I hesitated, surprised by the question. 'No thank you.'
'That's eleven dollars.' He took my money without thanks and went back inside. I was fairly dumbfounded. I don't know quite why. Through the window I could see him pick up his telephone and make a call. He looked at me as he did it. Suddenly I felt alarmed. What if he was calling the police to tell them to come out and shoot me? I laid a small patch of rubber on his driveway as I departed-something you don't often see achieved with a Chevette-and made the pistons sing as I floored the accelerator and hurtled out of town at a breakneck twenty-seven miles an hour. But a mile or so later I slowed down. Partly this was because I was going up an almost vertical hill and the car wouldn't go any faster-for one breathless moment I thought it might actually start rolling backwards-and partly because I told myself not to be so jumpy. The guy was probably just calling his wife to remind her to buy more wart lotion. Even if he was calling the police to report an outsider asking impertinent questions, what could they do to me? It was a free country. I hadn't broken any laws. I had asked an innocent question, and asked it politely. How could anyone take offense at that? Clearly I was being silly to feel any sense of menace. Even so, I found myself glancing frequently into the rearview mirror and half expecting to see the hill behind me crawling with flashing squad cars and posses of volunteer vigilantes in pickup trucks coming after me.
Judiciously, I stepped up my speed from eleven to thirteen miles an hour.
High up the hill I began to encounter shacks set back in clearings in the woods, and peered at them in the hope of glimpsing a Melungeon or two. But the few people I saw were white. They stared at me with a strange look of surprise as I lumbered past, the way you might stare at a man riding an ostrich, and generally made no response to my cheerful wave, though one or two did reply with an automatic and economical wave of their own, a raised hand and a twitch of fingers.
This was real hillbilly country. Many of the shacks looked like something out of 'Li'l Abner,' with sagging porches and tilting chimneys. Some were abandoned. Many appeared to have been handmade, with rambling extensions that had clearly been fashioned from scraps of plundered wood. People in these hills still made moonshine, or stump liquor as they call it. But the big business these days is marijuana, believe it or not. I read somewhere that whole mountain villages sometimes band together and can make $i00,000 a month from a couple of acres planted in some remote and lofty hollow. That, more than the Melungeons, is an excellent reason not to be a stranger asking questions in the area.
Although I was clearly climbing high up into the mountains, the woods all around were so dense that I had no views. But at the summit the trees parted like curtains to provide a spectacular outlook over the valley on the other side. It was like coming over the top of the earth, like the view from an airplane. Steep green wooded hills with alpine meadows clinging to their sides stretched away for as far as the eye could see until at last they were consumed by a distant and colorful sunset. Before me a sinuous road led steeply down to a valley of rolling farms spread out along a lazy river. It was as perfect a setting as I had ever seen. I drove through the soft light of dusk, absorbed by the beauty.
And the thing was, every house along the roadside was a shack. This was the heart of Appalachia, the most notoriously impoverished region of America, and it was just inexpressibly beautiful. It was strange that the urban professionals from the cities of the eastern seaboard, only a couple of hours'
drive to the east, hadn't colonized an area of such arresting beauty, filling the dales with rusticky weekend cottages, country clubs and fancy restaurants.
It was strange, too, to see white people living in poverty. In America, to be white and impoverished really takes some doing. Of course, this was American poverty, this was white people's poverty, which isn't like poverty elsewhere. It isn't even like the poverty in Tuskegee. It has been suggested with more than a touch of cynicism that when Lyndon Johnson launched his great War on Poverty in 1964, the focus was placed on Appalachia not because it was so destitute but because it was so white. A littlepublicized survey at the time showed that 40 percent of the poorest people in the region owned a car and a third of those had been bought new. In 1964, my future father-in- law in England was, like most people there, years away from owning his first car and even now he has never owned a new one, yet no one ever called him destitute or sent him a free sack of flour and some knitting wool at Christmas. Still, I can't deny that by American standards the scattered shacks around me were decidedly modest. They had no satellite dishes in the yard, no Weber barbecues, no station wagons standing in the drive. And I daresay they had no microwaves in the kitchen, poor devils, and by American standards that is pretty damn deprived.
CHAPTER 11
I DROVE THROUGH a landscape of gumdrop hills, rolling roads, neat farms. The sky was full of those big fluffy clouds you always see in nautical paintings, and the towns had curious and interesting names: Snowflake, Fancy Gap, Horse Pasture, Meadows of Dan, Charity. Virginia went on and on. It never seemed to end. The state is nearly 400 miles across, but the twisting road must have added at least l00 miles to that. In any case, every time I looked at the map I seemed to have moved a remarkably tiny distance. From time to time I would pass a sign that said HISTORICAL
MARKER AHEAD, but I didn't stop. There are thousands of historical markers all over America and they are always dull. I know this for a fact because my father stopped at every one of them. He would pull the car up to them and read them aloud to us, even when we asked him not to. They would say something like:
SINGING TREES SACRED BURIAL SITE
For centuries this land, known as the Valley of the Singing Trees, was a sacred burial site for the Blackbutt Indians. In recognition of this the US Government gave the land to the tribe in perpetuity in 1880. However, in 1882 oil was discovered beneath the singing trees and, after a series of skirmishes in which 27,413 Blackbutts perished, the tribe was relocated to a reservation at Cyanide Springs, New Mexico.
What am I saying? They were never as good as that. Usually they would commemorate something palpably obscure and uninteresting-the site of the first Bible college in western Tennessee, the birthplace of the inventor of the moist towelette, the home of the author of the Kansas state song. You knew before you got there that they were going to be boring because if they had been even remotely interesting somebody would have set up a hamburger stand and sold souvenirs. But Dad thrived on them and would never fail to be impressed. After reading them to us he would say in an admiring tone, 'Well, I'll be darned,' and then without fail would pull back onto the highway into the path of an oncoming truck, which would honk furiously and shed part of its load as it swerved past. 'Yes, that was really very interesting,' he would add reflectively, unaware that he had just about killed us all.
I was heading for the Booker T. Washington National Monument, a restored plantation near Roanoke where Booker T. Washington grew up. He was a remarkable man. A freed slave, he taught himself to read and write, secured an education and eventually founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the first college in America for blacks. Then, as if that were not achievement enough, he finished his career as a soul musician, churning out a series of hits in the 1960s on the Stax record label with the backup group the MGs. As I say, a remarkable man. My plan was to visit his monument and then zip over to Monticello for a leisurely look around Thomas Jefferson's home.
But it was not to be. Just beyond Patrick Springs, I spied a side road leading to a place called Critz, which I calculated with a glance at the map could cut thirty miles off my driving distance.
