January 27, 2016
At This Point It's Obvious
As we pack up and get ready to leave the campground an older guy walks over from his large motorhome and starts asking the questions that people who don't know about bicycle travel always ask. But at the end he throws a curveball and goes somewhere no one else has.
"I have to ask: you two Obama fans?"
"Yep – I voted for him twice," I say with a big smile. "We'd have to be, right?"
He just throws his head back and laughs and starts to walk away. A second later he turns around.
"Ah, I knew it!" he says, as if he wanted to like us but because we're a couple of bike-riding liberals who voted for Obama that's just not possible anymore.
We backtrack through the little town of Newton, this time in daylight. We grab some stuff from the Dollar General store, where all but one person is black. But the software that powers the checkout system is in the middle of rebooting itself, so no one can buy anything. It means that about ten of us stand around in awkward silence near the register, waiting and looking in different directions while trying to avoid eye contact with one another. After ten minutes of waiting we give up and go across the street to the grocery store instead. All but one person there is white.
The contrast is so profound that I couldn't ignore it even if I wanted to. But it doesn't surprise me. Yesterday we crossed into what's known as the Black Belt. That term was first used to describe the dark, fertile soil of Central Alabama and Northeast Mississippi, but when the land was turned into cotton plantations farmed with slave labor, the meaning shifted. In time it was more broadly applied to areas throughout the South where there existed both a history of plantation agriculture and a high percentage of African-Americans. In practice, the geographic isolation and weak economic opportunities in these areas mean severe poverty, poor education and health care and housing, and high crime and unemployment. We're seeing the effect of these things all the time now.
We ride west toward Damascus in a world that's flat and calm under the thick, low-hanging overcast. Sometimes the clouds can't hold back and little drops of rain start falling down on our heads but never with force. If we want a break from them we just have to pull off the road and stop beneath the boughs of wise old oak trees. In these still moments I hear the plaintive call of the mourning dove.
Big farms aren't big farms around here; they're plantations. We ride past a few this morning. Some have fields full of cotton plants, others have their purpose obscured by winter cover crops, and one is so grand that we can't see what lies beyond the well-kept fences and grounds that mark its entrance. The plantations take up a lot of space, which means we don't see many homes. And yet it seems like there's one church for every fourth house. If this isn't the heart of the Bible Belt I don't know what is. Almost all of the graves that sit in ordered little rows behind or off to the side of these churches have some kind of wreath or bouquet of flowers placed on top of them. You never see that on the West Coast.
A venue of turkey vultures look down on us from the branches of pine trees, waiting for whatever dead thing next trips their radar. But out here on the back roads of Georgia that won't be us. We're passed by a car maybe once every twenty minutes, they wait until it's safe to pass, and always with a lot of room. There are a bunch of other things that make bicycle travel tough in this part of the state, but the riding itself continues to be a delight. It gives me a chance to think more about what's going on beyond the pavement. Like today, I notice how around here when you're picking someone up from their house in a car, you don't get out, walk to the front door, and knock. You just pull into driveway and lay on the horn. If the person doesn't appear in ten seconds, you do it again. If they still don't show, you repeat the honking over and over again until they do.
We push hard to reach Damascus before a line of heavy rain showers crosses our path. I already knew the town was going to be small, but it's the way in which it's small that surprises me. Half the houses along the highway have been abandoned. The two blocks of businesses that used to be the center of town are long gone, to the point that the roofs have caved in, most of the walls have fallen down, and plants and trees grow inside what used to be the grocery store and barber shop and laundromat.
There are about 250 people left in this town. It doesn't look like most of them are doing all that well. There are two gas stations that sit across from each other at the highway crossroads, a liquor store, a post office, a combined police station and city hall, and that's it. Large areas of the town are nothing but grass, the only sign that houses once stood there. It's not a place of progress or hope. No savior is coming. I count seventy-seven different types of scratch tickets in the plastic cases next to the register, which three-quarters of the people who come into the place buy at least a few of. There are six video slot machines crammed into the back corner. The cold cases are filled with cheap beer and forties of malt liquor. And I see more boxes of Little Debbie's honey buns on display than I've ever seen, and I've seen some insane mini-marts in my bicycle touring lifetime.
My enduring memory of Damascus will be of looking out through the window of the gas station. I see three middle-aged men hanging out in front of the other gas station with nothing to do, even though it's the middle of the week. In the closest parking space idles a dirty old Buick sedan where the headliner sags a foot down into the back seat. From behind the Buick appears another middle-aged man pushing an empty shopping cart slowly down the sidewalk toward the north. The low points of the parking lot have turned to deep puddles in just minutes from the driving rain.
At the edge of town we head past the Southwest Georgia Academy. The campus is ordered and clean and the parking lot is full of newer cars. The athletic fields across the street are in great shape. It's the most attractive thing in Damascus by a long shot – and I know exactly why.
I mean, at this point it's obvious. The town itself is sixty-four percent black and the county as a whole fifty percent. And yet of the 350 students that go to the academy, one percent are students of color. One. In the county school system at large that number is almost seventy percent. That this is the case is no accident. The academy's website explains how the school opened in January of 1970, only a few months after local residents got together to form it. Starting a school from scratch in such a short timeframe seems both difficult and unusual, but the website doesn't explain the reason for the urgency. That's okay; I will. 1969 was the year that a Supreme Court decision created specific standards that would force public schools to become truly desegregated. Although segregation had been deemed unconstitutional by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling fifteen years earlier, the ways in which students and teachers were assigned to schools and rules related to student transportation meant that integrated schools didn't exist in reality. When it became clear that desegregation was coming for real, that's when the Southwest Georgia Academy and other private schools like it came into being. They've never left – and I've seen nothing in the last few days to make me think they ever will.
We wave and say hello to everyone we see who's sitting or working outside their home. At one point we pass a clean, attractive country house that disproves my theory that Confederate flags only fly in the front yards of shitty mobile homes. And then I get heckled. This doesn't happen very often, but you can only spend so much time in the country before it does. I'm stopped off to the side of the road when I hear an SUV approach and then stop about 500 feet behind me. "Hey!" I hear a young guy's voice yell out. "What're yew doin'?!" He's not the brightest, this one. I don't turn around; I just watch the SUV in my mirror to see what happens next. But what happens next is that it starts moving again, then speeds past me, giving plenty of room, with no one inside saying anything. It's the worst heckling job I've ever seen.
For the most part we just pedal. The day is cool and wet and gloomy and we ride side by side talking about the TV shows of our youth, like Hey Dude and Welcome Freshmen and Clarissa Explains It All We're pushed forward by thoughts of a warm dinner and a toasty sleeping bag.
Dinner is in fact warm and the sleeping bag feels toastier than normal. We listen to Courtney Barnett and Mac DeMarco and enjoy the peace and quiet of our empty and free campground on the banks of the Chattahoochee River. On the other side lies Alabama. But when darkness rolls in the damp cold tries to work its way into me. It succeeds.
The cold and wet of the day have worn on me. So has the lack of good or even decent food in the last few days. But the poverty and racial issues also have a big effect. I've been through all kinds of depressed areas on a bike before, but knowing that what's laid out before us here in the South has its roots in slavery and intentional, systematic segregation adds levels of both disdain and despair that I haven't experienced. I just sit and shake my head in anger and disappointment when I think about the people who created that academy we saw earlier. They did it for the sole purpose of avoiding public school integration, for keeping white kids separate from black kids. In a place that appears so patriotic and so religious it seems about as un-American and un-Christian as you can get.
Sleep grabs hold early and I'm dead to the world by seven.
Today's ride: 51 miles (82 km)
Total: 339 miles (546 km)
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