Valdosta, Georgia

If I were restricting my purchase of ice-filled self-serve drinks at service stations to only the 79 or 99 cent specials, as I’m able to do on some trips, I wouldn’t be drinking many such beverages, as those once common specials are virtually no more. Stores are no longer willing to entice customers with such bargains, or else they don’t need to with people seeming to be willing to pay anything for such drinks when the heat soars into the nineties.   Some stores don’t even post the prices of their drinks knowing that people are willing to pay anything.   

Early on I asked the cost of a 32-ouncer at one such mom-and-pop store that didn’t post their drink prices.  The woman at the register said she didn’t know, she just pressed a key on the cash register for such drinks.  I said I was hoping it might be 99 cents.  She checked the price and said it was $1.39, but that I could have it for $1.09.  I no longer ask.  I just pay whatever they’re charging, as, when the heat is ovenish, price doesn’t matter.  I sometimes just pay for a cup filled with ice, especially when one of the tap options is water that comes out ice cold.

Yesterday in the small town of Boston, I felt like I was going back in time when I saw a sign on a local service station/convenience store adverting “all fountain drinks 99 cents.”  And it got even better when one of its selections was Gatorade.  I drank some of the 32 ounces and then poured the rest into one of my insulated water bottles and headed over to the Carnegie Library where I planned to finish it off while I luxuriated in its air-conditioning and its centuries old ambiance.  

But I had to settle for the shade of one of its surrounding trees, as it was only open four days a week and for just four-and-a-half hours at a time, and not on Saturdays. There were no electric outlets, but there was a water spigot, under which I was able to douse my head and soak my shirt.

Then it was east to Valdosta on a four-lane highway for thirty-five miles just north of the Florida border to the next Carnegie.  I had to regularly dodge fragments of tires on the shoulder, each a flat-tire hazard from their tiny wire slivers that could be scattered far and wide.  Such a sliver caused my flat four days ago and caused many many more during my time in Senegal and Mali.  Blown tires were strewn everywhere there and their remnants were hard to avoid.  Every tire fragment now triggers memories of that trip in sub-Sahara Africa. I don’t entirely mind, as other than the flats, the memories are something to savor, whether all the colorful fragments of fabric I gathered or the many friendly encounters I had with the locals or the pleasure of riding along the fringe of the Sahara.

Even though I have a new rear tire, it isn’t as heavy-duty as I’d prefer.  The lone bike shop in Albany had no 700-28s. All it had were 35s, which was too wide, and 26s,  a little narrow, but acceptable.  It is a new size, a tad wider than 25, in response to the popularity of gravel bikes and their need to have a slightly wider tire than 25.  If I had been obstinate about having a 28, it was sixty miles to the nearest bike shop, a sorry testament to the status of bicycles these days.  It’d been thirty years, the shop owner said, since there’d been another bike shop in this city of 72,000, the eighth largest in the state. 

It had long ago outgrown it’s Carnegie, which now serves as the quarters for the local art council.  I’d actually visited it a year ago on my ride from Miami to New Orleans and was happy to see it again thanks to needing to come to Albany for its bike shop.

Albany also provided me with my first collectible mask.  I hadn’t seen any masks along the road other than an occasional generic blue-throwaway, much fewer than around Chicago.  My find in Albany was a bright blue Walmart mask that its employees wear.  I’ll be happy to add it my collection of notable masks I’ve gathered the past year.  One of the most distinguished was an Indianapolis Colts mask highlighted by its hoof emblem that I found in Bloomington last month when I visited Dwight.  I was eager to expand my collection on this trip, but so far the pickings have been slim.

Now that I’m near the Florida border an RV passed me for the first time.  I can’t say with certainty that it was the first, but it did make enough of an impression on me that I realized it could well have been the first, as my instant reaction to seeing it coming towards me was to look in its windshield to see if there was a Tour de France course marker perched on the dashboard, an indication that my subconscious has me in France, as that is how I have been conditioned to respond when I’m at The Tour, wondering if the RV, or “camper van,” as they are known in France, is a fellow Tour follower. 

It is always a joy to behold a Tour marker, whether tied to a post indicating The Tour route or as a souvenir in the front or back window of a Tour follower.  It had me smiling to have such memories stirred and made me wonder if such recollections of France are subtle urgings from The Tour to come on over.  It starts in four weeks, a week earlier than usual to accommodate riders who wish to compete in the Olympics as well as The Tour.  But France has not opened up to Americans just yet.  That is supposed to happen June 9, but that is no certainty.   With the three-week Giro (Tour of Italy) going on and wrapping up today, that too has been reminding me how nice it is to immerse one in a Grand Tour for three weeks.

The Valdosta Carnegie, as with just about all the Carnegies so far in Georgia, was boldly branded with Carnegie on its facade, though it is now the county historical society and museum.

The Carnegie in Moultrie, south of Albany, has been the lone one bereft of any Carnegie identity.  It is now a law office.  It bears a plaque identifying it as being on the National Registry of Historical Places, but did not state its heritage. 

It has been difficult to fully appreciate the Carnegies in this post-pandemic period when towns haven’t fully come back to life.  The lack of activity lends the feel of ghost town and abandonment, making the Carnegies feel unused and unappreciated. They seem to be bystanders rather than instigators, more comatose than alive as they slowly emerge from hibernation.  The libraries that are open are hardly being taken advantage of.  I’m often the lone person there. 

Albany, Georgia

Jimmy Carter’s hometown of Plains has evaded me on several other trips to Georgia, so I was delighted to be able to include it on this one, as it was on my way to the first Carnegie on my Georgia agenda in Americus.  If I’d been a few weeks earlier, I might have crossed paths with President Biden when he paid a visit to the 96-year old Carter, who lives in the same house on the fringe of town that has been his residence since 1960 other than during his White House years.

Though his compound, including housing for the Secret Service, is visible from the road, it’s not open to the public.  One can visit the nearby farm he grew up on, as well as his high school, which is now the Visitor Center for the various National Historic Sites in the area relating to Carter.  Another is the old train depot, which was the headquarters for his first presidential campaign. The oddest of the historic sites is the gas station of his wayward brother Billy, which is now a tiny museum.  

Among the items on display, along with numerous magazine cover stories on Billy, was a  stack of Billy Beer.  

The museum was unattended, just as was the train depot.  I was the only visitor to either in this quiet town of seven hundred people, three times what it was when Carter was president.  Befitting the modest size of the town, was the less than gargantuan peanut emblem in the small park.

The National Park Visitor Center in the high school was closed, but the state-operated Welcome Center on the outskirts of town was back in operation.  I stopped to fill my water bottles. On the counter was a basket filled one-ounce bags of peanuts for the taking. The woman on duty said she knew Carter since before he was governor and that he’d always been a very humble man.  He could often be seen doing yard work at the Baptist Church where he’d taught Sunday School up until a year ago. 

I asked her if there was a bike shop in Americus, ten miles up the road, as I’d had my first flat the day before and discovered I ought to replace my rear tire.  She didn’t know, so called it’s Visitor Center to find out.  Word was the nearest bike shop was thirty miles south in Albany.  I’d be heading back that way the next day after rounding up the Carnegies in Americus, Montezuma and Cordele.

She said to be sure to stop at the Andersonville Historic Site between Americus and Montezuma.  “We may be the only county in the country with two National Park Historic Sites,” she said, and added, “You’ll see lots of American flags, as they’re getting ready for a big gathering for Memorial Day weekend.”  Andersonville was a prison camp established towards the end of the Civil War for Union solider.  It is now a vast cemetery containing the graves of over 13,000 Union soldiers who died there.  As a National Cemetery, it is still used as a burial grounds for veterans.

With 15,000 people Americus is a thriving metropolis compared to Plains. It had outgrown its statuesque Carnegie over forty years ago.  It had had quite a few tenants since.  The latest is a catering company that holds wedding receptions and other events there.  Besides the bold “Carnegie Library” above its entry along with “1908,” the date of its origin, a later-day bronze sign identifies the building as “The Carnegie.”

A couple miles north of the city I passed the Jimmy Carter airport and a plaque stating Charles Lindbergh made his first flight at the site.  The airport isn’t big enough for Air Force One, so Biden flew into Fort Benning, fifty miles west in Columbus, then took a helicopter to the Americus airport.  I’d actually suffered my flat passing through Fort Benning, which I knew well, having bicycled there twice from Chiczgo to attend rallies protesting the School of the Americas.  As I repaired my flat on the four-lane Highway that bisects the fort, a couple soldiers on patrol stopped and offered me cold bottles of Gatorade and water, almost making me happy for the  flat.

The less grandiose, quietly noble, Carnegie in Montezuma was now the Chamber of Commerce.  

I camped ten miles south of town in a forest behind a cemetery.  Ants found some of the smaller holes in my tent floor thanks to the ants of Brazil and filled my garbage bag containing my empty can of baked beans and spent the night exploring the tent searching for whatever crumbs they could find.  Some other insects gained entry and left me with bites on my ankles and feet below my tan lines and also feasted on the tender white skin below my belt line.  It was the worst I’d been bitten since Senegal when the zipper went on my tent and it was impossible to keep the mosquitoes out.  It forced me into a motel to thoroughly wash up in Albany while I waited for the bike shop to open the next morning.

It was further to Albany than I thought.  I had hoped to arrive before the bike shop closed.  It would have been close to dark if the Carnegie in Ordele, which still served as a library,  had been open.  I had planned on an hour break out of the heat there, but just kept riding.  It was the first Carnegie of these travels that advertised itself as being “Free” when it was built back in the days when they weren’t necessarily.

 It was another fine example of a library that was a town’s most prominent building, granting it the utmost of esteem.  Carrying its image helped blunt the effort of being out in the ovenish heat. 

Tuskegee, Alabama



I was denied entry to another fenced-in college campus, Tuskegee University,  due to Covid-restrictions and had to be content with seeing just the backside of its former Carnegie Library. It was across the street from the home of Booker T. Washington, one of the founders of this all-black college dating to 1881.  It is still going strong with an enrollment of 2,600 and one of the top five veterinary schools in the country according to a chatty security guard.  

When I told him I had just come from Montgomery and it’s Carnegie Library, he asked, “Did you see the hanging museum?”  I didn’t know anything about it.  

“You really missed something,” he went on.  “It lists over 4,000 blacks who were hung all over the South. It’s a very powerful experience.  You’ve got to go.  It’s a shame you missed it.”

“That’s a thing of the past, isn’t it?” I asked.

“The  Klan knows better than to try anything like that now,  but there’s still research going on and they’re always adding new names of victims they discover.  It’s just three years old and it’s actual name is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, but people call it the Hanging Museum because that’s what it’s all about.  People compare it to Holocaust and Apartheid Museums.  Its really an amazing experience. You wouldn’t be the same if you ever saw it.”

Then he asked if I knew about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first black pilots to fly for the US Air Force in World War II.  Nearly a thousand of them were trained here in Tuskegee. Several movies have been made about them including “Red Tails” from 2012 written by Ridley Scott and produced by George Lucas.

While we talked at the gated entry he had to check the temperature of someone driving on to the campus, but there was no permitting me.  Tuskegee  was my fourth Carnegie in Alabama on this trip and the final one, wrapping up another state.  I had gotten to the eight others still standing of the original nineteen on three previous rides across the state, two with Don Jaime in 2014 and 2015 and last year after my return from Brazil, biking from Miami to New Orleans along the Gulf.  Now it’s on to Georgia where I hope to gather fourteen more, nearly doubling the thirteen I’ve seen so far in these travels.

I was lucky a plaque in front of the Main Library in Montgomery gave the location of the Carnegie a few blocks away, as once again Wikipedia gave the wrong address.  And I couldn’t have asked a librarian as the libary along with its nine branches had yet to reopen.  I stopped by a branch library on the way in to the city and shared its WiFi with three others sitting outside it in a residential neighborhood.

All the closed libraries were an indication of how quiet Montgomery was.  No one was around the Carnegie in the heart of the downtown.  The grand building was now a property appraisal office.

I stopped in the shade of a forest just off the road on my way from Montgomery to Tuskegee to take a break from the sun and the 90 degree heat.  As ate a peanut butter and banana sandwich and read the thick tourist brochure I had picked up in Selma, a car pulled off the road in front of me and a middle-aged woman rolled down her window and asked me if I’d like a cold bottle of water.  I hopped to my feet and grabbed it before it could start warming up.  Ten minutes later another car pulled up and another middle-aged woman said she just bought some oatmeal-raisin cookies that she shouldn’t have and wondered if I’d like them.  She didn’t need to ask twice.  They’d evidently been an impulse buy, a bag of three marked down to 69 cents from a dollar, that she was regretting.  Lucky for me.  If it had been later in the day, the forest behind me would have made a perfect place to slip into for the night.

No one forced money on me as in Mississippi, but I found way more change in Alabama along the road, and mostly silver.  There was just one other offering of food during my week in the state, a young woman with a young girl in tow handed me a bag with a cold bottle of Gatorade and a ham sandwich as I sat outside a Walmart eating a bowl of shredded wheat with chocolate milk, merely saying “This is for you.”  

I am always touched by these acts of kindness and  heartened to bring out the good in others.  I’d much rather though inspire people to ride their bikes than to give,  but there’s not much hope in that.  I’ve come over a thousand miles in my two weeks on the road and have hardly seen another cyclist or even a bike.  Some of the cities have had scooter rentals, but those do little to lift my spirits.

Selma, Alabama

 
I paused at an intersection in downtown Selma looking for a street sign to see if I had come to Selma Avenue, the street where it’s Carnegie Library was located.  Before I could spot the sign a white-haired lady standing nearby talking to a friend said, “The Edmund Petus  Bridge is just ahead,” thinking I’d come to see the renowned bridge where a big showdown occurred in 1965 between the police and hundreds of blacks setting out on a March to the capital of Montgomery 54 miles away protesting the rigid restrictions that made it very difficult for blacks to vote.  

The bridge was on my itinerary, but I said, “I’m looking for the old Carnegie Library.”

She replied, “It’s just down the street.  That’s where the first meeting of suffragettes in the state took place.”  Whether she just coincidentally linked the Carnegie to voting rights, as is the Edmund Petus Bridge, or was making a point of it, I know not.  It’s a sad fact that blacks were given the right to vote before women, though once women were given the right they didn’t have to fight to realize it as did blacks.

She added that the Carnegie is now the chamber of commerce and then asked how far I had come and how many Carnegies I’d seen and if I was on Instagram.  I told her I had a blog and could be found by Googling George the Cyclist.”

I told them I’d just seen the Carnegie at Judson College in Marion, thirty miles away.

“We’re afraid the college is going to close down,” she said.  

“There is some hope it can be saved,” I said, “As a security guard there told me they had an open house yesterday that fifty prospective students attended.” 

It’s a small all-women Baptist College with a pre-Covid enrollment of just 260 students.  It was founded in 1848, named for the first American woman missionary to Burma.  It was one of the first colleges for women in the US.  I thought I had been to the first earlier in the trip in Columbus, Mississippi (The Mississippi University for Women in Columbus).  That had been founded in 1884, making it the first in the public sector, while Judson was in the private sector.

Judsen’s Carnegie gave way to a new library in 1962.  The Carnegie is now a museum and office building, and has been renamed A. Howard Bean Hall, though its Carnegie origins are not forgotten.

Selma’s Carnegie had nothing on its exterior acknowledging its heritage, though any Carnegie aficionado would recognize its distinguishing features. It hasn’t been marred by any additions, just an entry ramp for the handicapped on its backside.

As I approached the Petus bridge over the Alabama River I expected a series of plaques detailing its place in history.  The first plaque I came to three blocks away was actually devoted to Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet who was a popular figure in ‘60s counterculture.  It was in front of a building that served as his photography studio from 1912 to 1923. He lived from 1877 to 1945 and is considered the father of the New Age movement as many of the renditions he gave when in a trance related to reincarnation and Atlantis.  The Chicago Public Library has nearly one hundred books by and about him.

There were no plaques relating to the Bridge on the city side.  They were all across the river in a small Civil Rights Memorial Park across from a Voting Rights Museum. 

One of the cluster of plaques revealed the bridge was named for a leader of the KKK without also mentioning that he’d been a Confederate general and US Senator. There have been attempts to rename the bridge for the recently deceased Georgia congressman John Lewis, who was a leader of the March, but all have failed so far, though a photograph of the marchers from the time, including Lewis, has altered the name. 

I had planned to take a two-lane secondary road to Montgomery, but the March followed what is now a four-lane divided Highway designated as an official Historic Route.  I felt obligated to follow that.  The marchers took five days to cover the fifty-four  miles and its numbers grew to 25,000 by the end, including a fourteen-year old neighbor and classmate of mine from Glenview and his mother, Doris Conant, who was a long-time member of the board of directors of Facets Multimedia.  My friend Howie, who was a tennis star and played on the same championship intramural basketball team that I captained, wasn’t very political, but his mother certainly was.  I had a hard time imagining what was going though his mind over fifty years ago while he walked the route I was bicycling. 

There were historical markers indicating where the group, led by Martin Luther King, camped, and there was a huge National Park Interpretative Center at around the halfway point. 

The South has done little to suppress its sordid past.  Among the plaques at the Memorial Park was one devoted to lynchings in Selma.

 In Marion, where Judsen College is, a plaque by the courthouse recounted the murder of a local 26-year old black that instigated the March to Selma.

Birmingham, Alabama

 

I had hopes that Alabama would be more bike friendly than Mississippi and mercifully spare cyclists the dreaded rumble strips, but no such luck. It was a small consolation that the road shoulders were a bit wider and afforded the possibility of riding to the right of the strips and not out in the road as was the case in Mississippi.

The wider and smoother shoulders were a first indication of a more affluent state. It was further  reflected in towns that didn’t look like they were being abandoned in mass, as had been the case in Mississippi.  

I’m so conditioned to being in France in May, as I have been for the past seventeen years until last year, that I’ve had to remind myself from time to time that I can speak English to anyone I encounter.  But I am generally painfully aware that I’m in the United States, as I pass through one characterless, rundown town after another that reflect a woeful lack of civic pride, quite a contrast to the French.

I long for the charm of French villages, each distinguished by a caring local populace that can be seen out tending to their surroundings, spearheaded by the typical attentive mayor ever cognizant of maintaining the favor of those he serves by keeping his town as spic and span as the one down the road.  Every French town, regardless of size, is brightened by an array of flowers.  At the entry of most towns a sign announces its status as a Ville Fleurie with between one and four stars. Besides arrangements of flowers in beds, they are on display in wooden boxes hanging from window sills and on the bridges over the river that seems to bisect every French town.  

The old stone buildings most people live in all seem to be in competition for best preserved.  All have wooden shutters that rarely can be accused of needing a fresh coat of paint.  One can count on a boulangerie (bakery) and dignified town hall and public toilet.  US towns are denigrated by Dollar Stores and other franchise that are more of a blight than a beneficence.

But France does not have the libraries that the US does.  It didn’t have the gift of a wealthy benefactor like Carnegie funding libraries for any small town that wanted one.  Small town libraries are scarcely more than a room attached to a municipal building and only open for minimal hours. American libraries are a true national treasure.  Carnegie more than doubled the number of small town libraries in the beginning of the 20th century, and inspired countless others to donate the funds for a library.  He is truly the “Patron Saint of Libraries.”

Fourteen communities in Alabama took advantage of Carnegie’s largess. Ten of the libraries still stand, but none on my route to Birmingham, my first destination for the state’s lone Statue of Liberty donated by the Boy Scouts.  It had its back to the courthouse facing on to Linn Park, the site of many civil rights demonstrations in the ‘60s.  It’s the only such Statue I’ve come upon that wasn’t mounted on a pedestal, nor accompanied by a plaque explaining that it had been donated by the Boy Scouts in honor of its fortieth anniversary.  Without it being elevated one could see it was merely life-sized, some hundred inches from toes to torch.

A plaque gave the history of the mammoth courthouse built in 1931, designed by Chicago architects Holabird and Root.  Two other plaques, part of the Birmingham Civil Rights Heritage Trail, featured Martin Luther King and his time in Birmingham. King came before the court numerous times for violating state and local segregation laws and led numerous marches to the city-square block adjoining park designed by the Olmsted brothers.  Blacks were initially banned from the park.  They had other parks designated for their use.  When a federal judge ruled that Birmingham had to integrate its 67 parks, the city commissioners on January 1, 1962 voted to close them, stirring civic leaders to unseat the most bull-headed of the commissioners.

I had no need to visit the many other significant Civil Rights battle sites in Birmingham, one with a statue of snarling dogs inflicted upon marchers, as I had made their acquaintance on a visit to Birmingham six years ago with Don Jaime, who had lived through the era of desegregation and the many demonstrations, and had witnessed many of them.  He had been brainwashed as a youth to regard blacks as second class citizens.  Segregation was such a fact of life, he had no black friends, and he accepted that blacks had separate entrances to most buildings.

There was little racial mixture in Alabama in the ‘50s when he was growing up.  It was even against the law for blacks and whites to play checkers together.  Jim confessed that as a college student he was among the maddened mobs of whites hurling the n-word at black marchers led by King after the downtown church bombing.  He can hardly believe he could have behaved in such a fashion, nor can anyone who knows Jim today, an ardent activist on all fronts from poetry to critical masses. Discovering the music of Joan Baez helped cure him of his prejudices.

Just as the Civil War has not been forgotten in the South, nor has the Civil Rights movement and how harshly blacks were once treated.  Historical plaques everywhere along the road and in cities and towns recount the grave injustices blacks once endured.  The manner in which I have been treated gives no indication that blacks hold a grudge, as is much more the case in South Africa, which I can strongly attest to.  It is a dangerous place for whites.  But not the South.  I had another black accord me an act of kindness just before I left Mississippi.  I paused at an intersection to consult the GPS on my iPad.  As I studied it a grandfatherly, bearded black approached me and said, “God bless you,” and handed me a five dollar bill.

Okolona, Mississippi

Thanks to it being the only town in Mississippi with a “Strengthen the Army of Liberty” Statue of Liberty, I was drawn to Columbus. I was rewarded with several bonuses including the childhood home of Tennessee Williams, which served as the city’s tourist office, though it wasn’t open in these times.  Williams spent the first seven years of his life in this bright yellow Victorian home, then moved to St. Louis when his shoe salesman father was relocated there in 1918.  He returned to Columbus from time to time, but he committed to St. Louis enough to attend Washington University and to choose it for his burial site.

Along with Williams, Columbus is also the birthplace of the great Yankee broadcaster Red Barber, but its most fascinating curiosity is that it is the home of the first women’s college in the United States—Mississippi University for Women.   Among its students was Eudora Welty from 1925 to 1927.   When it was founded in 1884 it was known as the Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls. It changed its name in 1920, but not its policy of excluding blacks.  That was rectified in 1966 and sixteen years later the Supreme Court ruled in favor of some guys who wanted to attend the school’s nursing school.  It still calls itself a university for women but it’s enrollment is now twenty per cent male.

The Boy Scouts contribution to the city resides in the middle of its Main Street surrounded by flowers, half a mile from Williams’ home, also on Main Street.  Columbus is one of three cities forming what is called the Golden Triangle, a marketing ploy from the ‘60s to promote economic development.  One of the other city’s of the triangle,  West Point, twenty miles to the northwest, formed a Golden Triangle for me of towns with Carnegie Libraries, the only minor cluster of the state’s thirteen Carnegies of which just ten remain.  These were the only three I had yet to visit, so I entered this triangle with great eagerness.

I was fortunate that the Carnegie in West Point caught my eye as approached the city center, as it was hidden behind a cluster of trees, and came three blocks prematurely, as Wikipedia gave the wrong address for its location on Broad Street.  If I had gotten to 510 and seen no Carnegie I would have been befuddled, and with hardly a soul around would have had a hunt on my hands.

Carnegie Library in large capital letters remained above its entry, fully obscured by trees.  A sign out front identified it as the Chamber of Commerce.  The noble red brick building hadn’t had an addition and its interior hadn’t been altered much since its initial incarnation as a library, other than the absence of book shelves and the circulation desk.

It was going on seven and the off-and-on day-long rain was just resuming.  The forecast called for it to keep raining until midnight.  I was hoping to get into the shelter of a thick forest before I got soaked again, but when I saw the Relax Inn on the town outskirts, I recognized a refuge I couldn’t resist.  It was Indian-run and a bargain compared to the chains.  It was good to spread out the contents of my panniers on the bed and unroll my tent, wet from the rain of the night before, and let everything try to dry.  Most did other than my shoes and the soaked items I washed. 

It was thirty-eight miles on lightly-traveled roads, with nary a toot of a horn, continuing the trend the last few days since the assault of horn blasts on the busy highway out of Oxford, to the next Carnegie in Houston .  The road took me under the Natchez Trace.  The entry had a sign barring commercial traffic.

Houston’s Carnegie had a plaque along the road giving its history as the first Carnegie in the state, built in 1919.  It had an unobtrusive addition to its rear.  One had to be buzzed in to limit the number of people in the library, though that was of little concern at the noon hour on a week day.  After I looked around, the fifty-year old librarian at the circulation desk under the Carnegie portrait posed that question I’m frequently asked, “Are you from around here?” It comes across as a friendly conversation-starter.

When I told her I was from Chicago, she said she was too.  She had moved here seventeen years ago from the South Side, as she had family here and it was a much cheaper place to live.  And safer too.  She was driving up to Chicago next week to place flowers on her brother’s grave on the one year anniversary of his death.  He had been killed (stabbed) during the rioting over the George Floyd death.  He was a security guard trying to defend his building.

Before she moved to Mississippi she worked for the University of Chicago law department when Obama was teaching there before he ran for Senate and got to know him.  She laughed when I told her friends said if I were black it would be dangerous for me to be biking around Mississippi.  “Hell, no,” she blurted.  “It’s all good down here.  Best thing I ever did was to move here.  It’s hardly safe to even be driving around the South Side of Chicago, no matter what color you are, with all the car jackings and gun fire.”

Those who regard Mississippi as a den of racists with a bent to lynching are as misguided as those who think all men rapists and that no woman could go off on a cycle tour on her own.  Thousands do all the time.  I just read the account of Sara Dykman, who bicycled 10,000 miles in ten months following the migration of the monarch butterfly from Mexico to Canada and back in the recently published book “Bicycling with Butterflies.”  She wildcamped most of the time.  The only unpleasant male encounter of her travels was when she accepted the invitation of a retired high school principal to stay at his place and he made some unwanted advances.

I completed my Golden Triangle of Carnegies in Okolona, twenty miles east towards Alabama.  It was another red brick building with a small addition to its rear.  It still served as a library, but had limited hours, so I could only peer in.  And with it I finished off another state, my sixth of the forty-eight states that have a Carnegie, all but Alaska and Delaware.

I thought I was wrapping up my time in Mississippi with the ultimate roadside souvenir for the state when I saw a car flag still attached to its rod on the shoulder of the road that I presumed from its red color to represent the state university—Ole Miss.  That would be a great one to add to my collection.  But I was denied that pleasure, as it was a San Francisco 49er’s flag. 

The roadside pickings have been meager these first nine days with not a single neckerchief, but at least a license plate.  There have been more armadillo carcasses than any other item.

Some have had vultures feasting on them.

There have been a few bungee cords, mostly the heavy duty, black rubber ones.  If I’m not speeding along I’ll stop for them and leave them at service stations.  I’ll stop for garments of clothes on climbs and redistribute them too.  I left a pink purse that had nothing in it at the Relax Inn.  I’m eager to see what Alabama will offer. 
 

Scooba, Mississippi

I’m conducting an experiment, seeing if I can manage this trip without my small chain ring in honor of my first tours when I rode a Peugeot PX-10 with a 52-42 and a five sprocket freewheel, a mere ten-speed.  That gearing was sufficient to take me coast-to-coast in 1977 over the Appalachians and the Rockies and up to Alaska four years later, both five thousand mile trips.

I presently have 21 speeds, though I’ve so far successfully ignored the seven options the small chain ring would provide despite a far bit of climbing and some steep hills. It’s nice not to have to consider which bar end shifter to use after I make a descent and need to shift into a bigger gear, knowing that I hadn’t dropped into my granny gear.  I can essentially ignore the left shifter, as rarely do I even have need of the big ring.

I traveled much lighter on those early trips, with no front panniers and somewhat puny, primitive, canvas rear panniers, about half the size of my present Ortliebs.  I’m prepared for many more eventualities than I was in those early days.  It brings to mind my travels in India when an intensely curious young man unzipped one of my panniers as I sat in a small cafe talking to the proprietor.  

I was alarmed at the sound of the opening zipper and jerked around to thwart the thief.  The cafe owner told me not to be alarmed, as the young man, along with the swarm of others gathered around me,  just wanted to know what all I could possibly be carrying, as the pannier was large enough to contain all the man’s meager possessions, and there I was with two such panniers and two other smaller ones on the front of the bike.

No matter the season, or where I might be traveling, I carry gear for wintry temperatures, never knowing if a cold rain or a climb over a mountain pass will have me shivering even in the middle of the summer.  I could easily go without gloves and wool hat and extra layers in the warmer months, but I don’t want to be staring down hypothermia if I’m hit by a nasty thunderstorm miles from shelter.  I have encountered snow in the Alps in July during The Tour de France and have been saved by my winter gear.  I have also been very happy for all my reserves in Scandinavia and Iceland in July and on occasions in Africa when the weather turned nasty.

I did leave behind my mini-down jacket that compresses to the size of a water bottle on this trip, though it was a minor debate, especially when Janina asked if I were bringing it, as it was a gift from her several years ago.  I do have an additional item, a solar powered Goalzero lamp that was a recent gift.  I can hang in the tent and read by its strongest of three settings. I just have to be sure I’m well secluded when I use it, as it illuminates the tent into a gentle glow.

I’ve had the pleasure of just one Carnegie in the last 150 miles since Jackson, along with a historic marker at the location of a former Carnegie, one of the twelve Carnegies built for blacks in the segregated South.  Both were in Meridian.  The Carnegie built for whites was across from the grand town hall, and was equally impressive.  It has been an Art Museum since 1970, three years after it gave way to a new library open to all just a block up the 

street.

The one built for blacks was half a mile away in a residential neighborhood across from the city’s first black Baptist Church, which provided the land for it.  A house now resides on the lot, and a plaque honoring the Carnegie.  A second plaque beside the church also pays homage to the library.

Before I visited the new library to take advantage of its WiFi and do some charging I sought out a diner for my first hot cakes of the trip.  I was lucky that someone recommended Mr Rogers, a neighborhood joint where one ordered at the counter.  Pancakes were a dollar a piece, a bargain that will be hard to beat. I could only eat half of a three-stack, saving the rest for later.  I couldn't have been happier with this find, unless the restaurant had had WiFi. 

The day before I bought my first loaf of bread of the trip at a small grocery store.  I had the choice of two cashiers to pay for it, one with a mask and one without.  The one with a mask was just finishing up with a huge sale that filled two shopping carts to a young flaxon-haired woman in tight short shorts and tattoos and a nose ring.  Many of her items were in industrial-sized cans, as if she were purchasing for a camp or a cult or a commune in the backwoods.  When the cashier processed her credit card she told the woman that she had exceeded her limit.  She went over to an ATM in the store to withdraw some cash.  That took long enough that the other line had finished, so I slipped over to the maskless cashier to pay for my bread and quart of chocolate milk and can of baked beans. 

A couple minutes later as I knelt beside my bike pouring some of the chocolate milk over cereal in my Tupperware bowl a woman called out, “Sir.”  I turned and the young woman in the short shorts handed me a ten dollar bill, evidently concerned that I had walked out of the store with a mere three items.  That may have been the most unexpected offering ever.

But it wasn’t the only one of the day.  Later, a hefty thirty-year old black woman handed me four singles as I sat outside a McDonald’s finishing off my bowl of cereal and trying to access its WiFi.  Like another McDonald’s that didn’t have indoor dining, it had cut off its public WiFi and only had WiFi for its employees. I had somehow been able to access the WiFi at the other one, but not at this one.  

I never transferred those four singles to my wallet, so I was able to easily redistribute them the next day to an elderly bag lady in Meridian who directed me to Mr Rogers.  Now I’m curious to see who will get the ten.
 

Jackson, Mississippi

 

 Twice now I’ve had a librarian here in Mississippi take me to task for bringing my water bottle into the library ignoring the no eating and drinking sign at its entry.  Never before have I been denied hydrating while reading.  But so it is in the South, where those with authority like to exert it to keep people in line.  At the first library I was asked to leave my bottle at the front desk.  At the second I was seated when a librarian approached me and gave me a plastic bag to hide my bottle in, so it wouldn’t encourage others to bring in water bottles she said.

Neither library was a Carnegie, though the second in Greenwood was across the street from the former Carnegie, which had been without a tenant since 1978 when it had been replaced.  There have been occasional Friends of the Library book sales there, but not for years.  The red brick building had had an addition giving it a second entrance on the other street of its corner location. It’s pointed, high-peaked roof gave it the semblance of a church.  

Nearby, almost adjoining it, was the Confederate Memorial Building of a similar architecture, built about the same time over one hundred years ago.  The Hall is a popular building for wedding receptions and other functions.

 

It was nearly one hundred miles south to the next Carnegie in Jackson, the state capital, at Millsap College, a Methodist school founded in 1890 three miles north of the towering, domed capital building.  The campus had a high black metal fence around it and was off-limits to outsiders in these times.  The guard told me that if I came back Monday, two days away, I might be given a guided tour of the campus, but she couldn’t let me in.  

I could get a peak of the library through the fence, though it was largely hidden by trees.  That was good enough for me.  I could tell it was not a building of particular magnificence,  based on the rather bland, campus ordinarie surrounding buildings.  I’d had a good ride getting there on lightly traveled Highway 51 that paralleled Interstate 55, the very same superhighway that passes within half a mile from where I live outside of Chicago. I could be grateful to the interstate for siphoning off most of the traffic.  Though each Carnegie is a joy to behold and leaves a lasting memory, they are in essence providing me the opportunity for a good bike ride, so I could hardly be disappointed at not having a closer look.  I was able to place it in context and that was plenty good enough for my purposes.

Just a mile-and-a-half south, also on State Street, I passed Jackson’s characterless Main Library, named for Eudora Welty, a long-time local resident. It replaced the demolished Carnegie Library.   The library had been closed due to a fire when I was last in Jackson on a ride with Waydell in November of 2008, shortly before Obama’s election.  It had been closed for awhile and there was no rush to reopen it we were told, as the library had largely served as a refuge for the homeless. 

Jackson was somewhat hilly after a long flat period while I was in the Mississippi Delta to the northwest.  During one stretch of sixty miles my altimeter registered only 145 feet of climbing, quite a contrast to my first three days from Memphis when I was averaging one thousand feet of climbing every forty miles when it was hilly. Whether flat or hilly the terrain remained heavily forested, making camping almost as easy as in France.  Twice I’ve been able to circumvent gates to forests blocking dirt roads that showed no tire treads and with fallen trees or branches on the road promising I would have the forest all to myself.

The temperatures have remained coolish, only just encroaching upon the 80s.  I’ve bought just one cold drink in five days, and that was a half gallon of chocolate milk that I could nurse for two days.  I was given two bottles of cold water by two young black women who took me for someone in need as I sat against the wall of a service station/convenience store.  They each gave me a bag from the store with a bottle of water and some food—chicken and a biscuit in one and an egg and sausage sandwich in the other.  As always, such kindliness left me feeling uplifted and hopeful for miles.  I hope they felt the same.

A couple days before a middle-aged lady approached me with a couple of bills clutched in her hand.  Rather than handing it to me with the the briefest of greetings as most do, she actually engaged me in conversation asking, “Where are you biking to?”  When I 
 I told her I was seeking out Carnegie libraries, she realized I was not some desperate, forlorn character and kept the offering.  She said she and her husband liked to bike and wished me well.  I’d like to think I gave her some cheer, happy to meet someone off on an adventure she could relate to.