We tired of putting on the Christmas concert every year about the time the kids were old enough to start noticing we thought it was all bullshit anyway. I don't just mean Santa Claus, commercialism and all those more recent inventions. We're atheists, y'see, and think the jolly old elf is just as likely as any of that other mythological crap.
Not that I'm saying there's no god. Or no Santa Claus. As long as you get it. Like Francis Pharcellus Church. Just don't go literal on my ass or I'll go medieval on yours. Yes, Virginia, there is a Quentin Tarantino.
So for a few years, starting when the van o' kids ranged in age from prob'ly nine to 14 we made a better plan. Took all the money we would have spent on shipping containers of plastic-shrink-wrapped plastic and the same old cooking, eating, giving, receiving scenario that we'd always had a hard time taking seriously anyway and hit the road instead.
So let me tell you about Christmas, 2005.
Cause it ain't like all the others. It's as unique as one of them snowflakes we didn't see for damn near a month.
Actually Christmas Eve stands out. Cause the downpour was getting monotonous in the tents, with the safe zones centred more and more around the centre. And we were too ready for something other than the van to even consider that refuge, available electronic diversions or no.
We were in a campground just outside the same Meridian, Mississippi that Emmy Lou Harris made a touch famous in the title song of her 2000 album Red Dirt Girl. Y'know, just across the line and a little southeast of Meridian, you got it, sittin' on the front porch coolin' in the shade/singin' every song that the radio played, good stuff.
No need for coolin' that night though, stayin' warm and dry. Sitting on the dryer and laughing with the kids. Catching up on clumps of slept-on dirty road clothes. Pretty much owning this massive campground - amazed it's even open. While the machines hum and spin and a hard Mississippi rain does the dark drum all over this cozy cinder-block shack.
Big Day morning and we want to be Christmas tourists cause we're here, not there, and because we get it and we like a good old story. So we set about looking for a church, with some vague, probably objectionable in any number of inconsequential ways, notion of clapping, grooving choirs and general rootsy joy. Where people bring the magic and pass all the glory on to god.
Of course, we went looking for this as Canadian tourists with a timeline drifting about in our heads that started vaguely with the first slave ship and ended approximately now. Maybe with Cliff Huxtable. History being, of course, the story of how fucked up everything used to be before it all got fixed like now.
Course that's a lame joke even in squeaky little Canada. Let me tell you, it's an out-loud howl in Mississippi.
That was made clear to us that holy morning in church parking lots and fast food joints.
We went to churches first, a whole whack of them. Right about on time. As cars were emptying; buildings filling. Looking for a place where we could blend in just a bit and get a little culture - born in old pain and all fixed up just in time. 'Cept nothing's been fixed.
In the Mississippi we visited on Christmas morning there were black churches and there were white churches. And I'm talking unanimity here. Our attention to detail increased along with our slack-jawed disbelief and I can assure you we saw no exceptions. However urgently we looked.
So we didn't settle our condescending asses into pews in any Mississippi Christmas church. Not a black church where we would have felt like we should have brought a search warrant. Not a white church where the welcome would have made us need a shower.
We drove around till the cars were all empty and the buildings were all full. There was no snow in Meridian but there were a lot of inflatable snowmen. And santas. And reindeer. And religious iconography. Half inflated, actually. Maybe it was the rain. Toppled trashily on sodden lawns. Ready for roll-up in a day or two anyway. It was quite a tour though. And yes, here comes another song quote.
Pretenders: I went back to Ohio/But my city was gone/There was no train station/There was no downtown.
This one was downright eerie even though we were a long way from Ohio. Cause downtown Meridian is a blitzed-out grey mass of silent concrete and broken glass. All but abandoned. And the train station has found a way to outdo nonexistence. It's been turned into a museum. Commemorating the days when Meridian merited a train station. And right in the middle of it all is a cemetery. Overgrown and ignored. Where you can find barely legible wooden grave markers for soldiers who fell in the Civil War.
The Meridian of today is a plastic ring around the outside of this haunted shambles. Gas stations and Piggly Wigglys and fast food drive throughs and big box stores are alive and well. Bustling now with the after-church crowds looking for Whoppers to hold them over until Christmas dinner.
We join them briefly and discover a place where blacks and whites actually mingle in the same room. If you can call that mingling. All the employees are black. And they and their white customers don't even look at each other. We all notice this and comment as soon as we're back outside. It's nobody's imagination. There are black customers too, and that's a different story. But the tension in the restaurant is unnerving. 'Specially since it obviously isn't ending at the door.
We drove out of Meridian that night after breaking camp. Still in the pouring rain.
Crossed into Alabama and stopped for gas, unsure of where we were headed next. The gas station experience was just like the burger joint in Meridian. All black employees. This time us the only whiteys in the room. That slave ship was a long while back, but us and our string of pasty kids were apparently responsible for it and for everything since.
Next destination? West. Drive all night. Sunshine on the cacti by the time it rises. Palm trees dead ahead. We'll come back here some summer when everyone's in a better mood.
No comments:
Post a Comment