SashWeight, New York, April 2009
Highway 61, Visited
I'm a northerner by birth and temperment; I prefer pine trees to magnolias, Scotland to Jamaica and the crisp Presbyterian crackle of autumn to the sultry miasma of summer. I've always regarded the South suspiciously. To me it's a foreign country, a humid place filled with unspellable states, rattlesnake-kissing church ladies and an unhinged electorate that finds virtue in the likes of Trent Lott and George W. Bush. I'm one of those people John Updike was talking about when he said a true New Yorker has a secret belief that "people living anywhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding." That goes double for the Confederacy. I always imagined the South to be a traveling sideshow of corporate frat boys in Izod shirts, porcine pig farmers, dentally freakish Nascar fiends, and black people who still wear short-sleeve white shirts and skinny ties like in those civil rights pictures. In my darker moments, I conjure a picture of the South and people it with Boo Radley, the hillbillies from Deliverance, truant characters from Faulkner's lesser stories and Forrest Gump.
I never needed to look at my prejudices as concerns Dixie since I never spent any real time there. I have been to Florida, true, but Florida is south of the South. I visited Savannah when my sister lived there for four years, but we did only tourist things. Lisa and I used to attend JazzFest in New Orleans, but we hadn't been there in more then 10 years. These visits account for all the time I have ever spent in the land of cotton.
So when it came time to plan our first vacation in almost two years — we bought an apartment and nursed a geriatric cat to the very end of his natural life and we just couldn't get away — we decided that we wanted to go somewhere warm (not Seattle), that was easy to navigate (no foreign language), where the food would be good (strike Iowa) and that could stand to benefit from the tourist trade. We voted for New Orleans. Then, when we opened the road atlas, exotic place names like Yazoo and Vicksburg and Natchez got us thinking about a road trip. Those names sealed it. We'd make the now classic drive from New Orleans up Highway 61 to Memphis (with a detour through Cajun country, waypointing from one lunch table to the next.)
What we found there did not change my mind about one thing: The South is a foreign country. The pictures I took are vacation snapshots from a land that is more distant and unfamiliar to me than any city in Europe. Religion is everywhere and it’s in the blood. I’m a nonbeliever, but the simple crosses of Calvary we saw in Clarksdale are more evocative symbols of faith than all the basilicas of Italy.
What we discovered too is that Highway 61 is a four-lane, ultra-modern highway that leads through neat farms and occasional malls to deliver Mississipians to casinos the closer you get to Memphis. Only tiny sections of the original two-lane blacktop road remain. We also found that the blues are for white tourists. The barbeque is brilliant in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and the Natchez Trace in spring would give the Vermont countryside a run for beauty. The people were each of them kind and each of them friendly, and why George Bush is not in jail for dereliction of duty in letting the old sad beautiful city of New Orleans suffer so is a mystery that I will never understand.
I never needed to look at my prejudices as concerns Dixie since I never spent any real time there. I have been to Florida, true, but Florida is south of the South. I visited Savannah when my sister lived there for four years, but we did only tourist things. Lisa and I used to attend JazzFest in New Orleans, but we hadn't been there in more then 10 years. These visits account for all the time I have ever spent in the land of cotton.
So when it came time to plan our first vacation in almost two years — we bought an apartment and nursed a geriatric cat to the very end of his natural life and we just couldn't get away — we decided that we wanted to go somewhere warm (not Seattle), that was easy to navigate (no foreign language), where the food would be good (strike Iowa) and that could stand to benefit from the tourist trade. We voted for New Orleans. Then, when we opened the road atlas, exotic place names like Yazoo and Vicksburg and Natchez got us thinking about a road trip. Those names sealed it. We'd make the now classic drive from New Orleans up Highway 61 to Memphis (with a detour through Cajun country, waypointing from one lunch table to the next.)
What we found there did not change my mind about one thing: The South is a foreign country. The pictures I took are vacation snapshots from a land that is more distant and unfamiliar to me than any city in Europe. Religion is everywhere and it’s in the blood. I’m a nonbeliever, but the simple crosses of Calvary we saw in Clarksdale are more evocative symbols of faith than all the basilicas of Italy.
What we discovered too is that Highway 61 is a four-lane, ultra-modern highway that leads through neat farms and occasional malls to deliver Mississipians to casinos the closer you get to Memphis. Only tiny sections of the original two-lane blacktop road remain. We also found that the blues are for white tourists. The barbeque is brilliant in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and the Natchez Trace in spring would give the Vermont countryside a run for beauty. The people were each of them kind and each of them friendly, and why George Bush is not in jail for dereliction of duty in letting the old sad beautiful city of New Orleans suffer so is a mystery that I will never understand.
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Calvary: Clarksdale, MS |
