Deep South

by Paul Theroux

  “Most of this community is lower class,” he said, stating it as a fact, not a complaint. If the word had occurred to him, he might have said, We’re peasants. And he gazed with me at what could have been the rusted roof of a distant barn, adding, “All poverty level.”

  Chester Skaggs was fifty-five but looked much older, from a life of hard labor begun in childhood on his father’s farm and sawmill, and ultimately curtailed by a back injury on an oil rig. Forty-five years or more of work. He had never entered a schoolhouse or faced a teacher. Rose was about the same age but also looked older: white-haired, plump, a bit frail. Chester was skinny, ironic, a chain smoker with a smoker’s wheeze and a fruity cough. He wore a baseball hat with Cherry stitched over the visor.

  Driving to the Skaggses’ house was another time-warp experience for me of entering an earlier age in America, a simpler era, serious poverty relieved by the misleadingly picturesque. I agreed with Chester Skaggs, it was beautiful, meadows bordered by enormous trees, the undulant foothills of the Ozarks, all of it deep green in the summer noontime.

  “I don’t see any other farms. Didn’t see any on the way in.”

  “There’s some. All sorts. A black family too—Tyrone Williams. We get along fine.” He laughed and lit another cigarette. “Fact is, Johnson County’s getting crowded.”

  “You from around here?”

  “I was born near here, on the family farm. There was only eleven of us kids, five boys and six girls. Besides the farm, my father had a sawmill. We had cattle and chickens and a lot of lumber.”

  He noticed his dog nipping at my foot and gently pushed it away. When the dog toppled, I saw a scabby patch on its underside.

  “That there’s Speedy. She’s hurtin’. A copperhead bit her on one of her mammaries and rotted the skin out.”

  “I keep hearing snake stories in Arkansas,” I said, thinking of Fannie DeAlba’s finding a chicken snake in her horse trough and hacking it to pieces with a shovel.

  “We got snakes. Some poisonous, some not,” Chester said. “Speedy found that copperhead and was boogerin’ at it and got bit. After that she was lyin’ down with her tongue hanging out. She was the nearest thing to dyin’ I ever seen, rotted off her mammary.”

  “She doesn’t look too bad.” The dog was yapping and jumping.

  “I give her some medicine and squirted some of that stuff you squirt on cows to keep the flies off. She’s better—runnin’ around.”

  We were still walking up the drive, which was more a back road than a driveway, and in about the same condition as the unpaved county road beyond the thicket.

  “I’m the one hurtin’ now,” Chester said. “Worked at the farm and at my father’s sawmill, then when I was younger at the shoe factory in Wynne. Later on, I worked in the oil fields in Oklahoma. I got into pipelining.”

  “Travel much?”

  “We done a coupla jobs down in Texas, years ago. My back got so bad I couldn’t lift nothin’ and in the end I couldn’t stand up.”

  We had come to the house now, which was less a house than a cabin or a primitive farm building, a low structure under a vast overhanging sycamore tree.

  “This house used to be called the old Metzger place,” he said. “It’s a hundred and fifty years old.”

  “Looks like you did plenty of rehab on it.”

  “Got a lot of help and advice from Pat Atkinson over at Universal Housing,” he said. “The shingles was old on account of the trees. That walnut and that sycamore and that oak. Universal supplied the roofing.” It was a metal roof, heavy panels, 24-gauge, laid over the frame where the shingles had been. “No leaks now.”

  “Must have been a lot of work.”

  “Windows and doors too. This place was a wreck before. We did the fixin’ ourselves, with friends and volunteers. They was good people, and hardworkin’. I couldn’t afford to pay anyone.”

  Rose Skaggs had been listening. She said, “When my stepdaughter Rachel was about twelve, her friends from Lamar come over. School friends. Afterwards—” Rose had started to laugh, and needed to calm herself before she could continue. “Afterwards, they said, ‘Rachel lives in a barn!’”

  Chester laughed too. “It was in rough shape,” he said, seeming to agree with the mocking schoolgirls.

  Now the roof was new, the doors and windows were new, the outside trim had been painted white, and new siding fastened on. It was a small house but it had been restored, and, set in the grove of trees, it looked idyllic from a distance. Up close it was the humble home of two people in poor health, living on—what? I didn’t dare ask. Perhaps disability.

  When I remarked on the good workmanship, Chester took that as a cue to say that all he had learned in his life had been practical, on the job, no schooling.

  “School isn’t nothin’,” he said, volunteering the observation. “It’s only a guideline to learning. It’s not learning anything, really. They can teach you pronouns, but so what? You got to educate yourself. That’s everyone’s responsibility. You got to learn your skills outside school.”

  “I agree with you,” I said, thinking, The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

  “I worked making shoes in Clarksville,” Rose said. “That was back in ’78. I believe they’re still making shoes, some. But they may be shutting down, going overseas, like everyone else.”

  With Rose following us, Chester led me into the house. Every house has its own peculiar odor. This one smelled of cold soup and damp bedding and Speedy. Two horizontal rifles rested on a gun rack on the bedroom wall, a .30-30 and a .22—you could reach either of them from the bed. And there were more, upright in Chester’s gun case. I remarked on them.

  “Antigun people are buying up ammo, and the government is too,” Chester said. “I know where they’re stockpiling it. The Pine Bluff Arsenal.”

  “Really?” I said. “I know there’s an ammo shortage, but I didn’t realize it was a conspiracy.”

  “Yep. I got that from a friend of mine.”

  I looked outside at the sunshine, Speedy still nipping at my heels, the wind ruffling the sycamore boughs. Life here had seemed so simple: chickens in a coop, a goat tethered to a post, the yappy dog, and Chester puffing on a cigarette and talking about the jobs he’d had and how he and the friends and volunteers had rehabbed his house, turning it from a shack to a weather-tight bungalow.

  Inside the house, Chester seemed to become more furtive, whispering, as though under siege, someone in need of rifles, believing that dark agencies were eliminating the availability of ammo. The interior had the clutter I’d seen elsewhere—stuffed toys, souvenirs, biblical mottoes framed on the wall, several chunky clocks, an old TV set propped across from a sofa. In the small parlor the sofa and chairs were draped in throw rugs printed with tiger stripes, zebra stripes, or leopard spots, with gold fringes and tassels.

  All this time, Rose had been shadowing us.

  “We done the bedroom too,” she said, beckoning me in while Chester ducked outside to smoke. The bedcover was another bright, animal-skin print, wide stripes.

  “I pity the guy who tries to break in,” I said, patting the rifles above the bedside table. “Are you a good shot?”

  “That’s a story,” Rose said, lowering her voice. “I come back from church one day and Chester and his friends are here trying to shoot some walnuts out of the tree. They’re not hitting nothing, just missing. But still shooting. I watched for a while, then I says, ‘Let me try.’ Chester says, ‘You won’t hit nothin’, Rose.’”

  Then she nodded. She leaned sideways and saw that Chester was out of earshot.

  “I picked up the gun,” she said. “I aimed it. The Lord then told me, ‘Don’t think about it, just you pull the trigger.’ And I shot.”

  She began to laugh, as she had outside when talking about Rachel’s school friends—so full of laughter she couldn’t speak.

  “So what happened?”

  “Them ole nuts went flying!” she said at last. “
Chester wouldn’t speak to me for a week, ’cause I outshot him in front of his friends, with the help of the Lord!”

  Being in the house put her in a more confiding mood, as it had Chester. I saw a Bible on the bedside table, open to the book of Revelation.

  “You’re reading Revelation, I see.”

  “I’m studying Mystery Babylon,” Rose said with a tone of innocent pedantry, and lifted her Bible. She smacked her lips and in a steady cautioning voice she read: “‘I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.’”

  She placed the book, still open, on the bedside table, under the rifles.

  “Powerful stuff,” I said lamely, at a loss for words but thinking of what Chester had said, “God’s country”—and it had a new meaning.

  “I’d like to write a book about it,” Rose said. “We’re like Sodom and Gomorrah, which God destroyed. Homosexuals are taking over. They’re in the government. They’re getting married. But they weren’t meant to. It’s in the Bible. They can’t have children. It’s all a sign.”

  “So, what do you think—sign of what?” But I knew what was coming.

  “We’re in the End Times,” Rose Skaggs said. “I believe that’s one of the main signs.”

  “Paul’s Epistle to Timothy,” I said.

  “You know your Bible.”

  “I heard it on the radio a few weeks ago,” I said. But know this, that in the last days grievous times shall come . . .

  I craved to get out of the house, with its low ceiling and its stifling doggy air and the strange biblical confidences of its owners. And when I did, and the sun was shining on my head again, Chester and I sat under the walnut tree and just chatted. He scratched Speedy’s head with one hand and smoked with the other.

  The sight of the fixed-up house calmed him, and I had the impression from the casual remarks he made that he loved this place, where he had been born and still lived, up this dirt road, and wanted no other; that he loved Rose and looked after her; that he loved his dog Speedy—adored the dog, really; and that with this fixed-up house and having figured out a frugal way of living, humble though they were—“all poverty level,” his words—they were not afraid of growing old.

  Deep-Fried Chocolate Pie

  Avoiding Little Rock—I would go there later—I drove across Arkansas to Brinkley, arriving late, thinking that the town was simply shut down for the night. But the next day, in sunlight, I could see that it was shut down pretty much for good, the main street desolate, the stores boardedup, the houses shabby, and this was not deep country but a sizable town just off the interstate.

  I looked for a place to eat and found half a dozen small mom-and-pop places, soul food diners, Brinkley Country Kitchen, and at Market and Sporting Goods, with a LUNCH SPECIALS sign, I walked in. At one long table were fourteen big white men in overalls sitting at their noontime meal. Hearing the tinkle of the doorbell, they lifted their querying, somewhat disapproving faces from their plates of chicken-fried steaks and mashed potatoes and stared at me, twenty-eight scrutinizing eyes, no hello—very odd for the South, where I had gotten used to a greeting—and a shadow of serious suspicion, and a fork in one hand and a knife in the other.

  “Just a soda, please,” I said to a woman in an apron, and squeezed to the cooler in the back, picked out a can, paid for it, and retreated, feeling cowed, as if I’d blundered into a private party, which in a way I had.

  Another eatery in Brinkley was Mom’s Diner, a small, one-room cottage at the roadside, calling to mind the caution of Nelson Algren in the three rules he articulates in his novel A Walk on the Wild Side: “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”

  I drove back to Gene’s Barbeque, had a pile of fried catfish and black-eyed peas, and then was offered dessert.

  “Want some deep-fried pie?”

  “Never had it.”

  “You’ll love it. Chocolate pie. We wrap it in pastry and deep-fry it crispy. Why are you smiling, sir?”

  A Serious Row to Hoe

  Brinkley, Arkansas, experienced a brief boom in visitors when it was reported that an ivory-billed woodpecker, believed to have been extinct, was sighted in the swampy wooded bottomlands outside the town in 2005. Bird watchers from all over came to verify this unexpected news, but no one saw the large, yellow-eyed bird with the thirty-inch wingspan again, and the luckless town went silent. For three years after the alleged sighting, the place had been hopeful, but now it was like many towns in the South: the decaying main street, the thrift shops, the shut-down factories.

  I was in Brinkley to see Dr. Calvin King, from Aubrey (pop. 221), in Lee County in the Delta, Arkansas born and bred, educated locally, and committed—as he put it—to reversing the land loss among blacks in this part of the state. A great number of blacks in the Delta had been farmers. They had lost their land for various reasons, and so had lost their livelihood. Dr. King wanted to see black farmers back on the land.

  From a farming family himself, Dr. King was one of many admirable people I met who, having grown up poor, were committed to using their experience of overcoming hard times to help others. Like Pat Atkinson, Dr. King had come from a large, hard-pressed family.

  “I’m number eleven of eleven children,” he said in his office, in a brick building up the road from Brinkley, a hamlet called Fargo. He was sixty years old, scholarly-looking, and formal in a coat and tie, mustached, with confidence and a quiet intensity. “That many kids—you got a serious row to hoe. Four boys and seven girls. Nine of us went to college, and now they’re schoolteachers, nurses, college professors.”

  “All that education is impressive,” I said.

  “My dad had a real serious thing about getting an education,” he said. “When my older siblings were coming along, it was like going to school, learning from them.”

  “What were the schools like in Aubrey?”

  “Not good enough,” he said. “In order to go to schools, the good schools, you had to move a little. I went to high school in Marianna, thirteen miles away. I lived with a relative—this was the 1950s and ’60s. We didn’t get integration until 1971. Little Rock integration was earlier.”

  “Segregated schools?”

  “Racially speaking, it was straight-line segregation.”

  “How did you manage in that environment?”

  “‘Fear no man,’ my father said. ‘Fear only God.’ He had a high confidence level and that helped us.”

  “He had to feed eleven children,” I said.

  “Food!” The idea made him laugh. “We had everything to eat. I meet with my brothers and sisters and we talk about how lucky we were. We didn’t know we were poor. We didn’t realize it.”

  “How big was the farm?”

  “My father rented land at first, then he finally bought land, ending up with about a hundred acres in the 1970s and ’80s. But the first market was our family. We always had plenty.”

  Considering that Dr. Calvin King had been born in 1953, and his ten other siblings earlier than that, it seemed a long time that his father, Sterling King, had rented land and worked it before finally buying some. On his rented land he had grown cash crops and cotton and soybeans, and vegetables for the family, but his savings were meager.

  “We had cattle, pigs, geese, guineas, and what we called a truck patch—a field, really. We grew everything there, all our vegetables, beans, corn, peas, beets, watermelons.”

  “Your mother was part of the
whole operation, I take it.”

  “Mom was an outstanding homemaker,” he said with a note of pride. “She was always preserving, canning—peaches, pears, apples, you name it. And my father had a smokehouse. We had all our own processing. He smoke-cured slab meat and ham. We always had plenty of meat.”

  “How did you manage to study and work on the farm?”

  “Each of us had a task,” he said. “You have some people doing it now in the Delta, maybe not many. I never had to look for a summer job. There was always something to do on the farm. We had our own molasses. We would strip the sorghum and make the syrup from it. It wasn’t just our family—lots of other people did it.”

  “Did you sell the produce and molasses, and get money that way?”

  “We created a sort of barter system. My mother would say to someone, ‘I sure would like a quilt for me,’ and then after a bit, ‘I’ve got a hog.’ When we killed a hog, other people in the community would come and help, and for that help we’d give them a portion.”

  Reverend Lyles in Greensboro had told me the same story of his upbringing in Alabama, bringing a chicken or some eggs to the doctor as payment for a visit. And Floyd Taylor’s family had made molasses. The common culture of the peasant South.

  “What about hunting?” I asked. “I keep meeting people who still hunt for the pot.”

  “My father used to hunt rabbits and squirrels. Smother-fry squirrel we’d have for supper, with gravy and potatoes. Supper was ’long about seven. Sometimes we’d have guinea.”

  “How was that prepared?”

  “Guinea with dressing,” he said, swallowing, as people do when talking about a favorite dish. “The way I remember it, you boil a guinea to make the broth. Make your cornbread. Take the guinea, stuff it, and bake it with the dressing. Guinea with dressing is very tasty.”

  “Raccoon—did you eat them?”

  “We had coon sometimes,” he said. “My father liked squirrel a lot. But they’re small. You need three or four squirrels for a meal. Squirrel dumplings, same as chicken dumplings to make.”