The Spirit
of New Orleans backed out of Union Station and sat on a flyover for twenty
minutes in deference to another, favoured, train using the shared tracks before
jolting forward to begin the long journey south.
Almost
every seat was occupied in the designated rear carriage so my hopes for a
comfortable night were dashed when a very tall black man indicated he had been
assigned the seat next to me. Polite and affable, my fellow-passenger was easy
to talk to and we soon found ourselves discussing everything from the best way
of encouraging his six-year old daughter’s love of reading, to gun control, to
his wife’s employment conditions as a blackjack dealer at a Native American
casino in Missouri.
The windows
of the carriage were opaque blackness as we left Chicago and a twenty hour
journey lay ahead of me – I was glad of the good company until at midnight he
decided to try and sleep and managed to find some empty seats with a bit more
room to fold himself into.
The train
lurched from station to station during the night – Champaign-Urbana, Centralia,
Newbern-Dyersburg – sometimes whistling through, sometimes stopping to spill
and retrieve passengers, a sad-looking group of smokers sidling onto the
platform for a hasty puff at each stop. From Illinois we dipped into a corner
of Kentucky, spent a little longer in Tennessee and fell into Mississippi at
Memphis.
A drunk
fell into the carriage, mumbled that there were ‘ too many black folks’ and to
everyone’s relief, disappeared.
In the
seats behind me: “What did he say?”
“Oh, you
know, pay no min’…”
As another
local said to me in another place at another time: “Racism is everywhere,
especially in Mississippi.” Still.
Memphis
appeared out of the darkness as a name and a Mississippi bridge with a
guitar-shaped span, all lit up and ready to party – there were just no people
in sight.
Morning
brought green fields, dishevelled clapboard towns and swamps. Flocks of white
birds arced and dipped above the bare winter trees.
By nine we
reached Greenwood and my fellow-passenger got up to leave the train –just a
coat, no luggage.
“I don’t
know your name.”
“Calson” he
said “You take care now.”
American
names are intriguing.
Next stop
Yazoo.
Overcast,
breezy, with power poles leaning under the tangle of lines covering the main street, Yazoo was
declared ‘open’ by a red neon sign on the nameless shack advertising ‘gumbo
shrimp’ and ‘ribeye’.
As
multi-cultural as America is, it is the most segregated country I’ve travelled
in: from New Mexico with its dearth of African-Americans to southern towns like Yazoo where I didn’t see
a white face, it is a nation made up of many separate worlds, sometimes
intersecting but often spinning in different universes.
Flora,
Slobovia, “Next stop Jackson, Mississippi.”
(c)FMPDH 2012
