America is a beautiful thing…
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.
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.
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.
Apologies that this is so long, I ran out of time.