Deep South

by Paul Theroux

  The woman in the more conventional Little Rock Main Library, sitting at a wide desk at the top of an elegant staircase at the entrance, sat like the captain on the bridge of a ship, fielding questions, directing people to books and rooms and festival activities.

  “Very impressive,” I said, paging through the program she’d handed me and remarking on the many events and numerous writers participating in the festival. “I’d love to meet the organizer.”

  “That would be Brad. But he’s pretty busy with the writers.”

  “Perhaps I might leave him a note?”

  I wrote my name and contact number on a torn-off square from a pad of Little Rock Library stationery.

  “And what would this be in reference to, um, Mr. Thorax?”

  “About writing in Arkansas,” I said, and when she snatched at her blond hair and kept her blue eyes on me, hoping for more detail, I added, “I’m a writer myself.”

  “Do you write under your own name?”

  “Generally.”

  “What sort of things do you write, Mr. Thorax?”

  Though I made a tactful attempt, I felt it was like describing the color green to a blind person.

  “You’re going to love the festival,” she said, and that was when, hearing that I was looking forward to hearing Ellen Gilchrist, she told me her talk had been canceled owing to the bad weather.

  I saw that, within the hour, Congressman John Lewis was going to speak about a new book he’d written, and would be appearing at this free event at the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center on Ninth Street, across town. I got into my car and drove there to hear him.

  John Lewis, a long-serving politician from Georgia, was one of the stalwarts of the civil rights movement. Inspired as a youth by the speeches of Martin Luther King, he had met Dr. King when he was eighteen, and before long became an effective speaker himself. That was the beginning of his life as an activist at sit-ins and protests and voter registration campaigns throughout the 1960s. For his nonviolent, somewhat sacrificial efforts, Lewis had been violently beaten on many occasions, and on the Selma march on Bloody Sunday in 1965, his skull had been fractured by a state trooper’s truncheon.

  Born to a sharecropper family outside tiny Troy, Alabama, about forty-five miles southeast of Montgomery, Lewis was educated in the segregated schools of Pike County and later at Fisk University, graduating with a degree in religion and philosophy, with a further degree in theology. This academic background in Scripture amplified his role as a preacher, and he developed a sonorous rather than a hectoring tone in his speeches, which generally took the form of sermonizing. His pronounced Pike County accent made his pastoral homilies more persuasive.

  Elected to Congress in 1986 to represent Georgia’s 5th District (most of Atlanta), Lewis still held this safe seat twenty-eight years later. Along with listing his numerous medals and awards and his fifty honorary degrees, his official congressional website described him in these terms: “Often called ‘one of the most courageous persons the Civil Rights Movement ever produced,’ John Lewis has dedicated his life to protecting human rights, securing civil liberties, and building what he calls ‘The Beloved Community’ in America.”

  This taxpayer-funded gush bordering on ardent hagiography is perhaps forgivable in a man who had put his life on the line. He had suffered throughout the civil rights struggle, served as a rational voice in the movement, become an able legislator, was a living witness to history, and remained a conscience in government. He had distinguished himself by his insistence on ethical behavior in Congress—an uphill task, given the number of crooks, sneaks, junketers, opportunists, liars, tax cheats, adulterers, sexual stalkers, senders of selfies of their private parts to perfect strangers, and unembarrassed villains in that tainted assembly.

  Congressman Lewis was just one year older than me. I was drawn to him in order to reflect on the parallel lives we’d led—his so busy and political in the Deep South, as a constant speaker and campaigner; mine one of a lifelong immersion in writing, of travel, of unexplained absences and phantom appearances as “Mr. Thorax.” Lewis had been an activist and legislator; I had been a bystander and eavesdropper. While I’d been teaching in obscure schools in Africa and Southeast Asia, he’d been taking his stand in the Deep South against segregation. He was a public man, a role I avoided.

  Lewis was a luminary now, garlanded with honors, with a battered sagacious face and a noticeable limp, and was regarded as a statesman, an icon, a man of courage in a pinstripe suit. Now we were face to face, and I was—what? A wanderer in a wanderer’s rumpled clothes, sitting among a mainly black congregation, for that was how the attentive and pious audience seemed to me. But we were both writers. Lewis’s book, March: Book One, had just appeared, and he was promoting this work at the festival.

  The work, his book, was not a proper book but a comic book. Nor, I discovered, was it written by him. The stories were John Lewis’s, but the writing had been done by his congressional aide Andrew Aydin, the illustrations by an accomplished comic book artist (Swallow Me Whole, Tiny Giants, and many other titles), Nate Powell. This effort was, to use the dignifying expression, a graphic novel. As a boy, I had clutched at such comic books and reveled in their simplicity. The thought of the large Mosaic Templars auditorium full of literary festival people gathered to hear John Lewis’s peroration about a comic book made me wonder.

  But it was more than a comic book, and it had a serious history and a significant precedent.

  In his talk, Lewis spoke about a comic book he’d read as a teenager, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, which was a mere sixteen pages and sold for ten cents. It described the events leading up to and causing the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. The theme was the success that Rosa Parks, Dr. King, and fifty thousand others had had using the power of nonviolence to end segregation on city buses.

  “It became like our Bible,” Lewis said to the audience, who knew a thing or two about Bibles.

  That comic book had not been written by Martin Luther King. It was the idea, in 1956, of a pacifist reporter named Alfred Hassler, who had been prompted to write it after seeing how effective nonviolent action had been in Montgomery. His idea was to produce an account of the protest that would be accessible to potential activists throughout the South. Dr. King dictated passages and related dialogue to Hassler, and afterward, seeing the comic book in print, praised the work. Dr. King wrote, “You have done a marvelous job of grasping the underlying truth and philosophy of the movement. I am sure that this comic book will be welcomed by the American public.”

  Almost a quarter of a million copies of Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story were printed and distributed in 1957 by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an organization dedicated to resolving conflict in the world. Dr. King’s portrait—brooding, portentous at age twenty-eight—was on the cover, over the words How 50,000 Negroes found a new way to end racial discrimination. The book was whispered about, shared, and praised, and the whole printing sold out—a success. In some parts of the South this comic book explaining the concept of nonviolent protest was regarded as seditious and had to be circulated covertly.

  One copy fell into the hands of seventeen-year-old John Lewis in Troy, Alabama, and inspired in the boy a sense of mission. Many years later, he remembered how this story, simply told, had affected his life. Hearing this, his aide Andrew Aydin researched it and made it the subject of his master’s thesis at Georgetown University. And Aydin decided to do something similar, to create a graphic novel about John Lewis’s life, depicting his upbringing and the culture of segregation and the march on Selma. Aydin found the illustrator Nate Powell, and so the effort was collaborative, the three men making the book, March: Book One, the first installment of what would become an autobiographical trilogy.

  Aydin and Powell shared the literary festival stage with Lewis, who spoke of how he’d been influenced by the earlier comic book. He praised Nate Powell’s pictures as having reality and simplicity.

&nb
sp; Lewis didn’t say anything about Alfred Hassler, the moving force behind Dr. King’s comic book. I later learned that Hassler (1910–1991) was a quietly courageous man. A conscientious objector during World War Two, he was jailed for nine months in 1944 for refusing to fight, and later wrote a book about it, Diary of a Self-Made Convict. After joining the Fellowship of Reconciliation, he edited its magazine, and among other campaigns he urged food to be sent to China during its catastrophic Mao-induced famine in the mid-1950s. Hassler became an antiwar activist, visited Vietnam on a peace delegation in 1966, and, persuaded by a growing belief in Buddhism, befriended an influential monk, the Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, and brought him to the United States, where he lived in exile for thirty-nine years, founding monasteries and teaching. It was Hassler who persuaded Dr. King to take a stand and denounce the Vietnam War, for which defiance he was vilified by many and harassed by the FBI.

  (Looking into the life of Thich Nhat Hanh, known by the honorific Thay—Master—I found a nice story. A wealthy American socialite invited him to her grand house and offered a large donation to further his work, providing he could assure her of the truth of reincarnation—that she had nothing to fear of death, that after her demise she would be reborn. Thay said, “If there is no self, who is going to be reborn?” and went away empty-handed.)

  In the packed Mosaic Templars hall, Lewis gave a rousing speech, noting that this was the fiftieth anniversary of the civil rights movement, and nearing the sixtieth of the bus boycott. And, flanked by his collaborators, he spoke about the graphic novel.

  “It’s much stronger and much better than just simple words,” he said, elaborating on the effectiveness of the imagery of a pictorial work. “They say music is a universal language, but when the eyes behold something, a figure, somebody moving, it’s real, and it cannot be denied. When you see or hear a word or a phrase here and there, it can be interpreted one way or the other, but when you see the actual drawing, it says more than anything else.”

  The audience was almost all black and mainly older, more women than men, well dressed, some of them extravagantly so—wide-brimmed hats trimmed with flowers, satin blouses with frilly sleeves, purple gowns, bombazine and bonnets, many breasts and collars bejeweled: churchgoing clothes. And that was suitable attire, because Lewis’s tone was a preacher’s, and his message one of forgiveness. He was aware of his being a historical figure, a living witness—the word “icon” was often attached to his name. What a perfect delight to find oneself an icon! But Lewis was a portly and ailing and battle-scarred and patient one.

  In an atmosphere that was thick with sentimental adulation, Lewis acknowledged the emotion directed at him—not basking or gloating but in a mood of bland acceptance, like a prince responding to a mob’s acclaim, with a modest glance and casual hand gestures. Something regal about his head, a little too big for his body, commanded attention, and showed the effects of the war in which he was a much-decorated veteran. His was a trampled face, slack-jawed but otherwise featureless, and lopsided like that of a fat beaten boy. Inexpressive in the best of times, his face did not register much emotion today, as he waited for the applause to die down, seemingly aware of his symbolic value, the benign imagery of a lifelong campaigner, who now and then reached out, a hug for some older women, a laying on of hands, but nothing for me.

  After his talk came the signing, the three men sitting side by side at a long table on the stage, Lewis, Aydin, and Powell. A line formed to the right—one hundred people, because the entire shipment of one hundred copies of March: Book One had been sold at the information desk on the ground floor. Powell signed first, then Aydin, finally Lewis, and each time Lewis scribbled his name on the cover with a felt-tip pen, the buyer of the book joined him behind the table and was photographed with the congressman. One hundred books, one hundred photos. Skinny, seventy-year-old Willie Jones and his wife, Mildred, had made the 208-mile round trip from the town of Wynne for a copy of March and a souvenir photo. Mildred wore a purple top hat and lavender blouse with ruffles. “She mah queen,” Willie said to me as he watched her pose for her picture with John Lewis. The congressman looked exhausted, but he was game, and stayed till the last comic book was defaced with signatures.

  I watched it all from beneath the stage, where a group of people—the congressman’s entourage, and friends and supporters—stood beaming at the man and at one another. They were stylishly dressed—no bonnets, no bombazine, no frills for them—in dark well-cut suits and chic designer dresses, one man with a lacquered coif of stiff, crenellated hair. These were the black elite.

  “Hello,” I said.

  They were startled by my greeting, like a shoal of leathery sharks jerked to attention by the sight of a pale snorkeler, and then their response was muted. But I persevered. I introduced myself as a stranger from the North and a well-wisher. I received wan smiles or pitying stares in return. Some of them were excessively polite in a deflecting stance, the way elaborate manners can be indistinguishable from rudeness; others were offhand, with measuring glances. Far from welcoming, they seemed somewhat wary of me.

  “I see you’ve got extra copies of the congressman’s book,” I said.

  Twelve copies were stacked on the chair next to a woman in an elegant dress.

  “They’re sold out downstairs,” I said. “May I buy one from you?”

  “You may not,” she said, and turned away. “These are for some people.”

  This disapproving group were the urban blacks I’d hardly encountered on this Deep South trip, compounded by the Arkansas instinctual query—suspicious, chilly, with a suggestion of hauteur in their greeting, as if they were still learning how to deal with whites. And who was I, in plain clothes, rumpled by travel, my shoes still wet from the storm?

  Never mind what John Lewis had described up there on the stage—his parents cowed by segregation, his confrontations with the cops and the Klan, his wounds, his cracked skull, the march that had ended in a bloody battle. For Lewis it was the distant past, no bitterness, much sanctimony; for his entourage it was just yesterday—or today.

  “Who might you be?” they seemed to imply, squinting at me and smiling anxiously, almost in mockery. Perhaps I seemed a bit presumptuous. I took them to be the Little Rock power set, gleaming with privilege, inhospitable to any approach from me. They still lingered in a tight and glittering posse below the stage, under the congressman’s benign glow. Handsome, well turned out, chatting among themselves, posturing, they were a different sort of group from the poorly dressed or overdressed blacks in churchgoing clothes, shuffling in the long line to mount the stage for a signature and a picture: the older bumpkins in broken shoes, the poor, the peasantry.

  My pitch to the well-dressed power set was: I’m traveling the Deep South, I’m a writer, I’m a stranger. What did they think of March: Book One? Hello?

  In their mingled skepticism and confusion and unease, during which I could not get an answer, I felt a sense of rejection, as though their talking to me might end badly, because, after all, I was white, and they were not sure what response they wanted or would get. They were distrustful, probably with reason, because this was Little Rock and they were black. And rejection and exclusion, I supposed, were reactions they knew well, especially when meeting a confident and casual white man.

  But I was dressed badly, therefore I was implausible. In that crowd, looming like an intruder, I might have been an assassin. This was a city where appearances mattered, and it occurred to me that, dressed as I was—baseball cap, sun-faded cotton jacket, blue jeans, wet shoes from the rainy street—I could only be a cracker. I was an older man too. Of course, I had to be a peckerwood.

  “But this is what a writer looks like,” I wanted to say. “Not the pinstripes of politics! We have no entourage! None of us is an icon! We look dangerous and unbalanced! Yes, I suppose some of us look like peckerwoods, but we are harmless.”

  For a few minutes, in the presence of disapproving and powerful blacks, I had a little gli
mpse, as if through a knothole in a splintery board, of what it was to be an old and indigent white guy in Arkansas—a living annoyance, the creepy Mr. Thorax.

  Perhaps this was all paranoia on my part and I was wrong about their hauteur. Perhaps they were merely indifferent, or busy, or tired—it was the end of the day. Perhaps, being city dwellers—or so they seemed from their stylish clothes—they were more skeptical of strangers, less inclined to appease them with a smile, avoiding the fellowship of the rural areas, the routine greetings that I’d been accustomed to.

  Anyway, they turned away from me and, smiling, held out their arms. On flapping feet, loose-armed, fatigued, Congressman Lewis was descending the stairs from the stage. They closed ranks and gathered around him and escorted him out of the hall in a slow and dignified procession, seemingly protecting him from me while I watched.

  Buddy: “Be Careful”

  Unexpectedly, as a happy accident, the way things shook out or converged if you lingered the way Southerners did instead of hurrying away, I bumped into Charles Portis in Little Rock. I had hoped to meet him. He was one of the few living writers whose work I admired, thought exemplary, not only for True Grit, the book that everyone knew because of the two popular movies, but for his four other novels. Norwood and The Dog of the South particularly resonated with me, for being quests in the form of road trips, and his occasional pieces, written over almost sixty years and collected in his book Escape Velocity, show him to have spent a lifetime as a dedicated observer of human foibles. One of his essays is the best piece I have ever read anatomizing cheap motels. On the evidence of his reports from the road, it seemed we were kindred spirits in resorting often to, and sometimes celebrating, seedy lodgings.

  As a traveler, as a portrayer of American misfits and obsessive quests, Portis is casually brilliant, and not simply fluent and funny but a comic master at deadpan deflation. Portis is a strange creature, but genius is always strange—to paraphrase the description of Nikolai Gogol by Nabokov, who adds, “Great literature skirts the irrational.” Portis much resembles Gogol in his “irrational insight,” and the “message” of his books (which is no message at all) is similar to Gogol’s in Nabokov’s summary: “Something is very wrong and all men are mild lunatics engaged in petty pursuits that seem to them very important, while an absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs.”