In the next to the last chapter of Travels with Charley (pages 230-42 of the first edition), Steinbeck leaves New Orleans. He buys a poor-boy sandwich, drives to the Mississippi River, and sits with Charley to regain his composure. An “enlightened Southerner” (“a neatly dressed man well along in years”) walks up. He and Steinbeck carry on a short dialogue about the race issue. Both men agree that change is coming and both fear the means. The Southerner points out that they are both tied to the original sin of our nation: “Surely my ancestors had slaves, but it is possible that yours caught them and sold them to us.” However, both Steinbeck and the Southerner feel they are too old to be players in the change that must come.

Even though he had not slept much the night before, Steinbeck gases up his truck and continues to drive east. At the gas station, he offers a ride to an elderly Black man. The man is “reluctant to accept.” During the ride, he doesn’t look at Steinbeck and seems uncomfortable. When Steinbeck asks him what about the school desegregation in New Orleans, the man replies, “I don’t know nothing about that, captain, sir.”

The next day, Steinbeck picks up two more riders. The first is a young white man, who is on the road looking for work. He praises the cheerleaders in New Orleans, who are, he feels, “doing their duty.” He even says that he plans to kill many Blacks (of course, using the n-word) before he dies. When Steinbeck cannot take any more, he pulls his car over and orders the man out.

The last rider is a young Black student who has been involved with sit-ins. The student feels the nonviolent approach of Martin Luther King is too slow. He wants to see change in his lifetime.

While Steinbeck says that he could not claim to have presented a “cross-section” of the South in this chapter, it seems a little too neat. In a single chapter, he talks with an elderly White Southerner and an elderly Black Southerner (who represent the old order) as well as a young White racist (vowing to prevent change) and a young Black student (vowing to force change). Much of the dialogue, especially that between Steinbeck and the “enlightened Southerner,” is a little too formal, a little too finely crafted.

The chapter reads like a morality play. We view the forces of good and evil facing off and play’s chorus (the “enlightened Southerner” and Steinbeck) warn of the change to come and the “dreadful uncertainty of the means.” I suspect that Steinbeck, in this chapter, crosses from nonfiction to fiction, but I don’t think this bothered many readers in 1962. The boundaries between nonfiction and fiction were more porous then. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway carries on a dialogue with an elderly woman, clearly a product of his imagination.

The chapter, whether fact or fiction, effectively presents the question left unanswered in a book that might otherwise remain a pleasant travelogue: If Blacks are demanding equality and Whites will not relinquish their privilege, what kind of horrors will the country face in the coming decades?

If Steinbeck were alive today, fifty years later, I think he would wonder, like most of us, at how much has changed and he would despair that so much racism survives in dark corners, seldom even voiced except in a new code. Newt Gingrich would never use the n-word to describe President Obama, but he did recently say Obama might suffer from a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview. I am sure that Gingrich would say he is not a racist. And yet, I suspect that Gingrich knows phrases like this tap into an anger that is as old as our country. Such phrases hardly promote thoughtful political dialogue.

While Gingrich might be in another place and time, lost in dreams of his own father, many Americans have changed. We have witnessed, in our lifetimes, progress without apocalyptic violence. We may still feel uncomfortable whenever we discuss race, but that young Black student, if he did exist, if he did ride with Steinbeck and Charley, probably saw change in his lifetime. Steinbeck feared the “means” because he did not believe it was possible for Americans to change their attitudes about race in a few decades, even if we as a society are not yet post-racial.

Rockwell's painting of Ruby Nell Bridges

September 23, 2010

In the third chapter from the end of Travels with Charley (pp. 220-229 of the first edition), Steinbeck enters New Orleans and witnesses whites harass “a couple of tiny Negro children” as they enter school, escorted by US Marshals.

Steinbeck had been driving hard with little sleep. He says virtually nothing about the rest of Texas, just that he stops for gas and slabs of pie. Almost as soon as he crosses the Louisiana border, he comes face to face with racism. The attendants who fill his truck with gas see Charley in the front seat and think Steinbeck is travelling with a Black man. Over and over, he hears the same comment, which I will not repeat.

In New Orleans, he parks his truck at a gas station, puts Charley in the back, disguises himself as a seaman (he was famous enough to be recognized on the street), and takes a cab to the site of the school desegregation. He watches white women (called “cheerleaders”) hurl “bestial and filthy and degenerate” words at “the littlest Negro girl you ever saw.” In a draft of the chapter, Steinbeck had included the actual words of the cheerleaders, but his publisher was afraid of law suits. The insults were cut.

Steinbeck describes the scene as a performance: “Anyone who has been near the theater would know that these speeches were not spontaneous. They were tried and memorized and carefully rehearsed. This was theater. I watched the intent faces of the listening crowd and they were the faces of an audience. When there was applause, it was for a performer.”

In the crowd, Steinbeck looks for people who might be like his friends in New Orleans, “thoughtful, gentle people, with a tradition of kindness and courtesy.” He doesn’t see “such faces.” Racism, Steinbeck suggests, thrives when it has an audience and when it is not challenged.

The desegregation plan in New Orleans was to integrate the first grade, then allow those students to advance. Thus, an additional grade would be integrated every year. Although it is not entirely clear, it seems that Steinbeck watches as Ruby Nell Bridges enters her first grade class at William Frantz Public School. Shortly after Steinbeck left, Ruby Nell was the only student in the school. Barbara Henry, a native of Boston, was the only teacher.

It seemed like nothing would change. Protests continued throughout the year. Ruby Nell’s father lost his job as a gas station attendant. Ruby Nell’s grandparents, share croppers in Mississippi, were forced to leave their land. Barbara Henry was not given a contract for the next school year; she returned to Boston.

Then, Ruby Nell entered school the next year to find other Black students as well as white students. No one spoke of the previous year.

As with much of the history of race issues, we could argue that remarkable change happened very quickly in New Orleans or that we are still waiting for real change. The cheerleaders, their theater, and their audience disappeared. Families in New Orleans seemed to adjust to the new reality of integration. Yet, no one spoke of the previous year.

Steinbeck begins to write about race in fourth chapter from the end of the Travels with Charley. (The chapter is on pages 215-219 of the first edition. The book doesn’t have chapter titles or numbers, so situating my discussion will be a little awkward.)

After an extended stay in Texas, Steinbeck is about to enter Louisiana. He begins the chapter by saying one of the goals of his trip was to answer the question: “What are Americans like today?” In a seeming digression, he says that Europeans view Americans as a “faceless clot,” typically not in very positive terms, but they don’t apply this general impression (prejudice?) to the Americans who are their friends. Prejudice endures, Steinbeck suggests, because we compartmentalize our general attitudes about a race from our experiences with individual members of that race. Rather than use our personal experience with individuals to question broad generalizations, we comfortably abide with paradoxes.

With the seeming digression about European attitudes toward Americans, Steinbeck is preparing readers for his discussion of prejudice, which will include Steinbeck’s own prejudice about the South. He writes: “I faced the South with dread.” He describes himself as someone who is not drawn to “pain and violence” and who does not have the experience to understand racism. While growing up in Salinas, California, he never witnessed racism. The Coopers, the one “Negro” family in the area, were treated with respect. Ulysses Cooper, the oldest son, died his “third year” in high school, and Steinbeck felt honored to serve as one of his pallbearers.

Toward the end of the chapter, Steinbeck even turns one of the then current clichés of racism on its head: “If in Salinas anyone from a wiser and more sophisticated world had asked, ‘How would you like your sister to marry a Cooper?’ I think we would have laughed. For it might have occurred to us that a Cooper might not have wanted to marry our sister, good friends though we all were.”

This is why Steinbeck feels “unfitted to take sides in the racial conflict.” When Southerners begin to discuss race issues, he feels they go “into a room of experience” he cannot enter.

Though ill prepared for the task, Steinbeck realizes that he will become a witness: “When people are engaged in something they are not proud of, they do not welcome witnesses. In fact, they come to believe the witness causes the trouble.”

For Steinbeck (and, he hopes, for his readers), the Coopers serve as a glimpse into the future. Because they were not objects of racism, their “dignity was intact.” They were valued and fully integrated members of the community. The Cooper family, thus, served as an argument for the positive effects of a more equitable society.

I would guess most readers, even in 1962, accepted the values of this argument. In many ways, Steinbeck’s ethos carries us. He is sermonic in this chapter, and we want to answer with an Amen. However, as Steinbeck’s words echo, as readers gain some distance from the moral force of his voice, questions arise. Could Steinbeck have come of age without witnessing prejudice? Were the Coopers treated as equals in Salinas?

The Coopers were not the first or the only Black family in Salinas. Jim Bardin settled in Salinas before the Civil War. After the war, more Black families migrated from the South, as did a number of ex-confederates. With ex-slaves and ex-confederates in the same county, we would expect some racial tension. And, the area had a significant Hispanic population. It seems that Steinbeck would have witnessed some form of racism, even if these acts were tame compared to the lynchings in the South.

The website for the Monterey County Historical Society recounts one example of racism toward a member of the Cooper family. During World War II, residents of Maple Street signed a petition to discourage Ignatius Cooper from buying a house. Ignatius bought the house anyway, but he reported felt bitter about his treatment. This was, of course, long after Steinbeck moved away, but the event does suggest that Salinas had its own history of racism.

When I first began to talk to friends about traveling around the country, they typically responded, “Are you going to take your dog?” Even before I mentioned Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley as my inspiration, they made the connection.

Many people of my generation read Travels with Charley when they were in high school. They clearly have fond memories of the book, but there seems to be even more going on. The book, when they first read it, seems to have triggered fantasies of making a similar trip. Over the decades, the book simmered in their unconscious, undergoing a reduction, until they carried a pleasant memory of an old man and his dog, circling the country, both getting away and searching, apart from daily routines but still distracted by the mundane, checking the “pulse of the country” without a detailed itinerary. It’s a fantasy easily embraced, a guilty pleasure, an escape without guilt.

Interestingly, few of my friends have reread Travels with Charley as adults, and they don’t tend to remember the dark finale of Steinbeck’s journey.

In the end, Travels with Charley is about race. In the last three chapters, excluding the conclusion, Steinbeck drives from Texas, where he had an extended stay, into Louisiana. He writes about dreading his trip through the South, where the racism that affected the entire country was manifest and unavoidable, where travel writing would have to give way to social commentary.

In New Orleans, Steinbeck disguises himself as a merchant marine to witness, without being recognized as one of America’s most famous authors, a school integration crisis. He watches a young black girl walk past angry crowds, lead by “cheerleaders,” white women who hurl insults that Steinbeck cannot bring himself to repeat in print. In the penultimate chapter, Steinbeck presents a series of conversations with an “enlightened Southerner,” a young black activist, and a young white racist. Steinbeck and the enlightened Southerner agree that change must come but they both fear the means. The young black activist and the young white racist represent the extremes that forebode a racial apocalypse.

Steinbeck was traveling through America in the fall of 1960. Jim Crow laws were still in effect, but the Civil Rights Movement had already begun. In 1948, Truman signed Executive Order 9981, desegregating the military. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the “white” section of a bus. In 1957, schools were desegregated in Little Rock, Arkansas. These milestones were but the beginning. Most of the Civil Rights Movement would unfold in the 1960s, after Steinbeck had finished his trip. Steinbeck knew that change must come, but he could only imagine the events of the next decade.

Once he left Louisiana, Steinbeck continued to travel through the South and up the eastern seaboard, back to his home in Long Island. Interestingly, he didn’t write about this part of his trip, except for a few paragraphs in his concluding chapter, where he wrote that, psychologically, his trip had ended somewhere in Virginia. It seems to me that his trip actually ended in New Orleans. Once he had served as the Greek chorus to the racial drama of a heroic black girl pushing her way through angry white crowds, he could hardly go back to writing about an old man and his dog. Racism demanded to be the emotional climax of the book.

Racism—or how to change racial attitudes—is also the book’s unanswered question. If change was inevitable, as Steinbeck believe it was (also, as history proved) and the extremes were apparently irreconcilable, what would we, as a country, witness in the coming decade? Steinbeck wrote that he feared the “means.” He doesn’t catalog his fears, but he seems to believe that we would have to experience something like a widespread race war. The 1960s certainly brought violence—the bombing of black churches, the murder of civil rights workers, the police suppression of civil rights marches, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. But I think Steinbeck feared more than all this. He expected far worse. I don’t think that he believed that most Americans could change.

The focus of this blog will be shifting for a while. I want to write in more detail about Steinbeck’s experiences in New Orleans, about the transformation of my own attitudes about race, and about the possibility—the hope—of transformation.

Last week, I made a quick trip to Chicago to move Jay, my older son, into housing at the University of Chicago, where he will start graduate school in the fall.

Here is a summary of the drive up there: leave Little Rock (rice, rice, rice, rice, rice), take a left (corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn), arrive in Hyde Park.

Here is a summary of the drive home: leave Hyde Park (corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn), take a right (rice, rice, rice, rice, rice).

We did have a good time while in Chicago, which I consider to be my spiritual hometown. I grew up in Virginia Beach. However, when I moved to Chicago for my first job after graduate school, I felt immediately connected to the city. It felt like home to me from the start.  And yes, in many ways, you can’t go home again.

In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck visited the Monterey Peninsula, his spiritual hometown, and he was shocked at the changes. He wrote, “They fish for tourists now.” The town had changed, and he had changed. He met with Johnny Garcia, an old friend. They shared memories, and then they both fell into an awkward silence. Steinbeck says that he was a “ghost” now: “When I went away I had died, and so became fixed and unchangeable. My return caused only confusion and uneasiness.” He concludes: “Tom Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.”

When I lived in Chicago (from 1979 to 1984), I had an apartment close to Wriggleyville, the area around Wriggley Field. I lived about three blocks from the park, a little closer to the lake, in a neighborhood of struggling young professionals, sandwiched between a Jewish community and recently immigrated Cubans. Wriggleyville was working class (except for a small Japanese population), a little run down, on the border of being seedy. When I first moved to the area, I was a little concerned about walking around Wriggley Field at night. Eventually, I realized that it looked more dangerous than it was.

At that time, I could sit in the bleechers, the seats in the outfield, for $2.50. The kids who lived in the Brownstones and Greystones on Waveland and Sheffield, the streets behind right and left field, who couldn’t afford $2.50 to watch the game, hung out in the streets, glove in hand, flagging down homerun balls.

The neighborhood began to turn even before I left. They put lights in Wriggley Field. The Brownstones and Greystones were converted to condos. Upscale bars and restaurants began to appear.

On this trip, Jay and spent an evening driving around on the north side. Wriggleyville, that working class neighborhood, is now a clean and well-lighted place, packed with trendy bars and expensive restaurants, all with oversized neon signs. The area plays to young professionals and tourists; it has the feel of Disney World.

In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck commented on his concern for the loss of local culture. He saw the same corporations and chains everywhere he drove. Now, you can travel around the country and find Disney World everywhere. Every city fishes for tourists. Even the French Quarter in New Orleans now has chain restaurants and is family friendly. Well, at least more family friendly than it used to be.

I had a very mixed reaction to the changes in Wriggleyville–and Chicago in general. I miss the old Chicago. Nelson Algren once said, “If you love Chicago, you have to love it for its alleyways and back streets.” I think I have that quote more or less right. He meant that Chicago was a tough, working class town. To be a real citizen of Chicago, you needed to take a walk on the wild side. I found myself missing Algren’s Chicago, my Chicago.

At the same time, most people would say that the city is much improved. It is safer, cleaner, prettier. To me, it just doesn’t seem to have as much character.

I was on the road for 21 days or 7,477 miles. I made it to two family reunions, one in Sterling CO and one in Bremerton WA continued the next night in Allyn WA.

I visited 9 National Parks. I probably drove through in excess of 30 national forests. I think I crossed the Continental Divide about a dozen times.

I didn’t have any car trouble, although I think my battery is going dead. I will get that checked out tomorrow. No speeding tickets. (How about that Jeff?)

As I was driving back, I thougt about how Travels with Charley is, in the end, a book about race relations in America. While I am at home, I want to start writing about this.

I-40 East

July 21, 2010 (all day)

I entered I-40, my old friend from day one of the trip, in Flagstaff and began to head east. If I had more time, I would have taken another route back. I had originally planned to visit Joshua Tree National Park, then take I-10  and I-30 back. As time ran out, I had  no choice but to take I-40.

I am not sure about the mileage from Flagstaff to Little Rock on I-40, but I think it is in the range of 1,300 miles.

Early in the day, I talked to my father-in-law. He said that he had been reading the blog. He joked that he would like to buy me one of those GPS devices. I have had some bad spots in this trip where I drove in circles. I assured him, however, that I was now on I-40 all the way back to Little Rock. Even I could not get lost at this point.

By the end of Tuesday (July 20), I made it to Santa Rosa NW. After about 12 hours on the road today, I made it home. I will be home for about a week, then I will be making a short trip to Chicago and looping through some of the midwest. After about another week or two at home, I will make a loop through the south.

Painted Desert

July 20, 2010 (afternoon)

The painted desert part of the park (Petrified Forest and Painted Desert National Park) is remarkable. I had seen the Grand Canyon in the morning. The Painted Desert looks like the Grand Canyon on a smaller scale.

Petrified Forest

July 20, 2010 (afternoon)

After lunch, I headed to the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert National Park. This is basically two parks in one. You can see both the petrified forest and the painted desert. Either one would be worthy of its own park.

As I drove toward the park, I saw a number of roadside souvenir shops selling petrified wood. I guess that this is wood found outside the park. I didn’t stop, so I don’t know how much a piece of petrified wood costs. I guess you never know when you might need some petrified wood. It seems like these businesses would have a limited lifespan. I can’t image that these business people could keep finding more petrified wood.

I’m glad that I visited the park. I have always been fascinated with petrified wood. I don’t know why. It must be related to some forgotten childhood trauma.