Glendora, Mississippi

The smoke at Red's gave my mom and I both scratchy throats that lasted more than a week, but it was worth it. The following morning it was bright and early out of Clarksdale and on our way to Birmingham. A part of this route has recently been named the Emmett Till Memorial Highway. Emmett Till was one of the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement, a 14-year-old from Chicago who went to Mississippi to visit relatives in 1955 and, not knowing the local rules of engagement, made the mistake of looking at a white woman. Some say he made a flirtatious gesture or possibly spoke to her. Whatever it was, there was a perception that an incident of some kind had taken place. By the following morning, Till had been brutally lynched. The murderers, who eventually confessed to the crime, were acquitted by the local court. To ensure that all Americans came face to face with the reality of Southern racial dynamics, Till's mother insisted on an open casket. By bringing broader public awareness to the realty of lynching, Till's open casket funeral increased the pressure for reform. Here are the before and after photos of Emmett Till.





A small sign along the highway guided us to the raw and powerful Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center, which became my other favorite tiny museum of this trip.

Clarksdale

We took the Mississippi Blues Trail ( http://www.msbluestrail.org/ ) from Natchez to Clarksdale. This turned out to be a fun little hunt for markers in various towns and roadside locations along our way. Most of them were quite humble, none was spectacular in and of itself, but altogether they made for an enjoyable scavenger hunt and drew us into some out-of-the-way towns we otherwise would have just driven by. This was the tiny home of blues legend Muddy Waters, for example, complete with a bottle tree.


The bottle tree thing is something we don't see much of in California. Turns out there's quite a history behind bottle trees. Although I know nothing about him as an authoritative source, I liked Felder Rushing's "Bottle Tree History" which you can find at http://www.felderrushing.net/HistoryofBottleTrees.htm

Night found us in Clarksdale, munching on Wendy's lovely bacon-free salads and eagerly awaiting a show at Red's Lounge, a divy juke joint that's about as authentic as it gets. See if you can find the blues club in this photo!

ISO Alligators

After a couple of days in New Orleans, complete with a riverboat tour, a Bourbon Street jazz club, a couple of Frenchmen Street jazz clubs, a little art shopping and some good (though bacony) food, we were on our way again, destination Natchez, Mississippi. I wanted to drive the River Road trail which, I assumed, passed closer to the river and also went by several plantations. Admiring plantation architecture was way down on the list of our priorities for this trip, but I figured if they were more or less on the way we should stop and check out at least one of them.

What we didn't expect until we were already enroute was that we might have an opportunity to take a swamp tour. It hadn't really occurred to me, but yes, we were driving through the bayou and they really do have alligators in this part of the country. We saw a small, curious sign along the highway, at least, that implied as much. A fruit vendor along the highway (we were sooo happy to find some fresh fruit and vegetables, all unadulterated by bacon) informed us that Munson's Swamp Tours ( http://www.munsonswamptours.com/ )might be difficult to find. He had tried it himself one time, just out of curiosity, and only found it through extreme perseverance and because he had nothing else to do that day. We might not be so lucky. I whipped out my iPad and asked if he could show us the way, pointing out the pulsing blue dot that was us. "Oh," he said, "maybe with that thing you'll be able to find it."

It was quite a detour, but we did find the swamp tour shack. Alas, the next tour wasn't for another two hours and we didn't have that much time to wait. In any case, said a French tourist just arriving from the morning ride, the alligators seemed to be mostly hibernating. I didn't know that alligators hibernate. It didn't really seem cold enough for hibernation. Maybe the tour guide just said that because they didn't find any alligators and he didn't want his French visitors to be too disappointed. Whatever the reason, we skipped the swamp tour and continued on with our drive. If you're ever in the area during the non-hibernation season, however, and you want to get up close and personal with an alligator, it's probably worth a try.

We also visited the Rosedown Plantation House ( http://www.rosedownplantationhome.com/ ). My mom and I make good travel partners when it comes to things like walking through plantation houses and touring gardens. We were both quite interested in going to one and Rosedown turned out to be a perfect stop along our day's route, but neither of us was interested in going to more than one. It's nice little synchronicities like that which make for compatible travel partners.

Our long drive that day ended at the Natchez Eola Hotel, and that's where, for me, the nightmare began.

One thing I've learned about myself from traveling with other people is that I'm a much lighter sleeper than I had realized. I thought it was normal for the human brain to take an hour or more to wind down and fall asleep. I thought it was normal for people to wake up in the middle of the night if there was a ruckus outside. When I'm traveling, I always like to get a room on the street with an operable window so I can stick my head out and listen to the street noise of whatever place I'm in. That street noise rarely prevents me from sleeping. I like street noise. But I guess I don't like all street noise.

When I traveled in Morocco with my French friend Caroline, I discovered that she takes all of about two minutes to fall asleep. Literally, we would wrap up a lively conversation and say goodnight, and within two minutes she'd be snoring away. My friend Trish was even faster... on our trip through Portugal and Spain she consistently nodded off in a minute or less. Amazing! I can't do that under normal circumstances, let alone when I'm traveling. Add to that a noisy party outside and the night starts to get very, very long. Our lovely street-side room at the Eola was quiet enough when we went to bed, but right at midnight someone enjoying a rigorous night of partying at the club next door must have walked outside for a cigarette and left its door open. Suddenly, it was as though the party was right there on our balcony, and essentially, that's where it was. Several floors down, but facing right towards our room. Our room with the lovely, historic balcony doors that don't quite close all the way, allowing every decibel of sound direct entry. It couldn't go on, I thought. Someone will say something. But minutes went by and on it went. Boom! Boom! Boom! Ta ta boom! How could my mom possibly be sleeping through this?

After the eternity of five minutes, I decided to call the guy at the front desk to see if he could do anything. But I didn't want to wake my mom by picking up the phone. Lucky her that she can sleep through it, I thought, envious. Instead of picking up the phone, I pulled on some flip flops and took the elevator downstairs. The guy at the front desk knew exactly what club I was talking about. "How long do they stay open?" I asked.

"Two, three, four o'clock," he said. "Depends."

I had a long drive the next day and the last thing I wanted was to listen to somebody else's party for the next four hours. "I can put you in a different room," he suggested.

"Can I go in one and leave my mom sleeping where she is?"

"Mmmm, no. Sorry. Either you both go or you both stay." I felt bad about it, but I had no choice. "Do you want me to send up a porter with a cart?"

"Yes, please," I said.

That was only one part of the fiasco of the Eola, but I won't go into the rest. All was more or less fixed by the time we checked out, and I more or less managed to get enough sleep to be a safe driver the following day. I still got a ticket on our way to Clarksdale, but I don't suppose I can blame that on loud music or poor-fitting doors. Call that my $295.50 user's fee for the privilege of using the lovely, long, straight and well-policed roads of the State of Mississippi. In the grand scheme of things, that was money well spent.

Selma

One of the highlights of the trip for me was our visit to Selma.

The route from Selma to Montgomery is now a National Historic Trail. The Park Service brochure sums it up nicely:

"The 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery in 1965 culminated a journey of a hundred years by African Americans to gain one of the most fundamental of American freedoms: the right to vote. The peaceful march was possible because in the preceding days courageous citizens, local leaders, and civil rights groups had, at the cost of harassment, bloodshed, and innocent lives, come together to demand that right. The final march was a celebration of their achievement, a processional for fallen comrades, and the climactic event of the modern civil rights movement."

Anyone interested in this era in American history, or in the evolution of rights in the modern world, would do well to take a pilgrimage along this route. Beginning with the Brown Chapel AME Church (closed when we tried to see it) and the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute ( http://nvrmi.com/ )in Selma and ending at the state building, one could hike, bike or drive the 54-mile route over the course of several days without running out of things to see. I found the Voting Rights Museum to be one of the most interesting of the whole trip. It continues to keep the issue of voting rights alive with an annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee event featuring three days of activities, including a film festival, youth leadership conference, re-enactments and more. The museum's exhibits include a series of plaster cast footprints of the Foot Soldiers who participated in the march. By the time we arrived at the museum it had closed for the day. Fortunately, the staff on duty saw us out there and let us in anyway or else we would have missed this moving collection of exhibits.

We stayed one night at the historic St. James Hotel in Selma and were on our way again bright and early the next day. Next stop: New Orleans!

Hugs

The hugs we got from Shirley Cherry at the Dexter Parsonage Museum were not the first nor the last hugs of our trip. Almost everywhere we went, people were chatty and huggy. Maybe it was the time of year - December is not the busiest tourist season to be sure, so there's time to chat. Or maybe the post-chemo fuzz starting to fill in on my mom's head inclined them to an extra level of friendliness. Maybe people in Alabama just find strangers interesting, like people in Vietnam do. Whatever it was, we embraced the embraces we received from the locals and thoroughly enjoyed the long conversations and intimate farewells whenever they were offered.

The friendly welcome was evident on the road as well. The first gas station we stopped at was full serve with a smile... at no extra cost. And often while driving along rural roads, the pedestrians we passed would wave at us. "Maybe I'm driving too fast," I said to myself. "Is one of my lights out? Is there a dead animal stuck on my bumper?"

At one point, driving from Selma to Gee's Bend, I finally said it out loud. "You know, I think they're just saying hello."

My mom knew exactly what I was referring to. "People do seem to wave a lot, don't they?"

"I'm not driving too fast, right?"

"No," she said, "I think they're just being friendly."

"Maybe because we're strangers?"

"I was thinking that," she said, "but how would the know we're strangers if we're in the car? It's one thing at the museums where they know we're visiting, but here we're just driving by."

"True," I said. "I guess people in Alabama are just really friendly."

I started giving them a little wave back from the car. And when we arrived at the Gee's Bend Nutrition Center, home of the Gee's Bend Quilters' Collective, the little old lady whose lunch we interrupted gave us each a hug hello as if we were part of the family.

Montgomery, Alabama

By the time we were done with breakfast, the ghost town had transformed into a reasonably populated civic center. I wouldn't quite call it bustling, but we did pass other people on the sidewalk from time to time. The desk clerk had warned us that Dexter Avenue, up toward the capitol building, was in disrepair. Dilapidated. Apparently the last part of the center to benefit from the city's downtown revitalization campaign. "He's obviously never been to San Francisco," I said to my mom as we walked along it looking for the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. "No," my mom said, "you wouldn't call this dilapidated in San Francisco. This seems like a normal, slightly run down city street."

We followed it until we found the church, which was closed on Mondays. Our luck. We went on instead to the Civil Rights Memorial Center around the corner. The Memorial Center is part of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a major player in the ongoing struggle for equality in the US. Lawyers, activists and administrators of the SPLC have been threatened with violence over the years, and the facility itself has been bombed by people who are unhappy about its work. We noticed an armed guard standing patrol across the street.

The Memorial Center was a perfect first stop on our Civil Rights pilgrimage and road trip. The visit provided an overview of the places we would visit over the next ten days and many of the individuals we would hear about. Most of the other museums and interpretive centers we visited presented the movement from the perspective of a specific incident or individual. Many of them were absolute gems, highly experiential interpretive centers created to memorialize things that happened where they happened, and often by people who were there. The curators of these small labors of love have put together powerful, focused displays, each one unique right down to the items in the gift shop. Every one we went to was fascinating, but it was also good to get an overview at the start to put it all into perspective.

On our second day in Montgomery we were able to explore Martin Luther King Jr.'s small church on Dexter Avenue, the tiny office where he wrote and thought with a view of the capitol building right out the window, the hall downstairs where members of the Montgomery Improvement Association met to plan the bus boycott of 1955. The lady who gave us our tour was nice enough to let us linger alone in the church for a while afterwards. Standing at the pulpit where King spoke some of his most passionate words, I tried to imagine the thoughts that must have come to his mind in that very place as he began to realize the magnitude of what was at stake and his own role in history.

After the church, we spent the rest of the afternoon at the Parsonage a few blocks away, first for a tour of the home where King and his family lived from 1954 to 1960, then for a long, informal chat with tour director Shirley Cherry. By the time we left it was hugs all around. We were running late but still managed to squeak into the Rosa Parks Museum before it closed, followed by a much-needed rest back at the hotel.

This was our second full night in Montgomery. The first night we'd gone to a holiday concert at the Montgomery Symphony, which was conveniently located across the street from our hotel. The second night I wanted to go to a Sing-Along Messiah I'd seen advertised on Dexter Avenue. My mom, not being much of a vocalist, decided to stay in. I left her at dinner having just ordered what we thought was a personal size pizza...

A Foreign Land

People would ask me where I was going over the winter break. The last few years it's been warm places like Cambodia and Vietnam, or thick snowy places like Poland and Ukraine. They know I'm a sucker for places with intriguing names like Moldova (still on the list), Bolivia (also still on the list), Luang Prabang, and Nuuk. Also, being from California, I naturally have certain prejudices when it comes to the Southern states. We all do.

So I got some confused looks when I told people I would be traveling this winter to... Alabama. That's right - and Mississippi, too. That backward and confused region of the United States we call the South, land of bigotry, economically depressed, a blot on the respectability of the nation, an embarassment really, like the third cousin twice removed who always drinks too much at weddings... you kind of wish you could say, "he's not with me... no really, the relation is quite distant."

To a native born Californian, the South is a foreign land. Strange customs. Funny accents. Everyone y'all-ing and ma'am-ing all the time. Nobody from California goes to the South for vacation.

And yet, the South was the heart of the Civil Rights movement. It was where our race problems were greatest. It was where our solutions were most difficult, and therefore most interesting. That's what my mom and I wanted to see when we proposed to do a road trip through Alabama and Mississippi, and we did. What we didn't expect was to find people so consciously continuing to engage in that same problem solving today. Race seemed to be on people's minds all the time, everywhere, openly talked about, and everyone had an opnion about it they wanted to share.

We knew we were indeed in another world before we even parked our rental car at our hotel in the Montgomery civic center. We arrived at night and the place was like a ghost town... not a person to be seen, not a shop with its lights on, not a restaurant, bar or place of business. With some hesitation, we asked the hotel desk clerk if he knew where we could get a bit to eat. "Y'all won't find anything open round here this time of night," he said. It was 11:00 pm.

"Not even a shop where we can get some crackers?" I asked.

"I might be able to find you a Lean Cuisine back in the fridge." He was a talkative guy, and very helpful. Quite generous with the Southern hospitality we'd heard about. We suspected the Lean Cuisine was probably from his own personal stash and we set out for a walk. We did eventually find some crackers in a hotel gift shop down the street. We slept well that night, stuffed with Cheez-Its and orange juice, and wondering what Montgomery would have in store for us in the morning. First on our list: the Rosa Parks bus stop.