The South

            We are returned from another road trip, this time to The South, from Atlanta through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, to Austin via San Antonio.

            Atlanta has undergone reinvention a couple of times and seems like an working city.  San Antonio’s Riverwalk is simply magnificent urban planning, and Austin has made itself the capital of hip, where Waterloo Records even carried a Peter Ivers Band CD,  and the F1 racing event booked every hotel room in town.

            Tourists rarely traverse Alabama and Mississippi on US 80, and there really isn’t much to see.  However, for those of us of a certain age and memory the  burden of history is heavy as the road goes from Montgomery to Selma to Meridian, a three-weighted barbell of remembered bad civic choices with permanent impacts.  I have in mind that only a small minority of the residents of Alabama and Mississippi are old enough to remember the time between 1955 and 1965, so whatever baggage we bring with us to those forlorn places is ours and probably not significantly theirs.

            In Montgomery on a Saturday the streets are eerily empty, and the Rosa Parks Library commemorates bad choices by the City in bringing on the bus boycott in 1955. 

            In Selma the one street town is dominated by the Edmund Pettus Bridge where police beat the crap out of the voting rights marchers in 1965.  Pettus himself was a Confederate general, local KKK leader and segregationalist US Senator, and as of last week the bridge has not been demolished, renamed or had its name signs removed.  We were given a tour by a Teach for America teacher from our hometown, earnest and  enthusiastic escorting us through what appears to be a dying town.  It will not be missed.

            In Meridian we bring with us the baggage of the unpunished murders of the civil rights workers in 1964.  Meridian is like a lot of America – the downtown had died at the hand of strip centers along the Interstate.

            I mean no disrespect to the denizens of the South who are doubtless mostly upstanding citizens and most of whom were not born when these things happened.   I’m glad to see new things, but at least as to Alabama and Mississippi we bring too much baggage with us to find or enjoy what might be there.