Blue Highways (11 page)

While how little the New after all, how much the Old, Old World!

For these reasons, Thomas Harriot, who accompanied Grenville, is all the more remarkable. Harriot, the expedition scientist, wrote an absorbing botanical, zoological, and anthropological account of the Pamlico-Albemarle region called
A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia
. His book, containing the striking watercolors of his shipmate and Virginia Dare’s grandfather, John White, is the most important historical record of precolonial, coastal America.

Ahead of his time, Harriot saw the Manitowocs as admirable people who lacked advanced civilization but not intelligence or decency. They were to him cheerful human beings “void of all covetousness… a people free from all care of heaping up riches for their posterity, content with their state.” Of the Manitowocs, who had no interest or need to discover a new world, he wrote:

… considering the want of such means as we have, they seem very ingenious; for although they have no such tools, nor any such crafts, sciences and arts as we, yet in those things they do, they show an excellency of wit…. Whereby it may be hoped if means of good government be used, they may in short time be brought to civility, and the embracing of true religion.

His idea was to enter into an exchange: Indian knowledge of the new land and its produce for European technology and “true” religion.

Harriot’s work would help the Jamestown colony succeed a generation later. Nonetheless, the failure of the new people to give comparable respect to the Indians—not just on Roanoke, but over the whole continent for four centuries—would, more than any other cause, open a gulf between red men and white, a division not yet closed.

B
ECAUSE
of Pamlico Sound, the largest island-enclosed salt sea on the Atlantic coast, North Carolina has more water surface than all but two other contiguous states. Sizes are deceptive here: from Cape Hatteras in the Atlantic west to Hot House, North Carolina, in the Appalachians is five hundred miles.

Along highway 264, skirting the sound, grew stands of loblolly and slash pine, as well as water oaks, bayberry, and laurel. Away from the open waters, the day was warm, and in pocosins drained by small canals and natural sloughs, mud turtles, their black shells the color of the water, crawled up to the warmth on half-submerged logs.

The road passed through the fishing town of Engelhard, then down along Lake Mattamuskeet (drained in the thirties for farming but once again full of water and wildlife), to Swanquarter, around Hell Swamp to Bath. It was in Bath, the oldest town in North Carolina, that Edna Ferber went on board the James Adams Floating Palace Theater in 1925 to see a showboat performance—the only one she ever saw.

I didn’t want to drive the route I’d come the day before, so I headed toward the free ferry across the Pamlico River above where it enters the sound. Two hours later, the ferry, with a loud reversing of props, banged into the slip; three of us drove aboard, and we left in an uproar of engines, water, diesel exhaust, and birds. Laughing gulls materialized from the air to hang above the prop wash and shriek their maniacal laugh (Whitman thought it nearly human) as they dropped like stones from twenty feet into the cold salt scuds; some entered beak first, some with wings akilter, but all followed the first to see an edible morsel, real or imagined. A boy wearing an Atlanta Braves ballcap askew on his head got so excited by this excellent show, he almost tumbled in. I had to pull him back twice.

The other side of the river was warmer, the land high and flattened field after field. New Bern, on the Neuse River, was well-preserved antebellum Georgian houses. The military devastation—the repeated exchange of a town by Union and Confederate troops as the course of the war shifted—that did in so many other Southern cities did not happen to New Bern. Federal forces occupied the town early in the war and held it until the surrender. Later, as railroads developed in North Carolina, New Bern lost its importance as a port city, and “progress” came slower, the old ways remained longer. Most of all, the people retained an interest in the continuity of their past, and they made the new blend with the old. As a result, New Bern is an architecturally interesting city where the Old South still shows on the streets rather than in a museum.

It was afternoon. Maybe I should have stayed in New Bern, but I violated a rule of the road and drove south just because I felt I should move on. The map showed more towns: Comfort, Beulaville, Chinquapin. Either I failed to find the towns or they were clusters of shut-up buildings. I drove on through rising fields, many given to strawberries. No longer was I in the coastal South but coming now into the so-called Deep South. The sun, glaring, began to set, and I couldn’t find a place to suit me.

Finally, at Wallace, I gave up. I had two towns to choose from: a long, bright stretch of hurry-up food and one-stop convenience stores on U.S. 117, or the old town of brick and stone buildings closed for the night. I parked along the railroad tracks, across from the vacant depot. I’d been looking forward to a conversation in a cafe or tavern, but the cafes weren’t open and there were no taverns. It was the first of several Southern evenings when I couldn’t quench a thirst with anything but a sugar drink or sit for conversation at any place other than the softserve stand.

In a parking lot, six boys squatted about a Harley-Davidson and talked as they passed a can of beer. But for the outward trappings, they might have been Bedouins around the evening campfire. I asked one wearing a
BORN TO RAISE HELL
T-shirt what there was to do on Friday night. “Here?” Everybody laughed. “You got yourself a choice. You can watch the electric buglight at DQ. That’s one. Or you can hustle up a sixpack and cruise the strip. That’s two. And three is your left hand, a boy’s best friend.”

“Maybe there’s a tent revival or something like that.”

“Hey! How do you revive the dead?”

I went back to my little bus, washed the strawberry fields off me, ate a sandwich of something, opened a can of beer I’d brought from the last wet county, and looked through the windshield. Cars and trucks drove by. Some were noisy. Some were not. Sometimes a beercan flew out a car window. Once somebody shouted from a pickup. A dog peed on a mailbox.

I wished for a corner tavern with neon and a wooden bar, but I would have settled for a concrete block beerjoint. I grumbled at a hypocrisy that encouraged people to drink in the back ends of pickups. I wanted to go into the churches and hard cuss the congregations as if they were gourd seeds.

H
AD
Stephen Foster not changed his mind, the Pee Dee River would be much better known today than it is. The first version of his famous song about Southern homesickness began, “Way down upon the Pee Dee River, far, far away.” In a morning of wrong moves, I crossed the Pee Dee and almost missed seeing it.

Since daylight I’d been hunting a good three- or four-calendar cafe. Nothing in Tomahawk or White Lake. Elizabethtown, no. I crossed the Cape Fear River, looked in Lumberton, and found nothing right. Then I overshot a turn and got pulled onto I-95. Truck diesel spouts blowing black, the throttle-guts slammed past me as if I were powered by caged gerbils; campers hauling speedboats rushed into Saturday, and so did stationwagons with windows piled full of beachballs, cardboard boxes, and babies.

I escaped the damnation at the Dillon exit and found South Carolina 34, a smooth road built up high out of the low wetlands. The country lay quiet again except for the wind slipping over the roof and mixing with birdsong. The people of the Pee Dee valley waved from their aluminum chairs in the back ends of pickups, and I smelled cattle rather than carbon monoxide. Driving once more instead of being driven. But I was still hungry.

Then Darlington, a town of portico and pediment, iron fences, big trees, and an old courthouse square that looked as though renovated by a German buzz bomb. But on the west side of the square stood the Deluxe Cafe. The times had left it be. The front window said
AIR CONDITIONED
in icy letters, above the door was neon, and inside hung an insurance agency calendar and another for an auto parts store. Also on the walls were the Gettysburg Address, Declaration of Independence, Pledge of Allegiance, a picture of a winged Jesus ushering along two kids who belonged in a Little Rascals film, and the obligatory waterfall lithograph. The clincher: small, white, hexagonal floor tiles. Two old men, carrying their arms folded behind, stopped to greet each other with a light, feminine touching of fingertips, a gesture showing the duration of their friendship. I went in happy.

I expected a grandmother, wiping her hands on a gingham apron, to come from the kitchen. Instead I got Brenda. Young, sullen, pink uniform, bottlecaps for eyes, handling her pad the way a cop does his citation book. The menu said all breakfasts came with grits, toast, and preserves. I ordered a breakfast of two eggs over easy. “Is that all you want?”

“Doesn’t it come with grits and so forth?”

“Does if you ast fort.”

“I want the complete, whole thing. Top to bottom.”

She snapped the pad closed. I waited. I read the rest of the menu, the Gettysburg Address, made a quick run over the Pledge of Allegiance, read about famous American women on four sugar packets, read a matchbook and the imprints on the flatware. I was counting grains of rice in the saltshaker (this
was
the South), when Brenda pushed a breakfast at me, the check slick with margarine and propped between slices of toast. The food was good and the sense of the place fine, but Brenda was destined for an interstate run-em-thru. Early in life she had developed the ability to make a customer wish he’d thrown up on himself rather than disturb her.

Highway 34 out of Darlington ran past a rummage of steel and concrete where the Rebel 500 stockcar race would be held in a week. I stopped and asked a man leaning on a rake if I could look at the track. He told me how to get in. To be honest, I had little interest in an arena where men with a single talent—driving a car fast—performed. I was just looking into things. The immense asphalt oval lay baking in the quiet heat, and I walked around. Hmmm. When I came back out the man at the rake said, “That your honeywagon?”

“That’s my truck.”

“I spect you can stack the ladies in there like cut cordwood.” He became animated, and his eyes opened and closed alternately like an old-time two-bulb blinker stoplight. He was a homely man and the blinking didn’t help.

“Haven’t done any stacking,” I said. “Been moving along.”

“Travelin’ alone! Ever ascared alone?” I shrugged. “Me, I ain’t never ascared,” he said. “Looky here.” From his left breast pocket, he took a worn bullet: a .22 long rifle. “I carried a live forty-five round in the war and never got shot by friend or foe. Always carry me a round over my heart, and ain’t never ascared because I know when I die it’s agonna be from this. And quick. Lord’ll see to that—when it’s my time.”

“You mean you’ll put it in a gun and shoot yourself?”

“It’s a sin to do that, ain’t it now?” He waited for an answer.

“I’ve heard that’s the case.”

“Nope, this here little lady will go off by herself some way or t’other. When it’s my time. Won’t know it neither.”

“What if it goes off by accident before it’s your time?”

“You ain’t alistenin’. Ain’t no accidents in the Lord’s Plan. When she pops off, my ticket’s agettin’ punched. Oughter get yourself one. They make a man right peaceful.”

The sun was like slaps on the neck. Maybe I should have talked longer to that fatalist who made sure he remained a fatalist, but I yielded to the heat. On the road again, I wondered whether there were times when he didn’t put the bullet in his pocket, days he didn’t feel up to the extra risk. Sooner or later, a man carries the seeds of his destruction with him, but I’d never seen a seed like that one.

Dusty little clouds went puffing over powdery tobacco fields in the hot wind, the pine needles looked dry and bleached, and the buds in the deciduous trees afforded no shade. A horse stood up to its belly in a pond of rust-colored water. For me, there was nothing to do but go on into the sun. I’d forgotten to refill the water jugs and had only a few swallows of warm, stale water left from yesterday. I hoped for a soda fountain or rootbeer stand, but the road was dry fields and sunglare, and it went on and on.

Then, like a mirage, a sign:
ARTESIAN WELL.
I turned around. In a cool grove of loblolly, from an upright L-shaped pipe the diameter of a saucer flowed a silvery bash of water among ferns and moss. It gushed into my jugs, filling them instantly, almost knocking one from my grip. I drank off most of the first, gulping, spilling, drinking the coldness so long I came up gasping. I put my head under the cataract, and the force bent me over. I shook the water off.

Someone was laughing. Behind me, a black man with white balls of hair at his temples said, “Had a tickhound used to do that.” From the backseat of his Ford Galaxie, he and his wife unloaded forty-six empty plastic milk containers. He filled each gallon, capped it, and set it on the seat his wife had covered with oilcloth; then he opened the trunk and took out six five-gallon lard buckets and filled those. He finished in ten minutes.

“Do you use the water in gardening?”

“We uses it in us.” They lived three miles away, had no running water, and came to the well Saturday mornings for seventy-six gallons of “sweet-water.”

“What makes it sweet?” I said.

“Nothin’ in that water but water. Be comin’ up from four hundred feet, gettin’ cleaned all the way down and all the way back up. Natural wells used to be all over here, but them new, drilled wells dried up the othern. But this one, he be too deep.” The man closed the trunk and helped his wife into the car. “Govment man come round and say he’d drill a well by the house. I tole him all we’d do with it was flush a water toilet, and we got no water toilet. I says, ‘How that water gone get up to me?’ He say with a lectric pump. I says, ‘We drinks water what come up of his own mind.’”