A Southern Odyssey

A Southern Odyssey

I’m not sure whose idea it was to go to the South for 10 days.

It started as a conversation about Southern writers and how

I would like to see where they lived and wrote. Six months

later, my friend Liz and I were on a plane going to New Orleans,

with a stopover in Las Vegas. The plan was to start in NOLA,

as the locals call it, spend a couple of nights, get a rental car

and spend the next 10 days getting to Jacksonville, Florida

to fly back home.

The plan for those ten days was wide open, subject only to

our whims or interests. We were both on budgets and were

able to get cheap air tickets and the first two hotel nights and

the last night secured, but we arranged nothing in between.

I learned it was a mistake to have a Las Vegas connection,

even if only for an hour, as both Liz and I like to pull handles.

I was able to lose $250 in about forty minutes, including the

$100 my husband had given me for a carriage ride in New

Orleans. I told him the bill wouldn’t make it out of Vegas,

and I was correct.

The three-hour flight from Vegas to New Orleans gave me

time to start thinking about the South. I’d traveled the fringes,

but never gone into what is termed the “deep South.” As an

upstate New Yorker who’s lived in California for 30 years, I

wanted to see how different it is from what I’ve experienced.

Was it in fact in a time warp and behind the rest of the country?

Louisiana – Days 1 & 2 2

Flying into New Orleans, you look down on an expanse of

green, ribboned by waterways dotted with boats big and small.

It was about 85o and comfortable, which was perfect October

weather, especially since we were coming from a temperature

of 104o in Sacramento. We took the little airport shuttle into

town, crammed in with seven other tourists. One large middle

-aged man made it his mission to point out everything to all the

others on the bus, making you wonder why he was coming

back if he’d already since it all. The older black shuttle driver

had put on jazz music so loud you couldn’t focus, so the self-

appointed tour director was shouting above it to be heard. We

were dog tired after a day of flying. I turned to Liz and said,

“Are we in hell yet?”

We soon rolled in to the heart of New Orleans, checking in to

the Holiday Inn on Royal St in the French Quarter. The room

was great for $100 a night, and the first thing we did was

check the bed for bedbugs. We were paranoid about them,

after reading the almost daily articles in the news about how

they were spreading. No bedbugs.

Because we hadn’t eaten anything except crackers since

morning due to Southwest’s no healthy food policy, we

treated ourselves to dinner at Dickie Brennan’s, a world-famous

steakhouse just off Bourbon St. Food tastes so great when

you’re really hungry and the combination of Cajun shrimp

and steak was outstanding. Sweet potato soup and garlic

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potatoes with bacon, followed with Bananas Foster. Between

gambling and dinner, we’d spent $400 the first day! Guess

the budget idea wasn’t working as planned.

After dinner, we walked the length of Bourbon St. It’s like

having the Mustang Ranch in the middle of a seminary. Every

human weakness is addressed here – alcohol, barely-dressed

girls hanging in doorways, beckoning to those passing by to

come on in, a “love acts” bar, restaurants with “all you

can eat”shrimp, gambling. Every Biblical vice is addressed.

Music spilling out from bars all the way down – new and old

jazz, Cajun, the Eagles, country, Zydeco. Tourists were

scattered everywhere, carrying their little plastic cups of

booze as they explored the carnival on their stroll down the

street. Halfway down, a group of young men in white were

break-dancing, spinning on their heads, flipping and gyrating

their bodies in impossible moves, hoping that the crowd

watching would drop a bill in the buckets in front of them.

After a couple of hours, we were on sensory overload. It was

like having a videogame inside your head. We headed back

to the hotel and crashed, happy for the silence of our room.

The next morning, we headed down to Café Du Monde

next to the Mississipi River to get some café au lait and

beignets. The café au lait is half chicory coffee, half milk.

The beignets are the Louisiana state doughnut, but actually

more like bread pieces deep-fried and dusted with heaps of

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powdered sugar. We went over to the park and ate our

breakfast, leaving a little mound of white powder on the

ground afterwards. As we walked around, I noticed the

little mounds everywhere in front of benches.

The weather continued to be slightly warm, but a cooling

breeze blowing across the river made it very comfortable.

Our plan for the afternoon was to take a city tour and

we made reservations for 2 pm. When they called a few

hours later and cancelled because we were the only ones

signed up, we tried to take a trolley that circles around the

city, but part of the route was closed due to construction.

As we walked down Canal St, we realized we were only

a few blocks from Harrah’s. It was the only land casino

built in New Orleans – the rest of them had to be on the

river. The former mayor, Edwin Edwards, is currently

serving a 10-year prison sentence in Texas because of the

bribes he took from Harrah’s so they could build there.

Even though he went to prison, the casino was bringing

in too much money for the city by then, so it was allowed

to stay. Apparently, Louisiana politics, all the way back

to Governor Huey Long in the 1930’s, has a history of

corruption and deal-making, but it’s not viewed as anything

serious by the locals.

We were only a block away from Harrah’s, getting excited

about being able to pull some handles, when we heard a

voice say, “Would you ladies like to take a city tour?” A

young hawker for the VIP tour company was out on the

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sidewalk trying to get two more people to join the tour.

Liz and I looked at each other and knew it was a sign from

God, trying to keep us from the casino. It was almost like

being forcibly pulled off the street by one of those crooked

canes they use to take bad acts off the stage. So we reluc-

tantly signed up for the tour, knowing it was for our own good.

Our enroller, busdriver and tour guide was Henry, a large

black man in his forties. He juggled two cellphones, a

credit card machine and earphones as he drove and narrated

where we were going. The most meaningful part of the

tour was crossing a bridge to the area called the Lower

Ninth Ward. This was where the levee broke, spilling out

a 12 foot high wall of water which destroyed homes and

killed residents during Katrina. What made it so devastating

was the unattended barge that was forced through the levee

in the rush of water, crushing everything it collided with.

Many of the homes have been rebuilt by volunteers, inclu-

ding Brad Pitt who financed many of them. The new houses

are built high and with escape hatches in the roofs. The residents waved as we drove by, sitting on their front porches as Henry occasionally exchanged pleasantries with them.

Driving back across the bridge to the other side of town,

and entering the Garden District, we passed by Sandra

Bullock’s house as well as the one Nicholas Cage had

owned and lost, but the images stuck in our heads were

of the homes in the Lower Ninth.

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That evening we met Richard & Beth, friends of my son’s

that I’d met previously in Moscow. They live in New Orleans

and Richard was born there. He’s a commercial realtor and

she’s a nurse. We left the noisy French Quarter where we’d

met and went over to a restaurant in the tony neighborhood

where they live. It was a wonderful evening with good food

and good wine. We told them about our city tour and going

down to the Lower Ninth, but we found it curious that they

had never been there, even after Katrina. But then, how

often do we visit the poorer areas in our own towns, if we

don’t have to?

It seems that New Orleans is indeed a melting pot of all

its historical residents – Indian, Cajun, French, Spanish,

Irish, Canadians, American Blacks, Haitians, etc. But at

the same time, they all hold on to their separate cultures

and ways of living. They seem to mix, especially on Bourbon

St, but in many ways, they don’t mix – odd how they can do

both. Maybe it’s that way everywhere, but we just don’t notice it.

The Honey Island Swamp Tour was our last stop in Louisiana.

I’d made the reservation but lost the paperwork, including

even the name of the place, which was 45 miles out of New

Orleans. After picking up our rental car at the airport, we

headed out to Slidell. I at least remembered the name of the

town. We saw signs for a swamp tour and started following

them, thinking that there can’t be more than one company

doing this in such a remote area. Of course, it was the wrong

one, but we finally found the right one and actually ended up

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there on time, piling into a 20 person swamp boat captained

by Dr Paul Wagner, a botanist who is also a member of the

Coast guard. He reminded me of the soup nazi on Seinfeld.

He’s been doing these tours for over 20 years, and at 56,

he’s already a crusty old tar with a booming, New Jersey

voice. He runs a tight ship and wants you to follow the rules,

“No arms and legs over the side of the boat, or you’re outta

here!” But in return, he offered a very informative two hours

through the swamp. John Audubon came to Honey Island

to sketch birds, and in the 1800’s, it’s where pirates hung out.

The Choctaw Indians lived on its banks. We saw the largest

alligator I’ve ever seen, sunning on the riverbank with his

mouth open. We thought it was fake, until it moved.

The swamp is a haven for ibises, the graceful white and gray

birds that you see on old temples in Egypt. When the swamp

boat glided by, dozens of them would lift off from the mossy

trees overhead and fly to the next tree. Small alligators came

up to the boat for a hot dog treat the captain offered at the end

of a long stick, and occasionally we would see a turtle catching

some sun on a piece of driftwood. It was silent and peaceful

and the air was sweet, a far cry from the crazy loudness of

Bourbon St in New Orleans.

As we got off the boat, there were two boys, about 10 years

old, riding their bikes down the boat ramp and crashing into

the swampwater, a green oily mess at the bottom. They came

out of the water with their bikes and themselves covered in it,

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but happy. It reminded me of something my own two sons

would have done at that age.

The tour over, we headed out of Louisiana, only then discovering

that our rental car had satellite radio! We turned on a blues station

and listened to Bobby Bland’s hoarse voice as we headed the car

in the right direction for the three-hour drive to Mississippi. Life is good!

Mississippi – Days 3, 4 & 5

It took us about an hour to cross the border into Mississippi. With pinetree forests on either side to shield us from seeing anything, we could have been anywhere. In fact, it looked a lot like upstate New York, with the 80o weather and the clear blue sky. We stopped off in Hazelhurst, a tiny little town about 40 miles south of Jackson. Coming over a hill a mile away from town, we came upon a trooper who was directly traffic due to an accident. A car had gone down in the ditch and caught fire. It was completely destroyed, but there was no ambulance or any evidence of injury.

We continued on to Hazelhurst and started looking for anything relating to Robert Johnson, as this was the town of his birth. Johnson was born in 1911 and had a short life, dying at 27 of poisoning, although that has never been

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proven. He was a blues player and songwriter. When he started playing, he was a lousy at the guitar and couldn’t get the hang of it, so he left town for a few years. When he came back, he was suddenly a master at it. Legend says that he “sold his soul to the devil,” and one of his songs has that theme. He influenced generations of musicians who followed him, including BB King, Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac, Bonnie Raitt, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Elvis, and many, many others.

Driving around Hazelhurst, we took a turn that Liz said looked like the “other” side of town, and right around the corner was the historical plaque on Johnson. It was like finding a small treasure that was waiting to be discovered by anyone who appreciated what he contributed to the development of the blues. It was our first major discovery.

We headed out of town toward Jackson, passing the same spot where we’d seen the accident, but there was no sign of it having ever happened, except a dark spot on the road where the burnt car had been pulled out of the ditch.

Jackson is important as the home of Eudora Welty, an author of short stories and novels set in the South. Born in 1909, she lived in the same house in Jackson for 80 years and was the daughter of an insurance company president. In the 1930’s, she worked for the WPA taking photos of the various public works projects and the people working on them. But on her own time, she took pictures of people,

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animals, patterns and shadows, experimenting with unusual camera techniques. Her photographs gave her material for her subsequent stories. It was significant to me that for a number of years, there was a lull in the publication of her work due to her caring for her ailing mother, and she also lost two brothers during this time. Katherine Anne Porter was her mentor and her friend.

Since we were in Jackson Sunday morning, we decided to go to church. Liz wanted to go to a white church and I wanted to go to a black church. We compromised by agreeing to go to the white church this Sunday and next Sunday, we would switch. We chose the First Baptist Church of Jackson, a sprawling complex of buildings in the heart of the city. We couldn’t find the entrance so asked a well-dressed older white couple coming our way where it was. They gave us directions, passed by, then turned around and said “Glad to see y’all.”

Entering the church, the service was just starting and about

600 people were in the pews, circled around the front altar.

The ceiling was cavernous and the room looked as big as half a football field. It had acoustics to match, with sound bouncing off every wall. People dress up for church in the South. Suits, dresses, heels. The choir had over 100

people in it and only one black. I noticed about six others in the congregation. The population of Jackson is 170,000 and over 70% are black. It occurred to me that it must feel

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as odd to be a black person sitting in this congregation as it will be for us to be in a black church next Sunday.

The pastor was about 45 but looked younger. He started into his sermon and spoke so fast, it was hard to hear what he was saying, but the theme was “Taking God at his Word.” I was feeling pretty comfortable until toward the end of his sermon when a chart popped up on the video screen listing the number of people in the world who were Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews, and the pastor started talking about how they were not going to be joining Christians in the trip to heaven unless they converted. Somehow, it didn’t seem very Christ-like.

We made a hasty exit at the end of the service, hopped in the car and started looking for a breakfast place. Downtown was absolutely dead. Nothing was open, even museums were closed. Liz said it was because in the South, they force you to go to church because everything else is closed. So after going over to Eudora Welty’s house and taking some pictures, we decided to head out for Oxford, our next destination.

We were getting hungry after driving a couple of hours, so we decided to stop at Canton, touted as a charming, historical village about an hour southwest of Oxford. There is a Nissan manufacturing plant just outside of Canton, and the signs going into town say “A rich history, a bright future.”

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Well, the future isn’t there yet. It was a dump. The only things colorful and new were the Nissan signs. Even on the main square, the only restaurant was a Subway. We circled around and headed out of town, finding a China Buffet as the only option. We couldn’t hold out any longer, since it had been at least 12 hours since we’d eaten, so we stopped. It also was a dump, but the food was pretty good. We tried to ignore the lack of sanitation in the bathroom and the general uncleanliness of the restaurant. We decided that as long as everything was cooked, the germs had to be dead.

You could tell that for the well-dressed blacks coming from church, stopping at the China Buffet for lunch was a Sunday ritual. The buffet itself was only $5.95 for all you can eat, but there was a $2.50 charge if your plate was “not closed.” We assumed that meant you had to eat everything you took, so were not quite sure whether or not we would be surcharged on the way out.

Leaving Canton behind, we headed for Oxford, the home of Ole’ Miss, the University of Mississippi. In Oxford, the demographics are almost the exact opposite of Jackson. Out of a population of 19,000 in town, over 70% is white. Another 18,000 in student population is added on to that when classes start at Ole’ Miss in the fall. It’s a sprawling, hilly campus covered with huge, old trees. It opened its doors in 1848 with 80 students.

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James Meredith, motivated by President John Kennedy’s inaugural address, applied for admission as the first African-American student to the university in 1962, which led to riots on campus that killed two people, including a journalist, and injured hundreds of others. To stand where all of that happened was an odd feeling. It also made me flash back to my college days in 1962 and wonder why I didn’t have the courage to contribute in some tangible way to the civil rights movement, other than to just express my opinion in support of it. I guess my world wasn’t very big then.

Of the total student population, 70% are from Mississippi and 20% represent minorities. As we passed by two black students, I wondered if they understood the significance of Meredith’s actions almost 30 years before. In 2002, Meredith attended his son’s graduation from Ole’Miss as the outstanding doctoral student in business administration.

On the edge of the campus is the forested acreage containing William Faulkner’s house, nestled in the middle of the rowan oak trees for which it is named. Rowan Oak is a modest two-story house with outbuildings that Faulkner purchased in the early 1930’s. It was his primary residence until his death in 1962.

Because it was a Monday and the house was closed, we had the luxury of having it to ourselves, to wander around

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the property and look in the windows. The kitchen was his favorite place, and you imagine the stories that were conjured up there. The morning was bright and breezy, and if you closed your eyes, the wind through the trees overhead sounded like water rushing downstream. Because of its isolation from the outside, surrounded by forests, you could easily imagine life there in Faulkner’s time.

After visiting the house, we drove to downtown Oxford and walked around the little square that forms the town center. Faulkner used many of the businesses and townspeople as models for his writing, and they weren’t particularly fond of that. Devotees of his writing frequently leave a bottle of whiskey at his gravesite in Oxford as a tribute.

We left town, heading for Tupelo, our next stop. We stopped at the Elvis Museum, taking pictures of the little white “shotgun” house where he was born. The museum store was stocked with flashy things of every sort to commemorate his glory days – cups, shirts, books, Cds, photos, posters, key chains, dolls, etc. He would have been proud of the marketing done in his name. His fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Oleta Grimes, was quoted on a marble wall, saying, “There’s something nice about everyone, but everything was nice about Elvis.”

The house of playwright Tennessee Williams in Columbus was our last stop in Mississippi. It’s on Main St and was

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formerly a church rectory, as his grandfather had been a pastor. They paint it in different bright hues from time to time, perhaps to match the colorful life he led. He was ahead of his time in many ways, and didn’t care what people thought of him too much, although he loved adulation when one of his plays received great reviews.

We decided to have lunch at Proffitt’s Porch before we left Mississippi. It’s an old unmarked restaurant with a patio overlooking a lake and very difficult to find, even with GPS, even though it’s only about 15 minutes from downtown Columbus. We drove 30 trying to find it.

We’d nicknamed our GPS “Lurleen.” We thought she should have a name, as she guided us with a soothing voice every day to our next destination, except for one day when she refused to talk to us for some reason. Well, Lurleen couldn’t find Proffitt’s, either. We were lost, so Liz stopped into a gas station on a remote road and asked for directions. She ended up having three old guys argue for twenty minutes about where she should go and came out not knowing any more than when she went in. We finally called the restaurant and were able to backtrack ten miles to find it.

The airmen at the nearby airfield went to Proffitt’s for meals, and by word of mouth, it became a popular local eatery, even featured on the Food Channel’s “The Best of the South.” We had garlic bread, seafood gumbo and red

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beans and rice with spicy sausage, followed by warm chocolate chip pie with walnuts and whipped cream.

Don’t go to the South if you want to lose weight. You might pull it off in New Orleans, but not as you move away from the coast, where comfort food becomes a staple. We left Proffitt’s stuffed and in a food-induced, comfy haze, heading for the Alabama border.

Alabama – Days 6 & 7

We started out our first day in Alabama by visiting Hank Williams’ grave in the cemetery in a crumbling neighborhood in Montgomery. He and his wife are buried at the top of a hill, and their headstones include two guitars, as his first wife was also a musician. Hank Williams Jr had a statement etched into the platform of the grave, “Please do not deface this site,” apparently anticipating the fans that would visit through the years.

We headed back toward downtown, but a short ways from the cemetery, there was a curious two-story church named the “Brick A Day” church, so we stopped to read the historical plaque and find out the origin of the odd name. There were two security men outside, one a retired Marine and the other an older black man. They said the church is the First Baptist, founded in 1867. The blacks formed it because they were tired of being mistreated in the white

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churches in Montgomery. When the first wooden church burned down, they rebuilt it as a brick church starting in 1910. They didn’t have much to start with, so they told each member of the congregation to bring a “brick a day” when a service was held and they started construction. That’s why the bricks don’t match – they’re all slightly different shades.

The black security guard asked if we’d like to see the inside of the church. Even though it was closed, he told us to go in the back door. There were three women and an elderly man fixing lunches in the basement for their Meals on Wheels program. The 84 year old man, Benjamin Beasley, gave us a tour of the church with it’s huge stained-glass windows and went through its rich history. Ralph Abernathy was it’s pastor from 1952-1961. Both he and Dr Martin Luther King held meetings at the church to organize the bus boycott after the Rosa Parks incident.

Benjamin has been a volunteer in the church all his adult life, and he proceeded to tell us what is wrong with young people today and that they’re messed up because they don’t go to church like their parents did. He said years ago, the church was the only place where a young black person could learn to speak and sing in front of people and be groomed to serve the community or just to be a productive adult in society. There really wasn’t any other place where they could acquire those skills.

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Visiting the Brick A Day church was one of those little serendipitous side trips and exchanges that you don’t plan and don’t expect. Liz made a contribution to their food program on their way out and they gave us fresh pears to eat on our journey.

The Rosa Parks museum was next, and it’s built on the spot where she was taken off the bus and arrested on December 1, 1955 for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. At the church we’d just left, Benjamin told us that Rosa Parks used to babysit his children when they were little.

This museum uses an interactive method to make you feel what it was like to be on the bus. In fact, they use a real bus and it’s as if you’re watching the event unfold before you. It’s a powerful portrayal of an act that set the Civil Rights movement into action. At that time in Montgomery, 75% of those who rode the busses were black, yet they were verbally and even physically mistreated if they did not follow the orders of the bus driver to sit in the back and to give up their seat if a white person came on and there was no other place to sit.

After the Rosa Parks arrest, blacks banded together to boycott the busses, pooling resources to find ways to get places without using a bus – they did this for over a year, costing the city bus system $3,000 a day.

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The meetings organizing the boycott were held at the Brick A Day church we’d just left and also at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where 25-year old Dr. Martin Luther King had just been appointed pastor. He and Pastor Abernathy were instrumental in all the events that followed, including the march starting at the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma in 1965 and ending in Montgomery with over 25,000 people standing in front of the state Capitol, the same building where Jefferson Davis presided as head of the Confederacy. Five months after that protest, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

After a morning full of the history of civil rights, we went to Dreamland Barbecue for lunch, as Liz had heard about it from a friend of her son’s who was at a cattle ranch in Utah in 1997. He was from Alabama, and kept on dreaming and talking all the time about Dreamland Barbecue and how much he missed it, so Liz always wanted to go there. It lived up to its reputation. Their Brunswick stew is a pork-based concoction that has a deep, rich flavor to it. The recipe says it takes 20 hours to fix it properly. I had to have two bowls. The barbecue sauce is a secret, but you can buy it online at Dreamland’s website. Liz’s combination plate featured pork ribs, chicken and spicy sausage. We were in barbecue heaven.

Our waitress was a slight woman about 40 who looked like a young girl. She took our order by drawling, “Whatchoo want, baby?” Here dialect was sincere and charming.

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When I left her a $10 tip and walked out, Liz said she let out a big “Whoooeeeee, look at that!” when she saw the amount.

It occurred to me that at Dreamland, you could see the effects of the Civil Rights Movement in action. Previous to it, all the servers would have been black and the customers would have been white. Instead, it was an equal mixture on both sides, with young black and white professionals as customers and both whites and blacks as servers and bartenders.

It is ironic that a specific event in Montgomery gave the Civil Rights Movement its impetus and, at the same time, where the first act occurred to start the Civil War to protect the Southern way of life, including slavery. And both of these happened literally within a few blocks of each other. The order to fire on Fort Sumter if the Union troops resisted was issued from Montgomery, and that event led to the Civil War. And a block down from where that order was issued was the circle where the open slave market was held for the benefit of plantation owners.

The Civil Rights Memorial Center features a fountain with a large disc in front. The major events of the civil rights movement are listed in a circle under the shallow water which spills over the disc. It was designed by Maya Lin who also created the Vietnam War Memorial and the fountain in front of Yale’s library. The museum itself is

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simple and moving. It honors all those people who were killed because of their civil rights activities, or simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the path of racists who were looking for revenge against blacks or against white sympathizers.

On the way out of town, we passed by F Scott Fitzgerald’s house. He first met Zelda when he was a soldier at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery. They were married and lived in this house for about a year. It’s now run down and part of it is leased out to tenants. After our day of being immersed in the plight of those who had to struggle to have a life or even ride a bus without abuse, seeing Fitzgerald’s house didn’t seem to have much significance anymore.

After leaving Montgomery, we drove over to Selma to take pictures of the Edmund Pettus Bridge where the march started. It’s a beautiful arched bridge over the same Alabama River which flows by Montgomery 40 miles away.

Our last stop in Alabama was to the courthouse in Monroeville, where Harper Lee, author of “To Kill A Mockingbird,” used to sit in the balcony and watch her father practice law. For 45 years, it’s been a dream of mine to go the small town that was the inspiration for Lee’s novel, so I couldn’t believe it when we got there and it was closed for repairs! That’s a trip you just don’t make twice

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in a lifetime, so I went over to the county building next door and the middle-aged black receptionist made a couple of calls to see if they could make an exception, but she couldn’t reach anyone. I wandered around town for a bit in a daze, wondering what to do. Liz suggested going to the library to see if they had an exhibit there on Lee or her book.

At the library, there was nothing; however, they wanted us to attend a book signing with Frank Griffin, an elderly man who was connected with the Kennedy/ Oswald era. Liz said he reminded her of a used car salesman because he was jingling the coins in his pocket while he spoke. There were only 8 people at the book signing, including a Mormon missionary who was doing her project in Monroeville, so hey were happy to see us. We went for the coffee and cookies. Liz took pity on the author and bought one of his books, which he promptly signed for her.

After that, we wandered over to the Beehive Coffee Shop to have a latte and look for more books on Harper Lee. One of the men who had been at the book signing, James, came into the shop with his wife Jackie and started talking to us. He writes short stories himself and knew how important this trip was to me, so he got his nephew busy trying to track down how to get us into the courthouse. We visited with the couple for some time. They live in Selma and said they would give us a tour if we ever came back. We exchanged email addresses and decided that we

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wouldn’t have met the people at the library or the coffee shop if we’d been able to go to the courthouse. By meeting some of the locals and getting to talk to them for a while, it was easier to see where Lee got her material.

On the way out of town, we found the ruins of Truman Capote’s house, which was next door to Lee’s. They were childhood friends when they were next-door neighbors. We had lunch at David’s Catfish House, where Lee used to go every week. They said she sat in the back corner and no one bothered her. She is in her 80’s now and lives in an assisted living facility on the edge of town.

After lunch, we got on the road for the long drive to Columbus, Georgia situated right over the border from Alabama.

Georgia – Days 8 and 9

Andersonville was our primary destination in Georgia. A tiny town, just on the outskirts of it is Camp Sumter, now known as the infamous Andersonville Civil War Prison for Union soldiers. In high school, both Liz and I had read MacKinlay Kantor’s “Andersonville,” for which he was awarded

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the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1956. It was based on memoirs of surviving prisoners. It was a book that always stuck with you, even as a young reader who might not believe that such things could possibly occur.

The site for the prison was chosen primarily for three reasons. It had a railroad near the town to bring the prisoners in, it was a remote location, and it had a spring with a small creek running through it, making a ready supply of water for the prisoners. It was designed for 10,000 prisoners and the stockade area where they were held was originally only 16 acres. An additional 10 acres were added as prisoners starting pouring in daily. More than 45,000 prisoners came through Andersonville in the 15 months it was in operation. At its peak, there were over 33,000 prisoners living on only 26 acres of land, leaving most prisoners without enough room to even lie down and rest.

The pine fence around the perimeter prevented any view of the outside world, and the spring running through the camp was used by the guards and cooks upstream, so by the time it got to the prisoners, the water was polluted. Dysentery and disease killed

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over 13,000 prisoners, and they are buried in the nearby cemetery.

Captain Henry Wirz, a 42 year old physician from Switzerland, was commandant of the prison. When the atrocities of Andersonville became known and the prison was closed, public opinion demanded a scapegoat. He was hanged behind the state Capitol building in Washington DC in November of 1865. His defense was that he was “only following orders.” Wirz was the only man in our country’s history to be executed for Civil war crimes.

Because many Southerners feel that Wirz was not given a fair trial. In fact, in 1908, the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a granite monument to him in the middle of the town. Every year, they honor him as a hero who gave his life for the Confederacy on the date that he was executed. I guess there are two sides to every story.

After the sobering visit to Andersonville Prison, we headed across the state for Savannah, a four-hour drive. We opted to go through little towns as opposed to the interstate. We stopped at Shoney’s for lunch and had home-made potato chips with

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artichoke dip and deep fried chicken strips. Being Friday, their all you can eat seafood buffet was a half hour away. As five o’clock got closer, people started pouring into the parking lot for the buffet. Deep-friend buttermilk chicken, shrimp, catfish, barbecued ribs, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes with gravy, grits, hush puppies. Every color of food you can imagine but green.

We got back on the highway, tired of being in the car, but about an hour away from Savannah. When we reached the city, it was almost dark. We got downtown, but because crowds of young people were out in the street, drinking and having a good time, we couldn’t hear where Lurleen was telling us to go. We got sidetracked down River Street, which runs along the Savannah River. It’s one way and bumpy because of the cobblestones. I was going slowly, as I had no idea of how to get out of there, when I noticed a streetcar coming right up on our rear. I swerved to the right and ended up on Bay St, where our hotel was. We crashed, and because we’d been on the road for seven days, changing hotels every night, we decided to stay two nights in Savannah to recoup.

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The next morning, we took a city tour. There is a wealth of history here, between Savannah being a cotton shipping center and where Sherman ended his march from Atlanta, presenting Savannah to President Lincoln as a Christmas present in 1864. But one physical feature that defines Savannah more than anything else are the huge live oak trees draped in Spanish moss that cover the historic parts of the city and its many parks. They spread out to protect and cool Savannah during the hot, humid summers. Many of them are up to 200 years old or more and were there when Sherman arrived. It was healing to sit beneath the trees and soak in their beauty on a park bench.

We did take one more tour in Savannah – the movie tour. The original Cape Fear, Forrest Gump, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Something to Talk About, and over sixty more were made here.

The tour would have been enjoyable except for our tour guide, a woman in her 40’s who looked a little like Sarah Palin but acted like the stereotype of a drawling Southern female airhead. She took turns insulting most of the passengers with comments she thought were funny, but no one was laughing. We made a quick exit from the tour and commented that

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this was the first time through the South that we actually ran across someone who fit the worst stereotype of a Southerner.

Florida – Days 10 & 11

It takes about four hours to drive from Savannah down to

St Augustine Beach in Florida, but it took us three and a half.

I noticed when we crossed the Georgia/Florida border that

cars were passing me up when I was doing eighty. We saw

three cars stopped for speeding in Georgia on the way down,

and none ticketed in Florida. It didn’t feel like we were in the

South anymore. It felt more like Southern California.

We stayed on Anastasia Island a couple of miles past the city of St Augustine at a Spanish style hotel only a few feet from the beach. The sand is white and fine, with warm, gentle waves lapping up onto the beaches. I spent two hours sitting and reading without even being conscious of time passing. But although it’s a slow lifestyle, like the deep South we’d come through in the past ten days, the Southern hospitality we’d become accustomed to seemed to be missing. When we went to buy city tour tickets, the clerk was more abrupt and unfriendly. The same was true

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in the hotel. No more leisurely “How y’all doin’?” It was back to business – very much like California.

When we finished touring St Augustine and checked into our last hotel at the airport in Jacksonville, it was time for reflection and for the transition to normal life in California. We’d traveled 1,754 miles in the last eleven days and gone through five states. It was good to find out that the South is not backward. Yes, it has pockets of poverty, very much like the Central Valley in California. But overall, it’s a beautiful, vibrant part of our country with downtowns that honor their long history and people that enjoy telling you about it.

Instead of poor shacks in the country, we saw mini-mansions with acreage and private lakes that would make a Californian envious, and at half the price. People in the South seem happy to see tourists, and not just because they bring in money. When they go out of their way to please you, you sense it’s because they just enjoy meeting people. They take time to talk to you, to find out where you’re from, so they can tell you about the significance of where they live. As a tourist, all you have to do is be open to it and embrace the unplanned experiences as they happen.

The small-town friendliness and courtesy, oblivious of time, is refreshing and makes you want to be that way in return. As I fold back into the familiar pattern of my days back home, I will try to remember to do that. It seems to be a good way to live.

One postscript. On the way home through Vegas, I hit $230, so I recouped all but $20 of my losses. Not a bad investment for an hour of fun to top off a great ten days in the South.

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