(written Monday morning, July 12, 2010 morning after my return home)

regarding: SATURDAY, JULY 10, 2010

from Vicksburg to Memphis to Nashville

THIS WILL BE A LONG ENTRY BECAUSE IT WAS A LONG, EVENTFUL DAY. I fear that the familiarity of home and the preparation for getting back to work will make me forget everything, so I write at length today. For those who have faithfully "followed" me on this trip, remember that there is no way for me to check if you read the whole entry, and there will not be a test at the end.

VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI: We (Amity, my sidekick and I) stayed in the hotel in Vicksburg -- arriving very late on Friday night and leaving very early on Saturday morning. I did want to drive the few miles back from the hotel to the Welcome Center, mostly because I wanted to see if there was printed information on the Delta -- mostly Greenwood and Money -- and to take a photograph of the mighty Mississippi.

I admit that I haven't even glanced at the copy of Twain's Life on the Mississippi I brought along -- too busy reading The Eyes of Willie McGee; Letters from Mississippi : Personal Reports from Volunteers in The Summer Freedom Project, 1964; Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case; and The 2011 Rand McNally Road Atlas.

When I went to the Welcome Center and asked about information on the Emmett Till case, the older White lady behind the counter looked at me funny and said she didn't know about that. My guess is that she -- and many other people of her generation in Mississippi -- would rather forget that case. (Or, hey. Maybe her memory is like mine and she actually has forgotten it .)The same thing happened to me in 1974 when I was in Fall River, Massachusetts and asked about the Lizzie Borden case: it was either forgotten or everyone was trying to forget.

I probably would have visited the Vicksburg battlefield near our hotel -- especially would like to have visited the caves where people hid during the seige -- but there was so much to explore, and only days, not years, to explore it.

We drove northward on Hwy #3 and 49E -- through Satartia, Crupp, Yazoo City, Eden, Tchula, Cruger, and Sidon. I wanted the Delta Experience, and this was it. We drove for many miles on the two-lane road and hardly ever saw another car -- just hundreds of thousands of acres of cornfields and (I assumed) cotton and soybean fields. I recognize corn; cotton and soybeans, not so much.

After seeing these vast fields spreading out for miles on either side, I can understand how it would have taken hundreds of people per-farm/plantation to harvest so much cotton.

HISTORY LESSON (Todd, are you paying attention? You're the one who asked for this!) : The invention of the cotton gin, which separated the cotton fiber from the seed, made growing cotton much more profitable for the landowner and therefore increased the need for workers to grow and harvest it. The demand for human beings -- used exactly like machinery, used until they were broken -- increased dramatically after the invention of the cotton gin. The plantation owner could buy thousands of acres for cotton and use his slaves to plant, chop, and harvest, while the gin (short for "engine") could prepare the cotton for shipping much faster than by hand. I saw the very fields where this cotton was grown and where these people were used. LESSON ENDED.

GREENWOOD, MISSISSIPPI: I wanted to visit Greenwood, I told Amity, because it figures in my study of the Civil Rights Movement, Freedom Summer, Black voter registration, Emmett Till.