The exploration of the inner self requires new impressions…and traveling helps me.
My new relationship with the Southern United States of America, the people, and our American stories.
BEFORE I BEGIN WRITING, I wish to send my thanks to KL Simmons for mentioning me and asking me to write about getting to know myself through travelling to new places.
Growing up in Los Angeles, California after my birth in 1953, my idea of the American South was idyllic. Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain, alligators, hominy, cornbread, black-eyed peas with ham hocks, and the Spanish moss hanging from the trees were top of mind. So much of American lore was told from the Southern perspective.
My brother and I wore raccoon hats — artificial of course — and listened to music about Old Man River, the Mississippi Mud by a man nicknamed “Tennessee”, the Louisiana Bayou and so much more. Our mother told us about the movie Gone with the Wind and watching the burning of Atlanta. The movie version, of course, was filmed up the street at MGM Studios.
~I will return to my interest in the southern states in a few paragraphs. There are decades that needed to reveal themselves which created changes in my sense of purpose, and which led to my future.
Intriguing to my parents was our own state of California and it’s history and culture. The most notable was the active presence of the Mexican people who had become a solid force in southern and central California. The names of our cities, much of the cuisine, and the Spanish language had become a part of our daily lives.
The formal name of my city, La Ciudad de Los Angeles, meant The City of Angeles. And Los Angeles, like San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, and other communities throughout California were established and growing before our forefathers fought the Revolutionary War and established the United States of America. It is unlikely George Washington knew that an entirely different America was in full operation as the Spanish were controlling, growing, and conquering our first peoples.
Another two cultures of southern California were the movie industry and the virtual all-white surfing culture that was burgeoning during the 1960’s. These were all fine and good and entertaining but were almost all cultural.
To really learn the history, our family traveled to other places throughout the state. As we were active Catholics during this time, my parents decided to visit a few of the famous California missions.
San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Juan Capistrano, and a dozen or more other cities had missions built by the earlier peoples and finished before statehood. These late 18th and early 19th century buildings and communities were designed by Mexican architects and largely built by California’s Native American peoples.
The histories of the missions are an important reminder of the conversion of our original tribes into Catholicism by the Spanish Franciscan monks. The missions are still mostly beautiful and in good repair. However, the stories of their existence are heartbreaking.
At that time in the 1960s, the glory of God and the Catholic church were in full image mode. Father Junipero Serra had been the spark that built the missions and has since been sainted by the Church. One would walk out of the mission with a glorious sense of pride that it was your religion that taught the local tribes the value of giving up their sense of a god or a creator and follow yours. They went on to help the Franciscan monks build their missions. The physical beauty of the buildings and the warm feelings of comradery brought a smile to our faces.
However, other information has been published that these stories may indeed be untrue.
If you wish to delve into real facts and not simply the information given to tourists, read about the California missions from various sources. This is real California history.
After the mid to late 1960s, the time of the JFK assassination, the MLK and Medgar Evers assassinations, the Emmett Till murder in 1955, the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963, the Bloody Sunday attack in Selma, Alabama in 1965, and all of the additional assaults and murders against our Black brothers and sisters in humanity that took place largely in our southern states, my outlook on the people of the South was in turmoil.
True, racial violence happens everywhere, and Los Angeles was involved in its own. That fact, along with my desire to find places of a more peaceful nature, caused me to consider my past in a different light.
I had become completely disenchanted ‘spiritually’ with the racial disparities and the circumstances of both how we became a nation and the sad craziness of the “conflict” in Vietnam. My present and future life was in my hands now, and I decided to leave permanently.
As I had two female friends from Wyoming, I intended to move to Laramie. I ended up in Estes Park, and soon afterward in Fort Collins. Both are in Colorado. I learned to breathe again, both literally and figuratively.
Estes Park was a town of about 700 residents during the Winter months. It was also 7,500 feet high and located just a few miles from Rocky Mountain National Park.
It was, as one might say, good for my soul. Elk would wander through a town filled with two to three feet of snow. While hiking in the mountains I saw what I thought were baby eagles and was informed they were Ptarmigans. Little furry birds they are, living high near the timberline. I laugh at myself even now. I definitely was not in Kansas anymore.
Fort Collins was a young college town. It was there that I began playing music for money. It was like a dream until I had to go to work on Monday as an assistant vault teller at a bank.
It was here, at Butch Cassidy’s Restaurant that I met my wife of 45 years. Soon afterward, to begin a proper married life away from our party friends, we moved to Montana.
Yes, traveling to new locations was good for my inner self, and my outer world changed with it.
Okay, let’s go to the American South…
…by way of the United States Army.
Our daughter entered the ROTC while at the University of Portland in Oregon. After a few weekend sessions held at an Army training facility near Fort Clatsop, near Astoria in Oregon, she decided to enlist in the program. It startled her mother, but I was expecting ii. Our daughter loved visiting other countries, having already been to Italy, Greece, Guatemala, and Ghana. She visited Africa twice.
All those trips were while she was in middle school and high school. She loved the trips and worked on her own projects to earn the money to purchase her plane tickets. Because of the manner in which she was raised and the experiences of her foreign travels, she left for college without a bigoted bone in her body.
My daughter’s experiences were instrumental in her enlisting in the ROTC program to enter the Army as a 2nd Lieutenant. She said when questioned by us, “They teach you things”. I get it.
Our daughter was finished with her college education and having graduated from her training through the Army at Fort Knox, Kentucky, she was now a 2nd Lieutenant. She was sent to Fort Lee in Virginia to attend an Army Logistics Training facility.
After several months of education, she was transferred to Fort Stewart in Georgia. This is where she would be based for four years, and where my travels and the rethinking of our southern neighbors would take place.
Savannah and Richmond Hill, Georgia played a significant role as Confederate strongholds during the American Civil War, and now laid a foundation in breaking down the skeptical view I had of the South.
Visiting with the people in Georgia, South Carolina, and Kentucky softened my fears
Beginning briefly in Louisville, Kentucky during my first two visits to the South, I found the folks there to be overtly friendly. Somewhat like my hometown of Missoula. People smiled and said hello. We conversed. We made eye contact. And I need to say that these warm encounters were with both the Black and White folks who called Louisville home.
Now, some of the readers will likely be wondering why this was surprising. Well, consider that for the 55 years previous I heard little about the deep South that was not about civil rights issues and violent encounters.
Walking down the sidewalk and going to restaurants, stores, and places of interest, I had imagined some side eye at the very least, and perhaps smiles would be nonexistent. From others, I expected to hear some dog whistles and perhaps worse. I really did not know what to expect, so I expected anything. But nothing occurred that reinforced the image burned into my brain. Instead, I could simply be myself.
I had turned a corner. It felt good.
With our daughter now in the US Army, our future visits would turn to the state of Georgia. Specifically, Savannah and nearby Richmond Hill.
Savannah is a famous city. For historians, Savannah is well known for being a major port on the eastern seaboard for the importing and exporting of products and raw materials.
Additionally, as I was to soon learn, the port was important for the slave trade. Cotton was high on the export list and noted plantations needed a major seaport to do business. Savannah filled the role of importing slaves, and exporting products.
Welcome to the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters.
This home and former plantation property became part of the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences by the final owner, Margaret Gray Thomas. Ms. Thomas was the granddaughter of the second owner, George Owens, a local lawyer, landholder, and enslaver. The house was finished in 1819 and was commissioned by a wealthy shipping merchant and enslaver Richard Richardson. *
The above three photographs are from our tour of the OTH&SQ museum.
•The door on the left is, I believe, a door in the basement of the home. It contained a food preparation area and other areas of household duties.
•The second is of part of the kitchen area.
•The third is a door inside the master’s home. Artisans were hired to provide beautiful finish carpentry. Note the curve of the door. The home is a thing of beauty.
The side-by-side polar opposites of the living quarters affected my psyche. Yes, I knew of the extreme living conditions. I have seen it in movies and books. We all have. Every media has shown the world the conditions and the dehumanizing structure of America’s period of enslaving humans. And frankly, it continues through international human trafficking. But to see it, touch it, smell it, and breathe it all in? All while wiping the constant sweat off of my forehead during a sweltering 95+ degree day? Realization began to set in.
We were able to go into the air-conditioned master’s home and into the bookstore. We followed it with lunch in an air-conditioned restaurant. These experiences would never have been possible without making the effort of traveling to Savannah and placing myself into America’s past.
Great art, which includes visual art, dance, literature, music, and other media, can get you the knowledge of an event, or a time. But now that I have been there, I have been moved.
A few well-known historical places in Savannah include the riverfront. The buildings appear as they may have over a century ago.
The sublime “Bird Girl” statue, was made famous by enhancing the cover of the bestselling book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Lastly, a photo of a dock in the Ogeechee River near Fort McAllister State Park, a notable Civil War site. The site is in Richmond Hill and is about two miles from my daughter’s family home.
There are other areas of our four or five trips to Georgia where my wife and I took side trips. They too, in addition to the simple joy of seeing our amazing country and experiencing the American South firsthand, have been most helpful in reevaluating my opinion on life in the southern states.
Below are photographs of places that my wife and I have found beautiful and meaningful in our lives. And speaking for myself, my search for understanding of humanity’s condition — particularly in my heart and mind.
Washington DC
Washington DC and St. Augustine, Fl
Washington DC
Washington DC
Charleston SC
Tybee Island • Near Savannah, Georgia
One might say that I am simply another tourist.
Okay. I admit that I have enjoyed a few tourist moments. As tourists tend to do, we take photographs. We send a few to our friends and neighbors. We post them in order to let our besties see where we have been.
However, as I don’t have any BFF’s, and I don’t possess a FB or X or Instagram or TTok presence, very few of my photos are shown to anyone unless my wife wants a couple to post. I send just a few to my brother, sister, and daughter who just decommissioned from her 1st Lieutenant posting at Fort Stewart in Georgia. She, her husband and new son live right there where our country began.
These are memories yes. They are now my memories as well as the memories of multiple millions of American citizens. Our great-great grandparents fought viciously for various reasons all through this land I visited. They fought to keep or end slavery. They fought for their beliefs, and they fought for pride. They fought to keep themselves out of prison or from execution. They fought to be fed and to help their relatives and friends. They fought, died, suffered, starved, lost limbs and their sanity. Some no doubt forever lost their desire for life, while others fought for personal gain and valuation.
They fought, and my method of existence here was a direct result of the outcome. All of us are living the same story. America could have been an extremely different place.
As a westerner, I decided that in addition to visiting my daughter during her US Army deployment, I would go further to learn what our country went through. Who were the ancestors of those who wanted out of the USA? What will the ancestors of the enslaved think of me? Was I properly informed, only depending on the history books and various media reports?
My very “self” has been re-informed. I have traveled both geographically, as well as psychologically. Now, when I am presented with negative news about America, I may consider whether we have ‘only’ a racist South. I wonder whether the midwest is afraid or hateful of people of color and liberally minded westerners like me. I realize that my home state of Montana has become damaged through hate towards our American Indian tribes, Black Americans, and Latino immigrants coming over our southern border. And me. Yes, many would hate me.
When the local far right meets me, they don’t know me. I’m an older White man. I look like them and talk in the same manner.
They don’t know me. I don’t think like them. I don’t vote as they do. I’m not living completely in my closed opinions and fear of other ideas.
I am a changing me, even at 70 years of age.
I am me. And if I negate new impressions and learning until the end of my life, I will have died within myself long before my physical death.
I am here. You are here. We are here. Now what?
Thank you for traveling with me.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*Facts about the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters are culled from telfair.com
I thank them for keeping history alive.
Photographs are property of the author and to be used for this article only. Please do not use them. Thank you.
Photographs in order of appearance:
- Marshlands on Jekyll Island, GA.
- Bench in Beaufort, SC
- ROTC graduation from US Army officer bootcamp, Fort Knox, near Louisville, KY My daughter is the soldier beginning to cross the vertical red stripe.
- George “Babe” Ruth Louisville Slugger baseball bat. Louisville Slugger visitor center, museum and visitor factory. Louisville, KY.
- Visitor and fishing pier, Ogeechee River, Fort McAllister State Park, Richmond Hill, GA.
- Interior photographs from the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters, Savannah, GA.
- (left) Old building and businesses on the Savannah waterfront. (center) Bird Girl statue, Telfair Museum, Savannah, GA. (right) Dock and boats in Ogeechee River, Fort McAllister State Park, Richmond Hill, GA.
- (left) Montana House and Senate Representative Jeanette Rankin statue, US Capital, Washington DC (center) Dr. Martin Luther King Memorial statue, Washington DC (right) President Abraham Lincoln Memorial Statue, Washington DC.
- National Museum of African American History and Culture with Washington Monument, Washington DC
- Bust and reflection of George Washington, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC
- Old Spanish Market; Public Market; Old Slave Market, St. Augustine, FL.
- Three Soldiers Statue facing the Vietnam War Memorial Wall, Washington DC
- The Library of Congress, Washington DC
- The White House, Washington DC
- The Supreme Court, Washington DC
- Washington DC panorama from The White House to the Washington Monument
- Fort Sumter, Charleston SC
- Cockspur Island Lighthouse, Tybee Island, GA
- Selfie, Bonner, MT
20. Byways Cafe, Portland, OR
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