By John J. Dorfner

ocky Mount, North Carolina provided legendary writer Jack Kerouac with inspiration in-between his cross country journeys in the 1950's. It was a peaceful setting for the hurricane that was to become Jack Kerouac's life and times. Kerouac...if people heard of him at all...they'd associate it with the author of the 1957 novel On the Road, the story of one man's search for a place that, for him anyway, never existed.

The search took Jack Kerouac speeding across America in an automobile and into a frenzy of nonstop conversations and confessions. It was a search that many young people indulged in 20 years later, as the 1950's jetted into the 1960's, and it seemed as if every highway was a "road to paradise". Kids with backpacks fellowshipped in small groups, shared hitch-hiking stories and told of friends and lovers found and lost along the highway of life. It's strange that most of them had never heard of Kerouac...the man who started and coined the phase "the rucksack revolution." Look around today...all these kids wearing backpacks to school...Kerouac is the cause of this. Only his was an old Army packback...or maybe a beatup Navy duffel bag...loaded down with manuscripts and notebooks.

As the wild voice of the 1950's Beat movement, Kerouac, along with fellow writers, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, became an American legend in his pursuit of experience. In On the Road, he chronicled his journeys across the country. One of his frequent stops turned out to be...of all places...Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where his sister's house became a refuge of sorts. Kerouac referred to the town in his novel, The Dharma Bums, as Testament, Virginia.

I had the opportunity to meet with some of the people in Rocky Mount who knew Kerouac back in the early 1950's. They were the people who I interviewed for my book, Kerouac: Visions of Rocky Mount. They are the people who knew Jack long before America met him.

Helen Bone, a long time resident of Rocky Mount now living in nearby Nashville, remembers the house on Tarboro Street where Kerouac often visited his sister, Carolyn. She remembers stopping by during Christmas 1948 when Carolyn Blake (everyone always called her Nin) and her husband, Paul, were being paid a visit by Jack and his mother. She says she and her husband "didn't stay long, as they had company, but we stopped by and said hello and Merry Christmas."

Jack Kerouac - On the Road 25 in x 35 Buy this Poster at AllPosters.com

Jack Kerouac - On the Road 23 in x 35 Buy this Poster at AllPosters.com

She also remembers that Nin had the place fixed up "nice, real cute, just like her personality." Mrs. Bone describes Jack's sister as a good mother, great house-keeper and very pleasant and lively, which she says was the opposite of Jack, who never spoke too much to anyone.

After a short move to Kinston, North Carolina, the Blakes moved into Sarah Langley's small cottage in Big Easonburg Woods, now called West Mount. West Mount sits about 5 miles outside of the city limits of Rocky Mount. Tracks of farmland and crossroad country groceries still make up part of the West Mount community, and the brown, wooden tobacco barns echo a sound of time passed. The city of Rocky Mount decided to change the name to West Mount, says Langley, "because it was always confused with Little Easonburg, three miles down Halifax Road. The fire truck and ambulances were always sent to the wrong place. It was just too confusing."

The late Mrs. Sarah Langley, a long-time resident of Rocky Mount, lived on the corner in West Mount, right next store to the Blakes. She owned the house Kerouac's family rented during the 1950's, and knew Jack's sister, Nin, and Paul Blake well. Her kind words about Jack's sister and mother give you the impression she spent many hours talking to them and that she valued their friendship. Langley's son, Jack Jr., and Nin's son, Paul Jr., were very close in age and spent most of their time together.

Kerouac's family rented the small house that the Langley family still own. Mrs. Bone recalls that Kerouac would "sit and stare at something...like he was really thinking about it for long periods of time. And when he looked at you...he'd look at you like he was looking right through you..." She says they always wondered what he was thinking about. "He always had his writing pad with him, and you'd be talking about something and he'd be staring at you and all of a sudden he'd turn around, pick up his pad and write something down," Bone recalls. "And he was always holding the cats, too. And all of a sudden he'd put down a cat and pick up a notebook, write something down, then put down the notebook and pick up the cat again and start strokin' it. Sometimes, if he was eating...he'd put down his plate, pick up his notebook, write something down, then put down his notebook."

Langley says they never knew when Jack was coming to North Carolina. Little Paul would run over all excited and say, "My Uncle Jack is here...". Kerouac would "appear and disappear" according to Mrs. Langley. She says no one knew when he was coming or when he would go. "He would all of a sudden just be here"

[cont.] Both Langley and Bone wondered how Kerouac got along in life, because he never worked. At the time, they were curious as to how he got money. Both recall that his mother or Nin would get a phone call from a stranded-and-broke Jack, who was out on the road someplace. One of them, Nin or Jack's mother, memere, would send or wire him money. They informed me that Nin was always sure Jack would be killed in Mexico. Whenever he left, Nin would say, "well, I wonder if we'll ever see him again," because of the kinds of people that he associated with whenever he traveled to Mexico City. Nin and memere often thought when he left to go out on the road that he would possibly never return. They really feared for his life.

I asked what it was like to see Jack walking down Halifax Road with a pack on his back, as he was known to do, in the 1950's...when everybody else in West Mount were driving around on tractors or working in the fields, it must have been a sight to see Jack lugging up the road with a big rucksack on his back. "To tell you the truth," Langley says, "I never really saw him coming or going. He was just here, and just as quickly, he'd leave.

Mrs. Langley said that Kerouac and his brother-in-law, Paul, never got along, which was troubling to Nin and memere. On visits, Jack would stay up all night writing and Paul would get very upset because the typewriter would keep him awake. It vibrated through the walls of the house. Langley said Paul always was going to build Jack a room in the back of the house...a little cabin of his own...so he wouldn't have to hear the typewriter going all night long.

Both women, Helen Bone and Sarah Langley, remember that Jack's mother was a kind person, very bright and hard-working. "Jack is going to be famous someday," she would say. "Everybody is going to know who Jack Kerouac is..." Both women also thought that it was a shame that she didn't live to see how popular Jack became. Memere died in 1973, four years after Jack's death in 1969. Memere never lived long enough to see how much Kerouac is appreciated today.

After speaking to Langely and Bone in the big house Kerouac describes in his short novel, Pic, we walk over to the house that the Blakes lived in. Langley points out the route Jack would use to go to the store...through the back yard. Next to Langley's big house, sitting in the yard, is a little red brick cottage that Buddhy Tom lived in with his wife. Jack's described the setting and his friend Buddhy Tom in The Dharma Bums. Buddhy Tom is no longer alive. They didn't have children...but Langley says that Buddhy Tom was a real character in his own right. He was good to Paul Jr. and her son, Jack Jr. When the men were standing out in the front of the country store, the boys would scream for Buddhy Tom to bring them ice cream...Langley recalls watching Tom and Jack coming across the road, with an ice cream cones for the boys. Langley explained to me how Kerouac would always stop and talk to Buddhy Tom. She says Jack seemed to enjoy the conversation, but Tom never thought much about Jack. To him, he was just Nin's brother.

We walked across the field, where Jack tended the garden to the little house, as Langley and Bone told me how Jack would write on the back porch. "He'd be in there typing away, and if you came in through the back porch and said, "Hey Jack. How ya doing?" the only thing you'd get out of him was a grunt, "recalls Bone. They remember that Kerouac never looked up from his typewriter or acknowledged who was coming through the back door.

As we were standing outside, talking about what the house looked like back in the 1950's, how it was painted white, Langley's daughter, Lou Burton, walked over to join us. Lou recalls that she was about 15 years old when Kerouac would make his journeys to West Mount, to visit his family. He was about 33 or 34 at that time. Lou remembers Jack as a "real loner" and never really said too much to anyone. She also said that he always had a couple days beard growing. "He looked like he always needed to shave."

Burton speaks of how Jack Kerouac was the only one who ever wore blue jeans around West Mount. Her mother, Mrs. Langley, adds that Kerouac would always wear jeans and a ruffled flannel shirt that looked like it had "just been pulled out of his pack." The women informed me that most of the men around the neighborhood couldn't understand how Kerouac could walk around dressed like that, with a wrinkled shirt on all the time. Lou recalled that she and her girlfriends would lay out in the backyard in the summertime, trying to get a tan, wearing only their bathing suits. Kerouac would come walking over, which infuriated the girls. She'd tell her mother..."Gee...you can't even have any privacy around here with Jack walking through the backyard all the time." Burton pointed out where Kerouac would sit and meditate. She said if he wasn't meditating, he'd be writing something in his pad; either that or staring off into space or looking across the fields to the pine forest.

In The Dharma Bums, when Kerouac was writing about the dogs that belonged to the Joyners down the road, he was actually writing about the Langley pets. Langley even said that her family had a dog named Sandy. Jack would take Sandy out into the woods with him. So it seems that some of the subjects Kerouac wrote about in The Dharma Bums were actually derived from animals and people he knew in West Mount. He may have changed the names around. The name Joyner is stenciled on quite a few mailboxes that sit along the country roads of West Mount/Big Easonburg Woods. Many of the local farmers were named Joyner when Kerouac stayed at his sister's house in the 1950's. The name must have stuck with him. Not wanting to use the Langley name, maybe be decided to use the name Joyner instead. But he did use the name of Jack Langley's actual dog, Sandy.

Sarah Langley talked about all of the college students and professors who come to West Mount now in search of Kerouac anecdotes. She said many students from East Carolina University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill come and knock on her door to ask about Kerouac. She said she has never really understood what all the excitement was about. Her daughter, Lou Burton, said she tried reading some of Kerouac's books and just couldn't get into them. She found them boring. She too wonders, what is so special and unique about Jack Kerouac.

Well, as I like to tell people, and I quote Louis Armstrong "if you can't hear it...you'll never understand it."