Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

by Paul Theroux

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.

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.

the United States puts very few delays in the path of the traveler.

what I feel in traveling in America—the solitary road trip that is in many respects a Zen experience, scattered with road candy, unavailable to motorists in any other country on earth.

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.

only in America can you travel in confidence without a destination:

In Africa and China and India and Patagonia, the locals seem grateful to be visited by a stranger. This is the drama, the color, the encounter in the familiar travel book. But in the United States, a visit by another citizen is not an occasion to rehearse traditional hospitality,

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.

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

And I enjoyed being the foreigner, Mr. Paul with the hard-to-spell last name—the stranger—because that was how I viewed these people I was traveling among in this unusual place, some parts of the South as odd and remarkable as any I had seen in my traveling life.

That was another thing that distinguished this trip from others I’d made in my life. In Africa or China I never said, I’ll come back in a few months and continue. Instead, I pushed on to a destination and then went home and wrote about it. But in the South I traveled in eccentric circles, in and out of the fourth dimension, always hopeful, making plans to return, and saying to

“This is a drinking town with a football problem,”

The history of the river is like a metaphor for the South: the level is dropping, river traffic has slowed, riverside commerce has diminished, and the river towns and villages are struggling.

“What happened to Nicholson Files?” It was a company that made metal files and quality tools, a well-respected brand among builders. “Closed. Went to Mexico,” the bank officer said. This was a reply I often heard when I asked about manufacturing in the Delta.

JESUS IS LORD—WE BUY AND SELL GUNS,

I had found that America had a peasant class, as hard-up and ignored and hopeless as any I had seen in the world.

Nothing is more deadly than the anatomizing of scholarship, since the study of art, any art—even the obscene, semiliterate yawp and grunt of rap—drains the life from it.

Because of this shrinkage, the slipping into greater poverty, people—many of the ones I spoke to—had a clear memory of the past, of how things had been long ago, and what their hopes had been.

From where I stood the house was obscured by the trees at the front, yet it had the look of a mausoleum, marked—you might say—by the myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time, or simply peeling and weather-beaten.

Imitating Faulkner ?

You wonder, after all that has gone before, what’s going to happen next. Impossible to travel through the South and not ask: Who will inherit this land and its conflicts?

the most earnest moviegoer would find it hard to name a film written by any of those writers. But Faulkner was serious and successful, and his scripts—for The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, Land of the Pharaohs, and The Left Hand of God—are well known.

This generalizing—the snap judgment of the traveler—is the reason travel writing can seem so crisp, so insightful to the reader, and so maddening to the person who knows the place well, or who inhabits the area, who does not recognize his or her home from the brisk description of the wisecracking wayfarer.

The traveler’s conceit is that one visit is plenty, that travel is not a study but a summing up, personal and partisan.

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.

Last Days? Don’t they know? These traits are the traits of all days, every day, everywhere.

Contemplating Hot Springs, it is difficult to imagine a more unpromising origin for a president, one so likely to warp a mind or corrupt a soul. Yet the defining characteristics of a president are worldliness and guile. The world in all its bizarre forms had come to Hot Springs, and Clinton was buoyant in it; the town was clearly the making of the man.

“We never see them, we get nothing—they want to help Africa,” she said. “It really bothers me that Clinton does so little here. I wish he’d help us. He’s in Africa and India, and other people are helping in the Third World and those countries. We don’t see that money. Don’t they realize our people need help?”

was thinking how many of these numbered county roads in Arkansas, gravel and dirt, were Third World thoroughfares irregularly lined by Third World shacks.

According to a 2013 Department of Agriculture report I’d read about at Arkansasmatters.com, “19.7 percent, or roughly one in five Arkansans, do not know where their next meal is coming from.” This was the sort of statistic you might encounter in Sri Lanka. And when I checked, the figure for food insecurity in Arkansas was exactly the same as that for Sri Lanka,

This friendliness was one of the pleasures of Arkansas, and the green glory of the landscape was another.

He sounded strangely happy, even somewhat delirious. I remarked on his mood. “We’re storm chasers!” he cried. His name was Stephen Jones, a student at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

The thought of the large Mosaic Templars auditorium full of literary festival people gathered to hear John Lewis’s peroration about a comic book made me wonder.

Some of them were excessively polite in a deflecting stance, the way elaborate manners can be indistinguishable from rudeness;

Perhaps, being city dwellers—or so they seemed from their stylish clothes—they were more skeptical of strangers, less inclined to appease them with a smile, avoiding the fellowship of the rural areas,

said, “I started traveling in the South for that very reason, because I saw so many outsiders committed to solving Africa’s problems. They were the same problems that exist here—poor housing, poor access to health care and education. Child hunger. Illiteracy.”

“Clinton’s complicated,” I said. “Aren’t we all,” Rickey said, and smiled, and offered me a strawberry. These three soft words pierced my heart to such an extent that, traveling on, I never mentioned Clinton again.

One says, ‘You’re getting on my nerves, you damned nigger’—to a white guy!”

“What did you say?” “Nothing to say. We’re just standing around the corner, out of sight. But then the guy who said it came out and saw us. He said, ‘I apologize for that. I didn’t know you was here.’” “You weren’t offended?” Andre sighed, bugging out his eyes, as he often did when he took me to be obtuse or slow to understand. “He was saying it to a white guy!”

Dolores Walker Robinson had all the qualities that made a successful farmer: a great work ethic, a strong will, a love of the land, a way with animals, a fearlessness at the bank, a vision of the future, a gift for taking the long view, a desire for self-sufficiency.

What made the South an enlightenment for a traveler like me, more interested in conversation than sightseeing, was the heart and soul of its family narratives—its human wealth.

gathered from their response that I was speaking a different language, one that caused them to open their mouths in incomprehension and squint at me. At first I took it to be my Yankee manner, the affronted wanderer, the unlikely stranger with unexpected questions, someone to be appeased or placated. No, it was something else. It dawned on me slowly over months that to them I was an old man, who didn’t really count for much but who needed to be humored or grudgingly respected.

I say ignore the books and go there. 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.

For the first time I was driving myself the whole way in my own car. What made the experience a continuing pleasure