Bus Ride to Louisville, Summer 2023

I had anticipated seeing some of the country on the bus ride with Wally’s high school technology students to their national competitions in Louisville, Kentucky.  But the windows were screened by millions of little web circles, making it difficult to focus on the details of the landscape as we whished by. I could not look out the front wind shield since it was below my line of sight, so I was not quite sure where we were along the way. At one point I texted my kids and told them we were in Tennessee, “I think.” One of the joys of car travel is to watch the landscape change, to quickly peer into others’ lives as you pass by, and to daydream. Some of those joys were lost riding in a charter bus, though I could look down from my perch into cars to see what their occupants were doing, how they sat next to each other, what they were drinking or eating in that flash when we rode parallel to each other.

Although I had a row of seats to myself, my backside got tired and stiff, prompting me to squirm and try different ways of sitting on the 8-hour trip from Atlanta, aggravated by stops to cool off the bus. When we first got underway the students were a-buzz with chatter and excitement, but about 45 minutes in, they quieted and many of us got a nap and settled in for the long ride. I had a book with me, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, about his 1960 road trip across America in his camper Rocinante. I had read it decades ago but was prompted to revisit it by a travel manuscript I had reviewed that referenced Steinbeck’s book. I was more delighted with Steinbeck this time around: the prose, the observations about the nation, the folks he talked to, and Charley, his poodle companion. The mood of the book changed when he described a dip down to New Orleans to witness the “Cheerleaders,” mothers who shouted vicious invectives against some elementary-school aged Black children who were among the first to integrate “white” schools. Steinbeck was sickened, “churned with weary nausea” by what he witnessed in the South of 1960, the overt and mean racism. Unfortunately, things have a way of repeating themselves, with the Moms for Liberty, today’s cheerleaders against inclusion in education, targeting not only racial “others” but the LBGTQ+ community. I thought women were supposed to be nurturing and caring, but as history has shown, women who feel challenged tend to identify with the oppressor and not with other women or children.

Once arrived in Louisville, we checked into our hotel room and then Wally and the students were off to the convention center to check in. While Wally and the students were busy with the TSA convention, I was on my own, to walk around the downtown area and get in lots of computer time in the hotel room. Downtown Louisville is a rather sad mix of old, run-down buildings, and efforts to revive it with bars and music, a constant tribute to bourbon which is boring to someone who cannot gag down a sip of the stuff. Wally and I did make two excursions during downtimes to the Louisville Slugger Museum, home of the famous baseball bats, and to a quaint museum dedicated to the African American experience.

Wally’s dad, Wally Moon, was a major league baseball player who had his own Louisville Slugger bat, and my husband wanted to see his dad’s name template and tour the museum, which included the factory where billets were shaped into bats. The place was aswarm with families and kids running around with their complimentary mini-bats, tourists, and little leaguers. We took the tour and I learned more than I ever thought I would about how wooden baseball bats are made—so many trees, so many thousands of bats to be used by professional ball players and amateurs. Wally was both a kid in a baseball shop and an engineering teacher observing the equipment and processes of turning trees into bats.

The next day we went to Roots 101 African American Museum, a small museum in downtown Louisville.

Founded in 2020 by Lamont Collins to celebrate the achievements and resilience of the African American community, especially the Louisville experience, it is housed in a small brick building with some quirky small exhibit rooms to highlight its different themes. When you enter, you are greeted by a woman holding a 400-year-old chain and shackles that was used during the slave trade. I put my arms through the hand cuffs and could feel the weight of the iron chains and cuffs. She asked me how it felt, “heavy,” I said; then “the weight hurts my back.” Imagine wearing, dragging that thing around all day, doing chores and going about life weighted down by the clunking, not jangling, metal.

The large downstairs area of the museum displays masks, carvings, and sculptures from Africa, particularly from Benin (Nigeria). The variety of styles and faces represented in the masks, some with cowrie shells and raffia and others sleek metal sculptures that look as if they came out of the minimalist period of modern art, demonstrates the complexity of African art. After viewing the craftsmanship and careful, often ornate designs, you go into a room with 19th and early 20th-century American artistic renditions of African Americans—the crude stereotypes an effort to deny the sophistication of civilizations that produced such art demonstrates the national effort to demean and belittle the people they oppressed and justify their racism.

Other small exhibit rooms tell the stories of the KKK and racism, but more importantly of the accomplishments of the African American community, featuring musicians, athletes, writers, and leaders who resonate with the Louisville community—Mohammed Ali, Breanna Taylor, bell hooks.  

A replication of a room from the Allen Hotel, a Louisville hotel featured in the Green Book for African American travelers, brought home the efforts to freely travel in a segregated nation. I was struck by the cozy comfort of the replication but noted that the bed was a cot, not the king-or queen-sized bed I am used to when traveling.

Big Momma’s House, a room arranged as if it were grandmother’s living room, had the everyday displays of family, hope, and togetherness in the pictures that hung from the walls.

Roots 101 is a small but very touching museum, like an introductory 101 course in African American History (now needed more than ever as states seek to erase that history). Readings I have done in African and African American literature came welling back up, scenes from the literature reified in the exhibits, the collections that Lamont Collins had secured and curated. Recent books by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rivers Solomon, Yaa Gyasi, Colson Whitehead, Geraldine Brooks’s Horse, and of course and always Toni Morrison that fill in work by Chinua Achebe, Olauduah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs.

As we left, me close to tears from the experience, Wally struck up a conversation with Lamont; it seems that one of the things that ties men together is sports. They talked a little football and some baseball, Wally remembering how his dad played against Jackie Robinson and how he met Roy Campanella. Sports is one of those things that brings people together, kids running around the Slugger Museum and old coaches who happened to share a few moments of conversation.