by Paul Theroux
The gangster era came to an end in the late 1960s and is luridly depicted in the Gangster Museum of America on Central Avenue (“where you won’t be gambling on a good time, but betting on a sure thing!”). Because of its pleasant climate and sleaze, the town had been a destination for spring training for Northern baseball teams from the 1880s to 1940—a wild era too, when players routinely binged and whored.
That was Hot Springs’s colorful past, but it was the recent past. No place to raise a child, is what you’d say—dangerous, wild, full of malign influences, opportunists, career criminals, tarts, cheats, trimmers, and schemers. Yet that’s what the newly married Virginia Clinton did, accompanying her second husband, Roger, there, her seven-year-old Billy in tow.
Bill Clinton was born in the small, sweetly named town of Hope, in southwestern Arkansas, in 1946, as the often-told story has it in the mythology of the man. But the banal truth is that he grew up—was formed, educated, became a man—in raw, reckless Hot Springs, a hundred miles north, amid its miseries and splendors. His father, William Blythe, was killed in a car crash before he was born. His mother studied nursing, so that she could provide for the boy. In 1950, his mother met and married Roger Clinton, and three years later they moved from Hope to Hot Springs, Roger’s hometown.
“While Bill Clinton’s writings about his boyhood in Hope in the late 1940s acknowledge the racial separation of the town of 7,500 people, his memories are mostly sepia-toned and nostalgic, like those of his Pawpaw’s grocery store,” the Arkansas writer Jay Jennings explains in Carry the Rock (2010). “But in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when cotton was king and Jim Crow was unwritten law, Hope was the site of enough racial murder that it was sometimes called the lynching capital of the South.”
In Hot Springs, Roger Clinton was known as a shiftless drunk. In a town of degenerates, being a boozer was no shame, but Roger proved to be a wife-beater as well as a demented alcoholic, and when young Bill was old enough (he says he was fifteen), he defied his stepfather’s wrath and defended his mother. The marriage ended. Virginia continued working as a nurse anesthetist, but in an expression of hope over experience, she remarried the same pathetic man a year later.
Meanwhile, young Bill studied, learned to play the tenor saxophone, excelled academically at Hot Springs High School, attended church at Park Place Baptist, bought chili cheeseburgers at the Polar Bar (now Baily’s Dairy Treat), ribs at McClard’s Bar-B-Q, apple pie at Club Café, and ice cream at Cook’s Dairy, and went to movies (Elvis movies, biblical epics) at the Paramount and Malco theaters. He tells us this in his autobiography, My Life, displaying great affection for the town and an extraordinary memory for detail.
But he does not say that the theaters’ balconies and back entrances were for blacks, that the motels and restaurants were segregated, and that the black part of Hot Springs was miserably poor and decrepit. Speaking of the time of Governor Orval Faubus’s racist intransigence and of the federal marshals forcing the integration of Little Rock’s Central High, all he says is “Most of my friends were either against integration or unconcerned. I didn’t say too much about it, probably because my family was not especially political, but I hated what Faubus did.” He is equally disengaged when describing segregation in Hot Springs: “It bothered me that Hot Springs’ schools weren’t integrated. The black kids still went to Langston High School.”
One afternoon in Hot Springs, I made a point of driving over to Langston, the neighborhood on the opposite side of town from where Clinton lived. I found broken streets, run-down houses, a wholly black area around the school, Southern impoverishment, the other side of the tracks. Still a disgrace fifty years after Clinton lived in town, still poor and obviously neglected, Langston looked like a black “location” in South Africa, ripe for uplift from an NGO (though none was in sight), the very sort of place that should have been a target for improvement by the Clinton Global Initiative, but wasn’t.
While Clinton was a teenager (and from his account he roamed freely in Hot Springs), gambling was rife, murders were common, gangsters were part of the scene, Maxine Jones’s brothel and many others were thriving, and the town, run by a crooked political machine, was alight with roisterers, whores, and high rollers. You’re bound to wonder what effect that ingrained culture of vice might have had on an impressionable schoolboy.
Contemplating Hot Springs, it is difficult to imagine a more unpromising origin for a president, one so likely to warp a mind or corrupt a soul. Yet the defining characteristics of a president are worldliness and guile. The world in all its bizarre forms had come to Hot Springs, and Clinton was buoyant in it; the town was clearly the making of the man. In My Life, Clinton repeats the tedious Hot Springs boast of larger-than-life visitors—“outlaws, mobsters, military heroes, actors, and a host of baseball greats”—and describes his upbringing: the abusive stepfather, the hardworking and loving mother (who was also a drinker, gambler, chain smoker, and harmless flirt—an Auntie Mame type, adored by her son), his love of the tenor sax, his visits to relatives, his after-school job at the small grocery, his classes as a math whiz, his dabbling in student politics, his earnest posturing that successfully masked a troubled home life.
The pain of being hard-up and frugal in such a flashy, freewheeling place; the necessity to succeed, to achieve something and get out, to prove himself worthy of his mother, and to redeem her belief in him—these aspects formed him. It’s an American story, but in Hot Springs it is gaudier than most. Clinton was transformed by his upbringing, yet he was, like many white Southerners, a late convert to vocally demanding integration. In My Life he extols the diversity of the Hot Springs population—Jews, Greeks, Arabs, Italians—but the black side of town, the Langston neighborhood, is not mentioned; black life does not exist for him; he apparently has no black friends.
In his autobiography, Clinton continually makes the point that he was a keeper of secrets, leading a double life, never letting on in school of the turmoil at home. The succession of houses he grew up in (now all privately owned and unwelcoming) were in modest but respectable white neighborhoods. But a visit to Hot Springs is convincing proof that throughout his early life, as a young boy, as an older student, Clinton was performing a balancing act, keeping his head up while tiptoeing through a mud-puddle sludge of human weakness and greed, crookedness and carnality (the survival strategy of many politicians).
His relief at leaving Hot Springs is palpable in his telling. He had chosen Georgetown University because “I wanted to be in Washington.” Yet after Georgetown, a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, and Yale Law School, he did what many might regard as the unthinkable: he returned to Arkansas. It was a calculated move. He was still in his twenties, it was a state he knew well, and he was implausible anywhere else. Perhaps he had a long-term plan—he doesn’t say in his book, but you can see he is driven: the desperate, do-anything-to-win drive of the man from nowhere, who seems to be hiding something (wounds, fantasies, transgressions, family secrets). He taught law for a year at Fayetteville, then ran for Congress in 1974, and lost. He became state attorney general in 1976 and governor in 1978, at the age of thirty-two—“the boy governor,” as he was known.
To his supporters, Bill Clinton was a man of immense charm who improved health care and education in Arkansas, at the same time mastering the art of consensus building, while retaining his amorous disposition. To his enemies, he was the fiddler and liar who turned the governor’s mansion into a fornicarium. He served multiple terms, totaling almost twelve years, and, still only forty-six, became president.
It was a breathless run, and he kept on running, for a second term, and afterward—he has never lived away from the public eye, has an obvious, perhaps pathological aversion to solitude, has always sought attention—for the role of world statesman, global humanist, and reformer; but also plotter in the shadows, conniver in schemes, and double-talker, in a mold described by Thoreau in a skeptical essay, “Now, if anything ail a man so that he does not
perform his functions . . . if he has committed some heinous sin and partially repents, what does he do? He sets about reforming the world.”
Hot Springs had two distinct sides, so did the Clinton household, so evidently does Clinton himself. This conflict could have made him a criminal, or disillusioned him, turned him cynical; instead it made him ambitious, adaptable, eager to please, charming, charismatic, sympathetic, and hardworking. But it also made him covert, adept at role-playing and posturing, with a hint of the huckster in everything he proposed, a teller of half-truths, and a master of secrets. Clinton’s drive to succeed was unstoppable, and it continues: his passion to lead, to be in charge, to relieve the planet’s ills, to be an explainer, a crowd pleaser, friend to the great and good (Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama), emotionally immature, and hungry for the world’s affection. “He seemed like the hungriest man I’d ever met,” a writer friend told me after accompanying the candidate on the campaign in 1992. In his autobiography, Clinton continually interrupts the narrative of his early life by flashing forward and describing how he learned a lesson or atoned for one lapse or another. America knows him as the great atoner, the fixer, the compromiser. The bird-dogger of chicks is also, inevitably, the most fervent sermonizer at the prayer breakfast.
Hot Springs has tried to reinvent itself as a family-friendly holiday town and destination for conventioneers. It has a look of solidity and criminal elegance, a big-city gloom and density, rare in a Southern town—the shadowy aura of a place in which many dramas have occurred, the rub of history, where a great deal of money has been spent to tempt the visitor to linger.
Horse racing and some low-level gaming persisted, as moronic pastimes rather than vices, but the present was simply seedy, college kids barhopping and late-summer tourists traipsing the streets, darting in and out of the gift shops and bars, shabbily dressed, pushing baby carriages, screaming at their children, hunting for fun in a place that seemed chilly and bleak. The barbecue joints and the occasional pageant or festival could not compete with the shootouts and the orgies of the past.
Now Hot Springs is a place wholly itself: the decaying abandoned buildings and vacant hotels on the main drag, funky motels, tacky shops, a whiff of damp motor courts on the outskirts—Southern neglect combined with Southern casualness and vulgarity, and redeemed by hospitality and self-parody. Part of the town’s good fortune is that it is just a gap in rocky cliffs, minutes from the deep woods and lovely hills.
There is something joyless in a place advertising itself as joyful, a note of desperation in the hype. Faded glory, faded hope, faded hilarity, the weird junk shops, the air of desperation, the stink like an alcoholic’s breath or a carnival sideshow, the shallowness and obvious scheming that is part of every gambling town on earth. And, like every other boomtown, doomed to failure.
But Hot Springs had once been a vortex of energy, and it is a characteristic of the power of such libidinized places to make their residents morally blind—you could say the same about the White House. Hot Springs, destination of murderers, cheaters, and whores, produced a president, a peculiar one, morally blind on many occasions—as in 1992 when Governor Clinton rushed back to Arkansas to sign the death sentence of drooling, brain-damaged Ricky Ray Rector, sending him gaga to the electric chair, so that candidate Clinton would win votes as a crime fighter. Complex and contradictory, the public man seeking redemption, mock humble in manner but lusting for glory, perpetually enlisting big companies to help him expand his brand, Clinton is the quintessential Southern huckster who does not know when to stop, and Hot Springs, the corrupted town, which advertised its waywardness, was itself Clintonesque.
Road Candy at the Dixie Café
“Poverty is a great educator. Those who have never known it lack something,” the Anglo-Irish writer Gerald Brenan observed in Thoughts in a Dry Season. Brenan spent most of his life among peasants in Spain, but this wise saying was a great epitaph to the Southern lives that were themselves peasant existences. To travel through the South is to see this insight proven over and over; Southerners, especially the older folk, black and white, often reflected with pride on the pleasure they took in their austerities.
I thought of Brenan’s words as I made my way on a lovely summer afternoon drive from Hot Springs northward, along simple Route 7, through farmland and forest, past Jessieville and Ola and Dardanelle, and across the Arkansas River, dark brown in spate, to Russellville.
There, at the Dixie Café, I met Patricia Atkinson, who had grown up in poverty in a family of fifteen children, ten boys and five girls. She was number twelve, and now in her late fifties. Her eldest brother had recently died at the age of eighty-nine. The family home had been near Hughes, in northeastern Arkansas, in the Delta; her father, Jim Short, had done sharecropping, cotton mainly. An enormous, poor white family farming outside a country town, but they had struggled and succeeded and stayed together. Later, Pat went to college, got a job as a secretary in a housing development organization, learned the ropes, stuck with it through a transition—“It’s self-help housing”—and was now executive director.
We sat among the remains of catfish, chicken stew and dumplings, fried tomatoes, fried onions, fried corn on the cob—the cobs dipped in egg, battered in flour, and deep-fried.
“My father used to cut off the corn kernels and fry them up,” Pat said, poking at her corncob. “Very good eating. But we ate everything. Imagine, fifteen of us kids. Only five of us graduated from high school. If you’re farming, you can’t go to school. One of my brothers never set foot in a classroom—my father wouldn’t let him.”
“Because he needed him on the farm?” I asked.
“No. Thought he’d be bullied. My father was protective of Hopper,” she said. “Short for Clodhopper. He was always running around the fields.”
“Fifteen children—how big was your house?”
“Put it this way, there was two or three beds in every room. Privacy was unknown. We shared the room, we shared the bed.”
The three beds had always held all the Lesters, Erskine Caldwell writes in Tobacco Road, even when there were sometimes as many as eight or nine of them there.
“I guess you all had to cooperate.”
“We had hard times,” she said. “I started picking cotton when I was six or seven, using a pillowcase. Later on, I had a tow sack, about the size of a feed bag. Then I got a proper cotton sack—nine foot long. The boys used to step on the end of it so I couldn’t pull it. They thought that was real funny.”
“But you were still in school all this time?”
“Oh, yes. The cotton we picked on Saturdays we got to keep for ourselves—kept the money, I mean.”
“What sort of money?”
“In the 1960s we got a dollar-fifty for a hundred pounds. My brothers could pick three hundred pounds apiece, easy.”
“Doesn’t seem like much money,” I said.
“It wasn’t, but we had to do it. Imagine trying to feed fifteen children in one house. It was always a problem. We always worked, and we helped each other. We raised our own meat—pork and chicken—and we hunted deer and squirrels. We trapped raccoons, mink, bobcat, and sold the hides. Catch a good coon and you could sell the hide and eat the rest.”
“Raccoons—I’ve trapped them,” I said, “when they were being a nuisance, crawling down the chimney, clawing the shingles off the roof. They’re so smelly, scavenging in the garbage.”
“Baked coon is some good eating,” Pat said. “A lot of people around here eat it. Baked raccoon and sweet potatoes. Skin it, cut it up, salt and pepper, then bake it some. Chunk up some sweet potatoes and put them around it and bake it some more.”
“They can sleep through a freezing winter,” I said, “so they must have a lot of fat.”
“Lot of fat on a coon. It bakes off, adds to the taste.”
“You mentioned squirrel?”
“Squirrel’s big,” she said. “Squirrel season’s coming.”
“How do you cook them?”<
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“Squirrel for breakfast—smother-fried,” she said. “Gut the front shoulders and back legs and rib cage. You can cook the head too. Roll all of them in flour and shove them in the skillet. Squirrel cooks real fast. Then put water into the skillet with the browned squirrel. The flour turns into gravy. Cover it, let it simmer awhile. It’s delicious first thing in the morning.”
“I guess you had chores to do on the farm, before you went to school?”
“For many years we didn’t have water in the house, we had a well. Jerked water out with a pump. It’s sometimes real cold in the winter in Hughes. I remember going out to get water one winter morning when I was a girl. The snow was up to my waist.” Pat had shoved her chair back and was looking into the middle distance, reflecting on this scene in her girlhood. “Course, you had to prime the pump, so we always kept some water back for that. That day we had to dig a lot of snow out from around the pump before we got any water.”
“I think of the Delta as warm,” I said. “It wasn’t that cold when I was there in the winter.”
“The summers are very hot, but summertime was fun for us. We’d fill a sixty-five-gallon barrel of water, leave it in the sun to heat up, and play in it. If you don’t have money, you make your own fun. We made toys out of corncobs. Soak ’em in water, get ’em soft, and throw them at each other. We were barefoot most of the time, wore hand-me-downs, just like everyone else.”
“By ‘everyone else,’ you mean black people?”
“Blacks were our neighbors. We worked in the fields with them, side by side.”
“But the Delta in the fifties and sixties was segregated.”
“We worked together. I didn’t feel any prejudice.” She thought a moment. “My dad was from Tupelo, and he was old-fashioned. He thought blacks had their place.” She shook her head and added, “He had a sad life. His parents died in 1915, when he was twelve. He was deemed ‘too old’ to go to the orphanage with his two brothers and two sisters, who were younger. So he was separated from them and was sent to a woman he called his grandma—only she wasn’t. She was some distant relation, Aunt Jones.”
