Deep South

  I phrased the next question delicately, saying, “And the hubshis?”

  Hubshi (sometimes habshi), the Hindi word for a black person, has an interesting etymology, deriving from “Abyssinian” (in Arabic, Habashi). It is the politer term. The Gujaratis I knew in East Africa, Patels and Desais and Shahs, would sometimes refer to Africans as karia—blacks (and I was a dorio, a white). Bhakti Patel understood what I meant by hubshis.

  “I know hubshis. We have hubshis in Ahmedabad. They’re Muslim.”

  “You mean Siddis?” These were Afro-Indians, the descendants of African slaves who had been brought to India, still living in various parts of the subcontinent, unassimilated, surviving on the margins, still visibly African.

  “Siddi, hubshi, is same. I have no complications with the hubshis in Arkansas. Live and let live.” He then became expansive. “To those hubshis, and others, and you, my friend, I say vasudhaiva kutumbakaam!”

  He spoke it again loudly, like a battle cry, startling some other people in the lobby and causing the older women at the desk to wince. He was quoting the Sanskrit of an ancient Vedic astrological text, the Mahopanishad.

  “The whole world is a family!” he cried, and grasped my hand and shook it.

  “No problems, then? You’re happy?”

  He smiled and pointed through the front door to a new and slightly larger motel than his, across the road.

  “Only that.” His smile was grim.

  “Who owns it?”

  “Patels,” he said. “Patels from Little Rock. My main competition.”

  Chain Gang

  In Hood’s Chapel, Georgia, in 1936, Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, in their old Ford, came across a chain gang—fifteen or twenty black men in black-and-white-striped prison clothes, legs chained together in shackles, digging a ditch, supervised by a fat white man in overalls with a shotgun resting on his shoulder.

  “The gang goes out in the morning and the gang comes back at night,” runs the caption in You Have Seen Their Faces. “And in the meanwhile a lot of sweat is shed.”

  Another caption to a photo of the same men, at rest under a tree: “It don’t make no difference where you come from or where you’re going, because when you’re on the gang you’re here for a long time to come.”

  Those words and poignant photographs stayed in my mind, and so driving through the Arkansas Delta town of Marianna, seeing five obvious convicts in orange jumpsuits sweeping South Liberty Street and hacking at weeds, I parked in the main square—Court Square—and walked over to them.

  These black men were supervised by a black policewoman, of intimidating size and weight, whose name badge was lettered WILLIAMS. Though she carried a pistol, a truncheon, and a canister of Mace in holsters on her belt, she merely stood calmly watching the men. Her eyebrows were tinted gold. In her tight-fitting uniform, blue shirt, black pants, feet apart, hands on her hips, she was like a big blue barrel swaying on a pair of black posts.

  “How you doing?”

  “Jess fahn,” she said. “How you doing?”

  The men kept busy, didn’t look at me, scraped and swept, and one shoveled the debris into a barrel.

  “I’m passing through,” I said. “Are these men from the prison?”

  “Yes, ’deed, they are, but they good workers,” Officer Williams said. And lest I take them to be violent offenders, she added, “They misdemeanors, they not felonies.”

  Drunks, disorderlies, trespassers, vandals, pickpockets, petty villains, mildly desperate or luckless men.

  “You’re keeping them in line?”

  “It’s all about respect,” she said, looming over them.

  They made their way, in the heat and bright sunlight of Marianna, from Liberty Street to Court Street, Officer Williams and the so-called misdemeanants in bright orange, pushing brooms, still desperate and luckless but almost dainty compared to the oppressed convicts in stripes that Caldwell had described and Bourke-White had photographed.

  The Valiant Woman in Palestine

  One of the women who had been unable to meet me a few weeks earlier was raising livestock some miles north of the small Delta town of Palestine. She was Dolores Walker Robinson, forty-two, a single mother of three boys: Mack, twenty-two, Malcolm, eighteen, and Franklin, twelve. After more than twenty years of travel with her serviceman husband, and work, and child rearing, and a sudden divorce, Dolores had returned to the place where she’d been born and educated, to make a life for herself and her boys. I thought of her as the Valiant Woman.

  “I didn’t want my sons to live the harsh life of the city,” Dolores told me as we walked through her cow pasture. Most of the places she’d lived as the wife of a soldier had been urban, or at army posts near big cities. “I felt I would lose them to the city—to the crimes and problems that you can’t escape.”

  Soft-spoken, she had a gentle manner, an unlined face, and a vaguely Asiatic cast to her hooded eyes, but when she moved—carrying a bucket or feeding her animals or unhooking and swinging a farm gate—she showed strength and purpose. She seemed to have great health, and though she was dressed in her farming clothes she had style as well, yellow boots, leather gloves, a red kerchief knotted on her head. The dominant quality she possessed was maternal, not just a reflection of what she had told me about moving back to Palestine and wishing to keep her children safe, but her whole approach to farming and to raising livestock, her instinct for nurturing.

  Her small house and half her land were on high ground, and I thought of the lines in Ulysses: “The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother.”

  With her savings as a certified nursing assistant, she had bought forty-two acres of neglected Palestine land. The shack on it was uninhabitable and falling to pieces. With volunteer help from friends and her boys, she fenced the land, built a small house, and began raising goats. Four years passed. She heard of an organization based in Little Rock called Heifer International, a charity devoted to ending hunger and alleviating poverty, with a simple but effective program called Passing on the Gift: “This means families share the training they receive [the mission statement said] and pass on the first female offspring of their livestock to another family. This extends the impact of the original gift.”

  Dolores enrolled in the program, and after attending meetings and training sessions, she received two heifers to fatten. She now had a herd of ten cows—and, keeping to the rules of the charity, she had passed along some cows to other farmers in need.

  “I wanted something I could own,” she said. She’d been raised on a farm near here. “I wanted to get my sons involved in the life I knew.”

  Apart from the herd of cows and goats, she had sheep, geese, ducks, and chickens. She encouraged the birds to sit on nests of eggs, sold some of the fowl, sold and ate the eggs. She grew corn to feed the cows. Because the cash flow from the animals was still at a break-even point, she worked six days a week at the East Arkansas Area Agency on Aging as a caregiver and nursing assistant. Her two younger children were in school, and the eldest was in college. Money was always a problem.

  Early in the morning and after her day job at the agency, she went about the farm chores, feeding and watering the animals, repairing fences, collecting eggs. Some days she attended livestock management classes—she’d recently been to one in Greenville, Mississippi. “I made a lot of friends there. We’re all trying to accomplish the same things.”

  Easygoing, uncomplaining, yet tenacious, 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.

  “I’m looking ten years down the road,” she said as we tramped the sloping lane. “I want to build up the herd and do this full time.”

&n
bsp; Never mind that she was on a relatively small piece of land with a modest number of animals; being with her I was heartened, hopeful, happy, admiring her valiant spirit.

  Many Southerners I met asserted—with grim pride, or with sorrow, or quoting Faulkner—that the South doesn’t change. That’s not true. In many places, the cities most of all, the South has been turned upside down; in the rural areas the change has come slowly, in small but definite ways. Delores Robinson was someone who had shaken herself loose from another life to come home with her family, and she seemed brave on her farm, making her life, looking after her children.

  It goes without saying that the vitality of the South lies in the self-awareness of its deeply rooted people. 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.

  Old Man

  Traveling alone in eccentric circles these last Delta days, passing from farm to farm, observing lives being led, I’d somehow been tracing the course of the big river. But even when I was far away from its flow, earlier in my trip, the river was on my mind, as a symbol of the South and a solace.

  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.

  Yet the river poured through the land, endlessly sliding between levees and low banks of trees and the throats of backwaters and bayous. The onrush was unfailing, the one constant in a region in mild flux, the unappreciated South, resigned to neglect and disappointment. No wonder so much romance and promise was attached to the river’s muscly current, its course still a thoroughfare for goods and crops, bearing them away. As the Delta farmers I’d met had said, “Take ’em to the river,” because the river led to the world.

  The Mississippi, the “Old Man” of Southern folklore, is the central image and the plot mover of the Faulkner story of the same name. Contrapuntal (as Faulkner grandly described it) to “The Wild Palms,” in that book of the two tales, it is one of his most powerful fictions, the drama of a nameless convict in a rowboat who has been charged with rescuing victims of the great flood of 1927. Setting out from camp near the levee, the convict hears an unfamiliar and continuous sound. He has never seen the river before and is perplexed by the “profound deep whisper” in the air.

  “What’s that?” the convict said. A negro man squatting before the nearest fire answered him:

  “Dat’s him. Dat’s de Ole Man.”

  “The old man?” the convict said.

  Later, in a small boat on the river, the convict rescues a pregnant woman from a tree and takes her aboard. The progress of the story is their bobbing up and down the Mississippi, the convict hating what he sees, disgusted by the strange woman, and yearning to be back on the prison farm, probably Parchman. The truth in the Faulkner line about the South, that the past is never dead, never past, is that his fictional convict’s Parchman endures as a prison today. The Mississippi State Penitentiary was a bit south of Clarksdale, on the opposite bank, quite near to where I was now in Helena, Arkansas; it is still referred to as Parchman, from the old plantation it displaced. Parchman is also the subject of a number of blues songs, notably one by Mose Allison (who was born in nearby Tippo), which closes with the lines “Well I’m gonna be here for the rest of my life / And all I did was shoot my wife.”

  On a previous trip at Natchez, I’d thought how the Mississippi River is one of the gorgeous and unalterable metaphors for the South, oldfangled, its eddies flickering in sunlight, much of it undredged, with seasonal moods, thickening and slowing, or else brimming and breaching the levees, drowning and spreading fertile muck over the floodplain. As the river traffic has declined and riverside business has slackened, the river towns and villages have struggled. Floating casinos represent a last reckless gasp of commerce, the gambling on riverboats with fake smokestacks and fanciful stern wheels at Natchez and Vicksburg and elsewhere. The boats are as unseaworthy as chamber pots, moored in the mud, noisy with the jangle of slot machines, the embodiment of the Delta diminished, its past revived as fluvial kitsch as ephemeral as flotsam.

  But Helena still mattered. In my last days, I crossed and recrossed the river, from Lexa and Marvell and Lick Creek and over the bridge to Lula and Moon Lake, towns or villages tucked into bends and bayous. I lingered at the depot at hollowed-out Helena. In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain wrote, “Helena occupies one of the prettiest situations on the Mississippi. Her perch is the last, the southernmost group of hills which one sees on that side of the river.” The moribund Main Street now was an architectural heirloom deserving of preservation, like many other Main Streets in the South: ornate and ambitious shop fronts, dry goods stores and banks and theater marquees, cast-iron columns and the skeletal Cleburne Hotel, all from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Helena was booming. “This was a great town once” is a repeated lamentation in the South. In Helena the river was a presence, opaque with mud, swirling with risen silt, wide and empty of boats, a brown serpent sliding south past Helena Reach, snaking through a wilderness of bayous, canebrakes, and swamps.

  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.

  Often, talking with someone in the South—a young farmer, a fifteen-year-old mother, a perspiring and potbellied policeman, an indignant gun nut, a toothy preacher, an idle college student, a genteel bank clerk, a harassed community volunteer, or an insulted citizen—I 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. This response made me mutter and shake my head, because I didn’t feel old. I felt—still feel—I am in the prime of life. But it’s wrong to say that aloud or to object; protestation is a grim old coot’s standard reflex. The hardest thing for anyone healthy to accept is increasing age. Yet why should you feel old if you’re not infirm? I was fit enough to drive all day, hundreds of miles, and to manage this trip; to be lost and to find my bearings; to endure abuse at times; to take the knocks and reverses of the road and a degree of skepticism or hostility from folks en route. Possibly some of them cupped their young hands and whispered behind my back, “De ole man.”

  A news story I heard on my car radio gave me a clue. The announcer said, “An elderly man and a child were struck by a car late yesterday afternoon as they crossed Mabry Road near Highway 49 in Tutwiler,” the sort of details that resolved themselves into the jerky afterimage of an unlucky man holding a child’s hand at dusk, on the road, on foot in the heat—because the man was old and poor. Then more facts: “Warren G. Beaver, seventy-two, and his granddaughter . . .”

  I
laughed out loud and punched the radio off. Elderly!

  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.

  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 awareness 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.