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.
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.
Yesterday’s gentle evening, James and George and I sat on metal chairs beside the creek murmuring alongside the Mineral Springs Motel watching the night come over the mountains and I listened to their stories.
James and George are HIV positive. James was diagnosed in 1991, George was diagnosed in 2001. James has a Parkinsons-like tremor in his jaw and hands from the drugs and has blackouts, dropped conversation and a straight-ahead stare that lasts many seconds until he blinks and shakes his head and says, “Sorry, sorry.” George has osteoporosis and arthritis from his treatments, the pain is constant. His doctor’s afraid that one day his legs will collapse from his body weight. He walks with a cane. Through the years, they have both teetered over and over at the edge of death.
They were both born in 1964. James went to West Virginia Tech where he joined a fraternity and had a first boyfriend and dropped out of school. He worked in retail, as a model (he went to modeling school) as a writer and editor. George worked as a florist. His dad died in a coal mine. He and James have been together for 16 years. They live on disability.
George told me that they used to drink a liter of vodka a day. They’ve switched to wine because it’s healthier. They drink all day. George smokes cigarettes and James, who dislikes the habit and the smell, walks across the parking lot for an ashtray and lays it in George’s hand with a gentleness and intimacy that catches the attention.
They’d been living with James’ sister, Loretta. There’s tension; James had a fling with Loretta’s now-deceased husband. It happened some 40 years ago when Loretta was first married but it’s still there. A few days ago, she threw them out on some pretense and they’re staying at the Mineral Springs Motel. She calls the motel owner, Randy, every day to check on their condition. It sounds like they may be going home tomorrow. A relief for James and George; between them they have three older cats and miss them terribly. And they’ve been wearing the same clothes for a week.
