In 1985, fifteen years before he won the Nobel Prize but nearly as many since the publication of A House for Mr. Biswas, V. S. Naipaul traveled through the American South. Though Naipaul is best remembered for his fiction now, he spent nearly as much time writing travelogues, first of the West Indies, then India, and then among Islamic states in Among the Believers. But the South presented a special challenge for Naipaul, who wrote that America "cannot be alien in the simple way an African country is alien. It is too well known, too photographed, too written about; and, being more organized and less informal, it is not so open to casual inspection." And yet, casually inspect, Naipaul does: in metropolitan Atlanta, genteel Charleston, deep swamps and bottomland in Tallahassee and Jackson, and in the up-and-coming cities of the New South, Nashville and Raleigh.
A Turn in the South made me rethink a lot of things, not least among them Naipaul himself. For someone with a reputation as a crank and a bully, Naipaul comes off in A Turn in the South as remarkably open and empathetic. He lets people talk and talk, guiding conversation in only the subtlest of ways, and though perhaps it is only thanks to the writerly tactic of hiding his own questions in narrative voice while faithfully recording the responses of his interlocutors, the effect is of someone reserving judgments: a listener. Sometimes this is frustrating, as when Naipaul interviews an archconservative pastor in Elizabeth City, NC who calls himself a "Jesse-crat" after notorious senatorial douchebag Jesse Holmes, or any number of old white folks who perform paternalistic sadness at the degradation of Black life post-segregation. But it's a gift to get people to say what they probably know they ought not to say, and there's no doubt that in doing so Naipaul really does reveal something at the heart of Southern life. He gets more out of "ordinary people" than he does the black politicos of Atlanta, who are too cagey to stray from their talking points, or Eudora Welty, who is summoned for two paragraphs to talk about the long-gone fad for fur hats.
Naipaul really does empathize with white "rednecks"--a word that's more or less new to him--and with the Black Southerners he meets. Fascinatingly, that empathy seems to emerge from Naipaul's own Caribbean identity, which colors everything he sees in the South. Naipaul makes careful and articulate distinctions between the two regions of the New World, noting, among other things, the crucial lack of a white laborer class after the collapse of slavery and colonialism in Trinidad. "The possibilities" for a Black American, he writes, "were far greater than those of a West Indian. But there could be no easy movement forward for the mass; they had lived through too much; the irrationality of slavery and the years after slavery had made many irrational and self-destructive." And yet, when he writes that the culture of the South is defined by loss and by grief, one hears the echoes of his novels, in which colonial subjects struggle to forge an identity unchained by the weight of history: "The grief was special and was like religion; it would last beyond the decline of the nineteenth century empires, beyond the idea of empire itself." I think that, as a Caribbean, Naipaul is able to understand the South in a way that's difficult for an American Northerner, like Paul Theroux.
But it was the last section, titled "Smoke," which really hit home--literally--for me. The last stop on Naipaul's journey is in the "Research Triangle" of North Carolina, where I grew up, and I perhaps have never heard as insightful or as accurate a description of the place as Naipaul's:
...poor North Carolina pineland landscaped into the discreetest kind of industrial garden, many modern technological names represented by new buildings, long low lines of brick or concrete and glass, giving an impression of spaciousness and order and elegance, the land of rural poverty remade to suit its new function, the South seemingly abolished here, as it had been abolished at the space-research town of Huntsville in Alabama.
Durham poet Jim Applewhite, descendant of tobacco planters, takes Naipaul on a tour of the dying industry: the golden-leafed farms that scan still be found growing between the fresh new medical and research facilities, the meticulous handicraft of the curing barns and the packing process. "[I]t is close to the paradox of civilization itself," Applewhite tells Naipaul, "That this essentially poisonous substance formed the basis of a way of life that had so many attractive aspects--a formalized, seasonal cycle to it, which left the land combed into its even furrows after the stalks had been cut in the autumn." There can be no mourning the death of tobacco, if tobacco is dying, and yet the transition from the "folk art" and "nonutilitarian" practice of the small tobacco farm to the sleek anywhere technologies of biomedicine leave the land and its people bereft of something.
Tobacco, Naipaul notes, comes from the name of Tobago, Trinidad's junior island. Though tobacco planting was quickly abandoned there for the more lucrative sugarcane, Naipaul feels a kind of historical link between himself and the tobacco poet. And I felt it, too. Roughly ten months after Naipaul passed through the tobacco fields of the Research Triangle, I was born there. And it strange to read the great writer writing about the place that I would shortly be ushered into, and which I have not quite always understood. I started A Turn in the South pleased to know a little more about Naipaul; I was unsettled at the end to find Naipaul looking back. But if that's the feeling I got from A Turn in the South, it's because, in Naipaul's own words, we share something way, way back--but not all that far back--in our histories.
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