Time for a peach tea pit stop on the I65
This article first appeared in WalesHome in September 2011
It’s hot; suffocatingly hot. I’m already tanking up on a second large glass of iced peach tea, and the Montgomery bus, whose arrival I’m not so patiently awaiting at a kerbside plate-lunch café in Columbus, Georgia won’t be here for another half an hour. My supposed sound reasoning for not hiring a car, and thus my very own personal supply of air-con until Alabama escapes me. Or maybe it’s the heat addling my thoughts. It’s August and the states that make up the Deep South of the USA are collectively sweating their way through record highs. Today the mercury is hovering at the 103 mark, making it the hottest day of the year so far.
Fellow travellers are strewn around the vicinity; top buttons undone, long hair lifted from shoulders, all fanning frantically with large navy blue Greyhound bus tickets. Other than us, the town appears deserted. There’s hardly even a passing car. Next door a mechanic’s neon sign buzzes, flashing intermittently offering friends of Jesus a free brake inspection; opposite a huge billboard asks: “Where are you going- Heaven or Hell? Call 0800 Redemption.”
I’m well and truly below the Mason-Dixon North-South dividing line, in a place of almost unfathomable contrasts. America’s Bible belt it may be, but it is also the birthplace of Jazz, Blues and Rock n Roll. When Cotton and sugar were king, the area’s economy thrived on slave labour; a brutal and bloody civil war that saw the South defeated and its way of life destroyed heralded the abolition of slavery, only for it to be replaced by Jim Crow’s laws of segregation and discrimination. From such injustice came the Civil Rights Movement. Today across the South both histories sit side by side.
The landscape of Dixie is vast and varied also- from Georgia’s pine tree forests, Alabama’s red-clay dusty roads, the lonely, sparsely populated Louisiana swampland to the sweeping infinity of the Mississippi Delta’s cotton fields. Not your average summer holiday itinerary, I grant you; but this land has also proved fertile literary ground, producing some of the world’s most renowned authors and a genre of writing that has captivated me since my teens. This sweltering August afternoon is the beginning of my pilgrimage through the Deep South, in the footsteps of Twain, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee- to name but a few, in search of mockingbirds and a little of Huck and Tom’s Mississippi mischief of my own.
After a journey through the back roads of Georgia where even the bus drivers exude southern charm “Y’all go on right ahead and turn y’alls cell phones on silent. We don’t want to be botherin’ nobody today”, we cross into Alabama. Pines are replaced by a bottle-green overgrown countryside of messy looking woods wrapped in vines. In fact everything here is covered in the plant that I later learn is kudzu, the “mile-a-minute vine”, smothering everything in its path- trees, telegraph poles, old tumbledown houses. The locals say if you stand still long enough- it’ll cover you too. The next stop is Montgomery, both the cradle of the Confederacy and of the Civil rights movement. Here the First White House of the Confederacy (built, incidentally for Confederate President Jefferson Davis, of Welsh descent, whose family crest displayed in the main bedroom there reads ‘Heb Duw heb ddim, Duw a digon’ meaning ‘Without God, without anything. God is enough’) is a two minute stroll from the church where Martin Luther King Junior was pastor; further down the street is the bus stop at which Rosa Parks waited wearily every evening, gazing directly into the windows of the Winter Building opposite, from where the telegram authorising the Civil War was sent. The museum that honours her is only a few blocks away situated on the same street as the city’s former slave market.
These complexities of the Southern experience have provided inspiration for countless authors. Theirs is a world where niceties are dabbed like sweet talc on a difficult history. Fine Southern manners disguise ugly truths. It is a place known in equal amounts for injustice and for human kindness, for sin and for redemption. People mind their behaviour in company, never miss Church on a Sunday, and do horrible things to each other. This ethos of Southern storytelling can, I’m told be traced back to the early English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh settlers who brought with them the King James Bible and Shakespeare.
“We all grew up knowing those tales,” Randall Williams, co-founder of Montgomery publishing house New South Books tells me. “They were true to life to us, the vast tragedies- we could relate to them.”
We are sitting in the front parlour of the guesthouse I’m staying at in Montgomery’s Garden district, a mere cocktail-olive’s throw away from the house shared for a period in the early 1930ies by Mr & Mrs F Scott Fitzgerald. The community here, as it was back then is a tight one and considering that Montgomery is a city, my arrival has not gone un-noticed. People are keen to come and “visit with” me, to sit and talk about the literary legends that have left their mark here. Mr Williams, a founding director of the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s Klanwatch, and former reporter turned editor now runs New South Books, an independent printing press and bookshop in downtown Montgomery. Although times and attitudes have moved on, the area’s troubled past is never long forgotten- a fact he knows well.
New South Books has during recent months attracted international attention for its new edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn which removes the racially offensive ‘n’ word, used in the novel 219 times, replacing it instead with ‘slave’. The changes have come in for stern criticism from academics and readers alike who accuse Randal Williams and the book’s editor, Twain scholar Dr Alan Gribben of diluting the novel’s anti racist message and of censorship.
Gribben and Williams say conversely that they are attempting to rescue the text, which has been disappearing from the school curriculum due to its racially insensitive language. In the American Library Association’s list of the top 100 banned or challenged books of the past decade, Huckleberry Finn comes in at number 14. This new edition, Randall Williams says, was only intended for use in schools that were facing problems teaching the original text.
“We already publish the original version of the book with the ‘n’ word in there, the new edition is for those places where the book is stopped from being taught” he tells me.
“The 60 Minutes news programme went to a school that teaches the text and asked the kids there how they felt about the word. And one black child in a class of mainly white children said it made him uncomfortable. Well, if we’ve published this book just for that one child- then I’m happy with that.”
Although he admits he was shocked by the worldwide media attention.
“In 1972, as a reporter I covered the assassination attempt on George Wallace (the then controversial pro-segregation Governor of Alabama) In the 1980s when I was the director of Klanwatch, our office was fire-bombed by the Ku-Klux-Klan. Both those things were big media stories, but nothing like the storm that came over the publication of this book.”
I suggest to him it demonstrates that despite the delicate subject matter, Twain’s message remains an important one, which is why the book is still beloved the world over.
“Yes, absolutely” he says “That’s why we want everyone to have the chance of reading it.”
Mark Twain knew a thing or two about the importance of getting the tone just right. “The difference between the right and almost right word”, he famously wrote “is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”
Words are certainly important here in the Deep South. And getting it right, it seems, is still as difficult as ever.
80 Tales Around The World 