A Turn in the South

by V.S. Naipaul

"A Turn in the South" is a reflective journey by V. S. Naipaul in the late 1980s through the American South. Naipaul writes of his encounters with politicians, rednecks, farmers, writers, ordinary men and women, both black and white, with the insight and originality we expect from one of our best travel writers. Fascinating and poetic, this is a remarkable book on race, culture and country. 'Naipaul's writing is supple and fluid, meticulously crafted, adventurous and quick to surprise. And, as usual, there's the freshness and originality of his way of looking at things ...a fine book by a fine man, and one to be read with great a book of style, sagacity and wit' - "Sunday Times". 'A tissue of brilliantly recorded hearsay, of intense listening by a man with a remarkable ear' - "New York Times Review of Books".

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, History, The United States Of America, Memoir, Literature, American

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

V. S. Naipaul was a British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent known for his sharp, often controversial explorations of postcolonial societies, identity, and displacement. His works, which include both fiction and nonfiction, often depict themes of exile, cultural alienation, and the lingering effects of colonialism.
He gained early recognition with A House for Mr Biswas, a novel inspired by his father’s struggles in Trinidad. His later works, such as The Mimic Men, In a Free State, and A Bend in the River, cemented his reputation as a masterful and incisive writer. Beyond fiction, his travelogues and essays, including Among the Believers and India: A Million Mutinies Now, reflected his critical perspective on societies in transition.
Naipaul received numerous accolades throughout his career, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded for his ability to blend deep observation with literary artistry. While praised for his prose, his often unsparing portrayals of postcolonial nations and controversial statements sparked both admiration and criticism.

Reviews

[Dmitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If I wasn't writing, if I didn't have a purpose, and at times a feeling of urgency, if the writing hadn't given me a schedule, places to go, how would I have passed the days?"

"Travel of the sort I was doing, travel on a theme, depends on accidents: the books read on a journey, the people met."

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In 1989 V S Naipaul added this to his series of travelogues, from the West Indies and India in the 60's to the Islamic countries of Central and SE Asia in the 70's. Here in the late 80's he explored southern states in the US. He asked the same question for over forty years: How did relocated and native people live in former colonies? His approach was well crafted over time. With few advance contacts themes and itineries were made. Words of those he met were recorded meticulously in handwritten notes. Naipaul had an access accorded to celebrated authors but didn't choose to meet only the famous or powerful.

Atlanta had a former plantation town nearby with blacks and whites still self segregated. Although friendly each had their own churches and homes. A southern belle tells how women were suppressed by gender roles. After a march in an all white town he meets a sheriff and the civil rights leader who organized it. Earlier he wondered if protests had become a performance art since the 60's but was impressed with its authenticity. He visits a city manager entangled in identity politics and a jazz musician who found God in the African Methodist church. Naipaul finds a continuity of community lacking in the Caribbean.

Charleston was a tourist town. With 19th century streets, a Slave Market and Confederate Museum, some great families still lived in mansions. Naipaul soon tired of the horse drawn carriage crowd. Along middle class clusters of white fright stood bare brick buildings of public housing. Beyond the city plantations were divided after the Civil War into sixty acre plots, maybe a mule included. Monuments commemorated the Lost Cause. The grandson of a plantation owner waxed nostalgic for the Old South, ancestors of an elderly lady had bought Trinidad but drowned in the sea. Naipaul sees shacks of crackers in the swamp.

Tallahassee was next on the trip. Naipaul interviews a Baptist pastor who protested segregation and a parole board commissioner who made good. He notes the success of some but the despair of many. Sharecrop farming existed in the city outskirts but it was quickly dying. He visits Tuskegee University, founded by Booker T. Washington, home to G.W. Carver where WWII airmen were recruited. Syphilis had been studied by the government for forty years without giving treatments promised to patients. Naipaul observes the grounds in disrepair but much of the school's post-bellum grandeur remained intact.

Jackson was a nicer city. Although infamous for lynching, a woman thinks racism was once a concern but had since been replaced by crime. Another shares stories of the old Delta frontier. Recently as 1915 forests were felled, catfish farms replaced cotton fields yet poverty remained. While whites had left blacks still stayed. A memorial to a loyal slave stands in the center of town. A Christian tells how welfare defeats a man's responsibility to work and a redneck describes a rural lifestyle. The Governor explains the state constitution in terms of repression. Naipaul reflects upon the racial violence in his Trinidad home.

Nashville was a day ride. Naipaul visits the two room house where Elvis was born, imagining a shrine to a poor white saint. At Graceland, the King's mansion, tickets were sold out. The Grand Ole Opry was soul music for country whites and fundamentalism the spirit of frontier. A preacher and civil rights advocate ministers the Ku Klux Klan. Confederate troops, descended from servants, competed with ex-slaves for the greatest misery and were blamed for a racist system. A religious politician says slavery wasn't the issue, it was the government's control of people. Naipaul notes Bible quotes upheld the rule of Rome.

V S Naipaul was an Indian son of indentured laborers, Oxford graduate and Nobel prize winner. He had a perspective on inclusion and exclusion; experience gave a vantage point to his views. The book is written in plain words and without a hidden agenda. Much of his non-fiction ranges from dry to droll, with bursts of brilliance. This one is no exception. In earlier days he had sharper fangs. Here he becomes a senior statesman finding basic dignity in the people he met. The fortune and folly of traveling writers is to see things freshly and also misunderstand them. Naipaul tried to look deeply into the places he went.

[Bob Newman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A problem of trust

I grew up here in a small town on the New England coast. Jews started to move here only after WW II. I had a good childhood, but there was a lot of anti-Semitism around, starting with “gentleman’s agreements” that kept us out of living in most of the town. I learned how to maneuver between two cultures—the Jewish one of my non-religious parents and relatives, and the Yankee one of the surrounding town. However, if an outsider came to interview me about my feelings about all that, I would feel exceedingly wary. “Don’t shit in your own nest” is a good motto to remember, especially as a minority anywhere. I would hesitate to complain or point fingers—I mean, I still have to live here—the interviewer heads home. And what appears in print? The two different groups have relaxed a lot, prosperity has helped. So, why rake up those old hurts?

And why these remarks about a book on the American South? Well, it’s because I noted a very strong difference between the level or quality of what Black Southerners said and with what White ones said to V.S. Naipaul, an internationally famous author even in 1987. He won the Nobel Prize 14 years later. If you read this book by a very sympathetic author, you will see that the African-American interviewees spoke about race relations in very standard ways, ways in which they had spoken in public before, I’m sure. They were “explaining to the outsider”. Some even avoided speaking at all, the author notes. As I began reading, I felt, as an American, I was reading stuff that had been said a thousand times. Not that it wasn’t true, but it wasn’t new. The black speakers were almost entirely focused on their experiences of being black in America. Maybe that also has to do with the focus of the author. I felt that if someone had interviewed me about being Jewish in Marblehead, I would have been equally guarded, though my experiences were far better than what most of the black speakers had endured. You develop a certain sensitivity as a minority person that never leaves you, no matter how much the situation improves. The white speakers introduced Naipaul to catfish farming, to the Southern Baptist and Church of Christ religious beliefs and practices, to tobacco farming, to the cult of Elvis Presley and country music, the giant auto plants, and a lot else. The “else” included deep personal revelations, much deeper than what he got from the black people. And why was that? I would say that it was a case of “a hundred times bitten, a hundred times shy”—a problem of trust. It’s very understandable, but made for an uneven book. If you want to know what African-Americans think or feel, I think you have to read their literature (Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, and a lot more), not what they may or may not reveal to an unknown traveler from the Caribbean, who though a person of color, is a complete stranger.

I think this book was an honest and very well-written attempt to portray the South of modern America. But even monkeys fall from trees, as the Japanese say. On page 80, Naipaul tells us that the rice plantations of the South were set up by Dutch people who learned how in the Indonesian islands. That’s a joke, I’m afraid. It was done by African slaves who were bought specifically for the task. They not only designed them, but they worked every aspect of them as well. Try “Black Rice” by Judith A. Carney for the whole story. In a journalistic work like this, such slips are probably inevitable. It’s good writing, but three or four months and a lot of interviews are not definitive.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to this book much as Naipaul came to the South, curious and eager to see what was in store for me. I think both of us were surprised. I was surprised that someone as worldly as I think Naipaul is would begin a turn in the South expecting racial disharmony and faceoffs. I think he was surprised to find, by talking to many people black and white, that this isn't so and also that religion is a robust influence there. He doesn't say he was going to see the black South. He explains he'd never been there and wanted to visit. He states early on that he began his trip without a focus, a direction or theme to investigate. My impression, however, is that he seems to have begun with some preconceived ideas, especially about the give and take between the races. I believe the fact that he made Tuskegee Institute in Alabama a dedicated destination points directly to his interest in the race issue. To me it's not as true a picture of Alabama as Birmingham would be or, say, Montgomery or maybe Selma. All three would provide the accurate perspectives on race a relative backwater like Tuskegee wouldn't. He did mention visting Huntsville in Alabama, but it's not truly representative, either. Knowing this about Alabama, I began to be conscious of the double deception this kind of traveling investigation allows. Those he interviewed knew who he was and that maybe he'd use what they had to say and also that Naipaul himself chose what to include. Because the South is steeped in race, he never gets very far away from it. But gradually he begins to realize what a powerful force religion is in the region. And there's a wonderful chapter on Nashville and music, though he seems to have put too much importance on the traditional country music of earlier decades, not realizing the music's changing faster than clogging feet. And in North Carolina he spends the final chapter visiting the old tobacco culture. It's especially there and in Mississippi that he saw the "immense Southern past" we carry in us and the importance of memory and the ties to previous generations. He wisely doesn't try to describe this but records the words of those he interviewed. Yet he maybe finds that the myths of the South and the myth of the Lost Cause and the worship of defeat and the loss of the world before the Civil War isn't apparent anymore. You can find them, find those perspectives if you want to. Then you can write about them. What you do is enter the South with these preconceived notions already in place so that you're ready to see them. I sound as if I don't like the book, but I do. I like it a lot. It's terribly interesting, especially to a Southerner, what someone unfamiliar with the region and culture will think. It's a wonderful book full of intelligent observations. I don't agree with everything he says and wish he hadn't toured with some of his wisdom already received. It's also important to keep in mind the trip and book date from the late 1980s, a long time ago in this age of information. It also predates the huge Hispanic influx, a rush of culture that has deeply changed and continues to change the South. Some things he gets absolutely right. At the beginning of Chapter 7 is a section in which he writes about the oppressive summer heat and the brief relief a thunderstorm provides. It may be the best writing in a book very well written. That was the preconceived notion I brought to the book, that Naipaul's prose would flow like magic. It does.

[K.C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

What someone from outside thinks of America is not much reported. Naipaul, who grew up in Caribbeans to go to England to become a writer, returns to the USA in his middle-age and meets the people after going to places, to find out what makes the America or the USA of Today. The conflict of races and religion continue to simmer below the surface. The North-South divide of it is so well explored by Naipaul.
The transformation from an agrarian to an industrialised nation, from one where the franchise were extended to the Blacks only about half a century back is explained patiently by the author. While telling their family history orally, the people the author meets have no memory of many long years or a generation in between. It is disturbing.
These social dynamics must be there even today, though Obama is the President of this great nation.
Naipaul's book is an excellent documentation of the people he met and the places he went to, in a language which is simple and effective.
A book for one who is interested in the history of The USA and is not deluded by selective memories of the people who wrote more on the subject. The critical reviews of this book here prove that Americans are poor in terms of literature. They mostly can not tolerate when they come across a good one about them.

[Bill FromPA · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't believe that our present society is one whose basic beliefs are religious, except in the South.- Flannery O'Connor, "Novelist and Believer"

I did not feel that this book got off to a promising start. This was my first Naipaul and I wasn’t sure going in what to expect. It didn’t seem like a normal travel narrative, not that I read many of those, and I had the feeling that the observations in the book were meant to be meaningful just because they were being made by V. S. Naipaul, in 1990 a established and fairly famous writer, though not yet a Nobel laureate. Nor is it clear whether the people interviewed by Naipaul had any idea who he is, though presumably fellow writers like Anne Rivers Siddons and Eudora Welty would.

At first it seems Naipaul is not going to get into his subject in any depth, at least as far as the US reader would be concerned. He mainly talks to “names”, writers like Siddons, or locally prominent or established politicians, pastors, and journalists. At least two of his subjects, minister Bernyce Clausell and community organizer Hosea Williams provide him with illustrated pre-printed publicity materials: these are public personae who are going to stay on message and provide the author with a more or less standardized spiel, and Naipaul doesn’t seem to be in a position to ask penetrating or revealing questions which might break through this surface. The author is aware of the danger that in talking to people frequently in the public spotlight, he will simply be given another version of “the interview”, that is the same interview his subject gives to every profile writer, but in practice he doesn’t have an adequate defense against it.

He also does not seem cognizant of standard narratives that amount to American clichés. He gives at some length a musician’s “come to Jesus” narrative which will be familiar to anyone who has encountered descriptions of the “born again” experience. (Naipaul associates the depictions of a white, blond Jesus, common to both white and black churches in the South, with the image of General Custer in the film Little Big Man.) When a South Carolina businessman describes himself as “concerned with ‘resistance’. Resistance to the conquest by the North and resistance to Amercanization, which was really Northernization,”(105) Naipaul does not indicate that he recognizes this as a code phrase for “segregationist” though US certainly readers will.

After Naipaul talks to African-Americans in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama, the latter during a stay at Tuskegee University, at which he stays in a fourth floor room in an old building without air conditioning or a working elevator, he travels to Mississippi “to consider things from the white point of view, as far as that was possible for me.” In one of the few mentions of contemporary politics, William, “a businessman, of a prominent Mississippi family,” after telling another fairly standard experience of accepting Jesus, talks about his religious community.

I’m not sure the religious part of the community is keeping up with the population growth. I’m not sure that the church membership is keeping up. But I realize that there are many Christians. I am encouraged by the short patience people had with the Gary Hart-Donna Rice situation. I am certainly encouraged aboput Christianity in this country and the work of the Lord.

In Mississippi Naipaul becomes interested in and then fascinated by the idea of “rednecks”, the fascination being awakened by discussions with a new acquaintance, Campbell, “the new kind of young conservative, with strong views on race and welfare.” Campbell will admit to being “half a redneck himself”, but it his description of the full-blooded genuine item, a description Naipaul finds “a great Theophrastan ‘character’”, which enthralls Naipaul. The “redneck” Campbell describes is a fairly standard version of the type, widely known now, at least in the post-Jerry Springer era, but possibly not so well in 1986. On the page Naipaul fails to convey the charm that Campbell’s descriptions and attitudes exercised over him; perhaps because of the subsequent over-familiarity of the “redneck” type, Campbell’s observations come across as yet another cliché of the American South.

One thing Campbell does do that benefits the book’s narrative is to steer the writer toward Elvis Presley - “the all-time neck” according to Campbell - whose birthplace Naipaul visits in preference to his planned trip to Faulkner country. He finds the display there “could be felt as a kind of religion”, and I felt at this point the author was tapping into a more genuine feeling of religious devotion than he had been able to find among the more conventionally devout. (A strange but noteworthy look at the Elvis/religion nexus was published a year or so before A Turn in the South, Elvis After Life: Unusual Psychic Experiences Surrounding the Death of a Superstar). The stop in Tupelo is followed by a visit to Graceland, where the author eschews the guided tour rather than endure the hour-and-a-half wait. Though he doesn’t mention Elvis’ own late life corpulence, Naipaul sees body fat a sign of the relationship between the singer and his fans:

The wealth – spent in the way it was known to have been spent: simplicity magnified, and then magnified again – was like wealth for everyone, for all the fat people of the people who – acting on a similar Presley-like principle of expenditure, but restricting it to what was available to them, the fast foods they found eternally tempting, luxurious and within easy reach, like a real-life version of manna or a modern version of something in a classical legend – had turned fulfillment and the glory of abundance to personal fat, fat as a personal possession.

Ever since the Charleston hotel (and especially after the busy business people of the hotel in Atlanta) I had been aware of very fat people, people who had risen (like dough) to special spheres of obesity. Not one or two; they were almost a class. Charleston was a resort town. They had appeared there, in the hotel, in gay holiday clothes that were on them doubly and trebly exaggerated; and they had, bizarrely, also appeared in couples. At one time there were at least four such couples in the hotel – gargantuan, corridor-blocking, and (no doubt the effect of numbers) not without aggression.

I had noticed them in other places after that. But it was Campbell who first spoke to me about the fatness of redneck women, and made it appear a regional or group characteristic. It was at times a pleasure and an excitement to see them, to see the individual way each human frame organized or arranged its excess poundage: a swag here, a bag there, a slab there, a roll there. A kind of suicide, it might have seemed, but I also began to wonder – in the Graceland ticket hall, among all those proud and excited folk – whether for these descendants of frontier people and pinelanders there wasn’t, in their fatness, some simple element of self-assertion.

The visits to Elvis sites occurs at the beginning of Chapter 6, “Sanctities”, which mainly concerns Naipaul’s stay in Nashville. I found this chapter the best in the book, perhaps because it provides some relief from the unquestioned pieties and code-worded racism of the other chapters. Here we finally get to meet some religious discontents, thanks, surprisingly, to Reverend James Vandiver of the UCC. Henry, a college student who is wrestling with his faith, presents the “born again” experience as a socially conditioned element of Southern identity rather than as a divinely inspired spiritual awakening, an understanding which seems to surprise Naipaul. Melvin, an outright apostate, throws cold water on the idea of Christian fellowship within the church, an aspect many of Naipaul’s interlocutors praised unreservedly, calling revival meetings “the most boring, dull experiences you can have.”

In Nashville Naipaul also meets songwriter Bob McDill, who approaches his vocation in a business-like manner, but whose lyrics display a verbal skill and inspiration that his fellow writer Naipaul obviously admires. McDill evidently writes the music for his songs as well, but this aspect of his art is barely mentioned; Naipaul admitted earlier when speaking of Elvis, “I knew little about music”.

After a brilliantly written and evocative description of a Georgia heat wave, the book closes with a chapter Naipaul’s visit to North Carolina, which centers on James Applewhite, a teacher at Duke University and published poet, the descendant of tobacco farmers and owner of a small, still-active tobacco farm. Applewhite goes into extensive detail on the growing, harvesting, curing, and sale of tobacco – the subject of much of his poetry, at least in the selections reproduced here. I found the long discussions of tobacco farming pretty boring, but Naipaul seems fascinated by it, but again, alas - as earlier with the half-redneck Campbell – is unable to transfer the enchantment a subject holds for him unto the page for the reader to share.

The final chapter also contains a lengthy interview with right-wing political activist Barry McCarty, a Church of Christ minister, but effectively a worshipper of Baal in the form of Senator Jesse Helms. Early in the interview, McCarty lies, “Slavery was not the real issue in the War Between the States. The real issue was the power of the federal government over the states.” Naipaul lets that statement stand unchallenged, but by now apparently knows not to accept the words of someone like McCarty as necessarily made in good faith. McCarty talks about the early Roanoke colony founded by Sir Walter Raleigh, a subject Naipaul knows something about from Anglo-Caribbean history. Though he doesn’t confront McCarty in person, Naipaul provides an extensive parenthetical summary of Raleigh’s activity as a colonizer to provide perspective on McCarty’s simplistic characterization. After the interview Naipaul also looks up a Biblical passage cited by McCarty, Romans, chapter 13, to find that the reverend grossly mischaracterized its message and context.

Naipaul does recognize the conflict between belief and practice when fundamentalist Christians attempt to formulate laws and govern as similar to that faced by fundamentalist Muslims, but he doesn't extrapolate it to full Handmaid's Tale-like theocracy. I'm sure I could find more about his general ideas on the subject by reading Among the Believers : An Islamic Journey, but I'm not at all sure it's worth pursuing for me.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a mellow, observant, sociable take of the American South and its divided civilization.

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I first began building my library in earnest, I visited a number of different sales based on their regularity, usual quantities, and general quality. Over the years of these regular book buying excursions, as the works I pursue grow increasingly distant from the mainstream and near everything available has become that which I've heard of/read/discarded elsewhere, I've developed a tendency to compensate for any less than profitable journey through the acquisition of promising, yet not thoroughly vetted, works. This is rarely a rewarding compromise, and I've long since ceased going to a number of the smaller sales that I'd either exhausted to the point of repetitiveness or whose navigational price was too steep for what treasures I was able to glean at the final destination. This copy of mine is a discard from a library of my youth whose sales I stopped going to once my fount of nostalgia had gone dry, and I can easily imagine what thoughts had gone through my head during my acquisition: what I had looked for was hardly there, what was there had the hallowed aura of a Nobel Prize for Lit, and the perspective was so singular (a non-white person trawling one of the most artificially whitened places in one of the most artificially white countries on Earth and making observations; a twist on the usual hierarchy of the Self and the Other) that I must have thought, the price is cheap, and the reading cred is real. Finishing it, I find more worth in using Naipaul and some of his less dishonest narratological structuring to make my own observations than in the work itself. It's a shame that that proved the case, especially when the sections in the second half have such potential, but that's the risk an author takes when they write for so specific an audience that believes themselves not omniscient, but the only one worth knowing.

Coming to this after reading Black Reconstruction, White Rage, The Warmth of Other Suns, Almanac of the Dead, as well as experiencing the event of the white woman of the Emmett Till case confessing that it was all a lie, it's a borderline magical experience to watch these mostly white interviewees of Naipaul's logic out their world in the way that they do. Naipaul himself does his best to color (and I use that term with a vengeance) his record appropriately, slums and squalor and depression cropping up in the same way on different continents as the guaranteed destiny of the individuals en masse, rather than the white settler state evolving to fit the modernizing needs of its respective Neo-Euro colony. It's sickeningly fascinating to have to pick through the sociohistorical conventions and literary mythologies that built the statues and memorials that, in my day, are being replaced or torn down, and even I, white as I am, felt myself instinctively responding to certain structures of adventure and of mourning, all the while the other part of my brain was keeping me aware of the realities of a country bred on slavery and genocide.

According to this work, Flannery O'Connor wasn't going too far afield when she wrote her stories of these people who believe themselves the only ones to have been conquered in the middle north section of Turtle Island, whose younger denizens are repulsed by white missionaries while still believing in the necessity of missionaries in the plain of 'African' versus 'the West', where Naipaul is able to indulge his zoo-like fascination with 'rednecks' and music producers admit they were looking "a white man with a black attitude" when it came to creating the phenomenon known as Elvis Presley. All sensational tidbits on their own, and the author's own behavior, if nothing else, brought home for me the necessity of having the term BIPOC, or Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, in the days when those first two terms do most of the revolutionary work and bear most of the brunt of mainstream dehumanization that other POC are often able to more effectively wield for themselves. Naipaul managed to calm down during the later sections when he wasn't obsessing over meeting with his interviewee rather than just interviewing them (funny how the former were always Black and the latter rarely were so), so it was actually rather interesting to get into the details of the white religious leader who understood the civil rights movement enough to get involved with deradicalizing the KKK, the shifting economic landscape of mass produced catfish/tobacco/Nissan automobiles and the neoliberal destruction of unions being pushed with it, and even some poetry revolving around the unique blend of agriculture and history of the US South.

With all of that, I doubt Naipaul did the average person of that much maligned, least where I come from, landscape any good, and I probably can only trust his narrative as much as I trust the white academic introduction of the collection of Tokyo related stories I read this year: the facts can probably be taken after some external verification, but the tone is that of someone who's never been rightfully told off in their life, and that ultimately shapes what they have to say in a way that they would never apply to their precious London or Paris or mainstream Europe locale. So, much as I'm not interested in anything that purports to portray the "true South" (that makes as much sense as the existence of the Great American Novel), reading this did spark some inclination to do some further reading in various US South related topics, ideally with materials more equipped with holistic compassion and/or credibility and less caked with institutional grandeur. I'll admit that my reading priorities of the last few years has made it rather easy to avoid this section of my country altogether, and that's not going to do much to deconstruct the holier-than-thou mentality that my area is especially inundated with. Read too much of the English stuff Naipaul loved to pull out of nowhere during the most barely relevant places, and I might start thinking like he does.

The poor whites, many of them descendants of indentured servants, and to that extent sharing an ancestry of servitude with [Black people], were of no account in the South until the Civil War. Then, because they were needed to fight that war, they were evangelized and given their cause; and afterwards, as rednecks and Klansmen, still poor, still victims, they were held responsible and derided for what was really the racism of the entire society.

More of that, please, and less of the sensationalizing bad faith choking much of the rest of this work.

[Kobe Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got tired of all these religious folk, I get it VS bro. I liked the part about rednecks though

[Tom Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

sometimes the book is a two-star - when he is interviewing southern whites
sometimes it's a five - when VS is interviewing an African American
VS wrote 'A Turn in the South' in 1987. Back when journalists thought bigots were making their arguments in good faith. But of course, now with MAGA anyone blind to the GOP’s persistent bad faith is beyond redemption.
Still, ‘A Turn in The South’ is worth a read. (It’s just that there are so many other books about our racist history that are so much better)
I finally started to skip over the pages of bullshit. Could hardly expect VS to know better.

Based on interviews with a cross section of black and white long-time residents of the deep south. V. J. Naipaul appears to have made an earnest attempt at hearing from the dread “both sides”. We’ve known better for some time now that only one side’s story is worthy of study. The white apologists sing from the same hymnal using the same half-truths and outright lies based on their worn-out fables and make-believe history. It was only when VS managed to find an African American who would consent to an interview that the truth was heard.

VS was 57 when he took his journey of discovery. His early life in Trinidad and later life in England did not prepare him for what he found in the Old Confederacy. He was unaware that it was the South that first invaded the North - with their numerous gangs of mounted slave-catchers. The white voices of the South love to hurl the charge of aggression against the Yankees. According to them it was the North’s invasion of the peaceable souls of the deep south that started the War. That's just not so. During their raids into the border states and beyond, those early southern warriors cared little if they got an actual runaway or a bone fide free black man. Once they were dragged back to a slave state; any African face would bring good money. The number of raids were significant enough to account for the early advantage the South enjoyed in the use of cavalry. Since the beginnings of slavery, the agrarian slave owners had been organizing mounted militias in order to recapture runaway slaves.

But enough with the horses and back to the humans; how, pray tell, can a human be found guilty of stealing himself? Ours was a deeply sick nation (by my faith, it still is). A shame all that blood failed to wash our sins away.

The election of Drumpf puts lie to every single one of the arguments brought forth by those cunning voices of the Old South. At least the North did not hold with slavery (mostly because free labor did not want to compete with slave labor). Under President Grant, an actual, in good-faith, actions were carried out that enabled the former slaves to take part in government.

A personal note from page 13. On his first venture south VS travelled with Jimmy, a designer from NYC and Jimmy’s friend Howard. A young black man heading home for a visit. Sunday morning and Howard wasn’t going to attend services. Religion runs deep in the both the black and white communities of the South. Howard said he didn’t like going to church; it was something he had had to do too often when he was a child. I could only smile in sympathy as that is a description of my early years way up here in Western Wisconsin. Many people wear their religion on their sleeves up here too; it just isn’t as in-your-face as it is in the Bible Belt.

This book led me to order the book ‘Invisible Man’, by Ralph Ellison. How is it that I’ve never read that book? Dereliction on my part.

The white interviews were not without their moments. but taken as a whole, the interviews were exasperating, not worth the vexation to read. I don’t blame VS as his stomping ground was Trinidad and the other Caribbean islands; ye gods, the man hardly knew of Elvis Presley. Simply unheard-of here in the USA.

The South’s recollection of the Civil War is only notable as a fantasy. A childish one at that. Not surprising how often the “good death” popped up.

VS does offer more than a few choice nuggets of history. Things I should have known or more likely have just forgotten. Such as, 1879-1936 was the age of American Imperialism and was also the time when a multitude of Southern Civil War monuments were erected in praise of the southern soldier; that paragon of virtue. Here I must confess I do believe I understand that heartfelt desire to honor the dead. But it was a bloody war fought for a filthy cause.

I am conflicted as to how to judge this book. Perhaps I am simply a fan of V. S. Naipaul. He is an excellent writer of serious intent.

Those white voices sure do go on about the Yankees burning down their beautiful cities. (Tolstoy in War and Peace made an interesting comment on how all occupied cities tend to burn for a multitude of reasons.) But when it comes to explaining why it was that the numerous race riots inevitably led to the whites burning down the property of the blacks they are as silent as the tomb.
And another thing; those white peoples’ forebears sure weren’t bothered by stealing the labor of millions of black slaves but god how the whites complain about giving those goddamn * all that free government money, and food stamps, and medical care, etc., etc. “Why don’t those * believe in hard work like all the good white folk?” Christ Almighty what utter bullshit. And of course, they fail to mention the government subsidies for tobacco, to name but one government handout the south enjoys. But, of course, that’s different.

From page 185, here is a funny story. Whiteman, “I was encouraged by the short patience people had with the Gary Hart – Donna Rice situation.” Well, in light of the southern people’s embrace of Mr. Grab’em by the Pussy we can put lie to that bit of blatant hypocrisy.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Naipaul tours the southern United States and shares his impressions. He was raised in Trinidad, so has the perspective of an outsider. He puzzles over race, religion, history, and culture. As a novelist, his observations are not particularly tidy; he doesn't draw a lot of conclusions, but tries to approach his subjects from a number of angles. I was especially interested in his ideas about the past as religion for some white southerners--the places and situations that they think of worshipfully and that are not tainted in their memories, despite the powerful ways in which their history is marred. I'd recommend it.

[Scott Bradley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, when Naipaul is bad, he's simply boring. I expected so much more from the man raised in the rural south of Trinidad. He spends far too much time in the cities of the American south. He could be in any city in North America and learn the same things. The culture, history, scars and festering wounds of the south are to be found in its poverty-plagued rural towns and certainly not within the gleaming towers of Atlanta. Theroux's approach to the south is so much more interesting and it's impossible not to compare the books. As flawed as Theroux's latest book is, it's a much more enjoyable and fulfilling read than Naipaul's typed pages.

[April · Rating 4 out of 5]

In stark contrast to Paul Theroux - when Naipaul writes about a place I know (the land where I grew up, in fact) - it's fantastic. Even more compelling than his writing about places with which I'm not familiar.
Want some insight into the culture and society of the south-east United States? I'd highly recommend this book.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not particularly dated, for a book written a generation ago, although the last section on tobacco farming in NC is probably not nearly as applicable today.

[Selina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know much about Dixie apart from reading and watching Gone With the Wind, or books about Elvis Presley, so this book was an interesting perspective. Naipaul travels around the South and does find interesting people to talk to, so much of this is oral history. It is no the kind of travel book in which someone gets on a greyhound bus and complains about the motels they stay in, or quotes from tourist brochures, which is a relief. Nor is it a 'cultureshock' book.

I learned the South is very much scarred from the civil war and blighted by racism and the effects of desegregation. I was surprised at just how racist it was, where blacks couldnt even sit on the same park bench or use the same toilets as whites. It appears after the South fell, when slaves won their freedom no structure was ever set in place to integrate former slaves into society. I mean no treaty or form of government or leaders (in fact, whites did their utmost to keep blacks out of politics) no relief funds or charity, education, nothing. This was just dismissed as 'the race problem'. Naipual also touches on rednecks, and peoples differing perspectives on the race issue. To me it seems the problems are more socioeconomic than racial. Naipaul searches fruitlessly for a black middle class. But I suspect more time would be better spent observing interracial marriages. It seems black and white kids can play together but its taboo to marry or socialise after adulthood.

Apart from the race issue, the descriptions of the South, the landscape are lyrical. There is a wonderful depiction of tobacco plantation life. The South fertile land made possible huge empires of cotton, rice and tobacco. One other aspect Naipaul touches on is the importance of the christian religion. All in all an evocative portrayal of the South.

[Istvan Zoltan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Naipul describes his travels in the South of the US, mainly in the Bible-belt. He tries to be objective and questioning, rather than argumentative or judging. His is a genuine effort to understand and uncover the motivations, ways of thinking and world view of southerners. I'm not sure I agree with these positions more than I did before reading the book, but some of what people do there and how they vote makes more sense. I still think the major positions (religion, abortion, race, culture, etc.) are wrong there but at least I see that there is a somewhat coherent story behind choosing those positions, which is rooted in a certain understanding of their history and culture (or at least seemingly justified by that). The quality of the writing is very high. The book is engaging and interesting. Naipul considers many religious, social, economic, and cultural issues, combining a search for insight with real interest in the people he talks with. Not a quick read but it offers some depth in exchange for the work put in.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was sublime; a masterpiece. Naipaul at his very, very best. Explains and illuminates the contradictions and the enigma of the American south and makes it understandable. What a pity he never got round to doing something similar for South Africa, or setting in context the convict and Irish-Anglo past in Australia.

This book probably couldn't be written today, which is a tragedy in its on right. In reading Naipaul's excellent biography, I was surprised to see this book got short shrift, and in turn it made me approach this work with some trepidation. I needn't have worried.. I don't understand why the biographer struggled with it and failed to recognise it for the sublime and timeless masterpiece it is. Perhaps his biographer was not attuned to the subtleties and complexities of race. You need to live or experience it, to understand it. For me this is one of Naipaul's finest books, right up there with the Enigma of Arrival

[Kathi · Rating 4 out of 5]

My husband, who loves all things Naipaul, has been recommending this for a while. I've been dragging my feet because Naipaul novels haven't grabbed me. PLUS, my spouse and I tend not to cross over on favorite living authors. I'm about 1/3 of the way into this and am loving it. Naipaul's experiences/observations about the South, it's history, legacy, character are excellent. He has an outsider's (non-US born) view and relates some of his encounters back to the social/racial strata in his native Trinidad, as well as South America, which is a refreshing change from a European centered reference point. Can't wait to get back to it. I finished this quite a while ago...can't remember when. Not so good at updating status here....

[Antiabecedarian · Rating 1 out of 5]

all I can recall from "what I learned from this book:"

Naipaul is a TERRIBLE and PLODDING interviewer. It serves him and the subect no justice... in general, I like Naipaul's fiction. In general, I love Naipaul's fiction. V.S. Naipaul is my favorite writer. His brother Shiva Naipaul died too soon, for he did indeed have the knack, talent, wit, and proper disingenuity for unequalled "travel" writing. I wish that Shiva Naipaul had been alive to write this book. I don't care what V.S. Naipaul thinks about that statement.

[Diana Eidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Naipaul's writing, and his perspective as an outsider entering the exotic South gives me, as a native Southerner, a new perspective on my milieu. We cannot see the water we are swimming in, but with Naipaul's sensitive and erudite treatment, I find new things to appreciate and critique about my region. This book emerges as an epitome of travel writing. An intellectually stimulating and sensorium rich volume.

[Patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended by my husband. Clearly written if you enjoy travel. It made me want to take that southern vacation that I,ve been talking about for the last 14 years. I also plan to read more by this author. He's written quite a bit but I am not familiar with him.

[Alisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a beautifully written piece of work. It was recommended to me by someone I worked with who suggested I read it before taking on a long term assignment that placed me in the South for six months. Highly recommend this book.

[Mark Heyne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a lot better than Enigma of Arrival. Naipaul travels in the southern Bible-belt states of America, and enjoys what he finds. He is highly sympathetic to the rednecks, and his powers of observation are at full effect.

[Little Timmy · Rating 1 out of 5]

An absolutely horrible book. I had to read this for a college class, otherwise I would never have finished. The writer rambles and seems to have no direction whatsoever with the story. Only give this book to someone that you dislike greatly

[Sanjay Easwar]

This book review is a challenge, and pretty sure I will botch it up. Why? I can be flippant, and it’s already difficult to be politically correct when talking about the South. Maybe call it a book reminder then, and not a review?

The other challenge is the author Naipaul, a literary titan and Nobel winner, who even in death, will still be known for controversies in his wake. He was an Islamophobe, a misogynist and India-baiter (“I do not write for Indians, who anyway don’t know to read.”)

But all those things aside (see what I mean by difficult review?), his powers of observation and stylized recording (same reason I enjoyed India: a Million Mutinies now) are why a Naipaul book is so rewarding.

“American by birth, Southern by grace of God” - a New Right leader alluding to the most popular bumper sticker in the South.
“Religious Right is easy to ridicule but they represent a necessary common sense” - Reverend at a Church of Christ.

Naipaul educates through conversations with everyone from a wannabe politician, Church Pastor, farmers, hillbilly (it was either that or the R word), businessmen and professors, as he travels in a loop from Atlanta, Charleston, Tuskegee, Jackson, Chapel Hill. Naipaul observes and records without interruption or critique which in itself is refreshing (think back to the last social or work conversation you were part of). You may not agree with the Southerner’s ways of living, and known themes of slavery, racism and hatred may crowd out any other viewpoint you’d entertain about the South. But Naipaul makes sure you hear and appreciate the Southern state of mind - of which being rooted in religion is kind of a leitmotif throughout the book.

The chapter about Tuskegee University, a young conservative’s description (almost lyrical) of what a redneck is (there, I said it), passages on catfish farming, ‘shotgun’ houses (look that up) country music and Elvis Presley (“the all-time ‘neck”) are some of the most evocative in the book.

Some of it is hair-raising too - some opinion, some fact, some just plain new knowledge for me. The training of many political leaders on the right, curiously similar to fundamentalist Muslim leaders, is in theology and debate. Duke University exists because of Tobacco money (Stained University). Poor landless whites were also to be found in servitude.

And it’s most unsettling when it’s also about where you are currently settled: just miles from where we live - nearby Forsyth county and the unsavory and heinous history from early 1910s. (At the time, there were no WHITES ONLY sign to be perturbed about, because there was no other race to keep separate - they had been completely driven out).

When we moved here from Chicago 2 years ago, our motivations to move were prosaic, like most people who move these days. But it’s been fascinating to learn more about “where America started from” and to where “most of the Founding Fathers belonged”.

I’ve always fantasized about a year’s sabbatical (yes, totally responsible for someone with a soon to college kid). And yes, pipe-dream plans are the ones most worth plotting. In that hypothetical year, visiting the most amazing libraries or college campuses in every continent, trekking the Appalachian or Camino, safaris in Serengeti-Kalahari-Masai Mara-Kruger, traveling for senior tennis as a semipro, caffeinating my way through every good cafe this world has to offer, are what the dream list had so far.

Naipaul wrote this book in the 1980s and much has changed I’m sure so why not add another fantasy to that notional year off - why not retrace Naipaul steps from this novel? Who’s down with me for that?

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good book, not great. It's redundant, as the author goes over the same couple of things repeatedly: race, religion, and agrarian landscape. If you go through the first half of the book, you're pretty much read what he's got to say.

On the one hand, what he's got to say is quite illuminating. The interviews and visits took part in the late 1980s across Southern cities and rural areas, with pass-throughs of the rapidly growing suburbs. The author hears some blatant racism, and a lot of soft racism -- the latter being the type of, "The War Between the States was about states' rights, not that other thing," or "Southern whites feel an obligation, a closeness to Southern blacks that's absent in the North." And there's even crazy talk from a guy who wrote a book and many newspaper opinion pieces that called slavery an exchange of labor for a promise of lifetime food and shelter. Sounds like our fake news presidential administration today trying to turn everything upside-down.

So in those ways, this investigation is eye-opening because it's with people who lived with the pre-Civil Rights Era habits of the South and are now trying to understand the new rules.

Also, the book is filled with lovely descriptions and surprises because the author has traveled so widely. He sees parallels in looks and hears similarities in speaking styles between the South and the Caribbean, where he grew up. And he writes how the landscape reminds him of places in Asia that wouldn't be apparent to almost anyone else. And that's hugely interesting.

On the other hand, the book falls short in some ways. I felt like some of the people in the book were playing with the author, who is from Trinidad, and they were telling him lies because he would fall for it. For example, he repeats several times the claim that the South needed slavery because it was an agrarian society, as if that somehow justifies slavery. What? You don't "need" slavery for an agrarian lifestyle -- it didn't and doesn't exist in the US Midwest, for example -- and it's not justified by anything. It's as simple as that.

I found that the black people interviewed, which included ministers and political leaders, also played the author in some ways. He swallowed whole the idea from several of them that the problems in Black America (drugs, teenage pregnancy, crime) are now the fault of Black America, rather than created by racism that is ongoing and pervasive on every level of society. You couldn't write this book today without being laughed out of the room for your naivete or shouted out of the room for your racism.

So, this book is useful as a sort of period piece that shows a region in transition and the attitudes that were competing for attention. And maybe it still reflects how people think, but if so, it's a backwards way of thinking, and the author makes a mistake by not taking it head-on more often.

[Reza Amiri Praramadhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

While many people around the world drawn to the glitz and glamor of New York City, or Hollywood, I found myself strangely attracted to the Deep South, perhaps induced by romantic notion of Southern Lost Cause. In this book, the author brings us along in his trips throughout the South, taking us to places such as:
- Atlanta, GA;
- Charleston, SC;
- Tallahassee, FL;
- Tuskegee, AL;
- Jackson, MS;
- Nashville, TN; and
- Chapel Hill, NC.
Throughout his journeys, he met colorful cast of characters such as Black Politicians, White Scion of a dying plantation, Born again Christian Jazz musician, Country singer, redneck, tobacco farmer, the list goes on and on. Throughout the book, I am fascinated by the gloomy, rather fatalistic decline of the south, with its vision of agrarian utopia, southern belles having endless parties washed with mint juleps, and saddened while Martin Luther King Jr. and his freedom riders were succeeded in pushing through the civil rights and desegregation, things were only marginally better for the blacks, even with some of them clamoring back to the day of segregated neighborhoods. While desperately trying to catch up with its more industrious, Northern and western neighbors, the South seems to stubbornly cling to its visions of the past, something romantic that probably attracted me to the region.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But Reverend James Abrahamson, pastor of the Chapel Hill Bible Church, thought that this ridiculing or underplaying of the conservatism of easter North Carolina was foolish.
…
That eastern-North Carolina conservative side is viewed by many as being redneck and knee-jerk. Irresponsible - fanatical, almost. Unenlightened, lacking what I call the three 'I's - intelligence, information, and integrity. But they've got a stronger argument. They're easy to laugh at, and they'll never be popular. Our culture may self-destruct before they have a chance to articulate clearly the common sense they represent - for a culture that is based on more than self and materialism."

Naipaul wrote this in 1989 in a wonderful travel book about the South of the United States, a book one should read to understand what is happening today and how somebody like Trump came to power. We tend to see the States as a simplified copy of Europe, but it really isn't, it's a far more complicated place than we often think. I may not agree with everything written, or said here, but it made me reflect and I learned something...Always a good one. There are very interesting chapters about country music and Nashville, about slavery and what it did to both populations and about frontierpeople and their mentality.

[Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

V.S Naipaul has an amazing ear. This book, in part, about changes in the south, mentions topics, including the Klan; it is unusually, timely and bears re-reading, given the Proud Boy movement, which has gained steam under Trump. Barack Obama's presidency, may have been a bit forced, in that it is clear from the pictures in biographical materials, that the stone statue like, strong knee "gravitas", is not there- his backers, perhaps don't quite have his back, and perhaps seem primarily white. A political welterweight among giants, even if his abilities are, superlative. The current nation, much like a fracture in the Roman Catholic Church, which had as many as three Popes, has perhaps two presidents. Pence and Trump, regularly still make the headlines. The former, should likely be in prison. Can the system survive?

[JennyB · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was very interesting, almost four stars. Given that the book was written 35 years ago, you have to wonder -- what is the South like now? How has it changed? I've never been especially interested in the South, for all the reasons Naipaul highlights in this book -- religion, racism, tradition, and conservatism (never mind heat and humidity) -- but I'd be genuinely curious to learn how it has, or has not, changed since 1987.

[Ross · Rating 2 out of 5]

Naipaul seeks to know about the South through a connection with his own experiences. There is an element of inductive reasoning in his writing in which he finds southerners as extra-religious based on his informants, both black and white, who seemingly confirm this hypothesis. Of course, there is a danger in how he renders an understanding of the South—we are to trust his sources, assume the sample is varied and valid, as well as have faith in the complete nature of the information provided.

Each point raises cause for concern, but I don’t think Naipaul was trying to make sweeping generalizations with his writing as much as provide a different bias. Naipaul makes no attempt to hide his experiences as a boy in Trinidad, his education in England, or his Indian heritage. In fact, it seems that these aspects of his character may enrich his commentary. There was also an obvious attempt to let narratives and their possible meaning occur as naturally as they could under the given circumstances. He states that “travel of the sort I was doing, travel on a theme, depends on accidents: the books read on the journey, the people met." The assumption is that Naipaul was simply allowing his informants to represent themselves. Who he chose to interview, what he may have asked them, and what he hoped to find exists in tension with what these people actually said. Assuming they were accurately quoted, I believe they were diverse enough to convince the reader that Naipaul avoided one select group over another. Black radicals, jaded politicians, whimsical writers, fundamentalist Christians, yuppie businessmen, iconoclastic ideologues, and other characters speak in concert to provide an understanding, while incomplete, of particular southern mentalities. Even more surprisingly, Naipaul admits when certain people were rude to him, uninteresting or uninterested, surprisingly likable, or downright elusive, which allows the reader to intimate his biases and decipher the information accordingly.

This approach to rendering the South may be the only reasonable way to do so because to understand the South is to negotiate the different conflicting voices all speaking with supposed authority. Naipaul leaves us without an epilogue or conclusion, but can we blame him? The book is a gestalt, as is the South. There is no monolithic South and no single group has the privilege to singularly express southern identity. Any major conclusions would have inevitably been an attempt to synthesize the material into a cohesive understanding of southern identity, but that is simply not the point of the book.

Globalism, while never directly addressed, is omnipresent in the book. Naipaul draws historical parallels and connections with his birthplace of Trinidad—one informant even professes that his family at one time had a legal claim to the island. In another passage, Naipaul insinuates continuity between swept yards in the South, Trinidad, and even Japan, which to him represent the shared cultural values of order and cleanliness. Interviewees also express concern, excitement, and everything in between regarding the emerging global industrialization that is occurring in the South. Immigration, slavery, and global capitalism are all directly discussed by both the author and his informants, but no single understanding of how the South has interacted with the rest of the world is presented. In a way, the global/local intersection is implied more than it is ever stated in the book. Many of the informants seem to have an awareness of how they are perceived by the world, but most of them seem oblivious to how the world has shaped them.

At one point, Naipaul observes an “almost Indian obsession of the South with religion, the idea of life beyond the senses." This line struck me because it not only illustrates his preoccupation with southern religious life, but it draws a direct connection between his culture and the culture he is observing. It is in sentences like this that Naipaul reveals an emotional involvement with his subject. The religiosity of the South seems omnipresent to him as he speaks to each person about their experiences and opinions of the region. Honestly, it’s possible that many of his informants may have been posturing for the author, but this proves his point regardless. Whether genuine or not, it seems that most of those he spoke with felt the need to address religion to some extent as a factor in southern identity. The pioneer mentality is another reoccurring theme, but religious obsession is shown as a shared feature across all social levels. His quote also compared southern religiosity with Indian religiosity, which seems to provide a means for Naipaul to better understand and empathize with his subjects. I think the “obsession with religion” he found is better understood as an ongoing negotiation with a historical institution. Southerners are forced to define themselves within or against religious institutions because of their prominent role in Southern social life. Many of his informants most likely spoke about religion because they assume it is something with which they are expected to define themselves against.