Deep South

The Hermit Philosopher just finished reading Deep South, a luminous ode to a region that he traversed many times early in life and then lived in for 15 years before finally moving to California. The book chronicles Paul Theroux’s recent travels along the back roads of the Confederacy and describes  encounters with the real South – the South that hasn’t changed much in a hundred years, the South you can’t see from an interstate and usually forget about when in big cities like Atlanta and New Orleans.

19th C. house; no plumbing or electricity

Theroux makes the reader feel what life is like in the backwater (and largely minority) communities of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. He describes the plight of resolute and friendly people living with the vestiges of segregation, their incomparable music and cuisine contrasting with cruel poverty, high unemployment, poor schools, and some of the country’s worst housing. The paradoxes are striking.

Some personal recollections

Having been born in St. Louis and grown up in Terre Haute, IN, I was never far from the South as a kid. And for perhaps 20 years in a row we made the thousand-mile trip to Daytona Beach for spring vacation. In the days before interstate highways, it was two tortured days on tortuous two-lane roads, my white-knuckled father at the wheel migrating us down US 41 through Evansville, Hopkinsville, Nashville, Huntsville, hell-bent on getting us there – at an average speed of about 40 miles per hour – so he could “relax” for ten days before repeating the automotive ordeal in the opposite direction.

All the “villes,” it seemed, were county seats, and the Auto Club’s “TripTik” routed us through each one, into every downtown, and past each courthouse along the way. These personalized, loose-leaf travel documents from the AAA taught me how to read a map, an essential skill because as the navigator I had to be constantly on the lookout for the next road sign. Should we miss it, we might take 231 instead of 431 and end up in Laceys Spring instead of New Hope. Heaven forbid.

When not navigating, my brother and I passed the time looking for Burma Shave signs, noting license plates from far-off places, or playing the “alphabet game.” Heaven help the boy who had to pee, because my dad was loath to stop for anything but gas or coffee. Always thinking of our wellbeing, he brought along empty milk cartons that my brother and I were welcome to use in the event of a serious urological need. 

 

My memories of these trips through the 1950s-60s South also include run-down motels, gas station restrooms marked “Men,” “Women,” and “Colored,”  and billboards that implored us to “Impeach Earl Warren.” Not a happy place in the days of Jim Crow laws.

Water’s on the wrong side

In one section of his compelling travelogue, Theroux describes a view of the Mississippi River from atop the bluffs at Natchez, MS. I drove through Natchez a few times when I was working in Baton Rouge and had to go to Monroe, LA (near Arkansas). As a St. Louis native and resident for 20+ years, it’s impossible for me to see Old Man River without being moved, as Theroux was. “A river is history made visible, the lifeblood of a nation,” Theroux writes, and in our country the Mississippi is the aorta of rivers, the fourth longest in the world. 

But something struck me about a view of the river from Natchez or Baton Rouge: the water seemed to be on the wrong side!  In St. Louis, the Mississippi is never far from one’s mind, and it is to the east, on your right as you face north. Likewise, when I lived in Chicago, Lake Michigan was on the right, and in Daytona Beach the ocean was on the right. But in Natchez or Baton Rouge the river’s on the left – the “wrong” side. I found it disorienting, the same feeling I had when I first moved to San Diego in the mid-70s. There the Pacific seemed to be on the wrong side. I was 180° turned around for the first couple of months.

I’m south, but not Deep South

My place in San Diego is about as far south as you can go in California. It’s roughly the latitude of the Deep South towns of Philadelphia and Meridian, MS;  Selma, Demopolis, and Montgomery, AL;  and Columbus, Albany, and Macon, GA. My homes in Baton Rouge and Orlando were farther south geographically, but even they – being large cities – are not part of the Deep South that Theroux describes. If the residents of Deep South were to leave the Mississippi Delta floodplain, the cotton fields of rural Alabama, or the peanut farms of Georgia, they would probably feel as turned around, disoriented, and out of place in San Diego as I once was.

I’m grateful to be where I am, but also thankful to have an understanding of what "Deep South" means. I may be south now, but I’m not in Deep South, and the ocean is no longer on the wrong side. It’s where it’s supposed to be.

And so am I.

# # #