The muddy track took us between broken fences, collections of unidentifiable detritus, thin, bare trees, hen coops and pig pens. We passed the occasional silent, wide-eyed unhealthy child or ragged, thin-faced woman. Nobody spoke to us. In the moonlight the whole miserable settlement was eery and menacing, stinking of hopeless poverty. I had never expected to experience again those weeks when I had the misfortune in, 1919, to be stranded on the Ukrainian steppe. Yet here, in America were everyone was supposed to be so much richer, people of European descent plainly endured the same burden of unspoken, habitual despair; villagers so starved of food or mental stimulus they lived out their entire lives in a helpless trance. I could not tell if their general appearance of idiocy was a result of circumstance or interbreeding, but I had seen the same expressions in Russia, in the slums of Constantinople. I was glad to reach the clapboard church with the preacher’s shabby house beside it, a collection of youngsters, scarcely any more articulate or better fed than the rest, playing in the yard. A woman in a cheap print dress came out to the porch door. She grunted a question. She had light grey eyes, a cancerous skin and was not more than forty, though her hands had the stained, blotchy look of the very old. Returning a cautious, tired smile in answer to Sinclair’s courteous question, she said her husband was over at the other church holding the Wednesday prayer meeting. He would be back around nine. Major Sinclair explained our problem. The preacher’s wife said we should go back down the road a piece, to Miss Bedlow’s. She rented rooms. My friend saluted and said we were much obliged. Again I was reminded of the wretched shtetl synagogues, the ramshackle churches of Ukrainian peasants, their priests often as ignorant as the communities they served. I said nothing of this to Sinclair, however, for in a dim way I thought I might offend him.
Eventually we made out a sign we had missed on the way to the church. Miss Bedlow’s house had once been painted green. Someone had attempted to cultivate the front yard and the porch seemed in reasonable repair. Major Sinclair advanced up the few wooden steps. Again he knocked. This time I could clearly see the man who answered, for the light was brighter. He was fat. He had red, weather-beaten features, a bullet head, pale hair, almost no eyebrows. He wore a pink undershirt and overalls which he had loosened at the top. Something he was chewing stained the corners of his mouth. Though he did not seem greatly suspicious he made no attempt to disguise his curiosity, staring from me to Major Sinclair and back again. My friend explained our predicament. The fat man slowly became impressed until he almost stopped chewing altogether. ‘You boys flyers?’ I could hardly understand him. The words had actually sounded to my ears like ‘Y’baahs flahars’ but with extra vowels. I am famous for my quick ear and ability to reproduce accents and vocabularies. This came close to defeating me. The man went back into the house, calling for Miss Bedlow who emerged, a well scrubbed colourless woman in an old-fashioned woollen dress. She had one room she could rent us, she said, but we would have to share a bed. The charge was a dollar each, plus twenty-five cents apiece if we wanted breakfast. She could fix us supper now. Pork and greens would be another thirty cents. Gravely Major Sinclair told her the terms were reasonable (I think the woman was asking the most she dared) and she relaxed, inviting us in. The house smelled of mould and boiled food. The fabric of furniture, curtains and carpets was threadbare but clean and save for some differences of decoration was what one might find in the home of a Ukrainian moujik in similar circumstances. This was my first real experience of the American peasant and it depressed me. I had expected more, I suppose, of the United States. We went up the creaking staircase to our room, stripped off our flying gear, washed in the basin provided and went down again to be introduced to the other guests. Two elderly widows, the fat man, a grim farmhand and a young half-wit all showed comical astonishment at my accent. When Major Sinclair told them I was from England it created no specific change in their expressions.
The fat man spoke first. He had served in France for over a year. He had heard England was pretty. Was it anything like France? In some ways, I said. In others it was more like Maryland. He had never been to Maryland. He heard it was pretty there, too. He frowned for a while, then offered his view that France could also be mighty pretty, though it was a terrible thing what those Boshees had done to her. Shrugging, he added: ‘But I reckon she’s more cleaned up now than she was.’ I said her wounds were healing.
Seeing the difficulty we were both under Major Sinclair took over the bulk of the conversations, since I could follow them scarcely any easier than they could me. He explained where we were bound, why we had come down. He also managed to say a little about the Ku Klux Klan, the problems of whites undercut by black labour. The fat man said they never had trouble with their niggers, except once some buck got drunk on moonshine and the Sheriff over in Carthage had to come out.
‘Did you say Carthage?’ I thought I had misheard.
‘Sure did,’ said the fat man, wondering at my obvious curiosity. He waited politely for me to say more.
‘There’s Carthages all over,’ Sinclair said with a smile. ‘And Londons and Parises and St Petersburgs.’ He returned his attention to the fat man. ‘Then we’re not too far off course.’ He unfolded our map. ‘Here’s Pine Bluff. And this here’s Little Rock. Yes, now I see.’ He was pleased. ‘We’ll be there by tomorrow noon for sure,’ he said to me.
Like me, Major Sinclair ate sparingly of the abominable mess of grease and pulped vegetable served us. Then there was nothing else to do but say goodnight and return to our room where we slept uncomfortably, back to back in our clothes, until dawn. When I looked out of the narrow window at bare trees and broken rooftops, I was relieved to see the wind had dropped. The grey cloud had lifted; an early morning sun rose into a sky full of heavy cumulus promising dry weather.
After a breakfast of bacon and grits we paid Miss Bedlow. She told us who she thought would be able to help us with our ship. Two or three houses back down the dirt road, in a yard full of old tyre rims and rusting metal, we approached two wiry young men who lounged outside on a porch so rotten half the boards had fallen in completely. These were Bobby and Jackie Joe Dally. Major Sinclair quickly struck a bargain with them and the four of us set off to where we had moored the ship. By now word had evidently spread throughout the settlement. We were the centre of attention. First the white children, then the women, then the old people fell in behind us. By the time we could see The Knight Hawk’s swaying gasbag we had come to the negro section. Scores of blacks, keeping their distance from the whites, crept in a staring mass at the rear as our procession entered the field.