Driving through Mississippi and northern Louisiana, we were struck by the economic hardship and lack of public services in Scotlandville, Sugartown and other small rural communities. They seemed to have only God to get them through. Every half mile, next to collapsing wooden shacks and trailer homes, there was another Baptist church with a tiny cemetery. “Seventh Day Sabbath OBEY GOD’S LAW” warned a billboard. Boo Paul’s Assembly Building stood tall as an impressive outpost of the Calvary Missionary Ministry in the middle of Louisiana’s rural oil and gas fields.
“Bluegrass Festival”
On the radio, everyone was talking about Jesus. White church elders debated different ways to avoid sin if you had unnatural (homosexual) feelings. “He rose spiritually and gendered!” insisted one man. On a black Gospel radio show in Jena, Louisiana, the preacher said “I’m going to keep trusting God despite contradictory circumstances.” He invited everyone to meet down at the church this Saturday, to participate in a NAACP voter registration drive. “The only way you can make changes is at the ballot box,” he said.
It was hunting season, and we met burly men in full camouflage gear, driving their muddy all-terrain vehicles and trucks into roadside gas stations with next-door cafes. “Deer and duck processing” shacks offer their services with hand-lettered signs. The Butt Hot BBQ looked like a popular spot, featuring a giant homemade billboard of a pig with flames coming out of his rear end. We passed the Concordia Pawn and Gun shop and the Sunflower Baptist Church. Acres of of cotton fields were barren for winter, but there were posted notices offering “We Buy Pecans,” and “Crawfish” with a phone number to call. Catahoula, LA showed a certain pride, or was it stubbornness? with two barbershops along its short main street.
Sleek megachurches lined the road as we crossed over into Texas at 1:40 p.m. We found lunch at Jim’s BBQ and Catfish place, with fabulous pulled pork sandwiches, peach cobbler, triple-sized ice teas, and hunting trophies on the walls. The temperature was finally thawing out, climbing to 57 and then 62 degrees!
As we continued north toward our B&B in Gainesville, the car wreck billboards were getting more insistent. “When Everyone Forgets How to Drive, We Won’t Let You Down,” promised State Farm Insurance. ““In a Jam? Call Sam,” said another huge sign. Our favorite simply stated in gigantic letters, “Blessed are Those who Mourn,” with a Bible verse citation and an attorney’s phone number.
We finally understood what all this was about, at around 5:30 p.m., driving through the gigantic ring road outside Dallas. I was minding my own business, driving in the far right lane of a congested eight-lane divided highway, where everyone else was zipping around, changing lanes with a gotta-get-home-NOW–for-dinner intensity. Our northbound side of the highway was moving pretty fast, but the southbound lanes were crawling at a near standstill. All of a sudden, in the breakdown lane to our immediate right, a big black car came whizzing right toward us, at a high rate of speed. He was using our northbound breakdown lane as his route south! We stayed on course and managed to avoid a head-on collision, but it was a bit of a nerve-tingler that we weren’t going to forget anytime soon. It was actually the second time on this trip that we were nearly erased by another driver. In Tennessee on Dec. 30, huge trucks were racing to Nashville meet their end-of-the year deadline. We were passing a huge semi-trailer at about 75 miles an hour, when he decided to move into our lane. I was able to keep driving on the shoulder, hitting the brakes hard to pull behind him.
Driving calmly in the Wild West
This cross-country trip was not for the faint of heart. The long haul driving days like this one from Natchez to Gainesville required a 100% cold-blooded focus on what was directly in front of us, without regard to the past, the future, or the charms along the countryside.
To sweeten our long days in the car, we listened to an audiobook of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. Steinbeck found a way, on his 1960 journey across the country, to ask people about what was going on in America. The issues they worried about then seemed easy and old-fashioned, compared to the political Armageddon we are facing 58 years later. Steinbeck’s technique was to invite people into his camper, offering a drink of coffee laced with whiskey. Charley, the poodle, provided a natural entry point for conversation.
But I didn’t have a dog, a camper, or whiskey to offer, and engaging people informally was proving to be more difficult in these hostile times. My profession of journalism, with all of its 2018 offshoots and permutations, has lost its most important function, which is providing the country with a common set of facts. “Where do you get your news?” would have been a good starting point to learn about political views, but it seemed like a hostile question, thanks to President Trump’s attack on the media as “the enemies of the people.”
John with our laundry at Suds dem Duds
So I was looking forward, for multiple reasons, to the laundromat in New Orleans. I figured we were all stuck there, and I could start a conversation with my fellow captives. After beignets at Café Du Monde, we found ourselves at the Suds Dem Duds! down the street from our Bourbon Orleans Hotel. Dinah, the proprieter, said she used to sell Volkswagens, and having this laundromat business was a dream come true. I asked her how she felt about 2018, and she was optimistic. Before I could pop my questions about the news and Trump, she turned to help an Australian family, who were emptying their suitcase contents in a jumbo washer. What was it with these Australians? They were everywhere.
From my perch near the door, I snuck glances at a middle-aged nondescript man, a regular named Tom, who was sitting impassively in a folding chair. A quick guess: a veteran with PTSD? Certainly a loner. He never smiled or joined the chitchat of the other customers. Dinah told me, after he left, that he works as a bartender! Maybe he needed some peace and quiet before putting on his smile for work.
I realized I was violating Dinah’s and Tom’s world by lurking around, trying to pry out their political wisdom. The folks I was meeting seemed generally okay, and they deserved to be left in peace to go about their daily business. Nobody wants a Joe Bftsplk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Btfsplk hanging around, reminding them that their President is a maniac, bringing us to the brink of nuclear war, race war and gender war, as well as the End Times, climate-wise.
So I decided to suspend my search for truth and justice in the random views of Americans. I would just listen
and enjoy the life around me, and New Orleans was the perfect place to start. We visited the Mardi Gras costume exhibit at the Presbytere, and the Battle of New Orleans Civil War display next to the St. Louis Cathedral.
A Katrina photo exhibit offered shocking evidence of both the destruction and heroism of neighbors helping neighbors.
Blue jeans worn by a Katrina survivor, with his Social Security number and other identifying info in case he was found dead
The statue in front of the St. Louis Cathedral, which casts quite a shadow at night, is known locally as “the touchdown Jesus.” Next door, our Hotel Bourbon concierge regaled us with his building’s colorful history: once a convent and then a theater, this was the place where Andrew Jackson declared his run for the presidency. It was also the site of a celebrated Creole duel, leaving bloodstains that are still visible under the carpet on the stairs, according to the concierge, who gives official Haunted Hotels tours. He said that the Charbonnet twins, Stephan and Louis, having had a bit too much to drink, decided to turn to the gentleman’s way of gaining “satisfaction” as they both attempted to court the same beautiful debutante. They engaged in a sword fight, ending up in a tangle as they fell down the stairs, stabbing each other to death. I couldn’t help thinking about their mother, receiving the news.
Tennessee Williams’ table at Gallatoire’s
To add to all that drama, we booked Tennessee Williams’ table in the corner at Gallatoire’s. After a festive dinner, with multiple guests celebrating birthdays, we grabbed a taxi out to Mulate’s to hear live Cajun music.
There is a noir underside to the frivolity of The Big Easy. We found the streets a bit sinister and deserted at 9:30 as we left Mulate’s, so we walked very quickly to the nearest lit-up hotel. The concierge told us to wait inside while he called a taxi, confirming that crime is a factor here.
The next day we had breakfast with a friend who works with the families of incarcerated youth. We were inspired again by her work, supporting young people as they leave prison. Some people just try to hold on to what they have. Others, like our friend, go to where the trouble is and try to make things better. How can we do this in a divided world? I was beginning to understand. Start local, with what is in front of you. Find some sort of common ground. Allow people their dignity and a chance to excel.
Driving northwest from cheerful New Orleans, the South was not only frozen, but marked by the legacy of exploitation. On the road to Natchez, MS we stopped by two remarkable places: one was Rosedown, a cotton plantation built in 1835 by the Turnbull family, who had 450 slaves working a total of four estates. The slaves worked 18 hours a day, six days a week. The former Turnbull slaves became sharecroppers for them after the Civil War, and the last descendent of the Turnbull family lived there until 1955. It is a state historic site now, popular with visitors for its gardens in the spring. The whole place, shrouded in Spanish Moss, seemed a little creepy.
No matter where we drove on this journey, there was evidence of Native American life before the Europeans took over. The continent certainly wasn’t “empty” territory waiting to be colonized. In Natchez, the hereditary chief was called the Great Sun, and apparently when he died in 1728 his wives and retainers “were strangled with due ceremony to accompany him into the next life.” His house was burned and the burial mound was raised to a new height, upon which the house of his successor was erected. This was the official description from the Mississippi Department of Archives. Despite this, ethnographer Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, who lived for eight years in France’s Natchez colony with the Indians until relations soured in 1728, found them to be “more civilized, their manner of thinking more just and full of sentiment, their customs more reasonable, and their ceremonies more natural and serious—distinguishing this nation from all others. It was easy to recognize them as more refined and polite.”
It was still bitter cold as we drove north. When we were halfway to Natchez, my cell phone rang. It was our B&B hostess calling to tell us her pipes had frozen, there was no water and we couldn’t stay with her. She generously had booked us a room at a more ostentatious antebellum mansion called Dunleith Castle. The estate was built in the late 18th century by a couple whose daughter was widowed at the age of 15. Her second husband lived longer than she did, and rebuilt the house after it was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. This did not seem like a lucky place to spend the night.
The dining room at Dunleith Castle, Natchez
We were looking for a little warmth and rest, as we retreated to our small room behind the Dunleith kitchen. A big challenge loomed the next day: we needed to drive halfway across Texas, if we were going to meet our friends in Santa Fe by Jan 7. We dreaded this leg of the trip. A fully armed population of Good Old Boys in pickup trucks, speeding around in their Trump Virtual Reality world, did not bode well for a Massachusetts car. I expected trouble, but not in my wildest nightmares, did I anticipate what came next.
On our New Year’s Day drive from Memphis to Vicksburg, we looked in vain for a lunch spot. Everything was shuttered for the holiday. Finally at 3 p.m. we found a faded sign for “Simply Southern Café and Grill” in Grenada, MS. It was a modest African-American establishment, well worn but well-scrubbed. It offered an “all you care to eat, all-day buffet” for about $10. We had the place to ourselves, except for a young father and his two little kids. We had stumbled on a mecca of southern cooking: perfect fried chicken, collard greens, black eyed peas, peach cobbler and sweet tea.
Simply Southern buffet
It was a good thing that it was getting dark when we finally pulled up to the Cedar Grove Mansion Inn, a walled-in antebellum estate with a colorful history. We couldn’t see much of its surrounding neighborhood, a place of dilapidated houses and apartments, broken down vehicles, and random trash. In Cedar Grove’s once-beautiful garden, the cascading fountains had frozen solid. No one had bothered to turn them off. The ceiling fans on the outdoor veranda were also turning, as if we needed further cooling. We shivered on the front steps in 20-degree weather.
Finally a woman answered the door, seeming surprised to see us. We were to be the only guests, except for one other couple who had already disappeared for the night. We ate alone in the once-splendid dining room, eyeing the large cannonball that was still embedded in the wall. The empty tables around us were set with china, linen and crystal, for phantom guests who never came.
The cannonball in the wall
Cedar Grove’s original mistress was no ordinary Southern belle. She was General Sherman’s Mississippi cousin Elizabeth, who married jeweler John Klein, the richest man in Vicksburg. Klein, who also had banking and railroad interests, presented her with this house as a wedding gift. They had met in Natchez when she was 12, and Klein courted her until she married him four years later. General Sherman rescued her Confederate family as the war came to their doorstep, and when his Union Army overtook Vicksburg, he turned this manor into a Union hospital. The Kleins were allowed to return, and they continued living in suspense upstairs throughout the war, wondering when the Union soldiers would discover their safe of jewels, money and other valuables, in the family dining room. Miraculously, it was never touched. Klein had successfully hidden it in plain sight, disguised as an armoire.
Ready for the guests who never came…
As we retired for the night in a separate building on the estate, I could hear animals—or was it ghosts? rustling around in the woodwork. It was a bleak, cold night, without the cheer of a fire or the charm of other guests.
Day Six. Tuesday Jan.2 Battlefields
The next morning, we ate a rubbery breakfast of scrambled eggs and an impenetrable hotdog the cook tried to pass off as “sausage.” The white toast crumbled to bits when we tried to butter it. The other couple appeared in the dining room, and mumbled a few comments to each other about the toast. The gentleman introduced himself to us as a retired New Orleans police officer, with his lady friend from New York. They agreed that Cedar Grove, which he used to visit regularly, had fallen on hard times.
I asked him about his experiences during Hurricane Katrina. He hadn’t been on duty then, but he said that the storm’s awful impact actually had one beneficial side effect: It cleaned out some of the corruption in New Orleans, by disempowering the levee district boss patronage system established during the old Huey P. Long days. He told us to be sure to visit the Vicksburg battlefield nearby.
We left without knowing where we were going. The wifi hadn’t worked in our room the night before, and our new Honda HRV’s Garmin navigation system had no capacity for historic landmarks or cultural attractions. “Vicksburg Battlefield,” “Civil War battlefield,” “Jackson civil rights museum,” “Mississippi Civil Rights Museum” and “The Hermitage” all produced directions to random gas stations and cafes in different states. I wanted to hit the stupid dashboard with a frozen water bottle. (We had six or seven frozen half bottles rattling around the car, because anything left out overnight was solid by morning.) Our paper maps weren’t local enough to show the streets we needed to find.
Our noble vehicle, whose Navi was embattled
On Confederate Ave., we passed a wooden shack with a hand-lettered sign offering “Live Catfish” and “Fresh Buffalo,” but it appeared to be closed. Finally, thanks to a gas station attendant, we found the Vicksburg Battlefield national park just 10 minutes away. It was forested with stone memorials, scattered on gentle hills. These monuments honored fallen soldiers from Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio. As we left the park, we stepped onto the rotted wooden deck of the ironclad Cairo warship, dredged up from the Yazoo River bottom a few years ago. I wondered what the tour bus full of gray-haired seniors hoped to find here.
Dredged up from the Mississippi mud
Our next stop: the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, a perfect counterpoint to the Vicksburg’s lost Confederate glory. This display of the horrors of slavery, reconstruction and the Klu Klux Klan reminded us that the white South’s American dream was everyone else’s nightmare. Before Brown V Board of Education, Mississippi offered only a few months of school each year to segregated black students, with twice as many kids in black classrooms compared to white ones, and only a tiny fraction of the money per student. After they were forced to integrate, many white families put their children into new “segregation academies.”
Most striking were the glass pillars listing every known Mississippi lynching, year by year. Mississippi was the leader in this form of terrorism. Crusading black newspaper editor Ida B. Wells, who was born a slave in Holly Springs, MS, went to England to lecture progressive audiences about how British textile companies were profiting from slavery in the American South. She and others are honored here for challenging the law and culture of the South. There were scary white KKK hoods and photos, along with videos of the Mississippi Freedom Riders, the NAACP and other resisters. We saw no mark recognizing that President Trump, who appears to believe in white supremacy, came to the opening of this new museum less than a month ago. The museum staff seem to be the only people on earth smart enough to ignore this man.
MS Civil Rights Museum
A black woman I passed by in the museum was telling her grandson, “Now look at this history. Learn it.” I wished that instead of tearing down all the Confederate monuments, progressives today would put up new plaques on them, explaining what these men and women thought they were fighting for, and why it was so wrong. A white volunteer stopped me to explain part of the civil rights exhibit, and I told him about the ongoing Not In Our Town (www.niot.org) initiative that helps American communities that have been torn apart by hate crimes. I hope he will spread the word to others. I’ll be volunteering some time with the NIOT team once we get to California on January 15.
“Its amazing that this is all one country,” John said as we drove into a carwash machine outside Patchatoula. A surprising rainbow of colored soap, raining down from above, brightened our outlook. The car had been encrusted with frozen white bird droppings ever since we parked it under a tree in Opryland. We could finally see through the windshield again. as we drove into New Orleans!
Monday Jan. 1, 2018 Day Five: New Year’s Eve at Graceland (part two)
It turned out that the real New Year’s Eve party was in the lobby, where piano player Rob Haynes was bringing Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles and Elvis back to life. He was banging the keyboard not just with his hands, but with his water bottle, and finally, his feet.
A large man in a red suit and white beard started breaking out a few dance moves there in the lobby, which woke up the dozing senior citizens wearing tour badges. Arriving families put down their suitcases to join the party. Fancy guests who had escaped from the ballroom joined in. We all started to have a good time!
Suddenly the piano man slowed down and played “Dixie” as a patriotic hymn. He thundered into the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” People were getting tears in their eyes. A woman’s fist shot up in the air. This was beginning to feel a little scary, as if it was all going to explode into a Confederate rally. But the piano man shifted to “Hushabye,” putting all those fervent passions back to sleep.
The next morning, we ran across the street in the 24-degree chill, to pay our respects at Elvis’s iconic mansion. “All my dreams have come true,” Elvis said in a TV interview being played in one room. Graceland was a funhouse of 1950s fantasies being fulfilled. There were Cadillacs, private planes and mink coats. The jungle room had a real waterfall and green shag carpeting on the ceiling.
The Jungle Room
There were three TVs all in a row in the media room, a pool table, a swimming pool, even real live horses outside in a pasture.There was always a chef on duty in the kitchen, 24/7, because Elvis and his entourage might be partying at all hours of the night.
It was time for us to go. Our own fantasy was to find Vicksburg before dark.
“You do not take a trip. The trip takes us.”—John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
Thursday Dec. 28, 2017: Day One: The Cold Start: We left Boston on this bright sunny Thursday morning, hoping to say goodbye as quickly as possible to its temperature: only 6 degrees F. About an hour into our trip west, the turnpike in front of us was slowed to a crawl because everyone in our lane was looking across to the other side, ogling the aftermath of a disastrous accident. The rubberneckers were staring at the remains of a tractor trailer, whose entire metal side was ripped open. Bags of garbage that the truck was apparently carrying were now stacked neatly along the median. The maimed truck was surrounded by a dozen blinking emergency vehicles, including two official environmental hazard vans. The responders must have been there for hours, cleaning things up. The fate of the driver was unclear.
Ignoring this dark omen, we pressed forward toward our first goal: reconnecting along the way with dear friends. We asked for their advice. Reaching across the great American divide wasn’t going to be easy; how could we strike up a meaningful conversation about politics, with a stranger? “Ask, ‘what do you hope for’?” our New Haven friend suggested. I thought to add, “in 2018,” so that the New Year might be our excuse for a chat. The people from moveon.org had suggested starting with “What keeps you up at night?” as the icebreaker after you invited Trump and anti-Trump folks into your home to find common ground.
Neither one sounded like an easy line to drop into a passing conversation about football or winter weather, but we resolved to look for our opportunities as we stop in cafes, gas stations and laundromats across the Bible Belt.
Our first day’s drive was too long. After a memorable lunch in New Haven, we inched south on 95, a miserable highway from Boston to Annapolis that is always choked with traffic. Who were all these people creeping along next to us, and why did they have to be on the road at the exact same time we were? The winter solstice sky darkened early, as we passed the smokestacks of industrial Newark. Our anticipated seven-hour drive, which started at 9:15 a.m., took us almost 12 hours! We covered nearly 450 miles, pulling up finally at 8:45 p.m. in the Annapolis driveway of old friends from my Washington days.
At the end of a cosy dinner, Susy, who is an experienced political operative, took up our invitation to appraise the current political mood in Maryland. People are optimistic, she said, because they see the Alabama and Virginia elections as a harbinger of change. Politics today are all about change, she said. And if the Democrats can be the change, they can bring the country back from the brink. They don’t have to have a national figurehead or party narrative for the 2018 midterms. Instead, the elections need to be about each individual candidate in each district. A national figure could even be a distraction, muddling the fresh flow of candidates and narratives necessary to reanimate the Democratic Party.
Friday Dec. 29. Day Two: We Are Victims of A Crime
We had brought in our many suitcases for the night, because there was a rumor of a past car break-in in the neighborhood. We didn’t anticipate the danger of an inside job. Our hosts’ two highly intelligent dogs, Ulla and Cate, in the darkness unzipped my briefcase, unwrapped and devoured all four sports bars I had stashed there. They purloined our new audio book of Truman, by David McCullough and put impressive fang marks into the fancy wrapped soap I was carrying as a hostess gift.
After discovering the canine crime scene, we enjoyed a jovial breakfast and hit the road at 10:30 a.m. It was more than three times warmer than Boston, but still freezing and overcast at 21 degrees F. Heading through the Shenandoah mountains west on 66 and then south on 81, we nearly stopped to see the Bull Run battlefield and the Luray Caverns. But the weather was too cold and we wanted to make progress. So we plunged into the famously poor Appalachian area of western Virginia, past farmhouses that needed paint, large mining company outposts, and the flattened hilltops created by their strip mining. Politically, this is a Trump stronghold where people feel left behind by the global economy, immigration and the metrosexual Democratic Party.
We stopped at a tavern for a hamburger lunch, admiring the football on the TV and all the craft beer options. I didn’t have the nerve to ask the family sitting at the next table for their thoughts about America these days. Maybe our plan to talk about politics to random strangers was a bad idea?
We ended up for the night in the small town of Christiansburg, where in 1774, the not-yet-famous folk hero Daniel Boone escaped his creditors by leaving for Kentucky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiansburg,_Virginia A century later, this jumping-off supply town for the travelers west was booming. New Victorian mansions lined the broad streets, optimistic landmarks of the Gilded Age. This was an era when social Darwinism justified economic inequality and the country was pressing its “manifest destiny” westward.
We found, on the second to last day of 2017, that Christianburg’s streets were utterly deserted, and its stores all closed up. There wasn’t even a bar to brighten the Friday night chill. We took a room in one of the magnificent old mansions, The Oaks Victorian B&B, and headed out to dinner in another old Victorian house, The Summit. The place had a bitter past. Its first owner in 1888 fell on hard times and had to swap houses, five years later, with his brother-in-law. The original owner’s fortunes improved again a few years after that, but his brother-in-law wouldn’t swap back. The family lived unhappily ever after.
Wishing I had the nerve to talk to the folks at the next table, during lunch at a Virginia tavern
Saturday Dec. 30. Day Three: Nashville
Driving past the exit for Dolly Parton’s theme park, on I-40 W, we started to appreciate the billboards:
“The World’s Largest Knife Store”
“Machine Gun Rentals”
“Land Shark Bar and Grill”
“Real Christians Love their Enemies”
“The State’s Largest Selection of Moonshine”
“WRECK?”-Five Star Attorney
“I Took Control of Myself and got HIV Testing”
We stopped at the Cracker Barrel in Knoxville for lunch , where we met a friendly woman willing to talk about politics. Too many Americans are motivated by fear, she said. “The American dream came apart with Vietnam…There is a huge backlash against Obama. There was no way this country was going to go from a black to a female.” The textile and steel jobs went away, and people “appreciated having someone finally notice.” There is no frame of reference for what Trump actually does. “Trump sends the news that people want to hear.” If they identify with the Confederacy, it’s because that’s a fixed identity that they can return to, in the midst of all this global change. As I listened, I wished that instead of tearing down Confederate statues, we could add new plaques identifying what these famous southern leaders were doing, and why it was wrong.
I listened to the Tennessee woman’s advice about conversing with political opposites: Mix moments of eye contact with walking or driving that doesn’t require face-to-face confrontation. For example, agree to meet someone for dinner. But then walk together, side by side, across the parking lot to the restaurant. It may be easier to talk about sensitive issues during the walk.
It was 20 degrees when we got to Nashville, but the Grand Ole Opry show at Ryman Auditorium was sizzling hot. The music and showmanship were world class, a pleasure to experience even from our obstructed side seats. We noticed that the crowd on and off the stage consisted almost entirely of white people. I was glad that the Old Crow Medicine Show front man at least paid special tribute to Chuck Willis, the first black Grand Ole Oprey star, who wrote “C.C. Rider.” As we flooded back onto the icy street, looking for the shuttle bus back to our hotel in Opryland, young revelers in shirtsleeves were thronging in and out of music bars and honky tonks, as if this were just another warm Saturday night.
My Nashville cousin and his wife joined us for breakfast Sunday. He said 2018 would be a bellweather for Tennessee politics, with both the Senate and Governor’s seat open. It could go either way, with strong experienced Democrats poised to do well—maybe. No one wanted to count out Trump’s ability to dominate the narrative, to his party’s advantage. “The greatest thing about America is our ability to muddle through,” he concluded, leaving us on an optimistic note as we plunged southward, through the Tennessee countryside, to our appointed New Year’s Eve at Graceland.
Sunday Dec. 31 Day Four: A Southern Duel before we get to Graceland
As we left Nashville, we stopped at the Hermitage, President Andrew Jackson’s estate, just a few miles from Opryland. Here we saw a re-enactment of The Duel. This courtly game of chicken was used to settle scores. Duels were illegal, and not actually fatal two-thirds of the time in the antebellum South. The Gentlemen involved, hoping to avoid legal problems, referred to their pistol showdowns as seeking “satisfaction” for an insult or a debt.
Duels both made and then ruined Jackson’s reputation with his peers as a Tennessee gentleman. Of course there were other behaviors that were more important: he was an unapologetic slaveholder and he orchestrated the genocide of Native Americans on an unprecedented scale. He is still remembered by some, however, for establishing the Democratic party as a populist, with a keen interest in defending the little guy against the powerful interests that ran American business. The ghost of Trump was following us everywhere, and seemed particularly vivid at Jackson’s homestead.
Most surprising, in this white supremacist’s homestead, was the staff at the Hermitage café, where we had a delicious home-cooked lunch. It was run by an Uzbek couple, whose cashier was Albina, a young woman from Ufa in the Ural mountains of Russia. We had noticed other immigrants, mostly East Asian ones, in the fortified payment booths at gas stations and convenience stores along the highway. I asked one gas station cashier how he happened to come to the American South from India, and he said he discovered the job opening on the Internet. Now said he now runs three such Tennessee highway convenience stores. Before our trip, we had heard a story on NPR about how immigrants working at a southern chicken processing factory had lined up the night before for the precious job openings, beating out the local Americans who came in the morning. Arlie Hochschild’s book, “Strangers in their Own Land,” retells how “Tea Party” (Trump) supporters in Louisiana see this differently: minorities and immigrants seem to be cutting in line in front of them on the path to the American dream, getting unfair advantages like Affirmative Action, all along the way.
New Year’s Eve at Graceland!–Part One
At 6 p.m. we pulled up to The Guest House at Graceland, a five star hotel which opened just a year and a half ago. Its fancy lobby and guest rooms were full of huge Elvis photos and loops of Elvis music playing on the TVs and in the gift shop. We quickly changed into our party duds and headed over to the ballroom for the New Year’s Eve champagne buffet with 19-piece-orchestra for dancing.
The Iowa man’s wife told the Australians that she runs three businesses in their small Iowa town: a gift shop, a flower store, and a Christian store. The woman from Australia looked dumfounded. “What is a Christian store?” she asked in genuine confusion. “We sell religious items,” she said, adding that some Christians don’t want to pay for what they pick up there because they “believe that God provides.” The four teenagers, including her own daughter, looked down at their phones. Soon we were all making discrete exits from the party. The orchestra “sounds like Lawrence Welk,” complained one silver haired granny, who like the rest of us, left early and headed for the lobby, where more exciting things were going on.
This party was a little bit lame…but there was much more to come outside the ballroom!
At the end of a cosy dinner, Susy, who is an experienced political operative, took up our invitation to appraise the current political mood in Maryland. People are optimistic, she said, because they see the Alabama and Virginia elections as a harbinger of change. Politics today are all about change, she said. And if the Democrats can be the change, they can bring the country back from the brink. They don’t have to have a national figurehead or party narrative for the 2018 midterms. Instead, the elections need to be about each individual candidate in each district. A national figure could even be a distraction, muddling the fresh flow of candidates and narratives necessary to reanimate the Democratic Party.
Duels both made and then ruined Jackson’s reputation with his peers as a Tennessee gentleman. Of course there were other behaviors that were more important: he was an unapologetic slaveholder and he orchestrated the genocide of Native Americans on an unprecedented scale. He is still remembered by some, however, for establishing the Democratic party as a populist, with a keen interest in defending the little guy against the powerful interests that ran American business. The ghost of Trump was following us everywhere, and seemed particularly vivid at Jackson’s homestead.