Deep South

by Paul Theroux

  “Who’s ‘they’?” I asked.

  “The powers that be,” she said. “Instead of a big hospital, they put in a clinic. You think that’s all right? But in a true community development plan it would be a big hospital rather than a clinic here and a clinic there.”

  “People have forgotten about the farmer,” Andre said. “We are producing food for people to eat. We are creating exports. How about rice? Our rice is exported. It’s seven dollars a bushel—the price is up. Our production is increasing.” All true, I found. The National Farmers Union reported a massive increase in rice growing in the United States, and that exports were going to China, Africa, and the Middle East. Andre went on, “But all the while it’s a struggle. We’re fighting the good ole boy.” He clutched his head again and said, “Keep Pigford in mind and class action.”

  “Pigford” was a word I heard from other black farmers. It was shorthand for a court case that related to some of what these men were telling me about the racial inequities in the farming business. Pigford vs. Glickman was a class action lawsuit brought in 1997 by Timothy Pigford, a black farmer from North Carolina, and four hundred others, against the Department of Agriculture (and its secretary, Dan Glickman), seeking redress for the routine denial of loans to black farmers, whom the USDA had discriminated against, thus leading to a sharp reduction in their numbers.

  Although a settlement was approved in 1999, and more than a billion dollars had been paid so far by the government (under both the Bush and Obama administrations), serious allegations of fraudulent claims have been made, and there was proof of connivance by profiteering lawyers and politicians, scammers and “race hustlers.” If you look into the details of this tangled case, it is obvious that a trough was provided for the benefit of many worthy farmers (successful claimants got $50,000 apiece) as well as for the snouts of many opportunists. Yet black land loss was reversed, and after years of decline, the number of black farmers and black landowners had grown in the South and elsewhere.

  “But we’re still struggling with the banks,” Andre said. “We’re still struggling with the good ole boys. After all these years we still have to prove ourselves.”

  I said, “Bill Clinton spends a lot of time in Africa and India. Couldn’t he do something here to help?”

  “If Clinton came here,” Andre said, “the good ole boys would say, ‘Why you coming here? Why you want to change things?’” He looked around the room for approval, and got the nods he expected. “That’s why he doesn’t do it.”

  All this time, in all this talk, I could sense the men were restless. As farmers, habituated to digging, to fetching and carrying, loading trucks, repairing machines, tramping the margins of their fields, they were unused to sitting indoors for such a length of time. They were too polite to object but still seemed uncomfortable, hitching forward, clasping their hands, squirming on the plastic chair seats.

  I went on asking them about their farming operations, until finally, one of them—probably Andre, because he was the most frank of the group—stood up and said, “You won’t learn much here from us talking. We have to show you, if you have the time.”

  I said, “I have all the time in the world. I’d love to see your farms.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” Dr. King said, as he’d said to me before. Then he took me aside and said, “When you look at the Delta, do you see businesses owned by blacks, operated by blacks? In manufacturing? In retail?” He smiled, because the obvious answer was: very few. He went on, “Compare that to the black farmers here, who are part of a multibillion-dollar business.”

  “Food Deserts”

  The newest farmer, with the smallest amount of acreage, was Rickey Bone, who with his wife, Mary—Mary A, as she was known—had been growing vegetables on land adjacent to where the Arkansas Land and Farm Development Corporation sat in Fargo. The Bones planted about ten acres, a truck farm. They grew what would sell, what people wanted fresh: okra, squash, watermelons, purple peas, and pumpkins.

  “Last year, we had okra plants that was six feet high,” Rickey Bone said on the side road leading to his fields.

  Ricky was sixty, born and raised in Little Rock, a graduate of Central High School, the scene of the racial confrontation in 1957 when federal troops protected nine black students from an angry white mob and the defiance of Governor Orval Faubus. The Little Rock Nine slipped in through a side entrance, integrating the school and making history.

  “I’m sure you heard the stories about it,” Rickey Bone said. “I was just a little kid then.”

  “I was in high school in Massachusetts. It was big news,” I said. The shocking, enduring image was of the fifteen-year-old black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, being screamed at by whites. These scenes of persecution—and bravery—were vivid to me because the students being abused were exactly my age at the time. And now, almost fifty years later, Central High was no longer a battleground but a monument.

  “Man, there’s things a lot better about Little Rock than Central High School,” he said. “But I remember how tough it was.” He smiled, as though to signal an absurdity. “The black schools inherited textbooks from the white schools.”

  He had a clear memory of his first integrated school, his seventh-grade class in Little Rock.

  “I heard how awful whites were,” he said. “My mother—she was Creole, from North Carolina—she told me I was as good as anyone. First day I was thinking, They don’t all look alike. I found that was all bullshit. I thought, They’re not evil, they’re all different, they don’t look alike at all. We played football together. The kids didn’t have the hatred of their parents.”

  We were walking along the margin of one of his fields, a narrow path, because there was deep mud on either side and the path itself was goopy.

  “Teachers, though.” He clucked at the memory. “They put me in a remedial class, with clowns.”

  “How did you deal with that?”

  “I thought, This is not working. I talked to my English teacher. He listened. They moved me out.” Rickey reflected some more, treading the wet path. “Thinking different don’t make you different.” He seemed to be summoning up the sage advice of his mother. “Give me a chance and I can accomplish anything.” We were still walking. Suddenly smiling, he said, “You know? I’ve had everything I’ve ever wanted.”

  After graduation, he’d been a butcher in the meat department of a supermarket in the city. Then, two years in the US Army—Fort Dix, New Jersey, and a taste of the North. On his return to Arkansas and civilian life, he joined the Little Rock Fire Department and spent thirty years dousing flames. And now retirement, but not a conventional one, instead more work, inspired by his wife, Mary A.

  Mary A. Valentine Bone had been born in Lakeview, in the Ozarks. Lakeview was only thirty or so miles from Harrison, with its racial cranks and blasphemers—and decent citizens. Lakeview was just as white, proportionately, but it was more salubrious, tucked in a southern corner of Bull Shoals Lake. Mary A had had a career as a teacher in Little Rock, but now, newly in retirement, wanted to return to the farming life she’d known as a girl on her parents’ few acres. She’d had a lifelong dream of running a farm—not bossing field workers, but planting seeds, weeding crops, harvesting with her own hands, growing food.

  “Mary A wanted a tractor,” Rickey said. “She had a passion for it.”

  The farm, he said, was all Mary A’s; she was in charge, he was a junior partner. For two retired people with grown children—four girls—it seemed to me an ambitious operation, even with the help of Rickey’s brother Donald.

  “Where do you sell the vegetables?”

  “A lot of it at produce stands in Little Rock, where there are—ever hear the term ‘food deserts’?” Dr. King explained it to me: “Poor area, no grocery stores, no fresh produce, no stores at all—closed because of violence. Gangs.”

  That was perhaps true. The deprivation in central Little Rock and some of the nearer suburbs was visible: the boarded-up sh
ops, the tumbledown houses on the joyless grid of numbered streets, especially south of I-630, the Wilbur D. Mills Freeway, a dividing line that bisects the city, “a boundary . . . a part of the geography as real as a river or a ravine,” in the words of Little Rock writer Jay Jennings. Even the riverside neighborhood just off I-30, around the Clinton Presidential Library, was bleak, except for the revived River Market. But there is more to the city, and it is surprising if you have a car and a half hour to observe the difference.

  Leave the Clinton Library on East Markham, hang a right at Gus’s Fried Chicken, and continue on La Harpe Boulevard, which is Route 10, and follow it until it becomes Cantrell Road and widens, heading west. Past the districts known as the Heights and Hillcrest, and for ten miles—you’re still within the city limits of Little Rock—the houses are stately, set amid flowering trees and the hilltop towers of Rivercliff. The mansions of Edge Hill are imposing, many of them newly built and triumphant on their large lawns, and in the malls and shopping centers there is no hint of gang activity or a food desert. I mentioned the modernity, the beauty, and the obvious wealth of this part of Little Rock to a man born and bred in the city, and he defined it in two words: white flight.

  RICKEY AND MARY A still lived in the humbler part of Little Rock. But out at Fargo, an hour east, where they farmed, they had a new John Deere 85-horsepower tractor, a planter, a refrigerated truck, a hoop house for winter growing, and more. All of it they had bought with their retirement savings and by borrowing from the bank and from the USDA. They faced the small-farmer’s obstacles that I heard about often in the South, all the discouragements.

  “The woman at the USDA in Hazen said, ‘You need a hundred and fifty percent collateral to get the loan,’” Rickey said. “That bothered me. Why not a hundred? We had to mortgage some land to get the loan of $137,000. But anyway, we got the loan. We pay it back once a year, after harvesting.”

  “What about the foundations? The charities? The do-good organizations?” I asked. “Ever get any money from them? The Clinton people?”

  “I heard back there yesterday you talking about him,” Rickey said.

  “He was governor. He was president. His philanthropic charity is worth a couple of billion. I don’t see him spending any of it in Arkansas.”

  Rickey Bone was smiling at me again. We entered his hoop house through a flap to see the strawberries he was growing.

  “Clinton’s complicated,” I said.

  “Aren’t we all,” Rickey said, and smiled, and offered me a strawberry.

  These three soft words pierced my heart to such an extent that, traveling on, I never mentioned Clinton again.

  “Sundown Town”

  All the talk of Harrison and the Klan provoked me to take a sudden detour. Such was the size of Arkansas that it was a mere half day’s drive from the Delta to the heart of the Ozarks. Harrison promoted itself as a great retirement town, on the list of “The Best Small Towns in America.” It was a white town and had been known in its Jim Crow past as a “sundown town.” (“Boy, don’t let the sun go down on you.”) I got there by a two-day roundabout route, skirting the northwest of the state to look at the urban disfigurement of Bentonville, home of Walmart; Springdale, home of Tyson Foods; and the salubrious university at Fayetteville that is surrounded by a blight of strip malls. Then I was in the boonies, crossing War Eagle Creek and Onion Creek, Dry Fork and the tiny hamlet of Old Alabam, where the Ozarks begin to bulge from woods and pastures.

  The Ozarks are mountains in the Deep South sense of the word, not pyramidal peaks or potential ski slopes or alpine crags, but irregular elevations, a succession of low, deep green ridges, a sea of long, lumpy hills to the horizon in a dramatic panorama. That there is an identifiable and sundown-framed horizon in their midst gives the Ozarks their uniqueness: mountains that allow a great, gaudy, and effulgent sunset. No single Ozarkian topographical feature is apparent, but the whole of it—the broad shifting vista of elongated hills—appears like flattened and thickly forested mesas. And the view is especially moving because it seems unpeopled, the isolated communities hidden in hollows and behind the slopes, some of which are bunchy with old-growth trees, still remote and beautiful.

  “And thinly visited,” as I mentioned to an old-timer in a junk shop in the hard-up town of Leslie, which was once prosperous making oak barrels. He replied, “I hope it stays that way.”

  This man, in his overalls and boots and faded hat, had the beaky country profile that occurs frequently in Thomas Hart Benton’s sketches of the 1920s Ozarks, some of this portraiture transferred to the “Deep South” and “Mid-West” panels of his mural America Today. On any given morning in the small-town diners of the Ozarks—Harrison, Marshall, St. Joe, Bellefonte, and Yellville come to mind—the older men are Bentonesque. In this place of enduring backwoods, the forms of work and pastimes, which Benton recorded, are unchanged: family farms, hog raising, turkey rearing, the hoeing of cabbage patches, the spitting of tobacco juice.

  “Welcome to Hillbillyville,” a man said to me on a side street in Alpena, with the self-deprecation that is common in Arkansas. He later said, “People are poor here, but that’s a good thing for them. The economy don’t affect them. Up or down, they live just the same.”

  This man also mentioned that when he first moved to town from not far away, he had a visit from the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who had driven over from Harrison, encouraging him to join.

  I asked the man what his reply was to this dubious invitation.

  “I said, ‘You and me don’t have enough in common for that to happen.’” He hoicked a gob of tobacco juice into the street, punctuating his dry reply, then added, “He took it pretty good and went away.”

  Driving around Harrison, which was a prosperous-seeming farming community of about twelve thousand people—busy this weekend because of the Northwest Arkansas District Fair—I didn’t see the Klan billboard the men in the Delta had mentioned. I found another billboard that had become news, because this was a state that was trying to shake off its racist history. In large letters the yellow sign said, ANTI-RACIST IS A CODE WORD FOR ANTI-WHITE.

  There had been local protests and demands to remove the offensive sign. One man who lived near Harrison said to me later, “I’ve read that sign twenty times and I still have no idea what it means.”

  It was true that the Klan existed in Harrison, though how many Klansmen were active no one knew except the secretive Klan itself. As Andre Peer had told me, they didn’t wear sheets anymore. The tiny hamlet of Zinc (pop. 103), a few miles from Harrison, was home to Thomas Robb, who used to be a Grand Wizard but now styled himself National Director of his Klan splinter group, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. At Klan rallies, Robb (Michigan born, raised in Arizona) customarily denounced blacks and Jews.

  Jew hating was also an article of faith and a spiritual practice at another organization in Harrison, the Kingdom Identity Ministries. A transplant from California, Mike Hallimore, the head of this bizarre Christian sect, called his mission a “politically incorrect Christian Identity outreach ministry to God’s chosen race, true Israel, the White, European peoples.” Another article of faith was that idolaters, homosexuals, blasphemers, and abortionists should be put to death.

  Racism and anti-Semitism were encouraged by Kingdom Identity Ministries, because, as they helpfully explained, “race-mixing is an abomination in the sight of Almighty God, a satanic attempt meant to destroy the chosen seedline.” Jews were the descendants of Eve’s having sex with “the Devil or Satan and called the Serpent,” and the “seedline” was “commonly called Jews today.” All of Christian Identity’s assertions were backed up by Scripture, to which they provided chapter and verse, which proved yet again, as I had seen in many lands, that the Bible was often the happy hunting ground of an unbalanced mind.

  Consider this text from 1 Corinthians 11:6: “For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have
her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head.”

  A reasonable person might question the stark biblical choice between a headscarf and a baldy, but in a tent at the Northwest Arkansas District Fair just outside of town, at the Harrison fairgrounds, two young women dispensing hot popcorn to stimulate interest in their husbands’ businesses—roofing and repairs—were modestly dressed in long-sleeved old-fashioned cotton frocks, and each wore a light headscarf, an abbreviated hijab. They were, they said, Mennonites.

  “We call it ‘veiling,’” one of them explained. “We never take it off, outside or inside.”

  Rather than allude to the Bible, I asked if the head covering had a special significance.

  The taller of the two, scooping popcorn, said, “It means that we submit to our faith and to our husbands.”

  I said, “So you pretty much do what your husbands tell you to do?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Which proved to me yet again that traveling in the hinterland of the United States now and then resembled traveling in the wider world, listening to pious and irrational simplicities from credulous folks.

  All this time, the two women were filling bags of popcorn and handing them to passersby, not an ideal situation for my delving into the subject of Harrison’s racial politics.

  When I persevered obliquely, the smaller, younger of the two said, “It used to be much worse. It’s getting better.”

  “The old people, they still believe the racism,” the tall one said, and smoothed her veil.

  There were no black faces at the district fair, for which the whole town, it seemed, had turned out, for the carnival rides and the rodeo. Much more than a family-friendly weekend, though, it was a serious competition among cattle raisers in three categories, American, English, and Exotic. Some of the creatures weighed half a ton, with lovely eyes and long lashes, moaning in iron stanchions, awaiting the judges. Breeders vied for blue ribbons for their chickens, ducks, goats, hogs, and sheep. There were competitions for preservers of fruit, jelly makers, and honey gatherers; for quilters, carvers, and weavers—all the classic country passions, artisans and ranchers, the salt of the earth (Matthew 5:13).