In Leeds, not too far from Birmingham, Vicky owns a cafe called Laney’s. Her daughters, Sharon and Laney, do the managing and cooking, Sharon’s daughter, Lillian, makes the biscuits. Hot and buttery and crispy brown on the outside, served with pepper gravy, those biscuits are so worth the sore butt of getting there.
They were sitting at a table near the coffee pot and when I filled my cup and they asked about my trip; I told them I was wandering the south talking politics with people I might disagree with.
Laney
Laney told a story about a cop escorting her out of a local dirt track car racing event for being overly affectionate with her girlfriend. She told it like it was a family story she’d told many times. Her mother and sister laughed with her as she told it.
I parked the Revival and walked the streets of Marion. In the drugstore, the girl behind the cash register said hello. I said my wife worked in a drugstore when she was in high school and we got to talking. She’d graduated in May and is going into the Air Force in the fall. I told her that I’d joined the army after high school.
There’s a fine line between curious and creep. Two old ladies approached the register. Rather than skulk around while they paid, I told her to take care and we bumped fists, enlistee and vet, and I got back on the bike.
Two or three miles down the road from Marion, I stopped to talk to TJ sitting on his horse, Red. TJ lives on a farm down the red clay road from where I pulled over. He lives with his folks raising cows and sheep and growing melons. He’s ridden bulls in the rodeo, just a couple of times, and sometimes races Red. Red’s a fast horse. TJ graduated in May, he’s thinking about welding school in the fall, but sounded tentative. I told him about the girl at the drug store. She was a classmate.
TJ
I pulled off the road and down a little track under a bridge to pee. There was pickup parked there. Twelve years ago, Cleveland retired from his job in Cleveland, he’d been a mold maker in a foundry. He grew up near Greensboro and now he’s home, fishing for catfish. His daughters and grandchildren are coming from Ohio to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday on Tuesday. He already had two nice fish in the bucket. I didn’t ask him how he came to be called Cleveland.
Cleveland
Chris woke me up this morning at 6:00 when he started his truck just outside my window. It’s a diesel flatbed and damn it’s loud. Chris’ company is CH Mechanical out of south Georgia. They’re moving a veneer drier from Camden to Greenville, they’ll load the last semi this morning. Chris has horses and a wife in Georgia. He talked a lot about the horses. And about a broken neck he got in ‘95 that partially disabled his right arm. After the holiday, he and his crew will spend another six weeks living in motel while they put the drier back together. When I talked to him last night, Chris was slurring his words, lean-on-the door jamb drunk.
Yesterday morning at Waffle House, Inez was my waitress. I told her I liked her name, she smiled and told me it was her grandmother’s name. She had a gold tooth.
Once in a while, when the road is good and the air temperature and humidity and the thrum of intake, ignition and exhaust are just so, motorcycling creates its own ethereality. Yesterday was like that.
Last night I walked from my motel down the hill to the Chevron station and bought a can of Corona. I handed the kid at the counter some bills and change and he noticed that one of my coins wasn’t a quarter, it wasn’t a US coin. He offered me a quarter for it. I told him that it’s probably worth fifty cents some place, but he could have it for a quarter. He’s gotten a lot of wheat pennies and a couple of silver certificate dollars over the years. The beer was cold.
I had some conversations yesterday. I mention Roe a couple of times below, it wasn’t me that brought it up.
At Jim’s Cafe, Jimmy (presumably no relation) and Debbie parked their shiny new pickup next to the Revival and sat at the the booth next to mine. Jimmy was on the phone and I chatted with Debbie about scuba diving in Cozumel and horses and horse hotels, their five-year marriage, the second for both of them, and not believing in vaccines and having Covid this spring and now she’s on three kinds of blood pressure medicine and it’s worth it because they’re her antibodies fighting the virus.
Debbie
Jimmy, wearing a pink golf shirt, got off the phone and started talking to me, loud, motorcycle guy to motorcycle guy. He’d been cancelling plans for Sturgis. They’d been to Sturgis last year, trailered the bikes, great time, Sturgis, great music, great people, couldn’t wait to go back, ah, but this year a friend couldn’t go. Horrible. Very disappointed. Was really looking forward to Sturgis. He looks me in the eye over his bacon and grits and asked me, motorcycle guy to motorcycle guy, if I’d ever been to Sturgis. I told him yeah, I’d been to Sturgis. Forty years ago.
Ronald Lee Anderson was sitting on a bench in front of Jim’s Cafe and when I came out, I sat on the bench next to him and we got to talking. He told me about places he’d lived and jobs he’d had and how he supported the SCOTUS decision on Roe. I asked him why and he pointed to a book of scripture on the bench next to him, the binding shredded, the cover torn and the pages piled loosely. I said the bible has nothing to say about abortion. He said, “thou shalt not kill.”
My goal on this trip is to listen but sometimes listening is too hard.
I said, ‘That’s bullshit. Loving a fetus is cheap and lazy. I’m sitting next to a guy who just asked me for five dollars for breakfast, what about him? Where’s his unconditional love? Where’s the pro Ronald Lee Anderson life movement? Who’s picketing and protesting and raising money for him? Where are the billboards? Where’s the fancy speeches and big gatherings and powerful politicians demanding Ronald’s well-being?’ He got quiet. I’d asked him directions earlier and after a minute he stood up and he told me how to get where I was going and he walked away. I rode passed him and he didn’t wave.
I pulled off the highway into a little park and there was a Sheriff’s SUV parked there and I parked beside it. Nick Phillips is a Greenville County Sheriff, a vet and a native Apache, his grandfather as a child had been sent east from the reservation to go to school. Nick talked about the high rate of crime in Greenville, about the police and the local chapter of the Vice Lords having an informal agreement, ignore prostitution and drugs, focus on rapes and murders. The agreement worked for everybody until local politics and a new police chief made a mess. And Roe was going to make it worse. Because all these families living on the edge are going to have more babies they won’t be able to care for. More desperation. More crime. Nick is moving to Memphis with his wife and child and getting out of law enforcement.
Nick
In Rosedale, Mississippi, I sat in the shade on a concrete ledge on Bruce Street and had a conversation with John Wright. Rosedale was immortalized by Robert Johnson’s recording of “Traveling Riverside Blues” and made famous by Eric Clapton and Cream in their later version of the song which includes the line, “goin’ down to Rosedale.” In its heyday in the ‘30s, Bruce Street was lined with juke joints. Today, it’s vacant, crumbling structures and concrete pads where the joints used to shake, bluesmen strummed and wailed and people danced night into day.
John Wright
Apologies that this is so long, I ran out of time.
Arthur Lee Brown was walking down the sidewalk on Canal Street in Natchez when I pulled up next to him on the bike and asked for directions to the Under the Hill Saloon, a bar of some notoriety.
Arthur Lee Brown
He pointed and told me where it was and where to turn and I asked him how he was doing.
He’s from Natchez, lived there all his life, family in the area, relatives, kids, no wife. He’d been in a gang and he’s done with that. He did a 12-year stretch for a piece of bad luck; one guy had a gun, another guy died and somebody had to go to jail. Today he’s looking for a job. But unemployment is high in Natchez, among the highest in the state that has the highest unemployment rate in the country. And he’s a felon.
I asked him why he didn’t leave and he replied, “And go where?”
As he talked, I could see the rage in his hands. He had beautiful hands and I asked if I could take his picture.
I ordered a beer at the Under the Hill Saloon, four well-dressed white folks sitting at the bar and a young white girl behind it. I took a sip and got back on the Revival and rode out of town.
Tonight I’m at the Colonial Inn in Greenville, Mississippi, my second motel of the evening. My first had been the Relax Inn, where I had a forty dollar room. I took the luggage off the bike, put it on the bed and the cops showed up, a couple of squad cars across the parking lot followed by a bunch of banging on doors. As the banging was going on, Lenny from next door stopped by and told me what a nice bike I had, and did I want to ‘buy something, weed, anything you need.’
I’ve known guys like Lenny; 40-some years old, still working nickel-dime hustles, still trying to score. I said “no thanks” knowing that he’d be back, knowing that he’d try to sell me something and that I’d refuse, knowing that it would escalate, knowing that I had an expensive and fragile motorcycle parked in front of my room. He went back to his room and I loaded the bike and rode down the road to the Colonial Inn and got a fifty dollar room. Cops haven’t been here yet.
I had breakfast at the Little Easy Cafe, cheesy grits, collard greens and a veggie omelet. The chef is a guy named Jay who’s spent his career in the restaurant business, and what he wants to do is write.
I wrote about Ashley the other day, her tears and fury over the SCOTUS Roe decision in the parking lot of the Edelweiss. What I’ve been thinking is that a 15 year old child made a decision to keep a fetus and continue her pregnancy and that the cost was her life. (Sure, she can still go to medical school and became an astronaut and travel the earth and write novels, but how much are we going to ask of this woman?).
It was the visceral nature of her rage that I think about. The sense that for her, the SCOTUS decision was intensely personal, that the court was denying her her choice and her sacrifice. The decision that set the course of the rest of her life had been hers, nothing abstract about it. She wasn’t expressing pride or regret, but ownership and autonomy. And now this feckless enterprise was taking that decision away from her and making it theirs.
For me, an old white guy accustomed to having the world my way and viewing oppression safely through the filter of my media, to see that rage up close and in person was frightening. And inspiring. And worth writing about.
Left to right: Cameron, Chandler, your host, fellow customer David McClellen
I stopped at Toad Suck Harley Davidson in Conway, Arkansas for a quart of oil. The service manager, Cameron, confided that he would rather ride a sport bike than a Harley (sacrilege in that part of the world, particularly for a guy who works in a Harley shop). He wants an Aprillia. The young guy washing bikes, Chandler, has a liberal girlfriend and he’s going to school to become social worker. Fellow customer, David McClellen, grunted when I told him I was a commie, but he talked to me for another 45 minutes.
The photo below, from the left, Cameron, Chandler, me and David. The t-shirt cost $43.00.
Pro tip: when possible, stay at locally owned motels instead of the chains; the money stays local, and they’re a lot more interesting.
