by Paul Theroux
“Aiken is a real cute place,” one of its proud residents said to me in a coffee shop. It was true—so tidy and bright. And just down Atomic Road was the Bomb Factory. Everyone in Aiken talked about it, and I had passed it the last time I’d been this way, driving from Allendale. Its existence was no secret, but there were rumors of chattering Geiger counters and dangerous spills and radioactive soil and failed attempts at cleanups. I had been turned away at the main gate of the nuclear facility in the winter, so I thought, since I was in town, I’d gather anecdotal evidence.
Gregory Jefferson, whom I had met a few days before at the hotel on the eve of the steeplechase, had mentioned it. I had kept his cell phone number. I called him and met him for a drink.
“Atomic Road,” I said after a while. “That’s an amazing name.”
“Amazing place down there. It’s because of the bomb plant, what folks call the Savannah River Site. It’s from the 1950s, I guess. Happen this way. Government bought the town of Dunbarton, so they could build it there. They moved all the people, thousands of them, to Ellenton, and built New Ellenton.”
“So there was a town where there’s now a nuclear facility?”
“Not much of a town, though, way back,” he said. “Top-level people from the Bomb Factory, white folk, they live in Aiken, with the horse people. It’s all secret, they won’t let you near it, though the road goes right along it, and along the Savannah River.”
“Makes sense. Nuclear reactors need water for cooling,” I said.
“Folks say there’s spills, maybe spills in the river. Maybe you heard about the accident at Graniteville. Chlorine gas pollution. And there’s the other thing. You got a nuclear facility and what happens? You’re in trouble. Folks used to say that when the Russians send a bomb over here, the first place they’ll hit is us. We’re a target.”
“The Russians were planning to bomb Aiken?”
“We was in the crosshairs, sure,” he said, seeming to derive a measure of community pride by being a target of the Soviet Union. “Never mind, Aiken is a premier place to live.”
We were joined by his friend Willie, who said, “And there’s the other stuff, spent fuel rods and nuclear waste. That stuff is still lying around.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“We know it. We got high cancer rates, birth defects, lots of secrets.”
You could say: This is all anecdotal. You meet a couple of local guys and listen to their stories that sound like hearsay, and in your casual way (the credulous mood of a traveler) you draw dire conclusions. But Gregory and Willie were not wrong. The truth was much more alarming than anything they told me. I had asked a simple question about Atomic Road, because the road was so fragrant with pine needles, the river so placid, the air so fresh. Aiken itself was a pretty place, with its orderly town center, its golf club, and its racecourses, and the flat green meadows and stately homes and the paddocks and friendly board fences of horse country. Real cute, as the lady said.
But after Gregory’s chatty account of the history of the nuclear site, I talked to other people, just chatting.
“They make atom bombs there . . .”
“Lots of employment . . .”
“Very secret . . .”
“Sir, you be real careful . . .”
And a young military man named Kevin, on leave at his home in Augusta but running an errand in Aiken, said, “They’s some strange things happening there.”
“Strange in what way?”
“Full-on security, for one thing. You will never get inside that place. And strange regarding the animals.”
“Which animals?”
“Ones in the woods. Ones in the river.” He smiled, but it was a grim smile. “They got different colors. Not the colors you used to. Alligators in the river.”
“There are alligators in the Savannah River?”
“But not green ones. They yellow. They pink. Some of them white. They real different. From the radioactivity.”
Pink alligators? From radioactive and heavy-metal contamination? Records show that some Alligator mississippiensis have become unusually large. It has been argued that these giants (up to a record thirteen feet long) achieved their size not because of genetic mutation caused by radioactivity but for the opposite reason, because their habitat has been undisturbed. Yet in February 2012, strange webs of “string-like material” were found in a nuclear waste dump at the Savannah River Site, and it was theorized that they came from mutant spiders.
The site outside Aiken had been chosen by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1950, with the intention to build a plant to produce fuel for thermonuclear weapons. When the plant was finished it had five production reactors, fuel fabrication facilities, a research laboratory, heavy-water production facilities, two fuel reprocessing facilities and tritium recovery facilities.
Later, I found authoritative reports claiming the place—road, river, air—was blighted with “significant site contamination” and radioactive “ground water migration” throughout the 310-square-mile site. One EPA report cited that “multiple buildings and facilities at SRS have been contaminated with radioactive contaminants of concern, including cadmium, cesium, cobalt, plutonium, tritium and uranium.”
The site had been largely decommissioned, and as a Superfund cleanup site it had become a billion-dollar headache. And here was the EPA’s promise: “All inactive waste sites [at the Savannah River Site] posing an unacceptable risk to human health, ecological receptors, surface water or ground water will be cleaned up, and any contaminated ground water will be cleaned up or undergoing cleanup, by 2031.”
Gregory, Willie, and others had spoken of the Savannah River Site being a target of the Russians. More recently, Joseph Trento, a security analyst, investigative reporter, and president of the award-winning Public Education Center, wrote an alarming report on the site. He described it as being a prime target of Al Qaeda or any homegrown terrorist wishing to make a point by starting a plutonium fire, a dire consequence: “A nuclear accident has a beginning but no end.” This nuclear facility, hidden by the dense pinewoods on the banks of the Savannah River, contained “one of the greatest concentrations in the world of radioactive material . . . enough weapons grade plutonium to destroy the world multiple times. Here plutonium in its purest form can be found by the ton.”7
That the site was large and vulnerable (“a geographic nightmare”) was bad enough. Much worse was the fact that it was not guarded by the US military. This was something Trento described in detail. A private security firm, Wackenhut, was responsible for protecting “massive amounts of high-level nuclear waste, huge amounts of bomb-grade plutonium.” Wackenhut, renamed G4S Secure Solutions, was a Danish-British firm “with a long record of botched security operations from Afghanistan to London to Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”
The Oak Ridge breach was still in the news. Three antinuclear activists (a Vietnam vet, a house painter, and an eighty-two-year-old Catholic nun, Sister Megan Rice) managed (with bolt cutters and saws) to cut through the perimeter fence of the nuclear facility at Oak Ridge in July 2012. These three unlikely saboteurs, outwitting the guards, crept under cover of night to the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility and left graffiti (verses from Proverbs, Isaiah, and the book of Habakkuk: “The fruit of justice is peace” and “Woe to the empire of blood,” among others), hung symbolic yellow crime-scene tape, and splashed blood on the walls from a deceased activist, Tom Lewis, in his memory. They hammered at the guard towers, breaking off bits of concrete, then stayed and waited to be discovered. They remained in the facility for two hours. Seeing a guard, they offered him food and began singing. He arrested them. (They were finally sentenced in a court in Knoxville in February 2014. Sister Megan was given three years, her two male accomplices five years each.)
Wackenhut/G4S has as many as eight hundred armed guards on duty at the Savannah River Site. Even so, in the view of experts the site is underguarded and has too many access points on its perimeter. A well-planne
d suicide bombing could be effective and catastrophic, because the plutonium stored there is volatile, and there is too great a concentration of weapons-grade material on the site. “If an explosion disturbs it, then we could face a massive fire with a plutonium flash and large scale exposure,” one of Trento’s informants said, later adding, “It looks very impressive at the front gate but around back, a chain link fence is really all that separates the American public from a zealot or lunatic with a cheap pair of bolt cutters trying to inflict as much harm on the nation as possible.”
Just up the road from this nuclear-disaster-in-the-making is Augusta, Georgia, where you never hear the horror stories of nuclear contamination that will take seventeen more years to clean up, but only the whispered delights of playing golf.
“Even though signs said not to stop, not to get out of the car, there was not a single security patrol in sight during the entire trip,” Trento wrote in his analysis, recounting his drive on the narrow state highway, Atomic Road. “Gates were left open on either side of the highway. It seemed like the entire Site was open to the public.”
That was my experience too, as I drove out of Aiken and through the pretty pinewoods, not far from the nuclear waste dumps and the millions of gallons of high-level nuclear waste. I was heading southeast down Atomic Road, from happy, well-heeled Aiken toward poor, benighted Allendale County.
The Savannah River that slipped past the trees as I drove appears in Tobacco Road as an image of salvation, a refuge from sharecropping. “The best thing you can do, Jeeter,” his neighbors tell him, “is to move your family up to Augusta or across the river to South Carolina.”
A Glimpse of Wrens
Just across the Savannah River, which forms the state line, about thirty miles to the west of Atomic Road, is the small town of Wrens, Georgia. Wrens is the Cotton Belt town where Erskine Caldwell, son of a preacher, lived as an impressionable teenager. Much of his fiction is located near here, notably Tobacco Road, and many of his best short stories.
Caldwell was so hated by his fellow Georgians, who felt he’d made them a laughingstock, he left the South, lived in San Francisco and New York City, and for some years in a small town in Maine. He traveled in Europe and the Soviet Union, where he worked as a war correspondent, and was also regarded as a chronicler of peasant life in the United States. He wrote books about his trips, including several investigations of the Deep South. With his much younger fourth wife, he ended his days in Arizona, still writing, still prolific, but with a diminishing readership.
Though his literary star dimmed, Caldwell retained the distinction of having popularized the notion of Southerners as grotesques—toothless, incestuous, ignorant, coarse, and bigoted, quite a different cast of characters in God’s Little Acre (1933) from those of his fellow Georgian and near-contemporary Margaret Mitchell, chronicler of life at Tara in Gone with the Wind (1936). Her nostalgic version of a stylish and sophisticated South, passionate, wealthy (ball gowns, balustrades, ormolu clocks), violated by war, and wrecked by Yankees, is the one that many white Southerners cling to.
Deep Trouble at the House of Love: “Accused Means Guilty”
On a rainy night in Orangeburg—I had driven the country way, via the flyspecks of Blackville and Denmark—I was back at Ruby Tuesday, waiting in a back booth to meet Reverend Virgin Johnson. Because he did not in the least resemble anyone else at the restaurant, he created a vibe of murmurs when he arrived, and this susurration reached me on his approach. Reverend Johnson is a tall and athletic man with a preacher’s mildness and a lawyer’s confident bearing, and when he strode among the tables in his dark pinstripe suit and silk tie, people naturally looked up—white and black alike—compelled by his presence, his dignity, his bearing, a procession of one, bringing me a smile.
“Brother Paul,” he said, giving me a hug, and then he ordered sweet tea and explained his choice: “It would just not look right if one of my congregation saw their preacher imbibing alcohol. Sweet tea is just fine for me.”
“Speaking of which, how is your congregation?” I asked.
He smiled and nodded, but it was a complex smile with a world of worry behind it.
“That’s a story,” he said. “I’ll tell you in a little while, but what I want to hear is, how you doing, man?”
“I’ve just come from Aiken,” I said. And I began to recount a bit of the story of Essie Mae Washington-Williams, but no sooner had I said her name than he tapped the table and said, “Strom Thurmond.” I went on, “Funny that a racist like Thurmond would have had an affair with his black servant.”
“Maybe he wasn’t much of a racist, ever think of that?” Reverend Johnson said slowly, steadying his straw with pinching fingers and sipping his tea. “You got to understand that in many cases these white Southern politicians weren’t really deep-down racists.” He smiled again. “In spite of what they said.”
“But what they said lots of times was bigoted and inflammatory. How about that?”
Reverend Johnson laughed, as though at my innocence. “They had to toe the line! If they didn’t, they wouldn’t get anywhere.”
“Where does their racial talk put you?”
“We know what they’re thinking. We understand the double-talk. Strom Thurmond did a lot of good things for this state.”
“He said a lot of dreadful things,” I said, with—I realized—prissy Yankee sanctimony. “And what about his black child?”
“It’s the Southern way,” Reverend Johnson said, and then went back to sipping from his straw.
“And all that segregation talk.” Out of delicacy, I avoided quoting Thurmond’s speech about admitting “the nigger race” into schools and churches.
“It’s the Southern way!” Reverend Johnson said.
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
“We know what he’s saying. We can translate it,” he said. “Remember George Wallace? He ran for governor of Alabama, not a bad man, maybe even a moderate man in some ways. In the campaign he refused the support of the Ku Klux Klan—didn’t have any time for them, he said.” Reverend Johnson sipped more sweet tea. “That was his downfall. They would have helped him. The NAACP backed him. He was looking for the black vote. And he lost to the white man who took a hard line and had the Klan’s endorsement. ‘I was outniggered,’ he said. ‘I’ll never be outniggered again.’”
Reverend Johnson was laughing as I asked, “It’s the Southern way?”
“It’s the Southern way.”
Our meal was served. Reverend Johnson, over his lobster tail and steak, voluble and full of stories again, talked about growing up “po’ black” and what it was like at school to sit at a table in the cafeteria and watch thirty white boys get up and leave. “But I stood my ground. Eventually I got respect. I earned it.” And things had changed, he said. We talked about earning respect.
“I’ve got a fighting spirit,” Reverend Johnson said. He thought a moment. “Well, that’s what I was going to talk to you about. I got a little problem. I mean, there’s a case coming up and it’s vexing me.”
“Serious case?”
“A bishop, with a church down in Allendale,” he said, and paused—a preacher’s pause, suspenseful and intended to seize my attention—“charged with child molestation.”
This accusation sounded especially pernicious in his deliberate way of saying it, chewing each syllable: chahl moh-les-ta-shun.
“Did he do it?”
“No way. Lord no. I have known this man my whole life, and I have a feeling what happened—it is a gross misunderstanding.” He sipped more tea. “And it is a tragedy.”
“If he’s not guilty, then he’ll be cleared and he’ll be fine.”
“You don’t understand,” Reverend Johnson said. “He’s been accused of child molestation. Chahl moh-les-ta-shun. He will never recover, even if he’s cleared. He will be ruined. His name is tarred. Accused means guilty.”
He gave me some general details. The man was Bishop Bobby Jones, fifty-four, a r
esident of Allendale. His church, the New Life House of Love, on Oswald Drive at the edge of town, was about the same size as Revelation Ministries, but it was connected to a bigger organization, the New Life Pentecostal Holiness churches. The New Life Pentecostal Holiness House of Love Church advertised its motto as “Pursue, Overtake, and Recover All!”
“Hard-line Pentecostal,” Reverend Johnson said, clenching his fists and raising them to emphasize the sect’s tenacity.
From an early age, Bobby Jones had clung to the faith. He started as a six-year-old choirboy in Allendale, singing in a church group called the All Star Angels. They became so popular they were invited to other churches. They renamed themselves the Pilgrimaires, for their evangelizing, and traveled the South, singing their faith, finding adherents.
“He received the Lord when he was nine, studied hard, and preached his first sermon when he was fourteen,” Reverend Johnson said. “Dedicated his life to the people around here—people in Allendale, people in need. Thirty years he’s been preaching and fellowshiping.”
Pastor Bobby Jones was promoted to bishop. He was popular, known for his preaching as well as his singing. In accordance with local church protocol, his wife was referred to as “First Lady” Brenda Jones. He had six children and ten grandchildren. Altogether, as Reverend Johnson outlined it, an admirable man.
I said, “What about this child molestation charge?”
“Criminal sexual conduct with a fourteen-year-old,” Reverend Johnson said, and fo’teen sounded especially young. The incident occurred sometime in January of this year, 2013, but he had recently been indicted, and was out on $50,000 bond.
“So what’s the story?”
“Like I said, he’s a hard-line Pentecostal, born again,” Reverend Johnson said. “For them there are no exceptions. The letter of the law. No sex before marriage. The way I understand it, in a general speculative way, his daughter might have come to him saying she was feeling things—normal physical desires. The bishop listened. He is a patient and godly man.”
