Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

by Paul Theroux

A church in the South is the beating heart of the community, the social center, the anchor of faith, the beacon of light, the arena of music, the gathering place, offering hope, counsel, welfare, warmth, fellowship, melody, harmony, and snacks.

That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome. I had found it often in my traveling life in the wider world, but I found so much more of it here that I kept going, because the good will was like an embrace. Yes, there is a haunted substratum of darkness in Southern life, and though it pulses through many interactions, it takes a long while to perceive it, and even longer to understand.

The poor, having little else, keep their culture intact as part of their vitality, long after the well-off have dumped it. This was one of the many encounters that showed me how a traveler may arrive and slip into the rhythm of life in the South, the immersive power of its simple welcome amounting to a spell.

As V. S. Naipaul shrewdly explained in A Turn in the South, the traveler is “a man defining himself against a foreign background.”

Road candy seemed to me a perfect summing up of the pleasures of driving through the Deep South. What I saw, what I experienced, the freedom of the trip, the people I met, the things I learned: my days were filled with road candy.

I was to discover that America is accessible, but Americans in general are not; they are harder to know than any people I’ve traveled among.

Americans will talk all day, but they are terrible listeners and have an aversion to probing or any persistent inquisitiveness by a stranger.

We tolerate difference only when we don’t have to look at it or listen to it, as long as it doesn’t impact our lives.

Our great gift as a country is its size and its relative emptiness, its elbow room. That space allows for difference and is often mistaken for tolerance. The person who dares to violate that space is the real traveler.

All air travel today involves interrogation, often by someone in a uniform who is your inferior.

These days the airport experience is not only a disagreeable foretaste of all the insults to come on the trip, but also an annoying way of reminding the prospective traveler that he or she is an alien at home, and not just a stranger but someone perhaps to be feared, a possible danger, a troublemaker if not a terrorist—the hoo-ha, shoes off, belt off, no jacket, denuded and simplified and subjected to screening while tapping your feet, eager to get away; all this while still in a mode of predeparture, scrutinized, needing to pass inspection before you can even think of the trip ahead.

Even the lowest jalopy is better than a first-class seat on a plane, because to get to that seat you are forced to submit to the indignities of official scrutiny and a body search. But no one has the right to question your slipping into a car and driving away at high speed. There is no prologue, only the bliss of a sudden exit.

There is a better way, a truer way, the old way—the proud highway, the rolling road.

We travel for pleasure, for a door-slamming sense of “I’m outta here,” for a change of air, for edification, for the big vulgar boast of being distant, for the possibility of being transformed, for the voyeuristic romance of gawping at the exotic.

Nothing to me has more excitement than the experience of rising early in the morning in my own house and getting into my car and driving away on a long, meandering trip through North America. Not much can beat it for a sense of freedom—no pat-down, no passport, no airport muddle, just revving an engine and then “Eat my dust.” The long, improvisational road trip by car is quintessentially American, beginning with reliable autos, early in the last century.

One is more often greeted with suspicion, hostility, or indifference. In this way Americans could be more challenging, more difficult to get acquainted with, more secretive and suspicious and in many respects more foreign, than any people I have ever met.

I did not know then what I learned later, the racial geography of the South: the towns and villages in the mountains and hills are mainly white, and in the Lowcountry, the great sprawl of flat agricultural land where cotton and tobacco were grown, they are mainly black—the persistence of history.

Asheville, which prospered as a spa town, sited in the healthful air of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is home to ten colleges and even more hospitals and sushi bars. For people living within hundreds of miles it is a cultural center. The town is of course the obsessive subject of Thomas Wolfe, who was born there and is buried there. In my travels it was, or so it seemed to me, one of the happiest, most habitable and well-heeled towns I saw in the South.

I began to ruminate on how you might attempt to ramble in the rest of the world, but there are always obstacles, and sometimes serious risks, and many dead ends. In America you are free to travel without a destination, simply circulating. This suited my mood of restlessness and my love of the road and was a relief from the uncertainty and suspense I had felt on trips elsewhere—my last in Africa, for one. And even in the poorest places in America, where there are shacks and rotting house trailers, the roads are wonderful.

What inspired my trip through the Deep South was the notion that as a traveler the people I had been meeting in Africa and India and elsewhere were more and more familiar to me. I am not speaking about their common humanity but their circumstances. Many Americans were just as poor as many Africans, or as confined in rural communities as many Indians; they were as remote from anyone caring about them, too, without access to decent housing or medical care; and there were portions of America, especially in the rural South, that resembled what is often thought of as the Third World.

But this proud highway I was on, a substantial dual carriageway cut through low empty hills, was devoid of traffic: a royal road amid the green landscape and farms so fallen and abandoned they seemed like mere sketches of former habitation. The great rolling road was like a road to nowhere. No other cars on it today, no towns that I could see, no gas stations, no motels, no stores, like a road leading to the end of the world.

“You have to know where we come from,” Wilbur said. “It’s hard for anyone to understand the South unless they understand history—and by history I mean slavery. History has had more impact here.”

The contraction and impoverishment of the South has a great deal to do with the outsourcing of work to China and India,

Most of the Southerners I encountered had no more than a nodding acquaintance with books, and that gave them either an exaggerated respect for authorship or an utter indifference to it.

Some days in the Delta the river was the only vivid feature in a landscape that seemed otherwise lifeless—no leaves stirring, no people in motion, cattle like paper cutouts, hawks as black as marks of punctuation in the sky; the monumental stillness of the rural South in a hot noontime, all of it like a foxed and sun-faded masterpiece of flat paint, an old picture of itself.

What I had seen of the rural South, with few exceptions, were level landscapes, deforested and flattened farmland, tufty, snow-like expanses of cotton fields, low hills at best, thin parched woods, their dead leaves crackling under the strutting claws of wild turkeys, meadows blinded by rows of hickories and black gums at the margin of stony roads that looked as if they led all the way to the nineteenth century, and many did: an exhausted countryside, circumscribed and spoken for. But in the great hot sadness of a land that looked gnawed and hacked at and dug out and trampled, the river counted as a thing of beauty, a singular example of grandeur. It was no wonder that Southern writers, singers, and poets celebrated it. The central artery of the South, most of the lesser creeks and streams drained into it, fattening the thing and enlivening it. I smiled when I remembered its traditional nickname.

THE OLD MAN twisted and flowed, ancient but ageless and unstoppable. Take it for granted and it may fool you, dam it and it will flood you, ride it and beware of its fickle flotation, study it wisely and don’t make the mistake of believing that its surface—whether placid or turbulent—reveals the depths of its inner state. After a certain year, old is just old, indefinable. But oldness is also a sort of psychic weight, the accumulation of experience, which is why for the old nothing is shocking except the obvious repetition of human stupidity, and very little is new. All your electronics are toys. But it is not only the young who contrive to make you feel elderly, boasting of their toys, how cleverly they manipulate them; some older people connive at it too, as though in resignation, surrendering to bafflement, to expiate some fear or deficiency in themselves. Travel has always been my way of defeating this sinking feeling, partly because travel is a form of escape, and travel itself—the elemental farewell—becomes the fugitive fantasy of a new life, travel inspiring a sense of hope. I began my real life, my life of intensity and solitude and discovery, as a twenty-two-year-old traveler in Africa, then elsewhere, everywhere, and that formed me as a writer, alert to every sound and smell and to the pulses of the air. At last, in old age, I came back.

So much of what we see is unknowable. You don’t have to be young to have a keen awareness of sensuality.

The Deep South today is not in its books, it’s in its people, and the people are hospitable, they are talkers, and if they take to you, they’ll tell you their stories. The Deep South made me feel like a fortunate traveler in an overlooked land.

In a long traveling life, I had always depended on public transport: the clattering train, the slow boat, the tuk-tuk or scooter rickshaw, the overcrowded chicken bus, the careering East African minibus known as a matatu, the shuttling ferry, the trolley, the tram. For the first time I was driving myself the whole way in my own car. What made the experience a continuing pleasure was that, in my car, I never knew the finality of a flight, being wrangled and ordered around at an airport, the stomach-turning gulp of liftoff or the jolt of a train, but only the hum of tires, the telephone poles or trees whipping past, the easy escape, the gradual release of the long road unrolling like a river, like the Old Man itself.