The Terrace Motel in Natchez, Mississippi costs forty-five dollars a night. Cash. No credit cards. I stayed two nights.
Wayne lives at the Terrace Motel. He’s a concrete finisher. Standing behind him waiting to check in, I thought he was drunk, weaving and bracing himself against the plexiglass window and slurring his words as he waited for change for his hundred dollar bill; cash for a day’s work, cash for today’s rent and yesterday’s rent. I asked him how he was doing. Temperatures bouncing around a hundred degrees, humidity thick enough to steam my eyeglasses, he’d finished fifty yards of four-inch concrete that afternoon. That’s a lot of mud. He’s sixty-five.
I met Jay Yates when I was here a year ago. He played football on scholarship for the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, majored in political science, minored in English, married, divorced, no kids. He spent his career in the restaurant business, chef, executive chef, owner. He’s a dog guy, Roux died and now he has Roux-B, pronounced as you’d expect. He’s on sabbatical, charting a new direction. He’d wants to write. I’m reluctant to tell him there’s no money in the writing business.
Jay and some friends and I spent the afternoon drinking beer at the Under-the-Hill Saloon, a restored vestige of ‘Nasty Natchez’, a “boozing, brawling and prostitution” wayside for rivermen. The Saloon’s website boasts that Samuel Clemens was a guest but doesn’t mention the town’s role in the slave trade. I came to Natchez for the stories and the old man stories at the Saloon, the football stories, the golf stories, the business stories, the cancer stories, the law enforcement stories (complete with a nickel-plated snub-nose revolver pulled out of a pants pocket to make the point), were all good stories.
But the best stories were about crawfish, how to catch them, how to cook them, how to eat them. When Jay was a kid in Natchez, after a heavy rain flooded the fields and ditches, he and his father would go out at night with headlamps and nets and buckets, line the bed of the El Camino with visqueen sheeting, load it with crawfish, gather neighbors and family and have a crawfish boil. He mimed how to eat a crawfish, breaking off the head and sucking out the juice with one hand, squeezing the flesh from the tail into his mouth with the other. At the Saloon, there was a general consensus that the current world record for crawfish eating, 2.6 pounds in 10 minutes, was readily beatable. My money’s on Jay.
The main highway through Natchez is HIghway 61 which extends from Wyoming, Minnesota to New Orleans. In Natchez it’s called The Blues Highway. Where the Terrace Motel overlooks the Blues Highway, it’s a fast four-lane road with stoplights, left turn lanes, a gas station directly below, a strip mall across the way. At late dusk, as I sat on the steps to my room enjoying the evening cool, a woman ran naked down the Blues Highway.
Cars skidded and dodged and honked, drivers yelled and she yelled back as she ran through the lines of traffic slapping hoods and bouncing off fenders. She was alone, nobody chasing her, talking to her, trying to get her off the highway. A dozen or so people were taping her on their phones.
In the dusk I couldn’t tell if she was black or white. And that’s the thing, right, a white man trying to interfere with a black woman is messy, as messy as white people drinking and enjoying themselves at the Under-the-Hill Saloon, a bar crowded on a Friday afternoon with no black people, a historic remnant of the industry that made the town wealthy, the trafficking in human beings. Can a black woman trust a white man to do the right thing in that town? Or any American town?
I asked a couple of teenage girls peering at her through their phones if they thought she was white or black. They shrugged the white guy off and kept shooting. No doubt it was good stuff.
She ran into the gas station and under the pump lights and I could see her clearly and she was white. I walked over and asked her if there was anything I could do to make her evening better. Waving her arms over her head and dancing around me like she was going to hit me, she screamed at me, a high-pitched animal scream, “Get out, get out, get out of my face, motherfucker.” I asked again and she screamed at me again and we went back and forth under the fluorescent gas station lights. The people around us filmed it all; me offering to help, her naked and screaming.
Until she stopped screaming and stood statue still, her head cocked to one side, and stared at me and I studied her back. She was an old forty, short, five feet or a little over, stringy blond hair, small breasts, tattoos here and there. Her eyes were deep green and clear and locked on me and they were beautiful. We stared at each other for many long seconds, neither of us moving, until two police cruisers rolled into the gas station and I turned away from those viridescent eyes and walked back up the hill to my room. An ambulance showed up a few minutes later.
As I was loading my gear onto the bike and getting ready to leave the Terrace Motel, Wayne walked over from his room. He’d spent the day before vomiting from his dehydration and had been unable to work. I asked him if had money for his room for the night, he told me no. I gave him sixty bucks and told him to keep drinking water.
Randy’s not tall, 5’6” or so. His left shoulder was badly hurt in an incident and is hunched and lower than his right shoulder causing him to lead with his left when he walks, like a boxer, the good shoulder back and cocked like he’s about to throw a haymaker. One side of his face is swollen and pocked and port-wine purple, a condition that continues down his neck into his shirt collar. Sometimes he covers the wine stain with makeup; in conversation, he talks with one eye, turning his face to hide the color. This spring, he had brain surgery for cancer and wears a net stocking cap over his head to hold the bandage in place, tufts of gray hair growing through the medical-white netting.
Randy White owns and manages The Mineral Springs Motel, a twenty-three-room motel in Webster Springs, West Virginia, population seven hundred. He bought the motel on a contract-for-deed in 1978, he was 24 years old. He was elected mayor of Webster Springs then to the West Virginia House of Delegates then to the State Senate. He was defeated by a Republican in 2011. He was the first openly gay elected official in West Virginia.
He’s divorced and has a twenty-seven-year-old son, Clark; millennial blond and multi-colored hair, millennial wardrobe, fair skin. Clark was bullied in high school because of his dad’s figurement and identity. He works at the motel and lives in Randy’s house on the other side of town. Randy lives at the motel. Their love and resentments are painfully loud in their tones and silences.
At the motel, Randy lives in a two-story apartment. The upper story had been a bar, the lighting is bar-lighting and the glazy-brown walls haven’t been painted. Randy closed the bar a couple of years after he bought the place because of the drinking and the fighting; his shoulder he’d crushed chasing a customer down a flight of stairs, he and the customer both drunk. The bar is now his bedroom, his bed is where the dance floor used to be. The bar and the bar sink are still there and above the sink, glass shelves and part-empty liquor bottles fuzzy with dust.
In the corner of his bedroom, there’s a flat screen tv mounted to the wall, a recliner and a stool face the tv. The floor around the chairs is covered with paint tubes and brushes and stretched and rolled canvases and paint pots and an easel and pebbles and big pebbles and works in progress and all manner of art detritus with only small spaces in front of the chairs for his feet. In the room, not just the floor, every flat surface is covered with painted and partially painted pebbles, unhung paintings, paintings in progress, junk mail, important mail, IRS mail, a hammer, a pair of pliers, a screw gun, a screwdriver, empty pop cans, pizza boxes and all the rest. His paintings, framed and unframed, hang on the walls. On both rocks and canvas, his art is good enough that selling it helped him through the pandemic. He gave me a painted rock although what I really wanted was one of his canvases. I hinted but he didn’t offer.
The stools were still under the bar. I’d bought ground beef and tomatoes and buns and beer. We grilled the burgers outside and he heated up cheese dip in the old bar oven and we sat at the bar and pushed pebbles and mail aside and ate burgers and chips and dip and drank beer and smoked weed until past two in the morning. I asked him about his politics.
Randy’s liberalism exists in a harsh environment. It’s a street-level, street-wise liberalism, a tough liberalism, a clear-eyed and knowing liberalism. He didn’t talk about politics in terms of ideals but in terms of policy, his voice taking on the gravely tone and acronym-punctuated cadence of a career politician; campaigns, votes, personalities, accomplishments, failures, constituents, schools, roads, sewers, jobs, environment, law, losing. I got lost in the acronyms and county and small town names and nudged the conversation along.
For decades, Randy has allowed indigent people passing through Webster Springs to stay the night in his motel for free. He’s more careful now. People passing through are harder on his rooms than they used to be, more violent. But he still gives rooms away. While I was there, James and George were thrown out of their living situation by an irate sister. She owns the house and they live with her. Randy gave them a room and acted as an intermediary with Loretta as they patched things up. James and George are both sixty and HIV positive and crippled with the disease and its treatments and living on disability and drinking heavily. And they miss their three cats terribly. They don’t have a car and were waiting for Loretta to pick them up the morning I rode away.
Randy does the landscaping. Beyond the buildings and asphalt parking lot, the motel sits on two acres of tall, shady sycamores, close cut grass, and island gardens of lilies and hardy lilies and phlox and small evergreens dammed out of the grass by carefully placed rings of pebbled rocks. In a large, rectangular garden spaded into the lawn, Randy grows sunflowers; last year he came within five inches of having the tallest sunflower in West Virginia, twenty-three feet and change.
A rocky trout stream, a branch of the Elk River, runs along one side of the property. He’s placed metal chairs and benches along the bank; at dusk, as the shadowy dark crawls over the Appalachian Mountains and the soft, cool air settles on the back of your neck and your bare arms, the sensuousness, the perfection of the moment, is overwhelming.
Cairo, Illinois is an abandoned town. Closed buildings, one or two stories tall and built mostly of brick, abut the sidewalks on both sides of Washington Avenue, the main street through town. Besides an occasional aged car ducking in or out of a side street or a shambling pedestrian, the avenue is empty. There’s one restaurant, Shemwell’s, a mediocre rib joint, and just north of town, a Quality Inn motel with a half-empty swimming pool located between the office and the guest rooms so that guests have to skirt it to get to their rooms, the water brown and scummy with cigarette butts. No lifeguard on duty.
The town sits at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers. Both rivers are wide and stately and eddied with the power of their currents. It’s a very American scene; the beauty, the enormity, the magnificence of nature, the rivers spanned by humankind’s long and spindly bridges. There is a park at the confluence, the oaks are stately but the grass hasn’t been cut this year and there are potholes in the asphalt. There is an aged two-story viewing tower with concrete steps and galvanized pipe railings. A young woman walked past me singing to herself; she sang beautifully. I told her so and she smiled.
Gary’s from Kansas City and rides a Honda Goldwing. We met in the park. His wife died twenty years ago and he wanders the country on his motorcycle. It turned out that Gary knew something about Cairo’s history; in the nineteen twenties and earlier, Cairo was a boomtown. Organized crime had a large presence and a lot of shipping money stayed in town. Then the FBI moved in, threw the crooks in jail and left only “the blacks.” The town’s been going to hell ever since.
From Cairo, I followed the river north on the Illinois side. Very poor. Very beautiful. Rolling hills, farmland and forest. Middling roads. A friend had suggested East St. Louis.
When I arrived in East St. Louis, I stopped the bike to look around and get my bearings and Tiny, she’s seventy and lives in her truck, came up to sell me a copy of The East St. Louis Monitor. It cost me a buck. The newspaper office was across the street and the door wasn’t locked.
Frazier Garner has worked for the East St. Louis Monitor for fifty years. On the masthead his title is General Manager. The paper was founded by his father, Clyde Jordan, in 1963 and covers the local news of East St. Louis. The paper’s a weekly with a circulation of five thousand. We had a long conversation about the paper and its history and the town it covers. Frazier was patient and courteous with the white guy standing in front of his desk asking questions. He’d done it before.
As we talked, I studied his office walls. He had an NRA placard above the target he’d shot to qualify for his membership. He’s no longer a member. His reasons are unsurprising. It’s a small office, his desk against one wall, a narrow passage to get past it to his chair. On the wall, centered on that narrow passage at eye level is a photo. Arriving at work in the morning, coming back from a coffee break or the restroom or a meeting, he can’t sit down without looking at that picture. And his visitors, as he fields questions from his chair, are forced to confront it, to think about it, to lug that image out in their memories when they leave.
I wanted a picture of him. He wouldn’t let me take one.
For many years, I knew that there were culinary gems to be found in small town America. And for many years after that, I knew that there were no culinary gems to be found in small town America.
I’m in Bluefield, West Virginia. Dinner at Jah’ Kater Kitchen is the gem that I believed in. Don (he titles himself Jah’ Don) makes Caribbean soul food. His mission statement is to make food with “flavor you can feel.” Indeed, his sensuous candied yams, perfectly grilled and seasoned medium rare lamb chops, spicy yellow rice, and silky, peppery mac & cheese with a chewy melted top I could feel in my toes. Oh yeah, baby, it’s been a lot of years!
A couple of days ago I took a wrong turn and then another wrong turn and ended up on a steep little dirt road that got steeper and smaller and rockier until it was just a trail following a narrow, dry stream bed and had disappeared from the Garmin. I had no idea where I was or where I was going. I was surrounded by thick forest and undergrowth, no vehicles, no buildings, no people, no internet. The trail was too narrow to turn around, too steep and rocky to ride back up. The Harley weighs 864 pounds, plus gear and my fat butt.
I hung the bike up on a rock and walked a mile down the trail looking for help and walked a mile back with a six foot log to use as a lever. Along the way, I cut back brush and thorny blackberry bushes so I could see the path and it wouldn’t tangle with the bike (for years I’ve wondered why I carry that Buck knife when I travel). I took the gear and side-bags off the bike, used the log as a lever to pick it up and jammed rocks under the rear tire until the frame was clear. With great care and a little tire spin, it crunched and rolled up and over.
The dry stream bed turned into a wet stream bed so that I was riding in running water and when that smaller stream joined a larger stream, I rode through its rushing water, too. And the stream got bigger and the water got faster and deeper so that steam clouded off the engine and the exhaust burbled and blew bubbles and the engine coughed and wasn’t happy.
I tipped the the bike over three times and picked it back up, once in the middle of a stream in water almost to my knees; 864 pounds plus gear. But I repeat myself. My jeans were wet to the crotch, my feet sloshed in my boots and my t-shirt was soaked with sweat. Gentle clutch, gentle throttle, gentle brakes, it took me four hours to go three miles and find a tiny asphalt road.
I stopped at the first motel and poured the water out of my boots into the sink.
Two nights ago, my motel in Huntington, West Virginia overlooked a fast, busy, one-way, two lane thoroughfare. The speed limit was thirty-five, people were in a hurry, there was a lot of traffic, it was dusk.
I was sitting on the balcony watching flatbed semis hauling steel and diesel pickups rolling coal and gasser pickups with blue-lit wheel wells and growly hotrod Subarus and snarly Japanese motorcycles and burbly Harleys, the Harleys’ signature exhaust note muffled by their riders’ oversize butt cheeks, and a lot of people in sedans and minivans hurrying home for dinner.
A guy came riding by on a BMX bike. Tall guy, he was wearing a black hoodie, black baseball hat, black pants, work boots and carrying a black backpack. He was standing up and stomping the pedals like the cops were moments behind him.
When he was in front of me, he slammed on the brakes, skidded the bike sideways to a stop, lifted it chest high, slammed it down on the pavement and stalked away, back the way he’d come.
He was a hundred feet down the road and I was starting to think I’d better move his bike when he stopped, bent down and out of the gutter picked up a bright, shiny Bowie knife and held it above his head. The blade was twelve inches long or longer. He stalked back to the bike waving the knife over his head like a balloon on a stick, put the knife back in the sheath he’d dropped it from, and pedaled away, standing and stomping.
