A Turn in the South by V.S. Naipaul

Author:V.S. Naipaul [Naipaul, V. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78928-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-29T16:00:00+00:00

TO THE west, on the road to Mississippi, were shabby small settlements, like an extension of the poverty of the town of Tuskegee. I spent the night on a timber plantation on the border. There was still something like presettlement desolation there: cypress trees, half stripped of leaves, their bald knees rising out of muddy water like a kind of humped aquatic animal; shifting swamps, with forest litter at their margins; great damp heat. The land was not old. Tuskegee had been settled only in 1830.

Two months later I entered Alabama again, but from the north, driving down from Nashville in Tennessee, down from the hills to the flat land around Huntsville. Huntsville was where space research and the industries it had attracted had created a whole new landscape in the South: wide boulevards, low, flat factories, spacious grounds meant only to please the eye. Huntsville was also near where, in 1873, the first State Normal and Industrial School for Negroes had been set up in Alabama. That past had been swallowed up—though cotton still grew at the very edge of the new industrial town.

From the NASA museum—full of Asian visitors, Indians, Chinese (“coming to look at the place where they intend to work,” as the Southern businessman with me said)—Tuskegee seemed to belong to another age, to exist in a melancholy time warp. It made one think of the prisons of the spirit men create for themselves and for others—so overpowering, so much part of the way things appear to have to be, and then, abruptly, with a little shift, so insubstantial.

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