I sometimes
wondered what I was seeing in the South, and what I missed. So much of what we
see is unknowable. You don’t have to be young to have a keen sense of
sensuality. In the rural South I never recognized a beckoning of the sensual,
though a certain sluttishness was the unmistakable trope here and there. The
land bereft of temptations, of dreams deferred, was overwhelmed by reality, the
presence of decline and death; a world where people are struggling to survive
offers no occasion for the sensual, which if it existed there would look like
another dead end. It was odd never to be in the presence of temptation, no
flirting, no romance, no promise of another life. The valiant woman Dolores
Robinson’s sweet anticipating smile represented release and freedom, not
passion, and her life, like many I encountered in the South, was a wounded one,
with questions to which I did not have any answers.
Perhaps that is an old man’s response t a long trip, but so what? This trip was not about me, not a journey to There and Back, overcoming obstacles on bad roads, an autobiographical diversion about my moods and petty successes. No one ever got to know me well, and few people asked anything of me. “What sorts of things do you write, Mr. Thorax?” I took to be my triumph of anonymity. Only two out of the hundreds of people I met had read anything I had written. Fine with me. It’s better to be a stranger, without a past; it is a bore and an encumbrance to be conspicuous. Fame is a nuisance, and anonymity is bliss. (Bene qui latuit bene exit, wrote Ovid. To live well is to live unnoticed.) I did not really mind being singled out by blacks as a cracker, or by whites as an agitator, in either case a controversialist, since those misidentifications help me understand the mind of the person who saw me that way, and it helped me become, if only briefly, part of the scene.
But in the travel narrative of struggle, I was not as struggler. I was the bystander or the eavesdropper, recording other people’s pain or pleasure. I knew very little discomfort, never sensed I was in danger. No ordeals, few dramas. I nearly always felt I was in the presence of friends.
From state to state, county to county, I breezed along, and this progress was a way of understanding how lucky I was, but the confinement that Southerners feel, their keen awareness of themselves as stereotypes – provincials and yokels, in literature, in life- is sometimes palpable. No wonder, given the obliqueness of Southern fiction (and one way to know a place is through its writing – the evasions, the jokes, the showy literary metaphors. No wonder the grotesque preponderance of the gothic and the freaks- the reality was too brutal to state baldly, unbearably so.
Critics and academics extol the South for the abundant wealth of its literature, the region encouraging a story-telling tradition. This praise seemed to me a crock and self-serving. The opposite was the case: there was not enough writing, and what existed, with a few exceptions, was insufficient. Missing was a coherent introduction for the outsider to the South that exists, the South that I saw. Most of the South’s fiction suggests that it’s a broken place, but that’s not news. Anyone who strikes up a conversation there or wanders a little can sense the crack that runs through the South from one end to the other, a crack that began as a hairline fracture in the distant past and widened through its history to an abyss. The broken culture, perhaps unmendable, that Southerners were still trying to reckon with bewildered some people into intransigence and made many others gentler, and needed more chroniclers.
“Read the books,” people say, ”Study Southern gothic and the evocative poems.”
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. The Deep South made me feel; like a fortunate traveler in an overlooked land.
Catastrophically passive, as though fatally wounded by the Civil War, the South has been held back from prosperity and has little power to exert influence on the country at large, so it remains immured in its region, especially in its rural areas, walled off from the world. I had not realized until I spent some time there how cruel it was that so many American companies has fled the South for other countries and taken the jobs with them; that the American philanthropists and charities, benevolently concerned with poverty and deficiencies elsewhere, had traveled halfway around the world – was it for acclaim? For the picturesque? For the tax benefit, for the photo op? for an escape from reality? – to bring teachers to Africa and food to India and medicine elsewhere; they had allowed the poor in the South, a growing peasant class, to die for lack of health care, and many to remain uneducated and illiterate and poorly housed, and some to starve. Though America in its greatness is singular, it resembles the rest the rest of the word in its failures.
An old man gabbling in another language, I was the quintessential stranger, but a welcome one. I made friends. With rare and farcical exceptions, I was treated with kindness by the people I met by chance. “Kin Ah he’p you . . .in inny way?” was the rule. I cherished these experiences. In my life they will be fewer and fewer, because I am moving across the earth like the Old Man, to end my days in the sea, my dust to dissolve into undifferentiated mud.
Lingering, driving slowly and stopping often, procrastinating, I didn’t want this trip to end. The land matched so many images I’d had in my imagination, and I understood what Rebecca West had written in the 1930s of Macedonia, how it was like a vision in the midst of muddled slumber. That was the Deep South for me: a dream, with all a dream’s distortions and satisfactions, “the country I have always seen between sleeping and waking.”
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 the matutu, the shuttling ferry, the trolley, the tram. F or 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 about 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.
Except for the fart and flutter-blast of a johnboat below, skidding sideways in the current like a soap dish in a murky sink, I saw no river traffic today from my parking place on Walden’s Landing, on the Arkansas side of the Helena Bridge. Beneath the bridge, a truck parked next to a conveyor belt had opened its hopper to the belt, which was emptying into a moored barge of the soybeans of Andre Peer and his fellow farmers, $600,000 worth of beans. In sharp contrast to the geometry of plowed fields on the nearer banks was te curvaceous Mississippi, slipping southerly in languid liquefaction, so brown it was like the solid earth made fluid. A “reminder/ of what men choose to forget,” the poet from St. Louis ha written of the Old Man rolling along, pulling the banks that in places were as soft and crumbly as cake, touching lives, stirring the edges of the land in inquiring eddies, squirming through backwaters, fetching up at bungalows and whispering at the fringes of cotton fields, then moving on. I was the river.
When had I ever felt this way, reluctant to go back to my desk, not wanting the trip to end, this procrastinating sense that, even after a year and a half of being on the road, between the Southern salutations of Lucille’s “Be blessed” at the start and Charles Portis’s “Be careful” at the end, I wished to keep going. That same St. Louis poet had also written, “Old men ought to be explorers.” I could have kept on, easily, on this rare trip that was a cure for homesickness. Because the paradox of it all was that though I had come so far –miles more than I ever had in Africa or China – I had never left home.
Perhaps that is an old man’s response t a long trip, but so what? This trip was not about me, not a journey to There and Back, overcoming obstacles on bad roads, an autobiographical diversion about my moods and petty successes. No one ever got to know me well, and few people asked anything of me. “What sorts of things do you write, Mr. Thorax?” I took to be my triumph of anonymity. Only two out of the hundreds of people I met had read anything I had written. Fine with me. It’s better to be a stranger, without a past; it is a bore and an encumbrance to be conspicuous. Fame is a nuisance, and anonymity is bliss. (Bene qui latuit bene exit, wrote Ovid. To live well is to live unnoticed.) I did not really mind being singled out by blacks as a cracker, or by whites as an agitator, in either case a controversialist, since those misidentifications help me understand the mind of the person who saw me that way, and it helped me become, if only briefly, part of the scene.
But in the travel narrative of struggle, I was not as struggler. I was the bystander or the eavesdropper, recording other people’s pain or pleasure. I knew very little discomfort, never sensed I was in danger. No ordeals, few dramas. I nearly always felt I was in the presence of friends.
From state to state, county to county, I breezed along, and this progress was a way of understanding how lucky I was, but the confinement that Southerners feel, their keen awareness of themselves as stereotypes – provincials and yokels, in literature, in life- is sometimes palpable. No wonder, given the obliqueness of Southern fiction (and one way to know a place is through its writing – the evasions, the jokes, the showy literary metaphors. No wonder the grotesque preponderance of the gothic and the freaks- the reality was too brutal to state baldly, unbearably so.
Critics and academics extol the South for the abundant wealth of its literature, the region encouraging a story-telling tradition. This praise seemed to me a crock and self-serving. The opposite was the case: there was not enough writing, and what existed, with a few exceptions, was insufficient. Missing was a coherent introduction for the outsider to the South that exists, the South that I saw. Most of the South’s fiction suggests that it’s a broken place, but that’s not news. Anyone who strikes up a conversation there or wanders a little can sense the crack that runs through the South from one end to the other, a crack that began as a hairline fracture in the distant past and widened through its history to an abyss. The broken culture, perhaps unmendable, that Southerners were still trying to reckon with bewildered some people into intransigence and made many others gentler, and needed more chroniclers.
“Read the books,” people say, ”Study Southern gothic and the evocative poems.”
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. The Deep South made me feel; like a fortunate traveler in an overlooked land.
Catastrophically passive, as though fatally wounded by the Civil War, the South has been held back from prosperity and has little power to exert influence on the country at large, so it remains immured in its region, especially in its rural areas, walled off from the world. I had not realized until I spent some time there how cruel it was that so many American companies has fled the South for other countries and taken the jobs with them; that the American philanthropists and charities, benevolently concerned with poverty and deficiencies elsewhere, had traveled halfway around the world – was it for acclaim? For the picturesque? For the tax benefit, for the photo op? for an escape from reality? – to bring teachers to Africa and food to India and medicine elsewhere; they had allowed the poor in the South, a growing peasant class, to die for lack of health care, and many to remain uneducated and illiterate and poorly housed, and some to starve. Though America in its greatness is singular, it resembles the rest the rest of the word in its failures.
An old man gabbling in another language, I was the quintessential stranger, but a welcome one. I made friends. With rare and farcical exceptions, I was treated with kindness by the people I met by chance. “Kin Ah he’p you . . .in inny way?” was the rule. I cherished these experiences. In my life they will be fewer and fewer, because I am moving across the earth like the Old Man, to end my days in the sea, my dust to dissolve into undifferentiated mud.
Lingering, driving slowly and stopping often, procrastinating, I didn’t want this trip to end. The land matched so many images I’d had in my imagination, and I understood what Rebecca West had written in the 1930s of Macedonia, how it was like a vision in the midst of muddled slumber. That was the Deep South for me: a dream, with all a dream’s distortions and satisfactions, “the country I have always seen between sleeping and waking.”
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 the matutu, the shuttling ferry, the trolley, the tram. F or 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 about 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.
Except for the fart and flutter-blast of a johnboat below, skidding sideways in the current like a soap dish in a murky sink, I saw no river traffic today from my parking place on Walden’s Landing, on the Arkansas side of the Helena Bridge. Beneath the bridge, a truck parked next to a conveyor belt had opened its hopper to the belt, which was emptying into a moored barge of the soybeans of Andre Peer and his fellow farmers, $600,000 worth of beans. In sharp contrast to the geometry of plowed fields on the nearer banks was te curvaceous Mississippi, slipping southerly in languid liquefaction, so brown it was like the solid earth made fluid. A “reminder/ of what men choose to forget,” the poet from St. Louis ha written of the Old Man rolling along, pulling the banks that in places were as soft and crumbly as cake, touching lives, stirring the edges of the land in inquiring eddies, squirming through backwaters, fetching up at bungalows and whispering at the fringes of cotton fields, then moving on. I was the river.
When had I ever felt this way, reluctant to go back to my desk, not wanting the trip to end, this procrastinating sense that, even after a year and a half of being on the road, between the Southern salutations of Lucille’s “Be blessed” at the start and Charles Portis’s “Be careful” at the end, I wished to keep going. That same St. Louis poet had also written, “Old men ought to be explorers.” I could have kept on, easily, on this rare trip that was a cure for homesickness. Because the paradox of it all was that though I had come so far –miles more than I ever had in Africa or China – I had never left home.
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