If you study that postcard map of New Hampshire, you’ll realize pretty quick that there’s something missing: there’s no cute drawing of presidential hopefuls shaking hands or of the citizenry casting ballots. There is, oddly, an elephant down at the bottom of the state, just right of the Cathedral of the Pines–or is that Dimes?–but the fine print indicates it’s a roadside attraction not a political statement. There is also a lobster breathing fire, some bears, a zebra, and a chicken laying eggs. None of those images seem particularly political either, but some may be running for President. This is important, because forget all those notions of pastoral beauty and winter sports and mountains and trout, what New Hampshire does best is hold the first presidential primary every four years. The windup for February 2020 is going on as we speak, and driving through New Hampshire Kris and I will likely face traffic jams of Democratic wannabes vying for the nomination.
That can be both a good and bad thing. It will surely slow traffic, but if we have a flat we’ll likely have two or three senators and Beto O’Rourke available to help us change it. You can’t get that kind of service back home.
It’s true that Iowa comes before New Hampshire, but Iowa’s caucuses are a decidedly quirkier affair, and the results can be a bit off-kilter. Particularly on the Republican side caucusers tend to be both more conservative and more evangelical than the rest of the country. Who can forget that Iowa’s 2016 caucuses chose Ted Cruz as their candidate of choice? Ok, everybody has forgotten that, but really, what kind of state would elect Ted Cruz to anything? You might as well tell me that the Republican Party was going to nominate Donald Trump! What? Oh.
But perverse as it seems in retrospect that New Hampshire got the Trump part right, they did get it right. In 2016 New Hampshire gave Donald Trump more than 35% of the Republican primary vote. Trump’s win in the 2016 presidential primary effectively destroyed the campaigns of John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Lindsay Graham, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorino, Ted Cruz, and flat-earther Ben Carson. President Trump really didn’t have any serious challengers after New Hampshire, even though the other candidates hung on. Ted Cruz hung on long enough to win 45% of the primary caucus vote in Texas, but I’m living proof that Texans are crazy.
The Great Stone Face, Franconia Notch, N.H., 1926, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540
Back to Iowa, the Democrats there seemed to be a bit more prescient than their Republican neighbors. In 2008 Barrack Obama’s Iowa win proved that he could be a serious candidate, and in 2016 her extremely narrow Iowa victory over Bernie Senders might have warned the Democratic Party that support for Senator Clinton was shallow. It didn’t. At least it’s satisfying now to Monday-morning quarterback. The point of all this is that sure, Iowa has its place, but it’s not New Hampshire.
Likely there are slovenly, lazy, and ignorant New Hampshineers who don’t vote and who can’t snowshoe. In New Hampshire there are likely badly constructed fences that make for bad neighbors, and there are possibly New Hampshters who might trade just a bit of freedom, like obeying speed limits and washing their hands before returning to work, rather than dying. Ok, so they might not be all they’re cracked up to be, but the winnowing of presidential hopefuls has to start someplace, and even for their long list of failures and after validating Trump in 2016 New Hampshire seems both small enough and engaged enough to carry on. You gotta start somewhere, and I’m just as glad it doesn’t start with me. February 2020 here we come.
Edward French, M.D., “Good Fishing,” photograph by Arthur F. Sturtevant, at 284, The Granite Monthly, Concord, New Hampshire, 1895.
Just one other thing about that postcard. There sure are a lot of New Hampshire women who wear bathing suits. Do you think that’s year-round? I’d better warn Kris. She probably wouldn’t think to take a swimsuit.
Robert Frost, New Englander, wintered in Key West, and he went often enough that in the Key West literary tourist travel boom of later years his rented cottage was dubbed the Robert Frost Cottage. Sixteen winters he flew south. He got into an argument there with Wallace Stevens, but I’m not sure whether it was before or after Hemingway knocked Stevens down. Stevens seems to have been a bit of a drinking man, but there wasn’t any internet, so what else did he have to do? As a young man I preferred Stevens as a poet, he was stylish and inscrutable, but I think as an old man I’m growing into Frost.
I can imagine Frost, sitting as far south as the American South can go, and thinking about the New England winter. I wonder if he missed it? I wonder if he felt guilt that he was warm? How can someone named Frost ever be warm?
I first saw Vermont 30 years after Frost spent his time in Florida, 50-odd years ago, not live but on an RCA console color television. Almost all my notions about Vermont I learned from White Christmas, a movie filmed in a California back lot of Paramount Pictures. No. Snow.
But the lodge! It was so beautiful, stone and wood and that great fireplace where Rosemary and Bing talked about liverwurst and other things. It didn’t matter that it was a set in California. It was beautiful! It was Vermont!
My sister says that Vermont is like a foreign country. I imagine it as rambling lanes and small farms and white clapboard churches. I figure I can’t say it’s as close to a foreign country as the continent offers, since both Mexico and Canada are literally foreign countries, and I suppose New Englanders don’t think they’re foreign at all. But to my sister the Texas girl it might as well be Switzerland. There’s snow, and trees, maple syrup and other cute things. We don’t do cute in Texas.
Vermont was once in fact a foreign country. Not yet having attained Vermonthood, in 1763 the area was ceded to Britain by France after the French and Indian War. It wasn’t clear if the new territory was governed by New Hampshire or New York. Both claimed it, and both granted conflicting land grants to settlers. Tired of its neighbors’ shenanigans, during the American Revolution Vermont formed its own independent republic, the Republic of Vermont. It was not one of the original 13 colonies. It did not join the United States until 1791. The state constitution was the first to ban slavery.
Al Zifan, Vermont Presidential Results 2016, Creative Commons Attribution.
Vermont is forever linked to its mirror-image neighbor, New Hampshire. There are probably other states it could be compared to, Wisconsin and Oregon come to mind, but New Hampshire and Vermont are connected through history and temperament and geography. You can’t read about Vermont without both state mottoes being mentioned, and that Vermont has fewer Walmarts than New Hampshire, and that Vermont has no Dairy Queens. Why the Dairy Queen factoid gets mentioned I don’t know, but it’s part of the litany.
They sprang from different geological forces that produced the soft rolling Green Mountains of Vermont and the rugged, angular White Mountains of New Hampshire. The differences run through their colonial histories and are evident today in their cultures, politics and certainly in their state mottos: Vermont’s feel-good “Freedom and Unity” shrinks before New Hampshire’s stark ultimatum to “Live Free or Die.”
More Than a River Separates Bernie Sanders’s State From Primary’s, Katharine Q. Seelye, The New York Times, February 7, 2016.
The Spaceman, Bill Lee, lives in Vermont.
Here is the difference between Vermont and New Hampshire: Vermont, population 625,741, voted 55.72% for Hillary Clinton, and only 29.26% for President Trump. Favorite son Bernie Sanders pulled an additional 5.68% as a write-in. New Hampshire, population 1,316,470, also went for Clinton, but it was 48.2% to 46.1%. New Hampshire has greater ethnic diversity, being only about 90% white, while Vermont is more than 95% white. Snow, Snow Snow! Vermont, along with Hawaii, is consistently one of the most progressive states in the country.
Calvin Coolidge Fishing Near Home in Vermont, 1931 From Twitter.
And taxes. You can’t talk about Vermont and New Hampshire without mentioning that Vermont’s tax burden is 4th, New Hampshire’s 46th. I tracked down my old friend Mark who with his husband moved to Vermont after he left Texas. Mark worked for the IRS for a while but left when President Trump was elected, but now he’s moved on to Florida, largely because of . . . wait for it . . . Vermont taxes. The tax burden for the average resident is roughly 10.31%. If I’m going to sneak a new bamboo fly rod into my luggage on this trip, I’ll pay a combined 7% sales tax, though that’s cheaper than Texas.
New Hampshire has no income tax or sales tax, but it does have one of the nation’s highest property tax rates, with a rate of about $2.19 per $100 of value. All of that said, I gather that the Vermonters who stay, who like their state, are for the most part proud of its peculiarities and political stances, and want to be there. Freedom and unity! Ok, it’s not the quirkiness of Live Free or Die!, but it’s at least as good as Friendship. I could be perfectly happy with freedom and unity, at least as long as I don’t have to buy Birkenstocks.
There’s plenty of speculation about why the states are different. Sure, you can chalk it up to New Hampshire’s historic development as a water-powered mill state, a port state, a state with more difficult geography and weather, but my favorite theory is that modern Vermont was the result of an effective advertising campaign. They picked what they would be, a place of ski lodges and cows and Birkenstocks, and they sold it. Cultural immigrants like Bernie Sanders and Bill Lee believed the pitch, and Vermont was its own self-fulfilling prophecy.
Bringing in maple sap to the sugar house. Frank H. Shurtleff farm, North Bridgewater, Vermont, 1940, Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
A colleague suggested that I check to see if New Hampshire and Vermont are ranked by any sort of happiness index. The World Happiness Index is published by the United Nations, and in 2019 the happiest country on the planet is left-leaning, frigid Finland. I don’t pretend to have studied the Index methodology, though it’s based on polling. Finland though would seem to bode well for left-leaning, frigid Vermont. There’s a Gallup poll that’s supposed to measure happiness and health, and left-leaning but decidedly un-frigid Hawaii seems to come out on top most years. Last year Vermont was way down, but this year it was 7th. New Hampshire was 11th. Alabama and Mississippi, those other bookend states on the Southside, are Nos. 44 and 47. West Virginians are still the least happy of our lot.
On the Tallapoosa we didn’t expect big fish. We threw a lot of stuff in the car, helter skelter, but we intended to fish with five weight rods, and that’s all we set up for the float. Kris had her Helios D3, and I had the new Winston Pure that Trout Unlimited had sent me for my high school graduation.
So far I’ve caught largemouth, bluegill, longear, redeye, Alabama bass, and a really big catfish on the Pure. It’s an excellent trout rod I’m sure, and someday I plan to catch a trout with it. With the rod Trout Unlimited also sent a Cheeky Reel, which must be the single gaudiest unobtrusive reel ever made. It’s an electric blue and green. It’s also disk drag, smooth and silent, and I don’t fish much with five weight disk drags, smooth and silent. After I put it on the rod I never really noticed the reel was there. Like I said, at once gaudy and unobtrusive.
I have lots of five weight reels, so I loaded the new reel with something different for streamers and poppers, a Scientific Anglers half-weight heavy MPX line. I don’t know what MPX stands for, but I’m used to big weight forward lines for redfish and bass and I liked the MPX. It’s probably the worst possible combination with the Pure, mixing a medium slow rod with a half-weight heavy line to make it faster, but there you are. The combination worked fine for Alabama, where neither the bass nor the legislature is big on subtlety.
I do have one beef with the Winston rod. It has a hook keeper, a rather large, sharpish hook keeper which when combined with the cigar grip and my choked up hand position rubbed my index finger raw. Does anyone actually use hook keepers? Why are they still put on rods? I guess I’ve got lots of rods with hook keepers and cigar grips, but that combination on the Pure really rubbed me the wrong way. All afternoon. And it’s an ugly hook keeper too, and ugliness isn’t part of the whole Winston thing.
Flies
My leaders were a highly technical design: Three or four feet of 20 pound fluorocarbon joined to three or four feet of 16 pound fluorocarbon by a blood knot. They worked fine.
A month or so before we went to Kansas Alabama I lost most of my bass and sunfish flies, four fly boxes worth. They were returned by a Good Samaritan, but not before I’d frantically tied a bunch of new flies, including (at the suggestion of a Kansan I’d been emailing) some Barr’s slumpbusters. Other than the disreputable baseball tie-in, I really like that fly, and fished it about a third of our river time in Alabama. I also tied some BBBs, woolly buggers, and clousers, and used none of them. I tied everything but the BBBs on size 8 streamer hooks, so they should be fine as well for our New York/Vermont/New Hampshire trout swing at the end of June. Of course the whole point of that trip is to learn something about dry flies, so I shouldn’t use them. I really shouldn’t.
The rest of the time we fished poppers. Craig didn’t bother calling them anything but Boogles, which is exactly right. I know there are people out there who tie their own poppers, but I never could get them painted in a way that made me happy, so I am happy to use Boogles. Craig fished with an intermediate size, neither as large nor as small as the ones I usually use. I’m going to have to buy some intermediate Boogles. East Alabama Fly Fishing has an excellent discussion on popper colors, and when to use them. It’s the kind of cool stuff that Craig and the guide service owner, Drew Morgan, are thinking about.
New Shoes
I’m a biting bug magnet. This spring alone I’ve suffered from infestations of gnats, mosquitoes, and fire ants. There’s nothing quite like a couple of hundred fire ants together with your feet in a pair of Keen sandals.
I figure that I’m not likely to pay more attention, so I bought a pair of cornflower blue Converse high tops for our trip to Kansas Alabama. Paired with running socks and some supplemental arch support for the aged they’re pretty comfortable. There’s reasonable traction, and I don’t have to worry about fire ants between my toes. Plus the cornflower blue matches my eyes when I stick my foot in my mouth.
The laces will catch a fly, so it’s another reason to debarb hooks.
I think Kris prefers snake boots, and the Chuck Taylors probably don’t provide much snake protection.
Restaurants, Barbecue
Coming into Alabama, the lady at the visitor center sent us to a Dick Russell’s for barbecue. It wasn’t really so much a barbecue place as a plate-and-three place, with an incredibly good two instead of three and pretty mediocre barbecue as the meat. I had turnip greens and black-eyed peas, and I’d go back for them. They also didn’t have white sauce barbecue, which southern Alabama is known for: Mayonnaise, vinegar, brown sugar, mustard, horseradish, salt and pepper. It sounds awful for pork or beef, but is supposed to be great on chicken.
In Montgomery everyone I talked to told us to eat at Central, which was around the corner on the same block as our hotel. It was the kind of elegant modern American place which seems to be everywhere and because of which the world is better off, and on a Saturday night it was crowded. One of the servers suggested Cahawba for biscuits the next morning for their breakfast biscuit sandwiches. The cheese in the eggs was a bit much, but the biscuits were excellent. I’ve never baked a decent biscuit, though from time to time I try. Because of my own failures I admire the craft of a good biscuit.
Back in Mobile heading home we ate breakfast at Time to Eat, which had the only Amnesty International and Human Rights Campaign stickers on doors in Alabama, and a smoking room. We accidentally ate in the smoking room. It had good grits, and the view of the locals coming in to smoke and drink coffee was pretty memorable.
In Louisiana we tried to get po’ boys in Lafayette, one of the great po’boy towns, but everyplace was closed for Memorial Day.
Where We Didn’t Go
We didn’t see Birmingham, home of both the AA Birmingham Barons and the former Negro League Birmingham Black Barons, for whom Willie Mays, Satchel Paige, and, of all people, Charlie Pride played. Pride and another player were apparently traded to the Barons in 1956 by the Louisville Clippers for a team bus. Everyone seems to like Birmingham, and it was once, along with Memphis and Atlanta, the industrial heart of the South.
The Northern part of the state is supposed to have gorgeous waterfalls. Our guide Craig Godwin said it was the prettiest part of the state.
We didn’t try enough barbecue, and we didn’t catch a redfish on the coast. The same server who suggested Cahawba for biscuits suggested the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, Montgomery having been Zelda’s home. It didn’t open until noon on Sunday, so we didn’t make it.
Playlist
I didn’t know that Charlie Pride played for the Birmingham Black Barons, or he would have been included.
Alabama Shakes. This is one of those bands I follow because of their appearance on Austin City Limits. There’s just nothing not to like, except that I guess they may not exist any more.
Emmylou Harris. I probably have more Emmylou Harris music than anything else. For someone who doesn’t write many songs, she’s consistently had the best taste in music, and has a liberating way of making other people’s songs her own. I actually needed to cut 50 or so songs so I could hear something else, but I just never got around to it. She was a military brat, and didn’t spend much time in Alabama after she was born there, but being born there was enough of an excuse to listen to Emmylou. And of course there was “Boulder to Birmingham.”
John Prine, “Angel From Montgomery.” I had versions by Susan Tedeschi and Bonnie Raitt, but oddly I first knew the song from a high school John Denver record. It was a good version.
Handy’s Memphis Orchestra, 1918.
Paul Simon, “Loves Me Like a Rock,” “Kodachrome.” First I ever heard of Muscle Shoals, sometime circa 1973.
Arthur Conley, “Sweet Soul Music.” Muscle Shoals.
Wilson Pickett, “Land of 1000 Dances,” “Hey Jude,” “Mustang Sally.” Muscle Shoals.
Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band, “Old Time Rock & Roll.” Muscle Shoals.
James & Bobby Purify, “I’m Your Puppet.” Muscle Shoals.
Clarence Carter, “Snatching it Back.” Muscle Shoals.
Jimmy Cliff, “Sitting in Limbo.” Muscle Shoals.
Etta James. James, from California, had a long and strange career, and she recorded a lot of fine rhythm & blues, but none finer than what she recorded in 1967 in Muscle Shoals. “Tell Mama,” “I’d Rather Go Blind.”
Aretha Franklin, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” “I Never Loved a Man.” Muscle Shoals.
The Staple Singers, “I’ll Take You There.” Muscle Shoals.
Percy Sledge, “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Just try not to sing along. Muscle Shoals.
The Rolling Stones, “Brown Sugar,” “Wild Horses.” Muscle Shoals.
Ma Rainey, “Bo-Weevil Blues,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “See See Rider.” Rainey made some of the first important blues recordings, and the available versions are pretty poor quality. She said she was born in Georgia, but scholars think she was born in Alabama five years before the year she admitted to. Charlie Pride did the same thing in minor league baseball, and this is now known in baseball circles as Dominican Aging Syndrome.
Ma Rainey, 1917.
Hank Williams. What a lot of great songs in a too short life. There’s a Williams museum In Montgomery, but it closed before we got to it.
Erskine Hawkins, “Tuxedo Junction.” I had versions by Hawkins, Glen Miller, Duke Ellington, and Manhattan Transfer. Tuxedo Junction was a blues bar in Birmingham. One of the great happy songs.
W.C. Handy. Ma Rainey is the mother of the blues, and Handy is the father. I had the Louis Armstrong plays W.C. Handy recording. If I’d known “Loveless Love” was by Handy I would have included the Billie Holiday version. I probably should have included Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” as well, in honor of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, but it’s a tough song to contemplate, as is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. One was enough.
Alabama, “Dixieland Delight,” “Song of the South.” I liked these more than I thought I would.
On principal I did not download “Sweet Home Alabama.” I meant to download a selection by St. Paul and the Broken Bones, but never got around to it. If you’ve never watched the Muscle Shoals documentary, Muscle Shoals, do. Muscle Shoals is some of the best of Alabama because, well, it’s some of the best of all of us.
Guitar.
I took the Kohno since we were driving, but then worried about the heat of the day when it had to live in the car while we went down the river. I worked on the Allemande movement of the first Bach Cello suite, the Duarte transcription that I always associate with Segovia. I’ve been told that Duarte was kind of a jerk, but it’s a good transcription, and the Allemande is actually my favorite movement. I can’t remember it for anything.
For each destination state I’ve written at least one blog entry before the trip, but we went to Alabama on the spur of the moment so it didn’t get done. Usually they were evidence of my preconceived notions, and sometimes they were out-and-out wrong. For Alabama I started to skip it because it’s supposed to be a precursor not a post-cursor. I can’t quite bring myself to waste a perfectly good postcard though, so I’ll tell some stories from our trip.
Alabama doesn’t quite match Mississippi for music and literature. There is the one book, lots of people’s favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Fannie Flagg is enjoyable, but neither Ms. Flagg nor Harper Lee are Faulkner or Eudora Welty or Jermyn Ward. There’s some important blues like W.C. Handy and Ma Rainey, and there’s Hank Williams and Emmylou Harris, but it’s not the almost endless list of musicians from Mississippi. There’s Muscle Shoals though. That’s pretty good. And don’t tell Kris but I’ve had a crush on Emmylou Harris since I was 17.
Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Willie McCovey, and Satchel Paige were all from Alabama. Maybe they played on the same high school travel team.
And there’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” Ok, that’s harsh, Lynyrd Skynyrd wasn’t even an Alabama band, but the song is embraced by the state, there’s even a sweet home proclaiming sign when you cross the border from Louisiana, but the song’s resentment and outrage never seemed like quite the thing to me. It’s a catchy tune, but dang it’s pissy.
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It’s fitting that we did Alabama and Mississippi in the same year. Mississippi and most of Alabama were ceded to the United States by Spain in 1798. Mississippi was admitted as a state in 1817, and Alabama was admitted two years later in 1819. In the 1820 census, the Alabama population was 127,901. and some of my second and third great-grandparents lived in Alabama in the 1820s.
Alabama and Mississippi are a weird counterpoint to two other matching states, New Hampshire and Vermont, so going to the four in the same year has a weird resonance. The pairs of states are different, sure, but get rid of the state line and we could easily be back to 48 states without much change in the national character. They really are matched sets. There’s a lot more difference between, say Northern California and Southern California, or West Texas and East Texas, than between Alabama and Mississippi, or Vermont and New Hampshire.
Alabama has 4,887,871 residents, so it’s almost 2 million people larger than Mississippi. It’s also richer than Mississippi, but not by much. Mississippi now ranks ahead of West Virginia at 49th in median wealth per household, with $43,529, Alabama 45th, with $48,123. Alabama and Mississippi are also essentially white and black, with Alabama 68.5% white and 26.2% black, and Mississippi 63.5% white and 35.6% black.
Alabama Presidential Election Results 2016, Wikipedia, US gov – derivative work: Ali Zifan.
In 2016, Alabama voted 62.08% for President Trump, and 34.36% for Hillary Clinton. Like most states, there is a rural/urban split, with Montgomery and Birmingham voting for Clinton, but like Mississippi there is a black majority in the rural historic cotton counties, the rich-soil agriculture region that belts the south-central counties of the state. In Mississippi it’s the Delta along the Mississippi River. In Alabama it’s the Black Belt. Where 150 years ago the majority of residents were slaves, 150 years later the majority of the residents are black.
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I have never been a particularly devout alumnus of the University of Texas. I don’t belong to Texas Exes or go to football games or answer the phone when the fundraising calls come in from Austin, but still, from time to time I check the football scores, and if I ever drive cross-country I’m going to stick the largest longhorn I can find on my rear window out of a strange mix of perversity and pride. Kris went to Rice, so her experience doesn’t really embrace the goofy. Hook ’em.
On the way out of town Sunday morning downtown Montgomery was deserted except for one family, African American, standing on a corner looking mildly lost Two were wearing burnt orange tee shirts and one of the tee shirts was clearly decorated with a white longhorn. I was overcome, rolled down the car window, flashed the hook ‘em horns hand sign and screamed hook ‘em! They were startled for a second, long enough for it to dawn on me just how stupid I was being, and how a black family in Alabama might not expect friendly gestures yelled from passing cars by white guys, but then all four of them flashed the hook ‘em horns sign and yelled hook ‘em! I was feeling pretty satisfied.
Except that Kris was beating on me, not just any mild sort of beating either. She was pounding on my shoulder just as hard as she could.
“Why did you yell fuck ‘em at those people!”
*
Earlier in May the Alabama legislature approved legislation that effectively banned abortion in the state. Alabama was followed by Missouri and Georgia. I think Louisisana’s legislation is on the governor’s desk.
I get it. Abortion is a difficult issue, and it should be. In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court didn’t conclude that these questions are no-brainers, and that the litigants were wasting their time. I’ve been mulling the issues raised in my undergraduate Philosophy 101: Moral Philosophy: Abortion class for 40-odd years. It is an extraordinarily subtle and morally ambiguous question, which I admit I weigh out for the most part on the side of women’s rights, but there was a particularly gleeful screw-you totalitarian current to the Alabama vote that seemed to have more to do with political positioning than a thoughtful moral stance.
By happenstance after the trip a Republican congressman who I particularly like visited our office. He was not optimistic for his party for 2020, though he, a Republican in one of the most Democratic districts in the country, named a litany of party failures. He noted that 30% of the 2020 voters would be millennials, and that their first concern is climate change. Ok, climate change and college debt. He talked about the failure of both parties to adopt a sensible immigration policy, and how if legislation wasn’t adopted before the fall it wouldn’t get done because the parties needed it as an electioneering punching bag.
He said that in 2018 his party had lost 20% of its educated suburban women voters. He asked if we could think of what the party had done to recover that vote. “Georgia and Alabama,” I said. I forgot Missouri and Kentucky and Louisiana. It wasn’t only a mean-spirited choice by the states, it was a choice that given the 2018 election and what’s coming for the Republican Party in 2020 was incredibly naive.
*
Notwithstanding what goes on in the capitol building, Montgomery is a pleasant place to visit. We did lots of stuff in our short stay: ate at a recommended restaurant, Central, saw part of a Montgomery Biscuits baseball game and even better went shopping in the Biscuits’ store, the Basket, and instead of donuts had excellent Sunday morning biscuits, the baked good not the ballplayers, at Cahawba. We also visited The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the national African-American lynching monument. It’s reminiscent of the Vietnam monument in Washington, and is incredibly effective.
It’s the African American lynching monument, but it’s probably worth noting that not all lynching victims were black. In the period from 1882 to 1968 there were more than 1200 white victims, and more than 3400 black. Most African American lynchings were in the South. There were 347 recorded lynchings in Alabama: 299 African American and 48 white victims. Mississippi lynched 589 African Americans. Texas lynched 352 African Americans (and 141 whites, though that number is likely to include Mexican Americans). The monument signage says that African American lynchings included levels of torture and brutality that were generally not part of white lynchings, though I suspect South Texas Mexican Americans might raise issue with that. Black lynchings in the South were in part, maybe in big part, to control political authority, and in part to enforce the codes of racial etiquette that were thought to be required for a moral society. Irony is so ironic.
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The University of Alabama is in Tuscaloosa, 80 miles north and east of Selma. We didn’t make it to Tuscaloosa, but we did drive from Montgomery to Selma on Sunday morning. Selma could be a graceful Southern town, with pretty churches and handsome early houses, but it’s not. Driving around it looks beat up and ragged, with a lot of public housing and a lot of boarded businesses.
When we got home I talked to a young friend, a graduate of the University of Alabama, who said Tuscaloosa would look just like Selma if it weren’t for the University and the Mercedes plant. Would you put your Mercedes plant in Selma? Sometimes it seems the sites of such extraordinary racial conflict never really recover, and whatever the notions are 50 years later the places are still battlegrounds. I felt sorry for Selma, black and white, but I wouldn’t put my Mercedes plant there.
*
Floating the Tallapoosa on the long Memorial Day weekend there were other users, though it was never crowded. Where roads, not much more than tracks really, came down to the river through the hardwoods there were bank encampments of families and friends. They could be pretty elaborate, with multiple tents and pop-up shelters and dogs and children and pickups and boats and every kind of cooking gear imaginable, and, one suspects, plenty of beer. All of it seemed a bit slovenly, but a fun way to fill the weekend. Backwoods is a derogatory term for Alabama whites, like cracker in Florida and Georgia, or hillbilly in Arkansas, or redneck for anywhere in the South, and we were clearly in the backwoods. Our guide Craig made jokes but said they were his people, and I reckon they were some of my people too, though like I said none of my ancestors have lived in Alabama since before the War. Cousins.
There was an assortment of guys drinking beer and bait fishing where we took out of the river, a big guy came over to tell us all about himself. While Craig was loading the raft he talked, and he talked, and he talked. He told us about the tuna he caught while he was in the merchant marine, and his grandmother’s Irish potato salad, and where in those hills there was gold that could still be found. Craig thought he might have already drunk a bit of beer, but there was also a bit of the Boo Radley about him. Craig said that every time he came off the river there was always some weirdness. There was some weirdness, though the potato salad sounded pretty good. He ate it on Saltines, just like boudin.
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It had been way too long since my last Moon Pie, and in Alabama they were two for a dollar. You can get two Moon Pies and an R.C. Cola for two bucks. Inflation.
