From Deep South (Paul Theroux, 2015) pp 269-71
The small room was very hot, and it stank of dirty cushions and human feet, and the heat made it all the smellier, as of roasted flatulence. It was the smell of poverty, a stink that no one, not even someone in the submerged twentieth, could get used to, and it was intensified by a hissing gas fire attached to the wall, giving the alarming impression that the wall itself was in flames.
From the moment I’d entered the room, I’d been aware of the hiss. Outside, a spring day — of sunshine, with a light breeze — in the mid-seventies perhaps, shirtsleeve weather. Inside, the huddled family, with the gas fire blowing heat into the room. These people were cold on a warm day, indoors, with nothing to do except to keep warm.
Four generations of them: the old woman, the matriarch; Janice her daughter; her grandsons Roger and Willie; an older girl, a granddaughter, who turned away when I asked her name; and the girl’s daughter, age six, who told me her name, Shaquavien Thompson, as her hair was being braided.
“That’s a hazard,” Wilbur said of the gas fire mounted on the wall, spewing flames. “That needs to be vented”
A painting of Jesus on black velvet had been hung on one wall, with family photographs, and other pictures of Jesus, above a shelf of plastic trophies, a snow globe, a model of the Eiffel Tower, a dirty baseball, a mass of tangled beads, souvenir ashtrays, two propped-up postcards of New York City, some thick gold tassels on a thick gold braid, and a dish of loose buttons. The chairs were jammed together so tightly there was scarcely room to walk, and I found myself sidling from the entrance to the back of the room, trying to avoid the oddly leering face of Roger.
It was not poverty as an absence or an insufficiency of things, but poverty as a great unsorted accumulation of decaying and broken possessions, crowding the room the way the people did, like tide wrack heaped on a beach, the sort of debris a storm had deposited. Doing a rapid calculation, I realized that in that hot tiny room, hiding on this afternoon in spring on the dirt road that was Flowers Lane, in this four-generation family, there was no sign of a breadwinner.
“Here she is, here’s Sweetpea,” Sharlene Badger said as a smiling girl stepped into the room from the flash of sunlight outside, and greeted us.
This was Jessica. She was tall and wore a green sweater and black tights. Her hair was braided and colored with gold highlights, and had long, closely woven hair extensions. Her vitality was unmistakable — | could see why her mother had summoned her to speak for the family. She was worldly, she’d done a course in cosmetology, she said; she’d traveled a little bit. She wasn’t fazed by Wilbur or me. She led us down a narrow passage, showing us the house, the stained ceiling tiles, the bedrooms that had no windows and seemed to be a mass of quilts and blankets and mattresses on the floor.
“We got leaks,” Jessica said. “The rain comes through up there — see this puddle?”
But it wasn’t a puddle, it was a soggy blanket, darkened by water, in the shadowy and airless room. Jessica lived there too. Altogether, she said, nine people inhabited the four-room house — three small bedrooms and this stifling front room. I could not imagine the disposition of bodies at bedtime.
“I’m thinking of relocating to Ohio, Jessica said.
“Show them the kitchen, Sharlene said over the hiss of the gas fire and the squawk of the soap opera.
“The kitchen real bad,” Jessica said. “That ceiling falling down, the floor’s gone too.”
This was a tiny room tucked at the back, with a greasy, gummy stove-top, a chipped refrigerator, a sink stacked with dirty dishes, a counter full of torn-open cereal boxes. Outside, a patch of yard was scattered with Shaquavien’s toys, some old car tires, and a broken swing set.
“If we knew you were coming, we would have cleaned the place up, Jessica said. “That’s okay,” Wilbur said. “Think you can do something?” she said. “We can help. We can vent that stove and shore up the floor” he said. “Might be able to fix that ceiling.” He was making notes as he talked. “Patch the roof.”
As he spoke amid the squalor, I admired his calm and reassuring demeanor. I had no doubt that he would do as he promised, and make improvements.
The rest of the family kept watching the mid-afternoon soap opera — a romantic dispute onscreen, a quarreling young white couple — as Wilbur and I thanked them for allowing us to visit and went outside, where we stood in the mud of Flowers Lane and surveyed the damaged house.
“What do they live on?” I asked.
“That old woman you saw, she’s the key. Probably gets Social Security. Other than that …” His voice trailed off. He was thinking what I was thinking: food stamps, disability payments, unemployment insurance, government cheese, welfare, handouts.
It was just one poor house, one poor family — one of millions – but a vivid glimpse of poverty and hopelessness, of isolation and idleness.
Wilbur was still sizing up the house. He said, “You know, this is going to be a big job. It would be better to gut the whole place and build it all again. But we don’t have the money.’
Roger and Willie had followed us outside. They were sitting on old bicycles, smiling at us, rocking back and forth. They were too big for the bikes, and because of that they seemed playfully menacing, straddling the bikes, jerking them at us and laughing. Jessica had wandered out to the porch, holding the six-year-old Shaquavien by the hand. In the sunshine they all looked different, more exposed, sadder.
Walking away, Wilbur said to me, “We’ll do something.”
“Yes, living with them was frightful, but still they are human beings,” the narrator says, speaking for Olga, at the end of Chekhov’s story “Peasants.” “They suffer and cry like human beings, and there is nothing in their lives for which justification could not be found… And now she felt sorry for all these people, painfully sorry, and kept looking back at the huts as she walked.”
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