Blue Highways: Uniontown & Demopolis, Alabama

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnaill for MapWe travel with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) through Uniontown and Demopolis, making for Mississippi.  I will reflect on the ironies of the names of both places.   If you would like to see where they are located, click the thumbnail of the map at right.

Book Quote

"Uniontown, Demopolis.  The Tombigbee River and blue highway 28."

Blue Highways: Chapter 3, Part 6

View of Demopolis, Alabama. Click on the picture to go to host site.

Uniontown and Demopolis, Alabama

It's ironic that there is a town named Uniontown in Alabama, since Alabama is a so called "Right to Work" state.  The name of Uniontown actually replaced the town's earlier name, Woodville, when a local planter suggested the change.  So in that case, I'm guessing that the "union" in Uniontown stands for the United States, or our union.

But it's still ironic to me.  What is a "right to work" state?  Such a state, and there are 22 states with such laws, prohibit workers' unions from negotiating contracts with employers that mandate that employees join the union and pay union dues.

The whole question of unions and their value is a complicated one.  Lately, as our country has taken a rightward course, unions are more often than not seen as problems.  Employers see them as hassles to deal with, and as being bad for business because they negotiate higher wages, benefits and other types of conditions that cost money.  As a more conservative voice is heard across America, unions have been feeling the effects.  Union membership is down, partly because of the right to work laws in so many states.  As membership is down, dues go down too, and union power in American politics has become weaker.

Not that unions haven't made their own problems.  Corruption within unions used to be widespread, and in the heydey of unions, some of their activities bordered on the criminal, if they weren't already so.  Unions had the power to not only influence but intimidate politicians.  Some politicians knew that if they wanted to be re-elected, they had to do what the unions wanted.

What complicates the history of unions for me is that unions did great things for American workers.  Union organizers, often at the risk of their lives, brought unionism into such industries as mining, autoworking, steel manufacturing and all the heavy labor industries.  Strikes were common, and many of those strikes were deadly with police and private security using force to put them down.  However, over time, those industries transformed, becoming safer, better paying and more efficient overall.  With unions watching, exploitation of workers became a relic of the past.  Unions were responsible for demanding that companies institute 8 hour workdays, health and retirement benefits, safe working conditions, and many of the things that workers today, whether supportive of unions or not, take for granted.

Arguments are made today that unions aren't needed, because we are more enlightened people.  But capitalism is not about enlightenment, it's about profit.  In the United States, where unions are restricted, there tends to be lower wages.  Companies still often employ threatening tactics to keep unions from forming, such as firing workers (often for other stated reasons) for associating with union organizers.  In foreign countries, particularly in the developing world, lack of unions or weak unions have meant that child labor, wages that don't meet subsistence needs, and extremely unsafe working conditions still exist.  In Mexican maquiladora factories, women have claimed that in some factories they will be fired if pregnant, and have been required to show their used feminine pads to prove that they aren't pregnant.  You would not see that in a factory that had been organized by an effective union.

When I was in high school, I saw unions as an impediment.  I worked at our local lumber mill in the summer for a little over a $10.00 per hour wage.  In 1982, that was a kingly wage for a high school kid.  But I didn't appreciate that, nor did I appreciate the health benefits as I was a healthy young kid.  All I knew was that I was required to join the International Woodworkers of America and that a portion of my check went to the union.  That bothered me.  Also, the union was threatening a strike that summer.  I didn't like that, because I wouldn't be able to work, and I asked my father, who was management at the mill, what would stop me from working anyway.  He forcefully told me no.  Working would make me a "scab" and possibly put me in danger.  Luckily, the strike never came.  But I didn't appreciate, as I do now, some of the contributions that unions made so that my job there was so lucrative and safe.

I'm not saying you should or should not support unions, but in the argument over whether they should exist or not, I think that if one wants to join a union, they should be able to without fear of consequences.  I also think that despite union missteps over the years, we should put their accomplishments in the proper historical context.  They helped make America what it is today.

Demopolis, on the othe hand, brings to mind classical Greece.  Another irony - it was founded as the "City of the People" by French expatriates from Haiti who were fleeing a slave rebellion there.  So, a name that implies classical democracy and freedom was founded by people who were fleeing a rebellion that freed untold numbers of slaves and made them full citizens in a new republic!  I'm not saying that Demopolis doesn't have other attributes that reflect the classical world, but I have to say I love these little ironies.

If you want to know more about Uniontown and Demopolis

Demopolis
Demopolis Times (newspaper)
Uniontown
Wikipedia: Demopolis
Wikipedia: Uniontown

Next up:  Scooba, Mississippi

Blue Highways: Selma, Alabama

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe drive with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) into Selma, Alabama where so much changed for America on March 7, 1965.  We will also leave with him in a little fear of arrest.  To see where this sea change in American civil rights occurred which led, forty-three years later, to the election of the first African-American President of the United States, click on the thumbnail of the map at right.  Leave a comment, if you'd like!

Book Quote(s)

LHM:  "Doesn't sound like much has changed.

White man named Ray:  "Okay, sonny-jim.   I'll tell you about change....Change ruined this town.  Bar I just come from, three of them sittin' in there big as sin.  Fifteen years ago you couldna hired a nigger to go in there.  You talk about change, and I say to you, 'Go to hell.'

"....That whole march was a TV stunt.  Niggers knew what would happen here.  That's why they came.  Hardly none of them lived here.  They knew the sheriff had himself a reputation.  They picked him, not the town.  Well, they got what they were lookin' for.  I'm sick of goin' over and over it.

"I'm tellin' you sickin' dogs and poundin' the niggers was a lack of ignorance.  We shoulda paid them no mind.  Then the cameras woulda stayed in the bags.  That's what ruined us - photographers and reporters.  Like with the Klan.  Some Grand Genie comes crawlin' outa his rotten stump, and there go the cameras and the tongue-cluckin' over the poor South....I'm sick of talkin' about it."

Blue Highways: Part 3, Chapter 3

LHM: "I'm trying to find out if things have changed since the march.

James Walker: "Tell you in three words.  Aint nothin' changed.

Charles Davis:  "Made both marches.  People be sayin' we wasted our time, but things are better.  Least a little bit.

"....But lotta times it's like always.  Take yesterday.  I put a quarter in a sodapop machine at the gas station.  Money keeps comin' down.  Two honkies sit watchin'.  I ask if the machine was broke, and one honker says it takes thirty cents now.  Machine says twenty-five on it.  Then he says, 'Wondered how long fore you figured it out.'  He couldn't tell me they changed it.  I said, 'Don't take long to figure you.' and walked off.  Other honker says, 'Want me to whup the nigger?'  Five years ago I'da fought him.  Now I try to ignore it.  But hey, I used to follow Malcom X."

Blue Highways: Part 3, Chapter 4

Downtown Selma, Alabama. Photo by Carol McKinney Highsmith and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.Selma, Alabama

In March, 1965, I was not even a year and a half old.  So I was quite unconscious of the earthquake in the social and political landscape shaking around me.

In March, 1965, a bunch of marchers from Selma and around the country tried to cross a bridge as they commenced a 50 mile or so march to the state capital of Montgomery.  At the far end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were met by police on foot with clubs and tear gas, and mounted police with clubs.  The repulsing of the march became the United States' Bloody Sunday, and not only did it galvanize the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, but it also outraged millions of ordinary Americans who up to that point had ignored the fact that a significant minority of Americans were being denied their basic rights.  After Selma, when peaceful marchers were gassed, clubbed into submission and mowed down by horses, nobody could ignore the hypocrisy of the United States of America's ideals, and its actions and inactions toward its black citizens.

What happened that day sounds terrifying.  This is an excerpt of an interview with a woman who participated in that march.

"'The horses…were more humane than the troopers; they stepped over fallen victims,’ Amelia Boynton later recalled. ‘As I stepped aside from a troopers club, I felt a blow on my arm…Another blow by a trooper, as I was gasping for breath, knocked me to the ground and there I lay, unconscious…’."

From Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama posted on Jeremy Stangroom.com

When LHM travels through Selma, looking to learn if anything had changed, he finds little to encourage him.  Some white residents are clearly sick of discussing what had happened just little over a decade before.  Some black residents are convinced that nothing had changed, and that the Civil Rights Movement had petered out and died.  LHM is told that even if they could frequent establishments where whites go, most black residents wouldn't want to frequent them.  He is bluntly warned by James Walker and Charles Davis, two black men that he interviews in a black section of town, that the cops will target him as a drug dealer just for talking with them, and he leaves Selma with some fear that the police will arrest him as he heads out of town.  Clearly, despite political changes, social change comes slowly and the divides remain strong.

I believe that, despite the divides that still exist in America today, the Civil Rights Movement caused a huge upheaval in American politics in society that is still growing.  It unleashed political forces that led to more educational opportunities not only for blacks but for other minorities as well.  Armed with education, more minorities began to make inroads into politics and business.  We still see ghettos, incredible poverty among blacks and latinos, and the current political backlash.  But whatever you think about the state of our country today, the fact is that without the Civil Rights Movement, a young Barack Obama would have never become president of the United States.  We are still on the path, I believe, toward making America's true ideals of liberty and equality for all a reality - but we're getting there despite the political pendulum swings.

Back to me.  Some 33 years after The U.S. Bloody Sunday, I stood at a military and police barricade in Portadown, Northern Ireland.  Thousands of Unionist Orangemen had marched up and were demanding that their right to march through the Catholic area of the city on their traditional route be honored.  Inside, residents of the neighborhood were preparing to sit on the ground and engage in tactics of non-violence to oppose the police and the marchers in case the British government changed its mind at the last minute and agreed to let the marchers through.  Black police helicopters circled overhead, and both police and British soldiers had their weapons at ready - who they would use them against was anyone's guess.  The tension was extremely high, but amazingly, both sides remained non-violent, and after presenting their written protest, the Unionist marchers took an alternative route to the church where they held speeches and rallies.

I may not have been aware of what happened in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965 due to my age.  But what happened there affected me decades later, as I watched what appeared to be two intractable foes in Northern Ireland both use language and tactics that were first used by Gandhi in India, and refined by Martin Luther King, Jr. and SNCC in the Civil Rights Movement.  What happened in Selma not only had repercussions across time, but across the globe.  It brought out the worst but also the best in America, and I have to believe that the world is better for it.  Elections come and go, the pendulum swings from the political right to the political left, but the events in Selma took America one step closer to meeting the democratic ideals it set for itself in its Constitution.

If you want to know more about Selma

City of Selma and Dallas County
Concordia College of Selma
Jeremy Stangroom.com: Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama
Selma city website
Selma Daily Photo (blog)
Selma Times-Journal (newspaper)
Selma to Montgomery marches - National Historic Road
StoryCorps: Selma
Wikipedia: Selma
Wikipedia: Selma to Montgomery marches

Next up: Uniontown and Demopolis, Alabama

Blue Highways: Maplesville, Stanton and Plantersville, Alabama

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe make our way south with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), in the late 1970s, heading down toward Selma, Alabama to learn whether Selma had changed 10 years after Martin Luther King's death.  But, we drive through the friendly towns of Maplesville, Stanton and Plantersville where people wave to strangers.  Click on the thumbnail of the map at right to see where these towns lie on our route.  Leave a comment - are you a waver to strangers passing by in cars?

Book Quote

"By midmorning I was following route 22, as I had from the Alabama line, on my way to Selma.  The truck license plates said HEART OF DIXIE, and I was going into the middle of the heart.  West of the bouldery Coosa River, I saw an old man plowing an old field with an old horse, and once more I wasn't sure whether I was seeing the end or beginning.  Then an outbreak of waving happened - first at Maplesville, again in Stanton, again in Plantersville; from galleries and sidewalks people waved.  Where folks are friendly."

Blue Highways: Part 3, Chapter 3

Downtown Maplesville, Alabama. Click on image to go to photo on Flickr.

Maplesville, Stanton and Plantersville, Alabama

Waving.  Such a simple thing to do.  We wave when we want to capture someone's attention, either because we want to acknowledge them, or indicate trouble, or dismiss them.

What LHM describes in the quote, the friendly folks in the south who wave from their stoops and sidewalks, is pretty much what I've experienced while traveling in the South.  Actually, it is what I've experienced traveling in pretty much any rural area.

When driving across rural areas of the United States, I was always surprised when, on a lonely road, I might pass a pickup going the other direction and the guy driving would either wave, or simply stick up his index finger off the top of the steering wheel.  This man didn't know me and was probably quite aware that I was not from anywhere around there.  Why?  Because I wasn't driving a pickup but a sedan.  So, it always was a breath of fresh air in a car filled with the smell of Cheetos or some other cheesy comestible snack to get that brief second of acknowledgment by a stranger before they zipped past.

My father liked to wave to the train.  My family has some property in a remote valley in Northern California that had train tracks running right through the middle.  Our cabin was situated about 50 feet to the side of the tracks.  Every day in the summer, one to two small passenger trains, and then a large passenger steam engine from my hometown, heading to the next town over, would go by.  My father would stand by the tracks, usually shirtless and in shorts because it was often hot, and wave and put on a show for the tourists passing by on the train.  He waved, all the while yelling "how are you doing?"  "Look at you!"  He would point at people and shout "Bless your little heart!"  The tourists loved it.  I don't know how many family trip photo albums or Super-8 movies stored in attics and boxes my father is in, but I'm sure there are quite a few of them.  I should look it up on YouTube.  Maybe someone has uploaded one from the 1970s!

Driving through small towns, one often gets the same nice, friendly waves.  Whether they are meant as such or whether they are simply convention with no feeling behind them is not for me to say.  All I know is that the feeling of a place can be dramatically different if people are waving at you as you drive by in your car rather than staring at you from stoops or giving sullen looks.  I at least have a better feeling about a place.  As I've written before, small towns often have dark undercurrents behind them in a way that is much more malicious than cities, which hang their dirty laundry in the open for everyone to see.  Small towns can be hotbeds of dirty secrets that fester because they are insular and because people's business can't be lost in a multitude of other things like it can in a city.  In a city, darkness can hide in the open daylight.  In a small town, darkness must truly hide.  But waving puts a nice veneer on everything, and for tourists passing through, that's all that matters.

Of course, I am not suggesting that Maplesville, Stanton or Plantersville have any of these problems.  They are probably like other small towns throughout America.  In fact, Stanton is known as the site of the Battle of Ebenezer Church, a desperate stand by Confederate forces after days of retreat punctuated by skirmishes to stop Union troops from taking the manufacturing center of Selma.  Outnumbered two to one, they might have succeeded had reinforcements arrived as planned to attack the rear of the Union army.  At such a site, where much blood was spilled, a simple wave to a stranger near the now tranquil battlefield nowadays holds a lot of symbolism.

 If you want to know more about Maplesville, Stanton and Plantersville

Battle of Ebenezer Church
Battle of Ebenezer Church site photos
History of Plantersville
Wikipedia: Maplesville
Wikipedia: Plantersville

Next up: Selma, Alabama

Blue Highways: Alexander City, Alabama

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe enter a new state with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), Alabama, and make a quick stop in Alexander City to spend the night.  The course of a conversation there will send him to the epicenter of the American Civil Rights Movement, Selma.  We'll stop along with him.  If you wish to see where we currently rest, click on the thumbnail at right for an interactive map.  If you have any comments about this or your own literary journeys, please feel free to leave one.

Book Quote

"The woman was an authority.  Whatever there was, she knew it.  Her face, pallid like a partly boiled potato, looked as if carved out with a paring knife.  She was a matron of note in Alexander City.  Two other women, dark in eighteen-hole tans, sat with her on a bench alongside the tennis courts, while their daughters took lessons under the lights.  The discussion on the bench was Tupperware.  The potato had just said, 'for a shower gift, you can't do better than a Pak-N-Stor.'  Another explained how her eldest had received an upright freezer full of nesting food containers from the Walkers.

Blue Highways:  Part 3, Chapter 2

Downtown Alexander City, Alabama. Image hosted on Wikipedia.

Alexander City, Alabama

Every town has one, at least if you want to believe the movies or television.  It's usually someone who has access to everything that has happened to everyone in the town because of his or her ability to inhabit many different social circles, or his or her way to get access to what is usually privileged information.  It could be the town barber or hairdresser, the corner grocer, the trash man, the babysitter to many different families, the local banker.  It could be a fortune teller, or the wise woman or man that everyone goes to for advice.

Sometimes these people are motivated to do good things for people.  Mr. Oleson in Little House on the Prairie was one of those grocers who had the best interests of people at heart, even though he occasionally was swayed by his shrewish wife to use his knowledge for something hurtful.  Sometimes the person might be motivated by pure evil; Mr. Potter, the banker in It's a Wonderful Life, used his knowledge of the pulse of the town to try to run George Bailey and the Building and Loan out of business, and then get his revenge on George Bailey.

Many times, however, the motivations of the town gossip, know-it-all, maven or patron, whatever you want to call them, are more complex.  Marie Laveau, the Creole fortune teller used her influence with the Creole, Black and white populations of New Orleans to build her reputation and power, simply through the force of knowing, through her many networks, who was sleeping with who, who had committed what crime, and other good tidbits of information.  She could tell a mean fortune with that kind of knowledge, and she was not a woman to be trifled with.  In fiction, Yente in Fiddler on the Roof was another of these people whose motivations were good. In keeping with the tradition of her village, she knew the situation of everyone in the village so that she could arrange matches.  Unfortunately, sometimes the matches, though practical, went against the true feelings of those she tried to pair up.

That being said, that person in the town who knows everything has a role.  They can be loved and admired and eagerly sought out for their advice and knowledge, acting as an unofficial counselor or therapist.  They can be avoided or warily sidestepped, and the person who is avoiding them can try to keep their business as private as possible.

I think of the town gossip as a sort of pre-computer combination of Google, Facebook and Match.com.  The town gossip, like Google, has all the information one needs to know at hand.  Using such a tool of knowledge, there is usually a price.  One price might be privacy, as once a person's needs become known to the town gossip, their business might be made public.  Like Facebook, the town gossip makes their opinions known and encourages the opinions of others, so that a conversation becomes sort of like a town Facebook "Wall."  Like Match.com, a town gossip will know who is looking for what, and may under certain conditions bring people together.

I wonder if, in these days of 24 hour online information, the town gossip is disappearing?  If we can arrange dates, broadcast our thoughts, and look up all the information on anything we need on the internet, does anyone under 60 years old really listen to such people any more.  Do the town gossips sit lonely in the town square, remembering a time past when they were needed and wanted and hoping that someone will listen to them, seek their advice, or ask for their help?

If you want to know more about Alexander City

Alexander City Jazz Festival
Alexander City Online
Alexander City Outlook (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Alexander City

Next up: Maplesville, Stanton and Plantersville, Alabama