free at last! free at last! thank god almighty we are free at last!

Yesterday morning I was in Atlanta with two objectives in mind. I wanted to see the Coca-Cola Experience, which people at the hostel were raving about, and Auburn Ave. where Martin Luther King Jr. was born and gave his first sermons. Quite the polar opposites right?

I began by walking down Auburn Ave. through a neighborhood I wouldn't characterize as very safe. On three occasions I ran into corner boys who were clearly selling something I wasn't interested in buying. I would not recommend this stroll to people by themselves.

When I arrived at the visitor center, a whole two blocks are run by the Park Service, the ranger recommended I watch a video about King's life before wandering through the museum. Wait, let me first give a disclaimer. For the majority of the childhood that I remember, our family lived in what could loosely be defined as the suburbs, right outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Part of the reason my parents moved to Ann Arbor was because the city was lauded as a diverse place to raise your kids. In my lifetime I have never really been a witness to racism. Sadly, I know people who are probably racist, but I have never seen the aggression and hate in person before. I don't ever remember asking why people were certain colors or not being able to play with a friend because they were Black, Asian, or whatever. It's just something that has not been a powerful driving force in my life.


The Park Service's video on King's life was moving enough to bring me to tears. From the point I walked out of the theater until I walked away from the tomb of King and his wife Coretta Scott I was a wreck. I can't even possibly begin to imagine what this place would mean to a black person who grew up in the south while King was alive. I find it so unbelievable that one group of people could be so harmful to another simply because of the color of their skin. And that King was able to affect so much change through peaceful demonstrations and civil disobedience; there are no words I am capable of using to express how incredible that is. Seeing everything on Auburn Ave. really helped bring more perspective to what this nation has accomplished by electing Barack Obama as president.


Quite frankly, it's almost inappropriate to follow such an emotional experience with a trip to the Coca-Cola Experience, but caffeine is a pick-me-up. The "Experience" as it is called, is what you might think, a giant advertisement for Coke. However, it is very interesting to walk through and see how Coke started, how it has changed over the years and how it is made and bottled. Apparently a bottle of Coke cost five cents for seventy years until the company realized they could charge more and get away with it. Capitalism at its best. The best part of the whole tour is at the end when you can try over seventy Coke brands from across the world. Afterwards I was on such a sugar high I thought I was going to be sick. On to Florida!

Pictures

southern hospitality

I think I'm officially too old for hostels, or at least American hostels. Let's imagine your house, a 2500 square foot home perhaps. Proceed to jam every bedroom with at least three pairs of bunk beds, add some non-matching furniture that you picked up from someone's lawn because it was being thrown away, and don't clean the bathroom for a good five years. Needless to say, I look forward to getting out west and staying in cockroach motels with mattresses that sink a foot in the middle and boast color television as their top amenity.

Actually, the hostel in Charleston was not too bad, but I say that because late January is not tourist season and I had an eight bed room to myself.

Charleston, on the other hand, was an extremely charming city. You could easily get lost downtown just wandering the streets looking at historic homes and the many parks. The finely restored antebellum architecture was fascinating in and of itself, but what caught my eye was the lushness of the landscaping. Trees, flowers and shrubbery were everywhere: on the sidewalks, in the alleys, even parking lots looked like garden paradises. Everything was a dark shade of green which was a beautiful contrast with the surrounding architecture.


Despite the foreboding skies, I thoroughly enjoyed my morning strolling the cobblestone streets. Small parks would invite you in with a sort of dark intimacy created by dense vegetation and trees whose branches weaved a roof of leaves, nearly blocking out the sky. The cemeteries were just as welcoming, small clusters of headstones surrounded on three sides by buildings whose walls would rise up only inches away from the outer graves. And if, for a minute, you thought the city couldn't be more charming, nearly every restaurant and hotel had little gas lamps adorning the walls. If there is a Utopian city, Charleston is about as close as you get. It didn't matter that I am a twenty-something from Michigan, I had a strong feeling of nostalgia for pre-war southern life.


I traveled next to Magnolia Plantation, established in 1676 by the Drayton family and said to be the oldest plantation in the south (It has remained in the Drayton family for 15 generations). The site is primarily known for its gardens, which Reverend John Drayton created after he inherited the property in 1840. Following the Confederacy's defeat and the burning of his house by freed slaves, a bankrupt Reverend was forced to open the plantation to tourists, allegedly making it the first man-made tourist attraction in the United States.

The property is beautiful and its most defining feature is the exquisite garden surrounded by Oak trees covered in Spanish Moss. Unfortunately, the dark skies and winter conspired to make all my pictures give the impression I was in a desolate place far from any civilization.

While the sheer variety of fauna in the gardens was incredible, I found the whole experience a little haunting and slightly detached from reality. Less than seventy years ago, the gardens were tended by the descendants of slaves and before that, hundreds of slaves toiled in the rice fields. Following a day standing in the footsteps of people who, despite all odds, contributed to the success of this country, I was now walking through fields once occupied by the men and women upon whose backs the country was built. Today the primary gardeners are white men with mullets and camouflage cargo pants who stand up as they ride ATVs around the plantation. A tour of the property certainly didn't add to the perception I already had that the south may never get over its' history rooted in slavery.

The plantation grounds house approximately fifty alligators, a fact pointed out nearly a dozen times by the tour guide. I was hoping to get some history of the place--because the brochures offered squat--but we must have spent thirty minutes talking about alligators and stopping to let the other tourists take pictures of alligator after alligator. How many pictures of inanimate alligators can you take before they all look the same? When you're retired with a camera and nothing else better to do the answer is a million. In any case, after a lengthy discussion of the eating habits of alligators we headed towards the cabins where the slaves used to live. We were on a tram and as we turned the corner and came into view of the cabins, the guide actually sped up and quickly said, "AndHereAreWhereSlavesLivedUntil1940...Who wants to see more alligators!" Everyone let up a cheer and we zoomed by the cabins. Not one person took a picture. And with that I left and began the short drive to Savannah.

Savannah was everything Charleston was not: boring and uninspiring. The visitor center claimed that Savannah was the first "planned" city and the past few years have been spent restoring a square-mile historic district. Granted, many of the squares containing statues to Southern Civil War heroes were nice places to sit and avoid the commotion of the city streets. However, similar squares exist in a million other cities and nothing about Savannah really endeared it in my mind as unique. Even the famed Riverfront, while better than Detroit's equal, looked out upon factories coughing up black smoke and barges moving supplies up the Savannah River. I promptly left for Atlanta.

More pictures here.

trouble in paradise

I apologize for the lack of posts over the past day. The hostel I stayed at in Charleston last night had internet, but the computers must have built around the same time as the hostel, the turn of the 20th century. Since it took 20 minutes alone to start the computer, I moved on.

The annoyances continue, however. After a disappointing trip to Savannah, I drove to Atlanta and checked into a hostel there. The internet here is quite fast, but costs $2/minute to use. Ergo, I will have to delay any lengthy posts with pictures until tomorrow when I get to my sister's place in Daytona. I have pages and pages written, just no time to get them electronic. Be sure to check in tomorrow night. Now I'm off to find some food and booze.