To Brevard, NC

Then on to Brevard, North Carolina to visit my sister and her new husband who have decided to retire in a mountain community.  The route took us by Tallulah Gorge Falls, a deep crag in the mountains decorated with scattered waterfalls, white cascades that have attracted tourists since the railroad made the region accessible.  We got out for a few scenic looks, me careful as usual not to get too close to the edge of the precipices. Then back on the winding, up and down, around and around roads of the mountainous North Georgia and North Carolina. So densely wooded, our views were blocked except for occasional peeks at the far off view or of homes, subdivisions, golf courses that punctuate the mountain playgrounds for the wealthier set. We stopped in Highlands, a town that people are sure to let you know they have visited or lived in. I decided I should get some fudge at this tourist destination, so we stopped and walked about the main street area. Wally got a large double scoop of peach ice cream. My impression of Highlands, at least the main street, downtown area, is that it is a place to shop for expensive looking vacation wear, art, jewelry. You almost wonder why people leave home to come to such a beautiful place if they are just going to shop and eat the usual foods they no doubt have back in the city. At least it is cooler up there.

Then to Brevard, a really cute town, art, culture, lush woods and white squirrels, apparently unique to Brevard and a kind of local mascot. The story is that a circus truck overturned back in 1949 and the two remaining white squirrels were let loose in Brevard and became the grandparents of the many white squirrels of Brevard. After an enjoyable visit with my sister, we are back on the road, headed west.  We drove I-40 all the way across Tennessee, going freeway speeds, no stops except to eat, gas up the van and use the restroom, no views beyond the ever present wooded hills until we started to descend from the hills around Nashville. That day we made it to Hernando, Mississippi just south of Memphis-- a long day of relentless driving.

The Brevard white squirrel is simply a coat color variant. That is, they are part of the natural variation occurring in a very variable species, in this case the Eastern Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensi), which also includes black variants in many parts of its range.

The Delta Blues

Now our sightseeing, the vacation part of this trip could commence as we head back to Baton Rouge and then home to Texas. Our first stop-- the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi, telling the stories of the various blues musicians coming out of the delta, their guitars and outfits, even Muddy Waters’s childhood house of rough-hewn timbers, a one-room place from his share-cropping days, sparse and poor, are there for visitors to see. The young woman minding the museum spoke with such a thick Mississippi accent that I had trouble understanding her. I have been away from the Deep South too long, I suppose. The downtown area shows signs of some rehabilitation as a blues destination, but it is not gentrified, still a little rough looking. Clarksdale obviously was once a real hot spot in the 1930s and 1940s as evidenced by the number of dilapidated clubs in the downtown. To listen to the music being played in the museum, on the CD that we bought, it makes you wonder how many of today’s hip hop and rap artists understand the roots of their music, the rhymes, the steady rhythm, the ever-present beat that are signatures of the blues. One of the displays was of the Koko guitar-like instrument from Africa, suggesting the deep African roots of the beat, the music. It seems from reading their stories that so many of the blues musicians were not trained; they were more self-taught or picked up the music from the folks around them. You get a sense of the pervasiveness of the music as a part of everyday life, a way of escaping, making sense of and shaping the hard lives of the Delta Blacks. Somehow I had thought the Mississippi Delta was closer to the Gulf of Mexico, but my husband explained that the area of north Mississippi-Arkansas, where the river drained, was part of the Delta that reached all the way down to the Gulf. The Delta area is flat, cultivated into large fields of cotton, rice, sugar cane, and soybeans. Silos dot the landscape and Casinos perch near the river on the Mississippi side. Despite the rich farmland and the nice looking homes of the gentry, it is still a region of poverty and isolation from the larger cultural influences. Seeing the large fields, the crop-rich land asked me to think of the labor forces of days gone by, how much labor was needed to cultivate the crops that today are managed on a larger scale by machinery. No doubt the fields before mechanized farming were smaller, but still they must have been immense for the human labor conscripted to work there and to live in poverty and misery as reward for their back-breaking labor.

Criss-Crossing the Mississippi

Because I had just finished drafting a chapter on John James Audubon’s 1820-21 Mississippi River Journal, I wanted to retrace parts of his itinerary. He floated down the great river on a flatboat, shooting game for the crew and collecting and drawing birds on a three-month float from Cincinnati to New Orleans. We were driving an air-conditioned van, with fast food handy to keep us going for the day and a half we meandered from Hernando to Baton Rouge.  We went by land, criss-crossing the river from site to site. Not quite the same as Audubon’s journey almost 200 hundred years earlier.  After leaving the Delta Blues Museum, our next stop took us over to Arkansas, the Arkansas Post where Audubon got off the river for a night to stay at the tavern, sharing a room with five other men, his backside peeking out from the rude covers of his bed. The Post, situated at the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers was first established as a trading post by the French in 1686, ceded to the Spanish in 1763, reclaimed by the French and then sold to the US as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. An important location in the river travel, trade routes, and fur trade, it was a gateway to the West via the Arkansas River and to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi. When Audubon visited in 1820, it was already in shambles even though it became for a short time the capital of the new state of Arkansas. During the Civil War it was so heavily bombarded by the Union forces that it never recovered. Today nothing of the town or fort remains; concrete sidewalks mark the streets of the town. The course of the river has also changed, burying the shoreline that Audubon would have seen, but making for a pleasant spot for a stroll and a picnic.  To get here we had to go north from Clarksdale to Helena to cross over the Mississippi and then south in Arkansas to the Post, an out-of-the way location today when once it had had such a prominent location.  Today, you have to want to go there.  The park ranger was so glad to see us that she chatted with us about the Post, its history, and the local alligator. She asked where we were from—Texas—and she told us she was from Temple, Texas, making some kind of connection there at that small post.

Next stop, Winterville Indian Mounds in Mississippi.  That meant another crossing of the river, this time at Greenville on a new cable-stayed bridge. The mounds were not part of Audubon’s trip, though he did meet various groups of Indians on and along the Mississippi, trading for food with them. The mounds, among the largest in Mississippi, were used for sacred ceremonials from AD 1000 to 1450. Today, visitors can view several grassed humps of land and speculate about the lives of the Natives who populated the area and then disappeared.  We looked at the small museum, the displays of arrowheads, tools, and pottery, and then walked about the grounds a bit before getting back in the car. What happened to these and the other mound builders who lived along the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys is a mystery, but at one time they dominated the region, leaving behind traces of their past civilization.

The GPS system routed us through Arkansas to go to Natchez, Mississippi, where we would spend the night at a Holiday Inn Express, so another crossing of the Mississippi River.  Traveling south through Arkansas, we noticed a sign for a Japanese Internment Museum, so we stopped there.  There is only a small museum, housed in a part of the old train depot. There are no remains of the two camps in southeast Arkansas which held 5,000 and 8,000 Japanese Americans, just the museum and an informational video.  The woman working at the museum, an older woman with crevasses of wrinkles, red lipstick, what must be a blond wig styled to flip up at shoulder length, wearing camo-colored pants with a red and white rhinestone flower appliquéd at the pocket, greeted us and chatted so much that she forgot to take our admissions fee.  She told how when she was a child she had no idea, nor apparently did her friends, that there was an internment camp in the region. She also made the point that the camps had guards with guns, not to keep the Japanese safe but to protect against the Japanese residents of the camp. It seems that a theme for today’s outings has a racial tone, Japanese, Native American, Black Americans, as part of the South and the treatment of them that has not been very positive, to say the least. Though we don’t know what happened to the mound builders, we do know about the Native Americans who were forced off their lands in the Trail of Tears, some 200 drowning near Arkansas Post.  From the park ranger at Arkansas Post, we also learned about the massacre of about 300 African American Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tennessee on April 12, 1864 directed or condoned by General Bedford Forrest, perhaps in retaliation for Confederate losses at the Post. Sad stories in our nation’s history.

Audubon and Oakley Plantation

We finally got to Natchez around 8:00 p.m., checked Yelp for some local restaurants but at that time of night, they were closing, so we opted for Applebee’s, a chain restaurant. Our motel was just up the bluff from lower Natchez, where traditionally the boats would land and unload and upload cargo. Natchez had been an important port on the Mississippi, rivaled only by New Orleans and maybe St. Louis. It had been the juncture where flatboats from the Ohio River Valley would unload their cargo, the crews would dismantle the flatboats and then go overland on the Natchez Trace back home.  That habit may be one reason why there are no remaining flatboats. When Audubon stopped in Natchez, he noted the vultures swirling around the lower part of the city, the refuse of the rough port district, contrasted with the refinements of the upper part, famous now for its luxurious antebellum homes. We did not stop to tour the homes because we were anxious to get on the road to mother and daddy’s  house in Baton Rouge.  Anyway, back in the 1990s during a Christmas time trip from Alabama to Texas we had stopped and toured a mansion. My children were quite impressed with the house, the way it was decorated for Christmas with boughs of fir and red bows on the stair rails. My son, the budding designer was struck by the shoofly paddle and an early version of a cooler in the dining room. The shoofly paddle is a 3 foot by 4 foot wooden paddle suspended from the ceiling over the dining table with a pulley rope that a black child would pull during dinner to keep the flies off the food.

We were headed for St. Francisville, Louisiana, and Oakley Plantation where Audubon had stayed for three months tutoring the teenage daughter of the owners and collecting and drawing birds.  On the way, we stopped at a convenience store/gas station in rural south Mississippi or north Louisiana. It seemed to be a gathering place for the local African Americans, several older men chatting with each other, greeting each other as they came to the store, got coffee, a bit of breakfast to start the day. One older fellow, apparently toothless, sat at a booth in the little dining section, looking out the window, perhaps to see who was coming in the store. Another man, with a walking cane carefully and slowly made his way along the building and in through the door, stopping occasionally to survey the scene and visit with people he knew.  The ladies inside were having conversations about church, and one guy wanted to know what drink my husband was buying, a diet Dr. Pepper, which was in a new wrapping. He proclaimed to the attendant and my husband, “That Diet Dr. Pepper is not half bad.” Another man had some black lace-up shoes, the back heels either gone or mashed down, rags stuffed into the shoes in place of socks. I saw him filling up a red plastic gas can with gas; was he getting gas this way for a lawnmower or for some other purpose? This little convenience store/gas station may be a sign of the new rural America, a gathering place where people know each other and take pleasure in visiting with each other briefly before going about their business.  The interactions I witnessed suggest that in this town members of the African American community know each other and take the time from their schedules to chat with each other.  But it also a sign of the poverty that haunts the rural South, the rags stuffed in shoes, the toothless mouths, the role of the convenience store as gathering place, diner, and gas station.

Finally to Oakley Plantation.  We arrived just in time for a tour of the house given by a woman who kept commenting on the plantation her daughter owns. We saw the room, at ground level, where Audubon and James Mason, the young man who accompanied him and helped by drawing backgrounds for the bird paintings, stayed.  We learned about the construction of the home, the use of West Indian style shutters on the upper galley to move the air and shade the house, the history of settlement of the plantation from Spanish land grant days, the rebellion by St. Francisville residents from Spain. And of course we heard about the Pirrie family who owned the plantation when Audubon was there, the various marriages of Eliza, the teenager who grew up to replace her mother as matriarch of a number of plantations.  Our guide acknowledged the use of slaves and even showed us the attic space where the indoor slaves slept, but the focus was not on them or the peculiar institution, but on the Pirrie family and the house itself, a way of both acknowledging and eliding the fact of slavery and the persistence of racial tensions in the South.  St. Francisville is just a 45-minute drive from Baton Rouge, so I had been there a couple of times with my parents to eat lunch at the Magnolia Grill, walk about the old Episcopalian Church and graveyard, and drive past the historic homes, some dating back to the 1820s when Audubon visited. My husband had not been, so we did a quick tour of the historic district.  I wanted to see the Mississippi River which comes in at Sara Bayou, but the river was too high to approach it, the rains and floods raising the water levels in Louisiana. With that, we hopped in the car and made a beeline to my parents.