Saturday, March 1, 2014 – Dystopia in Louisiana

Like a pair of vampire bats, the boys blink and cower under the covers, hiding as we open the curtains, revealing a glorious rain-washed morning. “Remarkably accurate description,” admits Barkley.

I plan to look at the map and weather on the Nook this morning, but Keith hid it somewhere.  He departs, venturing downstairs for breakfast, informing me that I’m not permitted internet access until I dress and brush my teeth.

Obediently, I stand to put on my clothes but keep failing as I fall back into the chair before I can pull up my pants. Keith returns, sated by hotel food-like substances.  He instructs me to use my PT arm extension exercises to stand upright. This involves pushing my top body upward following my arms, the momentum carrying me up to stand.  Complying, I look somewhat like a deranged dolphin trying to escape from Sea World.  Keith begins demonstrating his idea of the correct PT form.  He resembles a demented Japanese person repeatedly bowing, ever lower each time.

At long last, dressed and my teeth sparkly clean, the Nook returns.  I check the weather, map and email.  All in order!

Early morning drama overcome, we actually leave the hotel by 8:45AM. Barkley and Bloodroot plan to visit a Coca-Cola Museum that opens at 9AM in Vicksburg.  On the brief ride downtown, they excitedly discuss the museum’s potential contents. The museum looks pretty sucky to the parental units so we opt out.

Pearl takes us downtown, patiently circling until we find appropriate parking.  Barkley and Bloodroot hop out of Pearl’s doors, barely saying goodbye, determined to be the first people in the Biedenharn Museum when the doors open at 9AM.   The museum, whose doors open a good bit past 9AM, disappoints the boys.  “Sadly,” opines Barkley with a sigh, “we just walked through a couple of rooms filled with old racist advertising.”

In the 1890s, a druggist named Biedenharn began bottling Coca-Cola syrup with soda water to take out to the surrounding countryside, starting the proud tradition of independent Coca-Cola bottlers. Bloodroot & Barkley rate the 1920s Coke models’ butts. Having avoided the museum, I can’t intelligently explain who won the competition. The advertising portrays blacks as puffy-cheeked red-faced happy darkies, per Barkley “probably drawn by 17^th-century people with gonorrhea who’d never seen a black person.”  Huh?  This is Mississippi, a place where skin color comes in a rainbow assortment.  

Leaving the happy darkies behind, the boys wander next door to a used bookstore, finding it much more to their liking.  Stereotypical nerds, they buy numerous books, grateful that we brought a car.  Fortunately, they surmise, an airplane remains far beyond our collective means.   From the bookstore owners, they learn that the Mississippi Delta for millennia has been very, very poor. The owners report, “We’d sadly watch Teach for America New Yorkers arrive in the Delta.  Altruistically intent upon teaching America’s poor, the volunteers would look about and just go home, completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the sprawling misery they saw.”

Bear and I have our own adventure while the boys meander through theirs.  We explore downtown Vicksburg, walking downhill, scarily downhill, eternally downhill to the river. All Bear has to do is let go of the chair and down to the river I would fly, smashing into the murals lining the river’s edge.  Having a good bit of life insurance, I’m worth far more dead than alive. Good thing he loves me! 

Vicksburg, a cute little Southern town, commissioned wonderful murals at the river’s edge illustrating life in Mississippi. Forming a wall in front of the river, the murals depict cotton crops, schools, blues players, the river and floods.  Lines mark the water’s height during the great flood of 1927, when the Mississippi rose 6’2” above her bed.  The river may periodically flood, but fortune placed the battlefield nearby, allowing Vicksburg to turn the tourist trade.

We walk back up hill to greet the ever patient Pearl, settling in with her to await the boys’ return.  Parked on a steep hill, Bear has curbed Pearl’s front wheels (turning the wheels and backing them into the curb, stopping any downward slide before it starts), as we learned to do so long ago in Akron and Pittsburgh.  Chafing, Pearl complains, “I’m quite capable of remaining on this hill.  I’m not a Model-T Ford, for goodness’ sakes.  You guys are forever overreacting.” 

Scanning our future plans, I note that Bloodroot has us visiting the Chennault Museum in Monroe, Louisiana, tomorrow, Sunday, when it’s closed. (Does Bloodroot do this because he loves me and wants to spare me yet another military museum?)  A quick conference ensues when the boys return.  Acknowledging temporal reality, we decide to drive to Monroe today to visit the Chennault Museum and tour Poverty Point (today’s original plan) tomorrow.

Off we go to Monroe, Louisiana.  Scanning the route for a picnic table, we hope to have lunch before sightseeing in museum #2, cleverly avoiding grumpiness and meltdowns.  But to no avail:  we see nary a picnic spot during the hour’s drive from Vicksburg to Monroe. 

Reaching Monroe, we exit I-20 downtown near the “Civic Center.”   Pearl cruises a few blocks into the city.  The bookstore folks were right about the desolation—Monroe is the saddest ghetto I’ve ever seen, and I’m from Cleveland. Tijuana’s bustling humanity suddenly looks prosperous.  I suggest stopping at the hospital, an edifice housing the last functioning sector of the American economy and perhaps people who won’t rob us.  “We could ask the valet for directions,” I offer brightly. My fellow animals ignore me.

The hospital holds Monroe’s only sign of life. The unremitting bleakness of the metropolis’ former downtown stretches for miles. I wonder, has a neutron bomb exploded here, eliminating all life but leaving the buildings?  After fifteen minutes of driving about, we pull into an open gas station that has no outside windows, the only operating business we’ve encountered. The Pakistani/Indian worker standing at the register behind steel bars and the only sheet of glass in the building (bulletproof) has no idea of the museum’s location. Nor does he have a working bathroom. Nor ice. Loud rap music erupts from cars. No one speaks to us, our skin being the wrong color. One elderly gentleman crosses the color line and gives us very confused directions of where he believes the museum might/could be.

We leave the gas station for more futile cruising, eventually parking at the central police station. The boys exit Pearl near a sign stating “subject to strict surveillance.”  No one answers the door. Have even the police have left town, abandoning their station?

The urban blight amazes me.  Is this what our country has become as the factories fled? No work, no jobs, no stores, completely segregated and with the poor solidly black.  Post-Reaganomics Cleveland sported large swaths of wretchedness yet still maintained downtown office and shopping areas. 

Leaving the empty police station, we follow signs to several downtown museums, all closed on a Saturday!  We pass the large green metal tents I’d spotted from the freeway.  Perhaps an urban revival attempt at a flea market?  No one in sight.  I’m reminded of a post-apocalyptic movie where the survivors peep out, look about, then scurry back into hiding.

Determined to exhaust all possibilities, Bear continues traveling about in circles. Disgustedly, Pearl notes, “There’s where we exited the freeway, AGAIN.”  “Ask the hospital valet,” I repeat, a bit more heatedly, this time. “What?  Why?” I receive the growly response vented by a very frustrated Bear. “OK, OK.” We approach the valet who gives us the correct directions out to the suburbs and the museum.

Backtracking on I-20, we exit by a suburban mall this time.  Still seeking ice and a restroom, we drive into a different gas station, this one solidly white. The station has two handicap ramps.  While no rap music assaults us, an ice machine blocks the east ramp.  As Pearl pulls over to the west ramp, a redneck in a huge smelly white truck drives around us, cutting us off to park and monopolizing the three handicap spaces, completely blocking the west ramp. Keith’s jaw flaps, left completely speechless by the incredible rudeness. Pearl eggs Keith on, “Let’s ram him, Bear!” Keith’s foot shifts to the gas pedal.  Fortunately, just in the nick of time, Bloodroot and Barkley hop out of Pearl to intervene, kindly asking the young man to move his truck, appealing to his sense of politeness.  He does, after apologizing to us.  Sven and I gratefully visit the bathroom while Keith buys ice.  The boys buy some gas-station garbage food.

Whew! What an adventure!  Back on the road, following the valet’s directions through the ritzy suburbs, we at long last pull into the Chennault Aviation and Military Museum parking lot.  They have a picnic table! We are saved, cannibalism avoided, although we may not be speaking to each other for a while.  Out comes the cooler and stove.  Bear brushes aside all offers of assistance, creating a simple meal of sausage, peppers, onions and pasta.  He worries, “We’re nearly out of good food.  We’ll have to find a grocery store soon.”  Point noted.  Monroe easily qualifies as a food desert, but we’ll be in Dallas soon enough.

Sated, we enter the museum.  Fortune smiles upon us, after having abandoned us for most of the day.  We meet yet another completely obsessed museum guide who teaches us lots:

Claire Chennault, a boisterous, forceful Louisiana boy, joined the military in the 1910s.  Learning to fly, he progressed up the military ranks, but constantly told his superiors what to do—not a good move. (Chennault supported pursuit flying while the Army invested in high altitude bombardment.)  By 1937, Chennault, deaf and tired of fighting with his superiors, resigned his commission in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

Around this time, Japan invaded China, easily defeating the Chinese military, and began genocide in Nanking.  Chiang and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek hired Chennault to develop the Chinese Air Force.  Initially planning a three-month stint in China, Channault remained there nine years, through the end of World War II.

Chennault created the Flying Tigers, an American volunteer group who fought the Japanese in China with covert US support.  Faced with the Japanese Air Force’s numerical superiority and greater maneuverability, he trained his pilots to attack the Japanese bombers from above in groups. In various sorties his Tigers graphically demonstrated that a fighter could take out a bomber, conclusively proving his point in the old argument with his Army superiors.

Many of the Tigers aided Chinese troops through an absurdly dangerous airlift, carrying food and supplies from Burma to China over a mountains range they called “the Hump.” Shifting weather and high winds over this offshoot of the Himalayas claimed many American lives. (Building runways by hand, while almost starving, claimed many Chinese lives.)

Roosevelt loved Chennault, making him a general. McArthur hated him, retiring him again as soon as Roosevelt died.

Even today, the Chinese revere Chennault, nationalists and mainlanders alike, despite his air force accompanying Chiang Kai-shek to exile in Taiwan.

The museum itself honors people from all parts of Louisiana who fought in wars from WWI to Iraq, complete with uniforms and transcribed tales of close calls and narrow escapes. The boys are in heaven reading personal war stories from around the world; I’m terminally bored. How long can you stare at a bunch of uniforms?  It’s mostly dead white men, but I am happy to see one Tuskegee airman and a smattering of women. 

We leave as the museum closes, returning to Vicksburg, eating nuts and cheese along the way. We learn that the state of Louisiana, pleading poverty, eliminated all roadside rest stops. What?  Eating at YuckDonald’s is good for the American economy, you know!  Is there ever a thought regarding the social and economic costs of bad food?  That we all pay for the resultant diabetes, obesity and heart disease?  Apparently not in Louisiana.

Barkley investigates poverty statistics for Monroe on the Internet. He finds it to be the same as Detroit, around one third living in poverty, unless you’re under eighteen, in which case poverty claims half the population. The city of Monroe is entirely black and the suburbs resolutely white. What an American city this is! Raised up from obscurity through one man’s innovation in military aircraft; brought down and destroyed by racism and white flight.

We return to our Vicksburg hotel.  Back in our room, we make salads for dinner. The boys eat leftovers. Fate teases us with the penultimate irony—our open hotel window overlooks the Wendy’s drive-through.  People yak, pull through, and order gross food.  When I think of fast food, I think of Soylent Green (Soylent Green, a 1973 dystopian science fiction movie, depicts the grossly overpopulated human race subsisting on one food substance, Soylent Green.  In the film’s denouement, Soylent Green turns out to be made from corpses.)  Looking down at Wendy’s I wonder, “Are they ordering Soylent Red, Green or Yellow?”

Ah well, enough navel gazing.  After 9PM, Wendy’s drive-through blessedly falls silent.  We cut the lights and turn in for the night.

Friday, February 28, 2014 – Vicksburg

Oh, a brand-new morning, albeit a cloudy one.  Out and about, Bloodroot drives following his iPhone directions. I point out several helpful “”Vicksburg Battlefield” signs.  The signs contradict the iPhone instructions.  “The iPhone knows all, Mom; the new generation, of which you are NOT a member, eschews signs.  We have mastered technology!” Bloodroot proclaims, a rather portentous pronouncement for this early in the morning.  I fall silent, easily defeated.  Sanctimoniously, intent upon the iPhone, Bloodroot drives up to the rear of the battlefield. We can’t enter. I only snigger a bit up my sleeve as Bear opines, “Boy, iPhones really suck.”

Irritated, Bloodroot speeds around to the side of the battlefield. Driving Pearl rapidly (50 mph), Bloodroot begins the Paul Distad tour of Vicksburg. (My OCD father would have toured Vicksburg at least 50 mph, if not 70 mph, all the while shouting, “Did you see it?  Huh?  Huh? Did you see it?”  I recall a mid-1970s flyby trip through Yellowstone at 60 mph.)  Finally, we find the Visitor Center, precisely where the signs would have led us half an hour ago, had we bothered to follow them.

Bloodroot parks Pearl.  “Stop laughing at me!” he grumbles.  Pearls winks at the three of us as we exit.  Entering the Visitor Center, we learn about the Civil War campaign for the West and the Vicksburg battle specifically. 

The battle of Vicksburg pits Confederate Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton against Union General Ulysses S. Grant. 

From the war’s start, both sides recognized the Mississippi River’s strategic importance.  Whoever controlled the Mississippi could move their troops and supplies along it.  The owner of the Mississippi would win the war.

In 1863, the Union plans to end the war by taking Vicksburg, cutting the South in half, beyond any hope of resupply.  Marching south from Illinois and north from the Gulf,  Grant handily defeats the Confederates at every turn, scattering the inland Mississippi General Johnston’s forces. 

Only Vicksburg stands between Grant and total victory in the western field of war. By this time, the Confederates claim a mere 250 miles of waterway, bounded by Vicksburg in the north and Port Hudson, LA to the south.  Vicksburg, built high on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi, uses her artillery batteries to defend the vital river.  From this vantage point, the Confederacy shells any and all Union traffic on the river. 

Having earlier disposed of various Confederate armies, Grant turns his attention to Vicksburg.  He attempts conquest by digging a canal to divert the Mississippi around the city’s artillery battery.  He fails.  But now, Grant needs resupply.  On an April night in 1863, the US Navy runs the Vicksburg blockade, losing only one transport ship to heavy Confederate fire.  Grant now has fresh men, food and materiel. 

Seizing the day, Grant orders two assaults on the fortress, uphill. Both fail.  Refusing to lose more troops by storming the city, in May 1863, Grant begins a formal siege. 

Aside from breaking the South’s back and leading directly to the end of the war, the Siege of Vicksburg also marked the first time black Union soldiers defended something of vital importance. During the siege, General Grant had left behind around 1,500 troops, almost entirely black, to guard his rear at a place in Louisiana called Milliken’s Bend. These troops had no back-up or reinforcements, and many received substandard guns and equipment, but the siege suddenly depended on them in early June, 1863, when a Confederate force tried to smuggle food supplies past them. Although their rifles sometimes broke after a few shots, and although some troops, totally untrained, had only received firearms the day before, the black troops at Milliken’s Bend held the line—mostly with bayonets and earthen works, as it was all the Union had given them to work with. Their success at preventing the relief of Vicksburg convinced the (racist) leaders in the North that black troops could and would fight for their freedom; several more black regiments were created. Even the Confederate commander admitted that the troops at Milliken’s Bend had been “obstinate.”

In an eerie precedent to World War I, Grant’s troops build zigzag tunnels, slowly crawling to the fortress. At maximum, the tunnels creep to within ten feet of the fortress, primed to undermine the walls.

The Confederates hope against hope for another army (Johnston’s) to relieve and resupply them.  They pray for Johnston to surround Grant and lift his siege. In the Confederate dream world, Johnston would attack Grant from the rear while Pemberton charged from the front, turning the Union siege into deadly Confederate pincers.  Unfortunately for the South, Grant previously chased Johnston’s Army out of Jackson, Mississippi, dispersing Johnston’s men across the South. Johnston eventually regroups, but far past too late.

On July 4, 1863, forty-seven days after the siege began, Pemberton assesses his situation.  Viewing his exhausted food and medicine supplies, Pemberton surrenders. Vicksburg is the battle that ends the Confederacy, not Gettysburg.  The loss of Vicksburg opens the Mississippi to Northern shipping as Pemberton surrenders his army of 29,500 men, 60,000 small arms, 200 canon and tons of ammunition, all irreplaceable by the agricultural South.

120,000 people fought here, each side losing 10,000 troops.  Following Pemberton’s surrender, Grant takes the Confederate soldiers’ weapons and sends them home, most heading to states west of the Mississippi.

Leaving the Visitor Center, we return to Pearl, waking her up to begin touring the battlefield.  We begin with the Union side.  The tour takes us through many stops, showing us the back-and-forth of the siege.  The boys find this far more interesting than I do, but I am patient and have reading material. Our tour continues on the Confederate side, the boys jumping out of Pearl at every designated stop.

 As we drive about, we find ourselves following an ROTC group of college students.  We ask which college they attend. They reply in strongly accented black rural speech, “Northwestern” with some unintelligible word appended to it.  “Northwestern in Chicago?” we think, puzzled.  Listening more closely, we hear Northwestern State University (NSU), a college indeed located in Louisiana, near Shreveport.

At each stop, a different NSU student gives a report, augmented by their ROTC sergeant.  The sergeant speaks of the importance of “unity of command”, meaning that a command issued top side would be obeyed down to the very last private. We take this as inherently obvious now.  But 150 years ago… Strongly eschewing advice, relishing slavery, independence and states’ rights, the Confederate side sorely lacked unity of command.  We learn that Jefferson Davis, not on site, issued battle commands from his porch, only to find his incompetent orders routinely ignored. The ROTC sergeant speaks of lieutenants ignoring generals, and everyone doing their own thing.  Lincoln had the sense to stay out of Grant’s way.

The clouds portentously grow darker, building as we observe a battlefield littered with monuments to each group of people who fought. The Illinois monument has a long formal staircase leading up to a large rotunda (in reality a scaled-down Pantheon) with an eagle standing guard over the monument’s entrance.

The two states where brother fought brother (Missouri and Kentucky) have the most poignant monuments. Located where two Missouri regiments clashed in battle, Missouri’s monument, dedicated to both Union and Confederate soldiers, features a huge monolith fronted by an art deco angel (the Spirit of the Republic), who dares anyone to refute the courage of the combatants.

Situated between the Union and Confederate lines, Kentucky’s memorial contains life-size bronze statues of Lincoln and Davis, both Kentucky natives. Behind the two men we find quotes from each supporting the Union.

Both Barkley and Bear, Pennsylvania natives, solemnly pose for photos at their state monument. The Union side has many monuments to Ohio regiments, but no Ohio Monument overall. As a person born in Ohio, I feel we disrespect our fighters, probably for budgetary reasons.  I am embarrassed.

The clouds, having gathered sufficient strength, begin dropping rain.  Fortuitously we finish touring the outdoor battlefield. Pearl motors up to the USS Cairo museum (pronounced like Karo, the corn syrup).

By January 1862, the Union, flexing its industrial muscle, constructs seven ironclad ships for the war effort, naming each ship for a northern city, including one for Cairo, Illinois.    Later that year, the Cairo, while working on clearing the Yazoo River of mines, hit two of the “infernal machines” and sank in the resultant explosion, becoming the first ship ever sunk by electric torpedoes.  One hundred years later, people raised the sunken ship, giving it to the National Park Service as a museum piece.

The ship itself indeed rests outside, covered by a large tent-type structure that resembles the multi-peaked tent roof at DIA (Denver airport).  Remaining dry, we explore the ship, impressed by the technology.  I often think of the Civil War being so far removed from today.  But even 150 years ago, we built a steam-powered, armored watercraft bristling with cannons.  The boys closely examine the boilers and engines as we wander about the craft. 

We walk into the indoor museum adjacent to the ship.  The Cairo sank quickly and lay undisturbed for 100 years, creating a time capsule.  From various displays, we learn about life aboard the ship.  We see lanterns, cooking equipment and “irons”—hand and leg cuffs used on recalcitrant crew members.  Medical equipment includes scary surgical items as well as myriad bottles of medications. Hastily abandoning ship, people left behind their personal goods.  The museum houses the forsaken shoes, shaving gear, and most movingly, photos of loved ones.

As much as I enjoy exploring daily lives of people born long before me, by late afternoon hunger ambushes me.  Hoping for some sustenance, I enter the museum restaurant.  Disgusted by the smells of horrendous Sysco-truck quasi-food substances, I begin to melt down.  The boys, alarmed by my predicament, appease me by cooking real food in the parking lot in the rain.  I am fortunate to have such caring animals in my life.

Finished with the Cairo and Vicksburg National Military Park, we return to our hotel.  I find my feet swelling and begin legs-up-the-wall exercises.  Exhausted, I fall into a dreamless sleep.  Tomorrow, we explore a wee bit more of Mississippi.