Spying on the South Read online

  ALSO BY TONY HORWITZ

  Midnight Rising

  A Voyage Long and Strange

  Blue Latitudes

  One for the Road

  Baghdad without a Map

  Confederates in the Attic

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Tony Horwitz

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Map illustrations by Jeffrey L. Ward

  This page and this page: Photograph courtesy of the National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Horwitz, Tony, 1958– author.

  Title: Spying on the South : an odyssey across the American divide / Tony Horwitz.

  Description: New York : Penguin Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018056912 | ISBN 9781101980286 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101980293 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Olmsted, Frederick Law, 1822–1903—Travel—Southern States. | Horwitz, Tony, 1958–—Travel—Southern States. | Southern States--Description and travel.

  Classification: LCC F213 .H768 2019 | DDC 917.504—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056912

  Cover design: Evan Gaffney

  Cover photograph of Webb-Bonds-Bamberg House, Greensboro, Alabama, ca. 1855 by Lauren Henkin

  Version_1

  To Geraldine, the architect of my landscape, in love, life, and work

  I WAS BORN FOR A TRAVELER.

  Frederick Law Olmsted

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY TONY HORWITZ

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE: AMERICAN NOMAD

  CHAPTER 1

  Yeoman Olmsted: “An Enthusiast by Nature”

  CHAPTER 2

  Over the Alleghenies: Gateway to the Rust Belt

  CHAPTER 3

  Ohio River: Mutants Making Tow

  CHAPTER 4

  Kentucky: “A Balance Sheet of Good Against Evil”

  CHAPTER 5

  To Tennessee and Back: A Thorough Aristocrat

  CHAPTER 6

  Mississippi River: Steamboat Blues

  CHAPTER 7

  Lower Mississippi: The Absolute South

  CHAPTER 8

  New Orleans: The Gumbo City

  CHAPTER 9

  Into the Bayou: “Dat’s How We Roll”

  CHAPTER 10

  Central Louisiana: The Unreconstructed South

  CHAPTER 11

  The Red River: Heart of Mudness

  CHAPTER 12

  Across the Sabine: “Gwine to Texas”

  CHAPTER 13

  Gulf Coast: Oil and Water

  CHAPTER 14

  Crockett, Texas: “The Drift of Things” in Ruby-Red America

  CHAPTER 15

  Austin and Beyond: The Loon Star Republic

  CHAPTER 16

  San Antonio: High Holy Days at the Alamo

  CHAPTER 17

  German Texas: Olmsted in Arcadia

  CHAPTER 18

  The Hill Country: True to the Union

  CHAPTER 19

  Upper Guadalupe: And Absalom Rode Upon a Mule

  CHAPTER 20

  To the Rio Grande: Border Disorder

  CHAPTER 21

  La Frontera: Days of the Dead

  CHAPTER 22

  Central Park Ramble

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTE ON SOURCES

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE: AMERICAN NOMAD

  The only lodging in Grafton was a low-slung motel with a smashed door at the entrance. Stepping past shards of glass, I asked the clerk if there were any rooms available.

  “You a coal miner?” he answered.

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “We sort of cater to them. Special deals.”

  If so, there were no takers in sight. On a raw Friday evening, my rental car was the only vehicle in the parking lot. The clerk nonetheless rummaged in a drawer for some time before handing me a key. “Fifty bucks,” he said.

  Miner or not, this seemed like a deal. Until I reached my room: broken heater, broken window, beeping smoke alarm. Either the battery was dead or the last guest had tried to disable it. Cigarette butts swam in the toilet.

  I went downstairs to a door by the shattered entrance marked “Pub.” Inside, two women stared at video slot machines. After a while one of them served me a beer. It was my second day on the road, and my first in West Virginia. It was also the last night of October, so I asked why I hadn’t seen any trick-or-treaters on my way into Grafton.

  “Halloween was last night,” the barmaid said. “It was moved up to Thursday.”

  “Why’s that?”

  The other woman snickered. “They say it’s because there’s a high school football game tonight. Real reason? Parents didn’t want their kids out on a Friday with all the drunks and meth-heads partying it up.”

  This was a haunting image: children staying home on Halloween because there were real zombies about. The women returned to staring at their screens, so I drained my beer and followed a road that wound between mountains and railroad tracks: Grafton’s main street. Midway along it, a neon sign winked from the window of a creosote-colored pool hall with yellow police tape strung across the door.

  The crime scene décor was a Halloween joke. Inside, a dozen people sat at a bar served by a woman dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. As soon as I sat down, the man at the next stool bought me a beer. “Don’t see many new faces around here,” he said, clinking bottles of Budweiser.

  Ron Childers was a bullet-headed man in his fifties who repaired aircraft in the next county. “Used to be a lot of coal and railroad jobs here, but by the time I left school you had to get out of Grafton if you wanted to work,” he said. “Burns my ass, people drawing welfare and doing drugs while I’m busting my butt and paying taxes.”

  He then told me about a recent spate of drug arrests. Methamphetamines were so rife in West Virginia that cooks had adopted a crude method called shake and bake: tossing pills and volatile chemicals in soda bottles and driving around to mix the ingredients. Vans sometimes burst into flames in midday traffic, passengers fleeing the scene with their clothes on fire.

  “Those drugs make folks dumber than the retards in Wrong Turn,” Ron said. When I looked at him blankly, he explained: “That’s a horror flick set in West Virginia, about inbred mutants who trap and hack up people like possum.” He smiled. “Gotta have a sense of humor to take all the jokes about how backward we are.”

  “Amen,” interjected the man next to him. He turned to me. “You know the toothbrush was invented in West Virginia?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Otherwise it would be the teethbrush.”

  Ron ordered us another round, and introduced me to a young woman named Jess, who wore a tank top, hot pants, fishnet stockings, thigh-high boots, and fake blood smeared across her neck and bare midriff. Jess worked on a road crew but was clad for Halloween as a member of a heavy metal band, the Butcher Babies.

  “I’m that one, Carla, except for the knife in the vagina,” she said, displaying a picture on her phone of a singer thrusting a bloody dagger at her crotch.

  Jess looked up from her phone and studied my costume. Jeans, work boots, plaid shirt, horn-rimmed glasses, dun Carhartt jacket with a notebook and pen stuck in one pocket. “Let me guess,” she said in an exaggerated drawl. “Yankee boy, spyin’ on us hillbillies?”

  This was uncomfortably close to the mark. I couldn’t muster a witty comeback, so I told her a version of the truth: I was doing research on a famous American who came through here in the 1800s.

  Jess pondered this for a moment. “Okay, history guy, here’s a question,” she said. “Did you know Mother’s Day was invented in Grafton?”

  I shook my head, awaiting the punch line. Some joke about incest?

  Instead, Jess led me to the door and pointed down Main Street. “Few blocks that way, big-time shrine to all our great moms.” Then she turned to greet a friend and share her Butcher Babies picture again.

  Walking through the drizzle, I reached a statue of a mother and child beside an old church. A historic plaque identified this sanctuary as the site of the first Mother’s Day observance, in 1908.

  A much larger building loomed directly across the street: an ornate brick-and-granite pile with massive columns, evidently a relic of the town’s better days. The hulking edifice was vacant and in poor repair. But at its crown, above elegantly hewn laurels, I could make out the letters “B&O”—the bygone rail line I was following through
the hills, on the trail of a long-ago traveler.

  * * *

  —

  In 1854, a roving correspondent for the New-York Daily Times noted a slang term common in the South: “Gone to Texas.” This phrase—or its abbreviation, G.T.T.—was painted on the doors and fence posts of abandoned homesteads as a sign that the inhabitants had fled debt, the law, or other trouble for a fresh start on the frontier.

  “G.T.T.,” the correspondent wrote, “was almost equivalent, when added to a man’s name, to branding him a swindler, defaulter, lawless ruffian or ’scape gallows.”

  The author of this anecdote was identified in the Times as “Yeoman.” Such pseudonyms were common in the 1850s, and traveling incognito was a prudent measure in the slave states, where Northern visitors were often cast as abolitionist snoops and stirrers. The pen name Yeoman also spoke to the writer’s agrarian identity. He was a proudly independent tiller of the land, on sabbatical from his farmstead, touring the plantation South and following the trail of those “Gone to Texas.”

  Frederick Law Olmsted is celebrated today as a visionary architect of New York’s Central Park, among many other spaces: the US Capitol grounds, college campuses, residential neighborhoods, the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Olmsted helped create much of the urban and suburban landscape that Americans still inhabit.

  But this farsighted designer was molded by an eccentric apprenticeship: as a merchant seaman to China, an experimental farmer, a European wanderer, and—most significantly—the undercover correspondent known as Yeoman, a Connecticut Yankee exploring the Cotton Kingdom on the eve of secession and civil war.

  Before embarking on his Southern tour, Olmsted wrote a friend that he sought “reliable understanding of the sentiments and hopes & fears” of Americans on the other side of the nation’s widening divide. He wanted to gather “matter of fact matter,” which he believed would give ballast to the angry debate over slavery that was tilting the country toward violent breakup.

  At age thirty, Olmsted was also restless on his farm and romantically adrift. He hoped that a winter’s sojourn in the South would renew him, and further the latest of his many ambitions, to make it as a writer. “Should calculate to leave middle of December & return early in March,” he wrote, in time for spring planting.

  Instead, the South would consume Olmsted for much of the next decade. As Yeoman, he first traveled the seaboard South, from Maryland to Louisiana, before returning for a much longer trek: across the mountains and Mississippi River to the Texas frontier and back.

  He expanded on his newspaper dispatches by publishing three books about the South under his own name. In the preface to the first, Olmsted wrote that he was determined “to see things for himself,” with an eye that was tough but fair. “Let the reader understand that he is invited to travel in company with an honest growler.”

  His writing reached a wide and influential audience, at home and abroad, winning praise from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, and many other luminaries. But this acclaim didn’t translate into strong book sales or a secure perch in what Olmsted called the North’s “literary republic.”

  Nor did his work achieve his stated mission, “to promote the mutual acquaintance of the North and South” with fact and observation rather than invective. By 1860, when the last of his Southern trilogy appeared, few Americans were in a mood for literary statesmanship.

  Olmsted’s initial faith in reasoned discourse had also waned. In the course of his travels, the South’s “leading men” had struck him as implacable: convinced of the superiority of their caste-bound society, intent on expanding it, and utterly contemptuous of the North. “They are a mischievous class—the dangerous class at the present of the United States,” Olmsted wrote, seven years before the Civil War.

  But this hard-eyed appraisal gave him a new mission. To fortify the nation against the South’s slaveholding elite and feudal ideology, the North must uplift its own citizens, to demonstrate the true promise of a free and democratic society.

  Olmsted saw many ways to pursue this reformist cause. His own path would lead to a swampy, rock-strewn tract in the middle of Manhattan. In shaping this unpromising landscape, he sought to create a public park that brought together and elevated “the poor and the rich, the young and the old, the vicious and the virtuous.”

  * * *

  —

  In 1953, a century after the first of Olmsted’s dispatches appeared in the Times, Alfred A. Knopf issued a single-volume abridgement of his books about the South, titled The Cotton Kingdom. It had first been published in Britain, at the start of the Civil War, but had fallen off the radar of all but a small circle of scholars. Knopf’s edition also came with a glowing introduction by a leading historian, Arthur Schlesinger, who extolled Olmsted’s work as “indispensable” and a “uniquely candid and realistic picture of the pre-Civil War South.”

  Thereafter, The Cotton Kingdom became a staple of research on the South and slavery, and a fixture in college curricula, including a class I took in 1980. At the time, I knew little about Olmsted the landscape architect, and skimmed the book’s six hundred pages for passages I could cite in a term paper. Then I packed the book away, with scores of other college texts I toted around in boxes for decades, imagining that I would one day revisit them.

  Of course I didn’t, until a few autumns ago when my wife and I fixed up a barn behind our home in New England, fitting it with shelves for our overflowing books. Under spousal orders to “ruthlessly cull” my college library, I unpacked, glanced at, and discarded four years of liberal arts education.

  Then I came to The Cotton Kingdom, perusing a few passages before consigning it to the give-away pile. I read about riverboat gamblers and gunslingers; the “free, rustic, shooting jacket life” of plantation masters who ruled over “little independent negro kingdoms”; bloodhounds trained to track a runaway slave and “tear him a spell”; and poor whites sharing their scarce space and food when Olmsted sought lodging.

  “The woman suddenly dropped off her outer garment and stepped from the midst of its folds, in her petticoat,” he wrote of a farm wife, as she lay down on the floor of a one-room cabin with her husband and child. Olmsted, given their bed, battled insects and listened to “the man and the woman, and the girl and the dog scratching, and the horse out in the shed stamping and gnawing himself.”

  Hooked, I searched out Olmsted’s original dispatches for the Times, his personal letters, and other writing on the South. Though his principal beat was the region’s slave-based agriculture, Yeoman strayed into every byway of antebellum life. He recorded the dialect and songs he heard at black churches, and closely observed the natural and built landscape, however humble, including makeshift, leaning structures that looked as though “too much whiskey” had been drunk in them, and new-sprung “mushroom” towns he dreamed of improving.

  Olmsted also described in detail what it was like to be a traveler in the South, and not always with delight. “At this dinner I made the first practical acquaintance with what shortly was to be the bane of my life,” he wrote, after choking down corn pone, fatback pork, and “vile coffee” at a rural inn, not realizing “that for the next six months I should actually see nothing else.”

  This scene occurred near the start of Olmsted’s journey from Maryland to Texas and on to the Rio Grande. He traveled by train, stagecoach, riverboat, and horseback, accompanied by his brother John, who hoped a long ride in the dry air of Texas would bring relief to his tubercular lungs.

  Olmsted rode back north alone, completing a nine-month odyssey that covered thousands of miles at a time of deepening national crisis. In 1854, free and slave settlers took up arms against each other in Kansas. Mob violence erupted over fugitive slave laws, and the two-party system and fragile political compromise that had held together the North and South began to collapse.

  “These principles cannot stand together,” Abraham Lincoln declared of slavery and freedom in 1854. “They are as opposite as God and Mammon; and whoever holds to the one must despise the other.”

  Yet Olmsted traversed what would soon be enemy territory, talking and eating and bedding with Southerners against whom he and other Northerners would zealously wage war in the coming years. He wrote unsparingly about the cruelties and inequities he witnessed, but endeavored to communicate with all those he encountered, including a band of Apache that overtook him as he rode in Texas.