Going South, Part II: Sweet Home, Alabama

Birmingham, Tuesday 21 June, 2022

Not for the USA a high-speed rail network with punctuality. 90 minutes late departing Atlanta, I take this to be part of the country’s glorious exceptionalism: trains will run slow and behind schedule. We trundle through Georgia then Alabama, sitting in icy AC while outside climate change rushes past in a heat wave hitting 40 degrees. Cleaved between the jagged edges of forested ravines and peri-urban industrial parks, the slowness reveals frontier style main streets of small town southern America; grand homesteads, porches and chairs, shacks with little porches and one chair (southern hospitality, there is always a chair). White, weather board Baptist church steeples compete for congregations. Deer meander in fields, turtles sunbake on creek-bound logs, and an eagle settles into a tree.

I chat with the young man in the opposite seat: 28 years old and this his first trip outside California where he was born. He is part of post-Covid mobility in the USA; changing jobs, working online, looking to move to a state where it’s cheaper to live or where there are more appealing medical, abortion and/or tax regulations. He has been travelling 50 days, staying for stints in New York, Savannah (GA), and now on his way to New Orleans, trying different cities before he decides where to settle.

As we creep eventually into a shimmering Birmingham, one hour late and in a new time zone, I’m starting to suspect that the strange smell following me around was coming from the cardigan I had picked up off the pavement in Atlanta. Clearly the light dusting I had given it was not enough. 

A short walk from the station there is an actual functioning bus service, hourly, mostly empty, handily dropping me right to the hotel on the edge of the city near the airport. The location is a food desert and while my cardigan dries after a good beating in the sink, a taxi gets me to the nearest strip mall for supplies. I did think about walking but the usual configuration of expressway splitting cities into two or more pieces prevents any urban meanders. The white driver, maybe late 30s, early 40s, is polite and chatty but warns me to ‘be careful’ as it’s ‘not a nice area’. I push him to say why: is it poor? Not exactly. In fact one of Birmingham’s wealthiest neighbourhoods is nearby. It’s not violent, exactly. But he feels the people there might steal something.

After some time in the USA the codes for things not said begin to emerge. ‘Not a nice area’ is code for ‘people of colour’. ‘It’s the South’, with an eye roll and a shrug, means someone’s being racist. While the legacy of slavery is not confined to the South, nor to the USA, those states of the Deep South that had been most dependent on an enslaved plantation economy (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina) are still marked by high levels of poverty, inequality and racial discrimination.

Valerie, a middle-aged black woman, is my taxi driver for the return drive back to the hotel. Another migrant from California’s high cost of living, she has a day job she loves in health care but drives taxis between shifts because she likes meeting folk. She knows that there are people in Birmingham who ‘think differently’ (code: racist). She knows that many are ‘sincerely friendly’, but ‘It’s the South’ (eye roll). Acknowledging ongoing constraints, such as being the only woman, and only one of three black members on a corporate board, all her ideas (e.g. the city providing public transport or setting up employee buses to help get people to work) are ignored, although the latter may also be rejected because they are distinctly ‘socialist’ in the lexicon of American individualism. 

Montgomery, Wednesday, 22 June 2022

I am sweaty at 7am having had to run back twice to the hotel for sunglasses and then a USB cable, but in time for the hourly bus. The driver helps me use the bus system's ‘change card’. ‘I got you’, she says. It’s a phrase I hear often: from restaurant servers, drivers, my Texan family in Atlanta, my Spanish hiking companions in the Pyrenees last year, my friends. They got me.

The driver is familiar with her passengers, and there’s a lot of chat about ‘love’ with a man sitting near her. A few people get on and off along the back streets of Birmingham but there is never more than six. I am, again, the only white person on public transport. Dropped off 20 min from the Hertz pick up point in a very industrial part of town the other side of the tracks, I jog to the yard to arrive only 10 minutes late but it was a pointless expenditure of energy. Hertz refused to rent me a car despite my booking. My international credit card that I’ve used around the world and all across the USA with other companies, doesn’t have a US zip code attached to it and is therefore unacceptable to Hertz. That’s some extreme exceptionalism even by USA standards. Ten minutes of remonstrating gets nowhere so I run thirty minutes to the next two rental yards before finding an available car (thank you, Enterprise).

I am now dripping in sweat. While waiting for my pick up, an older woman returning her vehicle is asked by the young agent, wearing her sun hat indoors, if she has left her gun in the car. She hasn’t but this is a question they are now required to ask all customers as a matter of course: over 20 guns a week have been getting left behind. The agents can’t touch the gun and the car is out of use until police come to take the weapon away. Firstly, I say in my imaginary arguments with the gun lobby, if your gun is in the glove box where you will eventually forget about it, how is it going to defend you should you actually find yourself in a gun fight? Secondly, if they mean so much to you, why are you forgetting about them and leaving them behind!

Finally, getting a car at 0930, 90 minutes late, just like Amtrak, I take off to Montgomery, driving through thick forest and past a Big Peach (nice to see it’s not just Australia). The capital of Alabama, with no train connections, is the birthplace of the modern civil rights movement in the USA. In 1955, Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat for a white passenger, and her arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, co-organised by a young pastor in the city, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Mrs Parks (and I have learnt not to be an informal Australian in the South and to address people properly) has her own dedicated Museum with multi-media and static displays. But it is the Equality and Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Legacy Museum that encapsulates the breadth of the struggle and its continuing impact: drawing out the links between a slave society, with its engrained racialised hierarchies and creation of a threatening black imaginary, to today’s experiences of racism for Black Americans, including police shootings and the highest incarceration rate of industrialised countries.

A mix of archival material, video, artwork and interactive holograms highlight the numbers: more than 12 million kidnapped into slavery, more than two million died at sea, more than 4000 murdered/lynched, and many, many more unknown and uncounted. It is too easy for these statistics to become incomprehensible in their magnitude and repetition, so the Museum has created a space where the numbers become a thing felt within the body: starting from the small opening room where projected dark waves and the noise of a storm threaten to submerge the viewer into the fear that someone in the belly of a slave ship must have felt. By the time I got to the section on lynching I was close to tears. 

The Museum, situated in a warehouse space, has thousands of visitors a week, from across the USA and internationally, and by the afternoon it’s heaving with young and old. In contrast, the EJI has also created the National Memorial for Peace & Justice, to remember those lynched in racial violence well into the 20th century; mostly men but women and children as well. This is a sacred space. It’s quiet: an expanse of lawn left empty through which a path winds up to a covered structure, open on all sides, with rust coloured boxes listing counties and the names of those known to have been murdered in each one. 

This literal counting of the dead signifies that these deaths must count for something: hope, perhaps, that humanity does better in the future. The walkway gently descends so that the metal boxes begin to hang over the spectator. A wall fountain at the deepest point honours the many 1000s more whose names are unknown. Outside there are sculptures honouring activists, past and present, and highlighting ongoing violence such as police shootings that for some are an extension of the lynchings of the past.

The museum and memorial are part of the EJI’s wider call for justice in the form of a ‘truth and reconciliation’ process so that the trauma of slavery and its legacies can be healed. They have already established a process of ‘community reckoning’ where the descendants of those murdered can gather soil at lynching sites that is then stored in large jars at the museum.

While much of contemporary Conservative and Republican politics rails against the idea of looking back in order to move forward, clearly there is a need for some kind of reckoning with this past. The desire for segregation and denigration and walls and keeping the other in their place isn’t going anywhere. Which might go some way to explaining the level of security and metal detectors at the entrances to the Legacy Museum and National Memorial. 

I’m guessing the city of Montgomery was attempting an act of reconciliation when it noted on the city seal both its role as ‘Cradle of the Confederacy’ and ‘Birthplace of the civil rights movement’. The secession convention, forming the Southern Republic, was held from January to March 1861 in the city, and the first White House of the Confederacy was established here. There’s still a Confederate Memorial Day in some Southern states, and it's an official state holiday on the 4th Monday in April in Alabama. Just to wind people up further, Alabama also has a Robert E. Lee day on the same day as Martin Luther King Day (the 3rd Monday in January). Local councils require permission from state authorities (Republican since 2003) should anyone want to remove a confederate statue (the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, 2017) of which there are many more than I thought there would be in my naivete.

Driving back to Birmingham, about 20 minutes or so from Montgomery, on a high cutting on the left of the highway, in full view of the world, a large confederate flag flies above a memorial for the Alabama Sons of Confederate Veterans. The League of the South are based just an hour north of Birmingham, still advocating for secession and hosting well known antisemitic, white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the KKK, David Duke, as a guest speaker at their 2022 annual conference. 

Calhoun County Confederate Memorial, Janney Furnace Park, O’Hatchee, Thursday, 23 June 2022

It doesn’t take much desk research to find the nearest Confederate memorial: a museum tucked away down a country road with no signage except to Janney Furnace Park. The ‘furnace’ is a ruined forge used in the civil war and later destroyed by Union forces, but the main memorial is a three piece black granite wall engraved with the names of those from the County who volunteered for the Confederate army. Between the lists of names is an etched likeness of Robert E. Lee on one side, and local hero, John Pelham, on the other. The five flags of the confederacy are flown behind the memorial, and a stacked row of seats is set in front. A metal box for visitors includes a sheet of ‘True facts you will never hear or see in the classroom’ about the Civil War.

Next to the memorial is a small, one room county museum presenting in display cases and wall galleries a local history of the area. It includes indigenous artefacts but also, inexplicably, a lot of knives from a range of eras and countries. Mostly it is Civil War memorabilia and an interpretation of how this 20 mile area in remote Alabama became connected to global conflicts: the British-American fighting in 1813 that entangled First Nation communities, and then, as its called here, 'the war of rebellion' or 'the war for Southern independence'.

The museum is only open a few days a week and at 10am on a Thursday morning I was the only person there. The docent, a genial veteran in his late 60s, gives me a personal tour for almost two hours. The civil war takes on an heroic narrative with women invisible or in their usual war time role of cradling the hero on his return. Origin stories take a turn away from slavery towards victimhood in a conflict redressing the injustice of an unfair economic relationship between a wealthier south subsidising the north. A painting at the entrance to the museum, one of the first to be seen, is the image of an enslaved man who, the story has it, on hearing his ‘Master’ was killed, joined the Confederacy in his honour. And so it goes: the battle over ‘truth’ and ‘history’ and ‘representation’, the defence of heritage and nation, continues. 

In late March, early April, the surrounding park is used for re-enactments of local Civil War battles by members of the Sons and Daughters of Confederate Veterans (although you don’t have to be an actual son/daughter of a confederate veteran to take part). They also had a medieval re-enactment society, jousting with watermelons or soft weapons. It was shut down for being too dangerous in what I’m guessing some local people thought was another example of political correctness gone mad.

Driving away from the park, the violence this small county has seen is muted by the serenity of the landscape through which history passed. As always taking the long way home, I crossed lush countryside, wooded hills, corn and vegetable fields. Rivers became lakes dotted with boat houses and decks shaded by old tree canopies. Homesteads are tucked behind trees, shaded from the heat, but the occasional dirt track reveals run down, off grid, trailers as well.

In need of a sugar hit, I stop at a Trading Post emblazoned with ‘God Bless America’. The shopkeeper, a grizzly middle-aged man, also had a large knife collection including samurai swords and a Game of Thrones replica for sale, as well as Amish pickles, jams and assorted sweets. I made a joke about how the knives were a nice change from guns. He said he kept his gun in his car so he can calm down before he gets it but he had a baton under the counter, which didn’t make me feel any safer. He argued a better strategy was to get close enough to an attacker to bite their ear off as a way of deterring further violence. I couldn’t work out if he was being serious but he discounted my chocolate so that was nice.