Jane Jacobs, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, calls it "the sacking of cities." Americans have become their own Visigoths.
Steinbeck noticed the decaying city cores almost fifty years ago. In Travels with Charley, he offered "a generality concerning the growth of American cities, seemingly true of all of them I know. When a city begins to grow and spread outward, from the edges, the centre which was once its glory is in a sense abandoned to time. Then the buildings grow dark and a kind of decay sets in; poorer people move in as the rents fall, and small fringe businesses take the place of once flowering establishments. The district is still too good to tear down and too outmoded to be desirable."
The collapse did not begin with box stores or the automobile or the suburbs. It began, I suspect, with those courthouses I"ve been noticing along the way. That odd cl.u.s.tering of government buildings at the heart of a town is the signature of the City Beautiful movement, sp.a.w.ned in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Civic buildings were designed not as places for people but as monuments- to power, to wealth, to civic security. They were arranged along boulevards or bordered by parks, anything to set them off from the rest of the city, to produce a grand and imposing effect. Often, what urban planners called slums-what Jane Jacobs calls densely populated, tightly knit downtown communities-were bulldozed to make room for them.
"Invariably the ordinary city around them ran down instead of being uplifted," writes Jacobs. "People stayed away from them to a remarkable degree."
The courthouse with its narrow skirt of gra.s.s may look like a New England common or a Spanish plaza, but the intent and the philosophy are the opposite of community: this construction divides a city into them and us.
Jacobs wrote her great urban planning treatise in 1961, the same year Steinbeck went on the road with his dog, Charley. Seven years later, she left the United States and settled in Toronto, a move prompted by her desire to protect her draft-age sons from the Vietnam War. We like to think of her as our own, standing with us in our moreorless constant criticism of America, but I wonder if we"re any better than Americans at making desirable places where we can live together in close quarters. Most Canadian towns still have some life at the centre, but the drain has begun; you can see it in the blank stares of the empty storefronts. Box stores and outlet malls are popping up along our highways, too. Already there are over three hundred Walmarts in Canada; the busiest in the world is in the Square One Shopping Centre in Mississauga, Ontario. In proportion to our population, we don"t have all that far to go to catch up to the United States, where there are almost four thousand stores (Walmart is the world"s largest public corporation by revenue, America"s largest grocery retailer, and its largest private employer).
Jacobs didn"t believe it was just the big retailers and the handy automobile that were ruining cities. She laid the blame on the planners, who traditionally refused to recognize cities as complex, integrated organisms.
"Human beings are, of course, a part of nature, as much so as grizzly bears or bees or whales or sorghum cane," she argued. "The cities of human beings are as natural . . . as are the colonies of prairie dogs or the beds of oysters."
What kills cities, it seems to me, is this insistence on hiving off their parts: bedrooms in the suburbs, civic buildings in the centre, shops "out the highway." The modern North American city is being dismembered, its functions separated, parcelled out. No wonder the centre cannot hold. These things, taken together, are what gives a city heart.
WE cross the border from Alabama into Georgia on the I-85, aware that we are travelling against the desperate tide of Southern history. By the time Thomas Jefferson began the long construction project that would be Monticello, in 1768, much of the agricultural land throughout the Old South was already exhausted. A century of intensive farming in Virginia, first of tobacco and then of cotton, on land that had not been rich to begin with, and without the relief of any system of crop rotation, had depleted the soil to such an extent that many plantation owners simply pulled up stakes and moved west to the neighbouring state of Georgia, the flat, disheartened land we are driving through now.
In the 1840s, when Georgia land had become good for little but peanuts, families moved to Alabama, then Mississippi, then Louisiana. Intensive farming didn"t take long to ruin that land, too. "By 1860," writes Roger G. Kennedy in Mr. Jefferson"s Lost Cause, "the alkaline uplands of Mississippi and Alabama were showing their bones." So it was on to Texas.
From the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 until the Civil War, it was not uncommon on these roads to see entire families moving to their new plantation lands in the West, the whites in their covered, horse-drawn carriages, preceded by wagonloads of their household goods and long phalanxes of their slaves-their human goods-trudging through the dust ahead of them. Most Southern families made this one-way migration at least twice in a generation, steadily moving further west.
It wasn"t as though Southern agronomists didn"t know about crop rotation and soil depletion. The point was that allowing arable land to lie fallow every two or three years cost money. Plantation owners still had to feed and house their slaves, whether the fields were producing cotton or not. And land in the West was so cheap that it was less expensive to buy new acreage, and clear and break it, than it was to properly tend land in the East.
It gives me a grim sort of satisfaction to think of this possible land of my forebears as sere and diminished by white inept.i.tude; I feel as an Israelite might have felt looking back on Egypt after the plagues had swept through it, plagues that the Egyptians had brought upon themselves.
WE ARE headed for Athens, Georgia. Back home, friends told us they had been to the University of Georgia in Athens for a conference and were struck by how often they had come across the name Grady while walking around town. "The place is full of Gradys," they told us. "White Gradys, black Gradys. If your father"s family came from the South, then Athens is the place to look." It struck me as a promising coincidence that the village where Merilyn and I live in eastern Ontario is named Athens, too.
I"m not actively researching the Grady family history. A few years ago, however, I did discover a Thomasina Grady, a black woman with a white slave owner"s surname, who moved from somewhere in Georgia to somewhere in Kentucky and from there crossed the Ohio River into Indiana in 1835. She and her husband and children and grandchildren-one of them my great-grandfather, Andrew Jackson Grady-weathered the Civil War on a farm near Spencer, Indiana. Somewhere in Georgia might easily have been Athens, given that there were plantation-owning Gradys in the area. I don"t know what I"ll do, exactly, in Athens. Maybe someone who looks like me will come up and shake my hand. At the very least, I might feel, for the first time in my life, what it"s like to set foot on ancestral soil.
I know there is a Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. I remember reading that the actor Whitman Mayo, who played Grady in the TV sitcom Sanford & Son, died there in 2001. And there is a Grady College of Journalism at the University of Georgia, in Athens. Both the hospital and the college were named after the journalist Henry Woodfin Grady, who was born in Athens in 1850, much too late to have been an ancestor of mine. But Henry Woodfin Grady"s father was William S. Grady. Henry and William are both common names on my father"s family tree, and William S. Grady was a slave owner. I don"t know whether slaves who took their masters" surnames tended to perpetuate their Christian names as well. I think it unlikely, but the coincidence draws me toward Athens.
William S. Grady was killed during the Civil War at the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864, and Henry was raised by his mother until he graduated from the University of Georgia and married into a wealthy cotton family from nearby Rome. Like me, he became a journalist. He started the Rome Commercial and the Rome Daily, both of which went bankrupt within a year. In 1872, he bought a half-interest in the Atlanta Herald, which folded in 1876. Still undaunted, he borrowed twenty thousand dollars and purchased the Atlanta Const.i.tution and this time succeeded in turning the newspaper into the most popular weekly in the United States. He specialized in "newsletters," a term he may have coined, and pioneered the practice of actually interviewing the subjects of his stories. He used his paper as a platform from which he extolled "the New South," a term, if not a notion, he also invented.
The New South, he believed, would be a post-bellum paradise of diversified agriculture, prosperous industry, and a conciliatory att.i.tude toward the North. He was known as "the orator of the peacemakers" in the North but viewed as something of a traitor below the Mason-Dixon Line. A famous speech delivered in New York in 1886 began: "There was a South of slavery and secessionism; that South is dead. There is a South of union and freedom; that South, thank G.o.d, is living." Northerners in the audience, including J.P. Morgan and Charles Tiffany, applauded; Southerners, reading the speech the next day in the Const.i.tution, scoffed.
It"s hard to know what they objected to most: Grady"s promise to coerce Southern farmers away from cotton, or his a.s.surance that a Southern industrial economy would be fuelled by emanc.i.p.ated "willing" black labourers who would be "fairly treated" by their former masters. His dream, expounded in speech after speech throughout the 1880s, was to unite all Southern whites into one political party, funded by a financial and industrial culture that would rise after King Cotton was deposed. He pursued this goal with such pa.s.sion that his speeches, as one biographer described them, sounded like "a cannonball in full flight," and wore him out to such an extent that, in 1889, while on a lecture tour in the North, he came down with pneumonia and died. He was thirty-nine.
My father was forever taken up with grand, impractical schemes. He would turn his father"s small plastering business in Windsor into a major construction firm; he would move us to Boston to manage a chemical plant owned by the brother of Joe DiMaggio, the baseball player, or maybe to Florida, where he would play first trombone for Guy Lombardo"s Royal Canadians. He never actually did any of those things, but as years pa.s.sed, as he went on delivering milk for Silver-wood Dairy without advancing to run the company, selling used cars in North Bay and still not owning his own dealership, or serving in the air force and never rising above the rank of corporal, I imagine the dreams sustaining him, keeping him going. And eventually killing him, for I also remember my father as a tight bundle of suppressed fury, not defeated or appalled by the unchanging number of rungs on the ladder above his head so much as baffled by it, as a fly is baffled by an invisible windowpane. In 1969, at the age of forty-four, after a fit of towering rage brought on by an imagined slight from a superior officer, he suffered a heart attack so ma.s.sive it would have killed him had he been living in a less technologically advanced age.
Impractical schemes, sudden untimely death: perhaps Henry Woodfin Grady and my father were related, after all.
MOVING through the plantation lands south of Atlanta, I can"t help but think of the women: the mothers, wives, and daughters in the antebellum houses and in the slave shacks behind, and the women, too, who travelled this landscape before me, especially the well-bred women travellers of the early nineteenth century who crossed the Atlantic to take a first-hand look, as I am doing, at the American South.
"Have you ever heard of Frances Kemble?" I ask Wayne. We are driving through agricultural land. Now and then we pa.s.s a stately house, but more often, these farms seem no different from farms we"ve driven past in Europe or back home.
"No. Who was she?"
"She travelled through here in the late 1820s. I wonder what she would have seen."
Frances Kemble was an actress. She toured the eastern seaboard with her father, a famous British actor. In Philadelphia, she left the stage to marry Pierce Butler, grandson of one of America"s founding fathers, the man who insisted that the Const.i.tution contain a provision to ensure the capture and return of fugitive slaves.
"Runaways like my great-great-great-grandmother Thomasina," Wayne says.
"I don"t think Frances knew how her husband made his money."
It wasn"t until after the wedding that Frances discovered she owed her comfort to cotton and rice plantations in Georgia. And she didn"t fully realize what that meant until, after her second daughter was born, she travelled with Butler to the South.
Nothing in England had prepared her for what she saw: twenty people or more living in cabins the size of a bedroom, all of them sleeping on moss collected in the forest and covered with "filthy, pestilential-looking blankets." During the day, only the very young were left in the cabins; toddlers carried newborns to their mothers in the fields to nurse. The infirmary was the worst. "Poor wretches lay prostrate on the floor, without bed, mattress, or pillow, buried in tattered and filthy blankets, which, huddled round them as they strewed about, left hardly s.p.a.ce to move upon the floor."
Frances did what she could to improve conditions for her husband"s 450 slaves. She had new cabins built with proper bedsteads, bought them mattresses and blankets. But what she wanted was for Butler to free his slaves. He gave her a choice: accept his way of life or lose her daughters. She fled north, leaving the plantation and Pierce, who won custody of the girls.
She didn"t keep quiet about what she"d seen. She made a fair copy of her journal and pa.s.sed it to her friends. Over the years it made the rounds of anti-slavery circles in the North until finally, a quarter century later, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 18381839 was published.
"I have sometimes been haunted with the idea," Kemble wrote, "that it was an imperative duty, knowing what I know, and having seen what I have seen, to do all that lies in my power to show the dangers and the evils of this frightful inst.i.tution."
What would we have done, Wayne and I, had we seen black men and women bent over in the fields? Would we have been appalled?
I"d like to think so. It takes a visitor to object to what locals take for granted as a fixture in the landscape. Travellers may know less about where they are, but they see more.
Wayne has a shelf of slave narratives in his study at home. I wonder how they got written, when teaching a slave to read or write was punishable by fines and outright imprisonment. Another Frances- Frances Wright-broke that rule. When she and her sister Camilla travelled to the United States from England in 1818 on a tour of the new country, they were so offended by slavery that they decided to stay and try to effect change.
"The sight of slavery is revolting everywhere, but to inhale the impure breath of its pestilence in the free winds of America is odious beyond all that the imagination can conceive." She understood the obstacles that stood in the way of emanc.i.p.ation; what she could not abide was that Americans contented themselves with deploring the evil instead of "setting their shoulders to the wheel and actively working out its remedy."
The sisters bought a tract of land where the Mississippi River enters Tennessee and brought forty slaves to the estate. Their idea was to build a school and educate the children exactly as white children were schooled, thus preparing them for emanc.i.p.ation and at the same time producing proof that the colour of a person"s skin had nothing to do with the workings of the mind.
Frances Trollope, a novelist and the mother of the writer Anthony Trollope, visited Frances Wright"s colony in 1828. The two Franceses had met on board ship while travelling from England to America. Trollope was intrigued by the idea of a wilderness slave school and had promised to visit.
"One glance sufficed to convince me that every idea I had formed of the place was as far as possible from the truth," she writes in her travel memoir Domestic Manners of the Americans. "Desolation was the only feeling-the only word that presented itself . . . I decided upon leaving the place with as little delay as possible."
In her travelogue, Trollope pulls no punches. Americans, she opines, are at once vulgar and prudish, live in ugly, makeshift buildings, and travel on roads that are all but impa.s.sable. The merchants are dishonest, the scholars stupid, the women flat-chested. More than anything, she rails against American hypocrisy. "Look at them at home; you will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves. You will see them one hour lecturing their mob on the indefeasible rights of man, and the next driving from their homes the children of the soil, whom they have bound themselves to protect by the most solemn treaties."
Mrs. Trollope found it hard to stomach lectures on democracy and freedom from a country founded on slavery and genocide and forged in the crucible of constant aggression. Not that Canadians were much better. Residential schools, the expulsion of the Acadians, the internment of the j.a.panese: we both have skeletons in our historical closets.
Trollope"s travels through the South produced more than a caustic memoir. Less than a decade after her aborted visit to Frances Wright"s colony, she published The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, which many consider the first anti-slavery novel. The book deeply influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote the most famous anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom"s Cabin, based on the slave narrative of Reverend Josiah Henson, who travelled the Underground Railway to Canada.
Uncle Tom"s Cabin opens with Tom being sold at a slave auction. Josiah Henson, in his autobiography, recalls the actual event in Maryland upon which Stowe"s fictional account is based: "The knowledge that all ties of the past were to be sundered; the frantic terror at the idea of being sent "down south"; the almost certainty that one member of a family will be torn from another; the anxious scanning of purchasers" faces; the agony of parting, often forever, with husband, wife, child-these must be seen and felt to be fully understood. Young as I was then, the iron entered into my soul."
In March 1857, five years after Stowe"s novel was published, the largest sale of human beings ever held in the history in the United States took place on a racetrack in Savannah: all 450 slaves belonging to Pierce Butler were sold to pay his gambling debts. According to the New York Tribune, buyers strolled among the slaves, "pulling their mouths open to see their teeth, pinching their limbs to find how muscular they were, walking them up and down to detect any signs of lameness, making them stoop and bend in different ways that they might be certain there was no concealed rupture or wound."
The highest price paid for one family-a mother and her five grown children-was $6,180. More often than not, families were split up and sold off one by one. The highest price for an individual was $1,750, the lowest, $250. Net proceeds were $303,850, making Pierce Butler once again a wealthy man.
"They say it rained non-stop all during the two days of the sale," I tell Wayne, my voice almost a whisper. Raindrops slide down the windshield, obscuring the landscape. "People said it was as though heaven itself was crying. The locals called the sale "the weeping time.""
There"s nothing more to be said. Wayne and I stare out the window, seeing nothing.
WE leave the interstate at Madison and take a red road to Athens. The town is as quaint and tidy as our friends described it. White-painted porches vie for s.p.a.ce along hilly streets. It is Sunday and the town"s record offices are closed. A "fraternity event" is being held in the Taylor-Grady House, a huge, white-pillared, Greek-revival mansion on the outskirts of town. Built in 1844 by Robert Taylor, who moved to Athens from Savannah in the 1790s, the mansion was the centrepiece of Taylor"s seventeen-thousand-acre estate. Upon Taylor"s death in 1863, William S. Grady bought the house, but he succ.u.mbed to a Yankee bullet before setting foot in it. His wife and son moved there in 1864; Henry Woodfin Grady later described it as "an old Southern home, with its lofty pillars and its white pigeons fluttering down through the golden air."
We stand outside the iron gate and peer over the expansive lawn, crisp and dry now in the January sun but no doubt lovely in summer, to the ma.s.sively porticoed entrance of the house. I don"t see any pigeons about, or golden air. Young men in tuxedoes stand around on the Doric-columned porch, smoking. I wonder if my ancestors were once inside, serving mint juleps, or out here watching through these same wrought-iron gates.
The university is equally disappointing. We drive onto the campus, pa.s.sing the three pillars representing Wisdom, Justice, and Moderation and park between the library and the student union. The library contains twelve thousand letters by Margaret Mitch.e.l.l, author of Gone With the Wind, and 960 copies of the various editions of Erskine Caldwell"s Tobacco Road and G.o.d"s Little Acre. So much for moderation.
Following a series of signs pointing to the College of Journalism, we thread our way along empty corridors, past a few students reclining on low benches and one or two closed concession booths, and come to a locked door marked Journalism. Not even the name Grady, beside which Merilyn could photograph me. By way of compensation, we go into the university bookstore. All we can see is long racks of red sweatshirts, T-shirts, and jackets, and shelves of baseball caps and beer steins with the University of Georgia crest printed on them. Not a book in sight. So much for wisdom.
That leaves justice.
In 1820, when six out of every ten people living in Georgia were slaves, an Athens gentleman named William Henry Jackson became particularly fond of a venerable white oak that had been growing on his property for as long as he could remember. It was a beautiful tree, perfectly formed, solid and stately as a Georgian day. Colonel Jackson worried about what would happen to his tree if anything should happen to him. Would a cabinetmaker cut it down for lumber? Would the town remove it to make way for a new street or a fire hall? To prevent such an eventuality, the colonel hit upon an ingenious idea. He deeded the land on which the tree grew, to a radius of eight feet from its base, to the tree, and then he deeded the tree to itself. "I, William Henry Jackson," reads the duly notarized doc.u.ment, "do hereby convey unto the said oak tree, entire possession of itself."
The self-possessed tree still stands in Athens on a small patch of tended turf at the corner of Finley and Dearing Streets. It is, in fact, not the original tree that owned itself, since that tree was struck by lightning on October 7, 1942, and burned to the ground. This tree, grown from an acorn produced by the old tree, was replanted by the Junior Ladies Garden Club the following spring. It is known as the son of the tree that owned itself.
Merilyn and I stand side by side, looking at the tree, our shoulders touching. Protected from traffic, vandalism, and dogs by a low, looping chain fence, it is indeed a fine specimen. White oak is a handsome tree. But I can"t help thinking that, in a state where thousands of black slaves did not legally own their own children, here was a white oak that owned a prime parcel of Georgia real estate. At a time when thousands of human beings were the property of a handful of white masters, here was a tree that owned itself.
"Let"s get out of here," I say to Merilyn.
MORNING brings an email from Wayne"s brother, who reports that an ice storm is pelting a swath from Texas to New York.
"Not again!" I exclaim. It seems as though we"ve been running with a gale at our backs for weeks.
Last night we lugged ourselves off the interstate at Lugoff, South Carolina, and checked into a cheap chain motel: $29.95, my lowest price yet. I dig yesterday"s newspaper out of the wastebasket, a gift from a former tenant, and smooth the pages across the bed. In our media-deprived travellers" haze, we"ve missed all kinds of news-riots in El Salvador, a mine collapse in the Congo, car bombings in Baghdad. And there it is, a triple whammy of severe winter storms. In California, night after night of freezing temperatures. Seventy-five per cent of the Central Valley"s citrus crop destroyed. Another storm is sloping up from the Rio Grande toward New England. The third is rising now from Texas up through the Carolinas. Hundreds of thousands of people are without power. The governor of Oklahoma has declared a state of emergency. The governor of Missouri called in the National Guard. A dozen people in Texas are dead.
"What"s going on with the weather?"
"It isn"t weather, it"s climate," Wayne says laconically. "We used to call it global warming, but the weather isn"t just going to get warmer, it"s going to be more unpredictable. And more extreme."
Just what we need: more extreme. September storms are standard in this part of the world, as hurricanes blow up the Atlantic coast. There"s a history of March storms, too. The eastern United States logged its storm of the century in March 1993: Georgia got six inches of snow, tornadoes broke out all over the South, and more than three hundred were killed as the tempest raged from Central America to Canada. It"s only January, but this year seems determined to set new records, too.
"Maybe driving up the Shenandoah isn"t such a good idea," I say tentatively.
We had planned to travel north from Athens, up to Asheville, North Carolina, where we"d get on the Blue Ridge Parkway, which would take us up the Shenandoah Valley, a verdant stretch that angles northeast through West Virginia and the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Blue Ridge Mountains on one side, the Appalachians on the other. Champlain claimed the valley for France on his map in 1632. The Confederates used it as a back door to get at Washington and Philadelphia. I thought Wayne would appreciate the new wines as well as the history of the region, and I"m keen to hear the music-Virginia bluegra.s.s and those famous Appalachian dirges and laments. Before we left on this trip, I watched Maggie Greenwald"s movie Songcatcher, about another one of those intrepid turn-of-the-century women, a musicologist who walked into the wilds to record the hill music of America. Maybe it"s just as well that foul weather bars the way; I"d like to keep intact my image of a banjo-plucking mammy crooning on every ramshackle porch.
"We need to talk," I say to Wayne. I love a plan as much as anybody, but I"m not willing to risk my life for it. "We need to get out of the way of this storm."
WE need to talk." Words to chill a man"s heart. They are usually code for "Everything you thought you knew is about to change." Nothing good comes after hearing those four words.
"What"s a little rain?" I say. "Nothing we can"t handle."
"It"s not a little rain," Merilyn says. "It"s a lot of freezing rain."
"We"ll be in a valley. "Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you.""
"The storm is in the Appalachians. Cold air sinks. It will be freezing in the valley."
"Well, then, we"ll stick to the mountains. Warm air rises."
"But the rain will freeze there first," Merilyn says. I can hear the frustration in her voice. She thinks I am being unreasonable.
I must still be reacting to Athens. How is it, I wonder, that in depressing, dilapidated, defeated Selma, I felt an unexpected kinship with the people I met, whereas I couldn"t wait to put tidy, genteel Athens behind me? Am I just being perverse?
"You"re just being perverse," Merilyn says. "Whenever there"s a storm, you want to drive into it."
"It"s not a storm," I say. "It"s nature. We can"t run from nature. "Away, I"m bound away, "cross the wide Missouri." Wait, how did the Missouri get in there?"
"Wayne, be serious. Please."
"Okay, look," I say, losing patience. "We"ve already made this decision. The Shenandoah Valley has the I-81. Look at the map. The I-81 runs right up and hits the Canadian border at Gananoque. We could be home in two days. We don"t need any alternative plans."
MAYBE not," I say, but Wayne is no longer listening. He has picked up his book and is on the bed, barricaded behind Death of a Writer.
"Don"t tempt me," I mutter, turning back to the map. The I-95 heads north in the lee of the Appalachians, but it runs through another megalopolis: Richmond; Washington, D.C.; and Baltimore- wall-to-wall urban sprawl. East of the interstate, though, there"s a red highway that hugs the coast: Route 17. It"ll be slower, but I reason that the weather has to be warmer close to the water. I boot up my computer and check the forecast for Myrtle Beach, Wilmington, Jacksonville, and Plymouth.
"There"s still a severe weather warning for the Shenandoah, but there"s a road up the coast, along the Outer Banks," I say, keeping my voice even. "It won"t be exactly hot, but at least the temperature is supposed to stay above freezing. Doesn"t it make more sense to go that way?"
"Whatever you say."
This is what drives me crazy. In Wayne"s world, it"s either his way or my way. I want us to talk about it and make it our way. He just wants to head off into the storm, like Daniel Boone.
That"s when it comes to me. Women are from Canada. Men are from the States.
TRAVELLING, SUDDENLY, seems like too much work. I"m tired of planning, accommodating. The cold and wet make me want to curl up by a fire, draw a warm shawl around my shoulders, speak to no one for a week. Maybe that"s the difference between these two countries: the United States is relatively warm; Canada, more often than not, is cold. When you"re warm, you reach out; when you"re cold, you huddle into yourself. Perhaps our national characters-America, the a.s.sertive extrovert; Canada, the cautious introvert-are nothing more than a human response to weather.
Wayne and I are barely speaking as we head east into Camden, South Carolina, following the recommendation of the grandmotherly woman who greeted us at the Welcome Center just inside the South Carolina border. Her a.s.sistant, a young black woman, suggested Boykin, a village owned by a family that restored the whole place.
"Maybe we could get a hotel there," Wayne suggested.
"Honey," she laughed, "y"all put your foot down in that town, your toes"ll hang out."
Camden is definitely bigger. It is apparently the oldest inland city in the state. The town was part of a plan by George II of England to settle the interior. During the American Revolution, it was a major British supply post and the site of the worst American defeat of the revolution.
"It"s also the steeplechase capital of the world."
"The board game?" Wayne says, trying to make up.
"I don"t think so," I say grudgingly. "But maybe."
Main Street is an American invention; Camden has a Broad Street, proof of its British roots. We notice how many banks there are, mostly private inst.i.tutions with names like First Palmetto, Planters, Wachovia.
""Watch over ya?" Are they kidding? Who would trust a bank called Wachovia?"
Banks and churches. Churches and banks. There"s one or both on every corner, it seems: the Starbucks outlets of the East. If it"s true that you can tell a lot about a town by its architecture, then Camden is full of very rich sinners.
We do a quick drive-through and press on. Something has changed in us. We seem to have lost interest. Curiosity is a peculiar animal: poke it a bit and it"s a lively thing, but it can just as easily hide its head and doze. We look flatly out the windows. The only difference I can see between this place and where we come from is that the gas stations have boiled-peanut stands in the middle of the aisle, beside the potato chips and chocolate bars. They look like popcorn kiosks. Patrons help themselves, scooping hot, dripping peanuts into paper bags.
Wayne is on automatic pilot, his foot heavy on the gas pedal, when we pa.s.s the roadside stand.
"Oh, let"s stop," I say. "We can"t go through South Carolina without at least tasting a boiled peanut." What kind of travellers are we, anyway?
Wayne backs up to the Fried, Roasted, and Boiled P-Nuts sign, hand-painted in bold red letters. Cloth bags of peanuts hang from the awning; baskets and sacks of nuts are piled along the counter. Half of the stand has a big sign saying Fried Peanuts; the other urges Hot Boiled Peanuts.