“Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads”
Author: Paul Theroux, with 24 color photographs by Steve McCurry
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pages: 441
Price: $29.95 (Hardcover)
Paul Theroux has achieved considerable success with his 30 volumes of fiction, especially “The Mosquito Coast,” but is even better known for his nine travel books. The most well-known may be his railroad adventures—taking a train from London to Japan for example in “The Great Railway Bazaar,” or “The Old Patagonian Express,” a train ride from Boston to the tip of South America. He also walked around Great Britain in “The Kingdom by the Sea.” Yet Theroux, a native of Massachusetts, never spent any time traveling in the United States, especially the South. He has fixed that. Over a period of two years, on four extended automobile trips through the back roads of Dixie, totaling 18 months, Theroux experienced the South. This is the result, his report on conditions here. Not all of here. Theroux avoided cities and colleges and universities. He wanted to meet and talk with farmers, small town citizens, plain folk, black folk and, as it turned out, poor folk. He will not fly. “The airport experience has become an extreme example of a totalitarian regime at work, making you small and suspect, depriving you of control.” First he reports on the highways. They are so smooth and efficient as to turn travel literature on its head. There is no danger or hardship in the journey, especially on interstates. Getting there is no trouble, even on back roads. To say otherwise is to write the “mock ordeal.”
After getting there, however, the difficulty begins. In Asia or Africa, or Arabia, “The guest is God!” Here, “one is more often greeted with suspicion, hostility or indifference. “You’re not from around here. WHY are you here?” In the South, people wanted to know. Might he be some kind of modern day freedom rider, outside agitator? Theroux traveled alone and hoped for the unbiased responses that would come with anonymity, no one telling him what they thought he wanted to hear. “Anonymity is freedom, “ he remarks. He certainly got that. In all his months on the road only two people had read one of his 48 books. (Where he did meet with avid readers, as he did with Randall Curb in Greensboro, Alabama, and the late Mary Ward Brown, in Hamburg, he is astonished at their intensity, their dedication to the world of books , where their neighbors ignore books completely.)
He has his own “objectivity.” A world-traveling Yankee, he sees the South with a fresh eye. He didn’t know what he was going to see and hear in South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas and was genuinely shocked by the poverty, the sense of anger at having been left behind. Readers in Alabama and other southern places will notice that he doesn’t get everything right. How could he? There will be objections and quibbles, but I urge Southern readers to relax their defenses.
Theroux sees, however imperfectly, conditions we have stopped noticing, conditions so taken for granted we are blind to them. Theroux observes the South with eyes that have lived in, traveled in and studied Africa and Asia for years, and he is surprised and appalled by similarities. Without our being conscious of the process, we all try to make sense of new experiences by relating them to previous experiences: that reminds me of such-and-such. Traveling through the Mississippi Delta, he writes: “Like Africa, I scribbled in my notebook.” Allendale, South Carolina, reminds him of Mozambique. Allendale died when the interstate went around it; in Alabama, Monroeville nearly died when Vanity Fair left, and Selma is largely boarded up.
In Greensboro Theroux is told by his B&B hostess that her sons “spent part of every year in Africa as a volunteer in some kind of community development…helping people.” Where do they volunteer, Theroux asks? In Zambia, he is told. Theroux thinks there are many similarities in the conditions in Zambia and Greensboro. Why, he wonders, do well-meaning volunteers not help out closer to home? In Greensboro, where he spends considerable time, he speaks with a number of citizens, including the black mayor and the black barber.
In towns like Philadelphia, Mississippi, he sees the same picture: high unemployment, half the businesses boarded up, and community activists struggling bravely to keep the town alive. They fight “lack of revenue and resistance to change.” After all, some folks –mainly the few who own it—like it just the way it is. He talks to black farmers, who are discriminated against by lenders.
There are sections on Southern literature and its uses, sections on racial issues, as he understands them, his experiences in the “Patel motels” of the American South, dismay over the way large manufacturing concerns have abandoned the South for greater profits with merchandise made in the third world and the effects of Walmart in the killing of the Southern small town. Time after time, Theroux learns that the amount of financial help received by community improvement organizations is a fraction of what he KNOWS our government and our large foundations, including the Clinton Foundation/Global Initiative, are giving in African countries—hundreds of millions.
He moves from befuddlement to outrage. Food insecurity in Arkansas, for example, is about the same as Sri Lanka—19.7%; “roughly one in five Arkansans do not know where there next meal is coming from.” Surely we should house and feed our own! He finds it understandable that many in the Deep South believe the Last Days are upon us, “the famine, tribulation, and false prophets mentioned in the book of Revelation.”
Theroux visits an extraordinary number of gun shows. He observes the obvious—pistols, assault rifles, knives, ammo, etc., along with paranoia about possible controls and regulations—but says, finally, the shows are not about guns. The gathering, he concludes, is about “the self-esteem of men—white men mainly—animated by a sense of grievance—who felt defeated and still persecuted, conspired against by hostile outside forces, making a last stand.” When Theroux writes about India we are entertained. What a keen observer of such an exotic place!
Although Southern readers will be irritated by many of his observations and conclusions, we would do well to take seriously his remarks on conditions in our own back yard. This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
