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.

THE fight

At least half a dozen times each year I drag Dingo Baby to the theatre because 'it's good for him'. It is not his favourite art form but he comes along, valiantly trying to see what I love about it. The closest we got to shared enjoyment was Butley in 2011, with Dominic West as the English lecturer falling apart at the seams.

Given this sacrifice it seemed only fair that when a couple of tickets popped into his hand for the boxing 'heavyweight championship of the world', namely, Joshua versus Klitschko,  I could only say yes. It's not that I don't like the athleticism of boxing, particularly the lighter divisions, and despite appearances it requires strategic intelligence. I even tried Muay Thai for a year but gave up after hitting myself in the nose (it's a short, embarrassing story). Both Joshua and Klitschko seem like nice chaps with none of the trash talk of fighters like David Haye.

But it's obvious that unless you're going to pay £6,000 for ring side tickets you will get a much better view of a boxing match in a pub on a large, HD flat screen TV. Sitting up in the god's at Wembley Stadium requires binoculars. Not even the two large screens around the stadium provide the detail necessary for a really visceral experience of sweat and pounding movement. The whole show is designed as a spectacle for television, complete with fireworks and platforms raising 'AJ' up into the air to shadow box for the cameras before the fighting begins. Music at decibels fills any interstitial moment, between bouts and between rounds, and yet there is an odd silence at times including during the fights. There is no commentary in the stadium, only the murmurs rising to roars of the crowd. It is boring with intermittent flurries of action.  

So 'why?', is my question, are 90,000 of us coming along to sit in a cold arena to watch something we could better see at home or in the pub. And the answer is that it signifies the continued importance of 'the gathering', the need for human contact with like minded others. 

Then the question becomes, 'who are these like minded others?'  And here I begin to delve into unknown territory.

We arrive early for the preliminary matches, including watching an excellent bout between Katie Taylor from Ireland defeating Nina Meinke from Germany for a WBA lightweight championship. At this stage the stadium is almost empty. 

As the bouts become heavier the crowds get bigger and I am slowly surrounded by predominantly young, white, men, well groomed, smart-casually dressed (loafers, sometimes with tie and blazer), drinking and occasionally enjoying a return to the 80s as they emerge from the men's toilets with a spring in their step. This energy contributes to frenetic explosions of dancing to House of Pain's 'Jump Around', and rousing sing-alongs to Gala's 'Freed from Desire', something from Usher, and that classic of arena events, 'Sweet Caroline', oh oh ohh. Amidst chanting of 'Oh Anthony Joshua' (to the riff of White Stripes's 'Seven Nation Army') I am on a football terrace. With the chanting of 'tits out for the lads' I'm back in Australia (sigh). At my age I can at least challenge the lads around me on their use of the latter and asked loudly to no-one in particular why men are so fascinated with breasts and were they not breast fed as babies. 

While there are few women those that have accompanied their men folk are split between casual sports wear and what is affectionately known in the UK as 'totty': the smallest of dresses no matter the weather, the highest of heels, the longest of lashes and hair extensions. I blame the WAG effect at boxing matches and the endless shots of the glamorous partner who has to sit in the front row and watch her man get beaten up. And of course there are the William Hill Women who get to hold up the Round Number every three minutes. They must get some kudos for being able to get in and out of a ring in heels and mini without flashing a knicker. 

Sitting in my sneakers, thermals, cardigan and wool coat, with half a pint of real ale and a bag of pick 'n' mix, I was in a foreign land. Supporting Klitschko was also not helping given the uber-nationalism being whipped up in the stadium. I added the mental strength to lose in front of this crowd as one of the skills of boxing (as well as an ability for agile ducking by spectators to avoid pints of beer missiles), although in fairness, while it's not possible to say it was a good natured crowd, there was a cheer for Klitschko at the end. 

On the hour tube journey home this crowd dispersed as we looped through the city on the Jubilee line, stations north, west, south and finally east. I have no compass for their location but I'm wondering if it might not be important to take a GPS to them next time ... I have a feeling the future of this country is somehow tied up with this cohort of young men and what brings them together to chant mantras of belonging.         

Lines on a map ... Part I

It took seven years before I could summon up the will to go back to the Occupied Territories of Palestine. The memories of endless checkpoints and searches, being asked the same questions (where are you from? where are you staying? do you know anyone in the West Bank?), never being able to calibrate my emotions with colleagues because you never know what mood people will be in (was there a raid during the night? is money tight again? has a family member been arrested?), observing the relentless grind of life under occupation and the constant visceral sense of anger, frustration and violence that permeates the entire mass of land known variously as Palestine, Israel, Judea and Samaria ... and I was only there for two months and could at least run over the border to Al Quds/Jerusalem and sit in a pub and pretend I was somewhere else when I needed a break unlike a Palestinian who lives with it every single day of their life.  

But Dingo Baby was keen to find out why I keep shouting at the television every time the BBC roll out the lazy cliches of Palestinians in ski masks holding AK47s, or continuously interviews Mark Regev or an IDF spokesperson and never anyone from the Palestinian or Israeli peace movements. Not to mention their amnesia when it comes to previous Israeli governments denial of the existence of Palestinians (e.g. Golda Meir).

So earlier this year I found myself back in the queue at Tel Aviv International Airport, facing the same questions, only this time with the addition of 'how are you two related?', 'do you live at the same address?', and carrying what I hope is a greater sense of resilience to insanity. Given the current escalation in violence between Palestine and Israel, now seems like a good time to write it up. And Tel Aviv is a good start. It is more relaxed than Al-Quds/Jerusalem. It is Mediterranean in feel with a string of 21st century beach bars and cosmopolitan cafes extending out from 10th century BCE Old Jaffa. Grotty shopfronts hide cavernous restaurants, young couples slow dance in pop up outdoor clubs while football fans watch Manchester United vs Manchester City on makeshift billboard televisions. In the evening, along the promenade, Israeli and Palestinian families are at least in the same space if not exactly interacting.

Helicopters regularly buzz the air as a reminder that despite the relaxed veneer, Gaza is only 70 kilometres away. Although possibly another reminder is the contaminated water off Tel Aviv's beaches. We swam for two days before realising that what the lifeguards were yelling at us in Hebrew was to get out of the water.

We arrived on the 28th April, two days after Israel's 'Independence Day' on the 26th. On the 27th, an African refugee family were fire bombed out of their home by their 'religious' neighbours. Noone made much of a public fuss. The Israeli government is now building a wall along its northern borders, to keep out Hezbollah, its southern borders to keep out African migrants and Sudanese refugees, and along its border with the Occupied Territories. The State formed in order for the Jewish community to escape the ghettos of Europe is ghetto'ising itself instead. 

But no amount of wall-building can contain the divisions within the country. Not only between Palestinian and Israeli, but between Israelis and the growing number of migrants (nannies and cleaners from Southeast Asia, construction workers from China, refugees and sans papier primarily from Africa), and between Israeli and Israeli (secular vs religious; the peace and 'occupy' movements vs the government; Christian Jewish vs Jewish Jewish; the Mizraheen/Arabic Jewish community vs the Ashkanazi/European Jewish community vs the Russian Jewish Community vs the Ethiopian Jewish Community; American Jewish retirees vs Middle Eastern Jewish culture). This complexity in Israel is another part of the story rarely discussed in European or US media and government departments. To really understand the conflict in the Middle East is to understand these tensions and that requires a road trip and lots of cups of black tea with fresh mint and sugar.

The plan was to drive around Israel first and then head over the border to visit the Occupied Territories. The first day of driving on the wrong side of the road is always guaranteed to ensure a good night's sleep, especially if it's hot, if Israelis don't sign post their roads, and if the Hebrew place names are spelt differently to the ones in the map which wasn't detailed enough as it turned out. And it seemed I was doing something wrong as I was constantly honked at by other drivers.

Not withstanding the challenges of contemporary way-finding, it is impossible to travel in this part of the world without being reminded of the passing of civilisations that too, at one time, thought they were indestructible; that too built walls that eventually came down. Caesarea is marked by Sidonians, Romans, Byzantines and Crusaders. Susita, Jericho, Masada among many others, are the ruins of empires that rose and fell as a palimpsest, one layered on top of the other, leaving traces for the next generation to figure out. One would think that this would be a humbling environment for the incumbent State but it seems hubris is a universal condition.

These traces of empire include the stones and chants of the religions of the book that create contemporary arguments over authenticity and possession. Ambiguity ultimately dominates a landscape that desperately tries to assert fundamental boundaries to contain it. Everything and nothing is apparent. It is possible, for example, to be Jewish and Christian, according to Hannah, our host in Tiberius. Yet Christianity sits uneasily in the Holyland. Given the history of Christian persecution of Jews in Europe she prefers to keep a low profile, citing a passage from the bible to illustrate that it's okay to live quietly with your neighbours and then noone minds or notices. Her community refer to themselves as Messianic Jews rather than Christians. Hannah corrects me when I ask how other Israelis feel about her practicing Christianity. She is not practicing Christianity but rather she is a believer in Christ. She doesn't celebrate Christian holidays and reaffirms her Jewish identity. But there are fears that organisations such as Jews for Judaism are gathering evidence to have Messianic Jews expelled from Israel for not being Jewish. Hannah believes she has had her phone tapped and her mail checked. On the other hand, there is an uneasy alliance between the State of Israel and USA based Christian fundamentalist organisations, such as Christians United for Israel. CUFI is alleged to raise millions of dollars each year to support, for example, the illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories.

Christianity's origins are centred on the Galilee as the region where Jesus Christ lived and preached. We stand among the faithful in a place that for 100s of years has heard the prayers, the wishes, hopes and desires of the believers. And they come from Nigeria, Fiji, India, Brazil, as well as Europe and the USA, to stand, to heave, to sweat in Tabgha and Capernaum and the Mount of Beatitudes. They add to the impressions in the mosaic before the altar that signifies the weight of the faithful over the years. And just as they leave their own mark here they also look for the mark of God: the footsteps of Mohammed in Al Aqsa mosque; Jesus in the Church of the Ascension; Buddha on Sri Pada. The believers stand where they are sure Jesus once stood, immersed in chatter and camera clicks and bible readings from evangelist preachers, and then, imperceptibly, there is silence. Prayers rise with the heat while bodies slow down.

We shifted to the shores of the Sea of Galilee for some respite. The African cleaners ambled through the haze, the only movement apart from a swimmer, a guitarist, a card thrown on a picnic table in the shade among friends, a sparrow after the remains of my dried mango, and the sonic booms of the Israeli air force. It is the somnolent air of summer on a divine afternoon in which even as an aetheist I find it impossible to deny the potential of a state of grace, given and received. I took comfort also in learning from Hannah that a Galilean accent is the Israeli equivalent of someone who is known in Australia, derogatively, as a bogan. Jesus was a bogan. Fabulous.

The complexity of Israel's identity crisis is exacerbated by intergenerational cultural change, exemplified in the reorganisation of Israel's once communal Kibbutzim. In Ein Gev, a farm that relies on fishing, bananas, dairy and tourism, a recorded voiceover with an Australian accent recites the history of struggle in establishing this kibbutz. It is explicit in stating that this was part of creating a 'new identity' for Jews: one based on physical, manual labour; one that can then claim ownership of the land that it has worked. This is not the effete identity of the past that some blame for acquiescing to its own death in Europe. But while this muscularity is still reflected in the contemporary politics of Israel, the idea of creating the nation is no longer what holds Israel together.  From 2002, like many other kibbutz, Ein Gev has slowly succumbed to privatisation and the end of the collectivist model.

War has also been used in Israel's nation-building project. In the Golan, another voice-over reminds us of how the Occupation is keeping the area 'clean' as well as celebrating the achievements of the IDF that have occupied this part of Syria since 1967. The UN in no-man's land keeps a token eye on things and gives the cafe on Mount Bental its name: Coffee Annan. For the best Shakshuka in Israel, eat here. Four villages in the distance sit uneasily beneath Mt Hermon on top of which, on the Israeli side, is a listening station known as 'the eyes of the State' (says the voice-over proudly). These are Druze villages which, according to the voice, 'chose to stay and integrate' after Syria withdrew. Other sources suggest that integration may not have been quite so successful as many refused Israeli citizenship.

Hannah, born in the USA originally, was nostalgic for the nationalism of past decades and its common project. When she came 22 years ago everyone worked together and left their doors open. Her fear is that of previous generations the world over: now people are more materialistic and there is nothing left to hold the nation together.

While Hannah may not be so confident about the future she did at least reassure me not to worry about the honking. It's a language in Israel. We cross the country from North to South, from soft hills to harsh light, from desert to sea. On the way a side trip to an oasis in the middle of the Negev finds a psy-trance party for Israel's well-heeled youth. Tanks line up in the desert to practice war and occupation. At Maktesh Ramon, a great gouge in the desert, another disembodied voice reminds us that civilisation, defined in terms of controlling nature, requires a strong government, beginning with King David, ending with Muslim rule, coming again with the State of Israel. The control of nature includes intensive dairies in the middle of the desert, where cows are milked three times a day and showered six to keep cool. Finally we arrive at a city with an airport in the middle of it, a clear sea, blue not red, and another flag just over the water.