Fredericksburg and our last day

Our last day on the road! Not that there wasn't still more to see. We started out by driving into nearby Fredericksburg, VA, a small town with a very attractive historic business center of small shops. We walked along the main street and then stopped in at the James Monroe Museum on the site where Monroe had practiced law from 1786-1789, before becoming the fifth president of the United States. Monroe achieved an important role in American history via his negotiations with France, which led to the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, and his presidential proclamation of what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that the United States would not look kindly upon the interference of European countries in the affairs of countries in the western hemisphere - a doctrine used and misused by various American presidents over the course of American history.
The building was fairly small, but a docent took us around to the various rooms and brought the various objects to life by explaining them in the context of Monroe's life and accomplishments.

From there we continued on our way home via Rt. 301, which proved quite slow due to all of the traffic lights. We finally arrived home at 6:30 to a warm welcome by Ilana and Miriam, concluding my journey across America and this series of blogs.

Charlottesville, VA.

I was up around 7:00, as I usually am, in time to have a quick breakfast and some conversation with Lyn. Lyn finished her breakfast and was off to her job at the child care center. As she was finishing, Elise and Steve joined me and I had a second helping of breakfast. Shortly afterwards, we were on the road again. This time, northward bound towards home!

Not that we didn't still stop along the way when we came to someplace of interest. Our first stop was at Lynchberg, VA., where we stopped in the downtown area just long enough to browse the farmers market and buy some lunch which we consumed at picnic tables just outside the market.

We both had some vague forty year old memories of Charlottesville from our previous crosscountry trip as a very pleasant small town with either a large plaza (my memory) or a pedestrian street (Elise's more accurate memory). In any case, we decided to stop there and spend some time. We found the walking street which was several blocks long and wide enough to have stalls in the middle selling cloth and scarves and hats and similar items. The stores on both sides were primarily small eateries with outdoor tables, small book stores with both new and used books, and stores selling various works of art. All in all it was a very pleasant area to walk on a lovely fall day. I even ended up buying a hat from a nice Chinese lady at one of the stalls, who claimed she was parting with a $15.00 hat for just $10.00.

At the end of the day, we looked for a motel near Madison, but couldn't find anything under $60.00 - more than we were accustomed to paying. We decided to move on to Fredericksburg which was still more or less on our way home and did find a nice motel room for our last night on the road in our $40.00 price range.

Charlotte and Chapel Hill, NC

We're on our way to visit our friends Steve and Lyn in Chapel Hill, North Carolina - the last real stop on our journey. Along the way we stopped in Charlotte, North Carolina (not to be confused with Charleston, South Carolina or Charlottesville, VA. ) Charlotte is probably as representative of the new South as any city south of the Mason-Dixon Line. At least that is the impression that we got both from our brief visit into the city and from spending some time in their museum presenting a history of the Charlotte area from 1865 to the present. The city itself is very modern with several attractive skyscrapers. The museum shows the old South with its history of slavery and Jim Crow, but its emphasis is on the new South boasting the city's multiethnic population and its role as the second-largest financial center in the United States.

From Charlotte we continued on our way to Chapel Hill and arrived there around 6:00, in time for a very good supper and a very pleasant evening catching up with Lyn and Steve. They are friends of long standing whom we met at the Grand Canyon during our first crosscountry trip back in 1968. It has been several years now since we've seen them, but it's always pleasant to spend time with them, and this visit was no exception.

On the road East

Today was mostly just a driving day - the only day in the whole trip that we drove more than 300 miles in a day. We started off taking a scenic route on a very pretty two-lane rural road to Talledega, Alabama, which was somewhat larger than Montevallo and seemed reasonably prosperous. From there we took Highway I20 to Greenville, where we spent the night.

Montgomery and Montevallo, Alabama

  Montgomery is the capital of Alabama, and the area with the government buildings is quite attractive. The downtown shopping area is practically extinct, however. Where various stores once stood, there are now only empty buildings. We had seen other small towns in a similar condition, but Montgomery was the largest city we had seen so depressed. I don't think that this was the result of the current economic crisis. The desertion of the central city was too complete to have happened recently. Apparently it was, as with many other towns, a result of the growth of shopping centers in the area around the city. Harrisburg and other cities in central Pennsylvania were like this for several years beginning in the sixties but have since recovered to a large extent. Perhaps Montgomery will someday recover as well.

 The only other activity we saw in this area besides the Civil Rights Museum and the Civil Rights Monument standing beside the museum was an area where women were selling pies and cakes for the fight against breast cancer. We bought what we thought was a pie (but turned out to be a  coffee cake) as a house gift for my cousin in Montevallo.

The Civil Rights Museum was a very well-done history of the Movement. The most moving and interesting presentation in the museum was a hologram (like a 3D movie) of the bus incident with Rosa Parks which sparked the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King in Montgomery. To watch it was not at all like just watching a movie. It was like being on the curb watching the incident unfold on the bus before our eyes!



                                                                 Civil Rights Monument, Montgomery, Alabama

Outside the museum and just a short way down the street was the Civil Rights Monument. It consisted of a large metal disc on which was engraved the names of leaders of the Movement and those who had been murdered because of their involvement in the Movement. Most of the names were those which I remembered from living through that era.



Just behind the monument was a large wall, with water pouring down it in a perpetual waterfall. On the wall were engraved the words of Martin Luther King from one of his speeches: ". . . until Justice rolls down like waters and Righteousness like a mighty stream." I suppose we are still waiting for that day; prejudice and discrimination still exist, but at least the daily obvious humiliations of "separate and unequal" have been pretty much eliminated.



    The previous night I had called my cousin Harry who lives in Montevallo about 30 miles south of Birmingham to let him know that we were in the area and would like to visit him. Since we hadn't talked in at least fifteen years and had only kept track of each other through his sister who lived in Harrisburg, I  wasn't sure what kind of reception I would get. He was very pleased to hear from me, however, urged us to come visit and invited us to stay over at his house.



 Montevallo was a small town (about 4,000 people) when I visited there as a child in the forties and early fifties. I don't think it is much larger today. My mother's brothers had gone to Montevallo to open dry goods stores shortly after they graduated high school and my mother had followed them and worked in one of her brothers' stores after dropping out of college.

                                                                     My cousin Harry and Betty


My cousin Harry grew up there and now lives a quiet life in the same house he had continued to live in with his parents until their deaths. He had come to Harrisburg several times to visit his sister and once to Hawaii with a lady friend as part of a group, but he was quite content to remain in Montevallo most of the time. The house was immaculately clean and well-cared for and little had been changed since I was there as a child. Even the old dial phone was still there. One difference was that whatever was done in the house, he did. The days of a Black woman coming in every day to do the cooking and cleaning were apparently long gone. He mentioned that one couldn't even find someone to fill that role today. He plays tennis three times a week, attends occasional events at the college, knows most of the people in town, watches a lot of sports on TV, and goes out to eat or watches TV with his lady friend whom we met and liked. He also helps her deliver meals to homebound elderly. It's a quiet life, quite different from my own, but he seemed quite satisfied and comfortable with it. Who could ask for much more than that?

My grandarents  and the families of two of my uncles had lived in Montevallo. As a child, I had gone there with my parents every summer to visit them, first by train and later by car. I have very pleasant memories both of the time I spent there with my mother's family and of the trips there. I remember clearly the clickety clack of the train, playing Uncle Wiggly  (a board game) with my sister, and looking out the window at night at the lights of the towns we passed. On the car trips, we often stopped along the way to look at scenic highlights. I especially remember the Luray Caverns and the Natural Bridge in Virginia. I also remember the hilly roads in Maryland on Route 11, where my sister and I invariably threw up from car sickness. 

 I had not been to Montevallo for at least thirty years and maybe more. I wanted to see my grandparents' house (if it was still standing) and just walk around some of the area where I had spent those summer days of my youth.
My grandparents' house was still there. Aluminum siding had been added and it actually looked a lot better than I remembered it from sixty years ago.

 Downtown Montevallo had not changed much, except that several of the storefronts were now empty. It wasn't as bad as Montgomery, but it wasn't good. The town's lone movie theater where whites once sat downstairs and Blacks sat in the balcony was gone. The local college where my mother had attended for a year was still there. The name had changed from Alabama College to Montevallo College but the biggest change was that when Elise and I took a short walk through the central part of the campus, there were black students setting up for some kind of a picnic with loud rap music - a scene which would have been unthinkable in the forties or fifties.


I was told that the public schools had also been integrated. What used to be the black school was now the junior high school for both races. When I walked past the high school athletic field around 5:00, there were a number of students playing at various unorganized games - not only a mix of blacks and whites but also a mix of girls and boys. My observations were inevitably pretty superficial, but just walking by it seemed that blacks and whites, girls and boys, were interacting pretty freely with each other and did not generally divide up by race or gender.

Until I was a teenager - or perhaps later - I thought that my mother had grown up in Montevallo, but this was not actually the case. She was actually born and raised in West Blocton, an even smaller town than Montevallo, about half an hour's drive away. I wanted to see it, and Harry offered to drive us there.



      Signpost in West Blocton

The town had never been very large. It was originally the commercial center for the town of Blocton, whichwas a company town for a nearby mining operation long closed.  According to a plaque in front of the courthouse, in 1910, the town had fifty-five thriving businesses, and various religious institutions including a synagogue. Now, however, the town had obviously fallen upon hard times. The two blocks of the business area consisted almost entirely of empty storefronts, some with signs still indicating the nature of the businessesthat had once occupied them. There were no more than two or three stores still in operation. The synagoguewas long gone. Apparently my grandparents' house was still there, but Harry wasn't able to locate it. 

We went out with Harry and his friend Betty for a very pleasant dinner at a Chinese restaurant, then returned to his house and went to bed.

At church with Kent

The next morning, Viviane had to work, but Elise and I went with Kent to church. Kent told us, "The service usually lasts an hour, but if you want to leave earlier, it's O.K.. I usually sit in the back myself and often leave before the service is over."  The service began with a few lively hymns presented by a quartet of teenagers and a small band. This was followed, however, not by a usual church service but by a simulcast from New York City of a sermon being delivered by one of Reverend Moon's daughters (who is the minister of the New York church), which we watched on a big screen. The sermon was devoted to a presentation of the qualities necessary to make a marriage successful and was not so different from what might have been presented by a good marriage counselor. Kent explained that the simulcast was a relatively new procedure and that they would eventually return to services led by local ministers.

On the way back to his house, Kent took us on a drive and brief walk through downtown Mobile, which was pretty quiet on a Sunday morning..

After lunch we were on our way again, off to Montgomery Alabama.  We spent the night in a motel just outside Montgomery.

Visiting in Mobile - Reverend Moon's community

on the beach in Biloxi, Mississippi 

Our goal today was to reach the home of Elise' cousin, who is a member of the the Reverend Moon community in Mobile, AL.

We drove most of the way on Interstate 10, which is a great route for getting from one place to another. You can do the speed limit of 70 miles an hour and probably a bit more without much concern about getting stopped. Of course, it's also pretty boring, with mostly flat land on both sides and straight road in front. As we left Texas and entered Mississippi, we moved over to Rt. 90, which is considered a scenic byway and also winds through small towns and hamlets along the way.




We made the change just in time to get into Biloxi, where we stopped at a Waffle House and Elise bought an egg sandwich-to-go for breakfast. The restaurant was just up from the beach, so we took Elise's sandwich and my folding chair and went to have breakfast by the Gulf of Mexico. The beach was very wide and immaculately clean. We also had the beach to ourselves; evidently Biloxi residents don't go to the beach in October. It was a beautiful breakfast.

After Biloxi Rt. 10 was not much of a scenic byway - just a series of traffic lights and the standard highway commercial establishments.





                                                      Elise, Benny, Kent, Jeannette, Milt

 We reached Elise's cousin,Viviane, around 1:45 and spent most of the afternoon just talking and catching up .One of the subjects we talked about was their membership in the Reverend Moon community in Mobile.Viviane has been involved with this group since she was in her twenties. She was married to someone chosen by Reverend Moon in a ceremony in Madison Square Garden with about 1,000 other couples. I think their marriage has not always been ideal, (but then again, whose is?) but they did manage to raise four lovely children, all of whom are doing well and are still involved in their community, and whatever their marital difficulties may have been, they seem to have settled into a good relationship.

They mentioned that this year for the first time, Reverend Moon told the people assembled for the marriage ceremony that they should pick their own partners this time. I would imagine that this was probably somewhat traumatic for those expecting to simply have someone chosen for them, and Elise' cousin didn't know the actual process by which couples were paired up; that was disappointing since I would really like to know just how it was done. Couples could also meet, fall in love, and get married in the traditional way (which involves parental permission and involvement).

Later in the afternoon, we went to a wedding celebration of a young couple in the community, which was held in a large yard at the house of the girl's parents. We were introduced to many of the people, including the woman minister of the congregation. They all greeted us warmly and were easy to talk with about the things people usually talk about at first meeting. They were happy to answer any questions we had about their community, but there was no attempt to convert us. We had planned to stay for just five or ten minutes, but ended up staying an hour - long enough to enjoy some food from the buffet.

We went from there with Viviane's husband Kent to see sunset an old fort on Mobile Bay, and then back for dinner and more talk.