I’m 67 years old, I’m a US Army veteran, I’ve lived overseas for many years in both Europe and Asia, and I’ve traveled the planet including 13 months riding a motorcycle around the world, the Sahara Desert crossing sticks in my memory. I’ve been married to the same woman for over 30 years, I founded and ran a business for 28 years (you know that, you worked for me), I put two kids through college without debt, paid off our house and had enough money left over to retire. I spend my summers traveling the southern states on my motorcycle talking to people I meet and writing about them (last summer I was in Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama (including a NASCAR race at Talladega!), Tennessee, North Carolina, West Virginia and Ohio). I subscribe to several newspapers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Guardian, BBC News and Al Jazeera; I read a lot and I am passionately and unabashedly liberal in my beliefs.
Having laid out a little of my history and perspective, and you know me as a co-worker and an employer, besides, I have to ask: Do I seem delusional? Do I seem like a person likely to be seduced by propaganda, false media and angry friends? If I do, stop reading. You shouldn’t read shit from delusional people.
If you’re still reading, here’s a quick thought experiment for you: apparently, a lot of people believe that Trump’s 4 indictments and 91 felony charges in 4 different jurisdictions are a “deep state” operation orchestrated by Joe Biden or his henchmen. A scenario like that would require that literally thousands of people be able to keep a complicated storyline absolutely secret not just for years but for the rest of their lives. Nobody, not attorneys, not juries, not court officials, not clerks, secretaries, police officers, or janitors can disclose their secret enterprise, despite the fact that revealing the secret would earn them thousands (or millions) of dollars and hours and weeks of TV fame. Does that seem likely? Really? People are people.
Now, let’s talk about you: I assume from your messages that your news sources are primarily Fox, OAN, Newsmax, Qanon and the various other websites, blogs and social media outlets that inform the MAGA faithful as well as the friends and people you choose to surround yourself with. And from those sources and associates, you have taken on a world view that is both false and destructive, a world view that is vengeful, bigoted and cruel, a world of lies, partial truths, conspiracy theories, self-dealing, self-aggrandizement and nonsense. The MAGA arguments are not something you will convince me of; in fact, it is not a conversation that I’m willing to be part of. But it is something you should reflect on.
And so, my former friend and co-worker, I wish you the very best. I warn you that outside the media and social bubble that you now live in, the world looks much different, it believes in science, humanity, justice and equality, it believes in an imperfect country forever working to better itself. That’s the America I believe in and want to be part of. Let’s go our different paths.
My plan was to follow The Great River Road, the Blues Highway, the Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan, from Minneapolis to Memphis then cut across to Birmingham for two days of NASCAR at Talladega with my son, Eli. Neither of us has ever been to a stock car race so, yeah; if you’re going to celebrate the South, NASCAR! We bought infield passes, because the “ribs are better in the infield.” That’s what they told me on the phone.
In Missouri just before Bob Dylan highway meets Interstate 64, I changed my mind and decided to cross the river to East St. Louis and ride south to Cairo, on the Illinois side. My purpose was to stop and visit with Frazier Garner, General Manager of the East St. Louis Monitor.
I walked in the front door and staff called for him and he greeted me and remembered me from earlier in the summer and we shook hands. Almost no small talk, it didn’t seem to flow, and then I told Frazier that the lynching photo hanging in his office stuck with me. I was curious about how he managed the anger.
The rage he denied he directed at me, spitting the words that he was “about love” and that he had no anger in response to the photograph, that the photograph didn’t matter, that he didn’t care about the photograph, that the photograph that hung on the wall in his office in such a way that every time he walked in he had to confront it, in such a way that his every visitor had to confront it, that that picture wasn’t important. This went on for a number of minutes until he stormed out of the room. I didn’t argue, there was no point at which I could interject or clarify or make amends. After he left, his sister, a co-worker, came in, initially looking at me with suspicion but nodding with what seemed to be an annoyed understanding once I’d described the exchange.
I’m thinking about emailing him an apology and trying to set things right but I’m not sure about that. I like Frazier and I’d like to visit with him again. The problem could be that Frazier, after fifty-some years in the newspaper business writing to and about the black community, has had his fill of well-meaning white people that speak and write pretty words that change nothing for him or his readers. Or maybe the random white dude stomping in the front door of his office and asking about his feelings deserved a firm fuck off. Or maybe the man who’s been fighting the fight his entire life has the right to wonder where I, the bleeding heart liberal I imagine myself to be, have been for the last fifty years. Or maybe he was just having a bad day. Something to think about.
Last night I stayed at the Quality Inn in Cairo, Illinois, the only motel in town still open for business. They have a breakfast buffet that includes Trix breakfast cereal, waffles, scrambled eggs from powder, sausage patties from powder (I guess) and coffee. Perfect. At breakfast, I met Angela and Alijah, Alijah is Angela’s niece and has a week off from school. Angela delivers school busses for a living. They’re from Atlanta and are on their way to St. Louis. The bus has a gasoline engine and no governor and they’re doing seventy-five.
Last night a friend asked me how I find the small, locally-owned motels where I tend to stay. I told him I just wander around whatever town I’m in until I see a motel-looking building that doesn’t have a Holiday Inn Express sign on top. You don’t meet interesting people at a Holiday Inn Express. And that’s the purpose of my wandering, to meet interesting people: steel workers, powerline workers, asphalt workers, concrete guys, carpenters, electricians, windmill erectors, engineers, government inspectors, young couples, retirees, farm laborers, tugboat crewmen, low-budget lawyers, helicopter pilots, circus workers, long haul truckers, cowboys, mechanics, salespeople selling toilet paper and John Deere tractors, beat up women and exhausted children, people with wheelchairs and walkers, people on porno shoots and sexy trysts, drug dealers, rodeo riders, addicts, drunks, hookers, fellow motorcyclists; silent people, noisy people, people who don’t speak English, people beaten down and moving on, people with their heads held high and moving on. These motels house the rich, colorful, fabulous and messy tapestry of our society. And every person I meet has a story to tell. A little situational awareness is advised.
It was 96 degrees yesterday in Montgomery, Alabama. I sat in the shade under the canopy of The Legacy Museum and had a conversation with the security guard. Her name is Ivory. We talked for an hour.
She’s sixty-two and remembers as a child helping her great-grandmother pick cotton, dragging her small sack through the fields following after Big Mama. She remembers riding the Trailways bus into Montgomery for groceries, and the long walk back to the farm in the evening lugging groceries from the bus stop.
Ivory spent thirty years working for the Montgomery County Sheriffs Department in Juvenile Detention. When she retired, she went to work part time for the firm that provides security to the museum. She has four kids, Bakith, Anthony, Precious and Marquis. Only one of her children is biological, the other three she adopted from the detention center. Anthony was a preemie and spent months in the NICU before she brought him home. Precious was five when Ivory adopted her.
Ivory was a single mother. Her mother helped. Ivory took mornings and nights. Her mother did the cooking, was there after school and made sure they did their homework.
Bakith is an over-the-road truck driver, he owns his own rig. Anthony lives in Montgomery and works for Hyundai. Precious is married and lives in Pensacola. Marquis lives in Birmingham. Ivory has sixteen grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Over the Fourth of July, there was a first-birthday party for one of her great-grandchildren and all four of her kids were there.
I asked Ivory about the museum, “The museum is difficult, it’s a lot to stomach.” I asked her where I should go in Montgomery; she encouraged me to go to the new waterpark.
Ivory has a sister. Her sister had several miscarriages before George was born. He was her only child. Four years ago, George was killed. His pregnant girlfriend’s new boyfriend shot him, six times while he was standing then emptied the gun into his body as he lay dying on the ground. George’s daughter is six, his son, who wasn’t born when he was killed, is four. Ivory’s sister is fifty-three and drinks heavily now.
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.
