by Paul Theroux
“I hear this story all over Arkansas—baked raccoon, smother-fried squirrel. It’s like a menu from another age.”
“People hereabouts still eat them,” he said. “But we had plenty of other food. We had cows, so of course we had plenty of butter. My sisters and I reminisce about how we used to come home from school and there’d be chicken or ham for supper.”
“Please tell me about your mother,” I said.
“My mother’s name was Jessie Hill, born in Phillips County in the Delta. She was part Cherokee.” His mother’s features were visible on Dr. King’s face, his sharp jaw, his hooded eyes. “She was raised over in Coffee Creek. And my mother made the best lunches—all my friends used to remark on them. She had kinfolk in Chicago. We used to send them food, preserved and canned fruit, smoked ham.”
Memories of a whole, congenial, hardworking, self-sufficient family; memories of good food, of food sent to hungry, homesick relatives in Chicago.
And as with others I’d met, Dr. King’s upbringing had determined his path in life. After graduating from Arkansas State University in Jonesboro and earning an advanced degree at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, he conceived a plan to uplift the farmers, and in 1980 he founded the Arkansas Land and Farm Development Corporation in Brinkley. He had grown up on a farm and been taught his parents’ solid values, had eaten well and learned dignity and a work ethic. His mission was deeply personal.
“This organization was designed to reverse land loss and the decline of the family farm,” he said. “Housing is another of our concerns. And youth services.”
“What sort of clients do you have?”
“The working poor. Some of our people have two jobs and still no money, no stability, no home ownership.”
The waiting list for rentals was long, and more than two hundred people needed their houses renovated or rebuilt.
“We’ve built what we call Safe Communities,” he said. “You have to qualify. We have regulations and requirements, we do background checks before you can be accepted. It’s just like the process of buying a house or getting a credit card.”
Brinkley was dying, he said. Unemployment was twice the national average. All the “support assets” were in place—roads, water, rail, the infrastructure of the past—yet there were no job opportunities. Sanyo had been there, making old-style cathode-ray television sets since 1977, but it had shut down, and manufacturing was now ended. Instead of upgrading the nearby Forrest City plant to make newer-model flat-screen TVs, they had outsourced production to Tijuana, just over the Mexican border—cheap labor, no taxes, no unions, easy importation into the United States.
“People from up your way come down here to teach,” Dr. King said. “They say, ‘I can’t believe the way things still are here!’”
“A lot of what I see here is Third World,” I said. “But I also meet good people, many of them doing what you’re doing. Making progress—small steps, maybe, but life-changing ones.”
“To have growth you need a shared vision, a collective sense,” Dr. King said. “We need to sit down and talk together. To be frank, there’s whites who say, ‘What’s the problem? We have a school—private school. Lee Academy in Marianna. Marvel Academy in Phillips County.’ They don’t realize what the rest of us are up against. It’s not all the whites. It’s the wealthy whites. No shared vision.”
“The Clinton Foundation has billions and spreads it all over the world,” I said to him, as I had said to Pat Atkinson in Russellville. It seemed an obvious question. The foundation was immensely wealthy, and from time to time—if you looked at its website—you’d read of the former president promising money to people with projects in Africa or India, or this: “Chelsea Clinton took time out of her 10-day humanitarian trip in Africa to meet some of the kids that her AIDS work is benefiting . . .” I asked, “Do you see any of that money?”
“No,” Dr. King said solemnly. “We have not received any funding support from the Clinton Foundation or the Global Initiative.”
“Would you like to get some?”
“Yes,” and he was nodding, “we would more than welcome such support.” He added, “We have lots of people working hard. Family farms. All over the Delta.”
“I’d like to meet some,” I said.
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
Working Poor
Arkansas was a place of outstanding natural beauty: the rumpled hills and granite cliff faces, the damp willow-haunted riversides, the meadows and plowed fields bordered by tumbled stone walls. But it was a poor, hungry, ill-thought-out, and badly housed state, and the rural areas were notoriously hard-up. In some counties, almost thirty percent of the people were living below the poverty line, and one in four of Arkansas’s children were classified as hungry—“food deprived.”
The overall figure for “food insecurity” in the state was unusually high. According to a 2013 Department of Agriculture report I’d read about at Arkansasmatters.com, “19.7 percent, or roughly one in five Arkansans, do not know where their next meal is coming from.” This was the sort of statistic you might encounter in Sri Lanka. And when I checked, the figure for food insecurity in Arkansas was exactly the same as that for Sri Lanka, an island that was struggling to overcome the effects of a recent and long-lasting ethnic war.
Many of Arkansas’s unemployment problems, and its hunger, were related to its decline in manufacturing. With time to kill until I met Dr. King’s Delta farmers, I sought out people who’d lost their jobs to outsourcing. One was a cheerful woman who called herself Dee. (“It’s not really Dee. I changed it because the Japanese couldn’t pronounce Odelia.”) She was sixty-nine and had worked at the electronics plant in Forrest City, not far from Brinkley, for forty-two years. Like most of the working poor in Arkansas I met, she was uncomplaining but clear-sighted.
“Wasn’t Sanyo in the beginning,” she said. “It was Warwick Electronics, owned by Sears. That was years ago. We made TVs mostly, but the company was going broke. That was the late seventies. Sanyo bought the plant, put a lot of money into it, and turned it around. It was real big.”
Sanyo’s moving into Forrest City, their taking over the TV manufacturing and creating employment for four thousand people, was one of the important stories in the business pages of national newspapers in the early 1980s. “Japanese Turn Arkansas Plant into a Success” was a headline in the New York Times in 1983. A deal was struck with the union, $14.4 million was invested in upgrading the plant , the new sets were an improved design, quality control was introduced—under Sears’s management ten percent of the TV sets had been lemons. The majority of the new workforce was black, though Dee was white.
“People care about you,” one of Dee’s coworkers had told the New York Times in 1983. “There is more effort on quality, better follow-through. There is a lot of sensitivity to the feelings of the workers. Management goes out of its way to obtain views of workers, to see how they can make the work more productive, more conducive to doing a better job, to see how they can make the job easier for the workers.”
The economy of Forrest City was saved, and the Japanese managers became members of the local golf club—though there were still no black members. Everything was rosy for about ten years. Then, in 1994, with advances in TV technology, and more investment and retooling needed, the North American Free Trade Agreement was approved and implemented. “We have the opportunity to remake the world,” President Clinton said at the signing of NAFTA in December 1994. “In a few moments, I will sign the North American free trade act into law. NAFTA will tear down trade barriers between our three nations. It will create the world’s largest trade zone and create 200,000 jobs in this country by 1995 alone.”
It was the beginning of the end for Forrest City. From that day, in Clinton’s home state, Sanyo began to shrink its plant and move its manufacturing to Mexico. And Forrest City became another haunted-looking, not to say spectral, town of high unemployment and boarded-up shops, with a Walmart and fast food ou
tlets and little else.
“My manager got curious and went down there to Tijuana,” Dee told me. “It’s tax-free now. No union. He said the workers are real young. They got little hands. They can handle the parts good. They’re real hungry. And they don’t get paid much.”
Dee was now working at a motel part time. So was Julie, whom I met around the same time in a town farther west. Julie was thin, sixty-something, a motel clerk, a chain smoker, toothless, with an alarming croupy cough, cheerful enough but battered and ill kept, like the motel, Patel-owned. My room stank so bad—dirty bed, decayed carpet—the humming pong of rug rot kept me awake. Even the lobby, where Julie sneaked a crafty butt at the back door, was malodorous.
“There’s no work here except for six or seven Mexicans living in one room and not paying taxes,” Julie said. She told me her story, but warned me in advance that it was one of failure. “Worked in a shirt factory for years. We made flannel shirts, outfits for state troopers, quality clothes. It all went overseas—China, Dominican Republic, God knows where.”
“What sort of work were you doing?”
“That’s the thing. Come to what I was doing was I was taking out labels saying ‘Made in Honduras’ and sewing in labels saying ‘Made in the USA.’ That was late eighties, early nineties. I said, ‘This is not right,’ and I quit. Not too long after that the whole factory closed. Now there’s nothing. Four red lights and a Walmart, like most other places.”
“And you came here to the motel?”
“No,” she said, and took a pull at her cigarette. “Got a job at Burris, making oak drawers and cabinet doors.” Julie took another long puff and blew the smoke out the door, dispersing it with slaps of her bony hand. “They was bought out. Then we’d get the real cheap swamp oak with lots of knots and couldn’t do nothing with it. I was laid off in 2000, and I was supposed to have a pension, but they didn’t give it to me.” She sucked on her cigarette again. “Under arbitration, they say. So here I am.” And she flipped the butt, twirling sparks into the parking lot.
In the silence—I didn’t know what to say—she became reflective.
“All I do is drive to the next exit. I go home, put the dog out, put on my robe, and watch TV.” She shrugged and tapped another cigarette out of her wrinkled pack. “I got divorced a couple of years ago. The kids are gone, my ex is gone. I work here, if you want to call it work. That’s about it.”
Roadkill
In Arkansas, the poorest towns, the most beaten-down people, could be found in the prettiest hollows and river valleys, the small, mean, ugly houses and scabby trailers set in magnificent landscapes—soft, green, thickly wooded, rolling hills and murky, crawling rivers. Avoiding Little Rock, I had drifted west off the interstate to the hamlets of Altus and Ozark and Mulberry, each as attractive as its name, in “Arkansas Wine Country,” some of it settled by Germans and Swiss, who planted the vines 130 years ago. The wineries and restaurants got mixed, not to say hostile, reviews, but the winding road was so pleasant and wooded, bounded by pastures where horses and cattle grazed, it was a relief simply to slow down and enjoy the scenery, to contemplate the clouds of gnats stirring in the golden slant of sunset.
“Hear about the storms?” a motorcyclist asked me at a gas station near Altus. He had just come from Memphis; he was riding up and down the whole country. “Tornadoes are coming. I’m heading to Fort Smith to hunker down until it passes.”
Perhaps it was the sharply winding road, the proximity to dens and warrens and the brakes and nests of nocturnal animals, but I saw more roadkill in forty miles of this country road than I’d seen in hundreds of miles of highway.
What caught my eye at the exhausted-looking river town of Ozark was its tranquil square surrounded by a hospitable-looking jail and a forbidding courthouse, and at the edge of town, Rivertowne BBQ, surrounded by a fragrant vapor of scorched meat. Like most of the towns in this part of the state, the population was overwhelmingly white. I’d seen a sign advertising Butterball turkeys outside of town. Ozark’s primary source of income, its Butterball turkey-processing plant—ninety turkey farms in the vicinity provided the birds—had been in the news a few years before when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) released an undercover investigation with the headline “Butterball’s House of Horrors.” The report detailed the company’s cruelty in the slaughterhouse, some of it intentional and thrill-seeking, the rest of it the industrial methodology of slaughtering and bagging the birds—fifty thousand a day, more nearer Thanksgiving, millions in a season. The USDA investigated, the abuses were corrected, and Ozark does not prosper but it survives, to the gobbling of desperate, doomed Butterball turkeys.
Outside Rivertowne BBQ, I said to a biker, “I hear there’s a storm coming.”
“Tornadoes,” he said. “Just sit tight. It’ll pass.”
He recommended the ribs, the breaded and fried pickle spears, and the fried green tomatoes. Possum dumplings in coon fat gravy and creamed possum were also on the Rivertowne menu, along with the celebrated spice rubs. I had the chicken salad with a side of fried okra and then continued west on the lovely road.
In the desolate, dirt-poor, rustic town of Mulberry, boys and men, black and white, were diving into rusted dumpsters to retrieve usable junk, and near them on the road, as if in mimicry, a hopping clutch of ravens were pecking at the rubbed-red hash of roadkill.
Jack-Jawin’: “Little Bitty Ole Meth Lab”
The next day, outside the town of Alma, I had intended to spend the whole day at two of the Sunday activities in the South, a church service and a widely advertised gun show—always friendly folks and strong opinions and plenty of food—but in both cases they’d been canceled. It was the dire weather report.
“Got some twisters coming out of Oklahoma,” a weather-wise woman told me in the parking lot of a convenience store. And she was in a hurry. “I’m heading home.”
The day was dusk-dark but there was still no sign of a storm. I drove off the main road, Highway 71, and took a dirt road up a steep slope into the woods, past shacks and trailers. At the summit, where the road became a muddy track, I came to a ramshackle house—a spectacular ruin at the edge of a field littered with cast-off shoes, rags of clothes, old rubber tires, hubcaps embedded in the earth, children’s faded toys twisted apart, plastic bags tangled on bushes, areas strewn with bottles and jugs, and shards of broken glass—a hovel with junk heaped against it.
It was a damp Deep South day in the mountains, of gray lowered clouds, yet the young man in the yard was barefoot, in rubber flip-flops, scuffing through the broken glass, and the woman behind him wore torn shorts and a hoodie and cowboy boots—Ozark work clothes. Bending and grasping, with the concentration of scavengers, they were rooting around the tall grass, filling a plastic oil drum with bottles and beer cans that had been discarded. A barefoot child and a dog followed them, impeding them in their work.
They did not look up when I pulled off the road to examine their house, its tin roof partly torn off, the porch knocked sideways, the windows gaping. In the yard fossicking amid the rubble, they were like strangers who’d found this abandoned house and were taking possession of it by scooping up its junk, and when that was accomplished they would penetrate the house itself.
But they lived there, this mean place on the mountain was their home, and that was their own barefoot child and their own drooling dog. They were both in their early thirties. They laughed when I said I was lost and needed directions, which was simply my ploy to disarm them.
They too mentioned the oncoming storm, that it was one more thing to worry about, like the terrible economy and lack of work, which became the topics of our conversation.
“But I’ve got me some work putting up garage doors,” the young man said. He added with glee, “I worked fifty-two hours last week, and I’m still hoping.”
The garage door workshop was at the edge of the town of Mountainburg, down on the highway.
“The town is nothing, and never was
nothing,” he said. “Never had no work here. We’re all struggling to get by.”
His wife kept tossing beer cans and plastic bottles into the oil drum, and it seemed from the force of her actions that she was attempting to make a point, which was: I am working and you are standing in your flip-flops talking. But I was thinking: This family is the very definition of the working poor—putting in the hours, hoisting the garage doors, and living in this wreck of a house with their barefoot child.
How lucky I was, fetching up here as a stranger on this back road in the Ozarks and being welcomed by this cheery young man, who was happy to answer my intrusive questions. This friendliness was one of the pleasures of Arkansas, and the green glory of the landscape was another.
“Any black families around here?” I asked.
He laughed, in the same way that a white person in Bar Harbor, Maine, or on Nantucket Island would have laughed at the same question, finding it preposterous.
“There are no black people here, none at all,” he said. “No black person ever lived in Mountainburg, and I doubt they ever will.”
“But half of Arkansas is black,” I said.
“Nothing like that,” he said. “Not even twenty percent.”
He was right: the figure is fifteen percent.
“You won’t find any blacks until you get across the state—say, around Conway,” he said. “It’s all white up here and black down here. That’s the way it is.”
“I haven’t looked closely at Conway.”
“I get down there on a regular basis,” he said, and laughed hard, rocking in the wet grass on his flip-flops. “Visiting my father in prison. He’s in Harrison now—Boone County Jail. Not too bad of a place, but man, he did plenty of years in a regular old prison.”
“A lot of years?” I asked.
“He was sentenced to twenty, but he’s doing eleven. I guess that’s a lot,” the young man said, and nodding, he added, “He’ll be out in a month.”
