by Paul Theroux
“They were the worst possible representatives of the South in people’s minds,” Randall Curb had told Whitford. “Of course that’s the big irony, because that’s what Agee was trying to tell people they were not.”
The most detailed return visit to the Let Us Now Praise families was recounted in And Their Children After Them (1989), written by Dale Maharidge and photographed by Michael Williamson. Its title, like Agee’s, was also derived from Ecclesiasticus 44. It had been respectfully reviewed and awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and though I had merely glanced at it, Randall had read it thoroughly.
“It’s venomous, it’s unwieldy, and a lot of it is biased,” Randall said. “They talked to white people, and the slant was how racist they are. I’m not denying that racism and bigotry are rampant, and that a large percentage of white children grow up not knowing black children, but they missed so much, especially that things really are so much better now than what they were here. Look what we lived through.”
Hearing this, I recalled Reverend Lyles speaking of how a stroll on the sidewalk of Main Street was forbidden to him.
“And now all the public schools are fully integrated,” Randall was saying.
“But there’s still resistance,” I said. “For example, the all-white private academy here.”
“Like all similar places in the South,” Randall said with a fatalistic shrug. “That’s a fact of life.”
“What about the churches? Eugene Lyles—Reverend Lyles in town—told me that he would never dare set foot in a white church for fear of being thrown out.”
“No one would be turned away, black or white,” Randall said. “Twice a year in Greensboro, at Thanksgiving and Easter, there’s an ecumenical service, community-wide, all the races together at the service.”
He went on to say that the whole social fabric of the community was found in the church and that the church was so much a part of the black identity that no black person had a desire to leave the protection of his or her own church. “Protection” seemed a shrewd word for church membership.
“Most people attend the church they grow up in,” he said. “When new people come to town, the churches vie to bring them in. I sometimes wonder how any new people manage without going through a church.”
“That’s a useful tip I learned in the South,” I said. “Go to church and you meet people. Gun shows too. Barbershops, football games.”
“And books. Southern fiction,” Randall said, speaking of how to get acquainted with the South. He gave talks—on Agee, on Faulkner, on the English writers he loved, on historical figures such as Ben Franklin. He knew the writers well.
I agreed with him that Faulkner wrote the definitive fictional history of the South, but said that I found some of it unreadable. I unburdened myself with my exasperation with the man, who was even more maddening because he was brilliant, along with being uneven and at times opaque in an Agee-like way. I liked his humor; I hated his mannered obliquity. In Randall’s book-lined parlor, we railed at the Southern gothics for their freak show of horror costumes and macabre cobwebs, and agreed that Truman Capote was overrated and William Styron underrated and Charles Portis entirely neglected. These men were considered dated, faded, old hat, and all passé.
“Not many people write about the new problems,” Randall said. “The new tensions are more delicate than the old tensions. The old tension was complete incomprehension. The new tension is ‘How do we do it?’”
“Who writes on that theme?”
“Do you know Mary Ward Brown’s writing?”
I said I had not come across it.
“You should meet Mary T,” he said to me, his way of referring to her. She lived in Perry County, east of Hale, in the town of Marion. “She writes short stories, very good ones.”
Randall told me a little about her. She had married into a farming family and still lived alone in the old family house in a remote area.
“She’s ninety-five,” Randall said. “Ninety-six in a few months.”
“Perhaps you could introduce me,” I said as I left him.
Some days passed. I read some of Brown’s short stories in Tongues of Flame and was impressed by the truth of their description, by the unaffected prose; many stories were episodes of social awkwardness in small towns, of misunderstanding—some of it racial—and hard feeling. And they possessed a simplicity of line, as in the opening to “The Fruit of the Season”: “The Deep South is at its best in early May, when the last cold spell is over and the heat has not yet arrived. Leaves and grass are still the tender green of Easter. Wild flowers liven the countryside and, above all, the magnolia starts to bloom. Days grow long and fireflies light up the slow-falling darkness. In early May of 1959, dewberries were ripe in Alabama.”
It was a story about three black children, their berry picking, and a small crisis that arises when they offer them to the white woman who owns the berry patch.
I called Randall and said, “I’d like to see her soon.”
“Maybe when you come back again,” he said.
I heard that a lot. Normally on a journey I might insist on a meeting, but this was not a normal journey, not a traverse of China or a tour of Africa in search of a book; this was something else, a road trip, a coming-and-going, a way of life, a series of seasonal returns, and now it was winter.
“Maybe in the spring,” he suggested.
“She’ll be ninety-six years old then.”
It seemed presumptuous to delay a meeting with someone who was so old, but Randall said that she was in good health and was looking forward to meeting me in a few months.
Hero of Greensboro
A corner shop on Main Street was now a café, called the Pie Lab, well known locally for its variety of homemade fruit pies and its salads and sandwiches. It had been a project of HERO, the Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization, which I’d heard about on my first visit.
“The idea was that people would drop in at the Pie Lab and get to know someone new,” Randall Curb had said. “A good concept, but it hasn’t worked out—at least I don’t think so.”
Shaking his head, he had somewhat disparaged it as “a liberal drawing card.”
Yet the next day, quite by chance, having lunch at the Pie Lab, I met the founder and organizer of HERO, Pam Dorr, whom I had wished to meet in the fall and had not gotten around to calling. And here we were, drinking coffee and eating quiche Lorraine, known to some folks in Greensboro as “quickee Lorraine.”
The more attractive of the skeletal, fading towns in the South attracted outsiders, in the way Third World countries attracted idealistic volunteers, and for many of the same reasons. With a look of innocence and promise, the places were poor, pretty, and in need of revival. They posed the possibility of rescue, an irresistible challenge to a young college graduate or someone who wanted to take a semester off to perform community service in another world. These were also pleasant places to live—or at least seemed so.
The desperate housing situation in Greensboro, and Hale County generally, had inspired student architects of the Auburn Rural Studio (an undergraduate program of the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture at Auburn University) to create attractive low-cost housing for needy people. The Auburn houses are small but simple, and some of them brilliantly innovative and attractive, looking folded out and logical, like oversized elaborations of origami in tin and plywood. Because affordability was a primary objective, the price of a newly built Auburn house in Greensboro—the “20K House”—would be no more than $20,000, the highest mortgage amount a person on Social Security can afford.
Hearing about the Auburn Rural Studio, Pam Dorr had traveled from San Francisco to Greensboro ten years before to become an Auburn “outreach fellow.” It was a break from her successful career as a designer for various clothing companies, including Esprit and Gap and, more recently, Victoria’s Secret (“I made cozy pajamas”). She had come to Greensboro in a spirit of volunteerism, but when her fellowship
ended, she was reluctant to leave the lovely but struggling town.
“I realized there was so much more I could do,” she told me at the Pie Lab, which had been one of her entrepreneurial ideas. She had many ideas. She had created her San Francisco apartment out of “free and found materials”—she showed me pictures of her colorful rooms, the tables and chairs she’d gotten at dumps and yard sales, and refinished. Repairing, reusing, and rehabbing were her passions; Greensboro was badly in need of improvement, and it had the raw materials—beat-up houses and shops to make habitable, a dying downtown that was still revivable, and plenty of wild invasive bamboo growing in canebrakes in the pinewoods that could be put to good use. Pam’s idea to make bicycle frames out of bamboo resulted in Hero Bikes, one of the businesses Pam had overseen since starting HERO in 2004.
“We build houses, we educate people on home ownership, and working with nontraditional bankers, we help people establish credit.”
The local banks had a history of lending mainly to whites. Blacks could get loans but only at extortionate rates—twenty-seven percent interest was not uncommon.
“It seemed to me a prime opportunity to start a community again.” Pam said. “We have thirty-three people on the payroll and lots of volunteers. HERO is in the pie business, the pecan business—we sell locally grown pecans to retail stores. We have a day-care center and after-school program. A construction business, a thrift store. The bike business.”
Some of these businesses were now housed on Main Street in what had been the hardware store, the insurance agency, the opera house. HERO had redeveloped or improved eleven of the defunct stores on Main Street, buying them when the owners were desperate to sell (“when the roof falls down or the ceiling caves in”).
At Hero Bikes I fell into conversation with the bike builder and manager, Patrick Kelly. He was an example of my notion that the outsiders who worked to improve Greensboro were the sort one might find working in Third World countries.
“I wanted to go to Nigeria, to work in development,” he said. “But the project wasn’t approved. So I went to Korea for five years, to teach. And I also learned bike building there. Then I came to Greensboro.”
Pam Dorr was also like the most inspired and energetic Peace Corps volunteer imaginable. Smiling, upbeat, full of recipes, solutions, and ideas for repurposing, still young—hardly fifty—she had wide experience and a California smile and an informal manner.
“I worked free for two years,” Pam said. “We got a HUD grant, we got some other help, and now, because of the various businesses, we’re self-sustaining.”
Being from California set her apart. The way she dressed, in a purple fleece and green clogs, made her conspicuous. Her determination to effect change made her suspect. Outsiders in the South are often objects of suspicion. What do they want? Why are they here? What is the point of their trying to change things? Such people are regarded as agitators, even if all they are trying to do is build inexpensive houses, or harvest bamboo, or keep the children of working mothers busy after school: De Kevion, Keyonna, Jaimesa, Kimberly, Jakira, Raslyn, Demais, Trinity, and the rest.
“You find out a lot living here,” she told me. “Drugs are a problem. Drive along a side road at night and you’ll see white girls prostituting themselves to get money to support their habit. Mothers pimping out their children to men. Thirteen-year-olds getting pregnant—I know two personally, but there are plenty of others. It’s not a black thing. White girls at Christian schools who get pregnant wrap their stomachs tight with belts to abort the child, because there’s nowhere for white pregnant teenagers in Alabama to go. They’ll be kicked out of school if they’re found to be pregnant.”
“What does the town think of your work?” I asked.
“A lot of people are on our side,” she said. “But they know that change has to come from within.”
“Reverend Lyles told me you had something to do with fixing up the Rosenwald school here.”
“The Emory School, yeah,” she said. “But we had help from the University of Alabama and volunteers from AmeriCorps—lots of people contributed. Reverend Lyles was one of our speakers at the reopening dedication ceremony. That was a great day.” She took a deep, calming breath. “But not everyone is on our side.”
“Really?”
This surprised me, because what she had described, the renovation of an old schoolhouse in a hard-up rural area, was like a small-scale development project in a Third World country. I had witnessed such efforts many times: the energizing of a sleepy community, the fundraising, the soliciting of well-wishers and sponsors, engaging volunteers, asking for donations of building material, applying for grants and permits, fighting inertia and the naysayers’ laughter, making a plan, getting the word out, supervising the business, paying the skilled workers, bringing meals to the volunteers, and seeing the project through to completion. Years of effort, years of budgeting. At last, the dedication, everyone turned out in clean clothes for a change, the cookies, the lemonade, the grateful speeches, the hugs. That was another side to the South, people seeing it as a development opportunity, and in “workshops” talking about “challenges” and “potential.”
“So who’s against you?” I asked.
“Plenty of people seem to dislike what we’re doing,” Pam said. She rocked in her clogs and zipped her fleece against the chilly air. “Lots of opposition. Lots of abuse. They call me names.” She laughed, saying this. “Now and then someone walks past and spits on me.”
“Reason for Visit”
I remembered the visitors’ book from my previous visit to the office of the Community Service Programs of West Alabama, in a low building at the edge of Tuscaloosa, behind an old high school. I had driven there from Greensboro one morning. This time, as before, I studied the column titled Reason for Visit and noted the scrawls next to the names: “Food,” “Clothes,” “Water,” “Light bill,” and more: “Utilities,” “Assistance.” “Food” was the reason most frequently cited, and the others listed almost as often. That was just today’s tally, and it was not yet eleven o’clock in the morning.
I had come again to see Cynthia Burton, to get an update on the housing situation and to make appointments.
Cynthia was as welcoming as ever, but did not look well. She admitted she’d been ill, and so instead of asking her whether she had been in touch with anyone I might see, I inquired about her health.
“High blood pressure,” she said, “and I have a blood clot. I need surgery on my knee, but the problem is that for that procedure I have to take medication. The medication might make me bleed. It’s a question of stabilizing my condition.”
In spite of her ailments she worked long hours every day in this small spare building, and she seemed to me to be as hard-pressed as the people she was attempting to help. While the desperate people wrote “Food” and “Clothes” and “Water” in the visitors’ book, the things they needed, Cynthia would have written “Time” or “Health,” perhaps.
Having just come from Greensboro, I mentioned the HERO projects: the renovations, the shops, the bike building, the pecan harvesting, the after-school program, the Pie Lab.
Cynthia listened with a lopsided smile of such obvious incredulity, I asked her why.
“They have caused divisions,” she said. “And they could have avoided that.”
“Pam Dorr seems to me a motivator.”
Cynthia shook her head and laughed softly. “Pam Dorr is from California, and she thinks she knows better. She believes she can walk right in and have the answers to everything she sees—the California way. But, Paul, this is Alabama. This is not California.”
“Still, she gets grants for her projects.”
“Some money from HUD. But she’s lost a few grants.”
“Isn’t HERO fixing up houses and building some too?”
“Not like us,” and by “us” she meant the house building and renovation work of the Community Service Programs of West Alabama.
I n
ow understood that in the scramble for grants, for recognition, for Housing and Urban Development funds, there was spirited competition among the nonprofits. Though both women had been frank with me, I did not know enough to take sides. They were both strong women, and I was grateful for their straightforward opinions. Neither of them dodged my questions, and they gave me more information than I’d asked for. Pam Dorr was an outsider, though, and as I kept hearing, an alien new to the South and determined to make changes was often characterized as an agitator—seen as a competitor by the local nonprofits, dismissed as a meddler by the old guard.
So I changed the subject and said, “What else is new?”
“Tell you what,” she said, “we got a newly elected probate judge, Arthur Crawford. How he won is historical. He was prevented from being on the ballot, disqualified because of some technicalities. So he started a campaign for write-in votes. He went all over, he told people how important it was to vote. All they had to do was write in his name as a candidate and spell it right. The incumbent, Leland Avery, was a three-termer, but Crawford beat him with the write-in votes.” Cynthia gasped a little in her excitement, then said, “Isn’t that something?”
The write-in vote that had turned the tide was unprecedented in Alabama. That Arthur Crawford Jr. was black and Leland Avery was white—and now Avery was facing serious ethics violations—led us to discuss the issues of voting that were at the heart of the 1960s protest marches.
