Tag: Civil War

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Pennsylvania Packing List

Gear

We took waders, boots with studs, and wading staffs, and we used them. Kris fished with her 10’6″ Orvis H3 3 weight that Trout Unlimited sent her for her intelligence, beauty, and patience. I fished a 9-foot Winston Pure 5 weight that I got from Trout Unlimited because they felt sorry for me.

On the third day, trying to tight-line nymph with a medium-length leader and only a foot or so of fly line out of the rod tip, I couldn’t control the short casts of the leader. Some of it was unfamiliarity, but whatever it was, my casts were mostly big looping air balls with minds of their own.

Dom recommended that I pick up the line earlier, before the leader passed me on it’s way downstream. With the increased line tension I could get a better back-cast, and that helped, but I’ve wondered since if one of the longer, lighter rods used for Euro-nymphing–like the Orvis rod Kris was using– wouldn’t have made those casts easier? That if an advantage of the long, light rods is that the greater leverage and limber tip section make short casts of light lines easier? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be curious enough to try it and reach a conclusion, or maybe not.

We fished Dom’s flies and Dom’s leaders, or Jim’s flies using pretty standard trout leaders. I don’t think we fished anything smaller than a 5x tippet, which is good since anything lighter than 5x tippet has to be manufactured by captive fairies in Celtic sweatshops. It must have been ok. We caught some fish.

Penns Creek

Other than being a pretty great place to fish, Penns Creek holds an oddly significant place in American history. In 1755, a group of Lenape massacred 14 Irish and German settlers on Penns Creek, and took another 11 captive. While William Penn lived, the Lenape and Penn’s Quaker-controlled government had good relations–maybe the longest-lasting good relations between Europeans and Native Americans in the British colonies–but after his death the English pushed the Lenape out of their historic territory into territory controlled by the Iroquois, and then the Iroquois joined the pushing. The Lenape struck back at Penns Creek.

The Penns Creak Massacre kicked off the Western Pennsylvania colonist/Indian conflicts of the French and Indian War, and as a direct result of the massacre, Pennsylvania assemblyman Benjamin Franklin led the effort to fund a common defense. Military funding was something that the Quaker-controlled Assembly had previously refused to do, and still because of their religious convictions didn’t want to do. Franklin won. In response, the remaining Quaker assemblymen resigned from government. It represented the end of Pennsylvania Quaker dominance, a broader divorce of religion and government, and a spasm of self-governance that arguably spurred Franklin toward the Revolution. That’s a pretty heavy load for a little crick.

Moccasins, Probably Lenape, history unknown, purchased 1908, National Museum of the American Indian.

The colonist/Indian conflicts in Western Pennsylvania were particularly violent. The Indians, encouraged by the French, fought a bloody no-holds-barred war against settler families. The English, encouraged by the English, offered bounties of $150 for Lenape men’s scalps and $130 for women’s. In the end, after the French surrendered, the Lenape were pushed out of Pennsylvania further into Ohio. Ultimately the largest groups of the Lenape–now known as the Delaware–settled in Oklahoma, with tribal governments in Bartlesville and Anadarko.

Irony of ironies, when I was 10 I shook Roy Rogers’ hand in Anadarko.

Knife sheath, possibly Lenape, 1780-1820, National Museum of the American Indian

Gettysburg

The Battle of Gettysburg, together with the concurrent fall of Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the end of the Confederacy, even if they wouldn’t admit it for another two years. Gettysburg was Lee’s greatest military blunder, other than rebelling in the first place. We called too late to get Segway tours of the battlefield, which sounded pretty fun, but we did find a horse-drawn wagon tour, which was probably better since it was too cold and windy to go zipping around on Segways. There were about twelve of us huddled in the wagon, not counting the horses, and it was a wee bit awkward being the only Southerners. I’m not sure that it helped that I was the only person who could answer the Guide’s question about which president besides Lincoln was born in Kentucky? It was Jefferson Davis, who hardly seems to count as a president, but I knew the answer so I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

Because we were going to Gettysburg, I was reading Ty Seidule’s Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause. Along with the rest of his army career, General Seidule is the former head of the West Point history department. He rightly touts his Southern, military, and historical bona fides. I don’t have any military bona fides, and barely any historical, but I certainly have Southern: five of my great-great grandfathers fought in the War, four for the Confederacy, one for the Union, but even the Yankee was a Southerner, having migrated from Eastern Tennessee to Missouri. During Gettysburg all of my great-greats would have been somewhere in the West, not Gettysburg, but still, notwithstanding family ties, it’s Gettysburg that captures attention. There’s a lot more romance in Pickett’s Charge than in siege starvation at Vicksburg.

I suspect that many of us white Southern boys of a certain age are reckoning with our Confederate legacy. It’s hard to tell four of your ancestors that morally they sucked, even if the conversation is only in your own head. My great-greats were mostly privates, but I don’t really doubt that they knew they were fighting for the preservation of slavery. They may have made treasonous choices for indefensible reasons, but like as not they weren’t unaware of the reasons the War was fought.

I suspect too that General Seidule’s book has a limited audience–old Southern white guys with a moral conundrum; their early reverence for the South smacking up against their delayed realization that the Confederacy doesn’t deserve reverence–but it’s an audience who will be comforted by General Seidule’s authority and certainty and urgency. I appreciated it anyway.

As an odd aside, I re-read the Gettysburg Address before we went to the battlefield. In Pennsylvania it finally registered that Lincoln was only memorializing the Union dead. Only the Union dead were buried in the new national cemetery. The Southern dead were left on the field and then buried in mass graves, and Lincoln’s words didn’t extend so far. It was a startling realization, that unlike what came after the end of Reconstruction the memorialization of the War didn’t always include the South, and that Lincoln’s consecration said nothing ennobling about the Southern dead. That’s tough stuff for a Southern boy.

Philadelphia to Pittsburgh

It is further than 70 miles from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. Who knew?

In Philadelphia we ate. Yeah, yeah, we saw the Museum of Art, and the Barnes Foundation collection, we walked around the preserved Colonial part of town and looked at the Liberty Bell through a window. It was all fabulous, but mostly we ate. Then we ate some more. Then we ate.

Of course I consulted my friend Tom, font of all trustworthy food suggestions. “Tom,” I asked, “Pittsburgh? Philadelphia?”

Tom didn’t know anything about Pittsburgh. About Philadelphia he was certain:

DO go to Zahav, Michael Solmonov’s paean to Israeli/Middle Eastern food. Great food. Great service. Great cocktails. And contrary to everything I say, it’s ok to order the set menu here – for two. Lots of appetizers, salads, entrees, and dessert.

Getting a reservation to Zahav is a bit like going fly fishing. It takes preparation, memory, some luck, and a credit card. Still, it’s worth it. It is an unflinching barrage of food, fabulous food, the kind of food that wears you down and leaves you drained and unhappy that you can’t eat it all, and thrilled that you ate what you ate.

There is also the Reading Terminal Market, where we ate roast beef and roast pork sandwiches at Tommy DiNic’s, then went back the next day to eat Philly cheese steaks at Carmen’s. Since it’s the only Philly cheese steak I’ve had, I can attest that it is, as far as I know, the best in Philadelphia.

We failed to get the Amish donuts at Reading Terminal Market on Saturday because I didn’t know the owners were Amish and I didn’t want to stand in line, and then they were closed on Sunday. It’s a lot of God to ask us to give up donuts for the Sabbath, so instead of the Amish donuts we went to Federal Donuts and Fried Chicken. I’m sure the fried chicken is excellent, but I really regretted missing my chance at the Amish donuts. Our daughter says they’re outstanding.

There was a very good market in Lancaster, the Central Market, which had lots of Amish goods but I recall no donuts. After visiting the Lancaster Market we ate lots of pickles. It’s a great place to buy pickles, plus after Philadelphia we needed some kind of a purge.

As for Pittsburgh, there were vendor stalls all over the Strip District, but as a market it was not so good as Reading Terminal Market, and while Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art is very fine, it’s not so good as the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I screwed up and we didn’t see the Pirates at PNC Park, which is unforgivable because the park is beautiful and I like the Pirates. The Pirates are far more likable than the Phillies.

The Pittsburgh airport is remarkably inconvenient. It’s hard to figure out where near the airport to stay, and Uber rides from downtown to the airport are ridiculously expensive. We did eat the famous local sandwich at Primanti Brothers, which for some reason is stuffed with French fries, and on Saturday night ate at a good Italian place, Picolo Forno.

The French-fry stuffed sandwich is not so good as the Philly cheese steak.

George Catlin, Ambush for Flamingoes, c. 1856-57, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Feathered Hook

We stayed at some good places, and a lousy airport Holiday Inn Express in Pittsburgh–it was advertised as an airport motel but it was seven miles from the airport and its airport shuttle was shut down for Covid–but best of all we stayed at the Feathered Hook in Coburn, which is a fly shop on Penns Creek with an attached bed and breakfast. This is not a romantic bed and breakfast decorated with period gew-gaws and serving artisanal breakfasts. This is a place for anglers to sleep when they fish Penns Creek. It’s decorated with fly fishing gew-gaws and second-hand furniture that might be antique someday but more likely will be discarded as junk, and there is a bit of a college frat house vibe about the place, that is if the college frats were 60-year-old fly fishermen. Kris was the only woman there, so if it is considered a romantic getaway it’s romance for a decidedly niche clientele.

Breakfast at the Feathered Hook is bacon and sausage and eggs and toast; three eggs, however you want them (though probably not poached, and certainly without any hollandaise). I guess that could be considered artisanal among the same niche that goes to The Feathered Hook for romance.

Coburn itself consists of The Feathered Hook, a main street with a few dozen raggedy clapboard houses, a bridge over Penns Creek, some vacation homes, and four Trump 2024 signs. The fly shop at The Feathered Hook is very good, and they have a fine selection of handmade bamboo fly rods. I have no reason to own a handmade bamboo rod; there’s no fishing I commonly do where I could enjoy a handmade bamboo fly rod, and they’re expensive–even for fly rods–so of course I’ve long wanted one. They’re pretty. If The Feathered Hook had put prices on the rods, I probably would have bought one, but I didn’t want to ask because then I would have been committed and Kris would have been aghast. I would probably find as many uses for an English riding saddle.

I’ve long wanted an English riding saddle.

We stayed at the Feathered Hook two nights, and the first night we drank whiskey in the kitchen with the Antietam Fly Anglers of Maryland. There was a very funny story about one of the members, a doctor, who had organized a trip to Argentina, and then a couple of days before the trip he collapsed and had to have immediate heart surgery. His friends, some of whom were at the kitchen table–as I recall it is a fine formica and chrome table that perfectly matches the decor, but memory is tricky and it may have been deal–went on to Argentina to fish for golden dorado without him. Ok, that’s actually not a very funny story. Maybe it was a funnier story because of the whiskey.

Anyway, the next day the members of the Antietam Fly Anglers were gone and were replaced by members of Long Island Trout Unlimited. They were good to drink whiskey with too, and I think that maybe Kris told them the heart bypass story, though in her version I bought a handmade bamboo rod for an extravagant outlay before I collapsed after she brained me. I can’t remember if in her version she went fishing for golden dorado without me.

Playlist

The Pennsylvania playlist was particularly fine, especially the jazz. Art Blakey, Keith Jarrett, Melody Gardot, Stanley Clarke, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Billy Eckstine, Joe Venuti, Joe Pass, and Stan Getz are all from Pennsylvania. Three of the great jazz pianists, Errol Garner, Billy Strayhorn, and Ahmad Jamal, all attended Westinghouse High School in Pittsburgh. I could listen to that music forever.

I hadn’t listened to Jim Croce in years, or Todd Rundgren or Labelle or the O’Jays, and I’m a fan of them all. Henry Mancini grew up in Pennsylvania and was the composer of the soundtracks to the movies of my childhood, and you know what? It’s terrible music, almost unlistenable. The two best songs, Peter Gunn and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, just can’t do enough to make me forget the Theme from Hatari! or Love Story or Dear Heart. If Mancini had been all we had to listen to, I couldn’t have left Pennsylvania fast enough.

Did I mention that Joe Pass was from Pennsylvania? And also Joe Pass?

Hans Bernhard, Joe Pass and Ella Fitzgerald, 1974, licensed under Creative Commons attribution.

Taylor Swift is from Pennsylvania, and Pink and Christina Aguilera and Joan Jett and Ethel Waters. Chubby Checker, Frankie Avalon. Fabian, and the Stylistics are from Pennsylvania. There’s also a pretty good classical orchestra in Philadelphia, and the Curtis Institute, and lots of new young bands. It is, all in all, a pretty great state for driving around listening to music.

Here’s a recording of the Guarneri Quartet with Emmanuel Axe playing the single best piano quintet ever written about trout, and brown trout specifically. All but one of the Guarneri Quartet studied at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute.

Guitar

I took the Kohno, and played a good bit, though I don’t remember playing anything in particular; some Bach, some Villa-Lobos, some Sanz. I almost certainly worked some on a guitar transcription of Pavane for a Dead Princess. I always work some on a guitar transcription of Pavane for a Dead Princess, and never remember any of it beyond the first couple of pages. Too bad there are five pages. Ravel, by the way, was not from Pennsylvania, but I bet he would have liked it.

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Arkansas packing list, part 2

What we didn’t see

Even before this trip, I’ve seen a lot of Arkansas. I’ve visited the Clinton Library, and the vaccine microchip hadn’t yet told me to. I went to Fayetteville as a teenager and as an adult I’ve seen the Arkansas Delta and Washington and Hot Springs. In January we went to the new museum in Bentonville, Crystal Bridges. My parents took us camping for a week at the Albert Pike Campground, to me a magical place with sparkling clear water where we swam in the heat of the day in the river, and that in 2010 was washed away by flood waters. Sixteen campers were killed. It’s never re-opened.

I have seen the Buffalo River, the first designated National Wild and Scenic River, but only from a car from a bridge. I’ve intended to canoe the Buffalo for 30 years. I still haven’t. I should have gone there to catch my fish. I didn’t. I guess I still need to go back to Arkansas.

US Forest Service, Buffalo River

Where We Went

Other than fishing, we stopped at the Dulcimer Shoppe in Mountain View Arkansas (“Folk Music Capital of the World”). I bought a jar of wild elderberry jelly, since that seemed suitably folksy, but Kris wanted a dulcimer. Did you know that in addition to your index and middle fingers, you use your thumb to fret a dulcimer? I didn’t, so I both learned something and got us out of the shop without a dulcimer. Success! It was a nice shop, and Kris really was sold on dulcimers. The jelly is good too, whatever elderberries may be.

This trip we went out of our way to see Little Rock Central High School. Everyone knows the photo of Elizabeth Eckford walking into Central High: the dignity and vulnerability of Miss Eckford, the rage of the white students . . . In person what’s striking about Central is its size, it’s big, and also its neighborhood. In 1957 when Eisenhower enforced integration there were three high schools in Little Rock . One of the schools, Horace Mann, was black, two others, Central and Hall, were white. One of the white schools, Hall, was generally affluent, which is why integration was slated for working-class Central.

The Central neighborhood hasn’t improved since the 50s. It’s still the same small houses, now 70 years longer in the tooth. It has slipped below working class, or maybe the working class has slipped below what it had achieved in the 50s. The school itself is handsome. Its neighborhood is rough.

Derek Chauvin’s trial for George Floyd’s murder started this week, so racially charged photographs are in the forefront, but there was another Arkansas event this week that brought Miss Eckford to mind. The Arkansas Legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto of a bill forbidding transgender youth from receiving therapy, puberty blockers and hormones, that would aid transition. Many won’t notice the legislation, but it is, well, central, and certainly central to the transgender youth and their families. The proponents’ reasoning is that minors are too young to make gender decisions, and the opponents’ reasoning is that those decisions are best left to the youth, their parents, and their doctors, not the state legislature. I don’t know why anybody would be dubious about the decisions of a state legislature. The Arkansas legislature must be at least as qualified as the Texas.

Playlist

I liked the music we listened to driving around Arkansas. We listened to a lot of Lucinda Williams because, while she was born in St. Charles, she attended the University of Arkansas. I first heard her name on Houston’s nonprofit Pacifica radio station, when the DJ said she had a crush on Lucinda Williams. I’ve listened a lot to Ms. Williams since. I always thought that if I could choose someone famous to sit by on an airplane–this is my personal version of who you’d like at your dinner party–Lucinda Williams would be high on the list. I finally saw her on stage a dozen years ago, and she appeared to be just what I should have thought: a little tough, a little road-weary, a little wild. I don’t share that DJ’s crush, but I would like to talk to Ms. Williams for an hour.

Is there a better road song (or a better song about living in the country) than Car Wheels on a Gravel Road?

Currier & Ives, The Fall of Richmond, Va., on the Night of April 2, 1865, lithograph, Library of Congress.

Levon Helm was from Arkansas. That lets in all sorts of great music, including the troubling The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, which is a song I like in part because it is troubling. It is arguably about white loss with no connection to slavery, and is often heard as a South’s arising anthem. Ta-Nehisi Coates apparently wrote of the song that it was another song of the “blues of Pharaoh,” but it’s hard for me to equate Virgil Kane with Pharaoh, and it seems one of the points of the song that Pharaoh is Pharaoh and everybody else isn’t. Kane, the narrator, doesn’t mourn Dixie’s defeat, Kane suffers it; hunger, poverty, the death of a brother, and there’s no pride, no blame, only desperate endurance. As the lyrics say, you can’t raise a Kane back up when he’s in defeat. As difficult to interpret as it may be, it remains one of the great antiwar songs, and Kane could have been black or white–it wouldn’t change the song’s bleak message. Whatever happens to Pharaoh he’s still Pharaoh. The rest of us are going to be Virgil Kane.

There’s a common misinterpretation of the lyrics that explains some of the ambivalence of the song. There’s a line where Virgil’s wife calls to him: “Virgil, quick, come see,/There goes Robert E. Lee . . . “, the general. At least that’s the way the lyrics are as often as not misinterpreted. The lyrics are “the Robert E. Lee . . . “, the steamboat, which is apparently clear in the live version but a bit muddled in the original. I like the steamboat better, both as a matter of history–Robert E. Lee was never in Tennessee and the steamboat was on the Mississippi –and because the steamboat had its own fame and tragedy. It’s the sort of steamboat on which Pharaoh would ply the Nile, while Virgil Kane watched from the shoreline.

August Norieri, The Robert E. Lee, oil, 1884

In addition to The Band and Lucinda Williams, there’s also Al Green, Johnnie Cash, Lefty Frizzell, Roy Buchanan, Iris Dement, Conway Twitty, and blues musicians from the Delta: Robert Lockwood, Jimmy Witherspoon, Son Seals. If you ignore Black Oak Arkansas, Arkansas has a pretty good lineup.

Glen Campbell is also from Arkansas, which justifies Galveston and Wichita Lineman, but not Rhinestone Cowboy. Nothing justifies Rhinestone Cowboy.

Guitar

I took the old Kohno. Four years ago when we last fished in Arkansas, I sat on a balcony above the Little Red and tried to play Duarte’s transcription of Pavane pour une infante défunte. The lady on the next cabin balcony asked what I was playing–which either meant I was playing the piece well enough to be nearly recognizable or I played it badly enough that it was unrecognizable. I like to think that the name of the song–Pavane for a Dead Princess in English (though a more literal translation would be Dance that a long-dead princess might have danced)–was on the tip of her tongue, and she just couldn’t quite think of it.

This year I was still trying to play Pavane pour une infante défunte, so for me Ravel will always have a weird connection to Arkansas. I don’t know that Ravel ever went there, and I still can’t play the Pavane. I’m pretty sure there were no steamboats named The Maurice Ravel.

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Coronavirus road trip, July 27-August 3, 2020

We drove last night from Sapphire, North Carolina, to Houston. We didn’t exactly drive straight through. Around 2 in the morning we stopped in Louisiana at a rest stop on I-10 just west of the Mississippi border and I slept for an hour. I had planned to stop for the night at a motel somewhere in Georgia, but Kris had other ideas and there you have it. I dozed while Kris drove through South Carolina and Georgia, and then it was after midnight and we just kept driving, trading back and forth, through Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana into Texas. It was 941 miles in about 15 hours.

We planned this trip as a car trip because we were just paranoid enough not to get on a plane, but not paranoid enough not to go, and we’d always planned to make the return trip in one long leg. Going home we were going to leave this morning around 4 am and drive straight through, but instead left last night. I hope our hosts will forgive the abrupt change in plans.

Going out was different, slower. We went north through East Texas, into Louisiana at Shreveport, in the heart of Northern Baptist Louisiana, through a bit of Delta Arkansas into Delta Mississippi. We had plugged the Robert Johnson Crossroads marker in Clarksdale, Mississippi, into the GPS because, well Satan, but neither Satan nor Robert Johnson were there, and I’m no better guitarist than before we left. It’s funny though, growing up in High Plains cotton country prepares you for the Delta. You know flat land, and you recognize cotton in the field. The Delta looked a lot like home.

Rowan Oak.

We went on to Oxford to visit Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s house near the University of Mississippi, and then camped nearby at an unremarkable state park. Rowan Oak was closed because of the virus. At the campground, I was drenched with sweat by the time I set up the tent; camping in Mississippi in July may not have been our best idea, but in the evening we drank Four Roses in memory of Faulkner and the Four Roses gave me sufficient courage to try to explain the ukulele to Kris. Kris has wanted to learn the ukulele.

“It’s the top four strings of the guitar a sixth up from the nut, so it’s D-G-B-E only it’s G-C-E-A . . .”

“Show me a chord.”

“This is wait, wait, it’s a 6th up from G, so this is E.”

“I can’t see your fingers, let me see your fingers.”

“Here, right here, this is, wait, a 6th up from G, so E.”

“Show me another chord.”

“This would be, wait, let me translate, it’s up from C so it would be A, or it could also be D-minor . And this is either B or B-flat, is it B-flat a 6th up from D or is it B? “

I thought I was being particularly lucid, but I think Kris got away from the lesson without knowing a single thing about the ukulele. That’s a good thing, since it should have been a 4th up, not a 6th.

***

To get to Shiloh National Battlefield we drove through Northern Mississippi and Southwestern Tennessee, and we started driving past Trump signs, Trump flags, Trump bumper stickers. I am surprised there weren’t Trump cut-outs, or even President Trump himself, waving at us from the side of the road. It struck me that if I lived in the area and was Biden prone, I’d be leary of putting a Biden sticker on my car. It just wouldn’t seem a safe thing to do.

Whatever our discontent with one another now, that locale of the first high-casualty battle of our largest discontent is not an easy place to get to. Because it’s not easy to get to, it’s pretty much as it was in 1862. I don’t know why I feel this need to visit our battlefields, but I continue to do so. Reverence and awe is what I feel when I’m there, for young men whose deaths and bravery were a long time ago, and sadness.

Me and William Faulkner.

***

I like to travel in the South. There is always great stuff to see, and many friendly and often peculiar people, and great food. And this trip there was still great stuff to see, but we weren’t stopping to eat anyplace, not even for donuts.

It may have been my imagination but there seemed to be an overlay of hostility about, of all the stupid stuff, masks. East of Nashville we lost an hour, which we hadn’t expected. Kris wanted to stop at a McDonalds because she thought it would be clean and we could get some iced tea and use their bathrooms: corporate America she thought could manage the virus, even if we collectively couldn’t. There was a sign on the door requiring masks, but inside it seemed to be a point of honor for customers to defy the sign. The staff, stressed with the burden of protecting themselves and America, were angry and yelling at each other, and openly hostile to the customers, who, arrogantly standing maskless, deserved their hostility. We stayed, which we shouldn’t have done, then tossed the food into the trash on the way out the door.

If I die because of the coronavirus, I will blame that McDonald’s.

***

Asheville may be one of the South’s better food cities. We had a barbecue pork sandwich at Little Pigs Bar-B-Q, which was very good and which we ordered to go from the parking lot, but you can’t like anything about traveling through a good city with good restaurants and not stopping at any of them because, well, coronavirus. When I picked up our sandwiches the customers inside wore masks, mostly.

***

Kris has a new minivan. Kris loves minivans, and she traded in her ancient Chrysler Town and Country on a new Chrysler Pacifica, which may well be the smartest collection of car compromises ever. It is even a good-looking car, if you can get past its mini-vanness. I hated to drive the Town and Country because it was like driving a bowl of jello; I love the Pacifica, but don’t tell Kris.

We piled so much stuff into that car.

  • tent
  • folding chairs
  • folding table
  • cots
  • sleeping bags
  • kitchen junk
  • food
  • a case of wine
  • some more food
  • stove
  • a five gallon water jug
  • fly fishing gear, including waders and boots
  • more food
  • a Yeti cooler
  • another Yeti cooler
  • still more food
  • a guitar
  • a yukulele
  • clothes, including whites to play croquet in North Carolina, because you can’t play croquet in anything but whites
  • Some more fly fishing gear

And it was all in a constant state of disarray. It was an experiment, to see after all these years, if we could still drive someplace and camp. We did it. We camped for one night. We can do it again.

***

Driving through Mississippi last night at 2 in the morning I told Kris that we were only 10 miles from the Tatonut Donut Shop in Ocean Springs. She said let’s go there and park on the street until they open in the morning. When we checked the internet they weren’t open on Monday. We kept driving. Those are very good donuts though, perhaps the best I’ve ever had. We would have broken up the trip for Tatonut donuts.

***

The Mississippi Delta is Mississippi cotton country, and still today 60% of the population is African American because Delta cotton production was industrial agriculture that depended on cheap labor. That’s where the enslaved were brought. It is also the home of the Blues. It is now one of our poorest regions because in place of cheap labor cotton production has mechanized.

Structurally the blues are usually a 12 bar phrase, repeated again and again with variations. The Blues can be extraordinary sophisticated, think Bessie’s Blues by John Coltrane, or raw and driving, like Cross Road Blues by Robert Johnson. One of the things that makes the blues different from other music is that it is cyclic, there is no chorus, no bridge, the phrase goes that 12 bars, or maybe 16 bars, and then it does it again and then it does it again and then it does it again. Folk music is cyclic as well, and one suspects that there is interplay (or at least a common human bond) between, say, Barbary Allen and Crossroads Blues.

In Clarksdale where we went to see the Crossroads Marker everyone, even people walking randomly down the street, seemed to be wearing masks. It gave me great hope for the drive. One hope, dashed.

***

Downtown Oxford, Mississippi, is charming, with cute shops, restaurants, boutique hotels, and a lovely courthouse with a Confederate soldier out front. There is a current controversy of course about the Confederate soldier, that he should be removed, but forgetting all else it is a charming vignette. It is hard though to forget he’s a Confederate sentinel for the courthouse. He will someday go I suspect, and I suppose I shouldn’t regret it, but I do, a little, but only because the statue is very pretty, and it makes me consider the War.

Current estimates are that there were about 750,000 young men, North and South, who died in the Civil War. If you include Americans both North and South among the dead, it remains our costliest war. We can only speculate at why most of those young men were fighting, but I suspect some of it was that young men fight when called by old men, or maybe, as Shelby Foote told about the answer of a random Confederate private, “because you’re down here.”

If the War was inevitable, both because of slavery and the fragility of the Union some 70 years in, then there had to be Confederate soldiers as well as Union, and the Confederates were as flawed and tragic as Hamlet, or Lear, or best of all, Othello. We may not be able to forgive them, any more than we can forgive Othello the death of Desdemona, but we can recognize their flaw and our collective tragedy. Honestly, I’d like to see that statue stay, rededicated to the dead of both sides, with an addition of a memorial to the cost of the failed Reconstruction and slavery. It would give us a better picture of our history. I suspect that ultimately it won’t stay though, and that’s ok as well.

***

I had a call last night with a young friend, a young African American woman. It started as business but we talked and I told her about driving through the majority-black Delta where everyone wore masks, even walking down the street, and then into East Tennessee, where it seemed a point of honor for the young white men in the McDonald’s to defy mask orders because the Second Amendment and tattoos would protect them. I told her that driving home the night before we had stopped at a convenience store/gas station on the edge of some city, Montgomery I think, and while I filled up the car I watched a series of young black men enter the store to buy cigarettes or beer or whatever.

“They were all wearing masks, right?” She thought that would be the denouement, that the young white men in East Tennessee arrogantly disobeyed the mask signs that the young black men in Alabama obeyed.

“Nope.”

“I thought you were going to tell me they were wearing masks.”

“Nope.” Having been one myself, I think that young men are sometimes just uniformly stupid.

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Andrew Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 7, 1864, “The war in Tennessee: Confederate massacre of black Union troops after the surrender at Fort Pillow, April 12, 1864, New York, New York Public Library.

It’s no accident that two of our most violent predecessors, Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-1877) and Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), were both from Tennessee. I had saved reading an Andrew Jackson biography for this trip, though I’d been thinking about it since President Trump’s election. President Trump compared himself then to President Jackson, and they were both arguably Men of the People, or at least some people anyway. There were also differences. Jackson was a man of great personal bravery, a brilliant general, devoted husband, and from all indications he didn’t really want to be President. Jackson ended up on the $20 bill, though to our modern sensibilities his presence is something of an affront. He was scheduled to be replaced by Harriet Tubman until President Trump’s election.

Hammatt Billings, The Battle of New Orleans January 8, 1815, Abbot’s Lives of the Presidents, engraved print, 1882, Library of Congress.

As a child Andrew Jackson was poor, even by 18th Century standards. He was poorly educated, a duelist, a slave owner, a slave trader, a commander in wars against the Creek and Seminole, and an under-qualified justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court (though to be fair no one else was probably qualified either). He married a married woman, gambled big time on horse racing, and was an uncompromising and violent general, the sort of general who during the Creek War (1814-15) stood in front of potential deserters and told them that if they tried to leave he would order the canon at their back to fire. Of course he was also in front of the canon. To modern sensibilities his greatest sin was the forced removal of the Southeastern tribes to Oklahoma, and the deaths of thousands in that removal.

As a Tennessee congressman David Crockett opposed Jackson’s Indian policies. Defeated for a third term in Congress, Crockett was in Mississippi when a third Tennessean (and Jackson protege), Sam Houston, got in trouble in Texas. Crockett went there to help, leaving us with his immortal line, “I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done; but if not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas.”

Whatever his failings, Jackson was a true believer in democracy in its broadest sense, and the great unionist of his age. The reason Jackson is on the $20 bill is that Lincoln needed Jackson. As President, Jackson had first faced down South Carolina’s threatened secession in the 1832 Nullification Crisis, receiving Congressional authorization to send troops to South Carolina to enforce Federal law. It wasn’t over slavery, it was over tariffs, but it was North-South, and Jackson gave Lincoln his precedent for a military response to preserve the Union. It didn’t hurt Lincoln either that Jackson was Southern. Hence Jackson enters the American pantheon, not merely as a man of action, but as a man central to an idea, the Union, and it was an idea that Jackson revered, both as a general and as President. It’s no accident that his Texas protege, Governor Sam Houston, resigned when Texas voted to secede.

Pierre Langlume, General Andrew Jackson, lithograph, c. 1824, Library of Congress.

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In his study of slavery, Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis suggests a number of conditions for slavery to exist, but one of his suggestions, and here I’m paraphrasing, is that we simply have no clue how hard and violent the lives of these people were. They were surrounded by death (50% of infants never reached adulthood), cruelty (corporal punishment of soldiers and sailors wasn’t that different than corporal punishment of slaves), privation, and violence to both man and beast.

I have a family story that I ponder when I think about these people. One of my 16 fourth great-grandfathers (along with 16 fourth great-grandmothers, nature being demanding that way), one Andrew Davidson, was born in 1768 in Rocky Gap, Virginia, and died in 1853 in Bedford, Tennessee. I don’t know much about Davidson, but he is famous enough to have a historical marker in West Virginia:

Even with a historical marker, Davidson isn’t famous enough to have a Wikipedia page, but there are plenty of descriptions of what happened to Mrs. Davidson. Mrs. Davidson, a Rebecca Burke, was pregnant, and she gave birth shortly after her abduction. The raiders drowned the newborn. Two of her other children were murdered and one was taken from her and subsequently died by accident. At some later date she was sold to a white family in Canada. All of her children, the newborn, two daughters, and one son, were dead. Lord only knows what she endured.

Davidson, to his credit, went looking, and it took about three years for him to find her in Canada. He brought her home, and then she died. She was 28. I think about that story when I try to imagine the outlook of these people, the level of violence that must have been, if not exactly their norm, at least not uncommon, certainly not as uncommon as it would be for us. The violence of Jackson and Forrest would not have been alien to Andrew Davidson. Andrew Davidson would probably have admired them both without reservation.

Davidson, by the way, remarried (this time to one of my 16 fourth great grandmothers) and had more children, for which I am grateful.

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I read H.W. Brands’ biography of Jackson. There were others, including at least one newer, but Brands’ seemed to have the best reviews. Then I read some stuff about Shiloh, and after went on to read Jack Hurst’s biography of the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Hurst starts out saying that he isn’t a Forrest apologist, but I suspect it’s impossible to write a biography without empathy for the subject, even if the subject is Nathan Bedford Forrest. Notwithstanding his disclaimer Hurst is a bit of an apologist.

After the Civil War, Forrest considered a plan to invade Mexico. He said he had been promised 20,000 muskets. It’s not clear who made the promise, or whether they were able to deliver, but it’s not unusual for a lack of clarity to surround Forrest and his deeds. This was during the 1867 elections when Forrest was almost certainly the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Forest is often reported as the founder of the Klan, but he wasn’t; it had been around a bit before he joined. There’s considerable speculation about Forest’s role in the Klan, but during its first incarnation, first as a social club born in Nashville and later as a violent means of suppressing black and white Republican votes, he was the Grand Wizard. He was almost certainly integral to its post-1868 election violence. The sheets, by the way, were to give the Klansmen the appearance of Confederate ghosts.

The Klan died out in Tennessee by 1871, in part because of Federal suppression, but also because it had accomplished what it wanted: suffrage for former Confederates and suppression of Southern Republican voters, black and white. Some of the credit for the first death of the Klan probably goes to Forrest, who for whatever reasons seems to have ordered it disbanded. It would next rise in Georgia in 1915, in part because of the popularity of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.

Nathan Bedford Forrest, Brady-Handy Collection, 1862-1865, Library of Congress.

Forrest shares a lot with Jackson. He was poor as a child, poorly educated, a duelist, a slave owner, and a slave trader. Forrest made a fortune before the War trading slaves, while Jackson seems only to have dabbled and to have made his fortune as a planter. Forrest was never an Indian fighter, the Southeastern tribes having been removed during Jackson’s presidency. As a boy he did once shoot at a man over an ox, after he’d shot the ox. He gambled at cards, and was an uncompromising and violent field commander. During the war he was shot four times, had 29 horses shot out from under him, and claimed personally to have killed as many Federal troops as he had lost horses. He didn’t drink. He was devoted to his wife and children.

Forrest is considered to be one of the great cavalry commanders, not just of the American Civil War but of any war, with an extraordinary sense of field tactics and leadership. Of all the Confederate generals of the Civil War, he was probably the most consistently successful. Forrest was born to fight in the violent West, the western theater lacking the patina of gentility present in the east, and part of Sherman’s strategy on his March to the Sea was to keep just enough troops in Tennessee and Mississippi to keep Forrest busy and out of his hair.

During his lifetime, Forrest was most notorious for the 1864 massacre at Fort Pillow on the Mississippi River in Western Tennessee. Forrest always denied that he had ordered the massacre, but 300 Union forces, many of them African-American, were murdered after the fort’s surrender. It is probably the greatest battlefield atrocity of our most atrocious war, and at the time was widely known, now largely forgotten. Instead of Fort Pillow being Forrest’s legacy, his legacy is the Klan.

At the end of his life, Forrest seems to have found religion and was, perhaps, one of the few Southern voices for reconciliation, not only between North-South, but between whites and blacks. Maybe it was too little too late. Like Jackson and Lincoln he’d come to view the Union as the most important thing, the only economic path forward for the destroyed South, and I suppose he deserves some credit for it. Of course that’s not why there are public (and private) statues of Forrest in Tennessee.

Brent Moore, photographer, Nathan Bedford Forrest statue on private land on I-65 in Nashville, 2006. While there are plenty of moral sensibilities that could be offended by a statue of Forrest, I’m not sure that the moral offense isn’t matched by the aesthetic offense of this particular statue. It would deserve to come down even if it wasn’t a statue of General Forrest. That is one ugly piece of fiberglass.

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Meantime the fishing near Houston, both for bass and redfish, has been outstanding. I had maybe my best day fishing for redfish ever, not so much in the landing, but in the seeing, and Kris did almost all of the day’s poling. The next day I sat in my canoe and watched what must have been a four-pound bass come out of the water to eye level after dragon flies. I never caught that bass, but I caught plenty of other stuff. And sometimes the seeing is the best part.

Now if I’d just remember to get my hand out of the way of the fish photo.