The Road to Selma

It’s the first week of June and I’m still writing about a trip I took in the Buick on the back roads of Alabama in February.  My apologies.  I learned too much, both on the trip and in doing research back in the shack, not to tell the whole story. 

I’m sure there is a lot going on in Montgomery.  I mean, it’s the capitol of Alabama, a city of 200,000 plus, and the state’s largest city after Birmingham.

Montgomery is a university town, home to Alabama State, both an Auburn and a Troy University campus, Faulkner University and Huntingdon College.  It has a Hyundai manufacturing plant, Maxwell Air Force Base and cultural attractions like the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.  But after my visit to the legacy museum, immediately following the lynching museum, I just wanted to get the hell out of the there.

Next on the agenda was Selma, but I was not exactly itching to see Selma either.  What I wanted was the quiet of the countryside and the emptiness of farm fields interrupted only by a seldom traveled two lane road.  I wanted to set the Buick on cruise, lean back, and let what I had just learned sink in while another Alabama glided past me under a blue sky; the Alabama of trees and birds, wind, sun and soil.

I got my wish.  I needed gas but figured I would get it somewhere down the road.  From downtown I took the first street that had traffic lights going west.  That turned into US route 80, a nice two-lane road.  The town fell away quickly.  It felt good being out where nature takes over from manmade constructs. 

Something is going on in rural America.  I noticed it again in Arkansas when I was headed back to Illinois.  We’re losing our farmhouses.  There used to be places, a little group of trees, a yard, a machine shed at least, maybe an old barn.  The corn cribs disappeared years ago.  The farm fields are big now.  Hardly any fences because livestock is rare.  Nothing to fence in any longer. 

No one lives out there because the small farms are gone.  Whoever buys and maintains the huge machines that work the land live somewhere else.  They swoop in at planting time, hire out the fertilizer, herbicide, and insecticide applications, and come back with huge harvesters to take in the crop.  Farmhouses get in the way.  They tear them down, push the foundations into the basements, fill them in and farm over them.  It’s eerie, but only to people like me who remember how it used to be.  Kids will know it no other way.

I drove through the emptiness on a beautiful spring day.  It’s only 50 some miles to Selma so I went slowly.  It was all cotton fields out there, not yet planted.  I imagined lines of slaves stooping to drop cotton seeds into furrows made by mule drawn plows, coming back after it had sprouted to chop it, or thin it out, with heavy hoes.  And then later, 140 days or so, when the cotton was high, coming back to pick it.  Generations of black lives were spent in those fields.  Those simple tasks, planting, cultivating, picking-promised such a lucrative harvest that white men stole human beings from Africa and kept them in captivity just for that purpose.  Plant, chop, and harvest cotton.  Year after year until machines finally replaced them in the 1950’s. 

Ghosts of souls who labored for two hundred years in the fields stretched out on either side of me, then morphed into visions of 25,000 voting rights activists marching for justice in 1965 down the road known in Alabama as “Jefferson Davis Highway”, the same U.S. Route 80 the Buick and I were travelling.  There were three marches between Montgomery and Selma that year.  The issue they were trying to draw America’s attention to was voting rights.  Voting rights.  Still an issue in 1965, one hundred years after the end of the Civil War.

Despite the 14^th and 15^th amendments to our U.S. constitution, the right of blacks to vote by the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, and American women achieving suffrage with the passage of the 19^th amendment in 1920, blacks were regularly denied the right to vote in Southern states through a variety of means.  First and ongoing was outright violence, but as the years went by more sophisticated means were added.

After regaining control of their state legislatures, white southern Democrats added to previous efforts and achieved widespread legal disenfranchisement of black voters.  From 1890 to 1908, southern state legislators (think deep confederate South not border states) passed new state constitutions, amended old constitutions, and enacted other state laws that made voter registration and voting more difficult, especially when administered by white staff in discriminatory ways. 

Among their bag of tricks were poll taxes, literacy tests, constantly changing voting procedures to make voting more difficult, and property requirements.  Mississippi’s constitution, rewritten in 1890 to institutionalize such practices, survived a supreme Court challenge in Williams vs. Mississippi and other states soon followed suit.  They succeeded in disenfranchising most of the black citizens, as well as many poor whites in their states, and voter rolls dropped dramatically in each state.  The Republican party was nearly eliminated in the region for decades, and Democrats established one party control.

Louisiana’s rewritten 1989 constitution had the most dramatic effect on black voters among all the deep South states.  In 1896 Louisiana’s voter rolls contained 130,334 black voters.  After applying hurdles to voter registration established in their new constitution, black voters in Louisiana dropped to 5,320 in 1890.  By 1910 only 730 black voters remained in the entire state.  Legal disenfranchisement of black voters in the deep South was brutally efficient.  Because black Southerners did not appear on local voter rolls, they were automatically excluded from serving in local courts.  Juries were virtually all white clear across the deep South.  The fix was in and it stayed that way.

Come back with me on the road to Selma in more modern times, to 2019 or 1965.  2019 is easier.  Let’s stay there for a while.

The Buick’s dwindling gas tank was a worry and there were no stations in sight.  No towns either.  The situation was getting serious.  I was to the point of watching the gauge closely hoping the needle would bounce off the big E.  At least the gauge worked.  In the old Buick the gauge was broken and given its age, plus the folly of putting more money into a machine worth so little (my god, what if they thought of human bodies in that way?) I didn’t fix it, depending instead on the trip meter.

I forget how many miles I had figured I could get off a full tank of gas in the 2000 LeSabre but using a number on an odometer buried in the dash as an indicator for fuel is much more easily ignored than an actual gas gauge, which I sometimes ignore also.  Knowing I have this tendency, I carry a small red gas can, empty, in the trunk.  Putting one’s thumb out with a gas can in hand next to a disabled car is one of the last acceptable ways to hitchhike these days.  I did that on one of my trips to the boundary waters with my son somewhere in Minnesota, I think.  I digress.  Let’s stay in Alabama.

I consulted my Rand McNally road atlas while cruising along Jefferson Davis Highway that afternoon, which is less distracting than texting while driving because the print is larger, and it is an exercise that requires no thumb movements.  I was in Lowndes County, population 9,974.  There was no town visible on my route to Selma.  The best I could find was an intersection at U.S. 80 and a road that by its thickness on the map looked to be of fair size, Route 97.  I decided if there was no gas at that intersection, I would head south on 97 to Hayneville and pray I had enough gas to reach there.

Back in the shack I learned that Hayneville, population 853, is the county seat of Lowndes County.  The internet offered evidence of two branch banks and a Subway restaurant, but no gas.  Interestingly, on the web page I visited, which contains random and crazy facts about towns from other sources, Hayneville is among the Top 101 U.S. towns and cities in two categories. 

·       #67 of Top 101 cities with the least cars per house, population 500+

·       #47 of Top 101 cities with the highest percentage of residents voting for ________ in the 2012 Presidential Election.  (In 2012 it was Obama vs. Romney)

Care to fill in the blank as to who they voted for so heavily?

Obama.

To my great relief I did not visit Hayneville because at the Intersection of U.S. Route 80 and Alabama Route 97 in Lowndes County I happened upon this establishment:

Billy’s Tires Hand Car Wash and Detail

While I admit I am sometimes fooled by chains which appear on the outside to be independent businesses, I’m confident Billy’s is a one of kind operation.  If not, the signage alone should be considered a stroke of genius by some graphic artist trying to depict local flavor.  I am endeared to anyone who runs out of room to add the last letter on a line in a sign like Billy did with that S on Tires.  

The Buick was relatively clean, my tires were OK, and I'm not much for details so I didn’t go inside and meet Billy.  I wanted to, but I couldn’t muster an excuse.  Besides that, I needed gas and a bathroom.  I went next door to a nondescript BP station.  I didn’t take a picture.  You’ve seen plenty of them.  Next to the BP was a corrugated tin sided structure called the Route 80 Café.  Deer Hunters were welcome, but it was closed.  I had a feeling it was a side business for the BP.  Maybe Billy’s was too.

When I entered the BP, I was hit by the smell of old grease.  Lots of those two pump rural gas stations fry chicken and leave it in a glass case on the counter under a heat lamp.  Sometimes there is pizza by the slice in there too, the cheese and perfect circles of pepperoni all shiny and glistening.  Those items, coupled with a nice display of various flavors of beef jerky stacked in partially open cardboard containers next to the hot case, completed an almost irresistible array of ready to eat gas station food offerings.

I went to use the bathroom before I filled the Buick's gas tank and as luck would have it became privy to local drama.  The apparent store owner, an older woman speaking in a thick foreign accent, was chiding her young cashier for excessive calls coming in on her business phone from someone known to both.  I guessed the caller to be an estranged partner or ex-spouse.  I walked into the middle of the conversation, which continued while I stood in front of the urinal (very thin walls) and kept up unabated as I quickly shopped and approached the counter.  I resisted the formerly mentioned items on the counter and opted instead for a bag of big individually wrapped LifeSavers.  Wint O Green.

“He is tying up my business line.  You tell him if he doesn’t stop you will LOSE YOUR JOB.”

“Ah tole him.  I said ‘Darryl you keep calling the store I’ma get fired’ but he don listen.”

I wondered how busy that business line was but put that aside.

“Maybe you tell him.  Would ya?  He was burnin’ up all the minutes on ma cell and I blocked him. Now he doin this.  I don know what more ah can do.”

“Not my place to talk to that man.  Your problem.  But it’s becoming my problem you see?  DO YOU SEE?”

“I done got a restraining order.  But it says he cain’t call me.  Says nothing ‘bout your number.”

I just wanted to pay for my mints, gas up, and head out.  The store owner turned to me.

“What would you do?”

Why me?  Why do people ask me things like that?  Involve me when I have no duty to respond?  I don’t know but they do.  I’m afraid I look like a patsy.  Somehow easy.  I should say its none of my business, but I rarely do.

“You might consider calling the sheriff, talking to him, and seeing exactly what  that order of protection applies to.  Telling him what is happening.  Maybe he or someone in his office will call they guy.  Just having a deputy talk to him might have some effect.”

I could see that made the cashier nervous.

“Might make him really mad too,” she said.

“Orders of protection are just that.  For your protection.  If you’ve gone so far as to get an order, you might as well have it enforced.  If it is not already part of the order, you could have it amended to include harassment here.  He is harassing you.  He may cause you to lose employment.  You don’t have to take that.  Don’t be afraid to ask for  more help.”

Neither of them said anything, but the stink eye look the owner had been giving her cashier was beginning to soften.  The cashier was so young, and obviously afraid.  Do I look like a social worker?  What does a social worker look like anyway?  Does it show?  Still?

“How much for these mints?”

I paid and walked out.  As the door was closing the owner yelled thanks.  Just as I regretted not meeting Billy, I would have loved to stick around and meet a member of the Lowndes County law enforcement community, but I was on my way to Selma and the Edmund Pettus bridge.