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John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley in Search of America
By
Published: Jun 08, 2020
Category:
Memoir
GUEST BUTLER JULIA PIZZOLATO grew up in the heart of Texas and is a wannabe New Yorker currently living in Palm Springs, California. She gave up television for good 2 years ago and is currently reading the books she’s been hoarding for years. She offers psychology-based ad agency services when she’s not reading. Meet her here.
A friend recommended John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley.” It wasn’t fiction. (I don’t read a lot of fiction.) And it featured a poodle. (I love dogs and have two, one a mini-poodle.) So… an easy sell for me.
By 1960, Steinbeck had been living in Manhattan and traveling abroad for so long he felt out of touch with his own country. He was ill — he’d had some small strokes and had heart trouble — and his relatives thought he wanted this trip, despite all advice, to see his country for the last time. (He died six years later.) Steinbeck didn’t admit that. He said he wanted a road trip to get reacquainted with America and its inhabitants.
“There were definite questions to which I wanted matching answers. It didn’t seem to me that they were impossible questions. I suppose they could all be lumped into the single question: ‘What are Americans like today?'”
His trip, taken in a custom truck and camper named “Rocinante” after Don Quixote’s horse, starts with a drive up to Maine, then Illinois, North Dakota, and Washington. With each state he visited and each experience he described, I was struck by how little things had changed in America, other than the added benefits (and drawbacks) of technology. No mobile phone? Gasp.
As I traveled the country with Steinbeck and Charley, his black French — real French, he likes to point out — standard Poodle, nothing struck me as out of place or surprising about what was happening in America at the time until we got closer to the end of the trip.
Steinbeck wraps up his cross-country adventure with Thanksgiving in Texas on “one of those millionaire’s ranches,” and then heads to New Orleans.
“I faced the South with dread. Here, I knew, were pain and confusion, and all the manic results of bewilderment and fear.”
Before he shares his experience in the South, he describes his childhood experience of black Americans.
Steinbeck grew up in Salinas, California, where, when he was born, there was one black family. The Coopers had three sons, and the father ran a trucking business. The middle son was Steinbeck’s age, and they all went to the same school. The Cooper boys were excellent students, excelling at arithmetic, Latin, and musical instruments.
“If there was any color prejudice in Salinas, I never heard or felt a breath of it. The Coopers were respected, and their self-respect was in no way forced.”
“Now, these were the only Negros I knew or had contact with in the days of my flypaper childhood, and you can see how little I was prepared for the great world. When I heard, for example, that Negroes were an inferior race, I thought the authority was misinformed. When I heard that Negroes were dirty, I remembered Mrs. Cooper’s shining kitchen. Lazy? The drone and clop of Mr. Cooper’s horse-drawn dray in the street outside used to awaken us in the dawn. Dishonest? Mr. Cooper was one of the very few Salinians who never let a debt cross the fifteenth of the month.”
“I realize now that there was something else about the Coopers that set them apart from other Negroes I have seen and met since. Because they were not hurt or insulted, they were not defensive or combative. Because their dignity was intact, they had no need to be overbearing, and because the Cooper boys never heard that they were inferior, their minds could grow to their true limits.”
Steinbeck heads for New Orleans, Louisiana, with one purpose — to see “the cheerleaders” perform their daily act of pure venom and hatred as little Ruby Bridges was escorted to school during desegregation. Crowds gathered each day not only to watch Ruby but to cheer and applaud the efforts of these mothers.
“This strange drama seemed so improbable that I felt I had to see it.”
He records each moment of that experience. Not something I’ll describe here — if you aren’t familiar with this chapter of our history, you get a good idea from Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With” — I held my breath as I read his description of the filthy and obscene screams of rage aimed at a 6-year-old child. It’s worth getting the book just to read this chapter. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
It occurs to Steinbeck that his friends in New Orleans — people who are good and kind, and whose “arms would ache to reach out” and protect that sweet black child — are nowhere to be found. Perhaps they feel as helpless as he does. But their silence leaves New Orleans misrepresented to the world as the newscasts show only the delight of the crowd in the horrible taunting of a child.
Things have changed — schools have been legally desegregated, bathrooms and lunch counters are equally shared — but I was heartbroken to be reading an eyewitness account of events in 1960 that was hardly different from what we are seeing now in 2020. For all basic sentiments, these passages could have been written yesterday.
On his way out of the South, Steinbeck gives a ride to a young black student who is desperate for change. He wants it now. He explains to Steinbeck that peaceful protest will take too long. As he got out, he looked at Steinbeck and said, “I’m ashamed. It’s just selfishness. But I want to see it — me — not dead. Here! Me! I want to see it — soon.” As he turned to walk away, he wiped tears from his eyes.
Sixty years later, Ruby Bridges (now Hall) still lives in New Orleans and is still fighting for racial equality and harmony.
