Category Archives: travel

IT WAS in Dallas in 1984, at the Republican convention, that the idea of traveling in the American South, or Southeast, came to me. I had never been in the South before; and though Dallas was not part of the Southeast I later chose to travel in, I had a sufficiently strong sense there of a region quite distinct from New York and New England, which were essentially all that I knew of the United States….

It was mid-August, and hot. I liked the contrast on the downtown streets of bright light and the deep shadows of tall buildings, and the strange feel of another, more temperate climate that those shadows gave. One constantly played with contrasts like that. The tinted glass of the hotel room softened the glare of the hot sky: the true color of the sky, outside, was always a surprise. Air conditioning in hotels, cars, and the convention center made the heat, in one’s passages through it, stimulating.

The heat was a revelation. It made one think of the old days. Together with the great distances, it gave another idea of the lives of the early settlers. But now the very weather of the South had been made to work the other way. The heat that should have debilitated had been turned into a source of pleasure, a sensual excitement, an attraction: a political convention could be held in Dallas in the middle of August.

On the wall at the back of the podium in the convention center the flags of the states were laid flat, in alphabetical order. The flags of the older states were distinctive; they made me think of the British-colonial flag (and the British-given colonial motto, in Latin, from Virgil) I had known as a child in Trinidad. And for the first time it occurred to me that Trinidad, a former British colony (from 1797), and an agricultural slave colony (until 1833, when slavery was abolished in the British Empire), would have had more in common with the old slave states of the Southeast than with New England or the newer European-immigrant states of the North. That should have occurred to me a long time before, but it hadn’t. What I had heard as a child about the racial demeanor of the South had been too shocking. It had tainted the United States, and had made me close my mind to the South.

The convention center was very big. The eye could not take it all in at once. In that vast space the figures on the podium looked small. They could have been lost; but a big screen above them magnified their image, and scores of smaller screens all over the center repeated this living, filmed picture. It was hypnotic, that same face or gesture in close-up coming at one from so many angles. The aim might only have been communication and clarity; but no more grandiose statement could have been made about the primacy of men; nothing could have so attempted to stretch out the glory of the passing moment. And yet, almost as part of its political virtue, this convention dealt in piety and humility and heaven, and daily abased itself before God.

A famous local Baptist pastor spoke the final benediction. His church organization was prodigious; its property in downtown Dallas was said by the newspapers to be worth very many millions. His service, on the Sunday after the convention, was to a packed congregation. It was also being carried on television; and it was a full, costumed production, with music and singing. But the hellfire sermon might have come from a simpler, rougher time, when perhaps for five or six months of the year people had no escape from the heat, when travel was hard, when people lived narrowly in the communities into which they had been born, and life was given meaning only by absolute religious certainties.

I began to think of writing about the South. My first travel book–undertaken at the suggestion of Eric Williams, the first black prime minister of Trinidad–had been about some of the former slave colonies of the Caribbean and South America. I was twenty-eight then. It seemed to me fitting that my last [or, fortunately, latest] travel book–travel on a theme–should be about the old slave states of the American Southeast.

My thoughts–in Dallas, and then in New York, when I was planning the journey–were about the race issue. I didn’t know then that that issue would quickly work itself out during the journey, and that my subject would become that other South–of order and faith, and music and melancholy–which I didn’t know about, but of which I had been given an intimation in Dallas.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 23-25

Regular readers know I’m an avid fan of V.S. Naipaul, from whose book Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples I’ve excerpted many passages on this blog. I thought it only fair to accompany Naipaul as he encounters some of the Christian peoples of a part of the world with which I’m more intimately familiar. So I’ve begun reading A Turn in the South (Vintage, 1989). And it does not disappoint.

The epigraph quotes the first two lines of the following reply by Warwick to his king in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV Part 2:

There is a history in all men’s lives,

Figuring the natures of the times deceased;

The which observed, a man may prophesy,

With a near aim, of the main chance of things

As yet not come to life, who in their seeds

And weak beginning lie intreasured.

That is certainly the goal of most of my reading these days. And the following passage rings true to me, an expatriate son of generations buried in family plots scattered over the landscape of Virginia. Naipaul’s opening chapter is entitled, “Down Home: A Landscape of Small Ruins.”

JIMMY WORKED in New York as a designer and lettering artist. Howard was his assistant. Jimmy, who could become depressed at times, said to Howard one day, “Howard, if I had to give up, and you couldn’t get another job, what would you do?” Howard, who was from the South, said, “I would go home to my mama.”

Jimmy was as struck by this as I was when Jimmy told me: that Howard had something neither Jimmy nor I had, a patch of the earth he thought of as home, absolutely his. And that was where–many months after I had heard this story–I thought I should begin this book about the South: with the home that Howard had….

Later [after arriving in Bowen/Peters, North Carolina], we went out for a drive. Hetty [Howard’s mama] knew the land well; she knew who owned what. It was like a chant from her, as we drove.

“Black people there, black people there, white people there. Black people, black people, white people, black people. All this side black people, all this side white people. White people, white people, black people, white people.”

Sometimes she said, “Black people used to own this land.” She didn’t like that–that black people had lost land because they had been slack or because of family disputes. But blacks and whites appeared here to live quite close to one another, and Hetty herself had no racial complaints. White people had been good to her, she said. But then she said that that might have been only because she liked people.

It was a landscape of small ruins. Houses and farmhouses and tobacco barns had simply been abandoned. The decay of each was individual, and they were all beautiful in the afternoon light. Some farmhouses had very wide eaves, going down low, the corrugated iron that once provided shelter now like a too-heavy weight, the corrugated-iron sheets sagging, fanning out in places.

We went to see the house, now abandoned, where Hetty’s father had lived when he had sharecropped for Mr. Smith. Bush grew right up against the open house. The pecan trees, still almost bare, just a few leaves now, were tall above the house and the tobacco barns. The colors were gray (tree trunks and weathered timber) and red (rusted corrugated iron) and green and the straw-gold of reeds. As we stood there Hetty told us of the death of her father in that house; the event was still vivid to her.

Another house, even more beautiful, was where Hetty and her husband had lived for ten years. It was a farmhouse with a big green field, with forest trees bounding the distance on every side.

Home was not for Howard just his mother’s house, the little green house that was now closed up, or the new concrete-block house she had moved to. Home was what we had seen. And we had seen only apart: all about these country roads, within a few miles, were houses and fields connected with various members of Howard’s family. It was a richer and more complicated past than I had imagined; and physically much more beautiful. The houses I was taken to were bigger than the houses many people in Trinidad or England might have lived in.

But, still, in the past there was that point where darkness fell, the historical darkness, even here, which was home….

TWO DAYS later, in New York (and just before I began my true Southern journey), I talked again with Howard, to make sure I had got certain things right. About the presence of Asians and Cubans and Mexicans he said, “I get very pro-American when I think about that.” And that pro-American attitude extended to foreign affairs, which were his special interest. So, starting from the small Southern black community of Bowen, Howard had become a conservative. He said, “I think that when you come out of a Southern Baptist background that is the groundwork of being a conservative.”

UPDATE: The Tanuki Ramble adds more on Naipaul, including the following passage from A Turn in the South, which the Tanuki read about a year ago.

That had been the great discovery so far in my travels so far in the South. In no other part of the world had I found people so driven by the idea of good behavior and the good religious life. And that was true for black and white.