by Paul Theroux
“Did he reconnect with his brothers and sisters?”
“He wanted to. He tried to find them later, but never did,” Pat said. “Then I tried—tried everything, all the databases, all the connections. But I failed. It was a sadness to him his whole life.”
“Your upbringing was amazing,” I said.
“Growing up that way is the reason I’m doing what I’m doing now.”
What she was doing now was improving housing for the poor in nine counties in west-central Arkansas. Her stories of growing up poor in the Delta, offered modestly, were wonderful examples of the full life she had led. The stories were like road candy to me, the happiest aspect of my seasons in the South.
“There’s Some People Who Never Hit a Lick at a Snake and They Expect Help”
Over the next few days in Russellville, I got to know Pat Atkinson better. She introduced me to her staff—organizers and contractors and clerks—and some of her clients. And she told me how she had become part of this housing program.
After graduating from business college in 1981, Pat had joined a self-help housing organization called ARVAC, working as a secretary and then moving up, taking on more and more responsibility. Her long apprenticeship in housing development resulted in her present post, more than thirty years later, as executive director of the Universal Housing Development Corporation of Russellville, rehabbing homes, building houses, making repairs. As she said at the Dixie Café, growing up in a large, hard-pressed sharecropping family in the Delta was good training for this.
Anyone who was approved for housing help was expected to work on the house—“sweat equity.” Her organization’s budget was $2.5 million, much of it from federal grants and most of it going to programs rather than salaries. We were sitting in Pope County, one of the nine served by Universal Housing, a county that was mostly white (ninety-two percent) and very poor (home to a submerged twentieth). The Delta and urban areas—Little Rock, for example—had a greater percentage of black residents and about the same or higher poverty levels. Universal Housing built, on average, about thirty new homes a year and rehabbed about fifty. It was the largest self-help housing program in Arkansas, and the most successful, though still a modest-sized organization with a relatively small budget.
“Our clients are the working poor,” Pat said. “Around here that works out as about thirty-two thousand dollars for a family of four.”
“The price of a car,” I said.
“A good car,” Pat said. “If they’re earning more than that, they don’t qualify. On that kind of income all they’re doing is surviving. We have a long waiting list, mainly white. That’s the demographic here.”
“Many Hispanics?”
“Hispanics are classified as white,” she said. “Some of them show up and ask for help. We say we need to see documents—IDs, Social Security cards, tax bills, whatever. Now and then they say, ‘Do they have to be my documents? Can they be someone else’s?’ You know? They’re serious!”
“How long is the waiting list?”
“About four hundred at the moment. Some of them are on the list so long they don’t make it—they pass away before they get a house. We’ve got people who’ve been waiting ten years or more.”
In Arkansas, insurance companies made regular inspections of policyholders’ houses. In many cases, the houses of clients had deteriorated so badly that the companies canceled their policies. The owners were left uninsured, with leaky roofs and broken windows and no means to fix them.
“You can see sunlight through those roofs,” Pat said. “The people call us so we can help them with a roof or a repair. But we expect people to work and help. We give advice, we help with plans and with ordering materials, and the house owners do most of the work themselves. They involve family, friends, neighbors, anyone who’s willing.”
“Do people usually pitch in?”
“There’s some people who never hit a lick at a snake and they expect help,” Pat said. “There’s all sorts of issues. I don’t understand people who expect you to help them without their thinking they could help themselves. And then there’s people who don’t ask for much. They don’t want to admit they’re poor.”
“Proud, I guess.”
“Little old woman, Dolores Malton, up on Crow Mountain. Tiny lady, a hundred pounds or less, a little biddy, she came to us for help. She wanted us to put in a water line.”
“She had no water?”
“No running water. She lived in a little old storage building, just an eight-by-ten shack. No plumbing—she used a chamber pot. She said she was getting too old to carry water. Probably in her eighties.”
“Did you put in the water line?”
“We wound up building her a house,” Pat said. “Another client, mother and daughter and the daughter’s two children living in two small storage buildings. No plumbing. Terrible conditions. We built them a house.”
“I’d like to meet some of these people you’ve helped.”
“I’ll see if I can arrange something,” she said. “I need to get their permission for you to visit. I’ll make some calls.”
“How about Bill Gates, and Clinton, and the other charities—get any help from them?”
“We never see them, we get nothing—they want to help Africa,” she said. “It really bothers me that Clinton does so little here. I wish he’d help us. He’s in Africa and India, and other people are helping in the Third World and those countries. We don’t see that money. Don’t they realize our people need help?”
The Cabin on Quickerstill Lane
Dover, a small, pretty town at the edge of the green bumpkin hills of the Ozarks, about twelve miles north of Russellville, sunny today in smiling summer heat, was notorious for a massacre. In 1987 Ronald Gene Simmons murdered his entire family, fourteen people—his children, their spouses, and their children—one of the saddest victims a seven-year-old girl he had fathered through an incestuous relationship with his daughter. And afterward, still in a fury, he drove to Russellville and killed two more people. Then, unshaven, grubby Ronald Gene Simmons meekly surrendered.
“But he was from Chicago,” Dover people told me. That was true. Simmons had served twenty-two years in the air force, fought in Vietnam, and retired to New Mexico. When a charge of incest was filed by his daughter, he fled to Arkansas. There he lived north of Dover on five fenced-in acres, with many of his family members, in a pair of jammed-together house trailers with no running water. Heavily bearded and bald and swivel-eyed, he seemed in the beginning to fit in.
A drinker and a loner, with no friends, he had attempted to work at clerking jobs in Russellville, but ultimately was shunned as a weirdo and a woman-pesterer. One woman in particular who had resisted his advances became a nonfamily victim of the massacre. Simmons chose the days just before Christmas for the murders, which he carried out with calculation, shooting some with a .22 pistol he’d bought at Walmart, strangling others with his bare hands, and drowning the smallest children by holding them underwater in a rain barrel. All this mayhem was carried out in and around the trailers, which were strewn with unopened Christmas presents.
He apparently said to the children, “Come in here, I got a present for you,” and killed them one by one. Others had shown up for their holiday visit and were shot. After spending a night with the corpses, Simmons drove the next day into Russellville, drank a beer at a bar, and shot two more people, whom he considered unfriendly to him, and wounded five others. When he surrendered, he said to a bystander, “It’s all over now. I’ve gotten everybody who wanted to hurt me,” and demanded the death penalty. His wish was granted: he was executed less than three years later.
Apart from that killing spree, Dover’s history is mild; it is a tiny, quiet town, mostly white families and rather poor, even by Arkansas standards. Ten miles outside Dover, not far from the site of the massacre, at the end of a dirt road called Quickerstill Lane, in lumpy, wooded hill country where the Ozarks begin to rise, I was met by Fannie DeAlba, a s
mall, cranky-voiced woman of sixty-six, who greeted me sourly by complaining, “I don’t get many visitors.”
“I wonder why,” I said, meaning to be ironic.
She answered me sharply: “I don’t get visitors ’cause I’m hateful and mouthy.”
“You seem very pleasant,” I said.
“That’s bull,” she said, and smiled, seeming to test me with her bad temper.
She was small and smooth-faced and stout, with an impish smirk, and later, when she stopped being vexatious and became friendlier and took out her rifle and challenged me to a shooting match—knocking down a beer can—I noticed that she had a way of cradling the weapon on the paunch of her bulky body, both resting it and keeping it handy. With the rifle vertical and the butt on the ground, Fannie DeAlba wasn’t much taller than the muzzle.
“Also, this here is country poor,” she said, meaning Why would anyone bother?, and canted her grizzled head at the dirt road, the trash pile, the heap of discarded car tires, the piles of lumber and a few flower beds, and the dense woods that continued for sixty miles north, the deep green and mostly trackless heart of the Ozarks.
She’d been born Fannie Campbell to a sharecropping family in Dumas, and saying the name, she added, “Bet you don’t know where that is.”
“It’s near Monticello,” I said.
“Think you’re so smart,” she said in a teasing tone. “We were raised old-fashioned. Cotton, soybeans. No indoor plumbing. I never had a steak growing up. When you’re on a farm and poor, you eat pork and chicken. I had shrimp for the first time in California—my second marriage. I’m looking at the shrimp and thinking, The hell’s that?”
That second husband was DeAlba, and though Fannie married a third time, and divorced him too, she kept the name DeAlba. “His family was all Spanish. They explored California. Some of them was royalty.”
How she had come to this small cabin on Quickerstill Lane—“Named either for Mr. Quicker or maybe his still, no one knows”—was a long story, she said, and hardly worth knowing. But I encouraged her to elaborate. The salient fact was that she had for many years lived in a trailer in the woods off Morgan Road, a long, dead-straight country road south of Dover. “The trailer was junk. It caught fire four or five times. It belonged to my ex.” That was her third ex. About twelve years ago she moved out and bought a trailer on Quickerstill Lane. Then it caught fire. “The whole thing was burned out from a gas fire. We couldn’t move on.”
That was when she got in touch with Universal Housing. Pat Atkinson sent a contracting adviser, Shawn, to see her, and he assessed what it would take to repair. In effect, the burned-out shell was turned into a cabin, the materials costing $4,674. Fannie signed a contract and a deed, and she got a loan, vowing to pay it off after the work was done: new metal roof, new bathroom, new porch, plasterboard walls inside, new floor tiles.
“It was a self-help deal. Different friends helped. And Shawn from the agency told us what to do and how to do it. And I paid it off, every penny.”
Shooing cats—she had eleven of them, she said—she showed me inside, a kitchen and living room arrangement, and behind the rear wall, the bathroom, which she insisted I see.
“I fixed this up myself. See that angel?” It was a sweet-faced winged creature. “I painted that. I mess with painting and drawing all the time.”
It was a simple flat-roofed cabin, and it was cluttered, but it was secure—and a far cry from her old junk trailer on Morgan Road, or the burned-out shell that it had been before Universal Housing had helped her.
“After deer season we’ll get the rest of the porch put on,” she said. “You can’t get anyone to work. They’re all hunting. And if it’s not bow season, then it’s black powder season, or modern rifle. They close school the first day of hunting season. No one would show up anyway.”
“You do any hunting, Fannie?”
“Not as such,” she said. “I hate possums and raccoons. My dog trees ’em and I shoot ’em. They kill my chickens. I killed a seven-foot chicken snake a while ago. They like eggs. They can smell ’em. Them snakes are all over, or in the weeds. They got into my horse trough. I couldn’t shoot into the horse trough and make holes, so I got me a shovel and chopped it into pieces.” She looked at me, gave me a naughty child’s smile and wink. “I ain’t real partial to snakes.”
“I take it you’re a good shot.”
“Middling. Probably better than you.”
That was when she got her rifle out of a closet, and a box of ammo, and told me to follow her. She hugged the rifle against her belly, then set up a beer can about thirty feet away on a tree stump.
“You first,” she said.
“Go ahead. You’ve got the gun.”
She raised it, fired, and sent the beer can flying. And then she laughed—the first time I’d heard that witchy cackle—and it was my turn. I fired, missed, fired again, hit the stump, and swore.
“You’re pulling it down, mister.”
After a few more shots I managed to knock the can over, but with far less panache than Fannie had.
“You need to know how to protect yourself,” she said. “Take my new stepgranddaughter. She’s from Wisconsin. Never been around guns. She had anxiety attacks when she come down here. I fixed that right away. I don’t think anyone should be intimidated. No one intimidates me. I think you should be able to do and say what you want.”
“You told her that?”
“Yep. She was kind of scared, though.”
“What’s the answer?”
“Taught her how to shoot is the answer. First my thirty-eight, then my twenty-two. We hung up targets and I showed her. There was a buzzard flew over. I can’t hit no damn buzzard, but we tried! We shot up the trash barrels, we shot up the targets and the cans. Now, guess what?” Her face tightened in an imp-smirk and she wagged her head. “She don’t have no anxiety attacks.”
“Everybody’s got a gun.”
“Everybody’s got a lot of guns,” Fannie said. “And for a reason. I remember a time I had kids in my car—small kids. And some other kids come chasing after me, some doing harassment. I pulled out my gun. They left! I woulda shot ’em. I had kids in the car!”
“I guess they learned a lesson.”
Fannie was now perspiring heavily, excited by telling this story of a close call. She was breathing hard, too, and said, “I also got me a crossbow. Any stupid son of a bitch comes into my house will get an arrow in him.” She was panting, and then with an effort she shouted, “I will nail you to the wall!”
She put her rifle down and sat on a low bench to get her breath, leaning over and gasping.
“I been in fourteen wrecks,” she said. “People kinda run into me.”
Still she kept her head down, forearms resting on her knees, recovering her wind. It was late afternoon, and a coolness was settling into the Quickerstill hollow, the sun tangled in the trees.
“I’m part Choctaw and part Cherokee. My dad was an Indian. My great-grandma claimed to be Black Dutch—her name was Snow Flower.”
The term “Black Dutch” has complex roots and many conflicting definitions, depending on the region where it was used. In Arkansas it implied a Native American passing for white in order to own land and resist being forcibly removed to a reservation. This talk seemed to upset Fannie, who was fighting to breathe.
“You feeling okay, Fannie?”
“Out of breath. I got high blood pressure. ’Cause I’m hateful, and I get mad.”
“What makes you mad?”
“This was the Cherokee reservation. Then they split—Trail of Tears. Dardanelle was a reservation too.” She was speaking in an aggrieved voice, a tone of indignation. “An Indian could not vote, could not own land.”
“Terrible.”
“You said it. Blacks complain, but what I get pissed off about is that. Blacks complaining. Get a job. Get over it.”
“Your house looks nice from here,” I said, to change the subject, hoping calm her, because she
was breathing hard and her face was pink with a glow of sweat.
“I’m happy with what we done,” she said, lifting her head, picking up her rifle, surveying the small cabin that sat under the trees, among the small flower beds and the slowly moving cats high-stepping through the piles of discarded tires. She dabbed at her damp face. “It’s only got to last twenty years.”
“Really—why?”
“Because I don’t want to live longer than that,” she said.
The Back Road to God’s Country
Sticking to narrow back roads, driving cross-country northwest of Dover, toward Lamar, I was thinking how many of these numbered county roads in Arkansas, gravel and dirt, were Third World thoroughfares irregularly lined by Third World shacks. “Don’t they realize our people need help?” Pat Atkinson had said to me a few days before, speaking of the billionaire donors to Africa. It was she who had directed me here, to this area of considerable poverty in a landscape of outstanding beauty, to meet some of her clients, among them Chester Skaggs and his wife, Rose, whom Pat always referred to, in the delicately formal Southern way, as Miss Rose.
“This is God’s country. It’s beautiful out here,” said Chester Skaggs, leading me through the heat, up the long rutted drive to his small, rebuilt cabin, his dog nipping at my shoes. “There’s a dozen families”—none were visible, just open country in the foreground, the Ozarks rising behind it—“Holman Community, some call it. Or Hickey. The voting polls are in Lutherville.”
I looked north beyond the pastures toward the mountains, where I could see the promise of a lovely valley like a nick on the rim of the horizon.
