Cross-Country Road Trip! Day 24-26, Mile 4761: Dark Heart.

We left New Orleans early to make the four-and-a-half hour drive to Selma, Alabama.

For both O and I the mid-sixties struggle of the Civil Rights movement took place in our formative years, and we wanted to visit some of the places where that struggle took place.

Selma and the Edmund Pettus Bridge was where we decided to start.

 

The drive out of NOLA was pretty uneventful. It was Saturday, so there wasn't much traffic.

We passed this odd-looking high-rise, one of the largest on the New Orleans skyline. Jeff and Pam had told us the story of this building. It was apparently built at the height on the NOLA building boom for around $62 million, but the crash and Katrina killed the office building market, and it was never occupied.

Though it was finally sold a few years ago for a stunningly low $650,000, it remains empty to this day. 

That's a New Orleans ghost story for our times.

Last on my extensive list of must-have NOLA tastes was a muffuletta sandwich from Central Grocery. 

Unfortunately, when we walked by, the place was shuttered and taped off. The grocery is being sold, and the  location is kaput. What horror!

There was, however, a small sign promising that authentic Central Grocery muffulettas were available at Zuppardo's Family Market in Metairie. Which just happened to be on our way out of town.

I'd forgotten how gigantic the thing is. It provided me with two large lunches (not O's sort of chow). And it was as delicious as I remember it being.

While I stood in line, O perused the local paper.

It poured as we drove through Mississippi. It lightened up a bit when we got to Alabama, but there was still a light rain when we got to Selma.

We were looking forward to the Ancient Africa Enslavement & Civil War Museum.

It was closed. We checked with Mr. Google. He assured us that the place was open. It was not. 

We drove around Selma a bit. It is a small, rundown town. You'd never suspect anything momentous could ever have happened there.

Sorely disappointed, we headed across the infamous Pettus bridge, following the route the marchers took on their five-day walk to Montgomery, the state capitol.

Our hotel in Montgomery was a twenty-minute drive from downtown. We wanted to visit both the Legacy Museum and the Hank Williams Museum, but we only had time for one. We chose the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration.

It was an incredible, intense, and emotional experience. The museum uses technology to immerse you in the history and human stories of the African diaspora in the Americas, mostly the US. It is stunningly well-designed and well organized.

Unfortunately, the museum doesn't allow photos, but you can see some images online if you're interested.

It starts with the beginnings of the African slave trade in the 1500s. It's a story we all know something of, but there was much I didn't know. 

Over 12 million Africans were kidnapped from their homeland and shipped off to be sold as slaves. Most were taken to South America by Spanish and Portuguese slavers. Many were taken by the British and the French to the various Caribbean colonies. It was surprising to me that less than 500,000 of that 12 million were brought to the American colonies and later the US.

The section of the museum that deals with slavery in the US is built on the very spot where the thriving Montgomery slave market once stood. In addition to photos and written word testimony, holograms of actors portraying slaves tell individual stories. The holograms are activated when you stand in front of each slave's cell.

 It could be hokey, but it's not. In the part of the museum that deals with our continuing history of racial injustice through mass incarceration, you sit in front of a window like a visitor at a prison, listening on a phone while a life-size filmed image of a prisoner tells you their story.

Another section of the museum tells the history of segregation with film clips of various political leaders praising white supremacy in the vilest rhetoric. Today's white supremacists may have cleaned up their language a bit, but the beat goes on.

The hardest part of the museum is the section on lynching. This section includes graphic photos and testimony on thousands of lynchings and hundreds of jars of soil collected from documented lynching sites all over the country by the Equal Justice Initiative, the group that founded the museum.

EJI is a non-profit that provides legal representation to prisoners who have been wrongly convicted, those who can't afford a lawyer, and those who have been denied a fair trial. They have put together a truly moving monument to a history that too many people are trying their shameful best to bury.

O and I walked out of the museum stunned. The place pulls no punches. We both felt that the effect on us was much like that of our visit to Dachau-- horror, anger, and a deep sadness at what human beings can do to each other.

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By the next morning the clouds, if not our hearts, had cleared. The sun and the long corridors of lush green trees lining the sides of the highway did help improve our spirits.

Soon we were in Georgia, rolling past acres of peach trees.

And pecan orchards. 

It is beautiful country. You could easily understand why we stole it from the Cherokee.

It was still mostly sunny when we reached Savannah. We had crossed the entire country.

Savannah is a beautiful town with a lot of ugly history.

We had time to walk around a bit after we checked in to our riverfront hotel. The downtown area has many pocket parks filled with huge oaks draped with Spanish moss. The story goes that the natives, seeing the heavily-bearded Spanish for the first time thought their facial hair looked like tree moss, and decked themselves out with mossy beards to mock the invaders.

The forecast called for thunderstorms, so we decided to eat at the rooftop bar rather than risk getting soaked. And indeed, we no sooner sat down than the rain started pouring. 

Unfortunately, the bar had an extremely limited menu. Fortunately, they did have Grey Goose for O, so we had martinis and hot dogs and watched the rain come down.

The clouds parted long enough to give us some pretty views of the Savannah skyline.

We had paid a little extra for a river view room, but when we got in, we found that the fan didn't work. The hotel sent someone up to fix it, but after four attempts over about an hour, he finally gave up.

O told the front desk that no fan was no go, and they graciously up graded us to a top-floor corner suite.

That's us, top two windows and one on the side.

We had an amazing view of the skyline and the river on both sides.

The Georgia Queen was rolling on the river.

That night it rained hard, but we only got a little bit of lightning.

The next morning, we watched a squall come toward us, gradually obscuring the city and much of the river.

Later I looked up from reading to find the river window completely blocked by a gigantic container ship.

The wide angle lens minimizes the size. The ship was quite a bit taller than our eighth floor room.

It wallowed its way ponderously down the channel, shepherded by two tugs.

After the rain cleared, we ventured out to explore downtown.

Can't get enough of the oaks.

This cemetery has some of the earliest graves in the city, dating back to the mid-1700s.

Spanish moss makes any graveyard spookier.

Savannah has many beautiful old churches.

And other lovely old buildings.

Little parks are everywhere. And trees, trees, trees!

On our last afternoon, we made the 30-minute drive to Tybee Island and the shore of the Atlantic.

Coast to coast, baby!

The temperature was perfect, the water refreshingly cool.

We watched a horseshoe crab scurrying along in a shallow pool.

Another was burrowed in the sand, waiting for the tide to come in.

It was a glorious afternoon at the beach. A much-needed refreshment for the soul.

It's been an intense three days. We've seen and learned a lot. And in spite of the ugliness, this is still a beautiful world. It can heal us if we let it

It's up to us to live up to its beauty.

P.