Damn it’s a beautiful evening here in Cleveland, Mississippi. I spent the day riding north from Natchez on Highway 61, The Blues Highway. My motel room cost $50.00. No coffee, no wi-fi.
Last night in Natchez, I stayed at John Quitman’s house, a National Historic Landmark. Quitman owned four plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana and four hundred people. The estate is described in writings as antebellum, a fancy word that means Quitman’s enormous wealth, acquired through slave labor, was acquired legally. Quitman died in 1858, his daughter sold the estate in 1914. These days, they call it the Monmouth Historic Inn & Gardens.
There is a malaise about the Historic Inn & Gardens, a brooding sense that something’s not right, a haunting guilt that within the painstakingly manicured gardens, fountains, statues and period-decorated rooms and canopy beds, that we’re celebrating a history better left to revile; that the savagery and human suffering that built those buildings and planted those hedges is a tragedy rather than a weekend getaway.
As I wandered the grounds and read the signs and placards, I learned that in 1834 Quitman purchased 15 people among them Harry Nichols who became his personal valet. In modern times, it’s tempting for the visitor to see the busy black serving people and the bald white manager with his wetted lips and ingratiating smile, as direct decedents of the antebellum state. And maybe they are. And maybe it’s just a job.
Later in the evening, I laid alone on the well-manicured grass in the dark and stared at the stars and thought about all the people over the centuries that had laid on their backs in that same spot or near to it and stared at those same stars through their pain, rage and despair; a torment that the black and white abstractions of words can only fail to describe. Indeed, we are insulated from the brutality and anguish of our history by centuries of failing words. The faces that stared at those same stars for all those hundreds of years, those same damn stars, stared accusingly back at me. That is our history.
It’s been two hundred years but there are signs of wear. My fellow guests at the Monmouth were white, mostly older and overweight, and drove newer mid-price sedans. They smiled at me at breakfast, a curiosity with my motorcycle hair, my jeans and my Equal Justice Initiative t-shirt (from the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama; a token protest). The drive into the estate is rutted and unpaved, shutters are askew and need paint, the gift shop sells expensive white-lady jewelry, the much-vaunted breakfast was eggs, grits, bacon and clumsily sliced cantaloupe and musk melon; Waffle House is just as good. The room was fine, I don’t think I’ve slept in a canopy bed before. My trip into antebellum history cost $200.00.
In Morgan City, Louisiana I stayed at the Morgan City Motel, a small, lonely $60.00 room.
Jim’s room was directly across the parking lot from mine, he was sitting on the front step smoking a cigarette. Sixty and the first mate on a tug, he joined the Navy when he was eighteen and has spent his life at sea. He’s worked with the same crew for twenty years; 28 days at sea, 14 days off. The tug is used to tow heavy equipment between land and deep-sea oil rigs, It’s another week before he ships out again. He’s been married twice and getting his second divorce and is worried about their ten-year old son. He takes medication for his blood pressure.
I went back to my room and rolled a joint and sat on the front step and after a few minutes, Juan shuffled across the parking lot with his cane and his cigarette and asked to sit next to me. Juan’s seventy-six; he was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in New York City. He’s married to a woman who lives in Virginia Beach, he hasn’t seen her in thirteen years. Juan started in the Navy, too, and has spent his career at sea, tugs, cargo ships, tankers. He’s seen so many places, Cairo, the Philippines, Alaska, the Eiffel Tower.
Juan’s got neuropathy in his feet and struggles to walk. I asked him if he had family in town or friends. He told me he’d shipped out of Morgan City many years ago, he’d liked the town and so he came back. He’s been at the Morgan City Motel for a couple of months, he came from Florida. He doesn’t know anybody in Morgan City except the motel staff and fellow residents; it was like he didn’t have anyplace else to go. Herbert, the maintenance man at the motel, has been making sure he gets out of bed in the morning and takes his meds. He used to have a motorized scooter but it was stolen. He’s worried about immigrants and crime, he talked about it at length. When I got up in the morning, there was an ambulance at Juan’s door. Herbert had called for it.
I went on a swamp tour with Captain Caviar. He spent thirty years fishing for choupique (pronounced “shoe pick”) for their caviar, and so the sobriquet. He sold the business and now Captain Caviar spends his days wandering the swamps with tourists, he gets a lot of Germans. A Russian couple in tall waterproof boots wanted to be dropped off on an island, he refused, too dangerous. The two of us spent four hours motoring the wide and tiny channels of the bayous under a deep blue sky and picture-perfect clouds, the Spanish moss-dangling over our heads from the live oak and cypress, the snow white egrets, the deafening silence when he turned off the engine, the alligators’ invisible presence. Our vessel was a 20’ flat bottomed aluminum boat with a 150-horsepower Suzuki outboard that pushed us fast on the big channels and was whisper quiet so I could only just hear it in the narrows. We motored past Pirate Island, famous for its booty; the booty rumored to be buried there by the pirate Jean Lafitte and the booty driven off the island by mosquitos after just one day on the TV show Naked and Afraid. He pointed to the shore where somebody caught a 13’ 1” gator just the other day.
When I got back to the motel, Herbert told me that Juan had been transferred to a larger hospital in Baton Rouge.
I ran into Colonel Sawyer on Facebook, he’s retired in Pensacola. We had breakfast at Waffle House.
Captain Sawyer was my Commanding Officer when I arrived at the 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, the 1/1 Cav, at O’Brien Barracks in Schwabach, West Germany, September, 1975. He’d joined the Army as an enlisted man, 11-Bravo, Infantry; a grunt. In 1964, he was sent to Viet Nam as an adviser. He later went to OCS, Officer Candidate School, and was commissioned as an officer. He retired as a Lieutenant Colonel.
I was his Jeep driver in the 1/1 Cav and at breakfast, he complimented me on his memories of my map-reading skills; navigation mistakes are bad when you’re leading a two-kilometer long convoy of tracks and wheels on tiny German roads; it’s hard to turn things around. But he needed sleep so he told me where we needed to go and I followed the pencil-line roads on the plastic-laminated Army map with klicks-instead-of-miles and thickets of contour lines, and steered the convoy while he slept beside me.
We talked about Jeeps, he preferred the old Jeep, the M151, the Jeep I drove for him, to the modern Humvee. In an ambush, he explained, you can roll out of the Jeep and onto the ground in one fast motion whereas you have to open doors and scramble to get out of a Humvee and that takes time. His unit was ambushed several times in Viet Nam.
When my younger brother, Greg, had his backpack stolen while hitchhiking around Europe, Captain Sawyer let him stay in my room in the barracks, against all kinds of Army regulations. Greg slept on the floor next to my bunk in my Army sleeping bag on my Army air mattress. When he arrived, he had no money and hadn’t eaten in days. When the Supply Sergeant was in the latrine, the Cav donated a case of C-rations to the cause. Greg finished them off the week he was with me, that was twelve high-calorie combat meals in addition to the three meals he ate every day in the mess hall.
Colonel Sawyer was interested in my life and I told him highlights. Breakfast was almost three hours.
I sent him an email afterwards that read in part:
“I spent three years on active duty, perhaps the most significant three-year period of my life. The Army taught me a lot about people, about life, about myself. It gave me time to grow up. I came away proud that I’d served, with an admiration for the institution, and with a deep gratitude and a profound respect for the professionals I served under such as yourself. For that I thank you.”
Ursula is fifty-four and has a son and some ex-husbands and lives alone in a pre-fab house on two acres of sun-baked scrub grass in eastern Tennessee. She chain smokes and has a prosthetic leg, the original she lost in a motorcycle accident. I met her two summers ago, the friend of a friend.
For a living, Ursula raises chickens, ducks and turkeys of various varieties and sells eggs, chicks and birds. Behind her house, she’s constructed a large fenced pen with coops scattered about inside. The work is rough, four-by-four posts, weathered two-by-fours and chipboard, chicken wire, nylon tarps, a torn shade tent with a splinted aluminum leg, sun-greyed barn wood, sagging and decrepit coops scavenged from failed farms, two aluminum enclosed trailers with shelves of nests and flat tires, plastic sheeting, ropes, straps, wire and whatever other materials came to hand. A red and white “Yield” sign is mounted on top of one of the fence posts, an odd juxtaposition.
Her birds and dogs follow her around the yard as she does her chores. When she sits to rest and smoke, they tussle to sit on her lap. She has conversations and lectures them, “Bernie, leave her alone. You know better than that. Oh Abner, stop it. Come here buddy.” Bunny, the one-legged chicken that was living in her living room when I was there last has died. Ursula celebrates the joys of birth and life and grieves and prays over their loss; she misses them, her animals that have died, and talks about them but doesn’t seem to mourn them. It’s farm life.
Predators, raccoons, foxes, rats, raptors, and neighbor dogs, are a constant menace. The neighbor’s pit bull broke into her yard and went after her birds and she shot it in the face with her air rifle to drive it off. The dog’s fine and hasn’t been back. She trapped a raccoon that was stealing eggs and chicks. The trap was a live-trap, I watched as she shot the raccoon dead with the pellet gun as it snarled at her through the wire cage. She threw the carcass into the woods behind her fenced yard. She has three small dogs, the black one, Sportster, kills rats.
She has a Harley, the one she was riding when she lost her leg was totaled and she bought another one. She doesn’t ride it much and she’s been trying to sell it but that would make her a biker without a bike and she’s priced it accordingly. Her daily driver is a faded-black, rattle-bang Ram pickup, the black plastic dashboard broken and sagging from the Tennessee sun, the cab and the bed littered with poultry farm material, equipment and bits. Money is tight and she works several days a week as a home health aide for her neighbor, Mr. Glenn, he’s 95; Mrs. Glenn died a year ago. He pays her cash. Ursula texted me after I left, “I took a fantastic nap after you left and then when I got to Mr. Glenn’s house, I made chocolate chip cookies and then a good supper and now I am headed to get minnows for the ducks.”
On the grass just outside the fence gate, she has a weathered coffee table and two chairs. We leaned back in the chairs and rested our legs on the table as the sun set and the evening cooled the air around us and we passed a joint of Michigan Lemon Bar and drank Coors Light. She’d left the gate open and the birds pecked at the grass around our feet and the dogs jumped onto the table and squirmed into our laps and the angel moths flitted about. As birds came close, she picked them up and cuddled them and talked about their personalities and then about their genetic makeup, what was good and what was bad and how best to interbreed to encourage the good. She used the multisyllabic language of science, like she knew what she was talking about.
After a while, I asked her, “Is this really sustainable?” And waved my arm at her creation around us.
Bird farming starts early and ends late and demands a lot of chasing, stooping and lugging. She got a new leg this spring, it has suspension and a greater range of ankle motion than the old one and it’s easier on her body. But it’s a prosthetic leg all the same; ulcers, pressure sores, blisters, prosthetics are uncomfortable and need constant care. At the end of the day, she’s tired and sore. She’s talking about veterinary school. The University of Tennessee has a program. It would take her eight years to get her degree. She’s thinking about it. She wants to work with farm animals. She’s worried that she’s bad at math.
She didn’t hesitate to answer my question, “No, not sustainable. I’ve been doing this for four years, I’m tired.”
Ursula wasn’t raised country, she was a Navy brat, she grew up and went to high school on the Naval Weapon Station in Charleston, South Carolina. Her father was career Navy, a submarine man. She worked for twenty years in banking and commercial real estate in Chicago. She has most of a bachelors degree. Her last husband beat her. I asked her what she thought of Harris. “I’m not voting for her,” she said, she said it fast so the words were a blur of syllables, like she was pouncing, like she’d been ready for my question to poke out of its nest. And then she said, “Let’s not talk about politics.”
