Paul Theroux lets the everyday folks tell the story of the Deep South

Years ago I read Dark Star Safari, the excellent book in which Paul Theroux drives from the top of Africa to the bottom. His style of sociological storytelling I find to be the most compelling way to write and read about travel.

Deep South is Theroux’s take on what James Agee and Walker Evans’s first contributed back in 1941 to what we masses know about the Southern life when they published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a major commercial failure that contributed to Agee’s alcoholism and early death before it went on to be deemed a classic. Theroux’s version sends him from his home in Cape Cod down to the poorest stretches of America, which he had always wanted to experience. 

Thereaux's style is to interview as many random folks as possible and tell the larger stories through their cumulative eyes. Here are some of the many great tidbits from the first quarter of the book:

• He starts off pontificating about how much better car travel is than airplane travel, since you can just get in the car and go rather than being striped down and made to feel guilty and interrogated. This all began being possible in the U.S. when the Lincoln Highway was built in 1913, with private money invested in the production and buying of car headlights, and stretched from New York to San Francisco. The first north-south route was built around the same time, connecting Connecticut to Alabama, and incidentally written about by F. Scott Fitzgerald in the short story “The Cruise of the Rolling Junk.”
• Other great writers of the open road mentioned by Theroux include Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, as well as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways.
• Locals are often suspicious, distrustful, hostile, or indifferent to visitors when traveling in the U.S., whereas across the rest of the world locals tend to be dramatically welcoming when strangers arrive in private, isolated areas. 
• The road out of Front Royal, Virginia, into the Shenandoah reminds him of Africa’s Great Rift Valley, which he says looks small in comparison to Shenandoah.
• So many towns down south feature doctors from India because of the National Interest Waiver introduced many years ago that allowed them to get to the U.S. and stay in geographically “underserved” areas.
• One thing that he says remains about the south is that white people mostly live in hilly mountainous areas and Blacks are segregated to flat agricultural areas.
• Ronald Reagan followed some of the same out-of-the-way paths as Theroux back when he was starting out his presidential campaign. While he got many Black people to side with him in winning, Reagan was a disaster for civil rights progress during his eight years in office. To name some of his ills, he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.
• Reagan, in fact, launched his campaign in the little town of Philadelphia, the home of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan. The Klan, Theroux describes, actually originated in the mid-1800s by the planter class that wanted Blacks to stay in the fields and keep the South’s plantation running business as usual. The group was inactive for many years until it was revived by poor whites at the end of WWI and spread north to Illinois and Iowa because of new immigrants such as Italians and Jews, who these people hated.

This is a pretty long book so I've already learned a lot just by reading the first quarter of it. I may start reading it again at some point, but for now, a portion gave me the major gist. Theroux has so many great travel books that I'm ready, for now, to jump to one of his other geographies.