A Turn in the South (2 page)

He had been excited all morning; he was more excited now. And then, entering another little town, we were seeing the places he had known as a boy. He had cut the grass and cleaned the swimming pool and mopped the porch of that house, the Bowen house, the house of the people who still more or less owned the little town that was called Bowen. And he had done the same job for people in that other house.

That little green wooden house, now closed up, just beside the highway, had been his mother’s house. He had grown up there. His mother lived in another house now; another house—bigger and newer—was home. We saw it from the highway. It was a concrete-block house set back from the road, behind some other houses: not the old, tree-embowered house I had had in my imagination. We didn’t stop; we were going first to the motel, which was some way outside the town.

The main building of the motel was a loghouse. In the sandy yard there were subsidiary little barracklike room-rows below trees and behind shrubs. A black boy was hosing down the veranda floor of the loghouse. He looked timid—for the first time that morning I had a feeling of racial constraint—and he said the office was inside.

There was no apparent office. Only an empty low-ceilinged room with two or three close-set rows of little tables with red- or blue-checked tablecloths. The air conditioning had been turned off a long time before, and the air was dead and smelly.

Howard called out, and after some time a young white man in shorts, with a yellow plastic apron and a large kitchen knife, came in from the back, through two doors. He was sallow, open-mouthed, and his movements were uncoordinated. A little while later a fat old white woman with a twisted face came in through the same two doors. I felt we had been wrong to disturb them, the old woman and the young man who was really a boy.

Two rooms? Would we want two double rooms or two single rooms?

I couldn’t understand the old woman’s questions. But then, putting
down his knife, the boy with the shorts and the yellow plastic apron half beckoned to us, and we followed him—he walked with stamping, awkward steps—out of the dining room to the sandy yard below the pine trees, and then to a low building at the edge of the yard. The ground there was damp; and the small rooms that the boy opened up, one after the other, had the dampness of the ground, with a shut-in, old smell, and with stained cheap carpets.

Better judgment was at work, however. And even while Jimmy and I were looking at the rooms with the silent boy in the yellow apron, Howard—who had not followed us—had heard from somebody in the motel (perhaps the old woman with the twisted face) that there was a more up-to-date motel in the next town, Peters. (Bowen, Peters: American places, big and small, are often named after people; and the ordinariness of the names can make some itineraries read like the muster of an army squad or a sports team.)

To Peters, then, we went, through the highway landscape. And the Peters motel was an altogether bigger affair, with a number of two-story buildings in red brick. It even advertised a swimming pool (though something had happened to the filter, and the pool was green with algae).

Howard, going up the steps ahead of us and entering the office through the two doors, turned to me and said mysteriously, with a touch of humor, “This is something for you.”

And what he meant by that was that the lady in the office was Indian, unmistakably, Indian from India, though she was not in a sari, and though there was an un-Indian confidence in her voice and manner. Her speech was American—to me. It let her down only once, when she said, in her brisk, undeferential way, that coffee and things like that were not available on the “pre-mises,” making the word rhyme with “vices.” That was Indian; that had a flavor of India.

I heard later from Howard that in the last six years or so Indians from India had been buying the motels in the South from white people. (And this perhaps explained the big neon sign,
AMERICAN OWNED
, that I saw some time later on a motel in northwestern Georgia.)

So there, in the place that was home to Howard: the white folk, who might have come out of a novel; and, not far away, people from the other side of the world who were already making themselves American, according to the special idea they would have had of the word.

The motel lady’s husband came into the office. He too was Indian.

He wore a short-sleeved fawn-colored velour shirt, and he had a Texas accent—or so it seemed to me. His wife had said (and he now confirmed) that he had been in the oil business, as a petroleum engineer, in Houston. He had left oil and Houston six years before; and he thought (as his wife had said earlier, though admitting that Peters, North Carolina, was a very quiet place) he had made a good decision.

H
ETTY’S HOUSE
, Howard’s new home, had been built in parts by Hetty herself, with her own hands. It was set back from the road, behind other houses in the settlement, and a drive led to it from the highway. The site had been well chosen. The house had a front portico with steps on either side, and a porch-garage at the end of the drive from the highway. At the back of the house was woodland.

The fluffy, carpeted, upholstered sitting room was welcoming. In one corner was the kitchen, with a dining or serving counter. The bedrooms and general rooms were on either side of a central corridor that ran off from the sitting room.

Hetty was a big but shapely woman. She was sixty, but her skin was still good. She wore glasses. She made a great deal of friendly noise welcoming Jimmy, whom she knew; and Howard acted out the role of the son returning home. He sat on a high stool in front of the kitchen counter, relaxed, his limbs elegantly arranged, one leg folded, one leg straight: in this house a son and now, in addition, half our host. On the wall beside the door that led to the porch-garage there were family photographs, including one of Howard in a graduation gown.

We had lunch: fried fish, collard greens, sweet potatoes with the color of boiled carrots. Four of us sat at the dining table in the dining part of the front reception room.

While we were sitting—I with my back to the front door, which opened out onto the portico with the steps on either side—there were great shouts. A party had arrived: Hetty’s sister from Augusta, Dee-Anna (as I heard the name), and Dee-Anna’s husband and son. Dee-Anna didn’t look like Hetty. She was much bigger and more full of bulges than Hetty, and darker (Hetty was brown). She was more vivacious—acting up a little to her figure—but she had more searching eyes. She didn’t have Hetty’s serenity.

Dee-Anna’s son seemed sloppily dressed at first, but then I saw that his outfit had been assembled with care and was absolutely for show: a
slate-blue jacket in the contemporary shapeless style, a shining, textured white shirt, tapered trousers with patches and exposed labels, and new shoes (new from the near-white appearance of the instep). Easter visitors; holiday dressing up.

They talked for a while about a recent big boxing match. They all liked the winner. Howard said he was like a modern black man, smooth and educated; the other fellow was big and strong, but rougher.

The young man with the contemporary clothes asked what I was doing in North Carolina.

When I told him, he said, “What sort of book? Historical?”

And when Howard and I explained, Dee-Anna said, with a knitting of her brows, “I hope you are not going to give us the gloom.”

Her son—his seriousness now seeming quite separate from his clothes—said, “We’ve had too much of the past.” They were not interested in the past; they were interested in the present.

I
T HAD
not occurred to me to ask whether Hetty did a job. Howard hadn’t told me; and it was only after we had got to the house that I gathered that she worked part-time in the café side of a convenience store that was owned by the present head of the Bowen family. She took Jimmy and me to meet him after lunch. She said he was a good man.

The convenience store was only one of Mr. Bowen’s interests. We went to see him in his furniture factory. He said that he wasn’t really a Bowen. He had only married into the family, but people spoke of him as a Bowen, and he had grown to accept the name. The first record of the name in the town of Bowen was a few years before the Declaration of Independence, but at that time the name of the town was Lawrence (which suggested some kind of dispossession during or after the War of Independence).

History, though, wasn’t what Mr. Bowen wanted to talk about. He was a big man in his early sixties, and he wanted Jimmy and me to see the furniture he made; he wanted to talk about business in Bowen; he wanted us to know that the little town was a go-ahead place, that, though it had only a few thousand people, there were very many millions deposited in the local banks. He was a Bowen man through and through; and while he gave us all the figures, walking Jimmy and me
round the furniture factory, showing us the things he or his machines did with veneers, Hetty stood aside, in her full denim skirt, with something of Howard’s elegance in her posture.

Bowen—I had never heard of the name of the place until Howard had told me. And here it was everywhere, attached to every kind of local business, farm equipment and agricultural supplies, general store, video rentals, gas station, furniture, convenience store.

He was a good man, Hetty said again, after we had left Mr. Bowen and the furniture factory. She had gone to him when she wanted $5,000 for her house. He had spoken that same day to the bank, and a loan had been arranged, and all that the bank had required as security was Hetty’s car and some other small thing. And Mr. Bowen was a religious man, Hetty said. He had given land for the black cemetery. She had a family plot there, with carved headstones.

We drove through suburban woodland to the cemetery. We drove up almost to the headstones. Hetty wanted us to see them, but she didn’t encourage us to get out of the car. We stayed in the car and looked for a while. It was a small cemetery, not set apart by a fence or any kind of planting. Now, with all the spring growth, it was like part of the woodland.

One of the headstones was of Hetty’s father. When we were back in the house she told us something about him. He was a smart man; there had always been a lot of food in the house because of him. He worked on a farm for a white man—and I was beginning to understand how necessary it was for Hetty to define people in the way she did. The white man took no interest in his farm. Hetty’s father did it all for him, the selling of the produce and everything. Now the farmhouse—where Hetty’s father had lived and died—had deteriorated. It was still owned by the white family, but they didn’t want to sell; they wanted to keep it for the memory.

Where did this father of Hetty’s come from? He had died in 1961. Had he perhaps been born around 1900? In 1894, Howard said. That was the year on the headstone in the black cemetery, on the land given by Mr. Bowen. And the story of the father was vague. He had been orphaned; he had run away from a difficult uncle and had found a job on the railroad and had then fetched up here, sharecropping for Mr. Smith, the white man, and ending successfully, being one of the first black men in the area to own a car. It was not possible to get more
about this father, to push back further into time. Beyond that was vagueness, and the gloom Hetty’s sister and the sister’s son, and perhaps all black people, had had too much of.

Later, after a nap—Jimmy in one of the bedrooms of Hetty’s house, I in another—and after tea, we went out for a drive. Hetty knew the land well; she knew who owned what. It was like a chant from her, as we drove.

“Black people there, black people there, white people there. Black people, black people, white people, black people. All this side black people, all this side white people. White people, white people, black people, white people.”

Sometimes she said, “Black people used to own this land.” She didn’t like that—that black people had lost land because they had been slack or because of family disputes. But blacks and whites appeared here to live quite close to one another, and Hetty herself had no racial complaints. White people had been good to her, she said. But then she said that that might have been only because she liked people.

It was a landscape of small ruins. Houses and farmhouses and tobacco barns had simply been abandoned. The decay of each was individual, and they were all beautiful in the afternoon light. Some farmhouses had very wide eaves, going down low, the corrugated iron that once provided shelter now like a too-heavy weight, the corrugated-iron sheets sagging, fanning out in places.

We went to see the house, now abandoned, where Hetty’s father had lived when he had sharecropped for Mr. Smith. Bush grew right up against the open house. The pecan trees, still almost bare, just a few leaves now, were tall above the house and the tobacco barns. The colors were gray (tree trunks and weathered timber) and red (rusted corrugated iron) and green and the straw-gold of reeds. As we stood there Hetty told us of the death of her father in that house; the event was still vivid to her.

Another house, even more beautiful, was where Hetty and her husband had lived for ten years. It was a farmhouse with a big green field, with forest trees bounding the distance on every side.

Home was not for Howard just his mother’s house, the little green house that was now closed up, or the new concrete-block house she had moved to. Home was what we had seen. And we had seen only a part: all about these country roads, within a few miles, were houses and
fields connected with various members of Howard’s family. It was a richer and more complicated past than I had imagined; and physically much more beautiful. The houses I was taken to were bigger than the houses many people in Trinidad or England might have lived in.

But, stili, in the past there was that point where darkness fell, the historical darkness, even here, which was home.

We went to dinner at the Seafood Bar-B-Q. It was really the only place possible. It was a roadhouse, a big dimly lit room with a silent jukebox and a few dressed-up white family groups. Beer couldn’t be served. So we had the iced tea, which Howard said was very Southern. It was syrupy, the taste no doubt of the waitresses, who were white and young and friendly. One of them was very young, perhaps about twelve, and delighted to be dressed like a waitress, helping out a sister or a parent during the holiday weekend, serving goodies.