Breakfast At The Exit Cafe Part 15

Wayne and I do this a lot: look at a place for its move-to potential, even though we are perfectly happy living in eastern Ontario. It's a way of gauging the feeling of a town, I suppose. And this one feels good. It's small enough that there aren't sidewalks in front of the houses: the lawns just feather out toward the road. In place of gaudy signposts, the red-brick streets are inset with bra.s.s wedges that say, ever-so-genteelly, Stop and Keep Right. We watch a pair of mockingbirds eating supper at a blue-berried shrub and follow a drift of white-throated sparrows through the cypresses to the bayou. At one time, Mary told me, there were canary cages hanging under the front verandah of the Excelsior; it was called the Canary Hotel then. The only singing I've heard so far, though, was from the black girl was.h.i.+ng the windows on the balcony above our sunroom, rolling, joyful hymns that I savoured as we ate our grits and eggs and orange-blossom m.u.f.fins.

I expect Wayne to say he loves it here, too, but he says nothing. He doesn't have to. His face is a mask of unease at this sudden plunge into America's Deep South.

11 / SELMALABAMA.

MID-MORNING, I get ready to leave Jefferson, but with reluctance.

"I wish I'd looked at the real estate listings," I say as we put our things back into the car. We're wearing shorts and T-s.h.i.+rts. The sun, at last, is almost hot. The only thing we have to do now is find a laundromat.

"Why didn't you?" Wayne asks.

"I guess I didn't want to be tempted." Lee Marvin told us he'd come for a day, stayed for a week, and ended up buying the coffee shop. Lord only knows what would happen if we took our suitcases back into the Diamond Bessie Suite.

But seeing Wayne's disquiet is making me look at Jefferson with new eyes. At the local laundromat, all the women are black. All the housekeeping and wait staff I saw at the hotel were black. In the restaurants, the busboys and cooks, but not the bartenders or waitresses, were black.

Is this evidence of a colour line? Too small a sample to tell, perhaps, but something in the way the maid kept her eyes lowered and punctuated every item with "Yes, ma'am" as the thin white woman listed her jobs for the day made me think she was exhibiting more than simple southern courtesy.

The women at the laundromat don't seem to be doing their own wash. Their loads are huge batches of white sheets and towels and mattress covers. I put our few things in the washer and walk across the street for a doughnut.

An Asian woman and her son appear to be operating the place. "Cake or regular?" she says.

"Cake," I reply, pointing to a chocolate glazed with crushed peanuts. I feel suddenly nostalgic for Tim Hortons. Hippocrates observed that whenever people from one country travel to another, they are often beset with a debilitating la.s.situde. From this, the father of modern medicine concluded that people absorb topographic influences from their place of birth and that separation from them can be injurious to health. He called this la.s.situde "nostalgia," from the Greek nostos, to return, and algos, to suffer. I'm not actually suffering; it's just that doughnuts, for me, have more to do with Canada than with the Deep South.

Back at the laundromat, the women have moved outside to gossip with a man who has just quit smoking.

"I can breathe!" he exclaims with the fervour of the converted. "In just two days, I can breathe good again."

The laundromat is large and clean and empty. Nothing much to do but read the notices on the bulletin board at the back. An offering of recycled lumber, a hunter green matching sofa and chair. A small poster advertising a Dream Walk on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, three days from now.

There are candy machines and beside them, as if placed there as a deterrent, a weigh scale. I put in a quarter and stand very still, as the machine directs. The numbers creep upward until I step off in horror. I have gained ten pounds: all those hash browns. The machine grinds on, spitting out my lucky lottery numbers for the day-30, 16, 64-and finally my fortune: "Things will be better tomorrow."

I move our clothes to a dryer and, from the rack of religious pamphlets, pluck a book of Christian prayers for all occasions. I thumb through it as we head out of town. There are no prayers for fat travellers about to have a bad day. No prayers for travellers at all.

WE take Highway 2 to avoid the interstate, leaving Texas as we entered it, and cross into Louisiana near Caddo Lake, an eerie stretch of water that spans the border of Louisiana and northeastern Texas. Together with Big Cypress Bayou, Caddo Lake and its surrounding wetlands cover some thirty thousand acres of prime bird habitat. This morning, it is a study in grey: silvery bald cypress trunks rise from mercury-slick waters; moss like heron's wings waves desultorily, though I can see no breeze. Maybe there are birds in the branches. I'm glad we're not here in summer, when the place must buzz with Jet Skis and fishermen. Looking out over the still waters, it's not inconceivable we're the first people on earth-or the last.

I'm wondering what birds might be tucked into the recesses among the trees when suddenly a huge black-and-white-and-red bird dips across the road.

"An ivory-billed!" I call out, braking hard. The ivory-billed woodp.e.c.k.e.r has not been seen for fifty years-the last confirmed sighting was in Louisiana in 1944-but last year a canoeist reported a sighting in Arkansas, not that far north of here. Part of me, the same part that is not entirely an atheist, wants to believe that it isn't impossible that I could be the one to positively identify the last remaining ivory-billed on earth. We are in dense mangrove swamp country, more water than land, Spanish moss hanging from skeletal trees rising from murk and disappearing into mist. Definitely ivory-billed territory.

"Why couldn't it be an ivory-billed?" I say to Merilyn, backing up the car and scanning the trees. In Cuba, I heard a recording of the ivory-billed's call, which sounds like an alien distress signal coming from some distant part of the galaxy.

By the time we get out of the car, the bird, whatever it was, is long gone.

"Pileated," Merilyn writes in her notebook.

We stop for gas at a small convenience store in the middle of the mist-grey forest. Rain, or possibly overflow from the swamp, has turned the yard in front of the store into a Rorschach of ruts. A single pump stands in the middle like a small lighthouse, the hose trailing on the ground. From the shelter of the store's doorway, a black man in grey coveralls watches me, smoking a cigarette. When he makes no move toward the pump, I a.s.sume it's self-serve, so I get out and pick up the hose. There is no nozzle at the end of it. The man nods and waves us on.

The feeling here is of a once-verdant land now overgrown and swamped, the world immediately after the Flood. We are only a few miles from Greenwood, the boyhood home of John Bentley Mays, the Canadian writer and art critic who spent the first eighteen years of his life in Louisiana. In his memoir Power in the Blood, he writes of Greenwood in the 1940s, when his father was a merchant and cotton plantation owner, as a kind of earthly paradise. The house he grew up in after his father's death in 1947 was surrounded by "traditional Southern plantings: shade-giving pecans and low figs and taller chinaberry trees and mimosas, flowering redbuds and fruit trees, nandina bushes with bright red berries, and abounding roses." By the time his Aunt Vandalia died, however, in 1990, the grounds had grown to ruin, overtaken by weeds and poisonous snakes and Virginia creeper, like the woods around Snow White; and now, driving through similar towns and the dark woods between them, it is as though the decay that began in Aunt Vandalia's garden has crept out to engulf all of Louisiana, perhaps the whole South.

MOORINGSPORT. Plain Dealing. Whynot. The names of the towns on the map spread over my knees are forthright. Nothing at all like the wild optimism of those who settled the area where we live. Newbliss. Prospect. Sweets Corners. (Delta, Harlem, and Charleston are also within a half-hour's drive of our house in Ontario: Canadians, in a.s.signing place names, indulge in either nostalgia for where they've come from or unbridled ambition for where they find themselves.) The speed limit in Louisiana drops to a lackadaisical fifty-five. The Don't Mess with Texas signs have been replaced with Don't Trash Louisiana, but everybody seems to anyway. The roadsides are white with fast-food throwaways or, as they are called here, to-go boxes.

Louisiana is a revelation, not only because of the bilingual sign that welcomes us: Bienvenue en Louisiane. After a few miles of moss-draped swamps, we emerge into forested hills: the northern part of the state is-or used to be-a swath of pineries. This is where the South came for the lumber to rebuild after the Civil War. In 1895, Louisiana's stock of standing timber was surpa.s.sed only by that of the Pacific Coast and Idaho. Virgin stands of longleaf, shortleaf, and loblolly pine, cypress, and hardwood covered some 25,000 square miles. By the beginning of the First World War, this sliver of a state led all others in lumber production.

Today, lumbering isn't even listed as a major industry, though obviously Louisiana is still cutting down trees. Palisades of tall conifers flank the road, a screen that almost, but not quite, hides the rough, grey slash of total clear-cut behind. Here and there regrowth has begun, a fur of green, too dense and random to be a replanted forest. Louisianians seem to prefer to leave Nature to look after herself, prolific old dame that she is.

I draw our yellow highlighter line through the town of Trees, which consists of two churches and a boarded-up catfish shop, clear-cut trailing off in all directions, oil donkeys nodding here and there among the stumps. Later, we pa.s.s through Forest, which is marked by the same denuded landscape, though the town is more prosperous, a huge lumberyard parked under the water tower, where the town's name is freshly stencilled, apparently without irony.

We take a back road through farm country to pick up US 80 again. At a crossroads deep in the countryside, we come upon three people sprawled in the roadside litter: an old man, a boy, and a toothless woman. They have margarine containers between their legs and are scrabbling in the dead leaves under a twisted and soaring ancient tree.

"Stop! Wayne! Please!"

I roll down my window.

"Hi there," I call out.

"How y'all doin?" the woman drawls, leaning back. This is the standard Louisiana greeting. Not h.e.l.lo, but an immediate inquiry into the state of your well-being.

"Good, good," I say, oddly touched that she's asked. It seems an antidote to the dire prediction of the weigh scale in the laundromat. "What are you picking?"

"P'cans," she says, opening the vowel wide and lifting the end of the word the way people here do, not in a California Valley girl upspeak sort of way, but in a singsong, a wavy vocal line that invites you to ask for the rest of the story.

"Can I see? What do they look like?" Apart from our salvaged California almonds, the only nut I've ever picked is a walnut, which comes encased in a big, hard, fuzzy fruit the size and shape of a lime-green tennis ball.

The woman opens her dark fist to the nuts that lie smooth and mottled in her pale palm. They look like big runner beans, nothing at all like the mahogany-coloured nuts we buy at Christmas in our northern grocery stores. She sifts through the leaf litter and picks up another, as if to prove their provenance.

"What do you do with them?" I ask. I'm thinking pecan salad, pecan soup, pecan pie.

"Ah sells 'em."

I try again. "Do you have to sh.e.l.l them?"

"No ma'am, ah jist sells 'em."

ALL ALONG the road we pa.s.s signs that declare We Buy Pecans. I finally get my chance at the Piggly Wiggly where we stop for gas. (I also purchase a can of Jack Daniel's Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey & Cola for Wayne and a double-wrapped half-loaf of bread for our lunch.) I scoop the nuts from a bushel basket, $2.49 a pound. They are sweet and crisp, better than any pecan I've ever tasted. But not as satisfying, I think, as what I might have had from that old woman, had I the courage to ask.

I am keen to buy local produce, to see what grows in the gardens here. The tables of the South, in my mind, groan under a bounty of exotic fare-hominy grits, gumbo, okra, collard greens, mirliton, crawfish, gator, frogs' legs, racc.o.o.n, squirrel, shoofly pie-but other than catfish stands and nuts, we see little unusual agricultural produce. In fact, everything about Louisiana seems familiar. The houses here are just like those at home, ordered, it seems, from the same generic North American catalogue of house plans. The roads are surfaced and striped and signed just the same. People dress like we do, eat like we do. Only the accents are different. If you drive through, never talking to a soul, you could be driving through just about anywhere, except for the parish signs. Louisiana is the only state of the Union divided into parishes instead of counties, just as Quebec is the only province in Canada to hang onto its parishes, too.

Anthills erupt like nipples along the shoulders of the road. The trees are mostly oaks now, nothing exotic about that, but they are festooned with b.a.l.l.s of mistletoe. Near Shongaloo, I stop to take a picture of narcissi blooming along the roadside. The gra.s.s has the fresh, green sheen of spring. We are driving with the windows down-in January.

"That's nothing like home," I say.

Hippocrates was wrong, I think: we expect difference when we travel. Crave it, in fact. Wayne and I are vaguely disappointed that the birds here are all the usual species that populate our woods-meadowlarks, cardinals, blue jays, kingfishers, yellow-shafted flickers, red-tailed hawks, turkey vultures.

"Similar landscapes breed similar flora and fauna," Wayne shrugs. "Similar people, too."

Maybe it's true. When I think of Louisiana, I think of Steel Magnolias, by Robert Harling, whose home town was Natchitoches, about an hour south of Shreveport. The movie, with its complex cast of female characters, was shot in and around Natchitoches, but the original stage play took place entirely in Truvy's beauty shop. I grew up in small-town southwestern Ontario, not small-town northwestern Louisiana, but I knew those gossiping, fluffy, tough-as-steel-spikes women. I've been to those funerals where you can't stop laughing at the jokes that break your heart.

Since that movie, I've thought of Louisiana as frank and female, the kind of place where friends are loyal and family is forever, and you can rely on someone to say to you with sharp kindness, "Honey, time marches on and eventually you realize it is marchin' across your face."

WHEN we approach the Mississippi River on Highway 2, Merilyn is driving and I'm navigating, an ominous combination. Merilyn wants to cross the river in daylight, so we are speeding. On the map, just before the river, Highway 2 joins up with the I-20. I remember crossing the Colorado River on the I-40 and not being able to see anything, so I am happy to note that there is a little town called Delta that appears to be on the west bank, off the interstate; maybe there's another way across, a lower bridge, or even a ferry. Merilyn is dubious. I tell her that a pilot has to trust her navigator. She tells me that I am quoting the movie t.i.tanic.

By this time, we're at the spot where the highway veers right to merge with the interstate, and I see another, smaller road meandering on, presumably into Delta. At the last minute I say, "Go straight, go straight," and, flummoxed, she does. Cars whir by above us on the interstate as we pick our way gingerly along the rutted track leading toward a stand of dark trees that I take to be the riverbank. Delta turns out to be a collection of trailers cl.u.s.tered around a bar, which is also a trailer, and the dark trees flank a muddy irrigation ditch that even I cannot convince myself is the Mississippi River. By now "dubious" is not quite the right word to describe Merilyn's state of mind. Ignoring the recommendation of her navigator, she does a neat, three-point turn in the bar's sodden parking lot and drives back the way we came.

"Emerson writes somewhere," I say archly, "that crossing the Mississippi at night is one of the seminal experiences in American life."

"You're making that up," Merilyn says.

"No, I'm not. He crossed it farther north, though," I say. "Wisconsin or somewhere, in winter. He was rowed across the ice in a skiff."

"At night? "

We're on the bridge, though it's now too dark to sense anything below us but a black presence, as of a living thing in the glistening darkness. A troll beneath the bridge. Old Man River, rolling along. "What is the Mississippi," Kerouac asked, "a washed clod in the rainy night . . . a voyaging past endless vales and trees and levees, down along, down along . . ."

I roll down the window, lean my head out into the wind, but all I hear is interstate. Appropriate, I suppose, since we are exactly halfway between Louisiana and Mississippi, about as interstate as you can get. I feel like an ant crawling across the belly of a dark, slithering reptile.

On the Mississippi side of the river, we are immediately struck by the glare of lights from the casinos in Vicksburg. In 1863, Vicksburg was the scene of one of two decisive battles of the Civil War. The Union army, under General Ulysses S. Grant, laid siege to the town until its commander surrendered, on July 4, 1863. One day earlier, the Union had defeated General Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and the fall of Vicksburg gave the North control of the Mississippi. The citizens of Vicksburg refused to celebrate the Fourth of July until 1942.

Grant became involved in Vicksburg again in 1874, when as president he had to send in troops to quell the Vicksburg Ma.s.sacre. That year, blacks were given the vote for the first time, and they had the audacity to elect ten black officials, including the county sheriff. White citizens went on a rampage, murdering more than three hundred blacks. After the ma.s.sacre, armed white vigilantes formed a group called the Red s.h.i.+rts, which organized a campaign to discourage blacks from voting ever again. The black sheriff, who was run out of town during the rioting, returned and was shot by his white deputy. Though banned, Red s.h.i.+rt groups spread to North and South Carolina, where they called themselves "rifle clubs."

It's suppertime, and we briefly contemplate the prospect of eating in one of the casinos that line the top of the bluff like storm-tossed riverboats, then decide to try our luck in town instead. It is Sunday night. The main street is lined with little shops and cafes, everything closed up tight. We reach the end of the business section and are about to turn back when Merilyn says, "Let's go one more block."

It looks dark to me, beyond the reach of the downtown street lamps. But we have a tendency to give up too soon, to turn back just before the right road or the perfect hotel. So I keep going, and sure enough, at the end of the street we find a restaurant full of people. Rusty's Riverfront Grill. The restaurant is hopping. There's even a parking s.p.a.ce right in front. We join a lineup of eight ahead of us, two groups of four, but a waitress greets us, takes my first name, and says we can sit at the bar until a table comes free. Have we crossed into some travellers' Valhalla, I wonder, or do we just look old and travel-worn? The bartender shows us the menu, recommends the Gulf grouper, and brings us drinks. She is a young black woman, and there are several black customers at the tables. The atmosphere is cheerful and friendly, but I can't help wondering how many of these diners and servers are descended from members of the rifle clubs and their victims. Whose great-grandfathers hanged whose outside the churches and the polling booths? After all, doesn't the inscription on the memorial to the Confederate dead in Oxford, Mississippi, still exhort modern Southern whites to "unite in this justification of their fathers' faith"? What justification?

"Escape from history is impossible," wrote John Bentley Mays after his visit to Mississippi in search of his Southern roots, "hence immoral to imagine."

MY, isn't it a beautiful day!" the tall black man booms as he enters the lobby of the motel. We'd driven out of Vicksburg after dinner, looking for a cheap place to stay after our Jefferson extravaganza, and have ended up at this very nice Budget Inn outside Jackson, Mississippi. The Wi-Fi doesn't extend to our room, but we are happily set up in the little lobby at one of the breakfast tables, coffee and m.u.f.fins at our side, our computers flipped open, Wayne checking in on his students, me electronically calling home.

"Good mornin', y'all," he says, spotting us. He's built like a football player, but it turns out he's a plumber from San Antonio, Texas. "We're just driving back from Georgia. It's warmer there than it's ever been. Our son called and says he's comin' to visit, but we put the dog in the kennel and said, No, we'll come to you, that way you can do the cookin'!"

He turns to the clerk behind the reception desk. "Y'all know what's goin' on in Jackson today? We're tired of driving."

While she shakes her head, I Google.

"There's a parade," I say. "Wayne! There's a parade!"

I love parades. They make me cry.

"It starts at Freedom Corner, where Medgar Evers Boulevard meets Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive." The names thrust me into a time warp: I'm fourteen, weeping in front of the television, my father telling me to get cleaned up for dinner. In 1963, Medgar Evers boycotted stores and helped desegregate the University of Mississippi, then died from a bullet in his back as he carried a stack of T-s.h.i.+rts with the slogan "Jim Crow Must Go." Two southern juries deadlocked trying to bring a verdict against the fertilizer salesman who shot him; he wasn't convicted until 1994. In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot face-on, standing on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, after giving a speech. "I've been to the mountaintop," he'd told the crowd that night, "and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"

"All right, then!" the man exclaims. He gets directions from the clerk, and when she's shown us both the way on her desktop map, he asks, "Where y'all from?"

She's Pakistani, maybe Indian. She smiles shyly. "Huntsville, Texas."

"My son lives in Huntsville, Canada," I say.

"Well, then," the man laughs, opening his arms to include the whole room. "We're all of us connected!"

FREEDOM CORNER is blocked off. We inch down side streets clogged with men on horseback, young people with s.h.i.+ny band instruments, girls in sequined bathing suits and knee-high white ta.s.selled boots. We park behind a beauty parlour with a sign advertising Best Cold Braids in the World and make our way back to where the parade is forming. A trio of bongo drummers keeps up a steady beat as the high school bands and majorettes pa.s.s, trucks and cars bursting with politicians who toss handfuls of candies and crayons into the crowd. Hand-lettered signs taped to the trucks' windows say Happy B-Day, Dr. K. On the side of one truck, above a photograph of King, two plush monkeys, one brown, one white, grip the edge of an open window as if they're doing chin-ups.

The music is exhilarating. In high school, I was in a marching band. I twirled a fake wooden rifle as I marched ahead of the musicians. For two hours every Wednesday we perfected our moves, stepping high, eyes right, presenting our instruments in stiff jerks, like British soldiers with bayonets. But we never marched like these kids: they boogie down the street, jiving with their trumpets. Girls in sparkly bathing suits shake their boodies, doing dance routines that would make my mother blush.

There are hundreds of people standing at this corner, hundreds more in the parade, the biggest Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade in the United States. The joy is palpable. Parents bend to their kids, helping them scoop up the treats the politicians throw from their cars. Everyone seems to know each other; they seem to know us. They smile and wave and step out of the way with a grin when I try to take a mini-movie of one of the dance routines.

It's only as we turn to leave that I realize: for the past two hours, mine has been the only white face in the crowd.

WE cross the Alabama River at night, as we seem to have crossed most of America's great rivers. Our room in the elegant St. James Hotel, in Selma, Alabama, has a balcony overlooking the expanse of slow, muddy water, so that is where we sit the next morning in the warm suns.h.i.+ne, reading and drinking coffee sent up from the kitchen. Selma, we've learned, is hardly ever mentioned without identifying the state it's in. Even in Selma, it's not Selma, it's Selma, Alabama. In fact, the comma is usually dropped, so it comes out all in a rush: Selmalabama.

The St. James Hotel is a Spanish colonial building, a square of rooms surrounding a covered courtyard that contains a waterfall and a sprinkling of tables and chairs. Apart from Veronica, the desk clerk, we are its only inhabitants. We have the run of the place. When I tire of reading, I wander the halls, explore the large, empty conference rooms, go through unlocked doors into deserted chambers filled with ancient linen presses and tarnished champagne buckets and through those onto a wide, open patio where the winter sun plays off the river running a few feet below the wrought-iron railing. To my left is a block of dilapidated buildings; almost every building on this street is falling down or about to. Veronica tells us there was a fine-dining restaurant next door to the hotel, on the top floor, but the roof collapsed just two nights ago. It and most of the other buildings are boarded up, but some still have ground-floor shops in them. The window of an antique store on Water Avenue is a diorama of stuffed animals and wildfowl of about the same vintage as the dodo: dusty woodc.o.c.ks amid tufts of dead gra.s.s, faded mallards dangling from rusted wires, ragged racc.o.o.ns perched on punky logs. Touring the hotel, I am struck by the sense that we are now pa.s.sing through a land of collapse and decay. Not Eliot's wasteland, perhaps-that was the desert-but something just as primal: the domain of the Fisher King.

To our right, above the hotel's silhouette, the Edmund Pettus Bridge arcs over the Alabama River like a diamond ring on a wrinkled brown finger.

Of the many changes in postwar culture in the American South that John Bentley Mays writes about-faceless suburbs engulfing once-cozy small towns, filled mostly with strangers; new, largely evangelical religions disrupting the calm of the traditional churches; the decline of the middle cla.s.s in the social establishment-none, he says, "proved more alarming than the eruption of the civil rights movement." To many in the South, "it was 1865 all over again"; an essentially northern phenomenon visited upon the segregationist order into which the South had settled following its calamitous defeat in the Civil War.

But it wasn't really 1865 all over again; it was 1974. White-skinned Southerners understood Martin Luther King, Jr. They knew what King wanted and they knew how to keep him from getting it-the same way their red-s.h.i.+rted forebears had dealt with the problem in the 1870s, though perhaps with less violence. (As governor of Alabama in the 1960s, George Wallace prevented black citizens from voting by, among other things, requiring them to pa.s.s fraudulent "literacy tests.") What Southern whites didn't understand, what truly shattered their world view, was how white politicians and churchmen-some of them, like President Lyndon Johnson, Southerners themselves-could side with King and his followers.

In 1964, only 10 per cent of the South's 14 million blacks pa.s.sed George Wallace's "literacy tests" and were allowed to register to vote. In Selma, which was 57 per cent black, only 1 per cent of the black population was permitted to register. According to the Fifteenth Amendment, preventing any American citizen from voting for any reason is a federal offence. The underlying principle of democracy isn't majority rule, it's that everyone gets to have an equal say. But "Southern states controlled all the mechanisms for enforcing federal laws," writes black historian Tavis Smiley. "So it's not a matter of conjecture on my part that those states ignored the Supreme Court and the U.S. Const.i.tution. They did."

In Selma, black students who tried to register automatically failed their courses; black employees were told that if they registered they would lose their jobs; black homeowners would find their mortgages suddenly called in by the banks.

On Sunday, March 7, 1965, six hundred black people gathered at Tabernacle Baptist Church, on Broad Street, Selma's main thoroughfare, to begin a march to Montgomery, the state capital, sixty-four miles away along Highway 80, then known as Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway. They were marching to protest the denial of their right to vote but also in response to the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a black man beaten to death by police while trying to register.

George Wallace declared the march illegal. White store owners on Broad Street stoned the marchers as they pa.s.sed, and state troopers and local police met them at the Pettus Bridge with tear gas, billy clubs, and bullwhips. Images of women and children left wounded and lying in the street on "b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday" were broadcast across North America on television and in newspapers-Merilyn remembers watching footage of the attacks, but in our house, the television must have been off that day. Sixty-five people were admitted into the two Selma hospitals that accepted blacks. When a follow-up march was called for March 21, this time led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and with protection from the United States Army, more than eight thousand people showed up, including some sympathetic whites. By the time the marchers reached Montgomery on the twenty-fifth, they were 25,000 strong. King had turned a negative into a positive: just as the defeat of Vicksburg had been the turning point in the Civil War, the victory at Selma, Alabama, was the turning point in the civil rights movement.

When we ask Veronica where we should eat breakfast, she sends us to a diner on Selma Avenue called the Downtowner. We walk up Broad, pa.s.sing more derelict buildings, but fewer of them closed, and turn right on Selma until we reach the Downtowner. The white waitress, wearing a bright, jailbird-orange T-s.h.i.+rt with "Y'all behave!" scripted across the back, waves us toward the booths by the window.

"Y'all sit anywhere you like," she calls cheerfully. "Don't matter, I'll find you."

The centre tables have been joined together to accommodate a group of ten large, older white men, who seem to have settled in for the day, while other men pop in and out as their schedules permit. The talk is loud and in a Southern drawl we find hard to decipher: I guess at truck models and hunting paraphernalia, but I could be wrong. As we eat our eggs and chunky, deep-fried hash browns, a tall, thin white man in overalls comes in and hands around a box of metal objects for the group's inspection; porch-swing brackets, it turns out, but there are no takers. Another produces a box of blueberry and peach preserves. This is met with more enthusiasm. "My wife Hannah will love you for this," one of the permanent men says. Then a black man comes through the door, and the conversation is suspended while he orders a cup of coffee to go. The waitress serves him silently; he pays for the coffee and leaves without looking into the room.

"How are the hash browns?" I ask Merilyn, wanting to hear the sound of her voice.

"I wonder how many of these guys were throwing stones in 1965," she says quietly.

Quite often we think exactly the same thing.

MY binoculars-where are they?" Wayne asks, bursting into our room at the St. James, where I am reading about the March to Montgomery. "I've just seen an amazing yellow bird with a wide red tail."

History and natural history. Collusion and collision. One way or another, they're always vying with each other for our attention.

Back on the terrace, we spot two of the birds. Wayne identifies them as northern flickers, or yellowhammers, the state bird of Alabama. Alabamans are called Yellowhammers, the way folks from Indiana are called Hoosiers. Apparently, during the Civil War, when the battalion from Alabama joined the Confederate army, they had smart new grey uniforms with yellow flashes on their epaulets.