A Turn in the South

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at Oxford he began to write, and since then he has followed no other profession. He is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction and the recipient of numerous honors, including the Nobel Prize in 2001, the Booker Prize in 1971, and a knighthood for services to literature in 1990. He lives in Wiltshire, England.

PROLOGUE

J
IMMY WORKED
in New York as a designer and lettering artist. Howard was his assistant. Jimmy, who could become depressed at times, said to Howard one day, “Howard, if I had to give up, and you couldn’t get another job, what would you do?” Howard, who was from the South, said, “I would go home to my mama.”

Jimmy was as struck by this as I was when Jimmy told me: that Howard had something neither Jimmy nor I had, a patch of the earth he thought of as home, absolutely his. And that was where—many months after I had heard this story—I thought I should begin this book about the South: with the home that Howard had.

Howard arranged the visit. Jimmy decided to come with us. We went on the Easter weekend; the timing was pure chance.

It was raining, had been raining in New York for two days.

At La Guardia Howard said, “I hated the place when I was young, for the continuity.”

I thought he meant historical continuity, the past living on. But from other things he then said, I felt he meant only that it was a country place where little changed and little happened. I had this trouble with Howard’s words sometimes; I was too ready to find in them meanings he didn’t intend.

Howard was six feet tall, but slender and light of movement. He was in his late twenties or early thirties. He was very much his own
man. He lived alone, and he preferred not to live in Harlem. He was a serious reader of newspapers and magazines, and he had a special interest in foreign affairs. He liked to cook; and he kept himself fit by playing paddle ball on weekends. He was easy to be with, not spiky; and I put this down in part to the home he was so sure of and still close to.

Howard said, “You see how the South begins. More black people here, on the plane.”

Most of the passengers were black, and they were not like an African or West Indian crowd. They were almost subdued, going home from the big city for Easter.

We landed at Greensboro. It was a big airport; and then, just a few minutes away, proof of the scale of things here, there was another airport, just as big. We got off there. There were military people in the waiting areas. It was warmer than in New York; I changed into a lighter jacket.

Soon we were on the highway.

Howard said, “Look, the dogwood and the pines. It is what you see a lot of in the South.”

The dogwood was a small tree, and it was now in single-petaled white blossom. Not the dogwood of England, the water-loving red-stemmed shrub or small tree that made a bright autumn and winter show. And there were—Howard identified them for me—oaks and maples, in the freshest spring-green.

The land was flat, like the pampas of Argentina or the llanos of Venezuela. But trees bordered the fields and gave a human scale to things. We passed tobacco barns, tallish, squarish, corrugated-iron structures, where in the old days tobacco was cured. They were in decay, the corrugated iron rusted dark red, the wood weathered gray. Against the green this corrugated-iron rust was a lovely color; it gave an extra beauty to the land.

The highway looked like highways everywhere else in the United States: boards for motels and restaurants and gas stations.

Tobacco was still a crop. We saw the seedlings being mechanically planted: one black man on the tractor, two men on the trolley behind dropping earth-rooted seedlings down a shafted dibble. All this used to be done by hand, Howard said. He picked tobacco in the school holidays. The resin from the green leaf stained his hands black and was hard to clean off. I never knew about this black-staining resin from the
green leaf, but it was immediately comprehensible. It was for that resin, that tar, that people smoked the cured leaf.

We had driven so fast on the highway that we were in Howard’s area almost before I was ready for it. There was a small town center, a small rich white suburb attached to that town, and then outside that a black area. The differences were noticeable. But Howard, near his home now, appeared to claim both the white area and the black area.