by Paul Theroux
Vernell Micey
In Demopolis, which is an exhausted yet pretty town on the Tombigbee River, of sedate houses, several lovely mansions, and mostly empty shops, I met Vernell Micey and tried to understand what he was trying to tell me. Vernell had the strongest local accent that I had yet encountered in the South. He recommended a restaurant called the Red Barn, but he gave the name four jaw-twisting haws: Rey-oh Bow-un.
He was in his early twenties, a senior in college, studying accounting, a small, friendly, excitable fellow, scowling through large eyeglasses.
When I complimented him on the serenity of Demopolis, he became indignant.
“I want to leave this town,” he said angrily. His snarl made it almost comic, yet with a hint of pathos. “I want to leave this state.”
“Where would you go?”
“I’d like to go north, to New York City, or somewhere, anywhere. I want to get away from here. I want to get away from my family.”
“Ever been up north?”
“I’ve never been out of Alabama,” Vernell said. “That’s why I want to go. I don’t care what’s it like. It’s got to be better than this.”
Demopolis was an island surrounded by open fields and groves of trees, areas of outstanding natural beauty. Here and there, at a shack or near a cluster of decaying trailers, a woman would be hanging washing on a line, or a man under a propped-up car hood, leaning over an engine block. For miles there was no sign of modernity; you could not tell what year it was; the decrepitude and the clutter and the simplicity of the settlements suggested an earlier time. The poorer places seemed to exist outside time. It was not strange that Vernell wanted to leave, but he seemed more urgent than others, even frantic.
Pawnshop
Like many similar towns in the South, Demopolis was known for its several antebellum mansions: Bluff Hall, an early-nineteenth-century cotton planter’s home of majestic proportions, a Federal-style building that had been Grecianized in 1840; Gaineswood, a squat manor of white plaster built a decade later, more solid, more Greek, but sitting too close to the modern, red-brick Demopolis High School to possess much grandeur now; and Lyon Hall, with its porticoes, colonnades, hipped roofs, balconies, belvederes, and domes. As for the unwelcome fact that they were built by slaves, you could say the same about the pyramids, but the Egyptians had better excuses for using forced labor.
Such oversized houses, the McMansions of the slave states, were touted as sights for visitors, and some had been spruced up. But just as many or more had fallen into ruin, calling to mind the words of Rebecca West: “There is something especially terrifying about a house that is very big and very poor . . . a Blenheim of misery.”
In any case, Demopolis was also a town of modest bungalows, dogtrot houses, shotgun shacks, an area of decaying huts, and the remnant of a downtown with a defunct movie theater and shops struggling to stay alive. The motels, eating places, strip malls, gas stations, and banks lined the bypass road, which was also the road into Mississippi.
The exception, the busiest store in Demopolis proper—and the exception in most Southern communities in this condition—was the pawnshop, Trade and Traffic, in the center of town on the corner of Washington and Walnut. The pawnshop was thriving, multiracial, full of life—people selling, people buying. The shelves and display cases were filled with pawned tools, household appliances, clothes, jewelry, coins, Civil War and World War Two items, bayonets, helmets, canteens, and the usual Nazi memorabilia. Against one wall were shelves of weapons, with a selection of rifles, pistols, and knives, an arsenal being examined by earnest browsers in slouch hats and blue jeans.
And like most of the other pawnshops I’d looked at in the South, the mood of the place was hospitable and helpful. A dozen people shuffled through the shop, picking through the merchandise, and one happy man was surrendering an old chainsaw for a sum of money.
A black man with a bristly beard and a hunter’s cap sidled in past the stuffed deer head and the rusted harrow still with dirt in its blades, said hello to the browsers in his path, and made for the back of the shop, where a very fat man at the firearms section was leaning against a display case of revolvers. The man leaning was the clerk, and it was midmorning, and he was eating a takeout hamburger with such gusto he’d snagged the wrapper in his teeth and was chewing paper.
“What’s going on, heavy man?”
“I ain’t got no idea,” said the man, chewing.
“Effen you don’t, then no one do.”
“Bleeding Like a Hog”
Down the country lanes, past catfish farms, cattle ranches, and open fields—a horse nudging a foal struggling on spindly legs—past hedges growing out of control, the white froth of cherry trees, and bouquets of peach blossoms, I drove to Greensboro again, where more redbuds were in bloom.
The spring day was hot, and Main Street was a glare of sunlight blazing against the metal sides and dazzling windows of parked cars. I sat down on a bench on the shady side of the street near the Pie Lab, because the man seated on the other side of the bench smiled at me. He was very old and had one arm, a stump articulated at the elbow.
A brown beaky cap was jammed slightly tilted on his head. The thick lenses of his eyeglasses suggested cataracts, and he wore a heavy wool coat in spite of the spring heat. His smile was welcoming, and he patted the bench with the only hand he had. I took him to be about eighty, and he had the vaguely Native American cast of features that some black people had in this part of the South. His name was Floyd Taylor.
“The gun was loaded,” he said at last, after we’d passed the time of day and I’d asked the obvious question. “Because you never know what you’re going to find, and we was hungry, and depended on squirrels and such to eat. I was watching for squirrels, the gun leaning against me. The hammer was on the outside—they don’t make them like that no more. I had the safety switch off, and I picked it up by the barrel and trigger, and it come up and blow my arm off. I was bleeding like a hog for three quarters of a mile. But they fixed it and sewed it up and that’s what I got left.”
“Must have been a problem finding work, with only one good arm,” I said.
“We was farmers,” Floyd said. “It wun’t much of a problem. I drove a truck on the farm for a while, and then I worked at a cee-ment place, making cee-ment. And then I worked on the roads, when they got busted. Drove a truck and sprinkled water on the roads, a water truck.”
“With one arm?”
“Done it all with one hand,” he said. “That was in Demopolis and Greensboro about thirty years ago, maybe forty or more, now I think about it.”
“You grew up around here?”
“I’m from Greensboro, but the country outside.” He canted his head back and smiled at the blue sky. “Life was pretty good here, but we never had no work. Even now we’re trying to get some industry here. They had some things going, but they couldn’t get labor cheap like before. They used to find it, the cheap labor, but they cain’t no more.”
“There’s work in Tuscaloosa,” I said.
“Nothin’ here, though. If you cain’t find work, you just stay at home. We didn’t need much money.”
I smiled at this, and remembered. We weren’t poor, Thomas Hart Benton said of life as a struggling painter; we just didn’t have money.
“When I was a boy my parents were farmers,” Floyd went on. “We had corn, cotton, and outside of those fields we raised a few things to eat. We had watermelons, a big patch of watermelons. We never sold them. We just give ’em away. My pa didn’t believe in selling. We raised sweet potatoes for ourselves. We made syrups and molasses.”
“How do you make molasses?”
“Molasses we made out of cane and sorghum,” he said. “Ribbon cane was top of the line. They had another one called POJ.”
POJ, I found, was a variety of hybrid sugarcane developed in East Java, Indonesia, by the Dutch in the 1920s; the initials stood for Proefstation Oost Java. These imported rot-resistant hybrids saved the dise
ased cane fields of the South in the twenties and thirties.
“You take the cane and strip it. Then you take it to the syrup mill, where you had a thing like a crusher. You put the cane up there and hook your mule to it. And you had a pan, called a syrup pan, about four foot wide, and the syrup run into that pan, and up the front, that’s where the heat stays. Like a skillet. You boils it and th’ows the top away with a ladle. That molasses was prime.”
“It seems you could feed yourselves.”
“We was poor, so we made our own food,” he said. “Gutting and smoking hogs. Bleeding them, cutting them up, smoking them for about two-three days. We done everything ourselves.”
“How much land did you have?”
“Forty or fifty acres, we rented it from a white man who had a lot of land. I have nothing bad to say about that white man. He had a tractor, though, and we had nothing but two mules.”
“Mules instead of a tractor.”
“Sure enough. Hook ’em up to the plow, but they only plowed one furrow at a time, not like a tractor that could do two or more.”
We went on talking about the old-fashioned farm, cotton picking, foraging, hunting.
“My father went out hunting almost every day,” Floyd said. “He shot rabbits and squirrels and deer, and we et ’em.” He smiled, perhaps thinking of those meals. Then he said, “Not like today. People are hungry today but all they do is sit around.”
Paralyzing Despair
“When you come back again,” Randall Curb had said, in the no-hurry way of the South, assuming that nothing would change, because so little had changed. And he hadn’t finished the sentence.
People often said “Come back,” and consequently what I had thought of as a trip with a destination, like many I’d taken before to write about, became circular and seasonal, and I was not sure how it would end, or when.
The idea, which Randall eventually explained, was that he and I would drive over to Marion, the seat of Perry County, and see Mary Ward Brown, the short story writer, who in about a month would turn ninety-six. Randall was confident that when I came back, Mary T, as she was affectionately known to friends, would be eager to see me. More than that, she would still be alive, alert and talkative and healthy.
Randall had told me about Mary Ward Brown’s work, and after I read three of her books—two collections of stories and her memoir—I was eager to meet her. Her writing was direct, unaffected, unsentimental, and powerful for its simplicity and for its revealing the inner life of rural Alabama, the day-to-day, the provincial manners and pretensions, the conflicts racial and economic. No gothic, no dwarfs, no twelve-year-old wives, no idiots, no picturesque monstrosities, nothing that could be described as phantasmagoric.
From her girlhood, Mary T had yearned to be a writer, and had begun some stories, but she had put her writing aside to raise her family. In her sixties she resumed writing; her stories were published by some New York magazines and university quarterlies; and she gained notoriety to the extent that she was invited on a tour in the 1980s to the Soviet Union. She was someone who spoke for the rural South. But until Randall mentioned her name, I had never heard of her. Her stories were a surprise and an enlightenment.
Randall was also a surprise. In his house full of books, he was welcoming—singular and solitary, with a sweetness in his nature; and as a local son he was well connected in town. He had lived through the town’s segregation, had been an eyewitness to the civil rights battles on Main Street, and had chronicled much of this strife. He was not only the most widely read person I met in the South; he was one of the most widely read persons I’d met in my life. He’d been a teacher and a critic and a contributor to magazines and newspapers. He was modest about his writing, and as for his reading, he said that was how he spent his days, immersed in books.
He was blind now—a gradual blindness had descended as the years had passed, as the blind Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges had described his similar progressive blindness. “Not that perfect blindness which people imagine,” Borges said, because Borges had some ability to see, as Randall did. “In my case, that slow nightfall, that slow loss of sight, began when I began to see. It has continued since 1899 without dramatic moments, a slow nightfall that has lasted more than three quarters of a century . . . The pathetic moment came when I knew I had lost my sight, my reader’s and writer’s sight.”
In “Blindness,” the essay from which I am quoting, Borges writes, “Being blind has some advantages. I owe to the darkness some gifts,” and he speaks of how he discovered other ways of perceiving that blindness has given him, and describes the many blind people (Homer, Milton, Joyce, and others) whose lives have been devoted to literature. Randall seemed to me one of those unusual and gifted people, a rare person living alone, among his many books, in a small town in rural Alabama that had become famous for its poverty and isolation.
I was happy to return. The first time I met him, Randall was recommended to me as the cheerful local historian. Like many private people who are devoted readers, he was happiest at home, and he rarely had a chance to speak to anyone about the books he was reading—or rather, these days, the audiobooks he listened to. I’d left him listening to Time Regained, the seventh and last volume of Proust’s vast novel In Search of Lost Time. He was an enthusiastic reader of writers whom I admired, many of them uncelebrated today, such as Henry Green, Jean Stafford, Joyce Cary, and the other Elizabeth Taylor—the English short story writer. He had read all of Faulkner, all of Waugh, all of Henry James, all of Muriel Spark. In a world where books are decorative, or trophies, where books serve to furnish a room, Randall had read every book that rested on his shelves, and many more besides. He was brilliant and modest and solitary, and did not realize how unusual he was in this setting.
It was a relief to see him, to be able to talk about books, to hear his verdict on his completion of the Proust, to sound him out on my Faulkner confusions. As I’d felt before, when we first met, we had a common language and the common experience of books.
“Welcome, welcome,” he said, pawing the air between us, to seize my hand and shake it. “Great to see you. Mary T’s not expecting us until noon, so come on in and have a drink.”
We sat among his bookshelves, the radio softly playing a Chopin nocturne, and talked about books, and the weather, and Greensboro. He spoke with enthusiasm, and yet between bursts of information, taking a breath, or listening, he seemed subdued, even sad, and lapsed into a silent pause.
“I haven’t been well,” he said after one of these pauses.
“You’re better now, though?”
“A bit,” he said, and became quiet again, blinking, as if sentences were running through his mind.
The room at once seemed to darken, and the books to cast shadows, as a silence descended—so odd, on this spring day, the sun so bright on his lawn, the cherry blossoms on the tree in his front yard. This difference reminded me of the poor shadowy room in the house on Flowers Lane, filled with the family goggling at the soap opera, the gas fire hissing up the wall, while outside the mud puddles sparkled in the sunshine and new leaves fluttered on the trees. Randall was still thinking.
“I suffer from clinical depression,” Randall said at last. “I have had it my whole life.”
“What form does it take?”
“It is a paralyzing despair,” he said, but there was no self-pity in his voice, merely the stating of a condition, like naming a color.
“You’ve experienced it recently?”
“These past weeks, yes.”
“‘The black dog,’ Churchill called it.”
“All of that,” Randall said with a wan smile.
“How do you deal with it?”
“I can’t deal with it. There’s nothing to do. I’m helpless.”
“You can’t function?”
“I can’t think about functioning,” he said. “I lie in bed. I can’t get out of bed. I don’t see the point of getting up.”
“How long
does it last?”
“Days pass. I have no willpower. I lie there and think to myself, Can I raise my arm? I consider this awhile, lying there. Then I think, Probably not.”
He sat with his hands in his lap, saying that he was better now, but that at any time the melancholy might return and hold him in its paralyzing grip. I told him what William Styron had mentioned to me, of the physical effect of melancholy, the severe and monotonous pain, the brain ache, for which there was often no relief. Randall said that he had read Styron’s Darkness Visible, and not only knew the lines from Milton, but felt that the words reflected his own melancholy.
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell; hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end . . .
“What makes its slightly worse is that I have no one to look after me, only my mother, bless her,” he said. “And she’s eighty-five.”
The fact that Randall was blind made his condition of melancholy more intense, more alienated and isolated, perhaps triggered it at times. But he wasn’t looking for sympathy, he was explaining his fatigue.
“We’re going to have a good time,” he said, reviving a little, and smiled. “Mary T is dying to meet you. I made a reservation at Lottie’s in Marion—that’s the best Southern cooking you’re going to find around here. And look, it’s a beautiful day.”
“Limbic Resonance Is What You Need”
When I came to the town of Marion, I realized how moribund Greensboro was. The shops in Marion were still in business, and the town had a majestic courthouse, a large military institute, and Judson College, which Mary T (she insisted on the name, which was short for Mary Thomas) had attended. There were bookstores in Marion and the well-known soul food restaurant Lottie’s. Martin Luther King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, had been raised in Marion, and voting rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson had been shot by an Alabama state trooper in the town in 1965, during a peaceful protest, a catalyzing event in the civil rights movement that provoked the confrontational and historic protest marches from Selma to Montgomery.
