Some very, very tall signs I saw on a gray day in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The weather has improved quite a lot since then. Today was bright & crisp, autumnal in a southern kind of way, which is to say not that cold, but still you can feel that it's October.
Of course no Southern roadtrip blog could be complete without a kudzu photo. If you've never seen kudzu in action before, it's really a thing to behold. This invasive vine will take over anything in its path if you let it. Kind of like crab rangoons.
Took some sharp eyes to tell this was a Chinese restaurant. Spotted just north of Birmingham.
Here's a painting I saw in How Joy, back in Greenville MS. Portrait of the restaurant as a young institution. I think it's signed by someone named Terry Williams. If I were a thorough journalist type, I'd be able to tell you who that is, but as it is I have no idea. It's probably not Terry "Big T" Williams, but actually, you know, it could be. Why not? He's in the neighborhood. Blues musician & painter of Chinese restaurants? Sure.
This is a cascade of takeout cartons I found quite beautiful. Except for the fact that it's all gonna end up in the landfill. Bring your own containers, takeout customers! (As if I were so good myself, sigh. Something to aspire to....)
This is the Lorraine, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. It's been turned into a civil rights museum, but they have preserved the front of the motel, as well as his room, exactly as it was when he was shot, & also acquired the boarding house building across the street where the shots came from. We decided to see this kind of last minute before leaving Memphis; as soon as we rounded a corner & laid eyes upon it, we both unexpectedly burst into tears. I was really not prepared for the emotional impact of being there. You can stand inside & look right out on the exact spot where he fell on the balcony. It's really intense. Having stayed in motel after motel on this trip, I looked at the motel room with a certain perspective, thinking how motel rooms all kind of look the same, & feeling lucky for my relative anonymity, that I get to check out of each motel & keep going on to the next one.
How many off-white patterns & surfaces can exist in one tiny bathroom?
We're starting to get a tad worn out from all the cheap motels. You can tell because I actually started to muse out loud about what differentiates a Days Inn from a Comfort Inn. Comfort Inn is usually anywhere from $10 to $20 more than Days Inn, but the reason for that difference is not always apparent. A wallpaper border is not worth $10 a night to me. A refrigerator, maybe. Wifi? The Days Inn in Greenville had wifi & the Comfort Inn didn't.
See? I told you it's getting to me. Amidst all of this, the
was a breath of fresh air. If you ever go to Clarksdale, you definitely need to stay there. We stayed in one of their spanking new (the bathroom mural was dated July 2004!) "bins" in what used to be a cotton gin building.
But I digress. We're in Birmingham now. The rain that fell on us the whole time in Memphis has paused, at least for the time being. On our way out of Memphis we encountered what may well be the most depressing Chinese restaurant I have ever seen (which is saying a lot at this point). It was so run down & poorly kept, & so terribly tacky to begin with, that I almost wondered if it was somehow wrong to be taking photos of it. That it was below the belt or something, like I would be participating in further humiliation for this establishment, which humiliates itself daily. In fact I wrote a long description of it that I decided not to post here, because anyone who had ever seen the restaurant would recognize it from the details. I felt that there was a sad story behind this place, that the owners might be awfully depressed or awfully mean, or maybe both. The soggy weather only contributed to my overall dismay. I photographed it anyway, wondering the whole time about artistic ethics & whether I'd end up wanting to use the photos. I don't know. I have to think about it when I get home & look at how they come out.
Today between Tupelo & Birmingham we saw a completely different restaurant, the only Chinese restaurant in the small town of Jasper, Alabama. It was closed for the mid-afternoon between lunch & dinner, but I peeked in & saw a man sitting there. I knocked lightly on the window, he looked up, smiled & came to the door. He had an open, honest, kind face, just like his restaurant. He said he'd been there for about 13 years, but the building looked like it could have been just a couple years old. The pink-flowered shrubs in the parking lot were all healthy, nicely pruned & mulched. I didn't talk to him very long, just explained the project & got permission to photograph, but I came away from there feeling much more cheerful than I had been ever since I saw that other awful place in Memphis.
We're about to leave Memphis. Yesterday I got totally overloaded on Elvis at Graceland. We toured his mansion, saw a whole bunch of his white jumpsuits, lusted after his cars, & walked through his airplane. Too much! Anyway, at the little restaurant there I finally wrapped my brain around a fundamental American concept:
Anything that's not meat is a vegetable.
Repeat after me: If it's not meat, then it's a vegetable.
I ordered the vegetable plate. What I got was: mashed potatoes from a box, overly salty limp green beans from a can, a sort of mixed rice medley (mostly white rice w/ a few grains of wild rice & some tiny bits of tomato or red pepper for color), supersweet candied yams, & mac&cheese (for which I didn't bother taking any lactose pills because I knew it wasn't real cheese).
Here it is. (Yonder is Donna's meatloaf.)
Later on I got to have a brief conversation with the famous
who grew up in his parents' Chinese restaurant in Cleveland, Mississippi, then later turned that restaurant into a famous foodie destination & also has another fancy restaurant here in Memphis. I asked him what the similarities & differences were between what he's doing now & what it was like to run a small-town Chinese restaurant. He said, lots of differences, no similarities. I said, none? No transferrable skills? He said, No. I asked, So, it sounds like you're happy about that? He said, Yeah, I guess I am happy about that.
This was a Hopper-esque scene we encountered last night: China Garden in Tunica, Mississippi. There was just one customer in there when we passed by late in the evening.
Now we're in Memphis, taking today to avail ourselves of all the big-city comforts we've been missing: a swim at the Y, wifi & veggie burgers in a cafe, then later we'll stock up on healthy groceries, organic fruit & such. People in the Mississippi Delta don't get to have that stuff. I phoned all over the place only to hear "the pool's down" or "the pool is closed for the season". Consequently I haven't been swimming since Natchez (over a week ago), so it felt really, really good to get in the water today!
Last night we dropped by the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena, Arkansas. I think in the whole crowd I only saw about 3 other Asians besides us. Among the food booths was a stand giving away little promotional samples of rice, & they had a woman walking around in front offering them to passers-by. When we came along she said to us, "I know
you
like rice!"
I am so tired right now I can barely talk, much less blog coherently, so just some backlogged (backblogged?) pictures tonight.
Here are the biscuits in the fryer:
Here they are looking cute on the buffet:
And here's me next to a cotton bale!
What a lovely productive day we had! Just goes to show what taking a day off will do for your general outlook & ability to get stuff done the next day. Driving north from Jackson, we stumbled upon a little Chinese take-out place that is part of a gas station. The sign outside tells you to place your order inside the gas station. We talked to the owner, Van, who is Chinese-Vietnamese & has lived in Jackson for something like 20 years. He has an accent like nothing else I've ever heard before, an amazing blend of about 30% Vietnamese & 70% Mississippi. He had lots of interesting things to say, about the restaurant business, about the racism he encountered when he first came to Jackson (intense, on a daily basis) & how it's improved in the last 20 years. He works 7 days a week, from 5 am to 9 pm. Sometimes he sleeps there instead of going home to Jackson. We also interviewed his adorable little 7-year-old girl, who began all her answers to our questions with "Yes Ma'am" & "No Ma'am". I swear people around here are so polite I feel like the rudest most uncultured clod ever. Any stranger who walks within 10 yards of you feels obliged to give a friendly greeting.
We really are in cotton country now. We're lucky to be here during the cotton harvest. Many of the fields are all fluffy white, ready to be harvested, while others are freshly harvested, with giant cotton bales sitting along the edges. I have a little fetish for cotton bales; they're just these massive truck-sized blocks of solid cotton all mushed together. They have this feeling of severe density that kinda rocks my imagination. I'll try to post some photos of them in the next couple days.
We left Natchez on the Natchez Trace, a beautiful drive paralleling an old, old path that was originally used by the Natchez Indians, then later by everybody in the area, including slave traders who took slaves on forced marches along the Trace to the slave market in Natchez. You can see parts of the original Trace along the road. We also saw an old Indian mound, & then there was this church, which is the most famous building in the county. I think you can see why.
Here is Ann at Planet Thailand in Natchez, demonstrating how to make "baby chopsticks" for customers who don't know how to use chopsticks. She learned this trick from a Japanese restaurant. After we interviewed her for a while, she made us sing karaoke. I picked out "Puff the Magic Dragon", but instead of Puff frolicking in the autumn mist, the visuals were of a woman in a bikini frolicking on a beach. We laughed so hard we could barely finish the song.
What does this have to do with Chinese restaurants? Well, Ann's family had moved from Los Angeles to open a Thai restaurant in Louisiana before they came to Natchez. When they first opened, the phone constantly rang with requests for various Chinese dishes like orange chicken. Ann's dad, who was the cook, didn't know how to make any of these things, so they went to the nearest Chinese restaurant, ordered them, figured out how to make them, & added them to the menu. They ended up having to cook about 80% Chinese food & only 20% Thai, until an enthusiastic customer from Natchez persuaded them that Thai food would have a more appreciative audience in Natchez. They kept some Chinese items on the menu, though, & now they serve about 20% Chinese food. They also serve a fair amount of sushi.
This picture kind of tells you how the day went. As flowing & fun & productive as yesterday was, today was frustrating & full of false starts & annoyance. This cactus is in the back of a restaurant where, almost before the first sentence was out of our mouths, the owner said No, no, I'm not interested, I don't want anything! We said, Actually we're not selling anything... & she frowned, No, no, I don't care. They had no take-out menus, no business cards either, & as we left I shrugged, oh well, it'll be as if they didn't exist at all. (Except that now there's this prickly pear on my blog.) Lady, that little feng shui mirror isn't doing you any good.
That really wasn't the worst part of it, though. In the morning we went on a house tour. Natchez is famous for its intensely restored & preserved antebellum mansions, so we thought we should check it out. Well, at the end of the tour the lady of this house tacked on some horrifying racist comments about African American people in Mississippi; although of course she didn't say "African American people in Mississippi", she said "these people". It was quite a shock to my tender Berkeley system! I was so upset that I actually had to go & cry a little bit after that, & then I was in a bad mood for the next few hours. I mean, it's one thing to know that you're going to run into this stuff; it's another to actually hear it.
Fortunately, the day improved toward the late afternoon & we got some good interviews with people about their earliest Chinese restaurant memories. One guy we talked to said his first time eating Chinese food had been just two weeks ago! That's kinda cool, don't you think?
Spotted just north of Baton Rouge. I'm not even sure what town we were in. I do know that this restaurant was not in my database. I like that.
Baton Rouge was good to us today. This place had a sign on the front that said "closed for remodeling" but there was a suspiciously quiet air about it, no sign of construction at all. At the music store next door, the nice folks gave me the dish: the guy had owed a whole bunch of back taxes & left the country! So it's all over for the Mandarin Seafood Mongolian BBQ.