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I drove up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Dallas City (Illinois) in two days, making stops in Vicksburg, Greenville, Clarksdale, Cairo, Hannibal, Carthage, and Nauvoo.  This brief taste has whetted my appetite to bike the whole river.  I had thought that such a trip might be boring: a river trip does not offer the kind of scenic variety a cross-country trip does.  I think otherwise now.  There is plenty of material: the health of the lower river, the runoff, and the dead zone in the Gulf; the hydrology and vitality of New Orleans; the old Plantations and the black/white divide along the lower river; the Delta Blues; Elvis in Memphis; then entering Mark Twain country in Arkansas and Missouri; Lewis and Clark and Jim and Huck at Cairo; the Mormons at Nauvoo; and north from there you enter placid and idyllic (and extremely beautiful) farm country in Wisconsin and Minnesota.  What the source looks like I don’t know but would like to find out.  And general questions about modern agriculture and urban development and race relations are in play all the way.

(Photo: sunset over the Mississippi from Cairo, Illinois, March 2011).

I camped out in the Delta National Forest last night, and took breakfast in Greenville.  A group of eight or nine older white folks was sitting around a big table in the center of a Main-Street diner.  One reported that a “black man’s head” had just been found by the police, the second murder in the area recently.  (I do not know if this is true at all, but that is what he said).  That sparked the following conversation, highlights of which I recorded:

“It was a black head?”

“That keeps up we’ll be at fifty-fifty in this town, and maybe we’ll get somewhere.”

“The White Man wanted them to do his work for him, and we’ve been havin’ to deal with them ever since.  We almost got rid of them in ’27, but Mr. Percy had to have someone to pick his cotton.” [For more information on this comment read Rising Tide.]

“You see the difference with the way the Japanese do things with the tsunami?  You just see them all waiting in line, or helping each other?  And compare that to the looting in New Orleans.  They’re much more civilized than we are over there.”

“Well, they don’t have to deal with African-Americans.” [I found it interesting that this speaker always said “African Americans.”]

“I heard that God put the black man on Earth to teach the white man patience.”

“It ain’t workin’!”

“I know, they just make your blood pressure go up!”

“I’m just amazed at how they could be so stupid.”

“Most of ’em don’t even know who their own father is.”

“That ain’t gonna change.”

I don’t think any of these thoughts are very unusual, but hearing them expressed aloud in public is.  One thing about race in the South which is so striking is that many things which are suppressed and avoided in the North are expressed here.