From Deep South (Paul Theroux, 2015) pp 42,44,48
42
We talked about the coming presidential election, the vexed question of the hated voter ID law. This restrictive law, which posed serious obstacles to voters, was advocated by the South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley, who was the daughter of immigrant Sikh parents. Having immigrated to Canada, the Randhawas had percolated over the border from Vancouver and had worked as schoolteachers in the tiny hamlet of Bamberg (pop. 3,604), the same size as Pandori Ran Singh Village (pop. 3,624), outside Amritsar in the Punjab, where the Randhawas were raised. In Bamberg they had started a successful clothing company, Exotica International, which ceased doing business in 2008. Less than two years later, Nikki (by then married to a white Southerner and converted to Methodism) was governor and her parents were living in luxury in Hilton Head.
“Odd,” I said, “a second-generation Indian American elected governor of this state.”
“An awful lot of people didn’t know she was a person of color,” Bernie said. “She looked white in her political posters. She doesn’t have an Indian name. She’s a Christian. Shes a right-wing Tea Party Republican. She hates the unions. And she kept her folks way in the back. Her daddy’s turban would have been a problem for a lot of white voters here”
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44
Approaching the outskirts of Allendale, I had a sight of Doomsday, one of those visions that make the effort of travel worthwhile and proved to me that my setting out for the South had been an inspired decision, I had no idea that I would find what I saw that day of blue sky and sunshine, a mild breeze in the pines.
It was a vision of ruin, of decay, of utter emptiness, and it was obvious in the simplest, most recognizable structures — motels, gas stations, restaurants, stores, even a movie theater, all of them abandoned to rot, some of them so thoroughly decayed that all that was left was the great cement slab of the foundation, stained with oil or paint, littered with the splinters of the collapsed building, its rusted sign leaning. Some were brick-faced, others made of cinder-blocks, but none of them was well made, and so the impression I had was of devastation, as though a recent war had ravaged the place and destroyed the buildings and killed all the people.
Here was the corpse of a motel, the Elite — the sign still legible — broken buildings in a wilderness of weeds; and farther down the road, the Sands and the Presidential Inn, collapsed, empty; and the restaurants empty too, one unmistakably the curved roof and distinctive cupola of a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, another just a wreck but with a gigantic sign, its peeling paint promising LOBSTER. And another fractured place with a cracked swimming pool and broken windows, its rusted sign, CRESENT MOTEL, the more pathetic for being misspelled.
Most of the shops were closed, the only functioning ones owned by Indians. The Art Deco single-screen movie house, once the Carolina Theater, was boarded up. The wide main road was littered. The side streets, lined by shacks and abandoned houses, looked haunted. I had never seen anything quite like it, the ghost town on the ghost highway. I was glad I had come.
The presence of Indian shopkeepers, the heat, the tall dusty trees, the sight of plowed fields, the ruined motels and abandoned restaurants, the inactivity, a somnolence hanging over the town like a blight — even the intense sunshine was like a sinister aspect of that same blight — all these features made it seem like a town in Zimbabwe. It looked as though the colonizers had come and gone, the settlers had bolted, most of the local people had fled, and the place had fallen on evil days. Lingering at Mr. Patel’s shop, I saw a succession of black customers buying cans of beer and going outside to sit under a tree and drink.
All this was a first impression, but it was a powerful one. Later, just outside Allendale proper, I saw the campus of the University of South Carolina at Salkehatchie, with eight hundred students, and the old main street, and the handsome courthouse, and a small subdivision of well-kept bungalows. But mostly, and importantly, Allendale, judging from Route 301, was a ruin — poor, neglected, hopeless-looking, a vivid failure.
—
48
The small cotton farms, like those belonging to Wilbur’s family, were sold eventually to bigger growers, who introduced mechanical harvesters. That was another reason for the unemployment and the decline in population. But farming was still the mainstay of Allendale County, where forty percent of its people lived below the poverty line.
“What are the problems?” he said, in answer to my obvious next question. “Drugs—crack cocaine mostly — health, crime, guns, and the school] dropout rate, almost fifty percent.’
There was hardly any work. There were no visitors, as in years past. Once there had been textile factories in Allendale, making cloth and carpets. They’d closed, the manufacturing outsourced to China, though a new textile factory was scheduled to open in a year or so, he said. The local industry was timber, but the lumber mills — there were two in Allendale, turning out planks and utility poles did not employ many people.
I was to hear this story all over the rural South, in the ruined towns that had been manufacturing centers, sustained by the making of furniture, of appliances, or roofing materials, or plastic products, the labor-intensive jobs that kept a town ticking over. Companies had come to the South because the labor force was available and willing, wages were low, land was inexpensive, and unions were nonexistent. And so a measure of progress held out the promise of better things, perhaps prosperity. Nowhere in the United States could manufacturing be carried on so cheaply. And that was the case until these manufacturers discovered that however cheap it was to make things in the right-to-work states of the South, it was even cheaper in sweatshop China. The contraction and impoverishment of the South has a great deal to do with the outsourcing of work to China and India. Even the catfish farms —an important income-producing industry all over the rural South — have been put out of business by the exports of fish farmers in Vietnam.
The current debate fiercely fought in the state legislature was not about jobs or outsourcing, but voting rights: the South Carolina voter ID bill, a restrictive law that would make it impossible for a person to vote unless he showed a photo ID, even though his name was listed on the voter roll. In the absence of a driver’s license, it would be necessary to obtain a birth certificate to apply for an ID — not an easy matter if you happened to have been born in another county or state.
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