The Lost Continent (10 page)

A path behind the house led to a gift shop where you could buy Elvis memorabilia—albums, badges, plates, posters. Everywhere you looked his handsome, boyish face was beaming down at you. I bought two postcards and six books of matches, which I later discovered, with a strange sense of relief, I had lost somewhere. There was a visitors’ book by the door. All the visitors came from towns with nowhere names like Coleslaw, Indiana; Dead Squaw, Oklahoma; Frigid, Minnesota; Dry Heaves, New Mexico; Colostomy, Montana. The book had a column for remarks. Reading down the list I saw, “Nice,” “Real nice,” “Very nice,” “Nice.” Such eloquence. I turned back to an earlier page. One visitor had misunderstood the intention of the remarks column and had written, “Visit.” Every other visitor on that page and the facing page had written, “Visit,” “Visit,” “Re-visit,” “Visit” until someone had turned the page and they got back on the right track.

The Elvis Presley house is in Elvis Presley Park on Elvis Presley Drive, just off the Elvis Presley Memorial Highway. You may gather from this that Tupelo is proud of its most famous native son. But it hadn’t done anything tacky to exploit his fame, and you had to admire it for that. There weren’t scores of gift shops and wax museums and souvenir emporia all trying to make a quick killing from Presley’s fading fame, just a nice little house in a shady park. I was glad I had stopped.

From Tupelo I drove due south towards Columbus, into a hot and rising sun. I saw my first cotton fields, dark and scrubby but with fluffs of real cotton poking out from every plant. The fields were surprisingly small. In the Midwest you get used to seeing farms that sweep away to the horizon; here they were the size of a couple of vegetable patches. There were more shacks as well, a more or less continuous line of them along the highway. It was like driving through the world’s roomiest slum. And these were real shacks. Some of them looked dangerously uninhabitable, with sagging roofs and walls that looked as if they had been cannonballed. Yet as you passed you would see someone lurking in the doorway, watching you. There were many roadside stores as well, more than you would have thought such a poor and scattered populace could support, and they all had big signs announcing a motley of commodities: G
AS
, F
IREWORKS
, F
RIED
C
HICKEN
, L
IVE
B
AIT
. I wondered just how hungry I would have to be to eat fried chicken prepared by a man who also dealt in live bait. All the stores had Coke machines and gas pumps out front, and almost all of them had rusting cars and assorted scrap scattered around the yard. It was impossible to tell if they were still solvent or not by their state of dereliction.

Every once in a while I would come to a town, small and dusty, with loads of black people hanging around outside the stores and gas stations, doing nothing. That was the most arresting difference about the South—the number of black people everywhere. I shouldn’t really have been surprised by it. Blacks make up 35 percent of the population in Mississippi and not much less in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. In some counties in the South, blacks outnumber whites by four to one. Yet until as recently as twenty-five years ago, in many of those counties not a single black person was registered to vote.

With so much poverty everywhere, Columbus came as a welcome surprise. It was a splendid little city, hometown of Tennessee Williams, with a population of 30,000. During the Civil War it was briefly the state capital, and it still had some large antebellum homes lining the well-shaded road in from the highway. But the real jewel was its downtown, which seemed hardly to have changed since about 1955. Crenshaw’s Barber Shop had a rotating pole out front and across the street was a genuine five-and-dime called McCrory’s and on the corner was the Bank of Mississippi in an imposing building with a big clock hanging over the sidewalk. The county courthouse, city hall and post office were all handsome and imposing edifices but built to a small-town scale. The people looked prosperous. The first person I saw was an obviously well-educated black man in a three-piece suit carrying a
Wall Street Journal.
It was all deeply pleasing and encouraging. This was a first-rate town. Combine it with Pella’s handsome square and you would almost have my long-sought Amalgam. I was beginning to realize that I was never going to find it in one place. I would have to collect it piecemeal—a courthouse here, a fire station there—and here I had found several pieces.

I went for a cup of coffee in a hotel on Main Street and bought a copy of the local daily paper, the
Commercial Dispatch
(“Mississippi’s Most Progressive Newspaper”). It was an old-fashioned paper with a banner headline across eight columns on page one that said T
AIWANESE
B
USINESS
G
ROUP
TO
V
ISIT
G
OLDEN
T
RIANGLE
A
REA
, and beneath that a crop of related single-column subheadings all in different sizes, typefaces and degrees of coherence:

Visitors Are Looking

At Opportunities

For Investment

AS PART

OF TRADE

MISSION

Group to Arrive in

Golden Triangle

Thursday

STATE OFFICIALS

COORDINATE VISIT

All the stories inside suggested a city ruled by calmness and compassion: “Trinity Place Homemakers Give Elderly a Helping Hand,” “Lamar Landfill Is Discussed,” “Pickens School Budget Adopted.” I read the police blotter. “During the past 24 hours,” it said, “the Columbus Police Department had a total of 34 activities.” What a wonderful place—the police here didn’t deal with crimes, they had activities. According to the blotter the most exciting of these activities had been arresting a man for driving on a suspended license. Elsewhere in the paper I discovered that in the past twenty-four hours six people had died—or had death activities, as the police blotter might have put it—and three births had been recorded. I developed an instant affection for the
Commercial Dispatch
(which I rechristened in my mind the
Amalgam Commercial Dispatch
) and for the town it served.

I could live here, I thought. But then the waitress came over and said, “Yew honestly a breast menu, honey?” and I realized that it was out of the question. I couldn’t understand a word these people said to me. She might as well have addressed me in Dutch. It took many moments and much gesturing with a knife and fork to establish that what she had said to me was “Do you want to see a breakfast menu, honey?” In fact I had been hoping to see a lunch menu, but rather than spend the afternoon trying to convey this notion, I asked for a Coca-Cola, and was enormously relieved to find that this did not elicit any subsidiary questions.

It isn’t just the indistinctness with which Southerners speak that makes it so difficult to follow, it’s also the slowness. This begins to get to you after a while. The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence. Living there would drive me crazy. Slowly.

Columbus is just inside the state boundary line and I found myself, twenty minutes after leaving town, in Alabama, heading for Tuscaloosa by way of Ethelsville, Coal Fire and Reform. A sign by the highway said, D
ON
’
T
L
ITTER
. K
EEP
A
LABAMA
THE
B
EAUTIFUL
. “OK, I the will,” I replied cheerfully.

I put the radio on. I had been listening to it a lot in the last couple of days, hoping to be entertained by backward and twangy radio stations playing songs by artists with names like Hank Wanker and Brenda Buns. This is the way it always used to be. My brother, who was something of a scientific wizard, once built a shortwave radio from old baked-bean cans and that sort of thing, and late at night when we were supposed to be asleep he would lie in bed in the dark twiddling his knob (so to speak), searching for distant stations. Often he would pick up stations from the South. They would always be manned by professional hillbillies playing twangy music. The stations were always crackly and remote, as if the broadcasts were being beamed to us from another planet. But here now there were hardly any hillbilly-sounding people. In fact, there were hardly any Southern accents at all. All the disc jockeys sounded as if they came from Ohio.

Outside Tuscaloosa I stopped for gas and was surprised that the young man who served me also sounded as if he came from Ohio. In point of fact he did. He had a girlfriend at the University of Alabama, but he hated the South because it was so slow and backward. I asked him about the voices on the radio since he seemed to be an on-the-ball sort of guy. He explained that Southerners had become so sensitive about their reputation for being shit-squishing rednecks that all the presenters on TV and radio tried to sound as if they came from the North and had never in their whole lives nibbled a hush puppy or sniffed a grit. Nowadays it was the only way to get a job. Apart from anything else, the zippier Northern cadences meant the radio stations could pack in three or four commercials in the time it would take the average Southerner to clear his throat. That was certainly very true, and I tipped the young man thirty-five cents for his useful insight.

From Tuscaloosa, I followed Highway 69 south into Selma. All Selma meant to me was vague memories from the civil rights campaigns in the 1960s, when Martin Luther King led hundreds of blacks on forty-mile marches from there to Montgomery, the state capital, to register to vote. It was another surprisingly nice town—this corner of the South seemed to be awash with them. It was about the same size as Columbus, and just as shady and captivating. Trees had been planted along the streets downtown and the sidewalks had recently been repaved in brick. Benches had been set out, and the waterfront area, where the city ended in a sharp bluff overlooking the Alabama River, had been cleaned up. It all had an agreeable air of prosperity. At a tourist information office I picked up some pamphlets extolling the town, including one boasting of its black heritage. I was heartened by this. I had seen nothing even faintly praiseworthy of blacks in Mississippi. Moreover, blacks and whites here seemed to be on far better terms. I could see them chatting at bus stops, and I saw a black nurse and white nurse traveling together in a car, looking like old friends. Altogether, it seemed a much more relaxed atmosphere than in Mississippi.

I drove on, through rolling, open countryside. There were some cotton fields still, but mostly this was dairy country, with green fields and bright sunshine. In the late afternoon, almost the early evening, I reached Tuskegee, home of the Tuskegee Institute. Founded by Booker T. Washington and developed by George Washington Carver, it is America’s premier college for blacks. It is also the seat of one of the poorest counties in America. Eighty-two percent of the county population is black. More than half the county residents live below the poverty level. Almost a third of them still don’t have indoor plumbing. That is really poor. Where I come from you are poor if you can’t afford a refrigerator that makes its own ice cubes and your car doesn’t have automatic windows. Not having running water in the house is something beyond the realms of the imaginable to most Americans.

The most startling thing about Tuskegee was that it was completely black. It was in every respect a typical small American city, except that it was poor, with lots of boarded shopfronts and general dereliction, and that every person in every car, every pedestrian, every storekeeper, every fireman, every postman, every last soul was black. Except me. I had never felt so self-conscious, so visible. I suddenly appreciated what a black person must feel like in North Dakota. I stopped at a Burger King for a cup of coffee. There must have been fifty people in there. I was the only person who wasn’t black, but no one seemed to notice or care. It was an odd sensation—and rather a relief, I must say, to get back out on the highway.

I drove on to Auburn, twenty miles to the northeast. Auburn is also a college town and roughly the same size as Tuskegee, but the contrast could hardly have been more striking. Auburn students were white and rich. One of the first sights I saw was a blonde sweeping past in a replica Duesenberg that must have cost her daddy $25,000. It was obviously a high-school graduation present. If I could have run fast enough to keep up, I would happily have urinated all down the side of it. Coming so soon after the poverty of Tuskegee, it made me feel strangely ashamed.

However, I must say that Auburn appeared to be a pleasant town. I’ve always liked college towns anyway. They are about the only places in America that manage to combine the benefits of a small-town pace of life with a dash of big-city sophistication. They usually have nice bars and restaurants, more interesting shops, an altogether more worldly air. And there is a pleasing sense of being around 20,000 young people who are having the best years of their lives.

In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren’t available, but at least you did it. Nowadays, American students’ principal concerns seem to be sex and keeping their clothes looking nice. I don’t think learning comes into it very much. At the time of my trip there was an outcry in America over the contagion of ignorance that appeared to be sweeping through the nation’s young people. The principal focus of this nationwide wrist-wringing was a study by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It had recently tested 8,000 high-school seniors and found that they were as stupid as pig dribble. More than two-thirds of them did not know when the US Civil War took place, couldn’t identify Stalin or Churchill, and didn’t know who wrote
The Canterbury Tales.
Almost half thought World War I started before 1900. A third thought that Roosevelt was president during the Vietnam War and that Columbus sailed to America after 1750. Forty-two percent—this is my favorite—couldn’t name a single country in Asia. I would scarcely have believed all this myself except that the summer before I had taken two American high-school girls for a drive around Dorset—bright girls, both of them now enrolled in colleges of high repute—and neither of them had ever heard of Thomas Hardy. How can you live to be eighteen years old and never have at least
heard
of Thomas Hardy?