Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  6

  UNIONTOWN, Demopolis. The Tombigbee River and blue highway 28. I missed the turnoff to Sucarnochee, Mississippi, and had to enter the state by way of Scooba on route 16, a road of trees and farmhouses. The farmhouses weren’t the kind with large, encircling porches and steeply pitched roofs and long windows you used to see, but rather new houses indistinguishable from wet-bar, walk-out basement, Turfbuilder-Plus surburban models.

  Then Philadelphia, Mississippi. Here, too, the old, sad history. The town, like others in the area, was built over the site of a Choctaw village. The Choctaw, whose land once covered most of Mississippi, earned a name from their skill in horticulture and diplomacy; they were a sensible people whose chieftains attained position through merit. In the early nineteenth century, they learned from white men and began building schools and adding livestock to their farms. Later, whites would refer to them as one of the “five civilized tribes.” Nevertheless, as pressure from white settlement increased, the Choctaw had to cede to the government one piece of land (in million-acre increments) after another. Federal agents pressured tribes to sign treaties through mixed-bloods bribed with whiskey and trinkets; they promised Indians annuities, land grants, and reparations, almost none of which the Congress ever paid. To President Andrew Jackson, it made no difference that Choctaw officers like Ofahoma had fought with him against rebellious Creeks; Jackson pushed on with land-gobbling compacts. With the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, held in the woods northeast of Philadelphia, the Choctaw gave up the last of their land and reluctantly agreed to leave Mississippi forever. They walked to the arid Indian Territory where they set up their own republic modeled after the government that had just dispossessed them.

  It’s a sad history not because of the influx of settlers—after all, Indians had encroached upon each other for thousands of years. It’s a sad history because of the shabby way the new people dealt with tribal Americans: not just the lies, but the utter unwillingness to share an enormous land.

  Yet, a thousand or so Choctaw secretly stayed in Mississippi to claim land promised, although few ever saw a single acre returned. That afternoon their descendants were shopping along the square in Philadelphia, eating a hotdog at the Pow Wow drive-in, taking a few hours away from the reservation west of town. Holding to the token parcel now theirs, they could watch towns white men had built wither: Improve, Enterprise, Increase, Energy, Progress. As for what the land around the towns produced, they could watch that too.

  Highway 16 passed through green fields, blue ponds, clumps of pine; it crossed the earthy Yokahockana River, a name that stands with other rivers of strong name in Mississippi: the Yazoo, Yalobusha, Little Flower, Noxubee, Homochitto, Bogue Chitto, Chickasawhay, Skuna, the Singing River.

  At Ofahoma, I drove onto the Natchez Trace Parkway, a two-lane running from Natchez to near Nashville, which follows a five-hundred-mile trail first opened by buffalo and Indians. Chickasaws called it the “Path of Peace.” In 1810, the Trace was the main return route for Ohio Valley traders who, rather than fight the Mississippi currents, sold their flatboats for scrap in Natchez and walked home on the Trace. The poor sometimes traveled by a method called “ride and tie”: two men would buy a mule; one would ride until noon, then tie the animal to a tree and walk until his partner behind caught up on the jack that evening. By mid-century, steamboats made the arduous and dangerous trek unnecessary, and the Trace disappeared in the trees.

  Now new road, opening the woods again, went in among redbuds and white blossoms of dogwood, curving about under a cool evergreen cover. For miles no powerlines or billboards. Just tree, rock, water, bush, and road. The new Trace, like a river, followed natural contours and gave focus to the land; it so brought out the beauty that every road commissioner in the nation should drive the Trace to see that highway does not have to outrage landscape.

  Northeast of Tougaloo, I stopped to hike a trail into a black-water swamp of tupelo and bald cypress. The sun couldn’t cut through the canopy of buds and branches, and the slow water moved darkly. In the muck pollywogs were starting to squirm. It was spring here, and juices were getting up in the stalks; leaves, terribly folded in husks, had begun to let loose and open to the light; stuff was stirring in the rot, water bubbled with the froth of sperm and ova, and the whole bog lay rank and eggy, vaporous and thick with the scent of procreation. Things once squeezed close, pinched shut, things waiting to become something else, something greater, were about ready.

  I had a powerful sense of life going about the business of getting on with itself. Pointed phallic sprouts pressed up out of the ooze, green vegetable heads came up from the mire to sniff for vegetation of kin. Staminate and pistillate, they rose to the thrall of the oldest rhythms. Things were growing so fast I could almost feel the heat from their generation: the slow friction of leaf against bud case, petal against petal. For some time I stood among the high mysteries of being as they consumed the decay of old life.

  Then I went back to the Trace and followed dusk around the spread of Jackson highways that had broken open like aneurisms and leaked out strawberry-syrup pancakes, magic-finger motel beds, and double-cheese pizzas. Across the Pearl River and into Clinton, a hamlet that Sherman pillaged but decided not to burn. The place was shut down. Near the campus of old Mississippi College, I parked for the night and ate a tin of tuna and three soft carrots. Rejected the chopped liver. I ate only because I didn’t know what else to do. I’d got uppity about multilane America and was paying the price. Secretly, I hungered for a texturized patty of genetically engineered cow.

  7

  A CENTURY and a half ago, the founders of Mississippi College hoped the school would become the state university. But that didn’t work out, so they gave it to the Presbyterians; that didn’t work out either, and the Presbyterians gave it back. The Baptists had a go at it, and the college got on in its own quiet way, eventually turning out three governors. Actually, all the changing around may have made little difference. A student told me that everyone in town was a Baptist anyway, even the Presbyterians.

  I was eating breakfast in the cafeteria. A crewcut student wearing mesh step-in casuals sat down to a tall stack of pancakes. He was a methodical fellow. After a prayer running almost a minute, he pulled from his briefcase a Bible, reading stand, clips to hold the book open, a green felt-tip, a pink, and yellow; next came a squeeze-bottle of liquid margarine, a bottle of Log Cabin syrup wrapped in plastic, a linen napkin, and one of those little lemony wet-wipes. The whole business looked like the old circus act where twelve men get out of a car the size of a trashcan.

  A woman with a butter-almond smile sat down across from me. Her hair, fresh from the curling wand, dropped in loose coils the color of polished pecan, and her breasts, casting shadows to her waist, pressed full against a glossy dress that looked wet. A golden cross swung gently between, and high on her long throat was a small PISCES amulet. Her dark, musky scent brought to mind the swamp. We nodded and she said in soft Mississippian, “You were very interested in Jerry’s pancakes.”

  “It was the briefcase. I thought he was going to pull out a Water-Pik and the Ark of the Covenant next.”

  “He’s a nice boy. His parameters just aren’t yours.” She couldn’t have surprised me more had she said floccinaucinihilipilification. “The bottom line is always parameters no matter what the input.”

  “Let me make a crazy guess. You’re in computer programming.”

  “I’m in business, but my brother is a computer programmer in Jackson. He’s got me interested in it. He plays with the computer after hours. Made up his Christmas cards on an IBM three-sixty-one-fifty-eight last year and did his own wedding invitations two years ago. But we’re channelized different. I want to use the computer to enrich spiritual life. Maybe put prayers on a computer like that company in California that programs them. For two dollars, they run your prayer through twice a day for a week. They send up ten thousand a month.”

  “What if God doesn’t know Fortran?”


  “Come on, you! People are critical, but they don’t ridicule prayer wheels or rosaries and those are just prayer machines.”

  “Does God get a printout?”

  “Quit it! You get the printout. Suitable for framing. Quit smiling!”

  “Sorry, but you said they send the prayers ‘up,’ and I just wondered what kind of hard copy we’re dealing with here.”

  “You’re a fuddydud! It’s all just modalities. The prayer still has to come from a heart. Japanese write prayers on slips of paper and tie them to branches so the wind sort of distributes them. Same thing—people just trying to maximize the prayer function.”

  “You’re a Pisces?”

  “Would a Sagittarius wear a Pisces necklace?”

  “How can you believe in astrology and wear a cross?”

  “What a fuddydud! Who made the stars? Astrology’s just another modality too.” She took a computer card from her notebook. “I’ve got to get to class, but here’s one more modality. In India, people pray when they eat—like each chew is a prayer. Try it sometime. Even grumpy fuddyduds like it.”

  She handed me the card and hurried off. Here it is, word for word:

  SCRIPTURE CAKE

  2 cups Proverbs 30:33

  3½ cups Exodus 29:2

  3 cups Jeremiah 6:20

  2 cups I Samuel 30:12

  2 cups Nahum 3:12

  ½ cup Judges 4:19

  1 cup Genesis 43:11

  6 Isaiah 10:14

  2 tbsp I Corinthians 5:6

  1 tbsp I Samuel 14:25

  Season with I Kings 10:10

  Follow Leviticus 24:5

  SERVE WITH LOVE… SALLY

  8

  I WENT to the Trace again, following it through pastures and pecan groves and tilled fields; wildflowers and clover pressed in close, and from trees, long purple drupes of wisteria hung like grape clusters; in one pond a colony of muskrats. I turned off near Learned and drove northwest to cross the Mississippi at Vicksburg. South of town, I ate a sandwich where Civil War earthworks stuck out on a bluff high above the river. From these aeries, cannoneers had lobbed shells onto Union gunboats running the river. Anything—a rock, a stick—falling from that height must have hit with a terrible impact.

  The western side of the river was Louisiana, and the hills of Mississippi gave way to low and level cotton fields where humid heat waves boiled up, turning dusty tractors into shimmering distortions. The temperature climbed to eighty-six. Once, a big oak or gum grew in the middle of each of these fields, and under them, the farmer ate dinner, cooled the team, took an afternoon nap. Now, because they interfered with air-conditioned powerhouse tractors plowing the acres, few of the tall trees remained.

  The traffic on U.S. 80 had gone to I-20, and the two-lane carried only farm trucks and tractors pulling big cannisters of liquid fertility. The federal highway, like most I’d driven, was much rougher than state or county highways, so we all went slowly, just trundling along in the heat.

  A traveler who leaves the journey open to the road finds unforeseen things come to shape it. “The fecundity of the unexpected,” Proudhon called it. The Cajun Fried Chicken stand in Monroe (accent the first syllable), where I’d stopped for gas, determined the direction of the next several days. I wasn’t interested in franchise chicken, but the word Cajun brought up the scent of gumbo, hot boudin, and dirty rice. Monroe is a long way from Cajunland, but while the tank filled, I decided to head south for some genuine Cajun cooking.

  On the other side of the pump, a man with arms the size of my thighs waited for the nozzle. He said, “You driving through or what?”

  “On my way south.”

  “You want some meat?” It sounded aggressive, like, “Want a knuckle sandwich?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You want meat? I’m flying out of Shreveport this afternoon. Can’t carry the steaks with me. Just got called to Memphis. If you’re cooking out, might as well take them. It’s you or the garbage can.”

  He had a way with words.

  “Get him the steaks, Roger.” A boy, about ten, came around and handed me four nice flank cuts still frozen. I thanked the man.

  “What’d you pay for your Ford?” the boy said.

  “Three thousand in round numbers.”

  “How much to build the insides?”

  “Couple hundred dollars.”

  “How about that homemade bed? Could I try it?” I opened the door, he jumped on the bunk, stretched out, and made a loud snoring noise. Dreaming of far places. His eyes popped open. “Inflation’s added about twelve percent. These models run higher now too. How’s the gas mileage?”

  “Around twenty-five to the gallon.”

  “Can’t be.”

  “Can be and is. Straight shift, no factory options except highback seats, lightweight, and I drive around fifty.” That short man of a boy depressed me. Ten years old and figuring the rate of interest and depreciation instead of the cost of adventure. His father handed me a loaf of bread.

  “Thanks very kindly,” I said, “but I’m not much for white bread.”

  “Just have to leave it along the interstate for possums and niggers.”

  He did it again.

  With the steaks and white bread (would go well with chopped liver) I drove south toward the flat, wet triangle of gulf-central Louisiana that is Cajunland. The highway clattered Ghost Dancing and shook me so that my head bounced like one of those plastic dogs in car rear windows. The heat made me groggy, and I couldn’t shake it, and I didn’t want to stop. After a while, the road seemed a continuum of yellow-lined concrete, a Möbius strip where I moved, going neither in nor out, but around and up and down to all points of the compass, yet always rolling along on the same plane.

  My eyes were nearly closed. Then a dark face staring in. My head snapped back, and I pulled the truck out of the left lane. A hitchhiker. I stopped. His skin shone like wet delta mud, and his smile glittered like a handful of new dimes. He was heading home to Coushatta after spending two days thumbing along I-20 from Birmingham, where he’d looked for work as a machinist. He’d found nothing. Usually he got long rides on freeways if he could manage one, but it was easier for a black man to get a lift on the small roads where there were more Negro drivers. Sometimes the ride included a meal and bed, but last night he’d slept in a concrete culvert. I asked where he learned his trade. “In the Army. I was a Spec Four.”

  “Were the jobs filled in Birmingham?”

  “They said they were. I don’t know.”

  “Was it a racial question, do you think?”

  He moved warily in his seat. “Can’t always tell. It’s easy to say that.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “Go home and wait for something to open up.” We rode quietly, the even land green and still. He was a shy man and appeared uncertain about what to say. I filled some silence, and then he said, “Seems things I wait for don’t come along, and the ones I want to see pass on by, stop and settle in.”

  “I’m between jobs myself. Waiting for something to open up too.”

  “I hope I’m just between jobs. I went in the Army to learn a trade. Figured I’d found a good one for civvy life. Now I’m looking like my uncle. He only had one good job in his life. Good for his time anyway. Ran an elevator at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. Then they put in pushbutton elevators. He said he drove his old elevator a hundred thousand miles. He came back to Coushatta and did a little field work, then went hunting a better job in Dallas and got shot dead. I used to think he musta been a bum. Don’t see it like that now.”

  The rest of the way was mostly quiet. “I’ll get out here,” he said at last.

  “A man gave me some steaks. My cooler won’t keep them in this heat. Why don’t you take a couple?” I pulled out a steak and handed him the rest. “Gave me this bread too. Take it if you like.”

  He put the steaks in his plaid suitcase but had to carry the bread in his hand. “Can I ask you a question? Why d
id you give me a ride?”

  “I was dozing off. Owed you for waking me up.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe. It’ll be a good night at home. Mama loves steak.”

  Up the road he went, thumb out, smiling into the tinted windshields. Home is the hunter, home from the hill; home the sailor, home from the sea. And what about the Specialist Four home from Birmingham?

  9

  ALL the way to Opelousas, I thought of the machinist whose name I never learned. He had gone out and come back only to find a single change: he was older. Sometimes a man’s experience is like the sweep second hand on a clock, touching each point in its circuit but always the arcs of movement repeating.

  Near Ville Platte a scene of three colors: beside a Black Angus, in a green pasture, a white cattle egret waited for grubbings the cow stirred up. The improbable pair seemed to know each other well, standing close yet looking opposite directions. I don’t know what the egret did before it flew into the New World; I suppose it took its long, reedy legs to shallow water and picked in the bottoms for a couple of million years, each bird repeating until the new way of life came to it.

  I switched on the radio and turned the dial. Somewhere between a shill for a drive-up savings and loan and one for salvation, I found a raucous music, part bluegrass fiddle, part Texas guitar, part Highland concertina. Cajun voices sang an old, flattened French, part English, part undecipherable.

  Looking for live Cajun music, I stopped in Opelousas at the Plantation Lounge. Somebody sat on every barstool; but a small man, seeing a stranger, jumped down, shook my hand, and insisted I take his seat. In the fast roll of Cajun English, he said it was the guest stool and by right belonged to me. The barmaid, a woman with coiled eyes, brought a Jax. “Is there Cajun music here tonight?” I asked.