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, DON'T LITTER. KEEP ALABAMA THE BEAUTIFUL. '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 cant 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 selfconscious, 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 stu dents 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 S,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?
I don't know the answer to that, but I suspect you could spend a week in Auburn kissing the ass of every person who had ever heard of Thomas Hardy and not get chapped lips. Perhaps that is a grossly unjustified comment. For all I know, Auburn may be a hotbed of Hardy scholarship. But what I do know, from having spent only a short while there, is that it hasn't got a single decent bookstore. How can a university town not have a decent bookstore? There was a bookstore, but all it sold was textbooks and a decidedly unliterary assortment of sweatshirts, stuffed animals and other paraphernalia bearing the Auburn University seal. Most American universities like Auburn have 20,000 students or more, and upwards of 800 or i,000 professors and lecturers. How Carl any community with that many educated people not support a single decent bookstore? If I were the National Endowment for the Humanities, I would find that at least as compelling a question as why high-school seniors do so poorly on general knowledge tests.
Incidentally, I'll tell you why they do so poorly. They answer the questions as fast as they can, at random, and
