by Paul Theroux
But that night, at a motel outside Harrison, a woman said to me, “If a black person came here, they’d hurt him. They’d burn his house.”
In Silver Hill, I met a man who was pausing here with his wife, on their way from Harrison, to marvel at the beauty of the Buffalo River nearby.
“No one has a good word for Harrison,” I said. “Is that fair?”
“Great place, but we still have”—and he made a face—“those people.”
“The Klan,” his wife half whispered, half mouthed, with widened eyes.
“I’m a doctor,” the man said. “I treated one of them that lives around here, over in Marshall.” He casually pointed down the road. “Lots of them there.”
I decided to have lunch in Marshall, where a waitress—middle-aged, friendly—said, “There’s no blacks here. The older folks don’t accept them.”
Marshall was an old expiring town with a main square, still with an impressive and cavernous hardware store and a drugstore. The drugstore, in addition to filling prescriptions and retailing shampoo and aspirin, sold rifles and handguns and displayed shelves of ammunition, all calibers.
Behind the drugstore, a three-story squarish building made of fitted sandstone blocks, with heavily barred windows, had been the county jail. It was vacant now but possessed a gloomy majesty on the back street. Dating from 1902, it was said to have been designed in a style known as Romanesque Revival, oddly pompous for this small town. Seeing me sizing it up, a man wandered over and said hello.
“How you doing?” I said.
“Gooder’n taters, better’n snuff,” he said and winked. “Not near as dusty. Ha!”
It was a local expression, he said, much appreciated by people passing through.
“As a boy, I used to go by this here jail,” he said, “and the prisoners would put a string out of the upper windows, hang it down, and throw us a nickel. We’d go to the drugstore yonder, buy a candy bar, and tie it to the string. They’d haul it up. That was in the fifties.”
For all the talk of racism in and around the town, the only place to stay, and the best home cooking in Marshall, was at the Marshall Motel and Restaurant, owned and operated by a Chinese family, the Phungs, An Chay and Gay, who were well liked and content in Marshall, where they’d lived for twenty-eight years. Mrs. Gay Lee Phung was highly praised for her catfish dinners.
“Whites here in the Ozarks got no opinion of blacks, really,” a crusty old man in overalls in a junk shop in a small town west of Marshall said to me. “Want to know whah?”
“Yes, please.”
“People here never grew up around blacks,” he said. “Never knew ’em. And they never leave here. You’re born in St. Joe, you stay in St. Joe, and everywhere else is the same. So all they know is what they see on the teevy.”
“That’s enough, isn’t it?” I said.
“Nowhere near,” he said. “All you ever see on the teevy is a smart black guy and a dumb white guy.”
He was sorting soda bottles, caked with dirt, that had the look of having been recently dug up, disinterred like ancient amphorae.
“It’s all gone to hell, the world, and it’s getting worse,” he said. “But it don’t matter what’s going to happen. I’m seventy-seven. I reckon I got another ten years. Let someone else figure it out.” He was still handling the clinking bottles. “Mind, they’s some sorry whites here.”
“What sort of thing do the sorry whites do?”
“Wait for the next check,” he said, holding a bottle up to the light to examine its markings. “The whole country thinks we’re eejits here. Fine with me. They can stay away.”
Now he was examining the lettering on the bottom of another bottle.
“Why is it,” he said, “that you never pick up something—anything—and read the words ‘Made in Africa’? Just never happens, that experience, does it?”
I said, “That depends,” and wondered where this was leading.
“Don’t get me started on the damned niggers,” he said.
I cleared my throat and said, “Some people object to that word.”
“Not around here they don’t,” he said joyfully, and chuckled. He put a dirty bottle down and leaned into my face. “Now me, I’m real conservative.”
“I’m old school,” a middle-aged man said to me in Heber Springs. “What I mean is, I call ’em niggers to their face. They don’t mind. They call me a redneck.”
“They don’t object?”
He looked at me pityingly, as though I was new to the language. “Nigger’s not racial, you can look it up. Nigger just means you’re sorry. They’s white niggers and yella niggers too, all of them sorry. Some of them white trash are worse than any niggers. They on drugs—meth, you name it. They scare me.”
Buffalo River
As a break from this spirited but pointless to-and-fro, one day I rented a canoe and paddled for a whole day down the Buffalo River. The Buffalo—gloriously undammed—which crosses the state, flowing from west to east, is the central artery of Arkansas, splashing through the heart of the Ozarks. A whole, old-style travel book could be written about boating and camping down Arkansas’s wilderness rivers: wet feet, wildlife, intimations of danger, and observations such as “just ahead, the diabolical chatter of the rapids sounded like an invitation to disaster.”
I had other plans on this warm morning in early September. I found a boat at an outfitter near Silver Hill and paddled all that day, from Baker Ford to Gilbert, stopping at intervals to inhale the fragrant air, to watch the sun flashing on the rapids and the insects stirring on the surface of the shallows. The river was greeny gold in the stiller pools, as two deer upwind, a doe and her fawn, picked their way across the river ahead of me, occasionally pausing to nibble or sip. I saw herons and a cormorant, and the drumming of a woodpecker echoed from the cliffs and sheer rock faces, which made it seem that some parts of the river were coursing through a canyon. In this silence and solitude I had the reassuring sense—because of the visible slope of the river—that I was sliding downhill, on a tongue of the rapids in some places, on a wide washboard of water-tumbled stones in others.
A lovely day of serenity in the Ozarks: no mention of race, of conflict, of poverty; no sign of the outside world; no other people, only the gurgle and gulp of the river bubbling along, unimpeded, and my solitary picnic on a big warm boulder, watching cooter turtles that had crawled, like me, onto other boulders, sunning themselves with their jaws open.
Then I handed over my boat and drove south and east to the Delta again, stopping at a gun show in Jacksonville, a town about ten miles from Little Rock. Like other gun shows I’d been to, it had the usual stalls and stands, sellers of new guns, old guns, knives, Tasers, Mace, ornery bumper stickers, Nazi memorabilia, Civil War relics, and ammo. But this being Arkansas, I saw that one visiting family—five of them—were barefoot (“We’re just down from Letona,” the patriarch told me), and the gun show food area offered deep-fried pie.
“I’m In Too Deep to Quit”
Garrett Grove, where the young farmer Roger Smith had directed me, was not a town or a village. It was a few houses and, in one portion, an austere all-black graveyard, St. Paul’s, with about forty small headstones, many showing birth dates from the nineteenth century and first names such as Parthenia and Pankie. Four of the stones were nameless blanks—unknown or unremembered.
The three houses, small white wood-frame bungalows facing plowed fields, sat under tall pecan trees on a dirt road, a turnoff from a narrow state highway and a gutter of tadpole-stirred water called Little Piney Creek. One of the houses belonged to Ocie Trice, a man of seventy-four, with teasing ways, who had left this dirt road as a young man to live in Chicago for fifty-one years. He returned in the year 2000 when he and his brother inherited the family’s property, four hundred acres. Some of this land they leased to Roger Smith. Ocie’s older brother was named Eoies Oree Trice. Ocie laughed, saying he could not explain the names—maybe they were biblical. Yet the fattest co
ncordance to the Bible is innocent of those names. Ocie began teasing Roger, who was single, about the possibility of his getting married to the wrong woman.
“She start out good but maybe she break bad in the middle of the stream,” Ocie said. He was sitting under a tree at the back of his house, resting from tinkering with his car’s rusty engine. In his small house, with his inherited land, yet without much status, he struck me as a rich peasant, the sort known in Russia as a kulak, the word for fist.
“Got no time to get married,” Roger said. “Don’t even have me a girlfriend.”
“Git one,” Ocie said, and laughed again.
Roger drove me in his pickup truck to one of his milo fields. He had begun to farm at the age of nineteen, having studied and served in Future Farmers of America. He had also attended the community college in nearby Forrest City. He farmed seven hundred acres altogether, all of it rented land. He was helped by his uncle Larry Terry, an older man, roughly bearded, teeth missing but unexpectedly fluent on farming issues and philosophical on other subjects. Larry joined us in the truck.
Roger and Larry plowed and planted, sprayed for weeds, fertilized the sorghum and milo. Milo had qualities similar to corn and was sold as feed for cows, chickens, and pigs.
“You can grind it and make flour,” Roger said.
Roger was proud of the machinery he’d accumulated—his tractor, his harvester, his levee hog “for pulling levees,” creating the low walls of rice fields—angular, imposing, big-wheeled vehicles, and very expensive, bought with loans.
“I borrowed $200,000 this year. I could have used more. I really needed $240,000.”
“You got it from the bank?” I asked.
“I go to the Farm Service Agency and beg.”
“What’s your profit?”
“Weather-wise, I haven’t seen a good year,” he said. “And the first year I farmed it was terrible hot. Last year I had $28,000 in my pocket after harvest and paying off my loan. But any profit I make I put back into the farm. I have to pay people. I have to hire a semi to take the crop to Helena.”
“Why Helena?”
“The river. Truck it down to the river, put it on a barge.”
I wanted to see his rice fields. I had often seen rice growing, pullulating in exquisite terraces and ponds, in Uganda, Malaysia, India, China, and the Philippines. The peculiar contours of the fields were aesthetically pleasing, and the rice planter was an emblematic figure, laboring under a wide-brimmed woven hat, shin-deep in water, shoving slips of rice into the mud beneath to take root. When rice was half grown it was the most attractive crop imaginable, a watery field of luminous green grass. At harvest it lost its color, went brown, and drooped gracefully, the head of each stalk heavy with tassels of rice grains.
After a few flat miles of straight Delta roads abutting fields, Roger swung his truck onto the road’s shoulder and drove across a bumpy verge to the edge of a rice field, a lovely sight for the oddity of the enclosing foot-high levees, none of them straight but all containing a walled-in section of rice shoots.
“This is Roy J rice,” Roger said. It was a new high-yield variety, developed at the University of Arkansas just a few years before. It was sturdy—“straw strength” was important when the wind came up, he explained.
“All those walls,” I said. “Looks like a lot of work.”
“Easy with a levee hog,” he said. “After we pull the levees and get some rain, we plant twenty foot at a time with a drill”—a seed drill instead of the fingers of a peasant bent over in the mud.
“You take this crop to the river too?”
“Down the river it goes. Export.”
“Profitable?”
“If it all goes right. If we get a hundred fifty bushels an acre. That’s two or three hundred dollars an acre. Not bad.”
For the eighty-four acres he had under rice cultivation it was not a lot, and from that he had to deduct the cost of seed, fertilizer, labor, and truck rental, as well as service the farm loan. Roger had mentioned that the previous year his profit had been $28,000 on his entire harvest. He worked every day. He not only had to deal with his farm—which was very small by Delta standards compared with the vast corporate farms, but still demanding—he also had to manage the business side, the sales, the negotiations with Ocie Trice. He also had to maintain and repair the machinery, all of which he’d bought secondhand. And there was the weather, dramatic in Arkansas and often destructive.
In the pickup on the way back to Garrett Grove, three of us abreast, Larry Terry in the middle, I said, “A lot of people might say that it isn’t worth all this work to make $28,000.”
“It’s worth it,” Roger said, his voice flat with conviction. “When I get squared up I’ll do all right. Four or five years maybe. I’m in too deep to quit.”
We passed in silence through Moro, known, as they’d said, for being a community of all white families—the crossroads, the church, the school, the depots and sheds, farm machinery parked side by side, the small tidy bungalows.
“Moro,” I said, reading the road sign.
“Some things meant to be,” Larry said without looking to the left or right.
“You Need a Tough Skin”
I was in Andre Peer’s home, a renovated one-story ranch house, not grand but solid and well maintained, the kind a local attorney or an insurance agent might own, at the end of a country lane in the Delta town of Lexa, population less than 300, and of that about 100 blacks. Andre pointed out his window to a nearby field. “That’s a story.”
“Tell me.”
Andre had a white neighbor who had not shown him any friendliness, and who had planted a vegetable garden on an adjoining field that he did not own, some of the garden dug up and overlapping on Andre’s own property. It annoyed Andre that the man had done so, digging the land without asking permission or saying a word, nor had the man offered any of the vegetables to him as compensation. So Andre went to the owner of this in-between plot that was being presumptuously planted by the neighbor and offered to buy it. The owner, who lived in another state, agreed to a price. At the appropriate time, Andre called the neighbor and told him that he now owned the field and that the man would have to cease gardening there.
The neighbor then became friendly for the first time, and offered Andre a bag of vegetables from his garden.
“I don’t want any of your vegetables,” Andre said. “What I want is you to stop growing them on my land.”
I thought this a nice illustrative small-scale narrative of power and land, of country people living at close quarters, the sort of story people call Chekhovian.
Though Andre was forty-two, he had the experience and the maturity—and the capacity for risk-taking—of someone much older. He farmed four thousand acres, most of it on rented land, but his ambition was to buy more land of his own. He had impressed me with his work ethic, his frankness, and his refusal to be deterred by anyone in his pursuit of farming—by the bank, the USDA (with its much-hated bureaucracy, red tape, and fickle ways), or the white farmers, many of whom, he suggested, did not wish him well.
We had left his house and were driving beside one of his cornfields with its neat, symmetrical rows of stalks, and farther along, beside one of his wheat fields. Andre, like the others, was also impressive for his pride in his work.
“People get discouraged,” he said. “A lot of black farmers left to go north, to get away from the fields. They didn’t want nothing to do with farming. But it’s a good life if you work at it. Other people waiting for you to fail. They say ‘You messin’ up’ and all that.” He sighed and added, “You need a tough skin.”
“My feeling is that you have a tough skin, Andre,” I said. “I think I’d probably get discouraged. You’re up against the big corporate farms that want to encroach.”
“Ain’t going to encroach none on me,” he said. “But it’s funny. My wife was in Jonesboro. A woman asked her, ‘What does your husband do?’
“April said, ‘Fa
rming.’
“Woman says, ‘Is he white?’
“April says, ‘No.’
“Woman says, ‘Never heard of no black man farming for a living.’” Andre turned to me and stared with his wide-open ironical eyes. “True!”
That was the difference between Jonesboro, a large, mainly white university city in the northeast of the state, and the tiny farming communities down here in the Delta. The woman, who was white, had lived her whole life in Jonesboro. A black farmer was improbable, a novelty.
“A lot of those people think we don’t know how to do this,” he said. “But, you know”—he widened his eyes again and nodded—“I can read!”
“If You Can Tell a White Farm from a Black Farm, You in Trouble”
Ernest Cox, who was sixty-nine, was sitting on the axle tree of a tractor in his open-sided work shed on his family farm in Marvell, talking slowly. Andre had driven me here because the farm was so far outside town and hard to find. We all sat together, out of the sun, in the cool, high-roofed shed. Just a mile from here, at the crossroads of Turkey Scratch, the drummer, singer, and icon of country rock Levon Helm was raised, which perhaps was the reason he could sing with such feeling, “Poor old dirt farmer / He lost all his corn . . .”
“We’re originally from Parkin,” Ernest was saying. He had grown up outside that tiny town, in Cross County, an hour or more north of here and nearer to Memphis than to Little Rock, too high up to be regarded as the Delta. His father, Earmer Senior, had abruptly moved the whole family to Marvell, in the Delta, in 1950.
“Reason he left, he was living on a plantation,” Ernest said. Parkin, another flyspeck, was a modest grid of streets, with nearly all white-owned houses, on the St. Francis River and surrounded by fields. “The owner was a white man, name of Hauser. Came about this way. My brother Herschel and a neighbor was watching over some cows. And the cows wandered over to where they wasn’t supposed to be. Hauser roughed them up. Well, he didn’t mess much with Herschel, but my father saw what happened and said, ‘Time to go.’ We moved here to Marvell. He rented some land and bought some mules and farmed ninety acres.”
