Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley'

by Bill Steigerwald

  On Nov. 14, 1960, the city’s color barrier was broken at William Frantz by little Ruby Bridges, the 6-year-old first-grader immortalized in Norman Rockwell’s painting “The Problem We All Live With.” Three other first-grade girls integrated a second school in the Lower Ninth Ward. When Bridges, escorted by beefy federal deputy marshals, showed up at William Frantz in her little white dress and white socks, it was like a bomb went off under Jim Crow’s bed.

  The white teachers in the school immediately quit. White parents pulled their kids out and began mounting large daily protest rallies in front of the building that included racist signs, spitting, slashing tires and throwing rocks. Two days later thousands of white extremists and teen-agers went on a rampage in downtown New Orleans and, as the whole nation watched, a Southern city thought to be (relatively) progressive on matters of race was turned upside down and disgraced.

  Steinbeck was following these events from Texas as he prepared to make his dash home to New York. He decided he had to witness the ugly drama playing each morning outside William Frantz Elementary. He was especially interested in the well-publicized "Cheerleaders." He characterized them as “stout middle-aged women,” but from the old newspaper photos and newsreels they looked like mostly young, white working-class mothers. The mothers stood across the street behind barricades yelling crude obscenities at Ruby Bridges and the few white parents who braved the boycott by walking their kids into the virtually empty school.

  On what was probably Thursday, Dec. 1, 1960, Steinbeck writes that he arrived in New Orleans, parked his truck and took a cab to the school. He says he joined the morning circus at exactly 8:57. That was the time Ruby Bridges arrived each day. The barricaded sidewalks and streets were crowded and angry. Police were there to keep people from being hurt. Local and national media were there in force.

  Time magazine’s Dec. 12, 1960, article, “The Battle of New Orleans,” called the scene outside the school "an ecstasy of hatred." White parents and their teen-age kids screamed at anyone going in the school, especially white parents. Time said a Catholic priest who accompanied a local preacher and his child “was met with cries of ‘bastard,’ ‘Communist’ and ‘nigger lover.’” Homemade signs included "Communists & Jews Behind Race Mixing" and the tellingly misspelled “We want segragation.”

  Whites in New Orleans lost their fight to preserve their Jim Crow public school system, but they ducked the bullet of integration. They quickly re-segregated their children’s educations and themselves. They started their own private schools, sent their kids to Catholic schools or abandoned white city neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward and fled to the suburbs.

  New Orleans, a city of 630,000 in 1960, was transformed. William Frantz Elementary quickly became an all-black school. Within 10 years, as the city hemorrhaged people, almost three fourths of the students in New Orleans public schools were African American. By 2010, the population – 454,865 before Katrina and 343,829 after – had flipped, switching from 63 percent white in 1960 to 60 percent black. In 2010 the city’s integrated public school system was almost as black – more than 90 percent – as its segregated system was white in 1960.

  A Paragraph of Filth

  Steinbeck was appalled and disgusted and sickened by the racial hatred he saw and heard that morning. He has no empathy for the white working-class mothers of the Upper Ninth Ward, whose daily lives had been suddenly demolished by moral and legal forces beyond their control. He doesn’t hide how much he despised the Cheerleaders for their primitive bigotry. He portrays them as insane, low-class, childlike, egotistical and only interested in their own 15 minutes of local fame.

  The Cheerleaders also had very dirty mouths. They specialized in shouting vulgarities that were so foul no news outlet would repeat them. As Steinbeck complained, TV cameras drowned out their voices with crowd noise and the print media hinted only that the words the women howled were "indelicate" or “obscene.” But in his book he refused to censor himself.

  In his best scrawl, he wrote in the first draft that “I don’t know how the sick sadness of this morning can be felt without these words. I am going to write down the exact expressions screamed in a banshee voice, a voice in which hysteria was very near the surface. These words will go to the publisher on the manuscript and there is not a chance in the world that my readers will see them. But the texture of the morning can not be expressed without them.”

  Steinbeck then quoted what he said he heard a “cheerlady” at the barricade shriek at a white man who had dared to bring his child to a school containing a black girl “dressed in shining starchy white, with new white shoes on feet so little they were almost round”:

  “You mother fucking, nigger sucking, prick licking piece of shit. Why you’d lick a dog’s ass if he’d let you. Look at the bastard drag his dirty stinking ass along. You think that’s his kid? That’s a piece of shit. That’s shit leading shit. Know what we ought to do? Strip down them fancy pants and cut off his balls and feed them to the pigs – that is if he’s got any balls. How about it friends?”

  That paragraph of the filth coming from America’s most popular writer would have shocked, outraged or offended the entire country in 1962 – and still could. It also would have seriously diminished book sales, jeopardized “Travels With Charley’s” chances to be a choice of the Book of the Month Club and given his PG book a triple-X rating. It was edited out, as Steinbeck and everyone else involved must have always known it had to be. Probably fewer than a dozen eyes ever saw it.

  The paragraph was shocking. But there was no way it could have been a verbatim transcription of what any one of the Cheerleaders said. It was too perfect, too scripted, too compact, too masculine, too clunky with that final line “How about it friends?”

  Given Steinbeck’s knack of reshaping the nonfictional world to suit his fictional purposes, it had to be a composite or condensed or embellished version of what he heard. As he wrote earlier in a part of the first draft that also was cut, he believed it was the writer’s duty to his readers to straighten out the “chaos” of reality and make it understandable and “reasonably real.” In New Orleans he did just that.

  The same X-rated paragraph had been included in the manuscript Steinbeck submitted to Holiday magazine, which serialized a shorter version of “Travels With Charley” in three parts before it was published in book form. In the final installment of what it called “In Quest of America,” in February of 1962, Holiday ran Steinbeck’s original lead-in to the paragraph of filth and then inserted “{Editors’ note: Mr. Steinbeck is right. The Cheerleader’s words were a string of unrelieved filth and had to be deleted}.”

  Steinbeck, who was traveling in Europe with his family, pushed to keep the paragraph in the book. But it never stood a chance of seeing a drop of printer’s ink. In the end it apparently was kept out for legal reasons that sound a bit suspicious, as if they were being used as an excuse to overrule or legally bully Steinbeck. In a Jan. 26, 1962 letter to Steinbeck, his editor Pascal Covici said Viking’s lawyers feared that some Cheerleaders could say they were identifiable because of Steinbeck’s descriptions of them and could sue him. For what? Being made to look like the foul-mouthed bigots they were?

  In a letter to his agent Elizabeth Otis a week later, Steinbeck said that the threat of personally losing a lot of money from lawsuits was persuasive. He resented having to be cautious. But he said, “What started out as a simple piece of truth now wears all the clothing of sensationalism and has lost every vestige of its purity. It doesn’t feel clean to me any more. The only value of the passage lay in its shock value. Now it has become that book with the dirty words and by a magical turnabout the dirty words are no longer the cheer leaders’ but mine.”

  Steinbeck ultimately rewrote part of the Cheerleaders scene. He still managed to beautifully capture the ugly truths of that morning without using a single dirty word, relying on the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks.

  But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and d
egenerate. In a long and unprotected life I have seen and heard the vomitings of demoniac humans before. Why then did these screams fill me with a shocked and sickened sorrow? The words written down are dirty, carefully and selectedly filthy. But there was something far worse here than dirt, a kind of frightening witches’ Sabbath. Here was no spontaneous cry of anger, of insane rage. Perhaps that is what made me sick with weary nausea. Here was no principle good or bad, no direction. These blowzy women, with their little hats and their clippings, hungered for attention. They wanted to be admired. They simpered in happy, almost innocent triumph when they were applauded. Theirs was the demented cruelty of egocentric children, and somehow this made their insensate beastliness much more heart-breaking. These were not mothers, not even women. They were crazy actors playing to a crazy audience.

  Though sanitized, the Cheerleader scenes are generally, and deservedly, thought to be the best in “Travels With Charley.” Biographer Jackson Benson said in “The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer” that they were “unforgettable, the dramatic centerpiece of his book, branding on the minds of millions of readers the horror and nausea of the crowd’s demented cruelty and the theatrical degeneracy of ‘these blowzy women with their little hats and their (newspaper) clippings (who) hungered for attention.’”

  Going to New Orleans to see the Cheerleaders in action was the only deliberate act of journalism Steinbeck made on his entire trip, and it paid off. It gave his book of fictional encounters, musings and memories some needed punch and passion and a newsy edge. Not to mention a welcome dose of reality.

  Being where real people are doing real things always has a way of producing strong writing, whether you’re a newspaper reporter covering a house fire or a great novelist covering a race war. Steinbeck’s Cheerleaders scenes, unlike any other in the book, prove it. In probably less than an hour, he found a powerful ending for “Charley” without having to rearrange the real world much at all.

  A Rainbow of Fictions

  The lineup of Central Casting All-Stars Steinbeck says he met before and after his visit to William Frantz Elementary is another matter. The characters he quotes when he arrives in New Orleans – a parking lot guy and a taxi driver – are no more believable or less wooden than the other fictional people he paraded through his book. They are stereotypical low-class bigots and cretins, human props in a morality play who throw around the n-word, make crude racist jokes and blame the racial unrest in the South on commies or Jews from New York. Like nearly every invented human in the book except the Shakespearean actor, they can’t utter a sentence without emitting a “he don’t” or a “they wasn’t.”

  Even more improbable are the four stock characters Steinbeck conveniently bumps into as he flees New Orleans. The men – two whites, two blacks – just happen to represent a full spectrum of the Jim Crow South’s positions on integration. One white man is an enlightened, tolerant philosopher-type who defies the North’s stereotype of the racist Southerner and discusses the nuances of black-white relations with Steinbeck. One is an old black field hand who knows his place, wants to make no trouble and is wary of any white man asking questions. The third is an archetypal white bigot, a poster-cracker for the segregation-forever crowd who gets in an argument with Steinbeck and says he was not “about to allow my kids to go to school with no niggers.” The last is a smart, articulate young black college student in Mississippi who is impatient for results and thinks Martin Luther King's methods are too slow.

  Knowing Steinbeck’s modus operandi, the likelihood that he actually met the four Southerners in 24 hours is somewhere between pretty slim and no way in hell. Even Professor Shillinglaw admitted to Duke University radio documentarian John Biewen they were probably the children of “creative nonfiction” and were used by Steinbeck as fictional devices to present the views of segregation they represented. What’s more, Steinbeck has long, complex, conversations or arguments with each of the four men. No one, not even him, could have remembered their words so exactly eight months later without notes.

  Nonfiction or fiction, the writing is great, of course. Steinbeck was on the correct side of the integration-segregation argument. And he does a nice job of trying to sort out the rights, wrongs and complicated realities of a moral and political issue that would tear the country apart politically and socially for the next decade and more.

  He doesn't pretend to have presented a true cross-section of the South in his book. Knowing his own scant experience with black people and racial matters, he humbly comes to no conclusions. His only prediction was that integration was inevitable. It was only the means of achieving it that was going to be in question. Inventing characters and making up their conversations in a nonfiction book was nothing new or rare or even necessarily wrong. Steinbeck’s fictional quartet was harmless and obviously imaginary. It’s just too bad that for 50 years scholars didn’t notice or care enough to point that out.

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Friday, Dec. 2, 1960 – Upriver to Mississippi

  Steinbeck writes in “Charley” that he left the Upper Ninth Ward, ate a sandwich by the Mississippi River and then stopped at “a pleasant motel.” The next day, most likely Dec. 2, he drives north on U.S. Highway 61 along the Mississippi River to Natchez and Vicksburg. Then he takes U.S. Highway 80 east across Mississippi.

  Driving for Home

  Steinbeck had dreaded seeing the racially torn South and ended up seeing very little of it. His original plan was to swing through the black heart of the Jim Crow South and go up the East Coast. But he was tired and weary of the road. And he was so rattled by the hatred he witnessed in New Orleans that he jumped in Rocinante and bolted straight for home.

  I couldn’t blame him for fleeing New Orleans. Spending most of Saturday morning in heavy northbound traffic trying to escape to Mississippi, unkind thoughts filled my head. New Orleans was a city that needed sympathy. It had almost been destroyed, literally, by the incompetence and/or corruption of its government and its own elected political hacks. But of all the places I had been in 30-plus states, it was by far the most annoying and least enjoyable.

  I admit I didn’t see much of New Orleans and I sure didn’t see the fancy parts. I enjoyed my early morning walkabout in the Upper Ninth Ward. But I didn’t care how cool the French Quarter was or if Louis Armstrong and jazz were born there. New Orleans was dirty and dank, its roads were horrible and half of it was already below sea level. I didn’t want any living thing to get hurt, even male drivers under 25. But if I had looked in my rearview mirror and seen the entire bottom half of Louisiana sinking beneath the sea – from natural causes or from the further ineptitude of the Army Corps of Engineers – I wouldn’t have shed a tear.

  Following Steinbeck’s 1,600-mile route from New Orleans to Manhattan was easy, thanks to a postcard he sent from Mississippi to his agent Elizabeth Otis on Saturday, Dec. 3. “Since I couldn’t do everything,” he writes from the town of Pelahatchie on U.S. Highway 80, “I went to New Orleans and watched mother love at work.” He tells Otis he followed the Mississippi River to Natchez and Vicksburg. Saying he’d have to miss the coastal states and that he’d “be home next week,” he ends with, “Darned if I know whether I’m getting anything. At least I’ll know what’s not so. See you. It’s been a long haul. Love John.”

  Steinbeck was wise. “Knowing what’s not so” is as important as knowing what is. That’s especially true in a big, diverse, regionalized country that is too often summed up, averaged out or packaged into stereotypes by the national media, experts, politicians and various interest groups with money to be made, laws to get passed or ideological axes to grind.

  I followed U.S. 61 through the congested sprawl of Baton Rouge. Somewhere on the way I survived a heavily commercialized death stretch that had a 65 mph speed limit, thick traffic and red lights every half-mile. By the time it reached the Mississippi line, however, Highway 61 had turned into a beautiful, empty, four-lane parkway that rolled in long waves over the hills and swep
t through forests and farmland.

  U.S. 61, aka “The Blues Highway,” once connected New Orleans and Duluth and still splits Mississippi Delta blues country. Shadowing the Mississippi River for nearly 1,500 miles, it was a main north-south route before the interstates came and was the star of Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.” The road may have been widened since 1960, but little else had changed. The surrounding country, of course, had been liberated in the bloody overthrow of Jim Crow.

  The scenery was not spectacular, and the Mississippi River was hidden to the west behind the hills. More like a parkway, the road had not been made ugly to interstate engineering standards. There were no guardrails, no overpasses, few signs and no great walls or cliffs of concrete. I saw more hawks than cars and never saw a truck, an exit ramp or a sign of commerce. Not that I had anything against commerce or its signs.

  Fifty years apart, Steinbeck and I hurried down the main streets of the same few quaint, slavery-era towns and passed by the same plantations with long driveways tunneling through magnolias. I may have been prejudiced because I was going home. But from Natchez all the way to Vicksburg, U.S. 61 was one of the sweetest, smoothest, prettiest roads I'd ever driven.