Other states, other lives, other souls

A week ago, we set off down the Mississippi River flyway on a one month road trip. We loaded the car with two kayaks, two bikes and camping equipment. We were fleeing the soul-killing mid-March Minnesota weather: fresh heavy snow and a driveway covered in four inches of black ice. With any luck, we’ll find spring.

Our plan is to head relatively quickly down to Louisiana to catch the warmth, then mosey back north at the end of March and early April. Although the Big Muddy is our touchstone, we soon discovered two things we hadn’t thought of: 1. The Mississippi River floods in spring, and this year the flood is higher and earlier than usual. 2. Because of annual flooding, human development mostly starts beyond the flood zone so it is hard to get close to the river banks on the roads and in towns. Crossing bridges is one way. This photojournalist just completed an exhaustive photo journey down the whole length–much better than we could do. Have a look. Many of our impressions of the river as we drove were of flooded fields and tributaries, wet-footed forests, and soggy gullies. Unseen, except occasionally, was the fast flowing, slowly rising, silted brown bisector of east from west and state from state.

Our first full stop was to be Memphis for 3 days. On our way we stopped in Alton, Illinois, just across the River from St. Louis. Illinois was a free state and Missouri was a slave state, so Alton became a stop on the Underground Railroad and the Mississippi River, a symbolic baptism in freedom. Alton is a gritty workingman’s town, while St. Louis has the romance. In the morning before we headed to Memphis we crossed the bridge over to the St. Louis City Museum, located in the old Brown factory (St. Louis was once renown for shoe manufacture) in a blighted part of town. One man’s childhood fantasy run amok (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Cassilly )! It’s a gigantic indoor and outdoor adventure playground and folk art fantasy. Next time we will bring grandchildren so the sight of elders whooping it down a ten-story slide is not so ridiculous.

We pulled into Memphis after dark, day 2, following GPS to a narrow side street in the Cooper Young neighborhood. Cooper Young is either “hip and arty” or “old and working class residential” depending on which web source you consult. After some stumbling about we found our AirB&B in the back of an old brick side -by-side.

We were drawn to Memphis for a concert celebrating “America in Song” and the 100th birthday of Leonard Bernstein. The guest soprano was Julia Bullock, the daughter of a former colleague. The orchestra’s musicians  were crack classical artists from all over the country brought to the Germantown Center for Performing Arts by the conductor Michael Stern, son of Isaac Stern. I am not a regular attender of orchestra concerts, but the program of modern classics from the 20s to 40s, the quality of the musicians and soulful conductor, and Julia’s amazing voice, sent me into another realm and had my husband dabbing at his eyes. One of the pieces was Knoxville: Summer 1915, composed by Samuel Barber for the excerpt by the same name from James Agee’s A Death in the Family. It was so touching that I stopped in the local bookstore the next day and bought a copy to read again. Agee was a Knoxville boy.

We spent a day on bikes exploring racial politics in Memphis. First we stopped at the Stax Museum of Soul Music. Stax was started in the mid fifties and churned out a mix of gospel, funk, jazz, and blues and country in a neighborhood filled with natural talent and an abundance of little protestant churches. Sam Cook, Otis Redding, Mary Wells, Eddie Floyd, Carla Thomas, Booker T, Isaac Hayes, and so many others recorded on Stax. It was an early meld of Black and White musicians, divorced from the Civil Rights movement. “I don’t see color ” says one of the White promoters of Stax and a musician herself Estelle Axton.

Once MLK was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, Stax started to get more involved in community efforts and their musicians reflected the more politicized consciousness. By 1972 Stax was gone, supplanted by bigger labels.

In the afternoon we rode our bikes to the National Civil Rights Museum, housed in the old Lorraine Motel, where King was shot by James Earl Ray on April 4, 1968, under circumstances that are still debated. The museum tells the story of the African American struggle from slavery through 1968, rather than just Dr. King’s leadership. I was struck by the amount of training that went into maintaining nonviolence and the creative tactics and strategy. I think a detailed online training in the tactics of the Civil Rights movement and its sister organizations like SNCC would be a great help to today’s activists.

I was also reminded of the hatred and violence Whites in the South visited on the movement to desegregate and promote voting. When today in the US politics seems filled with divisiveness and hatred, it was even more so then. Fighting oppression and privilege brings violence from those who think they are losing something. That’s the way it goes. Don’t panic.