The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (53 page)

“God Has a Plan for You”

The back roads from Orangeburg to Sycamore were empty on this Sunday morning—empty and beautiful, passing along the margins of more twiggy cotton fields, many of them puddled and muddy, the ripe tufts (the linty so-called locks) in open bolls sodden and the bushes beaten down by yesterday's rain.

Reverend Johnson's church was the large industrial-looking structure near Barker's Mill and the flag-draped meetinghouse of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. At the church a group of older men, formally dressed in suits, welcomed me and introduced themselves as deacons and ushers.

On the back wall, a scroll-shaped sign in gold:
REVELATION MINISTRIES—REVEALING GOD'S WORD TO THE WORLD—WE LOVE YOU—AIN'T NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!

After the preliminaries—music, singing—when the church was full, the familiar dark-suited figure of Virgin Johnson Jr. rose from his high-backed, thronelike chair. He began to preach, a well-thumbed Bible in his right hand, and his left hand raised in admonition.

“Hear me today, brothers and sisters,” he began, and lifted his Bible to read from it. He read from Luke, he read from Mark, he read from Jeremiah, and then he said, “Tell your neighbor, ‘God has a plan for you!'”

The woman in front of me and the man beside me took turns saying to me in a grand tone of delivering good news, “God has a plan for you!”

Reverend Johnson described the children of Israel taken into captivity in Babylon and paraphrased Jeremiah's epistle: “Even though it look like stuff mess up in your life, it gon' to be all right, after a while! Stop distressing, stop worrying. Even though your circumstances don't look prosperous, you gon' be all right!”

Thirty minutes of his warm encouragement, and then the music began again in earnest and the whole church was rocked in song.

“I'm just a country boy, from bottom-line caste, born and raised in Estill, Hampton County,” Virgin Johnson told me that night over a meal up the road in Orangeburg, where he lived. Estill was the sticks, he said, deep country, cotton fields. Then with a mock-resigned sigh, he said, “Po' black.”

Still in his dark suit, he sipped his iced tea. This was another man speaking, not the excited Sycamore preacher, not the shrewd Orangeburg trial lawyer, but a quiet, reflective private citizen in a back booth at Ruby Tuesday, reminiscing about his life as a loner.

“I was born in 1954, in Estill. In 1966, as a result of what they called ‘voluntary integration,' I was the only black student at Estill Elementary School. Happened this way. There were two buses went by our place every morning. I had said to my daddy, ‘I want to get the first bus.' That was the white bus. He said, ‘You sure, boy?' I said, ‘I'm sure.'

“The day I hit that bus everything changed. Sixth grade—it changed my life. I lost all my friends, black and white. No one talked to me, no one at all. Even my white friends from home. I knew they wanted to talk to me, but they were under pressure, and so was I. I sat at the back of the bus. When I went to the long table for lunch, thirty boys would get up and leave.

“The funny thing is, we were all friendly, black and white. We picked cotton together. My daddy and uncle had a hundred acres of cotton. But when I got on the bus, it was over. I was alone, on my own.

“When I got to school I knew there was a difference. There was not another African American there—no black teachers, no black students, none at all. Except the janitors. The janitors were something, like guardian angels to me. They were black, and they didn't say anything to me—didn't need to. They nodded at me as if to say, ‘Hold on, boy. Hold on.'

“I learned at an early age you have to stand by yourself. That gave me a fighting spirit. I've had it since I was a child. It's destiny. What happens when you let other people make your decisions? You become incapable of making your own decisions.

“I was the first African American to go to law school from my side of the county. University of South Carolina at Columbia. I was in a class of one hundred—this was in the eighties. I was the only black person. Passed the bar in 1988. Got a license to preach.

“There's no contradiction for me. I'm happy doing both. I just wish the economy was better. This area is so poor. They got nothin'—they need hope. If I can give it to them, that's a good thing. Jesus said, ‘We have to go back and care about the other person.'

“This is a friendly place—nice people. Good values. Decent folks. We have issues—kids having kids, for one, sometimes four generations of kids having kids. But there's so little advance. That does perplex me—the condition of this place. Something's missing. What is it?”

And then he made a passionate gesture, flinging up his hand, and he raised his voice in a tone that recalled his preaching voice. “Take the kids away from this area and they shine!”

Part Two: Alabama

Greensboro, Alabama, less than 40 miles south of Tuscaloosa, lies under the horizon in a green sea of meadows and fields, a small, pretty, somewhat collapsed and haunted town. Up the road from Greensboro, around Moundville, lies the farmland and still-substandard houses where James Agee and Walker Evans spent a summer collecting material for the book that would become
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
. Published in 1941, it sold a mere 600 copies. Its commercial failure contributed to Agee's heavy drinking and early death at the age of 45. Twenty years later, it was republished, and in the early 1960s it found many more readers and admirers.

Cherokee City in the book is Tuscaloosa, Centerboro is Greensboro, the subject of some of Evans's photographs, and where I was eventually headed.

Greensboro was beautiful—hardly changed architecturally since Agee's visit in 1936—but it was struggling.

“Our main problems?” Greensboro's mayor, Johnnie B. Washington, said with a smile. “How much time do you have? A day or two, to listen? It's lack of revenue, it's resistance to change, it's so many things. But I tell you, this is a fine town.”

One of the largest personal libraries I have ever seen belonged to Randall Curb, who lived in a white frame house on a corner, near the end of Main Street, in Greensboro. He was legally blind, but as it had been a progressive decline in his vision, he had continued to buy books—real tomes—while adjusting to audio books. He was 60, kindly, generous, eager to share his knowledge of Greensboro, of which he was the unofficial historian. He was also steeped in the lore of
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
. He impressed me by calling its prose “incantatory.”

Randall knew all the readers round about. He gave talks—on Agee, on Eudora Welty, on the English writers he loved (he spent a few months in London almost every year), on historical figures such as Ben Franklin. He knew the writers, too.

“You should meet Mary T,” he said to me, his way of referring to Mary Ward Brown, who lived in the town of Marion, in the next county. “She writes short stories—very good ones. She's ninety-five,” he added. “Ninety-six in a few months.”

“Perhaps you could introduce me,” I said.

Days passed. I read a dozen of her stories and her memoir. I called Randall and said, “I'd like to see her soon.”

When I came to Marion, I realized how moribund Greensboro was. The shops in Marion were still in business; Marion had a courthouse, and a military institute, and Judson College, which Mary T (she insisted on the name) had attended. There were bookstores in Marion and a well-known soul food restaurant, Lottie's. Coretta Scott King had been raised in Marion, and voting rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson had been shot and killed by an Alabama state trooper in the town in 1965 during a peaceful protest, a catalyzing event in the civil rights movement that provoked the protest marches from Selma to Montgomery.

“Notice how it's desolate here,” Randall said as I drove outside town. Though he was unable to see, he had a clear memory of the flat land, the fields of stubble, the wet clay roads, the thin patches of woods, the absence of houses, now and then a crossroads. “You'll know it when you see it. It's the only house here.”

After 5 miles of fields, he said, “This must be Hamburg,” and a white bungalow appeared, and on the porch—we had called ahead—Mary T and a much younger woman, wearing an apron.

“Is Ozella with her?” Randall said, trying to see. He explained that Ozella was the daughter of a previous housekeeper. Ozella was standing closely next to Mary T, who was tiny, watchful, like a bird on a branch, and smiling in anticipation. Very old and upright people have a dusty glow that makes them seem immortal.

“My father built this house in 1927,” Mary T said when I praised the house. It was a modest two-story bungalow, but squat and solid, fronted by the bulging porch, a dormer above it, so unlike the shotgun shacks and rectangular houses we'd passed at the edge of Marion. Inside, the walls were paneled in dark wood, a planked ceiling, an oak floor. Like Randall's house it was filled with books, in the bookcases that were fitted in all the inner rooms and upstairs.

Mary T opened a bottle of blueberry wine from a winery in Harpersville, and though it was a warm noontime, a fly buzzing behind the hot white curtains in the small back dining room, we stood and clinked schooners of the wine and toasted our meeting—the ancient Mary T, the nearly blind Randall, and myself, the traveler, passing through. Something about the wood paneling, the quality of the curtains, the closeness of the room, the sense of being in the deep countryside holding a glass of wine on a hot day—it was like being in old Russia. I said so.

“That's why I love Chekhov,” Mary T said. “He writes about places like this, people like the ones who live here—the same situations.”

The sunny day, the bleakness of the countryside, the old bungalow on the narrow road, no other house nearby; the smell of the muddy fields penetrating the room—and that other thing, a great and overwhelming sadness that I felt but couldn't fathom.

“Have a slice of pound cake,” Randall said, opening the foil on a heavy yellow loaf. “My mother made it yesterday.”

Mary T cut a crumbly slab and divided it among us, and I kept thinking,
This could only be the South
, but a peculiar and special niche of it, a house full of books, the dark paintings, the ticking clock, the old furniture, the heavy oak table, something melancholy and indestructible but looking a bit besieged; and that unusual, almost unnatural tidiness imposed by a housekeeper—pencils lined up, magazines and pamphlets in squared-up piles—Ozella's hand, obvious and unlikely, a servant's sense of order.

In
Fanning the Spark
(2009), a selective, impressionistic memoir, Mary T had told her story: her upbringing as a rural shopkeeper's daughter; her becoming a writer late in life—she was 61 when she published her first short story. It is a little history of surprises—surprise that she became a writer after so long, a period she called “the 25-year silence”; surprise that her stories found favor; surprise that her stories won awards.

Setting her glass of wine down on the thick disk of coaster, she said, “I'm hungry for catfish”—the expression of appetite a delight to hear from someone 95 years old.

She put on a wide-brimmed black hat the size, it seemed, of a bicycle wheel, and a red capelike coat. Helping her down the stairs, I realized she was tiny and frail; but her mind was active, she spoke clearly, her memory was good, her bird claw of a hand was in my grip.

And all the way to Lottie's diner in Marion, on the country road, she talked about how she'd become a writer.

“It wasn't easy for me to write,” she said. “I had a family to raise, and after my husband died it became even harder, because my son Kirtley was still young. I thought about writing, I read books, but I didn't write. I think I had an advantage. I could tell literature from junk. I knew what was good. I knew what I wanted to write. And when I came to it—I was more than sixty—I rewrote hard. I tried to make it right.”

At last we were rolling down Marion's main street, Washington Street, then past the military academy and the courthouse, and over to Pickens Street, the site of Mack's Café—the places associated with the shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson. We came to Lottie's. I parked in front and eased Mary T out of the passenger seat and into the diner.

“I've been reading a book about interviews with people who are over one hundred years old,” Mary T said, perhaps reminded of her frailty. “It was called something like
Lessons from the Centenarians
. The lesson to me was, I don't think I want to live that long.”

People seated at their meals looked up from their food as Mary T entered, and many of them recognized her and greeted her. Though Mary T was moving slowly, she lifted her hand to greet them.

“See, the Yankee's having the grilled catfish,” Randall said, after we seated ourselves and ordered. “We stick with the fried.”

“My mother worked in the store—she was too busy to raise me,” Mary T said over lunch, pausing after each sentence, a bit short of breath. “I was raised by our black housekeeper. She was also the cook. I called her Mammy. I know it's not good to call someone Mammy these days, but I meant it—she was like a mother to me. I leaned on her.”

“If my mother ever sat and held me as a child I don't remember, but I do remember the solace of Mammy's lap,” she had written in
Fanning the Spark
. “Though she was small, light-skinned and far from the stereotype, her lap could spread and deepen to accommodate any wound. It smelled of gingham and a smoky cabin, and it rocked gently during tears. It didn't spill me out with token consolation but was there as long as it was needed. It was pure heartsease.”

Randall began to talk about the changes in the South that he knew.