I didn’t wake up until 10:30 today. I must have been more exhausted than I thought. I scrambled to make checkout and bounced into the car, then set off parallel to I-30 into Little Rock. Along the way, I stopped for a bagel and a Mayan latte (chocolate and cayenne). I also filled up my tank for $2.94 a gallon, which is currently a record. Arkansas has its points.
My activity of the day was to visit the Little Rock Central High School. In 1957, the Little Rock Nine, a group of Black students, enrolled in this all-white high school and endured bitter, nationally publicized opposition. The site is now a museum, like Monroe Elementary in Topeka, but my visit here was pedestrian. The staff were polite but busy, and the exhibits were passive instead of dynamic. The mood was definitely more “visitor center” than “ground zero”. I still learned from my trip, but I didn’t feel nearly as much.
I kept driving east, stopping in an isolated field to practice the saxophone. I was in the Mississippi Delta now, in a bottomland hardwood forest. The trees were tall, straight, and orderly. As the country flattened out and opened up, I started to appreciate it more. It felt better and healthier. Those good feelings continued into lunch, where I stopped at the chipper but awkward Craig’s Barbecue. The building is a small white shack, like the annex of a government building. The front door is undersized and scrapes along the ground, and the dining room was an odd mixture of barebones functionality and youth-birthday-party charm. There was no menu. I needed to trust the Food Bible on this one—and I was rewarded with a cheap, reasonably portioned pork sandwich that blew up my mouth with flavor. Deeply smoked meat, furious sauce and sweet crunch slaw—absolutely perfect.
After another hour and a half, I saw the Mississippi River again, fifty times larger than in Minnesota. I’ve stopped among the riverside casinos for the night. I considered going to Graceland tomorrow, but I’m not enough of an Elvis fanatic to justify the $80 tour. Instead, I’ll peek at a couple other spots in Memphis and start down Mississippi.
On the way to Memphis, where B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and others (to say nothing of ELVIS!) all cut their first records for Sam Phillips? Be sure to check out the Rock and Soul Museum (a division of the Smithsonian Institute) while you’re there. The ghosts that haunt Beale Street are still there, and their influence can be heard in the blues which still comes tumbling out of the bars and nightclubs.
Interesting commentary on the Little Rock Central High School Museum. You contrasted it with the one in Monroe Elementary in Kansas, I think it was. That one was vibrant and made an effort to bring visitors into the experience but Little Rock was very passive and not at all interested in being any more than informational. I wonder why that is. I wonder if the attitudes in the two states are really different toward government interference. You did not mention seeing a lot of Confederate flags in Kansas but there seemed to be plenty of them in Arkansas. Just wondering. I would never pay anything to go see Graceland! I was a keen Elvis fan when I was in high school but I got over it! Even then I don’t know as I would have wanted to tour Graceland. There’s kind of a cult of Elvis. I can’t identify with it. I have seen the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, on a bridge between Minneapolis and St. Paul. As you said, there’s a major size difference between there and the south, of course. These days there’s not enough water in it and barges and boats are not able to travel up it too far. This is a major problem. Probably a result of climate change. The land has become very dry from droughts. I wonder what you will find in Mississippi. Love, Grandma
As Levon Helm once said: “Nearly every record that Elvis made BEFORE he want into the Army was vital, ground-breaking and worth having. Almost none of the records he made once he got out of the Army were any of those things.”
According to Sam Phillips, he hired Elvis as a vocalist on what were supposed to be recordings by the Scotty Moore Trio. Elvis was so compelling a performer, however, that they soon became his backup band.