Bill Bryson Page 11

  So I went through the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum and I savored every artifact and tasteless oddity. It was outstanding. I mean honestly, where else are you going to see a replica of Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria, made entirely of chicken bones? And how can you possibly put a price on seeing an eightfoot-long model of the Circus Maximus constructed of sugar cubes, or the death mask of John Dillinger, or a room made entirely of matchsticks by one Reg Polland of Manchester, England (well done, Reg; Britain is proud of you)? We are talking lasting memories here. I was pleased to note that England was further represented by, of all things, a chimney pot, circa 1940.

  Believe it or not. It was all wonderful-clean, nicely presented, sometimes even believable-and I spent a happy hour there.

  Afterwards, feeling highly content, I purchased an ice cream cone the size of a baby's head and wandered with it through the crowds of people in the afternoon sunshine. I went into a series of gift shops and tried on baseball caps with plastic turds on the brim, but the cheapest one I saw was $7.99

  and I decided, out of deference to my father, that that would be just too much extravagance for one afternoon. If it came to it, I could always make my own, I thought as I returned to the car and headed for the dangerous hills of Appalachia.

  CHAPTER 10

  IN 1587, a group of 115 English settlers-men, women and children-sailed from Plymouth to set up the first colony in the New World, on Roanoke Island off what is now North Carolina. Shortly after they arrived, a child named Virginia Dare was born and thus became the first white person to arrive in America headfirst. Two years later, a second expedition set off from England to see how the settlers were getting on and to bring them their mail and tell them that the repairman from British Telecom had finally shown up and that sort of thing. But when the relief party arrived, they found the settlement deserted. There was no message of where the settlers had gone, nor any sign of a struggle, but just one word mysteriously scratched on a wall: "Croatoan." This was the name of a nearby island where the Indians were known to be friendly, but a trip to the island showed that the settlers had never arrived there. So where did they go? Did they leave voluntarily or were they spirited off by Indians? This has long been one of the great mysteries of the Colonial period.

  I bring this up here because one theory is that the settlers pushed inland, up into the hills of Appalachia, and settled there. No one knows why they might have done this, but fifty years later, when European explorers arrived in Tennessee, the Cherokee Indians told them that there was a group of pale people living in the hills already, people who wore clothes and had long beards. These people, according to a contemporary account, "had a bell which they rang before they ate their meals and had a strange habit of bowing their heads and saying something in a low voice before they ate."

  No one ever found this mysterious community. But in a remote and neglected corner of the Appalachians, high up in the Clinch Mountains above the town of Sneedville in northeastern Tennessee, there still live some curious people called Melungeons who have been there for as long as anyone can remember. The Melungeons (no one knows where the name comes from) have most of the characteristics of Europeans-blue eyes, fair hair, lanky build-but a dark, almost Negroid skin coloring that is distinctly non-European. They have English family names--Bro-gan, Collins, Mullins-but no one, including the Melungeons themselves, has any idea of where they come from or what their early history might have been. They are as much of a mystery as the lost settlers of Roanoke Island. Indeed, it has been suggested that they may be the lost settlers of Roanoke.

  Peter Dunn, a colleague at the Independent in London, put me onto the Melungeon story when he heard that I was going to that part of the world, and kindly dug out an article he had done for the Sunday Times Magazine some years before. This was illustrated with remarkable photographs of Melungeons. It is impossible to describe them except to say that they looked like white Negroes.

  They were simply white people with very dark skins. Their appearance was, to say the least, striking. For this reason they have long been outcasts in their own county, consigned to shacks in the hills in an area called Snake Hollow. In Hancock County, "Melungeon" is equivalent to

  "Nigger." The valley people-who are themselves generally poor and backward-regard the Melungeons as something strange and shameful, and the Melungeons as a consequence keep to themselves, coming down from the mountains only at widely scattered intervals to buy provisions.

  They don't like outsiders. Neither do the valley people. Peter Dunn told me that he and the photographer who accompanied him were given a reception that ranged from mild hostility to outright intimidation. It was an uncomfortable assignment. A few months later a reporter from Time magazine was actually shot near Sneedville for asking too many questions.

  So you can perhaps imagine the sense of foreboding that seeped over me as I drove up Tennessee Highway 31 through a forgotten landscape of poor and scattered tobacco farms, through the valley of the twisting Clinch River, en route to Sneedville. This was the seventh poorest county in the nation and it looked it. Litter was adrift in the ditches and most of the farmhouses were small and unadorned. In every driveway there stood a pickup truck with a gun rack in the back window, and where there were people in the yards they stopped what they were doing to watch me as I passed. It was late afternoon, nearly dusk, when I reached Sneedville. Outside the Hancock County Courthouse a group of teenagers were perched on the fronts of pickup trucks, talking to each other, and they too stared at me as I passed. Sneedville is so far from anywhere, such an improbable destination, that a strangers car attracts notice. There wasn't much to the town: the courthouse, a Baptist church, some box houses, a gas station. The gas station was still open, so I pulled in. I didn't particularly need gas, but I wasn't sure when I would find another station. The guy who came out to pump the gas had an abundance of fleshy warts-a veritable crop-scattered across his face like button mushrooms. He looked like a genetic experiment that had gone horribly wrong. He didn't speak except to establish what kind of gas I wanted and he didn't remark on the fact that I was from out of state. This was the first time on the trip that a gas station attendant hadn't said in an engaging manner, "You're a long way from home, aren'tcha?" or "What brings you all the way here from I-o-way?" or something like that. (I always told them that I was on my way east to have vital heart surgery in the hope that they would give me extra Green Stamps.) I was very probably the first person from out of state this man had seen all year, yet he appeared resolutely uninterested in what I was doing there. It was odd. I said to him-blurted really-"Excuse me, but didn't I read somewhere that some people called Melungeons live around here somewhere?"

  He didn't answer. He just watched the pump counter spin. I thought he hadn't heard me, so I said, "I say, excuse me, but didn't I hear that some people-"

  "Don't know," he said abruptly without looking at me. Then he looked at me. "Don't know nothin'

  about that. You want your oil checked?"

  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.

  Impulsively I hauled the car around the corner, making the noise of squealing tires as I went. I had to make the noise myself because the Chevette couldn't manage it, though it did shoot out some blue smoke.

  I should have known better. My first rule of travel is never go to a place that sounds like a medical condition and Critz clearly was an incurable disease involving flaking skin. The upshot is that I got hopelessly lost. The road, once I lost sight of the high--way, broke up into a network of unsignposted lanes hemmed in by tall grass. I drove for ages, with that kind of glowering, insane resolve that you get when you are lost and become convinced that if you just keep moving you will eventually end up where you want to be. I kept coming to towns that weren't on my mapSanville, Pleasantville, Preston. These weren't two-shack places. They were proper towns, with schools, gas stations, lots of houses. I felt as if I should call the newspaper in Roanoke and inform the editor that I had found a lost county.

  Eventually, as I passed through Sanville for the third time, I decided I would have to ask directions.

  I stopped an old guy taking his dog out to splash urine around the neighborhood and asked him the way to Critz. Without batting an eyelid he launched into a set of instructions of the most breathtaking complexity. He must have talked for five minutes. It sounded like a description of Lewis and Clark's journey through the wilderness. I couldn't follow
it at all, but when he paused and said "You with me so far?" I lied and said I was.

  "Okay, well that takes you to Preston," he went on. "From there you follow the old drovers road due east out of town till you come to the McGregor place. You can tell it's the McGregor place because there's a sign out front saying: the McGregor Place. About a hundred yards further on there's a road going off to the left with a sign for Critz. But whatever you do don't go down there because the bridge is out and you'll plunge straight into Dead Man's Creek." And on he went like that for many minutes. When at last he finished I thanked him and drove off without conviction in the general direction of his last gesture. Within two hundred yards I had come to a T-junction and didn't have a clue which way to go. I went right. Ten minutes later, to the surprise of both of us, I was driving past the old guy and his everurinating dog again. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him gesturing excitedly, shouting at me that I had gone the wrong way, but as this was already abundantly evident to me, I ignored his hopping around and went left at the junction. This didn't get me any nearer Critz, but it did provide me with a new set of dead ends and roads to nowhere. At three o'clock in the afternoon, two hours after I had set off for Critz, I blundered back onto Highway 58. I was 150 feet further down the road than I had been when I left it. Sourly I pulled back onto the highway and drove for many long hours in silence. It was too late to go to the Booker T.

  Washington National Monument or to Monticello, even assuming I could summon the intelligence to find them. The day had been a complete washout. I had had no lunch, no life-giving infusions of coffee. It had been a day without pleasure or reward. I got a room in a motel in Fredericksburg, ate at a pancake house of ineffable crappiness and retired to my room in a dim frame of mind.

  In the morning I drove to Colonial Williamsburg, a restored historic village near the coast. It is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the East and even though it was early on a Tuesday morning in October when I arrived, the parking lots were already filling up. I parked and joined a stream of people following the signs to the visitors' center. Inside it was cool and dark. Near the door was a scale model of the village in a glass case. Oddly, there was no you-are-here arrow to help you get oriented. Indeed, the visitors' center wasn't even shown. There was no way of telling where the village was in relation to where you were now. That seemed strange to me and I became suspicious. I stood back and watched the crowds. Gradually it became clear to me that the whole thing was a masterpiece of crowd management. Everything was contrived to leave you with the impression that the only way into Williamsburg was to buy a ticket, pass through a door ominously marked PROCESSING and then climb aboard a shuttle bus which would whisk you off to the historic site, presumably some distance away. Unless, like me, you pulled out of the river of people, you found yourself standing at the ticket counter making an instant decision on which of three kinds of tickets to buy-a Patriot's Pass for $24.50, a Royal Governor's Pass for $20 or a Basic Admission Ticket for $15.50, each allowing entrance to a different number of restored buildings. Most visitors found themselves parted from a lot of money and standing in the line to the processing doorway before they knew what had hit them.