by Paul Theroux
“We made furniture here,” he said. “We had textile factories, weaving cloth and carpets right into the 1980s.”
“What happened to them?”
“Went to China. Went to India.”
“A lot of jobs lost, I guess.”
“All the jobs went. There is nothing here now,” he said. “And we never had highly educated people. You don’t need much of an education to work in service industries or a carpet factory or agriculture. And so all these people were left. They’re struggling now. Those are the people we’re trying to help.”
“What would it take to transform this county?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you. We have significant amounts of undeveloped land. Think of people who want to retire to a good climate or who want to migrate. We’re near Columbia, Charleston, and Augusta, easy driving distance.” Now he was sounding hopeful, gesturing to the surrounding countryside. “It’s possible that we could grow that way. You could buy five acres and put a nice home on it. You might pay three thousand an acre, or even one thousand. Imagine, for a small amount of money you’d have a sizable piece of land in a pretty place.”
He answered his ringing cell phone, spoke briefly, and ended the call.
“I can introduce you to some folks.”
Razor Road
The abandoned houses on Razor Road gave it the look of having been in the path of a terrible storm, and blighted by it, leaving rat-haunted ruins. Razor Road—a menacing and memorable name—ran through the poorest district, from near the center of Allendale, where it began, to a perimeter of farmland at its eastern limit. The farmland stretched for miles, a margin of darkness at night.
Many of the houses had been reduced to rubble or were shacks. The oldest, strangest, most ramshackle one was a single-story house of age-blackened hand-hewn planks with a patched tin roof. This dwelling, primitive even when it had first been built, had existed in this place in the period General Sherman passed nearby, in February 1865, meeting two days of resistance at Broxton Bridge, his vindictive soldiers marching ever deeper into the state, burning farmsteads and barns. This house, a stark example of endurance, had lain far enough from the marauding army to have been spared.
It was an enormous antique, sensational in its decrepitude, with a cookhouse attached to the rear. But its dimensions looked original, and it could not have changed much since it had been put up; it had simply weathered the storms and gradually deteriorated. The roof was rusted, the porch sagged, the windows were broken and patched with cardboard; it had no evident indoor plumbing. A chimney rose from the middle of the roof peak, a feature of the oldest houses.
“Looks abandoned,” I said.
“It was fully occupied until last year,” Wilbur said. Then, hearing someone kicking through the tall grass beside the house, he said, “And here is the owner. Hello, Melvin. I want you to meet Paul.”
Melvin Johnson was an older man in blue bib overalls. I was surprised when he told me he was fifty-seven, because he looked much older—it seemed everyone below the poverty line aged prematurely here, as elsewhere. We shook hands and he smiled and said, “Want to have a look inside?”
“Melvin’s been poorly,” Wilbur said.
“I’m in recovery,” Melvin said, “from colorectal cancer.”
“How you doing?”
“Taking it slow,” he said. “Wilbur helped me a lot.”
“I got him into the housing program,” Wilbur said. “But Melvin did all the work to get a new home. He enrolled in a class to learn about managing money. He studied hard. He found finance. He got a mortgage.”
“Got me a new house,” Melvin said.
It was a small one, shotgun-sized but new, two streets away from Razor Road, and there he lived with his two sons.
To have moved a couple of streets away, from this wreck of a house to a modest new one, might seem a small achievement, but to me it was huge. I thought of the vast sums of money spent on projects, and the boasts, and how ultimately they made little difference. And I reflected on Wilbur and his attention to detail on a modest budget. Lines from William Blake’s Jerusalem came to mind:
He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.
“Better than this one, that’s for sure,” Melvin said, pushing the old door open.
The smell of house rot, of damp rags and worm-eaten wood and dead mice and wet, half-dissolved newspapers, was overpowering. Melvin switched on a light—the only bulb in the room, dangling from a cord—and I saw, as though a glimpse of an earlier age of poverty and hardship, the clutter: the flattened cardboard boxes nailed to the wall to serve as insulation; the floor strewn with old shoes, torn pillows, twisted quilts, splintered chairs, piled boxes, ill-sorted papers, and rags; the accumulation of decades, like the desperate nest of a burrowing animal. Paper portraits of Jesus decorated one wall, and perhaps some of the newspapers had been tacked up because of their photographs or headlines, but they were yellowed beyond any legibility. A cracked mirror was the crowning touch, lending a hint of horror.
Melvin sat on a torn sofa and tossed a blanket aside, where it lay over a soot-blackened and scorched woodstove. The spring day was bright and warm, but no sunlight penetrated this chilly, stinking interior. Blankets were hung against the windows, the inner doors were shut, and it was not the clutter that disturbed me but the smell, which was the smell of death, and the notion that it was the sort of setting that I associated with the Cresent Motel, a crime scene; all it lacked was a corpse.
“I was born here,” Melvin said. “I lived here, mainly with my grandmother.”
“What did you do for water?”
“The well, yonder.”
“What about the toilet?”
“Had us an outhouse ’round back. Still there.”
“How long did you live here?”
“Fifty-six years,” Melvin said. “Moved out last year, into the new place.” He looked around the littered room and marveled. “Ain’t this something? Six generations lived in this old house. My grandmother died in that room.” He indicated a door, which was nailed shut, with a mass of clobber piled against it.
“Do you know much about your family history?” I asked.
He replied with an extraordinary statement, diving into the nineteenth century, saying eagerly, “Oh, yes, sir. It was Bruce Eady sold us into slavery.”
Flowers Lane
On this sunny day, in the poorest part of the poorest town in South Carolina, I saw that Flowers Lane was not really a lane; it was about two acres of wasteland softened by the recent rain, with dirt tracks imprinted on it. And the houses scattered around this area of mud puddles and stony ground were not houses; they were hovels and decaying trailers, the sort I’d seen in the poorest towns of the Mississippi Delta. That was where Assistant Treasury Secretary Cyrus Amir-Mokri had passed through in 2011 and gazed on the ruination and the ragged people, remarking that he could not believe conditions like this existed in the United States. Perhaps that was less a comment on the United States and more a judgment on this privileged Iranian-born bureaucrat, who should have known about our “submerged twentieth.” Flowers Lane was in South Carolina, but it could have been in the Delta, and—as I kept thinking—it could have been in Zimbabwe too.
“You know the people here?” I asked Wilbur.
“I know them some,” he said. “This family asked for renovation. They’re on our list. Maybe we can help. That’s why I’m here—to do an assessment.”
The low, flat-roofed rectangular house, mobile-home-sized, had been faced in white plastic, and at first glance it did not look half as bad as the rotting trailer across the field, or the shack messily bandaged in blue plastic next door. Looking closer, I could see that the white plastic was merely a cheap cosmetic covering splintered wood walls, that the window cracks were taped, that the porch was unstable. When I stepped on the porch planks—and on the floorboards inside
the house—my feet sank as though I was walking on soft, wormy wood that was giving way.
An old woman met us at the door and seemed dismayed that there were two of us. She knew Wilbur, but who was I?
“I’m just looking,” I said.
That seemed more dismaying to her—not that I blamed her. The front room was cluttered and obviously falling apart, and it was crowded: a tiny room with seven people, old and young, draped on chairs and sprawled on the floor. They were watching a soap opera, The Young and the Restless, on a television set that was flickering in the far corner.
What do people do when they have nothing to do? I had wondered this when I’d set off from home months before. The family in this poor house on Flowers Lane provided the hint of an answer. Such people try to keep warm. It was not the television show they were watching, or that some were lying on the floor, one boy under a low table, a small girl in an older girl’s lap. It was the fact that they were huddled together in this ruined house, in this much-too-hot room. They stared at me and said hello when I did, and now I saw the assortment of ages, and that the only one of them in a proper chair was an old woman, with a steady gaze and a heavy shawl on her shoulders. There was a stump where her right foot should have been, and this amputation was the more emphatic for the red sock pulled tight on it. Her name was Janice Williams, and she might have been ninety, or older.
Her daughter, the one with the dismayed expression, who had let me in, was Sharlene Badger.
“This is Willie, and this is Roger,” Sharlene said, indicating two older boys in their late teens or early twenties. They smirked at me in a taunting way. Then one of them stood up—they had been lying on the floor—and put his face against mine.
“You can call me Roger Rabbit,” he said. “If y’all got any questions.”
“No questions yet,” I said.
I was slightly alarmed by Roger’s wolfish alertness and his dirty clothes. He wore a torn T-shirt with the motif of dark gesturing hands, each with an upraised middle finger, and over it, Fuck Y’all Records, not a music label that I was familiar with.
“Get Jessica,” Sharlene Badger said. “Jessica can answer your questions.”
“I think Wilbur’s got the questions,” I said.
The small room was very hot, and it stank of dirty cushions and human feet, and the heat made it all the smellier, as of roasted flatulence. It was the smell of poverty, a stink that no one, not even someone in the submerged twentieth, could get used to, and it was intensified by a hissing gas fire attached to the wall, giving the alarming impression that the wall itself was in flames.
From the moment I’d entered the room, I’d been aware of the hiss. Outside, a spring day—of sunshine, with a light breeze—in the mid-seventies perhaps, shirtsleeve weather. Inside, the huddled family, with the gas fire blowing heat into the room. These people were cold on a warm day, indoors, with nothing to do except to keep warm.
Four generations of them: the old woman, the matriarch; Janice her daughter; her grandsons Roger and Willie; an older girl, a granddaughter, who turned away when I asked her name; and the girl’s daughter, age six, who told me her name, Shaquavien Thompson, as her hair was being braided.
“That’s a hazard,” Wilbur said of the gas fire mounted on the wall, spewing flames. “That needs to be vented.”
A painting of Jesus on black velvet had been hung on one wall, with family photographs, and other pictures of Jesus, above a shelf of plastic trophies, a snow globe, a model of the Eiffel Tower, a dirty baseball, a mass of tangled beads, souvenir ashtrays, two propped-up postcards of New York City, some thick gold tassels on a thick gold braid, and a dish of loose buttons. The chairs were jammed together so tightly there was scarcely room to walk, and I found myself sidling from the entrance to the back of the room, trying to avoid the oddly leering face of Roger.
It was not poverty as an absence or an insufficiency of things, but poverty as a great unsorted accumulation of decaying and broken possessions, crowding the room the way the people did, like tide wrack heaped on a beach, the sort of debris a storm had deposited. Doing a rapid calculation, I realized that in that hot tiny room, hiding on this afternoon in spring on the dirt road that was Flowers Lane, in this four-generation family, there was no sign of a breadwinner.
“Here she is, here’s Sweetpea,” Sharlene Badger said as a smiling girl stepped into the room from the flash of sunlight outside, and greeted us.
This was Jessica. She was tall and wore a green sweater and black tights. Her hair was braided and colored with gold highlights, and had long, closely woven hair extensions. Her vitality was unmistakable—I could see why her mother had summoned her to speak for the family. She was worldly, she’d done a course in cosmetology, she said; she’d traveled a little bit. She wasn’t fazed by Wilbur or me. She led us down a narrow passage, showing us the house, the stained ceiling tiles, the bedrooms that had no windows and seemed to be a mass of quilts and blankets and mattresses on the floor.
“We got leaks,” Jessica said. “The rain comes through up there—see this puddle?”
But it wasn’t a puddle, it was a soggy blanket, darkened by water, in the shadowy and airless room. Jessica lived there too. Altogether, she said, nine people inhabited the four-room house—three small bedrooms and this stifling front room. I could not imagine the disposition of bodies at bedtime.
“I’m thinking of relocating to Ohio,” Jessica said.
“Show them the kitchen,” Sharlene said over the hiss of the gas fire and the squawk of the soap opera.
“The kitchen real bad,” Jessica said. “That ceiling falling down, the floor’s gone too.”
This was a tiny room tucked at the back, with a greasy, gummy stovetop, a chipped refrigerator, a sink stacked with dirty dishes, a counter full of torn-open cereal boxes. Outside, a patch of yard was scattered with Shaquavien’s toys, some old car tires, and a broken swing set.
“If we knew you were coming, we would have cleaned the place up,” Jessica said.
“That’s okay,” Wilbur said.
“Think you can do something?” she said.
“We can help. We can vent that stove and shore up the floor,” he said. “Might be able to fix that ceiling.” He was making notes as he talked. “Patch the roof.”
As he spoke amid the squalor, I admired his calm and reassuring demeanor. I had no doubt that he would do as he promised, and make improvements.
The rest of the family kept watching the midafternoon soap opera—a romantic dispute onscreen, a quarreling young white couple—as Wilbur and I thanked them for allowing us to visit and went outside, where we stood in the mud of Flowers Lane and surveyed the damaged house.
“What do they live on?” I asked.
“That old woman you saw, she’s the key. Probably gets Social Security. Other than that . . .” His voice trailed off. He was thinking what I was thinking: food stamps, disability payments, unemployment insurance, government cheese, welfare, handouts.
It was just one poor house, one poor family—one of millions—but a vivid glimpse of poverty and hopelessness, of isolation and idleness.
Wilbur was still sizing up the house. He said, “You know, this is going to be a big job. It would be better to gut the whole place and build it all again. But we don’t have the money.”
Roger and Willie had followed us outside. They were sitting on old bicycles, smiling at us, rocking back and forth. They were too big for the bikes, and because of that they seemed playfully menacing, straddling the bikes, jerking them at us and laughing. Jessica had wandered out to the porch, holding the six-year-old Shaquavien by the hand. In the sunshine they all looked different, more exposed, sadder.
Walking away, Wilbur said to me, “We’ll do something.”
“Yes, living with them was frightful, but still they are human beings,” the narrator says, speaking for Olga, at the end of Chekhov’s story “Peasants.” “They suffer and cry like human beings, and there is nothing in their lives f
or which justification could not be found . . . And now she felt sorry for all these people, painfully sorry, and kept looking back at the huts as she walked.”
The Fall
I drove from Allendale, back along Atomic Road to Aiken and Augusta, then across Georgia and into Alabama again, by way of Talladega and Childersburg to Greensboro, where I had an appointment that week. There I had an accident. Killing time at the edge of town, I walked to examine the run-down Inn Motel (Mr. Patel, prop.), near the junction of Route 69 and State Street. It was hideous and looked uninhabitable. As I left the parking lot, I stepped off the sidewalk, fell forward, and kept falling. Anticipating a flash of catastrophe and pain, and in a moment of panic too quick for me to form words in my head, I saw images of myself: a broken arm, a smashed face, a cracked skull, a messy death.
I tumbled into a cement culvert and crumpled in shock. I lay like a badly plinked squirrel for a minute or two. Then, crawling upright, my right forearm bleeding and sore, both hands raw, I blessed my luck that I had not broken a bone. My head ached, and the dirt jammed into my bleeding hands worried me. I squatted in the dust for a while to compose myself, then went to the nearby drugstore and bought bandages and antiseptic. After that, I sat in my car and dressed my injuries.
My fall was shocking and annoying. I might have died, people say. But I was angry with myself for being inattentive, for assuming that the sidewalks of Greensboro were as symmetrical and safe as the sidewalks where I came from.
I gave myself a day off and drove to Demopolis, where I found a motel on the bypass road. In my room, aching badly, I fell into a deep sleep. I woke up twelve hours later, still hurting, still feeling lucky.
