Deep South

  “What was his advice?”

  Reverend Johnson lifted his hands, curling his fingers, seeming to hold an object. He said, “I don’t know. But say he went out and bought her a dildo.”

  In his pronunciation, dee-aw-doh, it sounded like a large and very technical device.

  “Did he do that?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just theorizing,” he said, with an attorney’s surmise and circumspection. “And, let’s say, when the child went to school she could have told a friend what her father had given her. And that friend could have told someone else. The teachers learned of it. And they went to the sheriff. And the sheriff brought in state law enforcement. And the news got out.” Reverend Johnson gazed at me in a mournful way. “And Bishop Bobby Jones is in deep trouble, and so is the House of Love Church.”

  Under the strict terms of his bail, the bishop could not have contact with anyone under the age of eighteen, and that meant he had to steer clear of some of his children and all of his grandchildren. His name was smeared with the accusation.

  “Lewdness with an underage person is a crime in this state,” Reverend Johnson said. “Like I say, even if he’s found not guilty, he will suffer. He deserves to have the best trial lawyer he can find.”

  “Might that be you, Reverend?”

  “I’d do the best I can,” he said. “But the problem is that some of my congregation don’t see it my way. They have girl children and grandchildren. From what they hear, they see Bishop Bobby Jones as a guilty man who should be punished.”

  “What do you think?”

  He smiled and nodded. “I see Bishop Bobby Jones as a man who should have his day in court.”8

  “And not everyone agrees?”

  “There’s haters,” Reverend Johnson said. “Oh, dear me. There’s haters.”

  Sermon with a Subtext: “What Would I Do Without My Storm?”

  Revelation Ministries Church was, unusually, only half full on this Sunday morning, but as if to make up for it, the singing was more full-throated, and the Revelation combo was loud, playing their hearts out. The preliminary preaching, by a woman in a dress of watered silk who was gesturing with her Bible, seemed particularly intense, and when she called out “The Lord is here today!” she was answered with “Tell it, sister!”

  All this time, Reverend Johnson had been sitting quietly in his throne-like chair, under the gold, scroll-shaped sign REVELATION MINISTRIES—“REVEALING GOD’S WORD TO THE WORLD—WE LOVE YOU—AIN’T NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!”

  When he rose to preach, there was a hush as he lifted his battered Bible and spoke a chapter and verse from the Acts of the Apostles.

  “After they had evangelized that town and made many disciples, they returned to Lystra, to Iconium, and to Antioch,” he intoned, quoting, speaking quietly, “strengthening the hearts of the disciples by encouraging them to continue in the faith, and by telling them, ‘It is necessary to pass through many troubles on our way into the kingdom of God.’”

  He had struck the deliberate note at once, his theme being that there is no salvation without a severe test. Everyone knew he was alluding to Bishop Bobby Jones, accused of child molestation, but the man’s name was never spoken. The sermon was entirely concerned with hard decisions, Saint Paul’s, and Job’s, and Christ’s, and others’.

  “What is popular is not always right,” Reverend Johnson said. “What is right is not always popular. And so I gotta ask you, do you want to be unpopular with the Lord?” He mused awhile about bad weather—stormy weather was another theme of this sermon: “The rain comes and folks say, ‘Oh, it’s raining hard!’ But there’s something about the rain—a peacefulness and a calm. You can go into it and be with the Lord.”

  I had seen this congregation on its feet before, calling out, yelling their praise—“Tell it!” “Oh, yeah!”—echoing lines in the sermon. But now they stayed seated, listening with uncommon reserve, and Reverend Johnson seemed to be using his trial lawyer’s rhetoric rather than his preacher’s poise to persuade them, as though they were jurors. But then, both sounded similar in a church.

  “When I came to you, brothers, announcing the testimony of God to you, I did not come with brilliance of speech or wisdom,” he said, quoting Corinthians. “I was with you in weakness, in fear, and much trembling.”

  Being weak, enduring hardship, resolving conflict: it was all about Bishop Bobby Jones, except for the stating of his name, and it was clear that Reverend Johnson was trying to hold on to his congregation using his powers of persuasion.

  “God sends us a storm,” he thundered. “I need this storm. What would I do without my storm? It makes me turn to the Lord. And so I say, ‘Thank you, storm!’ Because it sends me to the Lord. I have to be willing to put it all on the line for the Lord—by faith and not by sight.”

  He moved from the podium, and as he did, as if his movement was a cue, the woman in the white hat and veil at the keyboards brought her fingers down on a loud chord that became a diminuendo before it trickled away, and the woman seated at the drum kit rattled her snare drum into a hush.

  “The darkness of night,” Reverend Johnson continued. “Nighttime does not have any limits. It can last a long period of time. It can test your faith. Job lost his possessions and lost his family. But he never left God. Hold on just a little while longer to see what the end gon’ be. Never leave your relation with the Lord, though you be tested so bad you want to howl in misery!”

  This mention of howl, the word “howl,” made him howl, and the spirit moved him as he chanted and moaned and threw his head back, gargling. This was so effective, the congregation began to call out to him in tones of support and encouragement, as though shouting to a man struggling to come ashore. And all this while the Revelation combo kept playing, the woman at the keyboards planting her hands on the keys and producing thunder and lightning.

  “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning,” he said at last in a tone of delivering good news, quoting Psalm 30, and repeating it.

  And it worked: the faces of his congregation were happy, even beatific. The storm had passed; he was no longer chanting. He spoke now in the modulated and consoling voice of a friend. He began telling stories about his life.

  He had first told me these stories over dinner months ago. Perhaps his flock had heard them before too, but if so, they did not let on. They sat seemingly fascinated by his tale of taking the first bus, the white bus; of being alone, tested by the white students, encouraged by the only blacks in the school, the janitors, who smiled at him as if to say, “Hold on, son. Hold on.” The school stories, the stories about being alone, being the only black student among a hundred whites.

  “I lost all my friends. I learned at an early age that you have to stand by yourself,” he said. “What happens when you let other people make your decisions? You become incapable of making your own decisions.”

  At this the church went silent.

  “I have a fighting spirit. I’ve been doing it since I was a child.” And now I saw his link, his sympathy, with Bishop Bobby Jones, the child singer and precocious preacher, the man who had spent thirty years evangelizing. “It’s destiny.”

  A chord rose from the keyboards, then a sizzle and smash from the snare drum and a crash and smash from the cymbals.

  “I want you to know that I’m leaning,” he said, and this was the nearest he came to declaring that his decision to defend Bishop Bobby Jones was coming. “And I want you to know that I love y’all. And if you talk to the haters, y’all tell them that I love them.”

  It was a powerful sermon. Yet not long after that, Reverend Virgin Johnson declared that he would not be representing Bishop Bobby Jones in the child molestation case. He told me that he had found him an excellent attorney from elsewhere in the county.

  Cresent Motel

  On a damp morning, the smell of the back streets of Allendale was the malodorous hum of poverty, and the neighborhood of poor houses was a littered encampment.
I had come back via the familiar route on the four-lane obsolete highway, desolation road, past the rusted and faded signs of the defunct restaurants (LOBSTER) and the abandoned gas station plazas (INTERSTATE, ESSO) and the bleak broken motels (EXECUTIVE INN), all of it like a foray into Dystopia Dixie. More than that, like arriving at the end of the world.

  And it was another return for me. A travel book is usually based on a journey on which the traveler confronts places for the first time, describes them vividly, then moves on and never goes back. This portrait of the place, the way it looked that hour, that day, or that week, in that weather, is the one that is clapped between covers for its peculiarity to be given permanent form. 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 single visit (“Then we stopped for lunch in Chittagong”) also accounts for the distortions and sour notes in travel narratives—not gratuitous or mean-spirited, but merely the blur of haste, the glance of someone passing through. The traveler’s conceit is that one visit is plenty, that travel is not a study but a summing up, personal and partisan. I have lived much of my traveling life that way, well aware of the reductiveness and dissonance and smirking self-regard in the breezing through, conscious that my journeys were as much about my life as about the places I was experiencing. What seemed to work in Africa and India and China, however, was insufficient and misleading in the Deep South.

  On my third visit to Allendale I saw things I had missed the first two times. Some of the town was improved, even in six months: the derelict movie theater was being renovated. Another soul food restaurant had opened, Carolina Diner, next to one of the three Patel-owned Stop-N-Go gas stations in town, this black-operated eatery on South Main Street. The New Life House of Love Church on Oswald Drive looked moribund, its parking lot empty, its doors locked, while its bishop, now on bail, languished under a cloud, disgraced on a charge of lewdness with an underage person—that was a new development too.

  The first time I’d seen the old sign CRESENT MOTEL, I laughed at the spelling and the rusted star above it, while fascinated by the look of abandonment of the mock–Art Deco brick building behind it, with its faded, numbered doors, the old-style, flat-roofed, one-story “motor lodge” from the 1950s. On a later visit to Allendale I walked around the premises, kicking doors open, stepping over broken glass, marveling at the big, derelict swimming pool, surrounded by a chain-link fence and secured by a locked gate, with a foot of green water at the bottom. These were my fall and winter visits.

  This springtime a flicker of life was evident at the Cresent Motel, some rooms were occupied, a few people were going in and out of them, a woman with a baby, a man with a bag of groceries. A man in a folding beach chair outside one room was staring with suspicion at me. Two battered cars sat side by side in the parking lot that was otherwise empty but for a flock of dirty pigeons strutting clumsily past the puddles. At first I took the people to be squatters or campers: they were poorly dressed, they squinted hard at me, and though they said hello, they wouldn’t answer any of my questions. The big man in the beach chair glowered at me and said softly but menacingly, “Git.”

  The door with the painted OFFICE sign on it was broken, and as it was ajar I could see the clutter of papers and plastic soda bottles on the floor, an oil can tipped over and leaking, a wing chair losing its stuffing and hanging sideways. All these interiors looked to me like crime scenes.

  Then the wing chair swelled and came alive and spoke to me.

  “Kin Ah,” the man breathed, “he’p you?”

  Jamming his cane into the cement floor, he clutched it and hoisted himself and rose to greet me. He wore a heavy coat and under it a wool sweater that was unraveling at the collar, a dark cap, and trousers baggy and torn at the knees. He moved slowly, emerging from the office, stabbing his cane into the cracked asphalt, then he saluted me.

  “Are you the manager of the Cresent?”

  “Me, I’m maintenance.” He was still limping toward me, grunting from the effort.

  “How are you doing?” I asked in a sympathetic tone, because he was clearly struggling.

  “Knee surgery,” he said. He was lopsided but still moving forward. “Hip surgery.”

  “Take your time.”

  “Had my knees done. Had my hips done. It’s the arthuritis got me.” His name was Leon Williams, he said; his job was to keep this place running. As it was visibly falling apart, and he was unwell, this was not an easy job. “It sure needs a new roof, needs new electric, needs a lot. Old plumbing fixtures, old everything.”

  Yet, amazingly, it was occupied—seven rooms, anyway—by single men, and some couples, and a small family, each paying eighty dollars a week for a room. I had seen motels just like this, ones built by optimistic Portuguese settlers in Mozambique, bullet-ridden and broken down, hollowed out by conflict, occupied by poor African families after the long civil war ended: the same sort of haggard women, scowling men, and bewildered children, standing in front of cracked walls and smashed windows by the seaside in Beira. It was Doomsday housing, desperate people scuttling and living rough in urban ruins.

  Leon lived about twelve miles east, in Brunson. He drove down Railroad Avenue from there in his pickup truck most days to look after the Cresent, which was now more a refuge for the truly hopeless and homeless than a motel for the casual traveler. Leon, born and raised in Allendale, said he preferred Brunson, a tiny crossroads community with a population of about 500. It had once been locally celebrated for its old town hall, a wood-frame octagonal building purposely upraised on stilts, so that Brunson’s citizens could sit under it, relaxing in its shade, and talk. The new town hall was a small brick structure that would never get in the news. Leon remembered the better days in Allendale—days when there had been employment in the town.

  “My folks, mother and father, worked at the mill, and me too. They was good jobs.”

  “They milled lumber?”

  “Two-bah-fo’s. One-bah-fo’s. Plahwood. Made telegram po’s. Made everything.”

  Leon was sixty-six but, ailing, he looked much older in his limping discomfort. He had three children; they’d grown up here, but with nothing to do and no opportunities, they had fled to New York City.

  “They come down here but they don’t like it, ’cause it too slow,” Leon said. “Me, I likes it slow.”

  “But Allendale must have been lively way back, when all the tourists stopped here at the motels and restaurants”—the fallen buildings that were bomb craters now.

  “They was plenty of nightlife, specially on Flat Street. That was where they was hangouts.”

  Flat Street was tucked behind the main road, Railroad Avenue, and ran parallel to it, in its shadow, so to speak, and somewhat hidden. It was hard to imagine any sort of nightlife on that bleak street, but in that other age Allendale was a boomtown.

  “The hangouts was lively but they was a problem—the drinkin’ and the fightin’. They was women too. But they put a new police station down on Flat Street, and that eliminated the problem.”

  “Pretty quiet now.”

  “The interstate killed us.”

  Leon gave me his address in Brunson and invited me to stop by anytime. Then he returned to the Cresent Motel office to await a call for maintenance.

  Allendale had a bright spot. A few miles south on Allendale’s empty superhighway, I found Christiana Estates, a subdivision of pretty, well-kept houses on large lots, not visible from the main road and casually gated, proof that not all of Allendale was in a state of decay or incurably hard-up, as I had believed.

  Saying Grace

  After a solemn prayer of grace over chicken, rice, gravy, biscuits, and cabbage at the soul food diner O Taste and See, Wilbur Cave said “Amen” and began eating.

  He’d su
ggested months before that I come back if I wanted to see more of his work in Allendale as an urban developer, and here I was. I wanted to visit some families that Allendale County Alive had helped, or ones that were looking for help.

  “I put in a call,” Wilbur said. “We need permission if we’re going to visit. Some people don’t want visits or drop-ins. They’re sensitive about their position.”

  Ninety years ago, not far from here, the great muralist and painter Thomas Hart Benton encountered those same sensitivities. He mentions it in his chapter on the South in his memoir, An Artist in America (1937). He was sitting on a curb in eastern Georgia, making a drawing of a whitewashed shack.

  “Some colored folks sitting on the porch went inside when they caught sight of me,” he writes. “Pretty soon a tall Negro with very much patched but clean overalls came out of the shack and walked over to me hesitantly. ‘Howdy,’ I said, seeing that he wanted to speak. ‘Sir,’ he said with perfect English, ‘I beg your pardon, but my mother thinks you are making fun of her house and wants you to please go away.’ I went.”

  A whole district in Allendale within easy walking distance of the main street was made up of inhabited shacks, which Wilbur Cave was attempting to improve with the limited resources of Allendale County Alive. He reminded me of his operating budget of $100,000, which was not much, but his organization was self-sustaining through the revenue from derelict houses they’d renovated and rented. His was a small operation but an efficient one, and it seemed to me that it was successful precisely because it was small; Wilbur could account for every dollar that flowed through his office, which was not the case when many millions were spent.

  We talked over a lunch of chicken and rice about Allendale County, which was small and poor, and about the town, which was seventy-two percent black, the highest percentage in the state. When I mentioned Leon Williams, who with his parents had worked at the mill, Wilbur enumerated the businesses that had left the town—not only all the restaurants and garages and motels, and their support services in the heyday of Route 301, but Allendale’s manufacturing.