Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

When I was a child, my grandparents lived in North Carolina and my aunts and uncles were scattered across the south, too: Atlanta, Chattanooga, even Charleston for a time. As a result, my family spent many school holidays criss-crossing that part of the country, and I mustn't have been more than eight when I learned that "Yankee" was dirty word. The South - and Southerners - were a region and a people apart, of that I had no doubt. The point was reinforced recently as I drove from Birmingham, Alabama, to Montgomery and a black and red, handmade billboard loomed into view. "Go to church or the devil will get you," the effect completed with an illustration of the devil, pitchfork in hand. In Michigan, this would have been a joke. I was in Alabama, though, and the friend I was visiting assured me the message was entirely in earnest.

All of which is to say that I was eager to read Paul Theroux's take on this part of the country. Theroux sets out to travel the south by backroads and forgotten routes, not anticipating that he will return repeatedly over the course of a year, forging friendships with a number of Southerners and developing a nuanced understanding of the region and the people. "In a place where everyone is armed," Theroux muses at a gunshow, "good manners are helpful, perhaps essential." Might this bearing of arms - obvious at a gunshow but equally prevalent virtually everywhere he stops - be at the heart of the gentility so much on display?

As is the case with virtually all good travel writing, Theroux devotes significant ink to both the historical context of the region, as well as the present-day issues. In case of the South, this of course means frequent conversations about race, which Theroux holds with everyone from former sharecroppers to white supremacists, to Indian motel owners. In that sense, Deep South is a bit of The Warmth of Other Suns meets After Appomattox. Time and again, Theroux's remarks are on the money, as when he notes that for many of the (white) southerners with whom he interacts, "the Civil War battles might have happened yesterday," and "the civil rights movement was another defeat for these Southerners who were so sensitized to intruders and gloaters and carpetbaggers, and even more so to outsiders who did not remember the humiliations of the Civil War." 

Perhaps my favorite person in the book was Floyd Taylor, the somewhat elderly former farmer who grew up on a farm plowed by mules, rather than a tractor, who spent many long years picking cotton and shooting squirrel, who noted that growing up "we done everything ourselves," - from making molasses to skinning game to smoking meat - and contrasted that with the fact that "people are hungry today but all they do is sit around." I couldn't help but assume the folks he was talking about are the same ones The Washington Post profiled recently in a piece on the rise in disability claims.

As is frequently the case with Theroux's work, at times, this book rambles. For example, Theroux spends far too much time dissecting William Faulkner for my liking, as well as any number of other writers and works. When Theroux is not feeling overly smug and self-satisfied (such as the time he recommends to an unsuspecting soul that they read Dark Star Safari), his observations are frequently amusing, as when the reader is reminded that "all air travel today involves interrogation, often by someone in a uniform who is your inferior." And while I did frequently find myself nodding along in agreement, I was also very conscious of the lens through which this was written. That is to say that while many of Theroux's observations struck me as astute and accurate, the author is nevertheless "a coastal elite," to use the phrasing of the day, wealthy, well-traveled, with good intentions, but a limited ability to truly shed any of these layers and see beyond "a bitter place of tombstones and memorials and ruins."

Theroux writes toward the end of this book that he "had not realized until I spent some time there how cruel it was that so many American companies had fled the South for other countries and taken the jobs with them." In this revelation and in so many others, Deep South serves as a reminder of how little we Americans know about one another and the pitfalls of our estrangement.