Deep South by Paul Theroux

Reverend Lyles said he was proud of what had been done at the old Rosenwald school, how it had been fixed up and was now a well-attended community center. The Auburn Rural Studio was still building ingenious low-cost houses. It was not the town of Agee and Evans anymore. It was still struggling, but it was improving, and hopeful.

On a single visit I would not have seen this, but over the course of a year, in four seasons, the true condition of the town had become apparent. This was not a trip about my having had a good meal or a bad meal, or my laboring toward a destination in the old travel-book manner. It may have seemed to some people I met that I was headed somewhere, but I was still traveling in widening circles, happily, on back roads, meeting people, and revisiting friends.

Paul Theroux has traveled all over the world: India, Southeast Asia, Africa. But until he steps out of his door on Cape Cod in Massachusetts one morning and hops in his car, he has never been in the American South. He heads down the interstate, making brief stops in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, heading deeper and deeper into a land that is familiar but unfamiliar, recognizable but unrecognizable. His travels in Africa become a specific touchpoint: the poverty Theroux sees in Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas is not just a reminder of the third world, but an instantiation of it, right under the American nose. Deep South explores these forgotten places, which are not just unknown to Theroux, but to nearly every American, because they lie in the places that even the highways have passed by, where industry and work have vanished, and which the cultural and political leaders of the United States would just as soon turn a blind eye toward.

I'm a Southerner, though I have always thought of my home in North Carolina as quite different from the "deep south" of Mississippi and Alabama. It is interesting to read about yourself, or at least a region to which you are allied, from an anthropological perspective. At first, I felt a kind of bemusement at the Northerner who carries with him a set of bromides about the South, without wondering whether or not they are accurate or true. When Theroux writes that the church is the center of social life in a Southern town, and claims this is one way it differs from his native New England, I thought about how a few weeks ago, I visited Sandwich, Massachusetts--where Theroux literally lives--and ended up at a church festival where a bunch of elderly white Catholics were selling wreaths and dolls and chili hot dogs. Certainly for those folks, the church is at the center of social life in Sandwich. And what do we do with the increasing number of white Americans, southerners included, who no longer go to church but claim evangelical as an identifier? There's an awful lot of cant about the South, is all I'm saying, and it can be hard to set it aside and see the place clearly, especially if you carry your expectations with you.

This feeling was amplified, for me, by Theroux's pointed aversion toward urban life in the South. Charleston, Asheville, Natchez: Theroux passes these places by, stopping in them briefly, if only to tell us their charms have no interest for him. To Theroux, this is a way of side-stepping the tourist sheen of the South, of skirting the guidebooks. But it also presupposes a real South that lies in rural places. Of course you are going to find the South to be poor and rural if you define it from the beginning as rural and poor. But moreover, I found myself wondering if Theroux doesn't miss something crucial about the South by not interrogating the "New South," the cities where industry has fled, where investment in the tech sector, for instance, has created new opportunities for gentrification and dispossession. I'm not sure you can understand the depreciation of Greenville, Alabama, for instance, unless you understand the boom in Huntsville.

But anyway. Most of my reservations about Deep South came to little, because in the end, what makes Theroux seem reliable is the fact that he keeps coming back. Deep South is the story of not just a single trip, but four different trips, each in a different season. Theroux keeps coming back to the same locations over and over again, meeting with the same non-profit leaders, the same black farmers and unemployed whites, the same Indian motel owners. Out of this investment in time a real picture of a region emerges: a place rich in pride and cultural power, but torn inside out by the deprecations of global capitalism and political neglect. By the end of the book, Theroux is no longer ignoring the cities: he spends several chapters on his time in Hot Springs, Arkansas and the capital of Little Rock, integrating them into the larger story of the South as he sees it.

I brought this book with me on a trip to Mississippi last weekend. We didn't quite get up to the Delta, the poorest part of the state and where Theroux spends most of his time, but we did see much of what Theroux saw. For me, it was the sight of a roofless, wrecked building on the main street of Port Gibson, sitting next to a restaurant: someone's business and dream. Everywhere he goes, Theroux wonders why Africa gets so much aid from the USA while its own communities suffer. (I thought Theroux was a little silly in the way he would compare the money given to say, Ghana, population 31 million, to the federal aid provided to a town of 800, but still, point taken.) But among the neglect are people whose roots are deep, and who spend their lives trying to make those communities thrive.