was sent back to Mississippi to escort the body. This was 1968, that terrible year. We drove through those cotton fields from Memphis. It all came back. Soon as I got to Jackson I said to myself, ‘I’m never going to accept being a second-class citizen ever again.’”
Many blacks in the Delta said the same thing; it was something Faulkner—and Ike McCaslin—had not foreseen: desertion.
In this Delta autumn of my trip, the countryside was beautiful—bottomland sloping toward the river looking moist and fertile, groves of oaks and gum trees and cypresses (Cypress Street was the old name of this southern stretch of Highway 61)—and I could sense the river beyond the trees from the clouds of insects over the nearer bayous and swampier distances and the quality of light, which was milkier and bluer, filtered through the stands of hardwoods and willows.
A little more than sixty years after the events of that short story, the landscape was hardly changed: no traffic, and only old or ruined houses. It was like driving into the past. The road flattened, straightened as I entered Sharkey County, cotton country, and the town of Cary, which had a ginnery and under five hundred people. Egremont, down the road, had far fewer. As I’d seen elsewhere, in South Carolina and Alabama, the cotton fields were an immense and linty whiteness of twiggy bushes, and no field hands, no pickers, no workers in sight. Flecks and scraps of cotton, blown from the fields, had snagged on boughs by the roadside, giving the impression of an immense untidiness, as if part of a bale load had blown from a passing rag truck.
Now and then I saw one of those gigantic cotton-picking machines the retired dealer in Vicksburg had described that cost half a million dollars. They were high-shouldered, they bulked over the throne-like cab, and they had a wide, gap-toothed lower jaw that entered six rows and stripped them.
No houses, and then bunches of them, and when I saw the beat-up house trailers, the shotgun shacks, the old rusted buses converted to habitations, I realized that this was the poorest part of the United States I had seen in my life, poorer than Allendale in South Carolina, poorer than the poorest village in Alabama, the meanest houses, as the Citizen rants in Ulysses, “mudcabins and shielings by the roadside.”
The mobile homes, seeming decayed and abandoned, were clustered together in improvised settlements under the trees. These were not communities. They were encampments outside towns and at the edges of cotton fields, and there was no evidence that they had utilities. They mimicked the pattern of Gypsy camps in Britain: the huddles of house trailers, the heaps of garbage and litter, the clotheslines of drooping laundry, the idle ragged children, and in a weird, heartbreaking touch—because it was only October—a Christmas wreath with a red ribbon hung on the door of one shack, for color.
Don’t stop, the man had said, but I stopped down the road at the town of Rolling Fork.
The large, stately, old stone Sharkey County Courthouse fronted the boarded-up shops, empty streets, and vandalized signs. But there was a Sunflower Food Store on one side of town and Sam Sing & Co, a Chinese grocery, on the other.
Walking around the town I met Leroy, a clerk at Sam Sing’s, having a cigarette break. He told me what many others said, that the bluesman Muddy Waters had been born, as McKinley Morganfield, in Rolling Fork. Muddy had claimed this himself, but it was unconfirmed—he might have been born in an adjacent county, and he grew up in a shotgun shack on Stovall Plantation in Clarksdale, farther up the Delta. But Rolling Fork had so little to boast about, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt on the Muddy question.
“These shops used to be all of them real busy,” Leroy said, “and now look at them—gone. But we farming still, cotton, soybeans, and corn.”
Seeing Leroy talking to me, a woman approached. She was Ann Culpeper, formerly a guidance counselor at Rolling Fork Elementary School. She knew Leroy from the school.
“They integrated the high school in 1994,” Leroy said, answering one of my questions.
“Must have been earlier than that,” Ann said.
An old woman walking by asked, “What is it you want to know?” When Leroy told her, she said, “They don’t know anything. Rolling Fork High School was white. When they integrated it, and blacks went there, a private school was started for whites.”
Both of the women were white. Leroy was black. They argued among themselves about dates, and couldn’t agree; recent history was a blur. It
was perhaps an effect of the stagnation. There were so few events in this dying town that there was nothing to remember, nothing to associate with a particular year. They were in agreement on one issue: there was no work, no money, seemingly no future here.
Anguilla, about five miles up the highway, was desolate, a scattering of mobile homes at the edge of the road and bordering the plowed fields—decayed, rusted boxes, lying higgledy-piggledy with an air of disorder and desperation, like a refugee camp, which it was, in a way.
Worse yet, more wretched and bereft, was Arcola, a mile off the highway, a ghost town, every shop and some houses boarded up on the main street (and this main street was the former, curving Highway 61, not the straight road of today). I could read the faded names on the signboards of these doomed businesses—Four-Way Grocery and Club Tropicana and Roger’s—everything shut except the Arcola post office.
The old backbreaking jobs were gone, and the newer businesses were failing—catfish farming, furniture making, and the Schwinn bicycle plant twenty miles away in Greenville that closed in 1991, with 250 workers laid off. There were also serious layoffs at the Viking Range plant in Greenwood.
Rotting, picturesquely hopeless, forgotten, these towns, all of them with a creek or a stream running through them, were backwaters, both literally and figuratively. They could have been any small, bereft agricultural town in the Third World where mechanization had taken hold, where tractors and picking machines had overtaken handpicking on the plantations. In these places people were struggling and making do, clinging to their routines, where life was precarious and everything—houses, shops, clotheslines, children’s toys—looked improvised.
