Resonant light

Cairo, Illinois

We passed by Cairo, and through the small corner of South West Illinois it sits in, late at night on our way to a hotel and sleep in a totally unremarkable town in Missouri on the other side of the Mississippi. We couldn’t make sense in the dark of why we crossed so many bridges and of course we couldn’t see anything, so we decided to double back the next morning and see if we could get a glimpse of the river. Also a friend on Facebook had told me that Cairo was an ‘interesting town’.

This turned out to be an understatement. Cairo is the strangest and saddest town I think I’ve ever visited. And while we had become aware of the impact of the 2008 economic ‘downturn’ USA experienced through what seemed to us initially as a puzzling quietness and lack of bustle and development in the fantastic downtown spaces of places like Montgomery and Memphis, Cairo introduced us to the much more disturbing realities faced by small to middling towns when economies change and big employers leave the area. Often they leave behind populations trapped by limited education, nontransferable skills, poor health, or investment in suddenly worthless business or property and a local government with a massively reduced tax base struggling to maintain basic infrastructure and services. What happens next is that things quite literally start to fall apart.

Along the Mississippi this decline is starkly apparent. Once one of the wealthiest, most elegant and perhaps liveliest parts of the nation (the wealth mostly concentrated, of course, in a small group of white land and business owners) the towns along the Mississippi went from extravagant opulence to enduring a slow and grinding bust over many years. While the Civil War and the end of slavery certainly brought to a close the era of the massive plantations, things eventually recovered and Jim Crow laws and policies ensured a cheap labour force and prosperous economy (for the benefit of white folks) from the height of the steamboat era well into the twentieth century. Most people I talked to blamed the decline after this on either the loss of primacy of river transportation in favour of railways or the later racial tensions reaching a head during the Civil Rights era and the consequent ‘white flight’ from the area (along with money and job opportunities). This was followed of course by a succession of later nation wide economic downturns and the closing down of what businesses remained. Since then there has been a vicious cycle at play: investors are unwilling to locate businesses in areas where education levels are low and general infrastructure is poor, thus ensuring a continued low revenue base for the area. Consequently, in the Mississippi Delta (including both Mississippi and Arkansas) unemployment and underemployment is high, education is massively underfunded and educational outcomes are also low. Seems like the Blues are still very relevant today in the Delta.

Such a big boom and long slow bust has left shells of towns with populations sometimes a tenth or less their former size. At its peak in 1920, Cairo – located beautifully at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers – had a population of 15,203. In the 2010 census it was 2,831. It’s probably even less now.

Of course Australia has its ghost towns – I remember one town a few years ago selling houses for $1 if you promised to live there year round in an effort to bring people, money and jobs back into the area, but it was a small place. I lived for a while in the town of Blackwood, Victoria. Population 400 or thereabouts. During the gold rush it was home to 13,000. But the gold miners lived in tents or wattle-and-daub huts. Their legacy melted slowly back into the bush. The bigger towns in Victoria, like Ballarat and Bendigo have endured and are now growing rapidly. Imagine, if you like, driving or walking through Ballarat today and seeing empty, rotting building, after empty, rotting building. Vacant lots on the main street. Faded for sale signs everywhere. Boarded up businesses. Weeds and ivy in every crack. That’s what it’s like in Cairo. Even ghost towns come on a grand scale in America.

The weirdness that is Cairo was immediately apparent. We went looking for the ‘centre’ of town and ended up driving along the road beside the leveee. The first people we saw in the whole place were two men zooming on motorised wheelchairs, beers in hand, veering from side to side down a wide main street in the blistering heat, a small dog running between them. It was post-apocalyptic, ghost town strange. So of course I had to get a photo. Which is how we met Donny Polovic, who was happy to stop for a chat.

Donny is 61 years old. He grew up in Cairo and worked for over 30 years as a barge man on the river. He remembers the street he was zooming down as full of hotels and bars and restaurants when he was a boy, all surrounding a busy harbour, loading and unloading goods through the levee gate. He said that in one of the bars he killed a man who went at him with a knife and he went to jail for murder. One of three stints he did, but the longest at 10 years. (That seemed a little far fetched to me – not sure how a 40 year sentence gets reduced to 10). He now lives in a public housing apartment in the building behind him in the photograph, overlooking the river, with his dog Shaky – so named because she was bashed against a wall as a puppy and now has Parkinson’s. He occasionally goes to the one bar left in town, but mostly he and his friend Larry, the man on the other wheelchair, spend their days drinking under a tree, just down the road, which is where he was headed when he stopped to chat.

Donny said that the only successful businesses in Cairo these days are the liquor stores, and we saw a few of those. Unlike most towns we have driven through, there were no chain ‘restaurants’, no Walmart or CVS, no chain hotels, no cafes. Donny said there was one general store, which we didn’t find, and one gas station. He blamed the decline of Cairo on the slowing down of the river trade and lack of employment.

Another chap we chatted too, who was heading back from a day out on the river on his boat, blamed the decline on ‘people who wanted more rights and better conditions but weren’t prepared to work hard for it’. This seemed to be code for ‘black people’, particularly as he alluded to the significant history of racial tension and unrest in Cairo during the struggle for civil rights. He directly compared the oppression these folk experienced with his own history as a Native American, whose people were forced up to Cairo on the Trail of Tears, implying that he just ‘got on with it and worked hard’ and did OK, unlike others. He got quite emotional talking about how he was forbidden to talk about or acknowledge his Choctaw heritage in the schooling system as a child. I didn’t argue with him, of course, but it seemed sad to me that a common experience of racism, though differently manifested, hadn’t lead to a greater understanding or feeling of solidarity.

The photos I got in Cairo weren’t great. It was very, very hot and bright. And I often feel incredibly rude shooting other people’s lives, so we didn’t linger too long. If you want to see more of Cairo, you only need to do an internet image search. Many photographers have been fascinated by this place.

Many places, like Cairo, Clarkesdale and Helena (which we visited later) have dedicated and passionate residents and officials who try hard to bring business to town and develop the downtown area. There is usually a ‘chamber of commerce’ building on or near the main street, one or two buildings restored or kept up, often through one off grants or donations. In Cairo a few cast iron street arches proclaim ‘historic downtown’, and donors have come together to sponsor an annual blues festival for the last four years. Perhaps these are signs of better times to come. The Cairo Heritage Foundation certainly thinks so. Their Facebook page declares Cairo a ‘beautiful place to live and visit’. I couldn’t really see much evidence of that. It seemed to me that living or growing up in Cairo, you really would feel abandoned and forgotten by the world.

It is important to note, however, that we only spent a couple of hours in this town and talked to only two people (though we talked to more people in other towns after this). This is the blogging dilemma for me – which makes posts like this very difficult to write and often means they stay as brief Facebook blurts lost in the stream. I am afraid of generalising from my own small window. The whole of my view is based on a two hour experience and a bit of reading. People’s experiences of the places they live and how they fit with the wider world are as diverse as the people who live them. There may be abundant hope and optimism and signs of a bright future for Cairo, just around the corner from where we stood and not seen by us in our brief time there. I am bound to have got things wrong, made mistakes, under emphasised some things and over emphasised others. If I have and you know it, please comment, tell me different, show me the bits of Cairo I didn’t see.

DSCF4622 — Commercial Ave. Donny remembers this street as full of thriving businesses and people. No commerce happening here now

DSCF4641 — The main street, Washington Ave

DSCF4649 — The other fellow we chatted to

DSCF4676 — Washington Ave with a permanently closed D’s Chicken and a welfare agency in the background

DSCF4691 — The Ohio and the Mississippi meet at Cairo

DSCF4696 — The Ohio and the Mississippi meet at Cairo

Memphis

We didn’t do our road trip to and from Memphis in any kind of logical order. Due to being blown off course by hurricane Irma, we went to Montgomery, Alabama, then Starkville, Mississippi and then Tupelo, Mississippi, before arriving in Memphis, Tennessee. Then we went down to the Mississippi Delta and on to New Orleans, skipping Nashville entirely. In terms of music history we were going backwards in time tracing the history of rock, blues and soul from the melting pot that was Memphis to it’s roots in the Delta and the jazz that originated in New Orleans. But then there are many possible orders to do it in – tracing the influence of ‘hillbilly’ music through the Appalachians and the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, starting with Dixieland and ragtime jazz in New Orleans, listening to gospel music in the churches in Alabama, the state with the highest population of African Americans, or immersing yourself in the plaintive, raw blues of the Mississippi Delta. All musical roads in this part of the world eventually lead to Memphis and the music that changed the world (possibly detouring and spending some time in Chicago on the way).

All of it makes much more sense seen through the lens of economic history with the wealth of a small, white ‘ruling class’ profiting from slavery and then poor tenant farming (sharecropping) and, above all the importance of a single crop in the economic development and perpetuation of human misery in this part of the world: cotton. Great art did indeed emerge, but the human suffering that shaped it was immeasurably vast and horrifying.

During our trip this understanding of the historical and economic context and the different musical threads that came together to create the music that I love – blues and jazz and soul – deepened with every step. Every museum, every conversation, every musician that I heard has left me with a greater and more informed appreciation. Most of the museum tours start with a film of some kind. Time and again musicians (black and white) in these films would talk about listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, singing gospel in church on a Sunday, and hanging out on a neighbour’s front porch listening to or learning the blues.

The Hank William’s Museum in Montgomery, Elvis’ early years in Tupelo, the many museum’s and tours in Memphis including the Civil Right’s Museum and the Ernest C Withers Photography Collection, the Delta Cultural Center in Helena, Arkansas, the BB King Museum in Indianola, Mississippi, the conversations with people not much older than me who remembered growing up chopping cotton from ‘kin to cain’t’ (can see to can’t see, dawn to dusk basically), the reminiscing with Jimmy and Quicksand at Bubba’s Blues Corner in Helena, sitting on a bench in Clarkesdale, Mississippi and chatting to Red of Red’s Juke Joint and Lucius Spiller who plays there, and above all the music we have heard at every stop in venues large and small have all come together to create one of the great trips of my life, which I will savour and draw from for many, many years.

Very hard to capture all of that in photographs – and too many photos for one blog post, so our journey after Memphis will be posted later. The photos below don’t capture any of the emotion I felt. Also, many times the camera stayed in the bag or the hotel room so as not to get in the way of seeing and hearing. I can only encourage anyone who loves the music from this part of the world to come and experience it for themselves and not to miss the museums. Learning about the blues has also meant learning more about the history of slavery and Jim Crow and the struggle for civil rights here in the South and America in general. A struggle which also paved the way and created a language and a style of activism which went on to be used for women’s rights, and LGBTI rights and other movements. One of the saddest things for me was hearing about how the assassination of Martin Luther King impacted and eventually derailed the vibrant, racially diverse soul music scene in Memphis, causing tension and bitterness where for a while there had been none, only a mutual joy in the music.

I’ve unashamedly cried a few times during this bit of our trip – at the Civil Rights Museum in the room of the Lorraine Hotel where Martin Luther King was shot, during the opening film at the Stax Record Museum watching Otis Redding perform, at the BB King museum reading some of the poetry on the walls and hearing about the life of that beautiful man. I’ve also danced until my feet were sore and felt my heart bursting with joy.

Montgomery, Alabama. We visited the Hank Williams museum here.

DSCF4228 — Oktibbeha County Jail in Starkville, Mississippi where Johnny Cash spent a night for being drunk and disorderly

DSCF4335 — Elvis Presley’s childhood home in Tupelo, Mississippi. A tiny two bedroom shack lovingly restored

DSCF4337 — Elvis Presley’s childhood home in Tupelo, Mississippi

DSCF4341 — Elvis Presley’s childhood home in Tupelo, Mississippi

DSCF4334 — The church Elvis attended as a child in Tupelo, Mississippi. We saw these tiny churches all through rural Alabama and Mississippi

DSCF4342 — Our first sighting of the Mississippi river in Memphis, Tennessee

DSCF4343 — Our first sighting of the Mississippi river in Memphis, Tennessee

DSCF4345 - Copy — The Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. Now part of the Civil Rights Museum

DSCF4353 — The Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, now part of the Civil Rights Museum

DSCF4356 — Outside room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated

DSCF4364 — Part of the Gibson complex, Memphis

DSCF4366 — The edge of downtown Memphis. Memphis, like many towns in this region is recovering from a big and long economic downturn. Downtown areas are only just starting to be redeveloped in a way that encourages people to live there. One of the first things is getting artists to move in and redevelop old warehouse spaces. In this case an old automotive repair and parts sector is being turned into studios and artist workshops

DSCF4367 — The edge of downtown Memphis.

DSCF4344 — Notice on South Main St in Downtown Memphis

DSCF4373 — Ann taking a moment with the very microphone sung into by Elvis, Howlin’ Wolf, Johnny Cash and others

DSCF4381 — Wonder Bread factory downtown Memphis. It’s been vacant for 25 years

DSCF4390 — Wonder Bread factory downtown Memphis. It’s been vacant for 25 years

DSCF4392 — ‘Soulsville’ in South Memphis, near Stax Records. A very different part of town. We drove around here for a bit. Definitely predominantly African American though it used to have a white population too when Soul was emerging. Very poor. Was at one stage directly connected to Beale St and downtown until a freeway was built separating the two areas. One of the many factors that contributed to the end of the great Beale St era

DSCF4400 — Stax Records in South Memphis

DSCF4405 — A night time view of the pool at our Memphis hotel

Where cars and trucks go to die

We were on the highway in Tennessee, driving north from Memphis, and passed this enormous lot full of old cars and trucks that the grass and weeds had grown through. It didn’t look like anyone was crushing them, or using them for parts – they had just been left there to rust. It was strange and interesting and weirdly beautiful so we had to do a u-turn to take some photos. Since then we have driven past many abandoned car yards. None quite as colourful as this one.

Noxubee Wildlife Reserve

One of the things I’ve enjoyed on the trip so far is the number of easily accessible State Parks and Wildlife Reserves that have dotted our path. They often seem to feature water. I know it gets dry out West, but I’ve been amazed at the huge lakes and rivers and even swamps we’ve come across on our journey. Australia really does seem parched in comparison.

One of the most beautiful we’ve seen so far is Noxubee, near Starkville, Mississippi, a collection of swampy waterways, lily ponds and cypress groves providing an amazing habitat for geese, storks, ducks, herons and other birds. Also, apparently, alligators, which freaked us out a little and is the reason that the park closes at dusk. It was cool and raining while we there, which added to the otherworldly, prehistoric feeling of the place. I really wished I’d bought my 70-200 mm telephoto lens for the Canon. We saw a great blue heron a few times and some beautiful geese foraging among the lily pads but they were too far away to do them any justice with the camera gear we had. Once again I stuck with the Fuji x100t.

One of the frustrating things about trying to cover so much ground road tripping is that we aren’t always going to get a golden hour or a blue hour wherever we go – in fact those are often the very times we are getting organised to find accommodation for the night or packing the car in the morning to move on. If we tried to get great weather and the perfect light everywhere it would be a very slow trip indeed. Hopefully we’ll be able to manage it in a few spots.

Fleeing Irma

2 am. Passing through Sawdust, Alabama. Below you can see a $1.50 Waffle House ‘coffee’ – basically slightly coffee flavoured hot water, but at least you get a gallon of it. Ann bought a cold with her to America and I have a raging sore throat and we are both sneezing and sniffling. We have 50 miles to go to get to the last available hotel room within a 200 mile radius in Montgomery, Alabama. A very nice fellow at a web based reservation site spent about half an hour on the phone finding it for us. We are lucky. Shortly afterwards internet searches revealed no vacant hotel rooms in North Florida, Alabama, Western Georgia or Eastern Tennessee. We find out later that Trip Advisor rates our hotel room as ‘avoid if possible’. If not possible, expect gun shots, drug deals and sex work on premises. As long as it has pillows and no one is shooting at us we don’t really care at this point. At every stop we meet fellow evacuees and friendly concerned locals all discussing the lack of hotel rooms. We are sleep deprived and have been driving in slow, busy traffic all day, with only a brief stop in St Augustine. On the plus side we have a car, credit cards and each other. We really felt for an older woman travelling with only her small, frightened dog that we came across at a gas station who seemed quite overwhelmed and very, very tired. She decided to turn back to Jacksonville, despite us assuring her there was nothing available there. Every so often one of us will say ‘I wonder how that woman and her dog are doing’.

21433037_10212646675816300_5102255612908824866_n — 2am Waffle House ‘coffee’

DSCF4154 — Boarded up buildings in St Augustine

DSCF4162 — Empty shelves at Walmart in St Augustine as people stock up to sit out the storm

DSCF4165 — Empty shelves at Walmart in St Augustine as people stock up to sit out the storm

A brief stop at South Miami Beach

We arrived in Miami on Tuesday afternoon. For some reason it took two hours to get the car sorted and then there was the stress of driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, so with one thing and another we didn’t see a lot of Miami that first night. Our plan was to drive down to Key West the next day and then come back to Miami after exploring the Keys, but when we got to the hotel we were informed that due to hurricane Irma the Keys were being evacuated on Wednesday and then Miami on Thursday. We managed to have a wander around South Miami Beach before heading out of town. We then spent the next three days driving North and then North West through Florida, Alabama and Mississippi as part of the hundreds and thousands of evacuating Floridians fleeing increasingly alarming hurricane warnings and searching desperately for a vacant hotel room. The little bit I saw of Florida was gorgeous. I would have loved to have spent more time there. The lesson is not to plan a visit during hurricane season. In one shot below you can see some girls on the beach putting together home made sand bags.

Even though South Miami Beach is all about bright, gelato colours, the stark light really seemed to lend itself to more graphical black and white images, which also I think show off the lines of that gorgeous art deco architecture to good effect. These photos were all taken with the Fujifilm x100t.

Stonewall Inn

So tonight I went to Christopher St and the Stonewall Inn, among other places. I had a few beers and bought the t-shirt and chatted to some people, including the 78 yr old barman, Tree, who was on the dance floor the night of the first riot in 1969. The area around Christopher Park and the Stonewall Inn was made into a national monument by Obama, as it should be. I felt very moved being there. And very conscious of how much has changed – in some parts of the world – and how much has still to change. But also how nothing really changes, initially, through being polite, by saying please, by promising not to rock the boat, by promising not to make the powers that be uncomfortable.

I chatted at the bar to Patricia, who comes to the Inn by subway from New Jersey a few times a week. She just started wearing women’s clothing on the outside a couple of years ago, after a lifetime of wearing lingerie under her suit. And Pete, who’s married and loves his wife, but likes to be touched by men – though not actual sex, you understand (which just about broke my fucking heart). He lies to his wife and his grandchildren about where he goes after work. And Fernando who is enjoying living in a different country to his family because he can finally relax and feel like himself.

Yes I want equal marriage but I agree with the fundamentalist Christians – it is the thin end of the wedge. At least I hope it is. Marriage will change. Society will change. This will pave the way – eventually – for group marriages, or no marriages, for time limited marriages, marriages between people who are neither man nor woman and don’t see the need to choose. Between people who don’t own each other and don’t need to be walked down the aisle or given away. And hooray for that. And yes, I hope it does mean a boy can go to school in a dress and kids can put on a play and act husband and husband or wife and wife and no one would bat an eye. The revolution has not gone far enough if it doesn’t go that far. I though about all of that on the walk back to my hotel room.

So I want to say thank you to the sissies and the fags and the stone butches and the drag queens and the rent boys and the dykes and the queers that said enough is enough and threw bricks and lit fires and took back the street. How beautiful and proud they were! Let’s keep it queer, to honour them. Yes it’s about getting married, but it’s also about Patricia being safe on the subway ride home and Pete being able to talk to his family about where he goes and why and Fernando not having to move countries to be comfortable being himself. It’s not about being just like the norm! It’s about problematising all of it – gender, sexuality, desire, love – queering it all up. Yes you fuckers marriage equality will mean that boys may be encouraged to go to school in a dress if that’s what the boy feels like doing!

It was a good walk home.

Marcus Garvey Park

So a mutual friend introduced me to the lovely Cynthia (pictured immediately below), who has lived in Harlem for the last 30 years, and NYC all her life. Cynthia works near where I’m staying in Gramercy Park and was kind enough to come pick me up and take me via subway to a spoken word poetry event in one of Harlem’s historic parks, Marcus Garvey Park. She is a member of the Marcus Garvey Park Alliance (MGPA), and the event was held in order to launch the third lending library box the MGPA has installed in the park.

I’ve noticed that New Yorkers really use their parks – they eat lunch in them, they read, they chat, they jog and ride their bikes, they just sit and soak up the sun – and Marcus Garvey Park seemed to be no exception. There were plenty of homeless people, as usual (every park I’ve been to so far has plenty of homeless people) but also plenty of other adults and kids just hanging out enjoying a cool evening and chatting with their neighbours. On Saturdays, apparently, a whole lot of drummers come together to jam, and there’s also a small farmers market and some community garden beds.

The poets were amazing. Fierce, funny, angry, tender, very witty. It was electric. Not once did I want to cut my ears off with a blunt knife, which I have been known to want to do at spoken word events in Melbourne (they’re not usually one of my favourite pastimes). But these guys were terrific – confident, experienced, clearly drawing on a long history of spoken word craft. I particularly loved Elisabet Velasquez. She totally rocked. But Kraal Charles, Parlay and Iyaba Ibo Mandingo were also great. All were drawing strongly from their identities as African American, or female, or Latina.

Afterwards I went with Cynthia and a few of her friends to eat pizza at a place on Malcolm X Boulevard. The brownstones we passed on the way were glorious, the Boulevard wide and grand. The pizza place excellent. The talk at dinner was of the politics of art funding and how to negotiate the local political tensions between majority Latino East Harlem and African American Central Harlem when it came to art projects. And of cats. And new houses in the country. Someone said at one stage how glad she was that there had been no talk of Trump, for a change.

It was a lovely evening. Good poetry, good food, nice people and a beautiful part of town. Thank you, Cynthia.