4/8 – 4/10/19
4-8
Just north of Baton Rouge, I merged onto US-61, the highway I would be following on and off through Memphis. My first real stop was the town of St. Francisville, where I spent a pleasant half-hour exploring the shady streets. I especially liked the picturesque Episcopal Church, shaded by live oaks, padded with moss, and ensconced in a cemetery straight from the pages of an Anne Rice novel.
I paused next in Woodville, Mississippi. As befitted the childhood home of Jefferson Davis, Woodville had the look of an archetypal southern town, down to a courthouse shaded by live oaks and a dilapidated gas station tended by an old man on a cane chair. On, then, to the antebellum glories of Natchez, where I decided to only tour one house – Longwood, an imposing octagonal mansion that was only partially finished when the Civil War broke out. Since only the basement was plastered and decorated before work stopped, the rest of the house provided an interesting glimpse into nineteenth-century construction methods.
After a brief drive around downtown Natchez and a stop for some truly superb fried chicken, I followed a winding road through kudzu-wrapped forest to the ruins of Windsor, a grand plantation house that burned down more than a century ago, leaving only its brick columns behind. Those columns remain impressively evocative, and their effect was nicely complemented during my visit by the distant thunder and spitting rain of an approaching storm.
After a waterlogged walk through Port Gibson, I made a short detour down the Natchez Trace Parkway to check out a preserved segment of the old trail. Then I continued to Vicksburg, where I had booked a surprisingly inexpensive room at a hotel that seemed (from the website) to be built into a grand antebellum mansion. In the event, the mansion was indeed grand – but my room was in the former carriage house.
During a break in the rain, I decided to save money on dinner by heating up one of my two remaining cans of soup in the hotel parking lot. As I did so, I was joined by a very drunk and apparently homeless man, who stood beside me as I stirred and recounted a long and completely incomprehensible story about his woman, who had “throwed him out.” To ease his pain and be rid of him, I sent him along with my other can of soup. Later, having clandestinely cleaned my dishes in a hedge behind the hotel, I walked up to the porch in front of my room, and read for an hour or so as crickets chirped in the rustling oaks.
4-9
The morning was bright and beautiful; and having enjoyed a pleasant breakfast in the mansion (and been shown the Union cannonball embedded in the parlor wall), I set out on my thrice-repaired bike to explore Vicksburg. I began at the Mississippi River Museum, partly because it was free, but mostly because the museum was devoted to a topic – civil engineering – I have always found fascinating. The museum was indeed interesting in a low-key, government-sponsored sort of way. I was, however, the only visitor; and under the rheumy eyes of the two curators, I felt obliged to dutifully inspect, or at least nod sagely at, every exhibit.
Once I finally escaped the museum, I cycled through the quiet town to the national military park that rings Vicksburg, the purpose and goal of my visit. From May 18 to July 4, 1863, U. S. Grant and more than 70,000 troops besieged the 30,000 Confederates holding Vicksburg, the last obstacle to Union control of the Mississippi River. The city’s surrender, which occurred on the same day as Lee’s retreat from Gettysburg, is often described as the turning point of the Civil War.
The massive Confederate earthworks that protected Vicksburg and the Union siege trenches that opposed them run in parallel arcs north and east of the city. The heart of the military park is the 16-mile road that traces the opposing lines. This road – after dutifully watching the orientation video in the visitor center – I circled on my bike, stopping at the various signs that explained the course of the siege. These were complemented by the hundreds of memorials set up by Union and Confederate veterans in the early twentieth century, the most impressive of which – I was vaguely pleased to note – was a miniature Pantheon set up by the state of Illinois.
The weather was perfect for riding, and the general sense of being immersed in history deeply gratifying. The only real drawback was the almost complete absence of level road, which called up unpleasant memories of the Ozarks. This time, however, my bike didn’t break down, and I was able to labor up and coast down as needed.
On my way back through downtown Vicksburg, I felt obligated – as a longtime devotee of Coca-Cola – to visit the Biedenharn Museum, located in the building where that heavenly elixir was first bottled. There I ordered a coke float (better, in my opinion, than the root beer equivalent), and admired the memorabilia piled on shelves while discoursing on various coke-related topics with the museum attendant.
Leaving Vicksburg, I continued north on highway 61. For a few miles, floodwaters lapped the road, and the submerged fields on both sides were pocked with sunken farmhouses.
Eventually, the highway pulled away from the river, and struck across the freshly-planted fields of the Delta. The flat landscape and black earth were strikingly familiar-looking; if not for the occasional cypress-shaded bayou, I could easily have imagined myself back in the Midwest. The fantastic ribs I stopped for in Clarksdale, however, reminded me that I was still far from home.
4-10
Having decided to spend at least half the day cycling around Memphis, I began with the sort of places I tend to visit in every city: a Gilded Age residential neighborhood and a Victorian cemetery. The neighborhood was Central Gardens, which featured dozens of imposing mansions, most built around the turn of the twentieth century. The cemetery was Elmwood, where the mansion builders were buried in suitable style. The houses and tombs were impressive; but as always in southern cities, I was particularly struck by the landscaping of the grounds, not least because many trees and bushes wore their spring flowers.
A series of debris-strewn bike lanes brought me toward downtown Memphis. After a brief pilgrimage to the former Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was murdered in 1968, I continued onto Beale Street, a touristy strip in the vein of Nashville’s Broadway. Locking my bike, I spent a pleasant hour in the nearby Rock n’ Soul Museum, which traces the central place of Memphis in the evolution of American popular music. I shared the museum with a group of elderly ladies from Arkansas, who – to judge from the enthusiasm with which they danced to the songs on the audio tour – had fond memories of the Fifties.
Although I had initially planned to visit Graceland, I found myself unable to justify spending $50 to share Elvis’ house with a few thousand other tourists. So instead of taking the Graceland shuttle from the Rock n’ Soul Museum, I continued on bike into downtown Memphis, which has (particularly for a southern city) a fairly impressive collection of pre-Depression skyscrapers. I was especially struck by the grandiose and long-abandoned Sterick Building.
Past downtown, I rode over to Mud Island, which offered sweeping views of the swollen Mississippi and downtown skyline. Then I turned back east into the city, for a long and looping route carward. Along the way, I enjoyed what may have been the best ribs I’ve ever tasted at a place called the Cozy Corner. I was stirred out of my food coma a few minutes after leaving the restaurant, when a distracted driver ran a red light and smashed into a crossing car about ten feet from where I stood with my bike, scattering debris across the intersection. The rest of my ride was comparatively uneventful, and I carried on to my car, and the long drive into Kentucky.