The Deep South
Just before the start of Spring semester, Avantika, Nikki and I along with a few friends indulged in the classic American pastime: a road trip.
As we left Boston, it was minus five degrees; when we arrived in Houston, it was twenty-five degrees. The thirty degrees that separates Boston from Houston in temperature sums up quite well the cultural chasm that divides North from South in America, one that we were to encounter often as we travelled across the Deep South.
We began in Austin, Texas, a city that draws arty types from across the South; a sort of liberal island in a sea that is now so resolutely red. Having spent a couple of days sampling Austin’s excellent breweries, we embarked on the long drive to New Orleans. To get there takes a long time: you cross rivers, lakes and endless swamps, ending eternally grateful for America’s vast network of spotless roads.
New Orleans bursts with energy. Jazz spills onto the streets, alcohol flows freely (about half the price of Boston), it is a muggy, sweaty and sociable place.
After a few days in Nola, we drove North to Birmingham, Alabama. We were lucky enough to visit the city, which was at the heart of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, on Martin Luther King Day, so heard former Attourney General, Loretta Lynch, give her final speech in office at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
Finally, we drove east to Charleston and Savannah, quiet post-colonial towns, almost a dash of the French Rivera, or Pune in India, right in the heart of Georgia and South Carolina. We sunbathed, drank some more, boarded colonial ships docked in the port, and headed up North back to Washington DC.
All of us were left marveling at how America has managed to bind itself together without serious internal strife for one-hundred and thirty years. In so many ways, the North and the South are different universes, with different cultural symbols, different readings of America’s history and future — and of course, as few of us could forget for long, different politics.
