Thursday, February 27, 2014 – Southern Pride & Northern Prejudice

We face even colder weather this morning.  Brrr!  Although certain that the mercury has fallen to 20°, I must admit that Pearl’s thermometer reads in the mid-40s. Today’s wan sunshine probably brings a dearly desired coolness to the area in summer, unwelcome now during the waning days of winter.

Bear, ever the morning commandant, rounds us up and chases us out of the door by 9 AM.  We leave our Airbnb nest reluctantly, worried about a week of inhabiting kitchen-less hotels and the bad restaurant food we will be forced to consume in desperation. But the boys soldier on, stuffing Pearl and her hat with our worldly belongings. We haven’t quite succumbed to refugee status.  Katrina descended upon the Gulf in 2005, not 2014.  But as we approach a month on the road, have we not become gypsies?

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, Bear, our wonderful morning chauffeur, steers Pearl up toward Baton Rouge once again.  Passing Baton Rouge, we turn north on state route sixty-one, heading for the scariest place in the United States:  Mississippi. Where were the civil rights workers slain? Mississippi. Where was teenaged Emmett Till tortured and murdered? Mississippi. Where was Medgar Evans assassinated? Mississippi. What’s the locale for every scary movie about the Klan? Mississippi. Does driving a new car in the land of conservatives scream liberal? This place scares the bejeebers out of me.

Ten miles inside the state, my fears spring to life.  The Mississippi Highway Patrol, a police force whose cruelty knows no bounds (per the 1960s and Hollywood), stops all motorists. Pearl trembles as my heart rises to my throat, beating so loudly as to be heard a mile away. Ominously, to the right, on the road’s shoulder, we see a white boy cuffed standing behind his car. “Oh my gosh,” I think, shaking in panic, “we have Colorado plates. These boys will have a good old time looking for marijuana, ripping Pearl, her hat, and Sven asunder.”  Our inanimate partners quiver with barely suppressed terror.  We picture ourselves on the side of the road in Mississippi, our belongings strewn everywhere.  Sven, conflated with Pearl’s transmission, both in a million pieces, blow about in the wind.  We cry helplessly seeing our lives scattered all over the roadway, while the police laugh heartlessly.

The patrolman approaches.  “Good morning, sir,” he drawls, “license and registration please.” Keith hands over the requested documents quickly, the only sign of nervousness he displays.  The officer scans Keith’s driver’s license and examines Pearl’s registration.  Looking at the front license plate, he begins to guffaw. “Colorado, eh? Ha Ha Ha.  Cold out there, huh?  Enjoy your travels in Mississippi. Have a good day.”

Keith explains that “stop ‘em all” provides much needed money to rural police departments, now a standard revenue source in the South.  Ask every driver passing by to produce a valid driver’s license and registration while searching for unpaid traffic tickets and outstanding warrants, and no one can complain about discrimination.  People failing the checks face jail, requiring them to shell out more moolah to escape authority’s clutches.  Living in poverty, people allocating scarce economic resources between electric bills and traffic tickets will often leave the latter unpaid.   The rich, who would squawk and quash the practice, will sail through these tests; the Republicans will be glad to see the boys working at keeping the riff-raff in line.

A mere forty-five minutes later, my adrenaline level finally subsides as Pearl drives into Melrose Plantation of Natchez National Park. We find, wonder of wonders, a picnic table!  Exiting Pearl, we sit amidst blooming chickweed, enjoying the sunny, open space.  The boys heat our lovely lunch, prepared last night by the ever industrious Keith. We enjoy our chicken, zucchini and pasta. Unfortunately we couldn’t convince Bear to prepare meals for an entire week, no matter how much assistance we proffered.  “We don’t have a refrigerator Beaver, much less a freezer. You’re being ridiculous, worrying far too much about the Sysco truck.”  “But we have a cooler and ice,” I feebly responded.  And I hadn’t said a word about that darn truck!

In 1990, the National Park Service (NPS) acquired Melrose Plantation, including the Greek Revival mansion and surrounding buildings that once created the plantation’s wealth.  The NPS has busily restored the property.  Sven and I motor about on paved trails.  We see slave cabins and various outbuildings, entering the accessible ones.  Displays teach us more about slavery. 

We learn that the overseer, not the aristocratic planter families, determined a slave’s quality of life.  The planter would contract with the overseer for a projected profit. If the overseer failed to produce adequately, the agreement generally permitted the planter to dock the overseer’s pay.

Cotton plantations ran on debt, generally 70% of their value.  Planters borrowed heavily to buy slaves, land and seed.  A slave cost $500 and was expected to generate $100 to $200 each year.  With patience and luck, a plantation would eventually turn a profit. 

Success or failure depended upon the slaves’ survival and continued ability to work. People, both planter and slaves, would die in cholera and yellow fever epidemics.  Every plantation had a slave infirmary, where the mistress of the house’s duties included nursing people back to health.

The South welcomed many planters who had exhausted their Virginia land growing tobacco.  Selling their depleted northern land, they would move farther south to new land.  Borrowing heavily, they established cotton plantations, bound by both their new and old obligations.

For the enslaved, tobacco farming required the least amount of labor, cotton more, and sugar the most.  Sugar plantations subjected exhausted people to horrendously dangerous processes, often proving lethal. Succumbing to accidents and overwork, people on sugar plantations seldom saw forty.

Leaving the Melrose Plantation, Pearl cruises a few miles west to deliver us to the Longwood Octagonal house.  Jumping out of the car, we sign up for the tour. 

Sven comments, “Like we ever jump, Beaver.”

“Poetic license, Sven, poetic license.”

“Who gave you a license, Beaver?  You don’t even drive anymore.”

“Why the State of Colorado did!”

“Poetic license or a driver’s license?”

“Ok, you win, now hush.”

Sven subsides as the tour begins, focusing all attention on our guide.

In the 1850s, a planter named Haller Nutt developed an important strain of cotton.  Flush and arrogant, Nutt began contemplating Longwood in the late 1850s.  He planned a 33,000-square-foot, six-story octagonal masterpiece, larger than Thomas Jefferson’s mammoth plantation at Monticello.  Designed by northern architects, the house eschewed the currently fashionable Greek Revival style so often adopted elsewhere.  Nutt’s architects incorporated the then-current ideas of health into Longwood, specifying windows and a coal fireplace for every room.  Work began in 1860 but the outbreak of the Civil War quickly interrupted construction, as Nutt’s craftsmen fled north.  Hiring local workers, Nutt only managed to complete the 10,000 square-foot basement before dying of pneumonia in 1864, leaving his house unfinished and his affairs a mess.  His neighbors long ago renamed the uncompleted mansion Nutt’s Folly.

The Civil War brought economic collapse in its wake.  Nutt lost nearly all his wealth as both armies ravaged his plantations.  Julia, his widow, sold off land to satisfy debt and moved into the basement with her eight children, raising them there.

Being from Colorado, we are the seven-day wonder here.  Our guide, a large, fiftyish, balding, potbellied man notices our Colorado license plates. “Well,” he says “I sure wish that Mississippi would legalize pot. But we will be the last state to do so. Marijuana is a lot better for you than alcohol. What would somebody smoking pot do? Rob a grocery store for a Twinkie? I’ve smoked it before, and I would smoke some now, if I had it.”

Taken aback, we respond, “Well, we don’t have any marijuana with us.  But people and money are pouring into Colorado.  We want the taxes to fund our schools. We’re embarrassed to admit that we’re fortieth or so in spending on education.”

“I’m sure Mississippi is worse,” the big man opines.  (Correct: Mississippi consistently ranks 48^th.)  “Years ago, when the government told us we had to integrate, the people in power chose to send all the white kids to private schools and not spend a cent on public schools. That’s what generated the mess we’re in now. Maybe marijuana would be a way out,” he muses.

Leaving our guide to his fancies, Pearl drives off to nearby small-town Southern America: Natchez, MS. Though comprising only a few city blocks of handsome old brick buildings, Natchez has its own National Park downtown: the William Johnson house.

Johnson, a freed slave (presumably his white father manumitted him), founded the town’s barber shop. Over the years, guided by sound investments and his own good business sense, he became quite rich. As owning other human beings marked one as a person of importance, Johnson eventually bought several slaves; once, he even sold a frequent runaway down the river, an action that he records in his diary as keeping him from sleep one night.

Although rich, Johnson died at forty-two when he was gunned down in a property dispute. His assailant, another free black, claimed some 1/16^th white ancestry and got off scot-free – black people couldn’t testify against white people in criminal cases. (Later research showed the assailant to be part American Indian, not white, but the court ruled that evidence inadmissible.) William Johnson had straddled both worlds of the racial divide, rising to wealth in the antebellum South, but in the end his skin color still determined his fate.

Departing, we at long last reach the Natchez Trace, today’s goal.  Evolving from an ancient Indian highway, the Trace spans 440 miles from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee.  In the early 1800s, people in the Ohio river valley would load all sorts of trade items (cash crops, animals, anything they could sell) on a flatboat and float down the Mississippi. Reaching New Orleans, the self-made merchants would sell all, including their raft for lumber. Goods-free and cash rich, they would then walk back up the Natchez Trace to their homes.  The boys ruminate about the manhood-building potential induced by hiking the entire Natchez Trace, deciding right there upon a future vacation adventure.  Sven rolls his eyes.

The federal government began building the Natchez Trace Parkway in 1936.  Finally completed in 2005, the Trace greatly reminds us of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Did the Park Service employ the same engineers or just repeat success?  Ten miles into the Trace, Bloodroot stops Pearl near a huge earthen mound named the Emerald Mound.   Constructed by Mississippian Indians in 1200 CE, the second largest mound in the Americas (after Cahokia) looms over us, dwarfing us.  We climb to the top of the mound to watch the sunset.  Descending, we notice that the darkness has also descended.  Pearl insists upon leaving the park. “There’s nothing but bends and shadows, kids,” says Pearl.  “I vote for safety and expediency.” 

 Exiting the park, Pearl returns to Highway 61 for our last amazingly painful half hour’s drive of the day.  Ultimately arriving in Vicksburg, we find ourselves weary, sore and hungry. First stop, Fairfield Inn, where we reserved an accessible room.  At the front desk, we learn that we’ve arrived too late for a handicapped room. “We’ve rented them all.  It’s a good night,” says the desk clerk.  “Yeah, good for you, not me,” I think. 

Resigned to failure, we check into our room and I head to the bathroom. Ugh!  The room lacks bars around the toilet. Can’t we just put bars around all toilets? We’re all getting old!  From Sven, I must standup without support, turn around and sit on the pot. Scary!  We decide to use Tinky instead. I can spin him around, only banging in the walls a wee bit, and sit. Tinky also helps me stand when the time comes.

Enough about toilets and cripples already!

While I flounder in the bathroom, Bloodroot and Barkley busy themselves finding a restaurant. Consulting Urban Spoon and Yelp, the boys recommend a place called Roca’s.

Bloodroot drives, easily following directions downloaded onto his iPhone. (The more I age, the more I’m surrounded by technology I don’t understand, like iPhones.)  Venturing a bit out of town, up a winding road, we stumble upon what appears to be a country club.

We enter the restaurant and sit down for dinner amongst all the movers and shakers of Vicksburg, Mississippi.  The Springfield Grill in Youngstown, Ohio, comes to mind, home of the selfsame people and mediocre food.  Full of trepidation, I begin with a green tomato and crab cake appetizer, something I’ve never had before—and it’s good!  Appearances can be deceiving, yes?  The boys get an A+.

A table across the room erupts repeatedly into unrestrained cheering as some basketball team beats another. We think it might be Arkansas versus Kentucky.  Giving the server our dinner order, we struggle to be heard over the mayhem.  Concentrating on the appealing food, we attempt to ignore the increasingly enthusiastic shouting, the kind you’d recoil from in an outdoor football stadium. The table’s occupants appear to be somewhat trashed.

Fortunately, the game ends while we dine.  The loud people rise to leave. One of the gentlemen stops by our table to apologize for the noise — very Southern. He explains that he and his friends, all lawyers, went to the University of Arkansas, which has just very handily beaten Kentucky. Asked which team we support, we mumble that we’re from Colorado.

“Colorado!” The man exclaims. “I’ve been skiing in Colorado.” He then launches into a very long story telling us each and every slope he has skied down.  He begins demonstrating his schuss skiing techniques by jumping about at our table. We sit spellbound, watching this very drunken man regale us with skiing stories while flapping both his arms and legs all over the place.

“Once going downhill, at Vail, I crashed into a rock, losing my goggles, skis and helmet. I looked up to see people on the lift worried about me. I waved to show them I was alive…”  At this moment, his friends walk by and collect him.  Our storyteller’s friends presumably usher him to a waiting car, so we never get to hear the end of the story. How did he get off the rock?  I’m totally sucked into the magic of the captivating tale, told the way only a Southern boy can tell it, and poof, he’s gone. Shoot!  An eternal mystery!

We finish our dinner, enjoying a sumptuous dessert, and head back to the Fairfield Inn for the night.  The boys dream of the Civil War, planning tomorrow’s exploration of the Vicksburg battlefield while they sleep.