Deep South

by Paul Theroux

  By reputation Portis is reclusive, yet any number of Little Rock friends and restaurateurs could testify to his sociability and wit. He had reported on the civil rights movement and the war in Cyprus, lived in London, and rambled all over Mexico, and can quote Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial—my kind of drinking pal.

  Yet in all his literary utterances he shows himself to be the least vain of men, once telling an awestruck fan who praised him as a great writer in a Little Rock bar named the Faded Rose, “I’m not even the best writer in this bar.”

  His friends and family, who call him Buddy or Charlie, speak of how he lives his life exactly as he pleases. Once, having applied for a job at a New York magazine, he was summoned to a preliminary interview and across his desk a senior editor asked, “Why do you want this job?” Pondering this question, and the implications of it, for a minute or so, smoking a cigarette, Portis replied, “Actually, I don’t want this job,” and left the room without another word. He is known as a listener, not a raconteur, a man of few words, eloquent and expansive on the page.

  He happened to be ruminating in a rocker the morning our paths crossed in Little Rock. He looked content but a bit wary when he glanced up. In old age, as some men do, he’d acquired the features of a sly child, the same smooth features and suggestion of enigma that arise from watchfulness and perhaps justifiable self-protection.

  I said hello.

  In an accommodating gesture he tipped himself forward out of the rocker and stood up, slim, rangy, upright, as physically fit, it seemed, as when he was a marine, but with an ex-smoker’s sallowness—he’d given up smoking ten years before, when he turned seventy. He led me through the door to a terrace facing a garden. It was a lovely Arkansas morning of blue sky and sugary, blown-open blossoms. The hot gravel gave off a dusty fragrance like a whiff of pollen, and the freshly mown grass had a sharp, healthy-salad aroma.

  Well aware of his hatred of interviews, I simply told him how much I admired his work—the apparent ease of his writing, the wisdom of his offhand remarks, his great ear for the cadences of Southern speech, his absorption and seeming delight in the mishaps of the road.

  He smiled his crooked, small boy’s smile and said thanks, but even at eighty he resisted praise and anyone fussing over him. He clawed at his shirt cuff as I was speaking and sneaked a look at his wristwatch. Then he waved away someone attempting to take his picture and, spooked, checked his watch again. He had something to do—I knew the feeling—and was impatient to be away.

  I knew I’d interrupted him. I thanked him for sparing me a few minutes and said, “I’m heading out—the Ozarks, the Buffalo River, then maybe down to El Dorado and Smackover, swinging by Brinkley.”

  Nodding, he hooked his thumbs into his belt, leaned back to size me up, and said, in the tones of a blessing, “Be careful.”

  Old Folks

  On a warm, rainy afternoon, two heavy white women, late sixties or early seventies, their plump arms on the table, reading newspapers and eating barbecue at Gene’s in Brinkley, dropped their heads and muttered as an older man approached their booth.

  “How you doin’, ladies?”

  “Jest fahn,” one said, straightening, as the other woman turned away.

  “Rain,” the older man said. He was stout, wearing suspenders and a baseball hat.

  “It’ll clear,” the same woman said; the other had not spoken but looked serene. “Ah don’t mind. How’s Shelby?”

  “Still hurtin’.” Then he turned and, speaking to himself in a hungry, reassuring tone, said, “Get me some pah.”

  He shuffle-scuffed away on old shoes, approaching the pastry counter, and was out of earshot. The old woman who had not spoken said, “When I was in the second grade and he was in the third, he called me Fatty.”

  They returned to their newspapers and their plates of barbecue.

  As I was writing this down, astonished by the recollection of a snub, a grievance perhaps sixty years old, another Deep South incident occurred.

  A tall, very old—mid-eighties—formally dressed white man entered Gene’s. He wore a blazer with a gold badge on the breast pocket and a necktie. He leaned on a cane with one hand, and his other hand rested on the shoulder of an almost as old, gray-haired black man in bib overalls who was nearly as feeble in his movements. They inched to a table, the black man serving to support the white man, and seated themselves across from each other.

  “Still raining,” the white man said.

  “Yep.”

  They ordered catfish from the waiter, a young man who at the same time wiped their table clean with a rag. While they waited for their catfish to arrive, they spoke of their grandparents.

  “My granddaddy,” the white man said, and spoke of a fond memory.

  “My old grandmama,” the black man said, and offered his memory.

  They swapped stories of their grandparents, laughing at the particularities. “Old folks,” one said, I was not sure which one.

  “They had money,” the old white man said. “They had land. They had two barns. Rode on horses.”

  “Ain’t that something. Mm.”

  “Always wore a suit when he came to town.”

  Their meal was served and they ate, still talking about old times, speaking in low, peaceful voices, each appreciating the other.

  Farmers on a Rainy Day

  On a wet day in Fargo, just north of Brinkley, I made my way under a gray sky along muddy fields—some of them silvery with puddles and others lightly flooded—past the turnoff to the derelict town of Cotton Plant, to meet Dr. Calvin King again. As he promised, Dr. King had invited some black farmers to meet me—early risers, they had arrived before me, and some had come many miles for this meeting. We gathered around a table in a room at Dr. King’s Arkansas Land and Farm Development Corporation, a low brick building on a Fargo dirt road. Black Angus cattle grazed where the road abruptly ended at a fenced field; they were stock from the experimental ranch, chewing at bales of damp, darkened straw.

  The farmers were men in overalls and feed caps, the oldest in his late seventies, the youngest twenty-three. A woman sat at a side table, appearing to take notes. Two other women, both of them farmers, had been invited, but at the last minute had other obligations. They were silent, watchful, patient men, somewhat ill at ease among the bare tables and many spare chairs in the conference room. Farmers are not a sedentary lot, and these men seemed restless and out of place.

  “I’m a stranger,” I said, to introduce myself. “I’ve traveled and written about many foreign countries, but I realized I hadn’t spent much time in the Southern states, where many of the problems are the same as in the so-called Third World.”

  I went on in this vein, explaining that I was traveling through the Deep South, trying to understand what I saw. I thanked Dr. King for arranging this session and said I was grateful to these workingmen for meeting me on a weekday morning, a helpful turnout.

  “It’s the weather,” one of them said. “It’s too wet to do anything on the farm. If this had been a sunny day, you wouldn’t have seen any of us. Our fields is flooded.”

  “And we already done our chores this morning,” another said, and laughed with the others.

  They were resigned to the realities of Mother Nature and human nature, but they were anything but passive and fatalistic. As I was to find, their willingness to work, to plant, to harvest, to repay loans, made them self-sufficient and gave them dignity.

  They laughed again and introduced themselves. The first man who had spoken was Andre Peer, who was forty-two and had been farming for twelve years. He now had four thousand acres under cultivation, near where he lived, about forty miles away, outside Lexa, in Phillips County. He was a stocky, well-built man of medium height, forthright in gesture and word, who looked me in the eye and spoke his mind. The best educated of this group, Andre had earned a degree in agriculture in 1995 from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. He grew wheat, corn, grain sorghum, and soybeans. I later le
arned that he had made such a success of his farm, he and his wife and son had been named Phillips County Young Farming Family of the Year in 2013, with a profile in the Helena World.

  “But it’s always a struggle,” Andre said, and placed his muscular farmer’s hands against his head and squeezed hard. “You got to hear about the banking.”

  “That’s a mighty big subject,” Ernest Cox said. He was a slender, mild-mannered, and sinewy man in his late sixties, weather-beaten from a life of farming—he’d worked in the fields since boyhood, on his father’s acres. He had an attractive and disarming habit of smiling and nodding even when he was speaking about something unpleasant, such as debt or financial obstacles or the hurdles at the loan office. He ran a large third-generation farming business with his brothers, Herschel and Earmer, on five thousand acres. This family farm—soybeans, wheat, and the grain sorghum known as milo—was just outside the small town of Marvell, also in Phillips County.

  All these men—family farmers—lived and raised their crops in the Arkansas Delta, in communities ten miles or less from the Mississippi River, and near the river town of Helena, where their crops were loaded, to be barged downriver. Talking to them, I remembered Reverend Lyles in Alabama telling me how his father had been advised by a white man not to sell any of his land to a white person. “Sell to blacks,” he’d said, because that was the only way a black man could get a foothold in a rural area.

  “I’ve got views on the banking,” Samuel Ross said. In his late seventies, he was the oldest of the group. “But I’m retired. I’ll let the others speak.” And that was all he said for an hour, though he was an attentive listener.

  “Me, I’ve just started, sort of,” Roger Smith said. He was twenty-three, yet was in his fourth season farming. He’d begun as a smallholder at the age of nineteen, leased a few hundred more acres each succeeding year, and now had seven hundred acres in rice and milo. He was soft-spoken and shy, with a drawl so heavy and such a sideways reflex of talking that many times I had to ask him to repeat himself, and even then had to mentally translate what he said.

  “And that’s Rickey Bone,” Dr. King said, introducing another older man. “He’s the only one here not planting row crops.”

  “My wife and I are growing produce,” Rickey Bone said. “She’s really the one who should be here. Mary’s a ball of fire.”

  “For these men the problem is access to capital,” Dr. King said. He was a farmer too, as he had told me before. And although he had an authoritative, almost scholarly way of speaking, he was fluent in enumerating the issues. He ran the Arkansas Land and Farm organization, so he was used to conferences and workshops and committees. “It’s imbalance,” he went on, “and it’s the problem of expanding impoverishment. Listen, I had a friend said she was going to South Africa. I asked why. She told me about the need. I said to her, ‘You don’t have to go to South Africa to find the need.’ She was from Little Rock. I said, ‘What about our need?’ She said, ‘I don’t think it’s the same. In South Africa it’s water quality issues.’ I said, ‘I can tell you about water quality issues right here!’”

  I said, “I started traveling in the South for that very reason, because I saw so many outsiders committed to solving Africa’s problems. They were the same problems that exist here—poor housing, poor access to health care and education. Child hunger. Illiteracy.”

  “And the banking,” Andre Peer said, tapping his thick fingers on the table. His tapping was insistent, but he also had a way of widening his eyes to express impatience.

  “Banking is a white monopoly in Arkansas—it’s white controlled,” Dr. King said. “Traditional banks lend on the basis of a hundred and twenty percent credit security. Think of that. And there are serious problems of imbalance at the USDA.”

  “We need operating loans,” Ernest Cox said. “Every year we have to go to the bank. We’re doing all right—I’m farming with my brothers. But we’re at the mercy of the merchants.”

  “Thing you got to understand,” Andre said, and thought a moment before he proceeded. “Bankers give other farmers more.”

  “What other farmers?” I asked.

  Andre widened his eyes and blew out his cheeks but said nothing.

  “You can speak plainly to Mr. Paul,” Dr. King said.

  “By ‘other’ I mean white,” Andre said. He told a story about a loan he had sought.

  It was then that I realized what these men were up against, because the loans—for machinery, for seed, for infrastructure—were considerable, in the many hundreds of thousands.

  “She let me have $442,000,” Andre was saying. “It was a bad, disastrous year—2006 into 2007—drought and excessive heat. My harvest was poor. I asked her not to turn me in to the USDA to file a loss claim. I didn’t want to be in default. I knew I could make good on it. I know how to work. I wanted to pay what I owed. I needed time. And I did pay—every dollar.” He thought a moment, then said, “White folks say we lazy. All we want is opportunity. We willing to work.”

  “These guys are surviving against the odds,” Dr. King said.

  “If you’re in a bind, in serious default, white farmers want to buy your land,” Andre said. “They’re just waiting for you to fail. They’re on one side, bankers on the other. My bankers are all right, but I have to explain a lot to them to get them to understand my situation. There are no black loan officers. It’s not talked about, it’s not written about. There’s none.”

  “Loan officers,” Ernest Cox said in a knowing voice, smiling, nodding, adjusting his cap.

  “Another loan officer,” Andre said. “We just talking, talking about people. I said, ‘Would you give that man a loan?’ He says, ‘No.’ I say, ‘But you don’t know him.’ He says, ‘How can he buy all that equipment? Must be selling drugs.’ He thinking, ‘How he able to do that, ’cause black people don’t do that.’ The same ones talking like that are the ones sitting on the banking boards.”

  “Arkansas is not like other places,” Roger Smith said in his drawl, and turned aside, as though he’d surprised himself by offering an opinion. He was shy and oblique, but he was not timid.

  “The Klan don’t wear sheets,” Andre said, and looked around at his fellow farmers. “They sitting behind the desks in the banks. Uh-huh!”

  “The South gives indications of being afraid of the Negro. I do not mean physical fear,” Frank Tannenbaum wrote ninety years ago in Darker Phases of the South. “It is not a matter of cowardice or bravery; it is something deeper and more fundamental. It is a fear of losing grip upon the world. It is an unconscious fear of changing status.”

  Roger said, “Harrison. That town—it’s a Klan hotbed.”

  It was not by chance that this remark was dropped into the conversation. Allusions to the Klan, to the past, to the insecurity that Southern blacks face especially in rural areas, I found to be common, for the Klan was the historical nightmare, the arch-destroyer, relentless and reckless, with connections in high places. Harrison is an Ozark community, the seat of Boone County, in the center of the northern edge of the state, where it lies flat against Missouri. Its decent citizens, of whom there were presumably many, hadn’t made any headlines, but its cranks were infamous.

  Roger said, “Harrison has a big billboard advertising the Klan.”

  “Oh, God, Harrison” was a murmur in the room.

  The farmers talked generally about the miseries and abuses of Harrison, and then Ernest said, “You don’t have to go all the way to Harrison to find this business. Moro does not have a black family.”

  Moro was a crossroads in nearby Lee County, with fewer than three hundred people.

  “A black family moved in some years ago,” Andre said. “But they bought him out.”

  “So many inequities here.” The speaker was the woman taking notes, Ramona Anderson, whom I had taken to be a recorder of the remarks in the meeting. But she was a staff member of the Arkansas Land and Farm Development Corporation, and up to now had been sitting quietly o
ver her notebook.

  She told a story about the strange history of Cotton Plant, a town just north of Brinkley. “A man came in the 1960s and saw a bird—not the ivory-bill woodpecker that everyone talks about, but another rare one. He was the only man who saw it. The result was that town authorities set aside many acres for that bird. They used eminent domain to get black farmers off the land around Cotton Plant.”

  “This was done maliciously,” Dr. King said. “No one wants to talk about inequities in race around here. Brinkley has a majority black population but has never had a black mayor. This is not talked about.”

  “Cotton Plant was once an important town,” Ramona said. “It’s now small and poor.”

  “The big landowners don’t want schools and hospitals,” Dr. King said. “Marianna Hospital closed in 1980. It has never reopened. DeWitt is just the same size, but it has a hospital. DeWitt is majority white. They don’t want educated blacks, they want blacks driving their tractors.”

  This again put me in mind of the white farmer James Agee mentioned in his survey Cotton Tenants in 1937: “I don’t object to nigrah education, not up through foath a fift grade maybe, but not furdern dat.” Rural Lee County, where Dr. King lived and farmed, had one of the highest rates of illiteracy in Arkansas (and the nation).

  “Public education continues to deteriorate,” Dr. King said.

  “Economic development has no color,” Ramona Anderson said. “But they manipulated the minorities. Instead of a Delta-wide initiative, they control each portion by dividing them. A true community development plan would benefit the poor, and that’s not something they want.”