CHAPTER SIXTEEN: OCTOBER 1993, WHERE IS THE RIVER FLOWING?
Part IV: 1990s America, Road Trips in Flyover Country
At the beginning of a journey, the solitary traveller looks for omens. Mine was a lakeboat, prow towering above the Port of Chicago, the sunrise painting over whatever rust and scrapes were there with golden light. Jet lag had me up with the sun to begin my first road trip around the Midwest in twenty years.
Throughout the 1990s the BBC sent me back to parts of America that were rarely reported on to write a series of essays, similar to Alistair Cooke’s Letters from America. Part Four of this History of America’s Calamity is made up of those letters. They are a contemporaneous record of what I saw and heard from Americans I met by chance along the way. They form a rough draft history from below of a decade when the country was in transition. I have altered the tense in which some of the stories are told to reflect that they happened three decades ago and inserted in italics some descriptions of the route I took. I have also added a few paragraphs at the start to explain how my relationship with the BBC began. These are the only changes I have made from the original essays written in late October 1993.
It had been only eight years since I left New York for London but it seemed like I’d lived away from the United States for a long time. Everything in my life had changed, not just the location of where I lived it. I had stumbled into radio journalism via some appearances on BBC arts programs, then discovered as I turned 40 that I was a hard-news adrenaline junkie and had worked my way to a contract with NPR. The NPR bureau was in Bush House, home of the BBC World Service and one thing and another I did stuff for the World Service was well. They were planning a season called Voices of America and asked me to return to the US and mark the changes that had occurred in the country since I left.
Over the eight years of self-exile there had been a slow transition in my viewpoint of my homeland. I dealt with editors in Washington every day but I did not live in the wider gestalt of American society. I'd become as reliant as anyone else who didn’t live there on mass media for information about what was going on in the US at large.
One thing I had noticed was the steadily increasing influence of broadcast news media, or just broadcasting in general on how people saw the world. Perhaps living in the UK, where newspapers were still people’s primary source of news, made me more aware of the overwhelming influence of broadcasting in the US.
When I spoke with my family and friends by telephone, they discussed news or politics or their own personal lives in the language they absorbed from the media. They increasingly spoke in soundbites, a mental shorthand in which assertions are their own proof. Simply saying something like "This country is in terrible shape" proves the point. And for years, that's exactly what people in the US have been saying about it.
The generational change that the 1992 Presidential election represented hadn’t changed the dark mood. Bill Clinton had done everything he could to cast himself as the John F. Kennedy of the Children of Victory generation but had not re-created that Camelot feeling.
Clinton’s presidency, only ten months old, had got off to a stumbling start and the stories from America had grown increasingly bleak. But as an ex-pat who now understood how things work in broadcast journalism I knew the world as we describe it isn't always the world as it is, so I was slightly sceptical that things in America were as bad as the news media and my friends and family made out.
But when TIME and Newsweek magazines within weeks of each other, ran stories on 'America The Violent' which described terror not just in New York or Miami, but in the sleepy cities of the Midwest, I was stunned. Drive-by shootings in Topeka, Kansas? Kids carrying guns to school in Des Moines, Iowa? For goodness' sake! This is the Midwest, the 'Heartland', the source of many of America's myths about itself, particularly that of the small town made up of good neighbours, whose sense of right and wrong is acute.
So I pitched the BBC the idea of a drive around the Midwest for a few weeks to see if the heartland was in as dreadful a condition as the media made out. I was in a position to make comparisons because I had been educated there twenty years earlier, at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and after graduation I had lived for a time in Topeka Kansas. I proposed flying to Chicago, and making a circuit—staying off the interstate highways as much as possible—that would take in both places and some of the stopping off places in between.
I landed in Chicago the day after an American helicopter had been shot down in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, by the forces of Mohamed Farrah Aidid. A couple of American soldiers had been killed. As I steamed through the flat farmland of Indiana toward Ohio, the right wing radio talk show hosts who had sprouted up all over the country since the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine six years earlier were whipping up their listeners. On Interstate 465 swinging around Indianapolis, Bob Kwessel was having a field day venting his spleen.
“I'm so angry with having this man's body being dragged, especially since he's American. I wanna go out there and I wanna kick ass. Pardon me but I just had to say that. I wanna go out there and I wanna beat these people so bad, I don't wanna see Aidid alive, I really don't. We're letting the world get the impression that America's nothing but a bunch of WIMPS and we're PANSIES and we're afraid to go in and do the STINKINJOB! LET’S GET THE DAMN JOB DONE!”
Next, the king of talk radio Rush Limbaugh with 18 million listeners, weighed in:
“These poverty numbers, don't buy 'em, folks! don't believe these poverty numbers. If we have poverty of anything in this country it's poverty of values. If we have poverty of anything in this country it's poverty of honesty from liberals. More on this in a moment. Day 278 of the raw deal if you're rich, or dead, it's 1,201 days remaining in the Clinton administration, that's what we call the raw deal here. It's a hostage crisis and we're all held captive, some of us don't even know it. Here's the phone number, 1-800-282-2882. We must start today with a discussion of Somalia.”
According to Rush, it’s the liberal media elite, as embodied by the New York Times that’s too blame for the fiasco.
“Why did we go there in the first place? We went there because nobody else would. We went there because our media plastered pictures all over the television and the newspapers of this country. The New York Times headline stories on Somalia with 'the land that God forgot.' Of course if there were a sexual revolution in Somalia and homosexual rights were protected, the New York Times would not have been upset with anything else going on there. That's another story.”
For 450 miles I drove with these voices going around my head. As I pulled off Interstate 70 onto US Route 68 to drive the last few miles towards Antioch, I switched off the radio and allowed myself a little wallow in nostalgia. Exactly 25 years ago I had travelled down this road in similar warm sunshine. A city boy bewildered by the endless cornfields and the smell of manure wafting into the car.
Not a lot had changed in the physical landscape of Yellow Springs since 1968.
Same drive through the cornfields, then cross a set of railway tracks and come to a stop light. Same main street of two-storey brick buildings, perhaps some of the shops had changed hands, same stretch of big wooden frame houses set back from the road in large green lawns, But before I reached the town’s other stoplight I turned east off US Hwy 68, which is called Xenia Avenue in Yellow Springs, and drove about 50 yards onto campus.
Set in south-western Ohio, a deeply conservative part of the country, Yellow Springs is an odd place to find a college dedicated to progressive values. But that's been Antioch's culture since it was set up in the 1850s. Antioch was the first co-educational institution of higher learning in the US, and among the 1st to admit black and white students together. The founding president was Horace Mann, a noted social reformer and educational theorist, whose motto was 'Be ashamed to die until you’ve won some victory for humanity.' A social activist creed, that.
A quarter of a century earlier as I headed down the same road Antioch was a centre of social activism; the college was often in the news. Now you expect change in a place after 25 years, but as I pulled up to campus this time, I found that that one aspect of life in Yellow Springs hadn’t changed. Antioch was still the focus of media attention.
The college had just instituted a written code of sexual practice which put rules on students' sexual behaviour. The irony was that sex was one of the controversies that put us in the news 25 years earlier. Antioch was the first college to allow male and female students to live together in the same dormitories. The administration turned a blind eye to the inevitable increase in sexual activity that followed, so the media focused a titillated eye on us as leaders of the sexual revolution.
Now the whirligig of time had come round and the college community had just put in place a strict code for sexual conduct. It required a person to obtain verbal consent for each stage of seduction. 'Do you want to have sex with me' is not enough. The request must be specific for each act; in other words 'May I kiss you?' 'May I touch this part of you, or that part of you?' Now the media was on campus to focus a jaundiced eye on this retreat from the sexual revolution.
The campus was crawling with media types, television producers hot to get the controversy of the week onto their shows before the story cooled down and another hot story sprang up somewhere else. I figured that, as an alumnus, it would be no problem to wander around and talk to students, perhaps sit in on a lecture or two. But when I made myself known at the college president's office, his assistant explained that given the circumstances, I couldn’t observe classes. What we arranged was that I could meet with some students away from campus.
Which is how, on a glorious, Indian summer morning I found myself in the Sunrise Café on Xenia Avenue, buying breakfast for four Antiochians. Two straight women, a gay woman and a gay man. I mention sexual orientation because in this community it seemed people wanted to be identified by a primary allegiance either to their gender or race or sexual orientation.
It was a pretty amiable conversation. I listened as they explained the reason for initiating the policy. Rape had become a terrible problem on campus, they claimed. How many incidents had there been? I wanted to know. The College’s enrollment, never large to begin with, had halved since my graduation. It was not quite 1000. In a community that small, numbers should have been easy to obtain.
But their answer didn’t mention specific numbers. It went to words. How many incidents? Well, that depends on your definition of rape, they replied, and their definition was fairly broad. It seemed to include all sexual contact including that which led to regret. One of the straight women said that it wasn’t until the community began discussing how to frame the sexual offence policy that many people realised they had been raped, including herself.
Now rape is a terrible and violent crime, I said, but it seems to me that if you’ve been raped you know that immediately, not months later. If you regret sleeping with someone, then you can’t call it rape. I spoke to them about the way things were when I was a student. Sexual liberation then was seen as a way of battering down notions of middle-class conformity. The gay women disagreed. Sexual liberation wasn’t all good, it put a lot of pressure on women to have sex they didn’t want to have. Fair point but you’re young you’ve got a lot of desire, shouldn’t you be free to explore sexuality? She spoke up again; "People need to control their sexual desires." But that was exactly the argument used by people who think homosexuality is a sin to keep gay people in the closet. You get that, right?
Maybe not.
Underlying this conversation, of course, was fear. No matter where I went in the US, it didn’t take long for fear to come into the conversation. Perhaps it was caused by people watching too much TV, with its endless juxtaposition of fictional murders and rapes and the real life kind reported in a tabloid style on the local evening news. Antioch's written code offers tips on how to prevent sexual attack: lock yourself in your room, don’t go jogging alone.
I thought, Is this New York City, or a village of 2,500 like-minded souls in the middle of some cornfields? Then asked them what they were afraid of. They turned the question around on me. Wasn’t I afraid for my wife when she went out at night?
Not in London, I’m not. Not even when we lived in New York. My wife knows how to take care of herself.
Not half an hour's drive from where this conversation is taking place, a woman named Tammi is getting the Urban Suburban Tavern ready for the day’s business. The Urban Suburban is in a small shopping centre in Kettering on the other side of Dayton. It draws a decent crowd at lunchtime because it is an official “Rush Room” a restaurant or tavern that puts the Rush Limbaugh show on the loudspeaker. I’d gone there for lunch the previous day. Even though I was alone, I didn’t lack for diversion. Running the length of the room there were four television sets, each tuned to a different channel; a sports channel, a quiz channel, a business channel with the latest stock prices whizzing underneath the talking heads. There’s even a television in the men’s room, so that you can watch TV as you urinate.
The concerns of the kids in Yellow Springs don’t begin to enter this place. Tammi is dressed in a tight T-shirt and bluejean shorts cut above the curve of her buttocks. She's not ashamed of her body and realises that it improves her tips to show it off. Nor is The Urban some dirty old man hang out, in the front of the room families are having lunch.
I’m watching the stock quotations whizz under the talking heads and thinking of the answers to the quiz questions and listening to Rush Limbaugh rant on about the liberal media, when a fellow in his late 50s starts a conversation. Actually a monologue, a counterpoint to the Rush rant coming out of the radio. He’s retired from one of the local General Motors plants in Dayton where he had been involved in brake assembly.
For no particular reason other than I was there and he felt like talking, which is often how conversations start in bars, he began to talk about when things had changed in America.
In his view, it started when they let women onto the shop floor. Women’s hands are quicker than men’s hands so they were more productive, he explained, and this put men under more strain to produce more. He had retired because he couldn’t keep up with the new pace. There was another aspect of women in the workplace that made life difficult. At lunchtime in good weather, they went up on the roof of the factory to get some sun and they took off their tops. Sometimes the younger men would go up and join them, and it was difficult to get everyone to go back to work.
He kept up a steady stream of chatter and in due course we arrived at his particular fear: racial fear. He was talking about winter's approach and where down South he might spend time. A friend of his bought a house to retire to in Myrtle Beach in South Carolina years ago, but he had to sell it. The man drops his voice to a whisper.
"Because it's all blacks there now. They've taken over the town and he's afraid to go back."
My companion is planning to go to Florida, but he won't drive there, oh no.
"They will shoot you just driving down the highway."
The memory of this lunch is going through my mind as I drink my fourth cup of coffee listening to the students. There's no point of contact between these two worlds—except me—so I told them about the Urban Suburban Tavern. Then I asked them why they were devoting so much time to this issue of sexual conduct rules when there were so many larger issues to address, like the racial fear that poisons much of America, or finding a populist and progressive way of talking about issues so they can make themselves understood to men like the retired assembly line worker or Tammi the bartender. Either I didn't make the question clear, or they couldn't understand it. Perhaps the conversation had become too complex for soundbite discourse. In any case, there was no answer.
I headed south on Xenia Avenue, out of Yellow Springs, driving through the town's other stoplight back into the cornfields. I had a lot of words going through my head: Rush Limbaugh, yet again, coming from the radio; memories of discussions from a quarter of a century ago about the revolution we would bring to America; the talk I'd just had with the students. I tried to match all these words up to the words of Horace Mann.
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
The omens continued to be positive, glorious Indian summer days lit my path southward through farmland. Burnished gold cornstalks stood in brown earth, barns full of a new crop of tobacco, the giant leaves hung upside down on drying racks, and then US 68 hit the Ohio River in the town of Ripley. I walked to the big beautiful waterway and sunbathed, then stopped in for coffee at a busy cafe with men, many of whom were wearing farm worker’s clothes. I thought I might get lucky and find a conversation but there was none to be had so I turned west and followed the river road to Cincinnati, around fifty miles away.
In Cincinnati, I drove up to Mt. Adams and stopped by the Playhouse in the Park. Fifteen years earlier, living a different life, I had played Benvolio and spoke the prologue in a very good production of Romeo and Juliet there and wanted to see if anyone was still around from that time with whom to have a chat.
In the main office’s reception area, I was explaining myself to the woman answering phones when another woman, standing behind her at the Xerox machine, turned and asked, “Shouldn’t you be in London ?” I answered, “How did you know that?”
“I listen to you on NPR all the time.”
We chatted briefly and she invited me to dinner, her husband also was a dedicated NPR listener. After the obligatory, “Oh no, I couldn’t possibly trouble you” refusals were themselves refused, I said, Ok and then she invited me to stay the night as her husband would want to chat.
Anyway, one thing and another. Cynthia and Todd Colebrooke were people my age, well launched in life, after a brief period farming somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and we got on famously. Todd mentioned he was heading over the Ohio to Kentucky the next day. It was the opening of the Fall Meet at Keeneland Racetrack in Lexington. His brother trained horses and lived in the slave quarters of an old plantation. The property’s big house was a crumbling old mansion that had lots of rooms and he invited me to travel down and stay the weekend with them.
So I spent the next day at the track.
Up early, too early for the likes of me, dawn just underway, the orange disk of the sun hovering between grey-green earth and grey-silver sky as we pulled into Keeneland. On the back side of the Keeneland complex, where you find the horse barns, a spit of rain was coming down but no one was getting wet as the massive oak and ash trees were still in leaf.
The back side was already bustling, the workday begins before sunrise. Horses being fed, warmed up, worked out, warmed down. Jockeys are the princes of the back side realm and the one Tommy had engaged to exercise Sea Swell, a horse he hoped to run very soon, was late for the work out. So he went off to track down the jock and I found myself getting a crash course in the racing life and its economy from James, Tommy’s groom.
James a Kentucky native, was born to the work. He traveled around the country following race meetings, earning a living.
“A man can’t starve on the back side. You have to be awful lazy not to eat back here.”
The employment is by the chore. Walk a horse, clean a stall, feed the animal each activity is worth a small amount of money, hustle a few trainers over the course of a meeting and a single man can pay his bills and have a little in his pocket to wager and maybe enjoy Saturday night.
James explained this while showing me around the whole of the area. Keeneland’s Fall Meet is a big deal in the racing business and there were some trainers and jockeys around that even I had heard of. They all seemed to know James. As we walked, people nodded, shouted greetings. The back side was a pretty well integrated work space and given how much racial tension was on the rise in the US it came as a bit of a surprise this was on the southern side of the Ohio River. James was an African American and I asked him if people of different races at the track got on as well as it seemed at first glance.
“Man, you know better than that. We all in the same boat but we rowin’ in different directions”
We made our way back to the barn, no more than a roof lifted over a row of boxed stalls that were easy to rent short term. The barns are a horse pace and a half wide, there’s a bridle path to walk them around just outside the stall’s door. I wandered towards a railing to watch some of the beautiful animals being led around the path and James yanked me back.
You about to get kicked. And man, if a horse kicks you that will hurt you all over.
Have you ever been kicked?
Just once.
What did it feel like”?
It felt like getting shot.
You would have to love this job to do it. Too much work in the modern world is not a labor of love, but to invest the money and time and live with racing’s uncertainty you would have to love this game. Tommy and James clearly did.
About love and hope and horses. The previous year the barn back at the estate where Colebrooke lived had been struck by lightning and caught fire. Tommy had run barefoot into the burning building to rescue the horses and been overcome by smoke. He had been hospitalized with severe burns to his feet. Four horses had died in the blaze.
By mid-morning the pair had worked a full day but there’s no point in being in the race horse business if you don’t go to the races so we joined a group of back side folks and walked up to the track to watch and wager on the day’s card. Hot tips are being exchanged on which horses to bet. On Wall Street this is called insider trading and it’s illegal. At the race track, it’s good business practice.
Tommy asked James,
Got any tips today?
Yeah … don’t look into the sun.
It’s a wonderful collection of people at Keeneland this day. Dice it and splice it any sociological way and you have a complete cross section of the population of Kentucky. By their uniforms you could tell them: folks from the farm dressed in overalls; chino and sensible shoe wearing suburban folks ready for a day’s shopping at the mall; and folks decked out for a night at the best restaurant in town. There was one Black guy living in a 1970 time warp, wearing a Superfly three-piece purple pimp suit with a matching wide-brimmed hat.
Out by the rail things were getting desperate. People who had literally bet their rent were running out of races to win it back. The hours of beer consumption were beginning to tell as well but the atmosphere remained good humored. Strangers offered one another commiserations or congratulations as appropriate.
I had forgotten how much fun an American crowd can be. Listening, watching reports about America in London I got a picture of a country fragmenting under the weight of its own diversity. But that wasn’t apparent at Keeneland. All colors, all classes mingled together amiably. I had stopped going to football matches in England because the tension threatened to erupt in violence, even in the normally placid stands at Highbury, home of my team, Arsenal.
Maybe it was just the social democracy of the race track: the democracy of people united in the pursuit of losing money.
There was one other reason I was feeling good. James had suggested a horse to me for the seventh race and I put a tenner on it at 6 to 1 to win. It did.
Sunday I pointed the car west along Kentucky’s blue highways. My road luck continued. The sun at Autumn angles revealed the land. The road followed it’s contours rolling along the sides of hills then cutting through valleys, none of them epic, all of them lovely. It was like motoring through a Thomas Hart Benton painting.
The car was a Chevy Caprice—I had been upgraded at O’Hare—this model was standard in a lot of police forces and I could see why. It had a V8 engine and it took very little effort to make it go fast. It was early Sunday and the roads were mostly empty. Sometimes I went too quickly to call it a meander but that’s really what it was. The run came to an end in Paducah, where the road caught up to the Ohio river again on its final southwestern bend before it is subsumed into the Mississippi.
The next morning I drove over to the Illinois side of the river and sat in Ft. Defiance park and watched that spectacle. The Ohio is a broad and mighty river but to see its flow pushed under by the force of the Mississippi as if it was nothing was a frightening as well as awesome sight. The weather was raw and the wind put an extra chop on the surface. I watched a man get into a circular flat bottomed boat with a small Evinrude engine and putter out through bubbling eddies to the line where the rivers met. Maintaining balance, he reached down and picked up a fishing rod and cast out. He periodically touched the engine awake to pull back from the worst of the swiring current, all the while balancing and keeping the fishing line in the water. It was mad. I muttered into the wind, Does your mother know you’re doing this?
I’d been living among the formal, well-mannered English long enough to be as surprised as they are by the spontaneity and openness of Americans. But my experience in Cincinnati with the Colebrookes told me to accept hospitality when offered. It also was the first inkling I had of the reach of NPR into the heartland.
I arrived in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, a town of 36,000 people on the banks of the Mississippi River early one afternoon. The reason for traveling there was simple. It was Rush Limbaugh’s hometown and when I got back to London I was presenting a program about him on the World Service and wanted to get a feel for where he came from.
As I knew no one there, I stopped in at KRCU, the local NPR station to get a little briefing and that’s how I came to be sitting down to supper wth Sam Jarrell, a man I didn’t know half an hour ago.
I’d telephoned Sam because I’d been told at the station he led the local volunteer effort during last summer’s Mississippi floods. Cape Girardeau had been the southern extreme of the river’s rampage. He said “We’re about to sit down to dinner. Why don’t you come over?” I went through the English ritual, “Oh no I couldn’t possibly. I’ll call at a more convenient time” He asked again. "Oh no, I couldn’t possibly.” When he asked a third time, I felt the ritual had been performed and now it would be impolite to say no.
So, now my hands are clasped with Sam and his wife Jan as they say grace before the meal. In front of me is a huge repast; home smoked turkey, homemade vegetable salads. This is midwestern hospitality, Sam explains. We’re sitting at a table in Sam’s special room, an example of midwestern self-reliance. He designed it and built it himself. An open room, two storeys high, ringed by a six-sided balcony.
Self-reliance is the theme of this story. It’s a basic tenet of life in this deeply conservative part of America, at least it was when I lived in the Midwest two decades earlier and one of the things I wanted to find out on my trip was if that had changed. Small-town Midwesterners make a virtue of taking care of themselves and prefer to take no help from the government. Being from the city, it was hard for me to explain to folks that sometimes the government is the only institution big enough to deal with the huge and complex problems of the cities.
Before sitting down to supper, Sam and I had a get-to-know-you session over soft drinks. Mine was a sugar free Dr Pepper. I explained that I was reacquainting myself with my country after being away a long time, and that I’d come to Cape Girardeau to find out about the flooding and how old-fashioned midwestern virtues helped the community through the disaster. Sam was anxious to talk about it because he wanted to keep the story alive.
Throughout the spring of 1993, the upper part of the Mississippi and its main tributary, the Missouri, had risen to record flood levels. It was the big news story in America. The river crested in mid July then fell off the front pages as the flooding began to subside. Now in October, the story had all but disappeared from the news media, but the flooding hadn’t ended. I had seen ample evidence of that earlier in the day.
I had been trapped on the eastern side of the river in Illinois, trying to get to the Cape. Every road I tried in the countryside had big warning signs saying ROAD CLOSED. They were all washed out during the flood. I would drive 2 miles one way and have to turn back, 3 miles down another road and have to turn back. I didn’t know how I was going to get over the river.
Finally I stopped in a roadside cafe. It was full of hunters in combat camouflage. They were wolfing down huge breakfasts after a morning of doing serious damage to the local duck population. A waitress explained that I should ignore all the ROAD CLOSED signs as most were open now. The roads were indeed passable, but in many cases they weren’t paved. Crews had built up gravel and dirt above the floodwaters. As I ground my way towards the Cape, I saw how little the flooding had receded. What seemed like a lake stretched away on either side of the road I was on. Only a barn stranded in the middle gave a clue that this was actually somebody’s field. By coincidence, Sam also spent the morning on the Illinois side of the river, visiting a family that got flooded out. He gave them some money from a church organisation he works for.
The relief effort along the river had been funded by many agencies. Talking to Sam, I got the sense that local groups are the ones he prefers to deal with; the big money has to come from the federal government but Sam was angry with the federal government’s flood relief agencies because they’re pressing people to apply for funds now. They can’t do that, because the floodwaters haven’t receded far enough yet. It’s difficult for people to assess the damage to their fields, or even if their land is gone forever, so they can’t tell the feds how much they need. To show me what they mean, after dinner Sam took me to Cape Rock the natural feature which gives the town its name. Cape Rock is a massive cliff that juts out into the river just north of town. It alters the river’s current, and creates one of the most dangerous navigation points along the Mississippi.
Looking down at the water, in the twilight you can see the surface crack and swirl around the base of the cliff. Normally the surface speed of the river is 5 mph; during the floods it was over 20. On this evening it seems to be somewhere in between. It’s a dangerous river, the Mississippi, but Sam fishes it. He points East to a spot towards the Illinois side, at the bottom of what had been a long, narrow tree-covered island. Now it’s just tree tops poking above the water. That’s where his favourite fishing spot was. It’s not quite a mile away across the turbulent water. I tell him he’s a brave man to take a small boat across to it because it’s in the middle of a lot of open river. He says no, usually there’s only a narrow shoot of water between the island and Illinois. All that water we’re looking at now is covering people’s land.
The flooding wasn’t as bad on the Cape Girardeau side of the river. Like most river towns, the Cape has a flood wall to protect against the Mississippi’s occasional rampages. It’s a 20 foot high concrete monster and during the summer, it had done its job. The only problem was that the wall only protects the historic downtown area. The floodwaters needed somewhere to go, and had curled around either side of the wall, and wiped out the working class neighbourhoods along the riverfront. Throughout the summer as the river rose, and as it fell, hundreds of volunteers had helped sandbag homes against the rising water, and then helped clean them up. People had taken care of one another.
Sam without asking for the job, had found himself leading the effort. From what I could tell, there were two reasons why. First, the man is a bear for work, and has been since he was a boy. When Sam Jarrell was eleven his father abandoned the family. They were living in Flint, Michigan at the time, where his dad worked on an auto assembly line. His mother moved the family to a farm in Missouri and Sam, the only son, became the man of the house. When he left school, he had gone to work in road construction. It was steady work but work that required him to move around a lot. He married and had children, but the constant moving hurt the relationship. And, he admitted, his hell-raising hadn’t helped. His wife walked out on him. Jan came into his life and he was born again with an unshakeable faith in Jesus Christ.
He realised he needed to stay in one place, so he started all over. He went back to school and trained to be a teacher. After a while, he became an elementary school principal, and had just retired the previous spring. That’s the second reason he ended up leading the relief effort; most of the flooding took place in the neighbourhood where his school’s children came from.
I had more than a bit of luck when I ran into Sam, because I also wanted to find out on this trip about the state of education in America. By now, I was over my reluctance to impose on him. I asked if it might be possible to visit his old school. He hadn’t been back since he retired and he was itching to pay a visit, so the next morning we went to May Green Elementary School.
It had been a few decades since I’d been in an elementary school. On this sunny morning, the surface seemed not to have changed much in all that time. School still starts with the pledge of allegiance to the flag. May Green was a 1920 vintage brick building, same as the elementary school I attended. That made it old by American standards, but it was well-maintained and clean.
The sound of the pledge, the ringing of bells followed by the squeak of shoes on polished linoleum and high soprano excitement of children shouting on their way to playtime seemed not so different from my daily routines of the late 1950s.
But of course, there were big differences, the most noticeable being the banners around the school urging that it be a fight-free environment. I asked Sam if violence really was such a problem here. He said, yes.
I said, “Come on, man, this is a small town!”
He looked at me. “You have been away a long time.”
I refused to believe that the fighting in the school was any different to the fighting that went on in my elementary school. I mean, boys fight. Up to a point, Sam agreed with me:
“I fought… When I came from Michigan to Missouri, it was a small school. There were six boys per grade level. In my grade level, all six of those boys had to try me. But we either wrestled or we had a physical contest that once it was over with, we were buddies. We did it out behind the shed, we didn’t involve the classroom, we didn’t involve the teachers, no problems. The fights that we see here now, they’re feuds. They go on for ever and ever, the two fight, then they go home and they get their brothers, their sisters. They come back and they fight. Now to me, the kind of fighting we did was the old barnyard, pecking order thing, but this isn’t the same thing. The fighting is much more vicious. You can’t even break it up.”
I found that hard to believe. Sam had silver hair, but it was still dark at the roots, and his body was pretty lean. It seemed to me impossible that he couldn’t handle a couple of 12 year olds. For that matter he looked more than capable of handling their fathers. In fact, he looked too young to retire, and he was: he had just turned 59. “I took early retirement,” he explained. His blood pressure could no longer handle the stresses of the work. May Green takes in the poorest kids in Cape Girardeau, and as Sam described their home life, I could have been listening to an educator in any big city. Parental neglect and drug use led to kids turning up for school in an unfit state for learning. Sam grew tired of fighting with parents who expected the school to raise their children rather than educate them.
Although he’d quit, he hadn’t lost pride in his work as an educator. When I asked him if he was worried about the bad education people were getting in America, he bristled. “The media creates the image of bad education,” he said, “There’s plenty of good education out there.” But it was clear he had become exhausted trying to explain to the parents and to the children that good education requires hard work and self-reliance.
“We’re trying to teach these kids in here how to teach themselves, and I come from a generation - and come from a family - where books are important to me. You saw the big room at my house. I’m not a carpenter. How do you suppose I built that? I built that by my bare hands with a book! If I wanted to know how to mix mortar, to put the bricks together, I went to the library and got a book. If I wanted to know how to cut steps, I went to the library and got a book. We’re not getting that across to this new generation. They say that so many of our people are illiterate. They’re illiterate because they quit practising. How many basketball players can stay on their game if they don’t keep dribbling and they don’t keep shooting? We all know that. But we never consider the fact that you have to keep reading if you want to be a reader. And yet, I guarantee you we don’t turn a kid out of this sixth grade up here that can’t read and write. But 25 years from now, some of them’ll be declared illiterates. And the reason is, is because they have never practised it.”
Frustration with parents wasn’t all that forced Sam to retire. He would have continued to plug away at his message if he’d got some help from the rest of the Cape community. That, as I said earlier, is the Midwestern way: taking care of your own.
Cape Girardeau is a prosperous place; there are two large medical centres and a branch of the University of Missouri, renowned for its nurse’s training. In 1993 The town was expanding west from the river, and there were plenty of new neighbourhoods and business parks to accommodate the influx of medical workers. It was a community that could afford good education for all its citizens, but twice in recent years, the community had voted down a a small property tax increase that would have been used directly to build a new elementary school for the kids who attend May Green.
Sam, of course, is no lover of big taxes, but he voted for this tax increase, and he finds it difficult to express his surprise and resentment that the tax measure failed. When he realised the School Board wasn’t going to offer him more funds to improve the existing facilities, he decided enough was enough, and took early retirement.
As we wandered around the halls of his old school, it was clear how important Sam Jarrell was to this place. Everywhere we went he got hugs and handshakes from his old colleagues; the children were in awe of him. It seemed a shame he had been driven to the point where he had walked away from it. “Oh I’m busy,” he kept telling his former staff when they asked what he was up to. He tutors in mathematics at the local college, he’s got more building projects around the house, and there’s a long way to go with the flood relief agencies. “There aren’t enough hours in the day,” he told me. Of course not. When you have that Midwestern belief in hard work and self-reliance, there’s always something to be done.
Topeka is the capital city of the state of Kansas. It’s just about at the geographical center of the US, and was the westernmost point of my journey. Here, the Midwest empties into the the Great Plains like one great body of water into another. The passage is unmarked by any unique physical features, there are just fewer and fewer people and more and more cattle.
I had come this far because 20 years ago I had lived here, and frankly it was the weirdest place I’ve ever been. I moved to Topeka the day I graduated college. Why, you ask? Cherchez la femme. My girlfriend back then, an aspiring psychotherapist, had been offered a six-month training position at the Menninger Clinic and I tagged along figuring I would write a novel and experience the America that East Coast intellectuals from Walt Whitman through the Beats felt they had to know to understand the country. And it was not a bad idea in theory. I’d already studied and travelled extensively in Europe and arguably knew the continent better than much of the United States.
But no matter where I had been overseas, no matter that I’d been to places where I had to use sign language to simply order a meal, I had not felt as much foreigner in a place as the first morning I woke up in Topeka. The physical landscape was completely strange. The flatness of Kansas—not a billiard table flatness but undulating ocean flatness—with fields of corn and wheat floating off as far as the eye could see.
The city itself was dominated not by the state capital’s dome, but by the dozens of railroad tracks that bent around the banks of the Kansas River past enormous grain storage elevators. Imagine New York’s Empire State Building knocked over on its side and filled up with wheat, and you have a sense of these structures.
People in Topeka were strange. They weren’t open and friendly as in much of the Midwest, they were polite but taciturn and seemed genuinely disinterested in outsiders.
I had to find a job and after living in town for a couple of weeks, I noticed that the newspaper, The Topeka Capital Journal, had no film critic. So I wrote a couple of sample reviews and went down to the paper to give them to the Features Editor. He read them, liked them, but said they would not get into the paper. He explained that the reason there were no film reviews was the paper’s publisher thought they were a form of advertising. In the publisher’s view, if cinema owners wanted people to go the movies they could take out ads in the paper. He wasn’t giving them free publicity in the form of reviews.
I worked for a time in a warehouse, unloading massive semi-trailers filled with boxes of shoes that had been purchased on the cheap by Volume Shoe Corporation, a discount shoe retailer. It was laborious rather than hard work, it was also boring and hot. In midsummer in Kansas, temperatures reached the high 90s, and inside these trucks, parked out in the sun, the temperature got well above that. After about a day of this work I began to resent the fact that I was earning a few pennies above minimum wage, about $1.92. After a few more days I finally asked one of the fellas on the loading dock why there wasn’t a union. He explained that an organiser had spent six months at the warehouse but gave up, not because the owner of the place gave him trouble but because the workers themselves didn’t want to join up. They seemed convinced that union membership was the first step towards communist party membership, or something like that.
After a couple of weeks I quit—or got fired—and couldn’t even deal with the situation by getting drunk. You couldn’t get a drink in town. Kansas was a dry state. I spent hours aimlessly driving around the countryside plucking ears of sweetcorn from the stalk, munching them like fruit, listening to the incomprehensible discussions of agricultural trivia and feeling lost in a time warp.
It was, as you can tell, not a happy time in my life. But the reason I chose to go back there is that Topeka is a place that time forgot and I reckoned if any city in America had avoided the destabilising social problems of the last decade or so, it would be Topeka. As I drove into town I dialled around the radio to remind myself that yes, Toto, I was in Kansas once again, and the radio confirmed for me that the crucial topics of discussion hadn’t changed.
“The most limiting factor for winter wheat yields is not drought or pest stress, that factor is early summer heat, says crop physiologist Gary Paulson, and with that in mind agronomists here are working to develop heat resistance in wheat varieties. Susan will visit with Gary about it, and there’s much more ahead for you on this edition of Agriculture Today. Good to have you along with us!
Well, there’s a renewed emphasis on alfalfa research here at Kansas State…”
I arrived during Topeka’s evening rush minute and took a little spin around the downtown area. On the surface it was clear that the city had changed, but only recently, and only on the surface. There were more parking lots than I remembered around my old apartment building, and fewer stores. That was because an interstate ring-road had been built around Topeka and a couple of big shopping malls had been developed near the highway. I stayed in a motel complex across from the brand new Walmart Hypermart, the biggest single store I’d ever seen. It put everything you might want to buy in a shopping mall under a single roof; food, clothes, drugs, books, garden furniture. It was so big they had a McDonald’s inside, not as a separate store. The shopping carts had pocket calculators attached to them so you could tote up what you were purchasing as you went along. I laughed to myself thinking, they couldn’t put calculators on the carts in New York, they’d get stolen in a minute.
The place was open 24 hours a day, a reasonable idea in a place like New York, the city that never sleeps, but a curious idea in a place like Topeka, the city that never wakes up. I spent a day or so trying to meet Topekans but didn’t have much luck. After about fifteen unreturned phone calls, I went in person to the warehouse where I had worked. Volume Shoe Company had been bought up by a national retail outfit and I was told it would take a while to get permission from Head Office in Chicago to let me on the premises.
I began to think I should move on down the line and leave Topeka to itself. Up the road from the warehouse was Rosa’s Mexican restaurant and I went in to mull over my situation over a combination plate of burritos and enchiladas. I hadn’t called any officials on this trip. I’d simply been meeting people by talking to them in restaurants and bars. But I figured this time I would have to call City Hall and get the official line on what was going on in this city. So, the next morning, I found myself talking with Greg Miller, a Topeka native and the city’s Director of Communications.
We started out talking numbers. Topeka’s 1993 population was around 120,000, the same as 20 years ago, but we quickly left statistics behind to talk about the changes in the city on a more personal level. Miller grew up during the 60s and 70s, but remembers that even in those turbulent times, Topeka was more like a town from a 1940s movie: staid and serene, with people living in clean houses surrounded by neat lawns. New ideas didn’t find much purchase in Topeka. Miller explained the attitude this way,
“People felt, if it’s not here already, then it must not be good.”
Miller told me the physical changes in Topeka occurred about 7 years previously, when the community, for the first time in living memory, elected a Democrat to be Mayor. He changed planning laws and almost immediately, property developers had their bulldozers out clearing land for places like the Walmart Hypermart. The predictable result was that these malls, with their easy access by car, sucked the life out of the downtown area with the speed and violence that a tornado, the scourge of Kansas, sucks the air out of houses reducing them to rubble. Now, with trade gone to these malls at the edge of town, shops in the centre were going out of business and much of downtown Topeka was becoming derelict. Across the street from the apartment building I had lived in was a burgeoning Skid Row. There had been drive-by shootings in the area.
I asked him about crime and he showed me some statistics. Burglaries had doubled since I lived in the city, assaults trebled, murders were about the same: not very many. But there was fear that the nature of crime was changing. It was being committed by kids who have no idea what they were doing. Recently a couple of teenagers had been out driving when their car broke down. They flagged down a passing driver who stopped to help. They shot him dead and took his car. They didn’t run away, didn’t try to escape, they simply went home and watched television. The police found them there and they seemed to have no idea of the enormity of what they had done.
I wanted to know if the kids who had committed this crime were white or black, but I had to tiptoe delicately around the question. Greg Miller is an African American and discussions about crime and race in the US are fraught. But he explained that crime in Topeka is an equal opportunity employer. All races are involved, and this murder was committed by a white youth and his black friend. With the subject open we carried on talking about race relations in Topeka, a city with an interesting history on the subject.
The modern Civil Rights movement began here in 1954, when a successful suit was brought against the city government forcing the schools to desegregate. Miller was a direct beneficiary of that decision. Doors were open to him that were not open to his parents. He recalled growing up relatively unaware that his color made him very different and was still a boy when Martin Luther King was assassinated.
Miller didn’t become aware of what the difference really meant until he graduated high school and went to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, a few toll stops down Interstate 70 from Topeka. His best friend in high school, who was white, was also enrolling at the university and Miller asked him if he’d like to be his roommate. His friend declined. He was going to pledge a fraternity that did not accept Blacks. Miller didn’t say and his face didn’t register whether that hurt him or not but he pointed to that moment as the beginning of an understanding that perhaps integration as dreamed of by Dr. Martin Luther King might not be a realistic, or even a desirable, goal.
Greg Miller spoke about race in America today with an earnestness and lack of emotion that I found a trifle unnerving. Seated behind his desk, he gazed evenly at me through his spectacles and was quite matter of fact in questioning the value of the civil rights movement and wondering whether segregation didn’t have hidden values.
In his view, segregation forced blacks to have a greater sense of community. There were more black businesses because black people couldn’t go into many white stores. There were more men around. There was a kind of mentorship—his word—that went on between the generations of men that is absent today. Miller explained:
“You can’t close your eyes to the history. In my Grandfathers’ day there was segregation. They tolerated a lot of abuse, but each of them had their own business. One was a blacksmith, the other a bricklayer.”
The hard segregation had ebbed by the time Miller’s father was ready to seek work and he got a job at a local tire plant that had recently become integrated yet in Miller’s view, his dad didn’t have the same level of control over his destiny that his grandfathers did.
“In America over the last decade, it’s become more acceptable to be racially intolerant.”
In his view it was time for African Americans to redevelop the sense of community that existed when they were segregated. He couldn’t see solutions to the community’s problems without returning to the spirit of those bygone times.
How do you deal with prejudice in the office. He made the gesture of his fingers walking through the air.
“We tiptoe around the problem.”
In his quiet way, he seemed to be speaking thoughts that Malcolm X had frightened white America witless with three decades ago. But community self-reliance is also an old Midwestern theme, perhaps there was an element of that as well in his thinking. I didn’t have much to say to all this. To listen to a young, middle-class Black man quite reasonably explain the values in segregation left me, uncharacteristically, speechless.
Greg Miller had a six year old daughter. I wondered if he worried about her encounters with racial hatred. But Miller’s fears for her aren’t about the effect prejudice will have on her life, it’s about something else.
“I would have liked her to stay a child a little longer. When I was six years old I could get on my bicycle and ride from one side of town to the other. Now, as a parent, I can’t allow her to do that.”
And on that sad note, I got up to leave.
As I was packing up my briefcase, Miller asked if I wanted to look at his new video editing system. A couple of computer boffins in Topeka have developed an affordable computer program that allows the user to do all kinds of fancy television editing and design. “The disc the program is on costs only $4,000,” explained Miller, and now, instead of earnestness, his voice was excited. “This is the first step into a future where people will be able to do their own video design and art,” he told me. He’s been able to use this program to design very sophisticated promotional videos for the city.
At his insistence, I sat down and tried it out. A couple of taps on the mouse and I wrote my name across the screen in a grand flourish of script. Next, I painted it different colours, then dissolved it in a starburst. “This is really neat!” I exclaimed. “This is the future! And it’s starting in Topeka of all places.”
And for the first time since I met him, Miller smiled.
My trip was coming to an end. Time to plot out a route back to Chicago. Carol and Ann, dear friends from London who had moved back to the US and got married, were living in Minneapolis and I gave them a call. We decided to meet somewhere in the middle.
At either end of the phone line we unfolded our maps and decided that Tama, Iowa was just about equidistant and agreed to meet there on Saturday. We had no idea what the town was like or where to rendez-vous. After some conversation, the decision was, if Tama was a county seat with a courthouse and courthouse square we’d meet there. If there was no courthouse then we’d meet in the roughest bar in town.
I set off on a Friday night. My luck with the weather ended in Topeka, proper autumn had arrived in the plains. Out there autumn is not a mellow season, it’s main function is to herald winter. It was not quite the middle of October but already winter was in the air. Rain followed by a biting, raw wind would usher me back to Chicago.
After working the loading dock at Payless shoes, I had earned money selling ads for the Capitol Journal’s annual high school football preview. The job meant driving backroads to small towns with a high school football team and convincing local businessmen to buy an ad supporting their local team. I learned a fact of small-town life: when selling ads the undertaker should be your first stop. Business is always good and boosting the kids’ endeavors was a less depressing way to remind people that you are always open should your services be needed.
I tried to retrace my route towards a crossroads town called Sabetha. An hour or two out of Topeka the lowering mist and cloud was underlit by a grayish white light. As I pulled closer I saw that it was a high school stadium. Friday night football. I stopped in, explained I was traveling in the area for the BBC and asked if I could record some of the sound. Of course, was the answer. As I worked my way along the bottom of the bleachers recording various cheers, the loud speaker announcer asked the crowd to give a big Kansas welcome to the fella from the BBC making a recording. I waved with one hand and kept the tape recorder running with the other.
I stayed the night and up early the next morning cut a backroads diagonal through Missouri towards Iowa. In Kansas, fields of milo, a feed for cattle, bursting and waiting to be harvested, stretched in all directions. In Missouri the view was brown and brown: brown rivers and creeks carrying away soil washed into them from days of rain, and trees having lost their autumn color with just a few brown leaves left on them.
Empty country.
The road dragged me on. No cars in either direction so I was driving very fast and was past potential beauty spots for a rest before there was time to really register them. I found myself in Tama well before our rendezvous hour.
A quick recce of the place confirmed there was no courthouse square, just a commercial street a couple of blocks long with a liquor store and several bars to choose from. None looked particularly rough but the most down at heels drinking spot looked intriguing. Through the big windows that fronted the street I could see the patrons looking up at a black and white television watching a bullfight. Went in.
The serving area was at the far end of the room and I was more than halfway across when a couple of the drinkers seated there turned around and it was clear that the clientele were all Mexican which explained the bullfight on the television. It felt a bit like a clubhouse but I had come to far in to easily turn around and walk out so nodding to them I took an empty stool and asked for a Tecate. Then quietly turned my head up to the television to watch the corrida unfold and to figure out a way to open up a conversation which was not going to be easy as my presence had subdued the hubbub at the bar and the talk was all being conducted in Spanish, a language I don’t speak.
On quick acquaintance Tama was more or less what one would expect of a midwestern crossroads town of not quite 3000 people. The one thing I wouldn’t have expected to find was a bar catering to an exclusively Mexican clientele. Mexican immigration was a controversial fact of life along the US border with Mexico but I was surprised to find a community here in rural Iowa 1,200 miles north of the Rio Grande.
Eventually, midway through the second beer, the bartender’s curiosity about my presence led to conversation and a quick explanation of the Mexican presence in town. Just outside of Tama there was a slaughterhouse and the men worked there. Most were on their own. They had crossed into the US, not necessarily legally, and had migrated or been recruited to work in the factory. There were many reasons for this but declining wages and significant weakening of unions from the late seventies and early eighties had driven native born Iowa workers to seek higher paid employment in other industries. Mexicans had filled the gap.
The bartender went on to describe the men’s isolated existence. Renting small apartments, living frugally so there was money to send back to their families in Mexico, and avoiding trouble with local roughnecks.
Men without their women and children doing the work other won’t do, scrimping to send money back to them or perhaps bring them to El Norte once their own residence status was approved. An enduring strand of the American story. My great-grandfather had arrived in New York a hundred years earlier, having left his family behind somewhere in Galicia. Family lore was he saved and went back to get them. But maybe he just sent for them. It’s not clear if he got to the US legally. There is no record of his arrival.
Tama was too small not to bump into my friends and I found them a few hours later peeking into bar windows as I had done. We found a place to stay and agreed to meet for cocktails and dinner at a steakhouse nearby. There weren’t that many restaurants to choose from.
Dining there involved a bit of time travel. We were all Children of Victory and the decor transported us to the restaurants our parents took us to back to the Fifties. It wasn’t a nostalgia themed restaurant, it just hadn’t had a major design update since then and so we decided to pretend that we were back in that happier time and have prime ribs and drink highballs instead of wine. Just as our parents might have.
We played that popular conversational game of people who are in their forties “When my father/mother was my age he/she had” x number of children, or just bought their first house, or done something we had not done yet and would never consider doing. It’s a game that honors parents’ memories but also reminds us of how different our lives are from theirs.
Thoroughly lubricated we drove to Tama’s only nightlife spot, a dance hall on the edge of town. No Mexicans here. The music was Country and Western and people were line dancing. Ann may have got up and joined in but Carol and I were having none of it. We discussed the semiotics of line dancing: its lack of touch. its rigidly drilled, follow the leader style. The conversation was more complex than you might imagine. When we met, Carol was producing BBC radio’s daily arts magazine, Kaleidoscope. He knew how to filet any esthetic performance from the sceptical perspective of a person born into the American working class and was the first of his family to go to university.
While we spoke we watched the table next to us where a scene of impending violence was being acted out. A young woman was refusing to get on the dance floor with one of the men she was sitting with. Another man, who looked like he might be an older brother, was insisting that she do so and was cocking his arm for a slap. Both males faces were reddening with anger. One of them, the brother I think, pulled her out her chair. Carol and I looked at each other. Without the words the thought was there, if she was struck should we intervene? It was a bad idea for many reasons, not least there were just the two of us and there were four or five men sitting with the woman and the men looked hard, used to brawling. In the event, gallantry was not required. The young woman acquiesced and went out onto the dance floor and when she came back she smiled at everyone and the tension sank beneath the surface.
Carol shook his head
“God, I hate to see that. I fear for her,”
Sunday morning I got up early and went to church. In my walking up and down looking for a bar the previous day I had seen an empty storefront with a sign inviting people to a Sunday service of the gospel at 9:30. I walked in as the preacher and a few of his children were putting out folding chairs and found myself in an awkward situation. I was the only person there. Having taken a seat I couldn’t just walk out once the man began the service and so I sat two rows in from the street and listened for an hour to the most despairing account of the sinful life of the world and the hellfire that was about rain on all of America. The preacher was not a gifted orator and hearing of hell in verbal slow motion was its own particular torture. The congregation was just me and the man’s family: his wife and five or six children. They looked as miserable as the man’s worldview. Many are called but few are chosen to convey this kind of call to repentance in a way that makes people pay attention. He was not among the chosen.
By now Carol and Ann were awake and we left the town and drove east along US route 30. In Tama US 30 is called the Lincoln Highway. If I stayed on that same road in about 1000 miles it would run close by the Gettysburg Battlefield and another 100 miles past that the house where I grew up. America is big and it seems even bigger when you’ve lived in England for nearly a decade.
After walking off our hangovers along the Iowa River my friends turned north for Minneapolis and I carried on east towards the Mississippi at Davenport, Iowa, reviewing the situation.
Twenty-four hours in Tama, a heartland small-town the same size as Yellow Springs, but nothing like the Midwest I remembered or people on the coasts could conceive.
As I went over the great river again into Illinois the sun was in the space between the clouds and the earth bringing a few moments of illumination to an otherwise gloomy day. I looked south. Travel a mere 400 miles down along the snaking, surging water and you get to Cape Girardeau.
Sam Jarrell had said something when he took me down to the river to show me where his fishing spot had disappeared over on the Illinois side. When the flood finally receded there was no guarantee the Mississippi would follow the same course. That sweet, secret place might be gone forever. Then in a plaintive voice he said something that I realized was as much about America as the aftermath of a historic natural catastrophe.
“I just don’t know where the river’s flowing.”
This has been the opening chapter of Part Four of History of a Calamity, the story of how America went from Victory in World War 2 to Donald Trump and Cold Civil War in a single lifetime … Mine. The next chapter, Going South, details a journey around Mississippi in 1995. Here’s a preview:
“The Natchez meeting of the Sons of Confederate Veterans started with the pledge of allegiance to the American flag. When I was at school I hardly thought of what the words of the Pledge meant but in present circumstances the words seemed quite profound, particularly the word “indivisible”. The assembly then turned to the Confederate flag, and right hands open, palm up, pledged this oath. “I salute the Confederate flag with affection, reverence, and undying devotion to the cause for which it stands.”
And if you need to catch up on previous parts of my book, Part One, Bliss Was It In That Dawn, begins here:
Notes:
Very informative. You're probably sick of people likening it to Bill Bryson's "The Lost Continent" but I think they complement each other nicely. I know this isn't a representative quote from the chapter but I do like it - “We all in the same boat but we rowin’ in different directions.”