The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (54 page)

What will happen here? I asked.

“Time will help,” Mary T said. “But I think the divisions will always be there—the racial divisions.”

And I reminded myself that she'd been born in 1917. She had been in her teens during the Depression. She was only seven years younger than James Agee, and so she had known the poverty and the sharecroppers and the lynchings in the Black Belt.

“I did my best,” she said. “I told the truth.”

After, I dropped her at her remote house, the sun lowering into the fields; she waved from the porch. I dropped Randall in Greensboro. I hit the road again. The following week Mary T sent me an e-mail, remarking on something I'd written. I wrote again in the following days. I received a brief reply, and then after a week or so, silence. Randall wrote to say that Mary T was ill and in the hospital; and then, about a month after we met, she died.

Traveling in America

Most travel narratives—perhaps all of them, the classics anyway—describe the miseries and splendors of going from one remote place to another. The quest, the getting there, the difficulty of the road is the story; the journey, not the arrival, matters, and most of the time the traveler—the traveler's mood, especially—is the subject of the whole business. I have made a career out of this sort of slogging and self-portraiture, travel writing as diffused autobiography; and so have many others in the old, laborious look-at-me way that informs travel writing.

But traveling in America is unlike traveling anywhere else on earth. It is filled with road candy, and seems so simple, sliding all over in your car on wonderful roads.

Driving south, I became a traveler again in ways I'd forgotten. Because of the effortless release from my home to the road, the sense of being sprung, I rediscovered the joy in travel that I knew in the days before the halts, the checks, the affronts at airports—the invasions and violations of privacy that beset every air traveler. All air travel today involves interrogation.

Around the corner from Main Street in Greensboro, Alabama, tucked into a brick building he'd financed himself, was the barbershop of the Reverend Eugene Lyles, who was 79. He was seated at a small table peering at the Acts of the Apostles, while awaiting his next customer. In addition to his barbershop, Reverend Lyles was a pastor at the Mars Hill Missionary Baptist Church just south of town, and next door to the barbershop, Reverend Lyles's soul food diner, nameless except for the sign
DINER
out front.

Marking the page in his Bible, and shutting it, then climbing onto one of his barber chairs and stretching his long legs, he said, “When I was a boy I bought a pair of clippers. I cut my brothers' hair. Well, I got ten boy siblings and three girl siblings—fourteen of us. I kept cutting hair. I started this business sixty years ago, cutting hair all that time. And I got the restaurant, and I got the church. Yes, I am busy.

“There are good people in Greensboro. But the white core is rooted in the status quo. The school is separate yet. When it was integrated the whites started a private school, Southern Academy. There's somewhere above two hundred there now.” Reverend Lyles laughed and spun his glasses off to polish them with a tissue. “History is alive and well here.”

And slavery is still a visitable memory because of the persistence of its effects.

“I went to segregated schools. I grew up in the countryside, outside Greensboro, ten miles out, Cedarville. Very few whites lived in the area. I didn't know any whites. I didn't know any whites until the sixties, when I was in my thirties.

“Most of the land in Cedarville was owned by blacks. There was a man, Tommy Ruffin, he owned ten thousand acres. He farmed, he had hands, just like white folks did, growing cotton and corn. He was advised by a white man named Paul Cameron not to sell any of that land to a white person. Sell to blacks, he said, because that's the only way a black man can get a foothold in a rural area.

“My father was a World War I vet. He ran away from here in 1916—he was about twenty. He went to Virginia. He enlisted there, in 1917. After the war, he worked in a coal mine in West Virginia. He came back and married in 1930, but kept working in the mine, going back and forth. He gave us money. I always had money in my pockets. Finally he migrated into Hale County for good and bought some land.”

We went next door to Reverend Lyles's diner. I ordered baked chicken, collard greens, rice and gravy. Reverend Lyles had the same. His younger brother Benny joined us.

“Lord,” Reverend Lyles began, his hands clasped, his eyes shut, beginning grace.

The Gift

At the edge of County Road 16, 10 miles south of Greensboro, an old white wooden building stood back from the road but commanded attention. It had recently been prettified and restored and was used as a community center.

“That's the Rosenwald School. We called it the Emory School,” Reverend Lyles told me. “I was enrolled in that school in 1940. Half the money for the school came from Sears, Roebuck—folks here put up the difference. My mother also went to a Rosenwald School, the same as me. The students were black, the teachers were black. If you go down Highway 69, down to the Gallion area, there is another Rosenwald School, name of Oak Grove.”

Julius Rosenwald, the son of German Jewish immigrants, made a success of his clothing business by selling to Richard Sears, and in 1908 became president of Sears, Roebuck and Co. In midlife his wish was to make a difference with his money, and he hatched a plan to give his wealth to charitable causes but on a condition that has become common today: his contribution had to be met by an equal amount from the other party, the matching grant. Convinced that Booker T. Washington's notion to create rural schools was a way forward, Rosenwald met the great educator and later began the Rosenwald Fund to build schools in backlands of the South.

Five thousand schools were built in 15 states beginning in 1917, and they continued to be built into the 1930s. Rosenwald himself died in 1932, around the time the last schools were built; but before the money he had put aside ran its course, in 1948, a scheme had been adopted through which money was given to black scholars and writers of exceptional promise. One of the young writers, Ralph Ellison, from Oklahoma, was granted a Rosenwald Fellowship, and this gave him the time and incentive to complete his novel
Invisible Man
(1952), one of the defining dramas of racial violence and despair in America. Rosenwald Fellowships also went to the photographer Gordon Parks, the sculptor Elizabeth Catlett (who later created Ellison's memorial in New York City), W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and many other black artists and thinkers.

The schools built with Rosenwald money (and local effort) were modest structures in the beginning, two-room schools like the one in Greensboro, with two or at the most three teachers. They were known as Rosenwald Schools, but Rosenwald himself discouraged naming any of them after himself. As the project developed into the 1920s the schools became more ambitious, brick-built, with more rooms.

One of the characteristics of the schools was an emphasis on natural light through the use of large windows. The assumption was that the rural areas where they'd be built would probably not have electricity; paint colors, placement of blackboards and desks, even the southerly orientation of the schools to maximize the light were specified in blueprints.

The simple white building outside Greensboro was a relic from an earlier time, and had the Reverend Lyles not explained its history, and his personal connection, I would have had no idea that almost 100 years ago a philanthropic-minded stranger from Chicago had tried to make a difference here.

“The financing was partly the responsibility of the parents,” Reverend Lyles told me. “They had to give certain stipends. Wasn't always money. You've heard of people giving a doctor chickens for their payment? That's the truth—that happened in America. Some were given corn, peanuts, and other stuff instead of cash money. They didn't have money back in that day.” Reverend Lyles, who came from a farming family, brought produce his father had grown, and chickens and eggs.

“My grandfather and the others who were born around his time, they helped put up that school building. And just recently Pam Dorr and HERO”—the Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization—“made a plan to fix up the school. It made me proud that I was able to speak when it was reopened as a community center. My grandfather would have been proud, too.”

He spoke some more about his family and their ties to the school, and added, “My grandfather was born in 1850.”

I thought I had misheard the date. Surely this was impossible. I queried the date.

“Correct—1850.”

So Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) was younger than Reverend Lyles's grandfather. “My grandfather wasn't born here but he came here. He remembered slavery—he told us all about it. I was thirteen years old when he passed. I was born in 1934. He would have been in his nineties. Work it out—he was ten years old in 1860. Education wasn't for blacks then. He lived slavery. Therefore his name was that of his owner, Lyles, and he was Andrew Lyles. Later on, he heard stories about the Civil War, and he told them to me.”

Fruit Pies and Bamboo Bikes

A corner shop on Main Street in Greensboro was now called PieLab, a café associated with HERO and well known locally for its homemade fruit pies, salads, and sandwiches.

“The idea was that people would drop in at PieLab and get to know someone new,” Randall Curb had said. “A good concept, but it hasn't worked out—at least I don't think so.” Shaking his head, he had somewhat disparaged it as “a liberal drawing card.”

The next day, quite by chance, having lunch at PieLab, I met the executive director of HERO (and the founder of its Housing Resource Center), Pam Dorr.

The more appealing of the skeletal, fading towns in the South attracted outsiders, in the way third-world countries attracted idealistic volunteers, and for many of the same reasons. With a look of innocence and promise, the places were poor, pretty, and in need of revival. They posed the possibility of rescue, an irresistible challenge to a young college graduate or someone who wanted to take a semester off to perform community service in another world. These were also pleasant places to live in—or at least seemed so.

The desperate housing situation in Greensboro, and Hale County generally, had inspired student architects of the Rural Studio (a program of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture at Auburn University) to create low-cost housing for needy people. The Auburn houses are small, but simple, and some of them brilliantly innovative, looking folded out and logical, like oversized elaborations of origami in tin and plywood. The studio determined that in Greensboro the right price for a small, newly built house would be no more than $20,000, “the highest realistic mortgage a person receiving median Social Security checks can maintain.”

Hearing about the Auburn Rural Studio, Pam Dorr had traveled from San Francisco to Greensboro 10 years before to become an Auburn Outreach fellow. It was a break from her successful career as a designer for popular clothing companies, including Esprit and the Gap and Victoria's Secret (“I made cozy pajamas”). She had come to Greensboro in a spirit of volunteerism, but when her fellowship ended, she was reluctant to leave. “I realized there was so much more I could do,” she told me at PieLab, which grew out of an entrepreneurial group she was in. Another idea, to make bicycle frames out of bamboo, resulted in Hero Bikes, one of the businesses Pam has overseen since starting the Housing Resource Center in 2004.

“We build houses, we educate people on home ownership, and working with nontraditional bankers we help people establish credit.” Local banks had a history of lending mainly to whites. Blacks could get loans but only at extortionate rates—27 percent interest was not uncommon.

“It seemed to me a prime opportunity to start a community again,” Pam said. “We have thirty-three people on the payroll and lots of volunteers. HERO is in the pie business, the pecan business—we sell locally grown pecans to retail stores—the bamboo bike business, the construction business. We have a daycare center and afterschool program. A thrift store.”

Some of these businesses were now housed in what had been a hardware store and an insurance agency. They had redeveloped or improved 11 of the defunct stores on Main Street.

“I worked free for two years,” Pam said. “We got a HUD grant, we got some other help, and now, because of the various businesses, we're self-sustaining.”

She was like the most inspired and energetic Peace Corps volunteer imaginable. Upbeat, full of recipes, solutions, and ideas for repurposing, still young—hardly 50—with wide experience and a California smile and informality. The way she dressed—in a purple fleece and green clogs—made her conspicuous. Her determination to effect change made her suspect.

“You find out a lot, living here,” she told me. “Drugs are a problem—drive along a side road at night and you'll see girls prostituting themselves to get money to support their habit. Thirteen-year-olds getting pregnant—I know two personally.”

“What does the town think of your work?” I asked.

“A lot of people are on our side,” she said. “But they know that change has to come from within.”

“Reverend Lyles told me you had something to do with fixing up the Rosenwald School here.”

“The Emory School, yeah,” she said. “But we had help from the University of Alabama, and volunteers from AmeriCorps—lots of people contributed. Reverend Lyles was one of our speakers at the reopening dedication ceremony. That was a great day.” She took a deep calming breath. “But not everyone is on our side.”

“Really?”

This surprised me, because what she had described, the renovation of an old schoolhouse in a hard-up rural area, was like a small-scale development project in a third-world country. I had witnessed such efforts many times: the energizing of a sleepy community, the fund-raising, the soliciting of well-wishers and sponsors, engaging volunteers, asking for donations of building material, applying for grants and permits, fighting inertia and the naysayers' laughter, making a plan, getting the word out, supervising the business, paying the skilled workers, bringing meals to the volunteers, and seeing the project through to completion. Years of effort, years of budgeting. At last, the dedication, everyone turned out, the cookies, the lemonade, the grateful speeches, the hugs. That was another side to the South, people seeing it as a development opportunity, and in workshops talking about “challenges” and “potential.”