MS Day 4 - Civil Wars, Civil Rights, Civil Engineering, and Serious Setbacks
Today started with a trip to Fusion Coffeehouse in Ridgeland. The coffee shop was really cozy and vaguely jazz and blues themed which was cool. I got a coffee and a sausage and cheese biscuit. The coffee was good, but the biscuit was incredible. What we call biscuits up in New England just can't compete.
My first stop for the day was back in Vicksburg at the Lower Mississippi River Museum. Since I got my first good look at the river yesterday, I decided it couldn't hurt to actually learn a little bit about it. It was really interesting for a museum to be centered around a river, because it ended up being a mishmash of different kinds of museums as it discussed all the different facets of the Big Muddy including its history, the nature in and around it, and the technology it generated both through inspiration and more literally through hydroelectricity. The museum begins with a small fountain highlighting the Mississippi and its four tributaries, which really gives you a feel for just how darn big this thing is.
The next chunk of the museum focused on the evolution of travel along the river from the first dugout canoes to more modern ships. These were all illustrated through neat little dioramas. My favorite was of the river rafts because they reminded me of the sense of whimsy and adventure I associate with Huck Finn, without any of that pesky moral ambiguity. The fact I was most surprised to learn from this chunk was that Native Americans were able to make canoes capable of holding as many as fifty people!
After reading about the different boats, I played an interactive choose your own adventure game where you got play as different characters trying to make it down the river to New Orleans. Somehow I don't think I won, but I do love that this was even an option.
The next chunk was on the history of the Army Corps of Engineers, and their attempts to safely control the river. Learning about the science of efficiently creating levees that protected both the people and the wildlife around the river was really interesting, and not something I'd seriously thought about. Unfortunately some of the most important insights gained were only after some pretty terrible mistakes. These mistakes were the focus of the next little bit of the museum about the Great Flood of 1927. After heavy rains all through the summer of 1926, the Mississippi reached a recored height of 56 ft 2 in (still unmatched to this day). All down the the length of the river, there was a total of at least 145 different levee breaks leading to 27,000 sq. miles of flooding and more than 700,000 people left homeless. The vast majority of those left homeless were poor and/or African American and racism was unfortunately a large factor in the response to the tragedy adding even more suffering to a natural disaster. Worse yet, evidence later suggested that the government tried to cover the cruel and unequal treatment black families received in migrant camps. The photos from this section were really powerful but also heartbreaking. On the more positive and life-affirming side, great humanitarian efforts, most notably from the Red Cross, actually led to there being very little loss of life relative to the destruction of crops and property.
On a totally different note all together, the next thing in the museum was actually an aquarium, filled with native fish species. What better antidote to national tragedies, than watching big dopey turtles and catfish just sort of plop around for a bit? Look I didn't say it was a perfect solution, but it was the best available.
The last part of the museum was also probably the coolest, because just across a small bridge from the main building was the massive Motor Vessel Mississippi IV for you to explore. The MVMSIV was the first diesel powered vessel used by Army Corps of Engineers, and it patrolled the river for over 30 years, delivering equipment and materials to different Corps project sites. I was most surprised by how swanky the boat was and even though the rooms were fairly small, it honestly didn't seem like that bad a place to be cooped up in if you had to live on a River for a bit. It was absolutely massive too, and almost all of it accessible to poke around in, and there were all kinds of cool gadgets ranging from the super impressive to the super outdated. I'm looking at you floppy disc drive.
My favorite part though was easily this far too meticulously recreated model of pancakes.
Right down the street from the River Museum was the Old Depot Museum. As the name suggests, the museum was in the old railroad depot building, but it actually wasn't really about trains so much as it was about Vicksburg history and the history of transportation around the Mississippi River more broadly. Don't worry though, trains were not excluded and the first big exhibit hall had two different functioning model train sets as well as other models of notable trains and boats from the region. The models were so meticulously well made. I like learning from models because the history is cool, but they're also such labors of love from the people who worked so hard on making them just right. My favorite one was of a horse powered ferry because it looks insanely goofy and impractical. The poor horse must have been so confused by that predicament.
Next up there was a showcase of different architectural styles found in Mississippi. I liked that they included one room Delta shacks as well as opulent mansions. The most interesting fact from this bit of the museum was that the Windsor Mansion, the largest Antebellum Mansion ever built, was destroyed by a fire started by just one cigar. It. Kind of a David and Goliath story.
There was also several cases honoring the more recent military history including collections of different Navy patches, which I really liked because of all the different ways they tried to make fish look tough and scary without using a shark, easily the most bad ass of all fish. I guess that would have been too easy.
The next room had an absolutely incredible diorama of the Battle of Vicksburg, which was one of, if not the, turning point in the war for the Union. It was so massive and thoroughly researched with little annotations all around it, giving you key people and places. They also had little replicas of all the major warships from the Civil War in cases on either side of the diorama.
My favorite part of the museum though was that along the walls they had paintings by a guy named Herb Mott of major naval battles of the Civil War, with little descriptions of each one. I loved these, because not only was the art great, but I couldn't believe how little I knew about this whole aspect of the war. I think in general most pop culture narratives of the Civil War kind of ignore the Western front entirely even though it was pretty crucial.I remember learning about major Western battles and the development of ironclads, but I didn't know how intense and interesting all the smaller battles were. I learned one of my new favorite war stories ever from these paintings about a Union admiral named David Porter and some unconventional tactics. Things were not looking good for the admiral. The confederacy had just managed to sink an d capture a Union Ironclad called the USS Indianola, but they had not yet had time to salvage weapons and supplies from it. Worse yet, if they were able to repair it, they would have a huge naval advantage over the Union. Porter had to act quickly, but he didn't have any Ironclads or similarly powerful ships to challenge the confederates. So he made one up. He and his crew got a big wide commercial raft, and made a fake hull painted black to look like iron. Then they built a fake chimney and started just a regular campfire underneath it so it would look powerful and intimidating billowing down the Red River. In one of the ballsiest moves anyone has ever done ever, Porter and his men charged at the Confederacy with this fake ship. And it worked! The ship seemed so massive and imposing that the Confederates were sure it wouldn't be worth challenging, so they set fire to the Indianola without getting anything from it and fled. When they looked the next morning to see this horrible new warship, they instead found the hoax with the words "Deluded People, Cave in!' painted on it. Porter had regained control of the river, prevented an Ironclad from switching sides, and got in a solid old-timey burn all without a single shot fired or loss of life. That's just incredible.
After leaving the Old Depot, I decided to go another coffee for the day. As I was walking along the train tracks, I saw these pretty impressive murals along the levees celebrating different aspects of Mississippi culture and history. If you've got big slabs of concrete, why not make 'em pretty.
The cool art continued as I went to the coffee shop, Highway 61 Coffee House. I mainly wanted to go their because it reminded me of Bob Dylan, but the coffee was very good and right above the store was an outsider art gallery called the Attic Gallery. You know I can't just see a sign like this and not check it out.
The gallery ended up being great! It did not disappoint on the promised unusual either. There were buckets of fake lobsters, creepy ceramic faces, bedazzled Elvis ironing boars, robots made out of tartar sauce tins, and more than a few legitimately beautiful paintings. There was certainly no limits on creative uses of people's time and recyclables.
My two favorite pieces (I did not write down the artists' names unfortunately) were sort of non traditional paintings. Both had frames and traditionally painted and drawn backdrops but one had a completely three dimensional clay head in it and the other used collage, photographs, and other mixed media to paint a portrait of two young Black children holding hands. The former I found incredibly technically impressive, and the latter I found powerfully sweet.
My last stop in Vicksburg was also probably my most unusual: The Grave of Douglas the Confederate Camel. Yup, the confederacy had a camel and named him Douglas. I'm not sure which part of that is more surprising. Apparently he was given as a gift to Colonel, and faithfully served as a pack animal in several conflicts before being intentionally gun downed by Union snipers to demoralize the troops. The gravestone was filled with some incredible turns of phrase including "Douglas at first frightened all the 43rd's horses, but soon became a favorite of both beasts and men" and "He may have been eaten by starving Confederates. Douglas' death was greatly mourned". It is just a such a shame that war makes everyone choose sides, even camels.
Because at this point it was still rather early in the day, I decided to go back to Jackson before my open mic and see one of the museums I had missed out on earlier in the week. The Smith-Robertson Museum and Cultural Center is located in the former Smith-Robertson School, the first school for African-American in Jackson, and its goal is to educate on and celebrate African-American history, culture, and art in the Deep South.
The museum started very powerfully with massive scale model of a slave ship that you could walk through. It makes the horrors a lot more real to actually experience the darkness and the crampedness. Each slave had no more than three feet of space in the below ship docks which is just awful to imagine. And just when you think you've heard about every horrifying fact about slavery there could be, there's a a little bit of writing on the floor that says slave ships through so many bodies into the ocean that some scientists believe this may have permanently altered shark migration routes. Jesus.
The next exhibit was on a different sort of migration, and focused on the different historical and social contexts leading up to and following the Great Migration of Southern Blacks up north after the war. I really liked this exhibit because there were lots of old photographs and documents that made the information really come alive. I also liked that they didn't let the North off the hook. I think we like to pat ourselves on the back a lot for not having mass slavery (we can't even say that we didn't have any), but we were still pretty racist and the Blacks that fled there didn't exactly have sunshine and roses time. I was so naive that i didn't realize that the KKK had chapters up north, until I saw some recruitment letters. Despite the troubles up north, the migration was worth it for a lot of families primarily because it provided better access to work, education, and not being casually murdered in the streets. While the threat of lynchings was probably the most immediate concern, the education piece was really pressing as well. Black schools in the south frequently had such little funding that they could only be open for three months out of a year. They often didn't have school buses, and according to some firsthand accounts the white school buses would intentionally try to hit puddles and spray the black children walking to school. It just seems unnecessarily cruel to not only have perks and privileges but then also be a dick about it. Oh and for people who like to use the "the Confederacy wasn't only about slavery" argument there was an article from the Journal of Secession stating very clearly "Our position is thoroughly aligned with slavery, the greatest material interest in the world".
The next exhibit was probably my favorite of this museums and it was on the life and legacy of Medgar Evers. I'm ashamed to admit that I was not familiar with his story, despite the fact that he was one of the leading faces of the Civil Rights movement in the early 50s before his assassination. This exhibit was just so well curated. It was really holistic in really capturing not just what he did, but who he was, what the world was like at that time, and what shaped him. Because he was a native Mississippian, they had a lot of authentic artifacts, and the coolest thing to me was actual audio recordings his parents made specifically for the museum telling stories they about Medgar as a child and the stories they used to tell him growing up. HIs dad told an insane story about a white businessman trying to rip off Medgar's grandpa. His grandpa refused to pay more than he owed, so the businessman threatened him with a gun. His grandpa didn't back down though, and broke his coca cola bottle on the counter and said he would pay exactly what he owed and dared the guy to see who would be faster. The businessman took the money and let him go. He said to Medgar's father who then told Medgar, "You don't run away from white folks. That's when they'll kill you". No doubt that story inspired Medgar's own activism. It's also horrifying how real the threat of death was over what literally couldn't have been more than a couple of cents. His mom told a story about his brother and him sneaking up to the front of a big political rally and a US Senator saw the two of them and literally said "You see those two little niggers sitting down here. If you don't keep them in their place, someday they'll be in Washington trying to represent you" That absolutely blew my mind that an adult could look at two children actually giving a damn about politics and say something that awful. Thank God, Medgar saw it more as a challenge that he intended to win. He didn't live long enough to hold any offices in Washington, but his tireless campaigning for equal access to education, voting booths, and basic rights helped pave the way for a lot of Black politicians and leaders to come.
The next exhibit was a life size model of the Woolworth's Sit-In, which was one of the most effective non-violent protests in the country because the majority of people just couldn't believe how much violence broke out over a bunch of Black college students sitting peacefully at a counter. Weirdly enough, I'd actually seen two other life size models of this counter at the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and in a museum in North Carolina, where the protest took place. This one had more biographical information though about each individual protestor and their allies which I really liked.
After the emotional roller coaster of being alternatingly horrified at the racism and inspired by the activism, it was nice to end the museum on a positive note with a gallery of art work by contemporary African-American artists.
There were a lot of great pieces, but my favorite was one called Postcolonialisms by Felandaus Thames. I loved the way it combined photorealistic images, cartoony images, and street art styled taggings. It was really cool.
After the museum I set off back to Hattiesburg for another open mic. It was a really pleasant three hour drive. I was feeling good because I got to do more than I had expected today, and I had just had a funny conversation with my cousins. Then when I was about ten minutes away from where I had planned to get dinner, everything sort of imploded around me.
You see, I hadn't mentioned the kinda boring bits of my days in the blog, but my ABS light had come on in my car, so I got it checked out last week in Birmingham. They said I had a problem with my actuator which tells the car to engage the anti-lock brake system, and they needed to order a part. I asked if it would be okay if I drove to Mississippi while I was waiting for the part and then drove back to pick it up. They said that'd be fine, and the part should be in by Monday. The part arrived this morning, and I told them I'd pick it up tomorrow. Unfortunately while I was in the rare situation of being on a state highway where I was going from a 55 MPH speed limit to a full stop at a red light, my brakes didn't lock and I continued to slide for roughly two car lengths after fully pressing down on the brakes into the pick up truck in front of me at roughly 35/40 MPH.
I don't know if I had reacted quicker, it would have been possible to avoid things, but I think I was too used to my car, you know, stopping when I pressed my brakes that I didn't realize what was actually happening until it was too late. As you can see from the pictures above, the car was completely totaled but somehow nobody was hurt which is the most important thing. Plus on the bright side, I saved $200 on the installation fee for the new actuator. Small victories.
The crash itself is a bit of a blur, but it was really strange feeling going from listening to music and feeling pretty good to having to figure out if I was still alive (apparently if I had put my brakes on a half second later, I would not be). When I concluded that I was indeed alive, my first thought was to run out and make sure nobody else was hurt. The pick up truck I had hit had also gone into the car in front of him, and both of those guys were stunned to see me get out of my wreck at all let alone virtually unscathed. One of the gentlemen was nice enough to point out that I was bleeding pretty badly on my hand from some broken glass. I hadn't noticed because of all the adrenaline in my system, so I went to the bathroom and cleaned myself up.
When I got out and really got a good look at my car, I kept thinking "My life is over" which is a very silly thing to think when you have just actually cheated death. I didn't really know where I was, if I could get to my air bnb, how and when I'd get home, if and how I'd be able to continue touring, if I'd be able to salvage any of my possessions from the car, or if I'd be able to go to the open mic. Some of these concerns were more pressing than others clearly, but all at once they were a little overwhelming and I did a lot of nervous shaking and crying by the side of the road. Luckily the two other drivers and a nearby highway patrolman were all very nice and comforting.
The state trooper who took all our statements was less comforting. The first thing he did was get very close to me and ask if I'd been smoking marijuana. I had not, but apparently my eyes were pretty red and I guess in Mississippi it is unexpected to meet a near death experience with tears, because he did not buy my explanation and proceeded to search through all the dirty clothes and museum brochures in my wrecked car for weed that was not there. He also searched my backpack, and when he got to a pocket that had condoms in it, he said one of the most stunning statements I have ever heard, "Unopened, I see." First of all, is this really the time to make fun of me for not getting laid? Second of all, what kind of insane person would carry around opened condoms? So many questions than answers.
Luckily the much more nice people on the scene ended up winning the night, as the local Hattiesburg officer gave me all the information I would need for insurance purposes and where my car would be towed to. Then the guy whom the pickup truck had hit offered to give me a ride to my air bnb which was incredibly kind of him.
My air bnb hosts also took pity on me when I explained I was not doing things a little off the schedule I'd given them, and offered to drive me to get dinner near where the open mic was. Yes, I still did the open mic, because I desperately needed some sense of normalcy. But first, I went to my host's favorite burger place, The Porter, which was conveniently right around the corner. It was actually a really nice pub, with a pretty expansive menu and beer selection, but the burgers were definitely hard to pass up. I got a BBQ Bacon Cheeseburger. I don't know what's in their signature Porter Sauce, but I loved every minute of it, and if ever I had been in need of comforting comfort food this was it.
The open mic was at a place called Jazmo's Bodega, which was not in fact a bodega but a hip bar and performance space that used to be a bodega. I saw Ben Compton and Deveron Dennis from the open mic earlier in the week, and I can't oversell how nice it was just seeing familiar faces. The mic was an all performer's welcome mic, but it was relatively new and the local standup scene had started taking a shine to it, because it's a nice room and they let you do longer sets like the musicians.
Ben and Deveron had been two of my favorites from the Monday mic, so it was great getting to see them work longer form material and they both crushed it. Ben had my favorite single line of the night, which I actually did highlight on Monday but I left out a tag he did tonight that really put it over the top for me so I 'm just gonna share it again but now in its entirety:
"I've got bi-racial kids. The other day I asked my daughter if I could borrow five bucks and she said that she'd rather keep her money within the Black community. I couldn't tell if I was pissed off or proud of her. So I sent her to her room and had her mom ask for the five bucks."
Deveron's set was harder to pull a single quote from because he absolutely destroyed the audience from beginning to end. He really masterfully used crowd work to suck them in and get them to engage with his written material. It was super impressive to watch.
My own set was naturally a little bit shaky. I told the story about my crash and the state-trooper saying the things about the condoms which went over pretty well, but because it was very new material I had no idea to end it and I ended up segueing into a different story about condoms which didn't actually bomb, but it felt like a little too dirty to go after going dark with the whole near death experience thing so being aware of that I ended on some lighter sillier stuff and I think that saved the set as a whole, but if I'm being honest it was really all a blur.
Luckily I was able to stay long enough to see another performance by Mitch the Science Guy. It was just as magical and surreal as before, but slightly more subdued given the not-just-comedy-ness of the mic. It was good silly way to end a pretty terrible day. It was a nice reminder to me in this moment when I was unsure if I'd be able to continue my journey of why I started it in the first place. Comedy makes bad times less bad. When you can take some crappy terrible thing in your day and turn it into something that makes other people laugh,it's the best feeling in the world.
Favorite Random Sightings: Diva Dog; Sweat Sauna Studio; A highway sign asking "18 wheeler wreck? Call this number" (I hope those aren't that common); Boston Seafood Supreme (damn straight); Doe's Eat Place
Regional Observations: I dunno maybe reduce speed limits if there's going to be a redlight in the middle of a highway? Just me?
Albums Listened To: Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards by Tom Waits (Disc 3- the bastards. All the Tom Waits-iest songs that couldn't be easily categorized as anything else); Our Live Album Is Better than Your Live Album by Reel Big Fish ( I like them live better than on CDs, because you can better hear the musicianship underneath all the immaturity)
People's Favorite Jokes:
Why didn't the lifeguard save the drowning hippie? He was too far out man (this is one of my personal favorite ones I've heard for some reason. I heard it once in New Hampshire and not again until now and it made me very excited)
Why did the old man fall down the well? He couldn't see that well
Mississippi Superlatives:
Favorite Coffee Shop: T-Bones Records and Cafe in Hattiesburg
Favorite Restaurant: Pig and Pint in Jackson
Favorite Beer: Prohibition Brewing Company's Spoils of War Imperial Stout.
Favorite Bar: The Neal House at the Keg and Barrel in Hattiesburg
Favorite Dessert: Smoothies from The Tomato Place in Vicksburg; Close second to the beer popsicle floats at King of Pops
Favorite Attraction: the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson
Thing I Might Remember More Than the Car Crash: Shrimp and Alligator Cheesecake from Roux 61 in Natchez
Songs of the Day:
My friend actually sent me this on this morning without realizing how prophetic it would be:
I think this a very fitting send off to my first leg of the trip
