On the Hollow Earth

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten their words again to visible things.

Nature (1836) – Emerson

He leans on his gun. Thinks / How thin is the membrane between himself and the world.

from Audubon: A Vision, Robert Penn Warren

1.

I was in Kentucky’s hollow earth surrounded by stone.  The tour guide was speaking about how caves are formed.  He said that there were three levels to Mammoth Cave.  The subterranean river on the lowest level flows out of these caverns, measureless to man, to mingle its waters with the Green River.  “With the centuries,” the tour guide said, “the cave cuts down deeper and deeper in this limestone.  But the same is true of the Green River on the surface – each century it cuts deeper into its gorge and, so, the river outside will always be beneath the level of the river in the cave.”  

I thought I understood his point.

The tour guide said: “So you might imagine that two-hundred feet below us, there is someone paddling or kayaking on the Green River in the sunshine.”

This disturbed a woman standing in the stony shadows.

“How can that be?” she asked.  “How does the sun get down there.”

The tour guide looked puzzled: “Well, the Green River is on the surface.  It’s not subterranean.  The kayakers are just paddling down the river.”

“Directly under us?”  the woman asked.  “Isn’t it caves and watery chambers all the way down.”

“Well, the kayakers are in the gorge of the Green River and that’s outside of the cave.”

“Well, how can that be directly under us?”

“I just meant it’s lower than us,” the tour guide said.  

The lightless river far below the dry, rubble-filled chamber where we were standing is called the River Styx.  I imagined the cave tunnels ending at faces of rock that were the inside of steep bluffs overlooking the Green River.  The more I thought about the River Styx and the Green River in the wooded gorge below it, the more confused I became.  Like many things, the more I thought about it, the less I understood.

2.

Two kids, about 18, were ambling along at the head of the procession marching through Gothic Avenue, a broad, level tunnel through the limestone.

One of the kids asked the tour guide if he could pick up a stone and take it as a souvenir.  The path on which we were walking ran between slanting heaps of broken and chipped limestone, big tombstone-sized slabs and little brick-sized flakes and pebbles in repose leaning against the cracked sidewalls.  There seemed to be plenty of stones.

“No,” the tour guide said.  “If you take a stone, I will have to call the Big Park Ranger and he has a citation book and carries a gun.”

When you watch TV shows with the subtitles displayed, very commonly, words will tell you that a character is “scoffing” – for instance, “Bill scoffs”.  These titles are to inform that the viewer that the scoffing character has made a noise interpreted to have a vaguely derisory, and dismissive, aspect.

I guess you would say that when the two kids heard about the “Big Park Ranger,” they scoffed.  But, so far as I could see, they didn’t pick up any pebbles either.

3.

As in all cave tours, there is a place along a flat, level corridor where the tour guide pauses and flips off the lights.

“This is absolute darkness,” the guide said.

“But I can see,” one of the kids remarked.  “I am holding my hand in front of my eyes and I can see it’s shadow.”

“Congratulations,” the tour guide said.  “You are officially hallucinating.  Your mind knows your hand is oriented in front of your eyes and so it sends a signal to your brain that deceives you.”

I held my right hand in front of my eyes.  Indeed, I saw a darker shadow impressed against the pitch black.  The shadow was hand-shaped and, when I moved my paw, the shadow moved as well.

I congratulated myself.  I was officially hallucinating.  I had joined the distinguished society of those who see what can not be seen.  These visionaries are the ones that make history, who found cities, who wage wars and crusades and study the universe to learn its laws and that explore the hollow earth of Kentucky.

4.

Culus est solum eius et usque coelum et ad inferos – these words are a legal maxim that means “Whoever owns the soil also owns up to the heavens and down to hell.”  This is an important rule in Kentucky’s cave-country.  You may own land with an abyss opening into a spectacular limestone cave replete with speleothems and crystal rivers full of blind ghost-white fish and salamander, but if you don’t own the terrain above the caverns themselves, you may be barred from access to the underground passages.  Kentucky law reports several judicial cases in which cave explorers entered into great underground chambers, worming their way through tight crawlways descending below inconspicuous fissures in the cliff-sides and creek beds.  Discovery, even, development of these richly decorated chambers by those explorers is to no avail, however, without an ownership interest in the surface under which such chambers extend.  Adverse possession doesn’t apply to entry into underground rooms and chambers since such possession must be “open and notorious” to establish squatter’s rights, something difficult to prove when the property argued to be adversely possessed is 300 feet below the verdant hills and hollows. 

5. 

In the ‘90's, I took some depositions in Clarksville, a town in Tennessee located in the so-called “Land Between the Rivers.”  As I recall, the deponent was a soldier deployed to Fort Campbell, a large military base in that region.  I don’t remember the case or the facts pertinent to the deposition and have no memory of where the testimony was transcribed.  Most likely, the deposition took place on the second or third floor of a bank building in a lawyer’s office suite above the tellers and the drive-through.  I recall a long GI strip comprised of check cashing places, strip bars, fast food, and pawnshops between the several numbered gates leading into the base.  Some barracks were posed against the horizon, beyond runways lined with metal hangars.  The base occupied many miles and the GI strip ran parallel to a long, high wire-mesh fence.  

After the deposition was complete, I went to a National Historic site a few miles away and drove along a winding road that looped between almost invisible trenches and eroded fortifications where a great battle had been fought during the Civil War.  It was summer and the air was suffocating, humming with stridulating insects and cicadas made a chainsaw buzz overhead.  There was water everywhere at the battlefield, swamps and lagoons and wide reaches of river-front where once gunboats had shelled the Confederate positions in the deep woods along the shore.  Some fields with little stone walls or rustic split-rail fences marked places where there had been frontal assaults.  Some tobacco-drying shacks stood in the green shadows.  Obelisks spiked low hilltops and ranks of old cannons painted midnight black stood amidst the trees.  

After spending a hour and a half at the battlefield and, dutifully, reading the many explanatory markers, I drove to Nashville.  The next day, I looked at a long row of columns on a yellowish low plinth.  The building, a facsimile of the Parthenon, stood near a small, shallow lake.  At least, this is what I recall.  But I now know there is no lake next to the Parthenon building.  Probably, I saw some pictures of the structure taken during the Centenniel celebration in 1897 – those pictures show a lake impounded under the monument with people paddling around in rowboats under the long colonnade of brutish-looking Doric columns.

I think I walked past the Ryman Auditorium downtown and saw the Grand Ole Opry building from the sidewalk.  It was scalding hot and honky-tonks were blowing cold air from the air–conditioners onto the pavement, slow, frigid avalanches spreading out from the open doors of the taverns.  Mingled with the mint scent of the air-conditioners, I heard some drums and an electric guitar.

Early the next morning, I went to the airport and flew back to Minnesota.

6.

Julie and I left Austin at 8:00 a.m. on January 5, 2023.  Travel in the Midwestern Winter is problematic and for the first one-hundred miles, I drove on ice encrusting the highway.  The sun emptied some wan light through gaps in clouds.  On the freeway, southeast of Waterloo, Iowa, the roads began to clear and I could drive at the speed limit (or a bit faster).  According to Google Maps, it is about a twelve hour drive to Nashville.  Time estimates on Google Maps are fantastically accurate, but they also assume that the traveler will not stop en route, an impossibility, of course.

When I first drove to St. Louis thirty-five years ago, the city where we intended to stop for the night, fully a third of the route was two-lane highways.  In Missouri, the blacktop road snaked along the edge of river bluffs at the edge of the Mississippi’s flood plain – the bluffs were low, unimpressive, gouged with tree-lined ravines.  It was a very slow and tedious drive from the Iowa border to Hannibal, rolling past primitive lathe-churches, shacks hidden in the hills, and decrepit gas stations with poorly maintained toilets.  During the last twenty years, however, the gaps in the interstate system have been filled with divided highways and the route from Austin to St. Louis, along the so-called “Avenue of the Saints” (St. Paul to St. Louis), is almost entirely freeway, the only exception being the two-lane highway across the Minnesota state border and, then, south forty miles to Floyd and the Charles City bypass in Iowa. 

We stopped for lunch Mount Pleasant about thirty miles north of the border with Missouri.  The Jefferson Street Café is near the town’s central square.  The bubble of a courthouse dome hangs over the plaza with its snow-covered benches and fountain locked in ice.  The café occupies a long narrow space, a shaft bored into the old block of offices and retail buildings and, therefore, mostly lightless except for a window onto the sidewalk.  These kinds of places trap odors and smell musty and, despite all efforts at decoration, stubbornly maintain a forlorn aspect.  Julie had a hamburger and I ate a club sandwich.  The other customers were mostly elderly.  On leaving the café, I saw the “Closed” sign, a plaque on a chain, resting in the display window and wondered what would happen if I impulsively picked up the chain and slung it across the front door. On cork board, little messages about work-at-home jobs and lost dogs were exhibited like pale butterflies.  Google didn’t know how to get us out of the town and among some new houses at the edge of the town, I found myself staring down the bore of a gravel lane, hideously slick with ice.  Clearly, this wasn’t a viable way to the freeway.

7.

North of Hannibal, Missouri, the new divided highway skates along the edge of the bluffs, sufficiently remote from them for the lanes to run fairly straight and true.  To the right, I saw remnants of the old two-lane route to St. Louis, no longer a through-road, but serving as driveways for some of the remote farm houses or, in other places, linking one or two dwellings before dead-ending at the base of a bluff.  

At Hannibal, the highway limps past a half-dozen stop-lights and travelers are encouraged to visit the old city on the river.  The cave in which Tom and Becky were lost at the end of Mark Twain’s first novel, Tom Sawyer, or, at least, the subterranean model for that place, is concealed somewhere in the bluffs.  You can pay to tour the caverns.  In the novel, Tom and Becky get lost in the cave in which the malevolent Injun Joe is lurking.  They are trapped for three days and almost die.  Upon emerging from the caverns, Becky’s father, the Judge, seals the entrance into the labyrinth of chambers and tunnels, inadvertently dooming Injun Joe who dies of dehydration and hunger in this black hole.  People tend to forget that Mark Twain’s fiction is full of all sorts of horrors.  

Mark Twain Cave is a show-cave near Hannibal.  In the last century, at least before the sixties, these caves usually featured a bedraggled mummy of uncertain provenance, a desiccated corpse set on a ledge to appall and delight visitors – the tour guides could point to the mummy and say that it was the mortal remains of Injun Joe, except, of course, that Injun Joe is a fictional character in a made-up book and, therefore, his body is nowhere to be displayed.  At Disneyworld, there was an attraction called “Injun Joe’s Cave”, an artificial grotto located on “Tom Sawyer’s Island” that could be toured in flat-bottomed boats.  The name for this attraction proved to be problematic and, although the ride is still labeled “Injun Joe’s Cave” on Disneyworld maps, signs on-site lettered with those words have now been removed or covered-up.       

8.

Joseph Nash McDowell was a prominent surgeon practicing in St. Louis before the Civil War.  Dr. McDowell believed that human physiology was best learned by dissecting human cadavers.  Unfortunately, these studies were outlawed and, as a consequence, McDowell encouraged his students to exhume freshly buried corpses and bring them to school where they could be dissected.  McDowell’s educational methods led to much controversy and, on several occasions, mobs threatened to tear his laboratory apart.  When the corpse of one of McDowell’s patients went missing, the dead body turned up in his medical school where he conducted an autopsy on the body.  (McDonald claimed that he had a dream in which the dead woman pleaded with him to exhume her body and discover the true cause of her death.)  A riot was narrowly averted.  Another “anatomy riot” was threatened when a woman last seen walking near McDowell’s medical school, vanished.  It was alleged that McDowell, like Burke and Hare, was now murdering people so that he could dissect their corpses.  An angry mob assembled and McDowell, a doughty disputatious fellow, set up several small cannons at the entrance to his laboratory, armed his students (who were fanatically loyal to him), and threatened the gathering rioters with these weapons.  Ultimately, Dr. McDowell was persuaded to allow officials to search his school – no contraband corpses were found.  A few months later, the missing woman was found very much alive, having set up housekeeping with man reported by the press “to be more handsome” than her husband.

In light of these events, St. Louis became too dangerous for McDowell and so he transferred his practice, and his educational efforts, to Hannibal.  There he conducted medical research far from prying eyes in the depths of what is now known as Mark Twain Cave.  When his fourteen-year-old daughter died, Dr. McDowell, a critic of contemporary mortuary practices, put her body in a copper vat, immersed in alcohol, and equipped with a glass lid.  (McDowell thought that inhuming corpses in the earth precluded the “liberation” of their souls.)  When some local hoodlums broke into McDowell’s subterranean laboratory with the intent of stealing the corpse (and probably desecrating it), the doctor thwarted this vandalism and, then, put the body in the vat in the family mausoleum in St. Louis where it could be better, and more safely, managed. 

9.

A couple days before we departed, I asked Julie to make reservations for lodging.  She did this with her characteristic efficiency and skill.  In St. Louis, she had chosen the Moonrise Hotel.  About eight years earlier I had gone with my son, Jack, to St. Louis and, by coincidence, we ate in the Moonrise Hotel’s dining room.  Julie didn’t know this and so her choice of the hotel was a peculiar coincidence.  (She had booked the place on the basis of its poetic name.)  

Jack and I left Austin very early, I think at about five-thirty in the morning and it was Summer so that the roads were all fast and smooth to our destination.  My plan was to visit the St. Louis Art Museum, to see the large collection of paintings by Max Beckmann and the institution’s excellent collection of pre-Columbian artifacts.  I recall that we went to the museum the next day and walked through a city zoo located down the hill from the acropolis-like knoll where the big marble temple containing the art is located.  It was very hot and humid and the animals in their cages were all passed-out in the tropical warmth.  The sequence of these events isn’t clear to me, although I have probably recorded our itinerary somewhere.  

The Moonrise Hotel is located a couple blocks from the big city park in which the museum and zoo are located.  I recall that we parked on the sidewalk in front of the hotel since the place was brand-new, then, with a sign posted in front of the building advertising brunch.  It was probably around 1:00 pm and the neighborhood around the Hotel was drowsy and still, the streets empty under the bright glare of the midday sun.

I remember that we came upon the place accidentally.  In the hotel, it was cool and the restaurant was mostly empty.  I remember that some display cases in niches in the wall were filled with pictures of astronauts, toys showing space monster, and, even, a couple of tiny fragments of the moon.  Along the wall of the lobby, about eight large pictures showed the moon in different phases, magnified by a telescope.

I had Southern grits with shrimp.  The shrimp were large and pink and seasoned with cajun spices.  The grits were infused with maple syrup and very good.

10.

St. Louis and its suburbs occupies a vast area.  Night had fallen and I drove on freeways lit by the headlights of innumerable vehicles for many miles.  The suburbs formed a vast, intricate cocoon around the city, fifty miles or more of interlocking highways running past malls and car dealerships on the hills around the road.  After driving for an hour in heavy traffic, the malls seemed shrink and become more shabby, withered, it seemed, with strip parking lots running along Chinese take-out places and battered-looking insurance agencies.  We exited the freeway and drove through commercial neighborhoods where small shops and more run-down restaurants marked the intersections obstructing our passage with red lights.  The road ran to the south and east about three miles and, then, we made sharp right turn and the hotel, still pale and new and fresh, was across the street – the phone said: “Your destination is on the left.”

The traffic on the freeways had been fearsome, but the hotel was easy to access, its parking lot to the rear through a sort of broad gate-like tunnel in the building.  Freshly fallen snow, perhaps, a day or so old, was heaped up along the driveway and between the aisles in the parking lot – the snow, cratered where it had been mined and heaped, gave the place a lunar aspect.

11. 

In the lobby, there were big pictures of moon in its different phases.  The desk clerk was friendly and said that his name was Justin.  He told us that we could dine in the Eclipse Bar and Grill, a part of the hotel and that we should definitely go to the rooftop lounge for a drink.  Then, the desk clerk checked us in and told us again that his name was Justin.  He said that we could dine in Eclipse Bar and Grill, open until 10:00 and that the rooftop lounge was open until midnight.  A stylish-looking Black woman stared determinedly into a computer screen in front of her.  She seemed to be making an effort to ignore Justin.  Justin handed us the key-card and, then, said that his name was Justin and that we could eat at the Eclipse and should have a drink on the rooftop terrace.  He paused and, then, said that his name was Justin and that we should call him if we needed anything, anything at all. 

We took the elevator to our room on the fifth floor.  The hotel was very still, quiet as a tomb.  From the window, I looked down on the pale avenue outside.  Across the street, a building shaped like a church showed dim, shadowy stained glass windows, glowing faintly as if lit by candles behind the multi-colored panes of glass.  A big truck was parked in front of the church and electrical cords extended from the vehicle up the steps into the building.  A couple of guys in hooded sweatshirts were standing next to orange cones set on the sidewalk to protect pedestrians from tripping over the power cords – but there were no pedestrians.  I speculated that the church had been converted into some kind of concert venue.  There was a display case in front of the building containing some posters.

12.

As Justin suggested, we went to the top floor of the hotel to have a drink in the terrace lounge.  The door to the rooftop bar was locked.  I looked through the glass window and saw a shadowy row of booths extending to the edge of the roof; city lights made a winking, blinking tapestry stretching to the river.  The open-air corridor along the booths was buried in snow three-feet deep and the booths were bluish grottos with ice-stalactites decorating them.  It was dark and cold.  Of course, the rooftop terrace couldn’t possibly be open in this weather.  The place rippled with snow drifts that cast icy blue-black shadows.  The terrace wasn’t open until midnight.  In fact, it hadn’t been open for weeks or, even, months.  The glass door opened onto a frigid mausoleum. 

13.

Justin was no longer in the lobby.  Perhaps, he had gone mad or overdosed or killed himself. 

We found the Eclipse.  It was a bar with high tables.  There were a couple other patrons, but they seemed to be off-duty employees.  A blonde girl came in, sneezed and, then, complained about the cold, removing her coat as she sat near us along the bar-rail.  She ordered a drink, obviously something that she regularly had in the Eclipse.  There were more bartenders than customers: a slick, sweet bar man with a man-bun, his sidekick – either the dude with the man-bun was training this kid or the kid was training him or they were both training one another.  A woman with long fake eyelashes loitered behind the bar, idly watching TV – the screen seemed to show nothing but local commercials. A couple of other bartenders appeared, whispered to the others, and, then, disappeared.  Later, a few couples came in from the cold.  I thought the place had something of the atmosphere of a refined, discrete gay bar.  

You ask: what did I eat at the Eclipse?  Duck confit, served with a oozy half-fried duck egg, on a cornbread waffle with a side of collard greens.  The greens were cooked in bacon grease and maple syrup and were very good.  The duck was slightly over-cooked.  You may wonder what a duck egg tastes like.  It tastes like every other egg that you have ever eaten.  Julie had shrimp with risotto.  She didn’t notice the two peppers marked on the menu beside the item and the shrimp were too spicy for her.  

The blonde at the end of the bar-rail had finished her drink and ordered another, her regular poison, an Old Fashioned, not too sweet.

Before we ordered, there was a slight contretemps.  The bartender with the man-bun asked in his soft-voice: “Are you ready?”  For some reason, Julie heard him to say: “I am Ricky.”  Julie responded: “My brother’s name is Ricky.”  The bartender looked sad, confused, mildly disoriented.  “Ricky?” he asked.  Julie told him we were from Minnesota as if that explained everything.  “From Minnesota?” he asked.  I told Julie that he had asked us if we were ready to order our meals.  She was surprised.  The bartender was mixing up a huge pitcher, pouring bright liquids onto the ice.  There was no kitchen anywhere in sight.  The food was produced out of thin air.  Someone introduced a friend to the bartender as “Morpheus” – “this is Dr. Morpheus,” the person said.  Dr. Morpheus bowed.

14.  

I had trouble sleeping.  I kept imagining the rooftop terrace with its icy heaps of snow and booths spiked with ice-stalactites.  I imagined that we had somehow opened the door and, then, found that it was locked against us and that we were trapped in sepulchral terrace bar under the icy light of midnight moon.

15.

The next morning, at dawn, I rose and went downstairs to explore the neighborhood.  The hotel is a couple blocks from George Washington University where Max Beckmann taught studio arts after fleeing from Holland to the United States at the end of the Second World War. (He was only in St. Louis for 18 months but the local department store magnate bought many of his paintings and, later, donated them to the St. Louis Art Museum; hence the curious fact that there are more Beckmann paintings in St. Louis than any other place in the world.)   The older buildings at the intersection were funky low-slung brick establishments: a tuxedo rental place with a well-dressed gent fashioned from tin striding across the roof over the entrance, a bar displaying a cowgirl and cowboy on its awning, a couple of Korean barbecue places and a humble-looking vegan lunch-counter  On the sidewalk, there were stars inset in the pavement commemorating famous people from St. Louis – Jon Hamm and T.S.Eliot among them.  The church across the street turned out to be a marijuana dispensary.  A couple of girls walking dogs passed me on the sidewalk.  I bought coffee for Julie in a little café where there was a Latino guy behind the counter.  Some bright rails ran through the intersection, curving in an elegant way to bend around the corner, and I saw wires for the street car overhead.  It was completely silent and there was no traffic although it was around 7:30 on Friday morning.

16.

We drove across the river into Illinois.  The land was snowy but the roads were clear.  It is flat, linear terrain ruled by shelter-belts.  Turning south, we passed Rend Lake.  The lake spread out on both sides of the freeway at the causeway where we crossed the water.  Trees came down to the water from the low hills that cupped the lake.  This is not a naturally occurring body of water, but the result of a dam on the Big Muddy River.  The dam was built in 1963, but the Big Muddy’s flow is slow, if steady, and it took ten years for the water to be impounded to its current shoreline.  On Wikipedia, there is a sentence identifying the size of lake in terms of square acres.  Then, some wag has written: “The pond in my back yard is larger then Rend Lake.”

Southern Illinois in the area near the crossing into Kentucky is heavily forested and hilly.  Road construction narrowed the freeway and we passed a big accident in the northbound lanes.  A semi-truck was flung into the median and, behind the crash, other trucks were backed up for five miles.  The wooded hills were impassive and empty, without towns near the highway.

A bridge lifted us over a huge brown river at Paducah.  Julie needed some supplies and so we stopped at a Walmart in Clarksville, Kentucky.  Robert Penn Warren, the author of All the King’s Men, was born in Guthrie, a town near Clarksville and we passed signs directing travelers to his birth place.  This writer is also known for his poem cycle on John Jay Audubon and The Cave, a novel inspired by Floyd Collins’ slow death after he was trapped in Sand Cave about a hundred miles from Clarksville.  The Cave apparently refers to the nasty hole where Floyd Collins died, buried alive under a carnival of people, some drunk, some conducting religious revivals, people eating and drinking, wooing, quarreling, buying souvenirs as they watched the rescue efforts proceeding all in vain.  But Robert Penn Warren is also a philosophical writer and the cave inescapably referenced in the title to the 1959 novel is also Plato’s Cave, the famous allegory of how we perceive shadows cast on a wall to be reality when, in fact, the true things, the Ideas, are hidden from us.   

17.

Sometimes, when you travel, you encounter things that seem to be out of place.  A few miles from the river-border with Tennessee, official signs direct travelers on the interstate to the Jefferson Davis Historic Site.  For some reason, I misinterpreted the highway markers and thought that they were aiming visitors to the place where Davis, allegedly dressed as an old woman, was captured at the end of the Civil War, only a few weeks after Lincoln’s assassination.  I didn’t take the exit and, so, only learned later that Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States, was born in Kentucky, near the modern town of Pembroke.  Like Abraham Lincoln, Davis was, originally, a product of the Kentucky frontier.  Davis’ family moved when he was ten to Bayou Teche in Louisiana and, later, to Woodville in the State of Mississippi.

The Historic Site in Kentucky is marked with a 351 foot obelisk, made entirely with unreinforced concrete.  The structure completed in 1922 is said to be the largest unreinforced erection in the world.  Presumably, the obelisk was made when the mythology of the Lost Cause took root in this country, after Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and the national resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and people in the South felt emboldened to denounce the Reconstruction and violently suppress the African-American population.  This sort of monument would have been unthinkable in the decades immediately following the Civil War when the conflict was still regarded as a rebellion and, its Southern participants, traitors.  Kentucky was a Union State in the Civil War, although it’s estimated that about 20% of its people were slaves. As a Border State, it suffered an invasion from the South involving the occupation of Bowling Green and a number of terrible battles were fought on its territory.  In light of this complicated history, the Davis monument seems to be in the wrong place, although, perhaps, the issue is debatable.     

18.

We arrived in Nashville under leaden grey skies.  The temperature was about 50 degrees.  Nashville is a small city, a bit like Des Moines, although there is heavy traffic on the access highways downtown. 

The Conrad is a brand-new hotel on the west side of downtown, about midway between Vanderbilt University and the country-western venues on Broadway, the main drag.  The city tilts toward the river, although there’s a hump in the downhill slope that conceals the bright lights of the honky-tonks from the skyscrapers on the terraces above.  The Conrad is part of a compound of three sleek high rises, more or less identical facades with a central court where vehicles can enter to be parked by valets serving the hotel and condominium towers.  An ugly dwarfish man, cast in bronze, stands in the courtyard.  He was some kind of civic booster and, perhaps, involved in the urban redevelopment that led to construction of this complex of towers.

I don’t like valet park and, so, I said I would self-park my wife’s Mercedes Benz that we had driven south on this trip.  (My vehicle, a Honda CRT, was found to have some kind of fluid in its oil and, so, we had to use Julie’s SUV for this venture.)

The staff at the Conrad told me to take three right turns, that is, to go around the block and, then, park in the ramp below the building.  I wasn’t sure whether the right turns were to be counted from when I exited the courtyard onto Broadway or, after I was on Broadway.  (Of course, I was tired and overthinking the instructions.) I exited the courtyard, counted three corners thereafter, and, indeed, found an entrance into a parking ramp on the opposite side of the complex.  Entering the ramp, the kiosk didn’t dispense a parking ticket to me.  I called for help by tapping the touchscreen.  The screen gave me instructions to accept the rate by putting my finger on a bar-shaped logo on the touch-screen.  No matter how many times, I tapped at the logo, to “accept rates” (very expensive by the way), the machine would not disgorge a ticket.  The woman answering my intercom call told me she would raise the gate and I could park.  Before I could ask her how I would be released from the underground ramp, she hung up and the gate popped open.  I tried to call her again but without any response.  So I drove down the ramp into the cold darkness of the lot, parked my car, and, then, left the vehicle, a bit panicked and disoriented by this turn of events.  As it happened, the underground ramp was divided into two halves and there was a floor to ceiling wire-mesh fence that kept me from accessing the west side of the lot where the elevators to the hotel lobby were located.  Apparently, I had inadvertently entered the lot under the residential condominiums, an area that was isolated from the hotel parking lot.  (Three turns, counting the first from the valet parking courtyard, brings you to the entrance to the hotel lot; but I had taken four turns and was now immured in the condominium parking ramp.)  I drove the vehicle to the exit, but, of course, had no ticket and couldn’t get out.  I pressed the button repeatedly for help but was ignored.  I parked the SUV again, not really taking much note of its location and, then, hiked over to the elevator shafts to the surface.  The elevator brought me into the lobby of a Bank.  No one there had any idea even where I was parked, let alone how to help me.  I walked across the courtyard, passing the ugly civic booster with his sardonic bronze scowl, and went into the lush lobby of the luxury hotel.  The desk clerks at reception had no idea how to help me.  “You’ve parked under the condos,” the reception clerk said.  “It doesn’t matter, however, you can park down there also.”  I told him I had no ticket with which to exit the ramp.  “Well, how did you get in there in the first place,” the man in his blue blazer asked.  I tried to tell him but it was obvious that this sort of thing was not part of his job-description and his eyes glazed over.  He told me to go to the Bank and that they could get me out of the parking ramp.  I went to the Bank again and they told me to go back to the hotel.  The valet parking guy at the hotel told me to go to the reception desk in the Condominium building.  The man at that desk said he wasn’t sure how to help me and queried how it was that I got into the lot in the first place – that is, without a ticket from the kiosk.  The desk man at the Condominium building told me that there was a maintenance guy who had just left the facility and that he would try to retrieve him to talk to me.  After about ten minutes, a fat man with a hunting dog in his car showed up.  The fat man couldn’t figure out how I got into the ramp under the condominiums in the first place, but he said it was fine for me to park there.  I told him that I had no way of getting out of the ramp because no ticket had emerged from the kiosk at the gate.  The fat man, then, led me into the underground parking lot beneath the residence building.  Then, I couldn’t recall exactly or, even, approximately where I had parked the Mercedes.  I used the key-fob to ping the vehicle and we heard it chirping above us, in one of the subterranean galleries of the lot.  It’s not an easy thing to find a vehicle by sound and it took us fifteen minutes to locate the car.  Under the guidance of the fat man, I drove the car to the kiosk where he pressed some secret button on the mechanism to lift the gate and, so, at last my car was freed from the underground vaults where it had been confined.  At the open gate, I handed the man twenty dollars.  He said he couldn’t accept the gratuity, but, when I told him that I was paying his dog for patiently waiting in his car during this ordeal, he pocketed the money.

I drove around the block, now counting three turns, and, then, found another entrance into the ramp under the hotel.  But, once again, the kiosk touchscreen didn’t seem to work.  I tapped it and punched it and clawed at it to “accept the parking rates”, but no ticket emerged.  I pressed the “Help” button but this was equally unavailing.  At last, I backed up and circled the block again, entering the valet parking courtyard between the buildings.  By this time, the bronze civic booster’s aspect had become positively malign – he seemed to be scoffing at me.  I told the valet parking man that I couldn’t get into the lot because the kiosk would not issue a ticket to me.  The kid at the valet parking desk looked at me with scornful disbelief.  He said that he would let me into the underground lot through the private valet parking entrance, a ramp hidden next to the bronze man in the courtyard.  I drove down the shallow ramp, a slit in the courtyard, and the kid met me below.  Effortlessly, he tapped at the kiosk so that a strip of adding machine paper with a bar code emerged from the device and the gate lifted.  I thanked him, found a parking spot that I recorded with a photograph on my phone, and put the parking ticket into the breast pocket of my coat.  The elevators to the lobby were a few feet away and I reached that place without difficulty.  I asked the desk clerk how to exit the ramp and he looked at me with scarcely concealed scorn.  “Show the machine the bar code,” he said, “pay with a credit card, and the gate will open.”  He seemed amazed that he would have to tell me something so obvious.  I showed him the ticket.  “Put that in your car,” he said.  “If you lose that ticket, here in Nashville, there will be consequences.”  This seemed sinister to me.  I went back to the elevator and found the vehicle in its parking stall.  I tucked the ticket into the visor on the windshield.

The entire episode, trapped in the hollow earth under Nashville, had taken two hours.  Needless to say, my wife was extremely frustrated and angry at my incompetence.  How could such a thing happen?   

19.

Blue twilight deepened in the shadows between buildings.  Grey skies overhead darkened.  I went for a walk on Broadway.  The street was empty on the slope where the Conrad Hotel stood.  The neighborhood was split by several freeways that seemed to converge here and overpasses traversed shallow canyons full of howling vehicles.  I strolled past a Whole Foods Store and some car dealerships; a White Castle with pale battlements ornamented a street corner.  In the distance, I saw some towers, renaissance-style campaniles, and an old stone church echidna-spiked with finials and lances on its ridge-line.  A museum occupied an Art Deco federal post-office and a Union Terminal squatted over train-tracks.  It was a pleasure to walk free from fear of falling on ice.  The wind blew against my face.  It was about 50 degrees.

After climbing a rise, a knob on the downward-descending slope to the river on which the towers and church were built, I saw neon ahead, clots of yellow and orange and blue glowing over crowded sidewalks.  Some of the lights were shaped like guitars and I saw a sign for Ernest Tubb’s Records: Music Row.  A big sleek auditorium, like a beached cruise-liner occupied one side of the street.  Some metal bridges crossed the Cumberland River at the bottom of the hill, tightly wound, it seemed, like metal springs. Crowds of people were jay-walking between intersections and cars unfortunate enough to have come to this part of Broadway were stalled-out as pedestrians spilled from the bars and cafes into the street.  To the right, the Ryman Auditorium loomed over a side-street, a hulk of dark brown bricks, immeasurably heavy, it seemed, like an armory pretending to be a church or vice-versa.  On a wall, I saw a bronze plaque for the Fisk Jubilee Singers.  At the first intersection in the forest of neon, colors like voices raised to a shriek, a long line of people stood outside Hattie B’s Hot Chicken.  The air smelled of marijuana and cayenne pepper.  Guys were selling dope from push-carts.  One vendor winked at me, lit a bowl of weed on the side of an ornate glass bong and inhaled deeply.  Some of the folks waiting in the Hot Chicken queue were smoking joints.  Down the street, a drunk had fallen in the gutter and the cops were working to rescue or arrest the man and sirens sounded in alleyways and I could hear the twang of music emerging from the honky-tonks.  

I had walked a mile to reach this place and it was about five-o’clock.  I expected that Julie would be hungry when I returned to the hotel and, so, I turned around and began the long hike up the gently sloping hill to the Conrad.  People were hooting and hollering behind me and, then, I reached the knuckle of the hill, passed over, and it was silent on the ascent to the pale towers ahead.

20.

Hot chicken is a Nashville specialty.  It’s made with lard seasoned with cayenne pepper, three parts pepper to two parts lard.  I’ve had this dish in Minneapolis at Revival at 45th and Nicollet.  I recall ordering a Tennessee Half Chicken in a mild sauce.  Even in that form, the chicken was too spicy for me.  You can buy the dish in a mouth-searing preparation called “Poultergeist” – people say it’s a real ordeal to eat.

Presently, Hattie B’s is the place in Nashville to go for Hot Chicken.  (The dish is served with cole-slaw, sweet tea, the chicken on a couple slices of white bread.)  The franchise is ubiquitous in the city and suburbs, but there are many other joints serving this food.  I must confess that my experience in the Great White North, at Revival, has made me leery of Hot Chicken and, so, I didn’t try the Nashville version.

The dish is supposed to have originated in the African-American neighborhoods in Nashville in the thirties.  There’s an origin story, likely apocryphal, but amusing, nonetheless.  A man named Thornton Prince III was a notorious skirt-chaser.  He spent a long night carousing in the bars and, then, came home drunk to his long-suffering girlfriend.  Enough was enough and, so, when he asked her to make him breakfast, she dumped about a quarter-pound of cayenne in lard, heated the mixture until it was simmering and ladled it onto some left-over fried chicken.  To her surprise, Thornton wasn’t repelled by the dish, but wolfed it down.  In fact, he thought the Hot Chicken was so good that he duplicated his girlfriend’s revenge recipe and began selling the stuff at a café called Prince’s BBQ Chicken House.  And the rest, as they say, is history.  No one seems to remember the girlfriend’s name.  

21.

The Conrad stands aloof from Nashville’s honky-tonks and fast food places on a hill occupied by banks and imported car dealerships.  I couldn’t find anyplace close to the hotel for supper.  (In fact, unbeknownst to me, there was a strip of funky little restaurants hidden behind other condominiums about two blocks away – but I didn’t discover this until later, when we were driving out of town.)  Since nothing was convenient, we decided to eat in the hotel dining room, a placed called Blue Aster.  

As soon as we were seated, I looked at the menu and felt ashamed.  Everything was extremely expensive and, of course, if you are in a restaurant of this sort and the menu disturbs you with its prices, then, you don’t really belong in the place at all – you’re an imposter:  it’s too elegant and upscale for tourists from a provincial town in Minnesota and you are best advised to vamoose to the White Castle down the street.  But we were committed to the restaurant, already had our glasses filled with “still spring water”, and, so, there was nothing to do but order from the menu and make the best of things.  

Under “Raw Bar,” Julie saw a shrimp cocktail that interested her.  The waitress was patient and willing to explicate the menu, truth to tell a rather Spartan selection with only a few options, but she didn’t seem too informed about the shrimp.  “Are the shrimp cooked?” Julie asked.  “No, it’s a raw bar,” the young woman said.  “The shrimp are raw.”  Of course, this couldn’t be true.  I’ve never heard of anyone eating shrimp absolutely raw and the girl seemed to not make a distinction between cooked food served cold and food never cooked at all.  Julie began to argue with her, but it was obvious that this dispute wouldn’t achieve any clarity on the subject and, likely, would result in the waitress spitting in our food and, so, Julie ordered “Potato Truffle Soup”, foregoing the shrimp.  I asked for “Grilled Crisp Octopus.”  Drinks were served.  Julie’s Cosmopolitan was dilute, watery, mostly tasteless, but it looked pretty.  I had the eponymous house specialty, the Blue Aster.  This was a small martini glass filled with pale blue fluid.  When the drink was set before me, the waitress bent forward and, as if lighting a cigarette, applied a small instrument to the concoction, clicking a switch on her appliance that puffed up a perfectly round, pale and greyish bubble over the liquid.  I had never seen this done before and, of course, gasped with awe, a predictable reaction from a Yankee tourist from a place so benighted that he didn’t even know how to operate a parking lot kiosk.  When I lifted the drink with the bubble poised on top of it to my lips, of course, the spherical membrane burst and, for an instant, there was a very faint smoky odor, a wisp of fragrance that vanished immediately.  The drink itself tasted like poorly mixed lemonade spiced with a hint of vodka.

The waitress next brought some bread to the table, a clump of dinner rolls resting on a stone.  The girl said that the stone was immensely hot, almost lava, and that we should beware.   Garnishing the rolls and resting atop them, there was a bundle of herbs, mostly pine needles, it seemed, with some dusty-looking sumac and sage. The girl slid the rolls to the side and, then, vigorously rubbed the herbs on the slab of hot stone.  “It will infuse the bread with its fragrant essence,” the waitress remarked as she scrubbed the stone and, then, slipped the bread back onto the place that she had prepared with the herbs.  The bread tasted a bit like King’s Hawaiian Rolls, sugary with a chewy dough taste.  As far as I could determine, the herbs imparted no taste at all to the rolls.

Julie’s “Potato Truffle” soup came in a broad bowl, a bit like a big porcelain hat upturned with a broad brim.  A little dab of crab rested in the china basin, sitting on a bit of tortilla.  The waitress poured white creamy soup into the bowl, six or seven spoonfulls.  Julie told me that the soup was excellent and, when I tasted it, I thought it was, indeed, very good.  My octopus consisted of a curved tentacle, rust-colored and cooked until the skin was crispy.  The tentacle was presented on a bed of barley and quinoa with swirls of deep red mustard, coiled like small dog turds.  You eat octopus for its texture and the meat was soft, not rubbery, under its burnt-crisp skin.  I thought it was reasonably good.

Some of Nashville’s elite were seated at a table across from us.  There was an old and robust man with a red face, clean-shaven, sporting a Marine corps haircut.  A blonde woman, probably fifteen years younger, sat at his side.  They talked about a cruise around the Amalfi coast in Italy, sipping expensive drinks that were, also, outfitted with globular bubbles that burst when brought to nose and lip.  Then, another old man appeared, this fellow with a severe crook to his neck to that his chin was on the level of his nipples and his little malicious eyes looked out below the slump of his shoulders.  This diner’s wife was even younger, with a bland bored face, and a filmy black dress.  She seemed to despise the wife of the other man, although to my eye, they were both faded blondes, probably once very glamorous, wearing chic and costly evening gowns.  The women ignored each other; the lady with the man with stooped shoulders talked exclusively with the ex-Marine business tycoon.  The tycoon’s wife amused herself teasing the fellow with his head embedded in the middle of his chest.  All four of them quizzed the waitress mercilessly, but she was game and answered all of their questions.  So far as I heard (eavesdropping), there were no questions about whether the shrimp in the shrimp cocktail had been cooked before being cooled and presented at the table.  

Julie ordered a steak filet.  She said that she wanted the meat to be “medium”.  The waitress opened her eyes very wide when she heard this, but didn’t dispute the point with her, demurring and saying “Of course”.  (In places like this, “of course,” is drawled with two syllables in the first word and three or four in the second – this is like the way waitresses in upscale places pronounce the word “sure”, that is as “shower-uuer” or some variant thereof.)  I asked for “Viking Village Scallops.”

At the table nearby, the diners were debating Kevin McCarthy’s travails in his bid to become Speaker of the House.  Obviously, these people were “hard right” and demons of some sort.  The ex-Marine said that Jim Jordan should move that Donald Trump be elected Speaker of the House.  (Apparently, by House rules, you don’t have to be an elected member of the assembly to be its Speaker; I think this idea was a “talking point” with Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson on FOX).  The women tittered appreciatively, applauding the ex-Marine’s idea, but they were more interested in their upcoming luxury cruise to Jamaica.  They had more twenty dollar drinks and the man with his chin jutting out of his chest became incensed with the political situation and perfidy of Leftist liberals such as Kevin McCarthy (as he maintained) so that he became agitated, stuttering and spitting, as he plowed through his drinks.  Of course, I thought these people were demons from some kind of special Nashville hell.

As you would expect, the chef was unwilling to cook a seventy-dollar fillet of steak “medium”.  The outside of the chop was beautifully charred and finely spiced with pepper-corns but the inside was raw and bleeding, like the heart of a Spaniard hacked out for a sacrifice to Vitzliputzli.  Julie couldn’t eat most of the meat, but I enjoyed it.  The Viking Village scallops were round and thumb-sized, wholly without taste as is properly the case with such seafood – I couldn’t even detect the slightest salt-sea tang in the scallops.  Like the octopus, the scallops were served on a pilaf of quinoa, barley, and wheat grits.  Some coiled dog turds of red-orange mustard garnished the edges of the presentation.

In the bar adjacent to the dining room, a man playing a guitar began to sing a medley of John Denver tunes.  The demons at the nearby table turned up their noses at the jangle of music coming from the nearby room and, even, asked the waitress to order the man to shut off his amplifiers.  

I don’t recall the ceiling to the dining room where we were seated.  It was high above us, at an immense height, a pale expanse like the night sky over snowy fields.  A tree stood in center of the dining room, actually growing out of some sort of ceramic basin, and lights were installed under its branches so that a pleasing pattern of yellow light and an embroidery of leafy shadow decorated the dome over us.  The demons said that President Biden and his followers were traitors who should be executed.  They were now drinking wine with their entrees. In the next room, the unseen singer was playing a melody by James Taylor.  

In these kinds of places, the more tasteless the food the more expensive.  

I won’t tell you what the meal with tips cost.  

25. 

On the internet, Dolly Parton has listed ten places in Nashville that no visitor should miss.  Julie admires Dolly Parton and thought that we should visit the bookstore that the Country Western singer endorsed, a place called the Parnassus.  Nashville isn’t particularly known for books and bookstores.  However, in her list, Ms. Parton observed that visitors to the Parnassus could always find the books that she had written, or that featured her, stocked on its shelves.  (Parton is the author of several autobiographies, a thriller, Run, Rose, Run, co-authored with the prolific James Patterson, and is featured in several children’s books in which she is presented as a role model.) I put the address of the bookstore in my phone and we drove to that place.

(On exit, the pay-stations at the hotel ramp worked flawlessly.  My problems the preceding afternoon seemed wholly imaginary, like something that I had dreamed.)

The Parnassus is a medium-sized independently operated bookstore in strip mall on the edge of downtown.  The selection of books is mediocre at best, mostly bestsellers, self-help volumes, and travel guides.  When we visited, about six talkative young women were competitively comparing notes on novels that they had recently read.  They stood, grouped around the wall on which fiction was displayed, and spoke loudly and confidently and, although it is probably a good thing that they are readers, their tastes seemed questionable to me and their opinions, loudly advertised and brash, were ignorant and superficial.  (I must admit that the books that they recommended are popular with book clubs and well-reviewed.)  I didn’t see anything of interest in the Parnassus.  I judge bookstores by their selection of poetry and what was on offer in the plce was woefully slim.  

It was time for lunch and, so, we went next store to bakery.  It was the sort of place where you order a sandwich on custom bread with bean sprouts, perhaps, or designer lettuce, buy a cookie with your sandwich and a bottle of water, and, then, sit outside at a picnic table to eat your meal.  Of course, you have to give the lady at the counter your first name.  The sandwiches are made to order, slowly, while patrons admire pastry and brownies on display.  In this sort of establishment, the woman behind the counter always has her hair austerely bunched behind her skull, wears ‘cheater’ reading glasses, and has an impressive collection of warts and moles on her face. Julie’s sandwich was delivered first and she took her sandwich in its brown bag and the bottle and the cookie outside.  I followed a couple minutes later.

Outside, Julie was bruised and battered and her hands were shaking.  She had walked along the sidewalk to a curio store called Ten Thousand Villages and, there, sat down at a cast-iron table around which there were some spidery metal chairs.  The chair on which she sat collapsed under her in slow-motion and, because it was standing on a sloping apron of concrete, the metal crumpling under her weight cast her down the incline so that she rolled slowly, and cumbersomely, into the gutter of the parking lot.  She wasn’t seriously hurt but, of course, her dignity was wounded.  A yuppie couple parking their car in the crowded and intricate parking lot (more or less L-shaped and folded into a nearby alley) rushed to her aid.  But, by the time they arrived, the spurt of adrenalin that accompanies such calamities had roused her from the gutter and she was standing, indignant and baffled, next to the broken chair.

I inspected the chair and observed that its legs were bent flat.  The chair seemed to be made of chicken-wire with legs fashioned from twisted coat-hangers.  The design of the thing was inexcusable.  

The air filled with mist and the tops of the hills above the Parnassus bookstore vanished into white frothy cloud.  Julie said to me: “You don’t even care that I nearly got killed.”  I told her that I cared.  She didn’t seem to believe me.  

26.

Andrew Jackson’s plantation, called “The Hermitage,” was once a genteel distance from the rough 1810 river town, Nashville.  Today, the acreage with split rail fences, log cabins, and a manor house stands on a green swath between suburban strip malls and a Walmart.  The place is accessed off Hickory Drive by Rachel Lane (Rachel was Jackson’s wife).  When I visited, the shaggy hills around the place were hidden in wet mist and the lane to the visitor center ran along old tree-lines sheltering empty fallow fields.  Although the tract of land in which the site is centered is relatively capacious, the manor itself is small and unimpressive.  In the distance, a freeway tolls like a bell.

The site reminds me that the United States was an unimportant and poor country before the Civil War.  Jackson’s house with its veranda with five Ionic columns is about the size of some of the mansions on the nearby hillsides, smaller than the big house that Johnny Cash owned in this neighborhood twenty years ago.  Of course, at that time, minor German principalities boasted much larger royal residences.  And a big palace like Frederick’s San Souci in Potsdam dwarfs Jackson’s estate – his manor is smaller, less elaborate, and much more primitive than the garden houses, for instance, at the Prussian king’s residence.  I’m sure that English or French or German politicians visiting Jackson’s “Hermitage” would have been appalled by its small size and rural unpretentiousness.  According to the tour guide at the house, Jackson entertained a constant stream of visitors to his plantation.  When important guests were on-hand, Jackson substituted high-grade spermaceti for the smoky, bad-smelling hog oil that he ordinarily burned in his sooty chandeliers. There were four bedrooms, large chambers with beds on platforms and with curtains like those at the proscenium of a theater.  Women visitors were invited to sleep in the beds in the two upstairs rooms used by guests; the gentlemen took their repose on the floor.  And the floors themselves in the common rooms were noisome.  Both men and women chewed tobacco and spit inaccurately at pewter spittoons or, when they were drunk (as was often the case) simply used the floor for their expectorations.  In light of these customs, the floorboards were covered with brown jute mats, simple woven textile without much substance that was disposable and could be readily replaced when impregnated with tobacco juice and smeared with muck from the stables and plantation grounds surrounding the structure.

One of the rooms on the first floor of the manor is designated as Jackson’s library.  But it’s a library without much in the way of books.  Jackson owned a cabinet with four shelves and this was the extent of his library, perhaps sixty or so volumes.  He read five newspapers a day and bound folio volumes of these periodicals are piled in slabs in a corner of the room.  On the reading table, a pen-knife for bloodletting is displayed next to an ivory-handled pistol.      

27.

The tour guide, a beefy Texan, looked like a high school history teacher also enlisted to coach football.  He spoke confidently and made jokes and seemed genuinely impressed by Old Hickory’s machismo.  The guide described Jackson’s wife with the kenning “the much-beloved Rachel” and he led us through somewhat cold and shadowy rooms on a path tightly circumscribed to keep visitors out of the domestic spaces that we inspected from behind hip-high transparent plastic barriers.  At one end of the formal entrance to the home, an elaborate stair spiraled up to the second floor.  The place had space for two groups touring the manor simultaneously – one on the ground level and one upstairs.

In broad corridor between Jackson’s dining room, his office, and library, the walls were papered with classical scenes.  On a green seacoast, small marble temples peeped out from groves of shapely trees and cypresses stood sentinel on hills.  A young man wearing an orange chiton appeared at various locations in the landscape, sometimes alone, as if on a quest, and, in other places, among groups of elegantly clad women and men in togas.  Some toy-boats were moored in a harbor.  On the high mountain slopes, under grey clouds shaped like pieces to jigsaw puzzle, larger temples, some of them pink like salmon, decorated the terraces.  A narrative was portrayed in the wall paper so that it was vaguely incumbent upon guests to decode the sequence of events involving the brash young man in the orange cloak, but this seemed difficult since the images were out of order, their location governed by the exigencies of doorways and thresholds and windows interrupting the story.

The guide said that the lush blue and green wallpaper told the story of Telemachus on the Island of Calypso.  “It’s based on Homer and his Odyssey,” the guide said.  He mentioned that when the wallpaper deteriorated beyond restoration, about forty years ago, the ladies’ committee administering the Hermitage had gone to France and located a similar wallpaper ensemble, perhaps, in a foreign embassy.  The wallpaper, said to be very rare, was steamed off the walls of the embassy, carefully collated, and shipped to Nashville where it was installed as a replacement to the old and faded paper.  This restoration was thought to be quite wonderful, returning the mansion to its previous splendor.

We all admired the wallpaper and agreed that it was fine thing that replacement panels of the story of Telemachus on the Island of Calypso could be located for this passage between the ground floor suite of rooms.  But I was puzzled.  I know the Odyssey reasonably well and wondered, of course, about the tale depicted in the wallpaper.  As I recall, Telemachus appears late in the Odyssey after Odysseus has returned to Ithaca.  With his father, he slaughters the suitors who have been wooing his mother Penelope, and, like locusts, eating her out of house and home.  I recall the final Peckinpah-style bloodbath in the Odyssey – regarding the serving maids as disloyal, I think that Telemachus butchered all of them too.  Inspecting the wallpaper, I found no discordant images of death or destruction (or, even, stylized combat) in the images pasted along the corridor.  The gist of the narrative seemed bucolic, an idyll involving shepherds with pan-pipes, nymphs in deshabille, the noble and handsome Telemachus touring this paradise, sometimes with a small group, just as we were touring the house.  

I now know that the wallpaper was based on events portrayed in a didactic novel first published in 1699, Francois Fenelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus.  This French novel portrays Telemachus searching for his father and, thereby, retracing some of Odysseus’ travels, including a sojourn on the island of the nymph Calypso.  (The book was much-admired and an influence of Rousseau, particularly his similarly didactic novel about education, Emile).  So the images plastered on the walls at Jackson’s house don’t portray Homer’s poem at all – they allude instead to the long-forgotten novel by Fenelon.  The wallpaper was manufactured by Delflour, a French firm first located at Macon and, then, Paris.  The stuff was available for purchase between 1818 and about 1920 and, contrary to the impression that I received from the tour-guide, the wallpaper is not particularly rare, although it is now expensive.  The images were reproduced on 25 widths, each 20.5 inches wide.  The guide didn’t mention that another ante-bellum mansion in Nashville, the Belmont, features rooms similarly decorated with “Telemachus” wallpaper.  

The Texan said that “Old Hickory” purchased the costly wallpaper for “his much-beloved Rachel” as an indulgence.  Of course, he would have preferred wallpaper depicting his great victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans.  “The battle,” the tour guide told us, “lasted only 37 minutes. But, it was said, that Jackson could easily spend two or three hours recounting the affair.”  The Telemachus wallpaper is incongruent with Jackson’s bellicosity.  The scenes on the wall depict a world free from conflict, an idyllic paradise where the only strife is witty debate about what might constitute a good life.  Maybe, the placid meadows and groves shown in the wallpaper soothed Jackson’s savage breast.  Most, probably, he thought the wallpaper a feminine trifle and paid no attention to it at all.

28.

On the walkway to the visitor center, banners show Andrew Jackson standing next to cannons, probably in New Orleans or, perhaps, during one of his genocidal wars with the Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole Indians.  A script along the side of the pennant says: “The People’s President”.  Of course, we know that Trump decorated the Oval Office with a large portrait of Jackson by Ralph E. W. Earl.  (Obama had a picture of Lincoln in this place in the office.  Biden displays a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt on the wall where Trump hung “Old Hickory”.)  Trump was told to admire Jackson by his master, Steve Bannon, and, so, obedient to that command kept the portrait near him – even after Bannon was ousted from the White House.  Jackson was intensely conscious of his image and Earl was on staff full-time to make portraits of him.  In fact, Earl lived at the Hermitage for almost twenty years and died there in 1838.  In the painting, Jackson’s pale horsey face seems to be about a yard long and he has a great, impressive mane of lion-grey hair.  Trump visited the Hermitage in March of 2017, had taps played over Jackson’s grave, and laid a wreath.  The 45th President extolled Jackson as “very tough” and said that he admired him for imposing tariffs on imports.  Trump was careful not to compare himself too closely to the 7th President with respect to military and government service – Jackson had been a judge on the Tennessee State Supreme Court and was elected Senator; Trump held no elected positions before becoming Prsident.  Similarly, Jackson fought with distinction in both the Revolutionary and War of 1812 – Trump has no military service.  And, of course, Jackson won the presidency by a landslide in the popular election; Trump lost the popular election to Hilary Clinton, although, of course, prevailing in the Electoral College.  When he toured the Heritage, Trump looked at the bound volume of newspapers that Jackson collected and said that he also had troubles with the Press.  The 45th President also remarked that if people had listened to Jackson, the Civil War could have been avoided.    One-hundred Tennessee legislators attended Trump’s tour of the Hermitage, where, unlike our group, he seems to have been afforded access to all the rooms in the manor.  The State legislators applauded when Trump set his wreathe on Jackson’s grave.  

29.

The Texas tour-guide, hearty and hale, didn’t really come to terms with the fact that Jackson was pretty much a swine.  I suppose it’s not the role of historians to reach moral judgements, although it might be argued that history is pointless without someone making judgements of this kind.  

Jackson was a scoff-law.  The rules of civil society didn’t apply to him – at least, this seemed to be his approach to things.  Although dueling was illegal in Tennessee, Jackson was involved, by some counts, in 106 affairs of honor.  He jumped the gun on his marriage to his “much beloved Rachel” – she was still espoused to another when he took her to be his wife.  He encouraged settlers and planters to “land grabs” contrary to treaties with the so-called “civilized tribes” (the Cherokees and Creeks) and defied the Supreme Court when it issued unpopular decrees, particularly those involving the rights of Indians.  At his inauguration, Jackson’s cronies, drunk on whiskey punch distributed on the mansion’s lawn, surged into the White House itself and smashed all the crockery.  (Allegations of misconduct at the inauguration were probably much exaggerated by Jackson’s enemies, but, nonetheless, the crush of people in the executive mansion was such that the new President was said to have fled the melee by exiting a window and decamping to Gadsby’s tavern to continue the revelry.)  

The duels were mostly ritualistic and harmless, indeed, with an opera bouffe aspect.  But it’s significant that Jackson was so bellicose (and unreasonable) as to be involved in so many of them.  No other American president was involved in formal dueling.  One doesn’t find Washington or Adams or Abe Lincoln involved in such idiocy.  After learning of Jackson’s most famous, and deadly, duel at the Hermitage, I told Julie that Rachel, the “much-beloved”, seemed to not be exercising her marital prerogatives to control her irrational husband and prevent him from engaging in nitwit affairs of honor.  In fact, I now understand that Rachel was part of the problem.  Since she eloped with Jackson when still legally married to another man, her husband’s enemies had a taunt conveniently ready-at-hand – when things escalated, they could always accuse Jackson of being an adulterer married to a whore.  Of course, vituperation of this sort required reprisal – hence, at least, a few dozen of the duels in which Old Hickory was involved.  

Jackson’s first reported duel was farcical.  At a trial, the opposing lawyer, a fellow with the amusing name of Waightstill Avery, accused Jackson of levity incommensurate with the dignity of the Court.  As the story goes, Avery was in the habit of pompously referring to the English common law jurist, Francis Bacon.  (Bacon’s book The Elements of the Common Laws of the State of England was ubiquitous as a legal authority in American courts after the Revolutionary War.)  At each proceeding with Jackson, Avery supported his arguments, some of them notably specious, by saying: “I refer to Bacon.”  Jackson brought a strip of real bacon to Court and put it in Avery’s law book when the other lawyer had his back turned.  When Avery adverted to Bacon as his authority, Jackson pointed out that this precedent was literally cured pork.  Avery denounced the prank.  Jackson scribbled a challenge to fight in one of his law books on the table and slipped it to Avery.  The two men met at dawn with their seconds and both fired their dueling pieces into the air, departing, as legend has it, as “fast friends” for life.  

A few years later, Jackson got into highly publicized quarrel with John Sevier, a revolutionary war soldier, Indian fighter, and, later, the governor of Tennessee.  The ostensible cause of the dispute was Sevier’s rivalry with Jackson and refusal to appoint him to a commander position in the State militia.  Sevier told someone that he would never advance the cause of a “poor, pitiful petty fogging lawyer”, namely Andrew Jackson. (“Petty fogging” means disputatious, unethical, and prone to quibble over trivial matters.)  The alliteration in this insult proved too much for the thin-skinned Jackson and, of course, he challenged Sevier to a duel.  Apparently, Sevier couldn’t resist calling Rachel an adulteress, a taunt that raised the stakes in the combat.  Nonetheless, the duel had to be deferred for several weeks  because of travel difficulties: the field of honor was at west Tennessee frontier fort, accessible by riverboat, and Sevier’s conveyance got caught in the shallows delaying his arrival at the appointed place.  

When the dueling party, combatants with seconds, arrived at the field of honor, the men exchanged loud insults.  Raised voices spooked Seviers’ horse which is said to have run off with the dueling pistols in its saddle-bags.  The led to everyone pointing their loaded side-arms, much more accurate and deadly than the intentionally hard-to-aim ceremonial pistols, at one another.  Someone suggested that the men fight it out with sabers, but, of course, this would have been messy, resulting in a bloody fight that would have been hard to end without someone being seriously injured.  Ultimately, cooler heads prevailed and the duel was averted.  

Jackson’s most famous duel was about a year after the comedy with Sevier.  The casus belli with respect to this fight was a wager on a horse race.  A man named Erwin owned a racing thoroughbred named “Ploughboy.”  Jackson planned to pit one of his horse’s against Ploughboy.  A wager of $2000 was agreed upon and committed to writing with an $800 dollar forfeiture fee payable if one of the horses was withdrawn from competition.  (These figures were astronomical for the era – an acre of land in Tennessee sold for $4 dollars at the time.)  Ploughboy, apparently, went lame and couldn’t race and there were recriminations about payment of the forfeiture fee.  Dickinson, an attorney and similarly hot-tempered man with a reputation for dueling, was Erwin’s father-in-law and insulted Jackson, calling him in a letter printed in a Nashville paper, “a coward and poltroon.”  Not content with these insults, Dickinson predictably besmirched Rachel Jackson’s honor.  Jackson demanded satisfaction, but, for a time, the duel was averted.  Dickinson said that he was drunk when he slandered Rachel, apparently, an acceptable excuse on the frontier, and Jackson accepted the apology.

The quarrel refused to die.  There were too many intermediaries and allies involved.  The dispute expanded with officious interlopers, now, spreading slander.  Someone said that Jackson had uttered defamatory words about the horse racing debacle when he was drunk at a bar.  Dickinson, who seems to have been anxious to fight, send a crony named Swann to confront Jackson at a local tavern.  Jackson struck Swann with his cane and, then, said that he was a stupid meddler.  As was the custom on the frontier, both parties wrote columns in a Nashville paper, accusing the other of cowardice.  Jackson characterized Swann as “the lying valet for a worthless, drunken blackguard” – that is, Dickinson.  The Nashville Review, the newspaper profiting in subscriptions for this squalid affair, published another column in which Dickinson again denounced Jackson as a “coward and poltroon.”  (A “poltroon” is an “utter coward”; the word has an interesting false etymology – since “poltroon” sounds like “pullet” or “poultry, some claim the word just means “a chicken”.  In fact, the word derives from an Italian insult that means “slacker” or “idler.”)

Dueling was illegal in Tennessee and so the combatants agreed to meet in Adairville, Kentucky on May 30, 1806.  Jackson’s second was a man named Thomas Overton.  Jackson and Overton were concerned about the duel.  Dickinson was known to be an expert marksman.  However, Dickinson also had a reputation for being impulsive.  Jackson thought his best chance at surviving the fight, apparently understanding that no one could back down from this affair (too many people were involved), was to goad Dickinson into firing first, without taking careful aim.  Therefore, Jackson decided that he would withhold fire until Dickinson had taken his shot.  The Seconds to the duel were charged with triggering the fight by crying out “fire!”.  Overton won the coin toss and, therefore, was allowed to control the inception of the duel.  As agreed with Jackson, Overton asked: “Gentlemen, are you ready?” and, when both men assented, he didn’t pause but immediately shouted “fire!”, a deviation from ordinary protocol.  (Dueling was supposed to be leisurely affair so as to allow combatants the opportunity to avoid carnage.)  As expected, Dickinson immediately fired his weapon.  Jackson was wearing a voluminous cape in the hope that Dickinson would shoot into the garment and miss him.  Standing sideways to reduce his silhouette, Jackson was hit in the chest, the ball breaking several ribs and lodging in the flesh only an inch or so from his heart.  Jackson turned to face Dickinson and tried to fire, but, when he pulled the trigger, the gun stopped at half-cock.  This was a “snap” and counted as a shot fired so that Jackson could have ended the duel at that point according customary practice.  Instead, Jackson re-cocked the pistol, cooly took aim, and, then, shot Dickinson through the belly.  Dickinson bled to death.  

The newspapers were scandalized and Jackson was denounced for continuing the duel after his pistol failed to fire at half-cock.  Never one to back down, like Donald Trump, Jackson “doubled down” as the saying goes.  He told a journalist that if Dickinson had shot him through the brain, he still would have “killed the man” in the duel.  It’s hard to understand today how these vicious and primitive squabbles were characterized as “affairs of honor”; “affairs of (dis)honor” seems a more apt description.

30.

Local surgeons were never able to extract the lead ball from the muscles around Jackson’s heart.  It is said that the wound bothered him until the day of his death and that, sometimes, after exertion, he would spit up blood.  

Jackson had a variety of wounds and scars.  When he was fourteen, he served as a courier during the Revolutionary War.  (Jackson’s two older brothers also fought in this conflict; one of them died of heat exhaustion after a skirmish at Stono Ferry in 1779; the other died of smallpox while a prisoner of war.)  Jackson was captured by the British in 1781.  According to legend, he was ordered to polish the boots of a British officer and, despite his tender years, manfully refused.  The officer cut him about the left arm and head with his sword, an event depicted frequently in Currier and Ives engravings in the 19th century and the frequently mentioned in Jackson’s later campaign literature.  (Jackson proudly displayed these wounds for the rest of his life.)  

While imprisoned at Camden, Jackson and his surviving older brother caught small pox with the result that the older boy died.  Jackson’s mother retrieved her last son, then, fourteen, from the prison camp, and nursed him back to health.  In the process, however, she caught cholera and died herself.  It is alleged that these incidents made Jackson an inveterate and remorseless enemy of the English and their aristocracy.  

31.

In an upstairs room at the Hermitage, there is a piano forte instrument in a long mahogany box.  This piano was purchased in Italy, transported across seas and oceans, and, finally, hauled over the Appalachian Mountains to Nashville.  

Jackson and Rachel were unable to have children of their own and, so, they adopted Rachel’s nephew, named Andrew Jackson, Jr.  Andrew Jackson, Jr. married and had five children.  One of those children was named Rachel as well and the piano forte was purchased for her.  The tour guide mentioned that the instrument cost $4100, a fantastic sum in the 1840's when it was purchased.  However, this must be considered in context of Jackson being willing in 1805 to bet 2000 dollars on a horse-race with an $800 forfeiture clause.  

Andrew Jackson, Jr. was feckless and, after his father’s death, acquired debt that led to the bankruptcy of the plantation after the Civil War.  Junior was, also, a drunk and, while hunting in April 1865, shot off his hand while attempting to climb over a fence with a loaded rifle.  He developed tetanus and died shortly thereafter.  A daguerreotype shows a handsome young man with a long narrow head and haunted eyes.  

32.

The question of slavery is unavoidable.  Jackson owned as many as 150 slaves, was harsh enough to suffer some runaways, and went so far as to advertise that anyone capturing one of his fugitives would be paid $10 for each hundred lashes administered to the miscreant, “up to the sum of 300 (blows).”  The cash crop on the plantation, then, called Hunter’s Hill, was cotton and Jackson acquired a gin to process his crops.  

It’s necessary to acknowledge “enslaved” people on the tour – this is mandatory, post-George Floyd.  And the verb “enslaved” is also au courant – that is, to signify that the people held in bondage are the subject of some activity by their oppressors (“enslavement”) and not characterized in any essential way by this status: that is, not “slaves” but “enslaved”.   In the tour, two “enslaved” people, both domestic workers, are mentioned by name: Alfred and Betty.  Betty was entrusted with meeting visitors at the front door, sorting through them, and, then, announcing their presence to the White folks living in the manor.  She was the head cook for the family and, most likely, Alfred’s mother, although this is not entirely clear.  Alfred’s history is more complex: pictures show him to be tall, dignified gentlemen, dressed in courtly fashion.  Alfred was apparently the major domo on the estate and he outlived Jackson by more than a half-century.  Born in the kitchen of the two-story log cabin preceding the more stately manor house, Alfred remained on the premises from about 1812, his approximate date of birth through September 1901 when the old man died.  Records show that Alfred lived at the Hermitage longer than anyone else.

Before reaching puberty, Albert worked in the stables and, in fact, may have been a jockey for a few years, riding Jackson’s thoroughbreds in the races that were an important part of the gentry’s social life – and, as we have seen, a significant bone of contention with respect to wagers placed on those races.  Albert was considered a skilled laborer and for the first half of his life built carriages and managed those conveyances, as well as the teams of horses that pulled them.  During the last couple decades of his life, Alfred was important as a living connection to Old Hickory and led tours around the mansion.  He was employed by the Nashville Ladies’ Association that managed the site during the last years of the 19th century and could entertain tourists with first-hand recollections about the President.  

In some ways, Alfred had the last-laugh on the Jackson famly.  After Andrew Jackson, Jr. ran the place into bankruptcy, and, then, shot off his hand, Alfred actually bid on some of the home’s furnishings in the Estate Sale.  Through those transactions, the old slave acquired an imposing four-poster bed that he proudly erected in his log cabin as well as several chairs and a big mirror.  Pictures show the old man, like the Ancient Mariner with a grizzled beard and ferocious glittering eye, seated on his extravagant chair next to his four-poster bed.  A big china basin rests on a table next to where he is seated.  

There is a story, possibly legendary, about Alfred and a tutor hired to instruct Junior’s children.  The conversation recounted in informative signs along the trail to the rear of the mansion, tell us that the tutor, named Brinkerhoff, was curious about slavery.  He asked Alfred for his thoughts on the “peculiar institution” and the former slave (it was 1867) said that Andrew Jackson was a fair man and hadn’t been particularly cruel to the Black people working for him on estate.  Brinkerhoff said that it was probably an idyllic existence because the slaves had no material worries – they were provided with all material things necessary for them to live in reasonable comfort.  “Freedom,” Brinkerhoff says, “has its burdens as well.”  Alfred is said to have taken some offense at this statement.  “So would you want to be a slave?” Alfred asked.  Brinkerhoff had no response.  

33.

I strolled the grounds.  The plantation once boasted 1000 acres and it still stretches to the horizon, notwithstanding the strip malls and buzzing freeways nearby.  Some markers showed Andrew Jackson on his death bed.  His family was gathered, together with a few weeping slaves.  “I go before you,” Jackson whispered, “and I will see you all again in heaven, both Black and White.”

Did he mean that his slaves would be in paradise and enslaved there to labor for him?

34.

The tour guide told us that Alfred is buried in the family graveyard next to the President.  I walked past a few log cabins and saw some pits where cellars had once been dug for storage purposes and there were farm implements lined up along the gravel pathway.  A lathe fence enclosed the little cemetery where the family members are buried.  Flower beds, winter-killed in January, flanked the fence-line and an orchard of small, gnarled trees surrounded the plot. It’s not really true that Alfred is buried with the Jackson family.  The President and Rachel are interred under slabs of stone in sepulchers planted in a small tholos – that is, an open circular temple, its round roof upheld by 8 classical columns, fashioned with stoic-looking Doric capitals.  Pointy cast-iron stakes and crossmembers surround the miniature temple, a sort of garden folly of the kind depicted in the glades shown in the Telemachus wallpaper in the house a hundred yards away.  Some old limestone slabs next to the tholos mark the graves of Junior and his wife, Sarah, and their children, including little Rachel, the child for whom Jackson acquired his impressive piano forte.  Alfred is segregated in death as he was in life.  His small headstone, really just a stumbling block about eight inches tall, sits on the opposite side of the tiny temple, separated from the White folk.  His gravestone has no last name – it reads simply “UNCLE ALBERT”.  In the South, people will tell you that “uncle” is a term of respect applied to elderly Black men.  But not too much respect – after all, the niceties of the social order must be preserved.  No one suggests that Jackson’s grave should be carved UNCLE ANDREW.  

Rachel’s slab, protected under the white roof, round as the top of a wedding cake, is marked with words to this effect: Rachel Jackson, a woman so gentle and virtuous as to be untouched by slander.  This is an odd epitaph, significant because untrue – Rachel was quarrelsome, despised in Washington, and much-slandered during her life.     

35.

There is a story that during Andrew Jackson’s second term, a dairy farmer, Col. Thomas Meacham, in upstate New York made an enormous cheese for the president.   The round of cheese was said to weigh 1400 pounds and, for several months, it was displayed as a tribute to the president in Utica, New York.  The mammoth cheese was, then, shipped to the White House where it arrived on a special schooner and, then, hauled from the tidal basin up to the residence.  No one knew what to do with the cheese round described as four feet across and two feet thick.  

On Washington’s Birthday in 1837, President Jackson invited the public to the White House to eat the cheese.  The thing smelled so strongly that some of the ladies were said to be overcome by the odor.  Crowds of people dismantled the cheese so that the stench became well-nigh unbearable, although the product was said to be well-preserved and excellent tasting.  By this time, Jackson was very old, frail, and scarcely able to walk.  Engravings show the ancient man seated next to the vast cheese, glaring ferociously at the lines of people come to carve the cheese.  Needless to say, wags wrote that Jackson was leaving office in “bad odor.”  The stink persisted in the White House for several years.  Visitors were said to have trodden slivers of the mighty cheese into the carpets and floor boards.  The incoming administration of Martin Van Buren was, it was claimed, much oppressed by the smell lingering in the White House.  

36.

The Country-Western Hall of Fame is about what one would expect, a lavish and slick display of artifacts, mostly guitars and rhinestone-cowboy apparel, in brightly lit exhibits arranged across three hundred-yard levels.  It’s a bit like a three-story motel with open-air access and stairwells, a place you tour by walking along the closed doorways.  As far as I’m concerned, much of this stuff is inaccessible to me, part of a history of commerce and advertising in which I’ve never taken much interest.  There’s some freakish stuff: Elvis Presley’s Cadillac with a fat old TV set hooked-up behind the driver and facing the roomy bench seat in the rear, flanked by a small table with dial-up telephone and a pocket-sized refrigerator; all of these appurtenances are, more or less, improvised and clunky with tangles of electrical cord on the floor.  Another car displays big revolvers on its hood on each side of the immense silver-plated horns of a Texas longhorn – this was Nudie Cohn’s Pontiac Bonneville with its interior studded with silver dollars.  Nudie Cohn was the LA tailor, an emigre Ukrainian Jew, who outfitted Nashville’s stars with their so-called “Nudie Suits” – that is, garish cowboy-themed garments for stage performances.  (Cohn has a Minnesota connection – he met his wife while living in a boarding house in Mankato; with his wife, he started his first business, sequin-punctuated underwear for show-girls and strippers.)  Cohn made Elvis’ famous gold lame suit; Porter Wagoner had a dozen of his ensembles for his stage appearances and, just, about every country-western star in the sixties and seventies did business with him.  Cohn tooled around LA in his custom-made cowboy car wearing mismatched cowboy boots to remind himself of the grinding poverty (and pogroms) that he had escaped in the Old Country.  Some articles about Cohn make the case that his signature style, tunics and slacks ornamented with lavish embroidery and pleated in sequins derives from Ukrainian folk dress; the man was nicknamed “Nudie” because no one could pronounce his real name “Nuta Kotlyarenko”.

There are walls of platinum records that wink at you as you stroll by and a special show about West Coast country stars, some artifacts relating to Gram Parsons including Nudie Cohn’s suit made for him and featured on the cover of one of the doomed singer’s albums: the fabric is Kentucky-colonel white but embroidered with garish marijuana leaves and naked ladies.  Taylor Swift has a hands-on lab where small children can work on writing songs and strumming guitars, but the Hall of Fame is expensive and I didn’t see many little boys and girls in evidence.  At the corner of the arcades of exhibits, a walkway leads into a temple with bronze figures half-embedded in the walls – gold letters form a frieze around the eaves of the circular space: Will the Circle be Unbroken?  A big mural by Thomas Hart Benton portrays the origins of country-western music: a hootenanny on what looks like a plank-board stage with a dozen rural types playing instruments while a train roars past like a football fullback on tracks running along a levee; in the distance, a steam-wheeler paddles along the river; a Black man with guitar sits on a log next to a strange, white taffy-stretched cloth that looks like a stylized tongue – some women in bonnets occupy an platform above the hootenanny, apparently shape-note singers.  Benton paints the figures making somewhat heroic, even, agonized gestures, all arranged around a central glowing void  – the singers and musicians are like the muscular personages on the Sistine Chapel and so it’s all faintly ridiculous and instantly forgettable.  The bronze busts of the famous singers are ineptly executed: without the identifying plaques, you wouldn’t be able to identify the performers.  Dolly Parton is shown as skinny with sharp features, haggard as if from the Great Depression.  Elvis Presley and some of the other worthies look like smarmy used car dealers.

Hatch Show Prints is in a corner of the complex, next to a bar (closed in the morning) and a taco place.  The business sells replicas of the rather primitive and utilitarian show-bills used to advertise country-western acts.  The posters are printed in large, legible, and weighty letters – this print style was cheap and designed to be seen (and read) across the street and, although originally rather grimly pragmatic, now has a certain retro charm.  The posters smell of the two or three colors in which they were printed and have a certain fugitive elegance of design that seems to be wholly unintentional and, therefore, naive – they are the pictorial equivalent of Shaker chairs, austere and maybe uncomfortable, but accidently beautiful.  

There’s a boat show underway at the nearby coliseum and the lots are full, all $20 event parking.  The corridors and skyways and pedestrian crossings around the Country-Western Hall of Fame are  crowded with wannabe boat-owners: men with rugged, purplish faces, children enlisted in daddy’s cause, and worried-looking wives.  On the incline of sidewalk above the sleek brushed-zinc and pale concrete facade of the museum, a man approaches us.  He has a skinny boy with him.  The man says that all the churches are closed because it is a Saturday, that he’s hungry, and that he needs some money to buy breakfast for his son – “I’m homeless,” he says, “and just got to town early this morning.”  The weather is raw and rainy.  I hand the guy five dollars and he says that God will bless me and, then, we make our way to the parking ramp.  (The afternoon on the next day, I see the man and the scrawny boy in the same approximate area, shaking down the tourists who have just spent $52 dollars to tour the Hall of Fame; this is Sunday, but, apparently, the churches are still closed.)  

37.

It’s mid-afternoon and we are eating lunch at Johnny Cash’s Bar and BBQ.  A couple of young men in baseball caps are playing covers of country-western songs, but no one is listening to them.  A table of drunk tourists are staring down bottles of beer and plates covered with french fries smeared with ketchup.  There are lots of pictures of the Man in Black scowling down from the walls.  Cash made some low-budget movies and poster advertising those shows decorate the black corridor leading to the toilets.

I have smoked sausage, finely sliced and served in sweet, pinkish and watery sauce.  It’s not too good.  Julie’s hamburger looks a bit wooden and her fries are over-cooked.

The streets are wet and seem slick.  A couple blocks away, the all-day all-night parade on Broadway is still underway, dazed tourists and dope peddlers and cops all marching this way and that, but really going nowhere.  

A museum dedicated to Johnny Cash is next door.  You enter and leave through the gift shop where most of the merch seems to be black tee-shirts.  The place consists of some dimly lit corridors with display cases full of memorabilia.  We follow a lean looking kid with sideburns who has come to Nashville from Manchester in the U.K.  

Johnny Cash seems to have been born old.  In his earliest school pictures, he presents the same indifferent, handsome mask to the world, an ancient face of someone who has seen his share of troubles even as a little boy.  A few pictures of Cash’s first wife, a floridly handsome Latina, are on the walls and there are souvenirs from the singer’s service in the Air Force.  When he was at the Landsberg Air Force Base, Cash played in a combo called “The Landsberger Barbarians”.  While at the German military installation, Cash saw a pictured called Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, a movie that seems to have had quite an effect on the young man – before leaving the Air Force, Cash had written the first-draft of his famous song, “Folsom Prison Blues.”  In one of the recesses of the museum, you can sit for a spell and watch clips of Johnny Cash in various movies and TV shows: he narrated the story of Jesus in a movie that he produced, The Gospel Road, and appeared in Columbo as a murderous CW singer, matching wits with Peter Falk’s disheveled detective.  On Saturday Night Live, he appeared with Elton John and performs a monologue dressed in feather boas and a pink and red felt leisure suit – he says that he felt he had to get dressed up to compete with the British singer.  His eyes are framed by big round glasses with purple rims.  Cash appears as a drifter in Little House on the Prairie and, in the TV clip, he says that he is planning to “go into Mankato.”  A few of the singer’s late, grim black-and-white music videos end the program.

Just before you leave the museum, in the last black passage, there’s a big wall of fieldstone and a fireplace hearth.  This is all that remains of Cash’s mansion in the hills overlooking Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville, Tennessee. (Hendersonville is a northeast suburb of Nashville.)  The stones and masonry rise like a cliff above the floor, a stern incongruous mass of rock.  This room is a shrine to Cash’s version of Trent Reznor’s song “Hurt” – a video of the song plays mournfully on a screen next to the fortress-like heap of fieldstone.  The video was filmed in Cash’s mansion with the singer playing guitar in front of this hearth.  After Cash died in 2003, the big house, a wall of vertical glass with cantilevered decks overlooking huge retaining walls and an inlet into the brown lake, was sold to the musician and record producer, Barry Gibb.  Gibb was the leader of the Australian group the BeeGee’s and, of course, a founding father of disco music, a pop genre pretty remote from Cash’s form of country-western music.  The mansion had been neglected and Gibb hired crews to renovate and remodel the place.  In the course of that work, a wood-preservative caught fire and the mansion was destroyed in the blaze.  This happened in 2007 and some wintry photographs on the internet show the burnt ruins, a tree with Johnny Cash’s face whittled into its side, the gloomy retaining walls above a dark tarn-like inlet, and Cash’s swimming pool hidden under a black tarp.  Cash wrote his name in fresh cement on a cornerstone to the house – the signature was clearly visible after the house burned.  

Somewhere in Hendersonville, Cash operated a small museum, the “House of Cash”.  Witnesses say that it was almost never open in the last years of the singer’s life.  Some of the “Hurt” video was filmed in the museum, a ghostly place with awards and gold records haphazardly placed on shadowy walls, a monument to past fame that was rapidly fading.  At the end of the tour route in the Nashville museum, there’s a small transparent case holding a ring that Cash wore in his final decades.  The ring is studded with a cross.   

38.

The night before, I think, we ordered Chinese take-out.  The front desk was supposed to call us when the food arrived.  But I didn’t trust the staff at the desk.  For some reason, the thought occurred to me that they would interfere with my food.  After all, their agenda is to lure folks into Blue Aster and, then, strip them of their wealth.  And, so, I supposed receipt of Chinese take-out by the guests would be discouraged; hence, my mission to the lobby to intercept the food delivery when it arrived.  A few minutes after the estimated time of arrival for the egg rolls, cashew chicken, and the lo-mein, a shabby-looking car pulled up in the loop in front of the hotel.  I dashed out and, when the man emerged from the car, announced my name.  The door-men were nonplussed.  The delivery was for “Nick” and I wasn’t Nick.  I retreated into the lobby and sat on a bench by the toilets.  The singer in the bar next to the Blue Aster was singing, something by Judy Collins.  The man’s voice was dense and reverberant, as if he were singing in the stone grottoes of the hollow earth.  Another van pulled up and an African immigrant stepped forth with a couple of greasy-looking bags of Chinese food.  “Is it lo-mein and cashew chicken?” I asked.  The man looked at the receipt stapled to one of the bags.  “Yes,” he said.  I took the delivery from him and walked toward the elevators.  One of the desk clerks rushed up to me.  “That’s not your food,” the clerk said.  “Yes it’s my order,” I replied.  “Are you Dominic in Room 823?”  I had to admit I wasn’t Dominic in Room 823.  “Who are you?” the clerk asked.  I repeated my name and the room number as I handed the bag of Chinese food to the clerk.  The clerk eyed me suspiciously.  He was wearing a blue blazer and a burgundy tie.  “We have your food,” the clerk said.  “It came a few minutes ago.  It’s behind the desk.”  I followed the clerk over to the desk.  The other desk clerk, a young woman, looked at me with dismay: Damned Yankee – they will try to steal your Chinese food every time.

As it happened, the Conrad was short-staffed on Sunday and didn’t clean the rooms.  The Chinese food was strongly spiced with garlic and pepper.  The leftovers sat in the metal waste-basket in the room overnight and, then, the next day also so that sleeping quarters smelled like a dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant.  If I could have opened the windows, I would have dumped the food onto the manicured courtyard between the towers.  But the windows were hermetically sealed.  

39.

After the excursions of the day, I walked to the Frist Museum of Art.  The stroll was about eight blocks down Broadway in the deepening twilight blue of evening.  The day before I had walked past the place, albeit on the other side of the street and been intrigued by a big banner decorating the museum’s Art Deco facade; the banner was colorful, some orbs of orange and blue lettered “The Flood in the Garden.”  The place seemed to keep strange hours – it was open when it should be closed and closed when one would expect it to be open.  

Apparently, the Frist Museum, a spacious echoing place, has no permanent collection.  It doesn’t own art but hosts touring exhibits and installations by local artists.  Before its conversion to an art museum, the building was a Depression era post office, a federal building with sleek metal pilasters, chrome-plated like fins on an old car and shiny onyx floors.  On the main floor, the lobby stretches along the entire facade – the room is as long as a football field and the space is punctuated with massive marble tables that look a bit like forlorn, and abandoned, altars.  (Presumably, postal customers addressed their parcels at these big chest-high blocks of polished stone.)  The galleries are above the lobby, behind lofty corridors overlooking the grandiose public space below.  Icy stairs carved from travertine lead up to the white box-like rooms where the art is displayed.  A skylight, dark when I entered the museum, hangs over the echoing lobby.  The air reverberates with cries and whispers.  The pale, pitted travertine looks like limestone in a cave.

To my surprise, there were many people in the gallery displaying “The Flood in the Garden”.  Just about everyone was African-American, mostly very earnest-looking young women stylishly dressed, some of them, like me, carrying notebooks in which to record their impressions.  The art on display by Matthew Ritchie was ambitious and interesting.  In one room, there were wall-size paintings of some kind of glowing, molten plasma, spills of color around bright orbs, pretty but not really engaging.  Several sculptures consisting of ominous tangles of pitch-black stuff loomed over the studious Black girls in the next gallery. In another room, eight cells, each amoeba-shaped and pulsing, displayed moving (digitally projected) images, about as tall as a man, pictures of water surging under a bridge, a church with faceless, blurred people coming and going, a choir performance, a pale luminous vision of ferns and vines and sky labeled Tiramat (that is, a Kabbala name for the Garden of Eden).  A tangle of thick black lines, heavy swaths of paint connect the 8 cells and the air vibrated with choral singing, the Fisk Jubilee singers performing a composition specially commissioned for this installation – somber tones in legato procession, passing from note to note.  The next room contained more didactic, or, at least, more aggressively programmatic works – big transparencies on which words are inscribed amidst globs of paint and scribbled blurs of illegible text.  One of the transparencies illustrate W.E.B. Dubois statistical theories about the Black middle class.  Another transparency is painted with a wheel showing Hegel’s diagram as the development of history.  On monitors, a performance is shown: handsome dancers darting here and there among the transparencies, not really pausing to behold or interact with them – instead, gliding and spinning as if the art objects were impediments to their motion.  From the next room, bell-like tones made by the Fisk Jubilee Singers resonated in the air.  

It was dark on the street in front of the old post office.  The wind was cold and moist, presaging rain.  Down the hill, past the big towers of the churches, the honky-tonks were spinning around and around and shedding light like so many glowing mills.  

(Matthew Ritchie, an artist about which I know nothing, was trained in London, but now lives in New York City.  He’s fairly well-regarded and has a movie-star wife.  I believe the work “The Flood in the Garden” was commissioned by the Frist Museum – some of the images in the cells showed a great flood that inundated Nashville a few years before.) 

40.

The Fisk Jubilee singers are an African-American a capella ensemble associated with Fisk University.  The University, founded in 1866, is one of the first historically Black colleges, established in Nashville immediately after the Civil War.  (Fisk University was endowed by Clinton Fisk, a White man who had fought in the Civil War on the staff of George Armstrong Custer.  Fisk was appointed leader of the Freedman’s Bureau in Tennessee after the War and was an important figure in the aborted Reconstruction.  He served in Grant’s administration, encouraged the American Missionary Association to found free public schools for Black children, and set up the university now named for him in abandoned Union army barracks in Nashville.  He was later a prominent advocate for the temperance movement but died in 1890 long before booze was outlawed in the United States.

To raise money for the new college, the Jubilee Singers were organized in 1871 and toured northern cities, performing a series of famous concerts, including one at the White House for Ulysses Grant.  The Jubilee Singers were advertised as a novelty – that is, actual “Negro singers” as opposed to “corked-up” black face singers in minstrel shows.  “Corking-up” meant artificially darkening your face with burnt-cork for a “coon-show” – even African-American performers in minstrel shows had to “cork-up”; this was the convention expected by audiences.  No one had seen African-American singers on-stage except in form of stereotyped figures impersonating “darkies” in minstrel shows.  By contrast, the Fisk Jubilee Singers were dignified, well-dressed artists, performing the “sacred music” of their race – that is, spirituals.  Their tours were successful and ticket sales and donations were a mainstay of the funding for the new university for a number of years.  Originally a nine-member ensemble, the singers now have 14 members and still tour extensively.  They have also released innumerable records and CDs.  A 1909 recording of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” is available on the internet.  The melody is sung in a very sedate, almost soporific, call and response style, a flute-like woman’s voice floating above close harmonies sung by the men – it’s a lugubrious performance, but historically significant.   

41.

After some fighting in northern Alabama, the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman began his march toward Atlanta, the famous and destructive “march to the sea.  The Confederate general, John Hood, leading the Army of Tennessee concluded that he had two options – he could either harass Sherman’s rear-guard as the Union forces moved East or mount an offensive to the North in the hope of forcing the Federal invaders to withdraw back toward Ohio to defend territory in the Midwest.  Hood, temperamentally inclined to be on the offensive, decided to advance toward Nashville with his force of about 40,000 men.  His concept was to enter Nashville, conscript additional forces there and, then, continue to attack into Kentucky.  (Hood mistakenly thought that the Union border state of Kentucky harbored enough Southern sympathizers to further augment his forces.)  This offensive was designed to draw Sherman back into the Midwest and away from the Chattanooga to Atlanta train line that he was ravaging.  The Army of Ohio commanded by General John Schofeld, with about 60,000 troops at its disposal was itself falling back in a controlled retreat after fighting in northern Alabama, moving toward Nashville along turnpikes about 15 miles to the south of the river.  

On November 30, 1864, before dawn, advance elements of Schofeld’s Army of Ohio reached Franklin, a village on Columbia Pike consisting of some commercial buildings and mills where several bridges crossed the Harpeth River.  Schofeld found that, except for a railroad trestle, the bridges over the Harpeth had been destroyed.  This meant that crossing the river would be problematic: engineers would have to construct pontoon bridges for the full force of the army to continue its retreat north toward Nashville.  Accordingly, Schofeld sent some cavalry over the railroad trestle and ordered that pontoons be deployed to replace the smashed masonry bridges over the stream.  (The Harpeth is a small river that flows in an incised bed – it’s about forty feet wide, flowing in a wooded ravine about twenty feet deep.)  Since Schofeld expected that it might take several days to execute the river crossing, he ordered his forces to fortify their lines, centering the defense at a small knoll about a half mile south of the river.  The Carter plantation, a humble place with a small lathe house and some slave cabins was on the knoll’s crest.  To the east, a neighbor had built a large two-story house, the so-called Lotz house that was to serve as a field hospital during and after the battle.  The fortified line was obstructed on its west side by some dense osage-orange thickets.  Some of these small wiry trees were cut down to make an abatis.  Trenches about four feet deep were dug along the hilltop at the Carter plantation.  Near the Lotz house on the east, the line zigzagged to create a salient anchored by cotton gin.  Here the trenches were about two-feet deep, but topped by barricades made from wood planks torn from the cotton gin. 

About noon on November 30, Hood’s army pursuing Schofeld’s forces reached Franklin.  Hood was told that the Union line was fortified and occupied an excellent and commanding position.  Nonetheless, and over the objections of his lieutenants, Hood ordered a frontal assault on the Union trenches.  Hood’s generals were skeptical about this plan, one of them reportedly observing that they would all die in the attack but, at least, would “die like men.”  The Confederate attack was timed to occur around twilight or sunset – that is, commenced at about 4:30.  At that time, Hood’s army went forward, wave after wave of soldiers charging toward the Carter house and the salient marked by the now-ruined cotton gin.  About 20,000 soldiers were committed to the attack.  The Union positions were too strong, covered by artillery, and fiercely defended.  The Confederate attack, at first, penetrated the Union line by about fifty yards, reaching into the area north of the cotton gin by the Lotz house.  But the Union counterattacked, encircling the Confederate vanguard that had broken through the fortification.  The Confederates were slaughtered in the salient by the cotton gin’s wreckage and the Union troops regained their trenches.  More attacks by the Southerners were mounted, but all failed.  By about 7:00 pm, in the dark, the battle was over except for some skirmishing around the flanks of the Union position.  The attack on the center of the Union line at Franklin has been called “the Pickett’s charge of the West” – the assault was heroic, desperate, and completely catastrophic.  Fourteen Confederate generals were either killed or wounded.  About 6200 Confederate infantry were casualties, about 2000 killed outright on the field.  Union losses were much smaller, probably about half the casualties suffered by the Army of Tennessee, although Schofeld’s retreat (or advance toward) Nashville, depending on how you see the situation, probably caused the Union commander to under-report his casualties – Schofeld claimed only about 170 killed, but, also, reported about a thousand men captured or missing in action, likely additional casualties that were left on the field when the Union general’s army hastily crossed the Harpeth and moved toward Nashville.  

Three or four days later, Hood fought Schofeld again on the outskirts of Nashville.  The results were equally disastrous and what was left of the Army of Tennessee was decimated, its officer corps wiped out and completely incapable of continuing the offensive northward.  

41.

The inglorious result of the Battle of Franklin, the more or less total destruction of the Army of Tennessee’s fighting capacity, made the battle unpopular in the South.  No one cared anything about the battlefield where so many men had died for no good reason at all.  The place was a source for bad memories.  Therefore, the scenes of the fighting were simply abandoned to commerce.  A mini-mall was built over part of the Union abatis and modest residential homes occupy most of the site.  A Pizza Hut was built in the seventies directly on the spot where the Confederate general Patrick Cleburne had his horse shot out from under him.  The last infantry to see Cleburne alive descried him dismounted leading the attack through the gunsmoke with his saber raised over his head.  His body was found later in one of the field hospitals behind the Union lines, gut-shot and mostly naked – his body had been stripped for souvenirs and his watch and other valuables were also missing.  

The Pizza Hut desecration of the battlefield was too much for the State of Tennessee and attempts to rehabilitate the site of the fighting were commenced in 2005, beginning with the purchase of the restaurant and its demolition.  (Franklin is the last of the major Civil War battles to be rehabilitated and recognized with a visitor center, signs, and some reconstructed trenches.)  Later, the old Carter plantation was acquired by the State as well as the Lotz house.  The bloody salient at the cotton gin was also added to premises preserving the battlefield.  There are now about 15 acres, although spread across several tracts of land with commercial buildings intervening, that comprise the park built where the Battle of Franklin happened.  Nearby there is a Confederate cemetery with about 1800 graves.

42.

Maybe it’s rational to prefer Pizza Hut to a monument to fratricidal murder on a grand scale.  How do we know that Patrick Cleburne, drifting about unquiet in the Bardo, wouldn’t think it better that people be served Meat Lover’s pizzas and honey-mustard chicken wings at the site where ordinance pierced his belly.  People need to eat and pizza with chicken wings is as good as anything else and, maybe, the bearded Confederate general used to ride shotgun in cars delivering the pizza pies to folks in Franklin.  Needless to say, Julie wasn’t buying what the Battle of Franklin had on offer.  She didn’t want to see fields and stone obelisks recalling meadows once full of mangled corpses.  As far as she was concerned, this sort of stuff goes on all the time but it really shouldn’t be celebrated.   So I drove down to Franklin, early on a Sunday morning, to inspect the battlefield by myself.

43.

I found the acreage preserving the Carter house plantation buildings easily enough.  The exit into Franklin is about 15 miles south from Nashville and, then, the road tracks the old Columbia Turnpike past exclusive-looking housing tracts and some big churches to the knoll that was once the center of the Union line.  Along the road, there are back-to-back police squad cars, spinning blue emergency lights in the center of the road.  Cops are standing on the misty centerline directing traffic at the left turn into a huge church parking lot.  Services likely begin at 8:30 or, perhaps, there is a Fellowship Hour and the cops are facilitating traffic flow.  A queue of cars waits for the hand signal to turn onto the lane leading to the church parking.  I’m thinking in military terms this morning and I imagine the caissons waiting next to the Harpeth River as the engineers pieced together the pontoon bridge.

The battlefield is tiny, a small winter-killed acreage of sere grass enclosed by rustic split-rail fences.  Some small cannons sit on the hillside near the old white frame of the plantation house.  A vegetable and herb garden flanks the house and there are a half-dozen tilted plaques on pipe stanchions scattered across the lawn.  A sign tells me that the place is closed on Sunday until noon and that no trespassing is allowed.  I walk down to the plaque closest to the parking lot.  It’s very still, chilly, and the town on the slightly tilting apron above the river is silent and motionless.  I have a sense that I’m intruding and, so, after I read the marker closest to my car, I decide to depart – this place is too spooky for me.

The marker says that the 183rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, 3rd Brigade, 2nd Division, 23rd Corps was driven back from its bulwarks on the hill by the ferocity of the Confederate assault.  A number of men were captured, sent to Andersonville, where most of them died of starvation and disease.  When the survivors were repatriated to Ohio in April 1865 after the War had ended, the steamboat on which they were traveling, the Sultana, exploded and the few remaining infantrymen on their way home were scalded to death.  Such are the fortunes of War.  The Federal forces prevailed on the day of the fighting but these Union soldiers were captured and, later, destroyed notwithstanding the victory of their comrades.  

(The Sultana was a 260 foot long steamship designed to transport about 400 people.  However, on April 27, 1865, the boat was carrying almost 3000 soldiers paroled from southern POW camps.  Near Memphis, the boilers of the paddle-wheeler exploded killing about 500 instantly.  The ship then burned and sunk with enormous additional loss of life.  Many of the men were too debilitated by starvation and sickness to be able to swim and, in any event, the water was full of flaming debris.  About 1500 people perished in the disaster.  You don’t know anything about this because the event was obscured by the assassination and obsequies for Abraham Lincoln occurring at the same time.)

44.

I drove to a Taco Bell open for breakfast about a half-mile from the battlefield.  A Beavis & Butthead kid wearing his Taco Bell uniform all awry was talking to another young man by the grill in the back.  “No one has ever seen Jihad here in the morning?”  Is Jihad the name of a co-worker?

I am planning another sortie onto the battlefield.  After all, what can they do to me?  But I’m a bit uncomfortable about the Yankee license on my car.  As I eat my breakfast burrito, I see a grey puff of vapor wafting across the parking lot.  Another puff follows and another, a procession of hazy figures vaguely shaped like infantrymen advance toward the Cornerstone Bank.  The misty wraiths are Confederate-grey and, one after another, they charge toward the vaguely classical facade of the bank and the gates where its drive-through ATMs are located.  The assault continues for a few minutes, the grey ghosts melting away in the misty air as they reach the fortifications of the bank.  What does this mean?

Walking across the parking lot, I see that a couple of cars are waiting for take-out food at the Taco Bell’s drive-through.  The vapor figures are exhaust from the car’s tail-pipes condensing in the chilly, wet air.

45.

The battlefield is small and I pace across the wet meadows, after parking my car, by the abandoned concrete-block shell of the old mini-mall – it looks like a place where there was once a realtor’s office, perhaps, and an insurance agency, but is now empty and the parking lot fractured, with yellow bursts of dry weed piercing the asphalt.  Some small heaps of cannon-balls stand within the split-rail fence enclosing an area a little bigger than a soccer pitch, the place where the Confederate advance was blown to pieces near the cotton gin. The markers here have post-Iraq and mid-Afghanistan war diction.  The old rhetoric of glory and valor has been supplanted by words that admit futility and post-traumatic stress disorder.  To millennials, war just generates smashed corpses, mutilated survivors and PTSD.  One of the markers signals a little in the direction of the old paradigm: at this “bloody angle”, about 2000 Confederate soldiers were killed, advancing toward “tattered red and white flags”, ranks of men like “phantoms sweeping along in the air.”  The Confederate legions broke through the Federal lines but were then rubbed-out – a “battle so horrible that survivors found it difficult to describe.”  Across the street, I duck under the split-rail fence and stand in a copse of trees where there are several “two-pounders”, cannons painted in thick, murky black paint, now more sculpture than weapon.  Along the line of the fence, Douglas McArthur’s father was severely wounded.  Plaques mark where generals were killed.  The pictures show men with ancient faces wreathed in whiskers like a garlands of gunpowder smoke – the Old Testament beards make the young men look old, like Biblical patriarchs, but most of their beards are dark and the men sporting them were probably 28 to 35 years old when they were killed.  

I locate the slumped places where trenches were dug and walk along the locust abatis that anchored this part of the line.  No one is around.  I hike back across the pike to the Lotz House.  It will open in a half-hour but I have seen enough.  An old man with a handsome beard unfurled over his chest meets a couple of Civil War enthusiasts next to their SUV.  The old man has a cane and some flip cards showing different phases of the action and some of the old Daguerrotype pictures of corpses literally heaped up on the scuffed and muddy ground.  His dog, a Golden Retriever romps happily with the war enthusiasts’ Labrador.  The old man starts to talk.  He has a deep voice.  It’s a walking tour across the battlefield.  The City is starting to come to life.  More traffic is now surging along the Pike and, at an apartment down the hill from the plantation buildings some people are shouting at one another – I can’t tell if its conflict or just rambunctiousness.

46.

I drive into Franklin.  The place is congested with weekend visitors from Nashville.  Vehicles spin around a traffic circle presided over by a slender pawn-like infantryman on a stone plinth.  I see boutiques and charming little cafes down the side-streets.  On every block, there are steel signs lettered with historical information.  The half-arch of the brick bridge over the Harpeth River is still standing, the span in ruins today as it was 1864.  Traffic is lined-up to enter the downtown free parking lot.  

Across the river, I stop at a complex of stores in a place called The Factory.  The little confectionary shops and upscale galleries occupy bays framed by metal hoists in a big, chilly building that has been converted from its earlier industrial use.  On the floors, there are yellow walkways and right-of-way signs for forklifts and some big bulls-eye emblems of uncertain meaning.  People are sipping coffee and eating pastry under the metal-framed glass windows comprising the factory’s skylight.  The toilets smell of peppermint

On the way out of town, church is now getting out.  The cops are still installed along the center turn-lane of the pike, this time protecting the lines of cars emerging from the big parking lot.  In this part of the South, people still dress up for Church.  I can see that the folks in the cars are wearing suit and tie and the women have hats.   

47.

Patrick Cleburne who died gut-shot at the bloody angle at Franklin was an Irish immigrant.  He proposed abolishing slavery and enlisting African-Americans to fight on the side of the Confederacy.  In arguments for this southern emancipation proclamation, Cleburne noted that the helots in Sparta fought bravely alongside their Spartan masters and that the galley slaves were liberated to fight for the Christians at Lepanto.  

A monument to Cleburne, comprised of several hundred cannon balls welded together in a pyramid proclaims: Where this division defended, no odds broke its line; where it attacked, no numbers resisted its onslaught save once and there is the grave of Cleburne.  

48.

The apparition in Nashville’s Centennial Park is peculiar, a vast colonnade of yellow-orange columns in the center of an ellipse of winter-killed dull-grey lawn.  The beast is broad as a warehouse behind mighty Doric columns that uplift a heavy pediment with raking cornice and stone griffins defending each corner of the roof.  This is Nashville’s facsimile of the Parthenon, built in celebration of the city’s 100th year, a tribute to the “Athens of the South”, so-called because of Vanderbilt University and, I suppose, the Fisk Negro College as well.  I’ve seen the Parthenon in Greece and the ruins of the place seem light, airy, dancing columns in the brilliant Mediterranean air.  Nashville’s iteration of the temple is grim, heavy, the color of weathered cheddar cheese, perhaps, due to the fact that the Tennessee Parthenon is, more or less, intact, a mass of heavily armored infantry, hoplites, on a vast mortuary slab.  Before it was opened up to the sun and elements, Athen’s great sanctuary to the Goddess may have made a similarly formidable impression.  We prefer monuments of this sort in ruins.  Intact, they are too heavy, immobile, and enigmatically implacable.  

The hero battling an Amazon queen on the pediment extends beyond the sloping frame of the pediment.  Panels below, painted ox-blood red, display warlike bas reliefs.  People are wandering around in the dreary grass under the temple.  There’s no acropolis here.  Rather, the ersatz Parthenon seems to occupy, not a prominence, but a kind of bowl, an amphitheater ringed by the towers of Vanderbilt and elite condominiums.  Some kids are kicking around a soccer ball in the remote corners of the park.  Here and there, bronze figures signal to one another.  Most of the pedestrians in the park give the temple a wide berth – it’s as if the structure embodies some sort of doom.

49.

For eight dollars, you can go into the building.  The entrance is a sort of glorified worm-hole into the pedestal on which the structure rests.  It’s well-lit under the floor of the temple, but, nonetheless, the weight of building overhead is palpable as a sort of shadowless pressure on the maze of galleries.  The subterranean space in the hollow under the building is divided into three galleries – one displays the history of the temple; another horseshoe-shaped room contains a contemporary art exhibit, fifteen or so objects responding to Homer’s Odyssey, academic work, it seems, made as a demonstration of proficiency in support of an MFA degree; wrapped around these spaces, a peripheral gallery displays works collected by a local grandee.  The floor plan of these three galleries that seem to interpenetrate one another is complex – I found myself repeatedly retracing my path through the maze of warm, airless rooms, all inserted into one another is a curious sort of labyrinth.

The art collection consists of 19th century paintings by American masters.  These are works of minor importance by major artists like Homer, Inness, Frederick Church, and Bierstadt among others.  The Winslow Homer painting seems unfinished; the two Inness canvases are small and lapidary; Church and Bierstadt are represented by somewhat lackluster landscapes.  Nonetheless, the collection is interesting, featuring, as well, a salacious Venus and Cupid by Benjamin West.  The MFA art show also is interesting in an abstract way.  The objects shown are mixed media, constructed from artisan paper or terra cotta or fired panels of painted ceramic.  It’s the kind of art that can’t be interpreted without the benefit of the rather extensive notes under the title inscriptions mounted next to the objects.  One work, entitled “House Slaves”, is a compilation of sheets of grey paper that look a bit like stone blocks – the paper is imprinted with the marks of hands and, above the round capstone, atop the paper wall, there are dark rags imbued with black and red pigment affixed like a sort of halo, either crumpled flowers or soiled linen.  The inscription argues that the word “servants” in Homer, in fact, means “enslaved women”.  In Homer, Telemachus and Odysseus slaughter Penelope’s suitors; then, they force the “house slaves”, the servant women to clean up the mess, sopping up the gore and dragging out the corpses by their heels.  When this task is complete, the heroes hang the slaves.  This is another of the adventures of Telemachus, although at Ithaca and not on the island of Calypso.

The most interesting part of the exhibit are photographs and souvenirs of the 1897 Centennial exposition.  The Parthenon originally occupied an island in a shallow artificial lake where pleasure-seekers paddled about in painted rowboats.  One building simulated Italy’s blue grotto complete with stalactites and other speleotherms, the hollow earth opened up for the delectation of visitors.  The fair divided the African-American community – most of the exhibition halls were segregated; however, there was an ostentatious “Negro Building” to celebrate the achievements of the newly freed people.  In the corner of the gallery, the cornerstone of the “Negro Building” stands like a grave marker or a stumbling block.  Some Black leaders argued that the Community should boycott the exposition; others urged participation, particularly in light of the celebratory “Negro Building”.  A popular restaurant called “Night and Day” served Italian dishes in a subterranean chamber decorated with horrific murals depicting the damned in Dante’s Inferno.  If you ate in that place, the waiter gave you a card certifying your courage.  An example of one of these cards is under glass in the exhibition: surviving “Night and Day” without wavering entitled the diner to another century of “doleful woe”, an odd message signed by “Scipio Barbatus.”  Apparently, lights in the dining room cycled between night and day, represented by the rosy-fingers of dawn, the blaze of noon-time sun, twilight, and the starlit night in which moon like a great silver balloon was wafted over the tables.  It’s all gone now, the lake drained and the temporary restaurants demolished and, even, the massive “Negro Building” torn down – all that remains is the immobile stone block of the Parthenon.   

The Parthenon, originally, wasn’t permanent either – it was made from stucco, plaster, and painted board.  After 20 years, the vast construction was drooping, close to collapse.  Nonetheless, the place was popular.  Each year, the city hosted pageants at the building, huge shows with hundreds of volunteer extras, symphony orchestras, chariot races and naval battles in the smelly little lagoon, and pyrotechnics bursting in air.  (For instance in 1917, the show was called “The Mystery at Thanatos.”)  Around 1920, the building was reconstructed in the concrete form visible today, a permanent structure.  Robert Altman shot the climax of his 1975 movie Nashville on this location.  

   

50.

In some corner of the Parthenon’s basement, a stair rises up to the Temple overhead.  It’s dim above with marble floors and chilly columns rising into the shadows.  In a spray of light, Athena stands, tall as a house and stout, bearing a spear and with a winged being (Nike) on her arm.  Her garments are gilded and a bright gold cascade flows over her body, brilliant armor that descends from the Gorgon emblem on her chest to her feet.  The Goddess was made from costly chryselephantine (gold and ivory) in the temple in Athens and Nashville’s figure has a creamy white complexion, blue eyes and long glamorous eyelashes like a silent film star – her face and skin look like Mae Marsh in Intolerance or one of the Gish sisters.  There’s gold leaf, or, at least, brilliant gold paint everywhere – a python next to Athena’s thigh has the head of a gilded vulture.  The exit is somewhere to the rear of the towering figure.  It’s the sort of spectacle that causes you to feel that you should loiter for awhile.  But, after a few minutes in the chilly chamber where people are whispering and taking selfies, you get restless– it’s enough, more than enough – and so you find your way out of the temple and into the wan, dismayed light of January in Nashville.   

51.

The Uber driver is from Mitteleuropaische country, one of the Blood-lands, like Latvia or Estonia, and his SUV is fragrant.  Tourists like to hear country-and-western music in Nashville and, so, the radio is tuned to a local station that offers that fare.  It’s only a few blocks to the Italian restaurant, a left, a right, and left after the freeway overpass – but, then, who’s counting?  (Is it three right turns counting the exit from the valet parking or three once you get on the public thoroughfare?)

Luogo is an upscale Italian restaurant on the sidewalk level of a glass tower among banks and finance companies.  It’s newly opened, the restauranteur a transplant from New York City, and the patrons are mostly young, prosperous-looking people, bi-racial couples, dressed well but not ostentatiously – if you are listening for old Frank Sinatra tunes somewhere in the air up above your table, you’ve come to the wrong place.  The walls are white and off-white and there are jute-colored curtains half-veiling the raucous streets at the corner where the restaurant is located.  You sit in semi-circular booths with blue upholstery the color of the Mediterranean on a fine day under lights that are dimmer than they look.  The place seems well-lit but, in fact, this is an illusion caused by the cream-colored walls.  There’s a hardwood veneer to the table-tops and abstract paintings of nothing decorate a few of the walls.  This is an efficient, well-tooled, and, basically, soul-less space, at least, to my eyes, but the menu is interesting and the air smells of wine and garlic and, so, it’s not so bad to be seated in what is, in effect, a dining machine.  As Scipio Barbatus would say, a successful meal here entitles you to another “woeful century” of life.

When I was a little boy, my father was keen to indoctrinate me on the merits of the University of Minnesota.  The big land-grant college was huge enough to offer every possible kind of class and was close to home and cheap – I could commute and not have to spend money on student housing.  And, further, the school was featured in the Max Schulman novels that my father had read eagerly when he was a teenager – The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and the campus comedy Barefoot Boy with Cheek.  (Schulman was from St. Paul but ended up, like most successful Minnesotans, in Los Angeles where he died in 1988.)  Sometimes, we would drive down to the campus and just walk around for an hour or so, exploring the quadrangle and the neighborhoods around the vast school.  On occasion, we went to concerts at Northrup Auditorium – my father had seen Igor Stravinsky conducting there when he was a very young man – or watched a classic movie at the Varsity Theater in Dinkytown or the Campus in Stadium Village under the brick vaults of the football coliseum.  I remember eating Italian food at Mama D’s, a joint in Dinkytown.  In those days, people didn’t eat out very much – or, at least, this was rare for my parents who were poor and had lots of children.  So my memories of Mama D’s made an impression on me that has lasted all my life.  The Dinkytown place that served noodles and red sauce at small tables with white table-cloth (it always ended up spoiled and gory with spills) is my model for the ideal Italian restaurant.  Chianti came in a bottle dressed in a basket and, above the tables, there were trellises densely hung with plastic flowers and waxy clusters of artificial grapes on fake vines.  Small Christmas-tree lights glittered in the trellises and, of course, the famous Mama D, a handsome older woman would glide through place on occasion, greeting people at tables.  Her son, Sammy, a hirsute fleshy fellow, a flashy Vegas-type, sat with his cronies at the bar, sometimes watching a tiny TV squirreled away like a plaster Saint Anthony in a niche over the cash-register.  Of course, Sinatra and Dean Martin were crooning in some remote place, muted music, and there was generally a boisterous banquet underway in a private room up a narrow and perilous flight of steps.  I always thought the overhead bowers full of plastic fruit and tangles of plastic vine were insanitary and half-expected a spider or roach to drop down from above to plop into the pitcher of ice-water, but this never happened.

Luogo (the name means “the place” or “joint” in Italian) is too expensive for children and, so, you’re not likely to see kids at the tables, although, perhaps, there’s a Sunday brunch where they might be in evidence.  This is probably a good thing.  I don’t remember what the food tasted like at Mama D’s – the sauce was most likely similar to something that would come out of can of Chef Boyardee lasagna or ravioli, but, of course, for a child, a restaurant’s atmosphere is everything and I always thought the Dinkytown place was romantic and exciting.  There wasn’t anything romantic or exciting about the decor at Luogo, although the food was memorably excellent.

52.

We ended-up spending a ridiculous amount of money on dinner.  We were on vacation, of course, and so money was really no object, but, nonetheless, the damage was pretty severe.  We had some cocktails, Cita della Musicco (a variant on an Old Fashioned – it’s made with chocolate bitters, bourbon, etc.) and a glass of “Whispering Angel” red wine. A plate of something called “Fritto misto” was delivered to the table complements of the chef – this was fried calamari, a bit like Japanese tempura, with zucchini, brussel sprouts, yams, and radiccio served on a bed of polenta, also fried.  I ordered Faroe Island Salmon tartare, little square chunks of fish served on an avocado and seasoned with garlic and basil – like most raw food, the dish had no flavor, the fish so mild as to be essentially tasteless except for the spices.  Julie has Arrancini de Luogo, a large breaded meatball served in a pepper-flavored red sauce.  We ordered some Chianti Rigoletto for the table and my entree was Paccheri Bolognese – large penne-shaped noodles served al dente with grated chicken and beef in the red sauce.  It’s now hip to put a few tater-tots in the presentation and so several tots decorated the entrees.  For dessert, we shared a big goblet of banana pudding.  The confection was layered with banana slices on the top, a couple of big heart-shaped strawberries and, then, a mound of slightly sugary creme fraiche very faintly banana-flavored, the whole thing resting on a gooey bed of caramel.  As an after-dinner aperitif, I drank a few drops of something called Don Ciccio & Figli Finocchieto – I have no idea what this was supposed to be: it tasted to me like a mix of retsina and ouzo.  (I made notes on the meal in my Moleskin, but it seems to me that I have confused entrees with appetizers and spelled most of the viands incorrectly.  You know it’s an expensive meal when you don’t know what you’re eating, can’t identify the ingredients, and can’t spell the names of the dishes.) 

A handsome Sudanese guy with a big smile drove us back to the Hotel.   

53.

It’s only an hour from Memphis to Bowling Green, Kentucky.  The sun is shining and, for the first time, we can see clearly the ring of green hills around the Memphis.  

A little past the border with Kentucky, we pause at a rest stop.  It’s a showcase for Kentucky, the portal to the State, and the place is well-furnished.  A few pensioners are browsing the racks of brochures.  I ask the attendant at the information desk how long it takes to drive from Bowling Green to Mammoth Cave.  “A half hour,” he says.  The man asks me if I’m driving to Bowling Green to pick up my Corvette.  Apparently, those cars are made in a factory near the city.  “I’m afraid not,” I say.  “You’d be surprised how many people tell me that they are headed up there to pick up their Corvettes,” the man says.

54.

The hollow earth of Kentucky begins under Bowling Green.  Rivers vanish underground and the your footsteps on the rock reverberate with cavities under foot.  The soil and stones are stretched taut as the skin of a drum over the voids below.  

In Bowling Green, a stream that is acid-green flows under some shelves of grey limestone, flat lintel rock above a pond seamed with green vines.  A small mill has been built under the rock shelter where a five-foot dam is covered in an ever-flowing veil of water.  Beyond the mill, in the shadowy entrance to the cave, some stone piers extend into the underground river and tourists can take flat-bottomed boats into a subterranean canyon where rock glows pink and vermillion in the electric lights.

The mill under the flat ledges of rock was built in 1825 and is reputed to be the “only underground mill” in the world.  Civil war soldiers bivouacked in the area and carved their names into the soft stone.  In 1936, Ripley’s Believe it or Not! touted the river as the ‘shortest and deepest’ river in the world, pointing out that the so-called “Blue Hole” just inside the cavern was over 400 feet deep.  Don’t believe it: the “Blue Hole” is 16 feet deep.  After serving as a clandestine night club during prohibition, the cave and lost river were abandoned for many years and, in fact, the area around the mill ruins was used as a dump.  Beginning in 1980's, the site was rehabilitated and is operated by the city of Bowling Green on 72 acres as a nature reserve and attraction.

55.

My tour at Mammoth Cave is scheduled for the next morning at 9:00 am and, since we are in Bowling Green, early – about 11 am – we decide to drive out to the National Park to time the route.  (I don’t want to arrive late.) 

The countryside northeast of Bowling Green is flat, agricultural terrain with old settlements where roads cross, typically a half-demolished commercial building, an abandoned general store or a gas station, with some trailer courts in the briars and a few old houses with decaying front porches and septic fields like Indian mounds.  The land is clear-cut with shelter belts crisscrossing along the edges of property.  A peculiar wall of low hills, heavily wooded, runs across the horizon and the border between the farmland and the forest is sharply defined – there are row-crop fields on one side of the road bordering the hills and deep, shadowy brown woods on the other side of thoroughfare.  

The densely forested ridges and hollows are land set aside for the National Park.  Mammoth Cave is vast with more than 30 entrances in the cracks in the hills and the system of passages and underground rotundas is more than 400 miles long.  Accordingly, when the Government acquired the cave beginning in the late twenties, large swaths of surface had to be purchased on the principle, previously cited, that the owner of the surface owns the sky above and the depths below all the way down to Hell itself.  The land had been occupied for almost 200 years by subsistence farmers and the rumpled green country was dotted with small clearings where there were farmhouses, granaries, and, along the Green River and its tributaries many water-wheels and mills, mostly, it seems, for sawing up the wood harvested from the hills.  About 600 small graveyards were hidden in the hills and valleys slumped down where caves had collapsed.  For this reason, there is no entry-fee at the Park.  The Government’s ouster of the mountain-folk living in these bluffs and ravines was controversial and scarcely tolerated and the Feds didn’t want to stir up further controversy by making people pay a fee to visit the graves of their kin.  

Inside the park, there are no surface features.  The narrow road curves along hillsides that overlook the Green River.  A single overlook provides a vista into the hill-country where bluffs are capped with pale, leather-colored crowns of outcropped rock.  The visitor center is surrounded by a couple acres of parking and is, surprisingly, inconsequential.  As it happens, a tour is scheduled for fifteen minutes after our arrival, around 12:30 and, so, I talk to the girl at the kiosk and change my ticket for entering the cave to the upcoming one pm descent.   Julie sits in the lobby and, then, goes to the car, uninterested in hiking down the steep and somewhat slippery slope into the cave.  I use the toilet, always advisable before entering a cavern and, then, wait outside under some shelters overlooking a deep, green ravine veined with flat extrusions of crumbling limestone.  The tour-guide appears on time with a side-kick learning the patter.  Both guides wear green and brown uniforms and look like Boy Scouts, although one of them is a burly woman.  An archaeologist and wife with a couple of belligerent teenagers are among the twelve people on the tour.  There are Canadians and a lesbian couple – one of the girls is an albino with long white eyelashes.

The slope down to the natural entrance is steep, running in a narrow ravine that drops to a sort of pedestal of rock like a landing where the descent reverses and becomes much steeper, concrete steps and platforms plunging down into the darkness.  On the sidewalk leading down the hill, a blonde woman asked me if I could identify the trees lining the rim of the ravine.  “No, unfortunately,” I tell her.  The woman says that she is from northern Alberta where they have no trees at all.  Perhaps, I should tell her that these are daffodil trees or asparagus elms.  I ask her if it is cold in January where she lives.  “Oh yes,” the woman tells me.  Her husband who looks Scandinavian is walking by her side and two children, also blonde, are clinging to her hips.  She tells me the temperature in northern Alberta today, according to weather reports.  I tell her how cold it was in Austin when we left – 11 below with a much colder windchill.  There is confusion.  I am talking in Fahrenheit degrees; she uses Celsius, a misunderstanding pointed out by her husband.  

The still, somewhat stagnant, air in the cave is warmer than the temperature in the ravine.  At a certain point, the cold suddenly ends and it is more humid and warm.  There is a sepulchral odor, a sort of dense emanation from the darkness.  The temperature change occurs from one stride to the next, very suddenly.  Then, we’re in a big underground gorge with water-sculpted walls and a flat lid of a ceiling forty feet overhead.  Trenches have been cut into the cave floor next to the concrete path and some huge and shadowy joists, like gantries, rise over decaying timber coffers.  At the turn of the 18th century, the cavern was known as the Great Saltpeter Cave.  The nitrous saltpeter, used for gunpowder, was extracted from mountains of the stuff (bat guano) heaped here in the place where the twilight of the natural entrance darkens to the black of the underground.  The tour guide says that “enslaved people” mined the gunpowder that was used in the War of 1812 – in other words, he notes, that the American fight for freedom from Britain was implemented in part by the slave labor used to raise the salt peter out of the dark pit.  The salt peter was dissolved into slurry by water drizzled down into the hole by sluices along the natural entrance – the end-product was called “beer.”  Then, huge leather bellows were used to pump the “beer” up wooden tubes to the surface.  It was backbreaking labor, performed in rotten conditions.  Gunpowder made from the salt peter was used in the Battle of New Orleans, the fight that made Andrew Jackson famous.  

Beyond the salt peter mines, the tunnel becomes more narrow and the smooth ledge of the ceiling drops to about fifteen feet above the trail on which we walk.  Apparently, the Mammoth Cave, as it is now known, extends for miles and miles along this passage way, a smooth and level path that resembles a subway tunnel, rational and direct with intersecting cracks and joints leading down into crevasses with hidden black bottoms.  Early tourists have smoked their names onto the flat ceiling and smooth spots on the walls – there are innumerable inscriptions, palimpsests with names and letters written over one another.  This tour is devoted to human activity in the cave.  There are no speleotherms in this level and straight passageway, just cairns made by nineteeth-century tourists, big heaps of stone piled up on the low ridges along the pathway.  (Visitors from the various States were encouraged to set rocks in piles commemorating their home territory.  However, only a single cairn was allowed to rise high enough to touch the flat, cracked ceiling – this is the rock-pile dedicated the State of Kentucky: a pyramid of flat loaf-sized stones rises up like a crooked man to where a pointed rock scrapes up against the cave’s ceiling.  According to the guide, when other cairns approached the height of the ceiling, the 19th century ciceroni waited until the corridor was vacant and, then, topped the rock piles so they could be rebuilt by later tourists.)  Most of the early guides were slaves, most notably the famous Stephen Bishop, who explored many of the more remote passages in the cavern.  Guiding was good business for the slaves because they were generally allowed to keep tips paid to them by the tourists.  Other income sources existed as well – tourists paid a few pennies for the animal fat (tallow) candles used to explore the darkness.  The slaves manufactured these candles at their cabins and sold them underground.  (The technology was simple enough – you burn grease from slaughtered hogs; Andrew Jackson, it will be recalled, burned hog tallow in his chandeliers when no one important was visiting – he reserved his fine spermaceti oil for special occasions.) Putting a stone on a cairn cost a penny or two.  If you wanted to leave your name in black letters on the rock, this writing had to be accomplished by laboriously holding the candle close to the limestone so that its smoke would darken a speck of the wall or ceiling – this operation was continued to produce the pointillist dark black characters marking the rocks; a large inscription might take an hour or more and, of course, would earn the slave a significant gratuity.  

I wonder if the enslaved guides didn’t regard the deeper and darker places in the labyrinth as havens where they were free.  There are three general levels to the cavern connected by domes with sheer flowstone walls and, if things were perilous on the surface, an experienced guide like Stephen Bishop could always retreat deeper and lower into the maze.  (Bishop discovered some of major rotunda-like domes passing between cave levels and he was the first man to see the River Styx, gorge-like tube full of cold, dark water where ghost-white, blind fish and salamanders paddled around in the impossibly clear stream.  I suppose the abysses and cistern in the cave and the formidable crawlspaces and squeezes protected the enslaved people and the tombs and catacombs in the rock were paradoxically spaces of liberation.  

There was less protection on the surface.  In 1799, the Harpe brothers, notorious serial killers on the nearby Natchez Trace, were hiding out in the saltpeter caves.  It was their practice to slaughter their victims, waylaid on the forest pathway of the Trace, steal their money and trade-goods, disembowel the dead bodies and fill their abdominal cavities with rocks before throwing the corpse into rivers and ponds.  A young black man named Johnson, apparently, encountered the Harpe boys at Mammoth Cave.  Johnson didn’t have anything of value but this didn’t deter Wiley and Micajah Harpe from attacking the man and bashing his head against a tree until his brains were spattered all over the brush.    

56.  

For many years, there was a corpse in the cave, a mummy bundle displayed atop of chest-high bulwark of stone along the Gothic Avenue tunnel that we are exploring.   The dead woman, a Native American from the Archaic Woodland Period (5000 to 2000 BC) was named Princess Fawn Hooves on the basis of artifacts discovered with her.  She may be moldering in the Smithsonian Museum today although this is, by no means certain, and the guide (as well as the National Park Service) is a bit reticent about the artifact.  Indian skeletons must be repatriated to their tribe, or the modern successors to their people, and, of course, the display of human remains, popular even when I was a child, is now ethically questionable.  

Gesturing to the stone shelf, the guide told us that a mummy was found in another cave, the so-called Short Cave, a few miles away.  The desiccated, but well-preserved, body was brought into Mammoth Cave where it was put on display for some number of years.  Later, the mummy was sold to an impresario who hauled the corpse around the United States for a number of years.  In those days, the tour-guide claims, people used powder ground from mummies for medicinal purposes – a kind of mummy tea was thought to be salubrious and capable of curing certain ailments.  Poor Princess Fawn Hooves, so-named for a necklace found by the body, had her fingers and toes and some of the leathery flesh over her ribs clipped off and ground up to be sold as medicine – at least, this is the assertion by the guide – and, so, when the cadaver was finally acquired by the Smithsonian, the body was much reduced in size, a shadow of its former self, and badly damaged.  

In fact, at least, six mummies were found in Short Cave by guano miners, probably between 1810 and 1813.  The corpses had all been intentionally left in the grotto with mortuary artifacts, burials made within sixty feet or so of the entrance to the underground chamber.  (There are other cadavers deeper in the cave system – for a time, Floyd Collins emaciated body was kept in a tomb in a scarcely accessible passage at the bottom of the cave.  Explorers used to open the grave and pour a Kentucky bourbon libation in honor of the embalmed hero before wriggling deeper into the labyrinth that they were mapping.  Needless to say, this practice was discontinued and Collins now occupies a casket buried in graveyard nearby and much closer to the surface.  An Amerindian, nicknamed Lost John, was found crushed under a boulder deep in Mammoth cave – the man had been mining gypsum about five-thousand years ago when he was pinned by the rock.  For a century, he was also on display.  The Park Service moved him to a secret location in the cave system – there are over 400 miles of tunnels and, so, the body is now preserved far from public view.)  Fawn Hooves was set upright in a niche made from flat slabs of limestone and impressed the miners with her stony, petrified visage and her regal demeanor.  Her wrists were tied together, apparently to keep the mummy in proper position, and she was clad in deer-skin.  Next to the body was a “reticule” as it was described in 1813, that is, a hand-bag or purse with a draw-string to pull it closed.  The reticule must have been capacious because many items were identified as being within the bag: there were two “night caps” made from fur and deerskin, hundreds of seed and nut beads on leathery strings, seven headdresses decorated with eagle feathers, and, of course, a necklace comprised of twenty hooves cut from fawns and strung together on deer sinew.  In addition, the miners found in the reticule, “handsome quill fans”, the jaw of a bear and an eagle claw pendant together with many bone needles, thread, thimbles, and two eight-inch long whistles.  Obviously, these grave goods were impressive.  Their whereabouts are unknown today.

Fawn Hooves had her reddish hair cut close to her scalp – the hair remaining on the mummy was said to be about a quarter-inch long.  She had perfect teeth.  A wound was found puncturing her ribs and she had a lesion on her back but otherwise the body was intact.  Some accounts say the cadaver, if stretched out would have been 5 foot ten inches tall or, even, approaching six feet.  Of course, many early commentators, astonished by the richness of the grave goods and corpse’s red hair, claimed that the body was that of an ancient Egyptian, buried far from the Nile, or a wandering Jew from one of the ten lost tribes or a Christian missionary, one of the men whom Mormon’s believed proselytized the Indians in the Americas a little after the time of Christ.  For a few years, Fawn Hooves rested in state in the “Rotunda” room where the slaves were mining saltpeter.  The slaves didn’t like the corpse overseeing their work and were superstitious about her wicked influences on labor that was already dangerous enough.  In deference to the enslaved miners’ fears, the mummy was hauled deeper into the cave to the ledge in Gothic Avenue to which the tour guide now points as he regales us with this story.  

The tale of Princess Fawn Hooves implicates a mystery that hasn’t been solved.  The Archaic Woodland Indians used the cave system extensively, mostly for gypsum mining – mixtures of gypsum and lime were probably used to spackle wood palisades around villages (although according to conventional archaeology, these people didn’t live in village – however, we know that they made ceremonial enclosures, probably for religious purposes.)   Furthermore, a mile inside from the natural entrance above Gothic Avenue and the saltpeter works, many so-called “entopic” patterns have been found pecked into the stone.  Entopic images are records of hallucinatory specks of light and form that eyes starved of light create on the retina – people seem to have entered the cave, sat in the absolute darkness until their eyes began to shimmer with hallucinated patterns; then, they lit cane torches, found in abundance in the caverns, and chipped the entopic imagery onto the walls.  (It’s now most hidden under layers of lard-fat soot letters.)  But, well before the Common Era, wall drawing and extraction of minerals and from the caves ceased and the Indians avoided them – no one knows why Native American activities in the caverns ceased. 

57.

The sunshine is bright in the ravine where the trail climbs up from the cave’s natural entrance.  The air outside is cool and bracing, animate with breeze, after the still and clammy atmosphere underground.  

About a half-mile from the Visitor Center, Flint Ridge Road tracks away from the main National Park highway, winding through glades of tall deciduous trees to a small clearing where there is a stark lathe-built Baptist Church.  Graves are gathered around the side of the church, a humble frame building that is no more than white-washed shed.  Close to the church walls, a granite block is lettered with the name “Floyd Collins” and the inscription “The World’s Greatest Cave Explorer.”   The inscription also declares that Collins was the “Discoverer of Crystal Cave.”  Quarters and nickels decorate the flat top of the tombstone.  It’s recent, erected in 1989 after Collins’ corpse finally came to rest here after various peregrinations around the local neighborhood.  The graveyard is silent but the wind moves a little in the tree-tops and the grim Church, eyeless as a skull, watches over the place.

Collins was pinned by boulder in a nightmarish pretzel of tunnel, a tight vertical tube in the rocks of a dismal little hole in the ground called Sand Cave.  During the “Cave Wars” after World War One, families in the neighborhood opened “show caves” for tourists, hoping to siphon off the trade traveling into the hills to Mammoth Cave.  Competition was fierce and, in fact, there was feuding and violence, or, at least, threats of violence between factions associated with various local caves.  Collins had discovered a splendidly decorated cavern, called “Crystal Cave” on nearby land owned by his family.  Unfortunately, “Crystal Cave” was a little off the beaten path and most tourists bypassed the place on their way to other attractions.  So Collins, an indefatigable cave explorer, was looking for a possible “show cave” closer to the main thoroughfare – this pursuit led him into Sand Cave where he was trapped in January 1927.

The twisting tunnel where a boulder (the size of a ham someone reported) pinned Collins was very difficult to reach and, as it turned out, there was no way to extricate him from the pinch-point alive and with all of his limbs intact – inevitably, someone suggested that the trapped man be cut into pieces to removed from the cave.  Collins slowly succumbed to hypothermia in the muddy hole while a huge crowd gathered overhead, enjoying the spectacle of rescue efforts in what was called a festive “carnival” atmosphere.  The access crawlspace to where Collins was buried alive collapsed.  A shaft underway at the time finally reached his body in the middle of February.  The corpse was extracted from the gloomy hole, embalmed, and, then, buried in the family plot at the Collins’ homestead adjacent to Crystal Cave.  After a few years, the body was exhumed, put in a lead casket with a glass window over the corpse’s gaunt face and, then, installed as a tourist attraction in Crystal Cave, the grotto that he had discovered in 1917.  The body either remained there or ended up in metal box deep in Mammoth Cave depending upon which version of the story that you prefer.  (It is clear that Collins’ body was stolen at one time from Crystal Cave, apparently by enemies of the family and as part of the ongoing “Cave Wars” feud.)  Cave explorers in the fifties and sixties mapping the Mammoth Cave system described seeing the corpse in the depths of the National Park’s cavern – in fact, it was a rite of passage to open the casket and toast the corpse before embarking on further exploration.  Collins’ family lost rights to Crystal Cave and court records show that, when his heirs sued to retrieve the body then in that attraction, the new owners prevailed – it was claimed that, when the Collins’ family sold the premises, it was transferred “lock, stock, and barrel”, in this case, the barrel being the lead coffin with its glass window and the mummified cadaver.  Finally, Collins was extracted from Crystal Cave (or, maybe, Mammoth Cave – the story is unclear) and buried in casket and vault next to the Mammoth Cave Baptist Church.  

A few dozen yards from the church, there’s another small plot, some old limestone shafts poking out of the sod, one of the 600 small graveyards within the boundaries of the National Park.  The road leads out of the park where the country is cleared, poor farmsteads there and several small villages dotting the frozen plain at this time of year.  On the edge of the woods, a small parking place marks the trail to Sand Cave, now sealed to prevent further tragedies.  The trail runs as a boardwalk that makes an S-curve through the woods to an overlook above a sinkhole edged with a grim-looking rock shelter on one side of the pit.  The boardwalk rings underfoot with a hollow sound – it sits on joists about a foot above the leaf litter in the forest.  The earth is hollow here, dramatized by the drum sound your feet make on the wooden boards.  Under some of the trees, where shadows persist, there are scabs of dirty snow.  Some ice is congealed in the pit next to the ledges of rock where the cave opening used to be.  

As many as ten-thousand people trampled this area in 1927, about this time of year, that is January.  Vendors sold street-food and balloons for the children and you could buy printed broadsides about the trapped man, some of them sheet music for songs performed on impromptu stages by hillbilly bands.  It was macabre and festive, either a disgrace or a testament to human optimism depending on your perspective.  A barbed wire strung taut between trees marks the edge of public area where people gathered at the site were barred from further access.  Beyond that point, there were sheriff’s deputies and state and county officials and contractors with drilling machinery slamming at the rocks above the cave.  The mob wasn’t allowed at the overlook above the sinkhole filled with fallen leaves and broken branches where a slant fissure dropped down to where Collins was entombed.  I presume that an archaeologist or simply a man (or woman) with a metal detector would find all sorts of debris in the woodland glades, pennies, money clips, wooden planks – the paper artifacts, candy wrappers and popcorn boxes and the printed broadsides have all long decayed.  Perhaps, there are guitar picks resting at foot of trees in this woods, maybe a prosthetic limb, the clasp on a brassiere and tin condom containers.  In any event, treasure-hunting is prohibited.  

It’s getting colder.  The shadows advance across the prairies.  At Horse Cave, the village closest to the National Park boundaries, lanes lead to other “show caves” – Onyx Cave, Great Crystal Cave, Outlaw Cave and so on.  The zip-lines strung from hilltops into sinkholes are deserted at this time of year.  The town seems desperately poor and sad.     

58.

The next morning, we drive north across the green pleasant hills of Kentucky to Henderson.  The freeway ends at the river-town and, for miles, we drive through a dispirited landscape of small strip malls, Dollar General stores, and trailer parks in swampy lowlands next to the road.  There are many traffic signals here and the going is slow, queues of cars at intersections making left turns, heavy truck traffic on the congested highways.   

John Jay Audubon lived in this area after the War of 1812, an emigrant to America from France.  Audubon was born in what is now Haiti on his father’s sugarcane plantation.  In 1803, when he was 18, his father bought him passage to America; the young man was sent to New York City under a forged passport to avoid conscription into Napoleon’s army.  At that time, Audubon’s family, refugees from slave revolts in Haiti, had been living at an estate near Nantes in France. 

Audubon is a generation younger than Abraham Lincoln, but, like that President, a characteristic frontier type.  Inept in business, Audubon wandered around the Middle Border, riding the rivers up and down between Louisiana and Cincinnati and settling for a time as a merchant in northern Kentucky near modern-day Henderson.   (Lincoln, it will be remembered, was born in wilderness Kentucky.) During periods of bankruptcy, Audubon, a skilled woodsman, supported himself and his family by hunting, often spending days in the woods and river bottoms with local Indians.  From his earliest childhood, he had been fascinated by birds and collected pelts from unusual specimens that he shot in the American wilderness.  For a time, Audubon supported himself by making death-bed sketches, memorial tributes to the deceased drawn from life.  He had a trading post in New Madrid in Missouri when the great 1811 earthquake struck – the air “was most unpleasant with sulphurous fumes” Audubon reported.  In 1822, Audubon taught himself to paint in oils and, later, when he was 41 launched his ambitious series of colored engravings of The Birds of America.  (However, most of the initial studies for the engravings were painted in watercolor.)  This was another of Audubon’s sketchy business endeavors, an expensive subscription volume that cost him the equivalent (in modern dollars) of about $200,000.  To everyone’s surprise, the over-sized volume – the first edition is in “double-elephant” format -- became enormously successful and Audubon recouped his expenses and made a profit.  After more collecting excursions to Key West and Newfoundland, Audubon used money earned from the book to buy an estate on Hudson River in New York.  In the mid-1840's, he published another book of large-scale engravings on the mammals of North America.  He died in New York in 1851 of dementia.

Audubon seems to have been indefatigable, energetic, and optimistic.  He was something of a frontier huckster and his ornithological studies are rife with misinformation, plagiarism, and other species of fraud.  He ran sugar mills, owned slaves, and seems to have gravitated to all manner of get-rich quick schemes.  Simply put, he wasn’t afraid to fail at his endeavors.  Like many people of his era, the West beckoned to him.  If things didn’t go well at home, you could “always light out for the Territory” to avoid creditors and business debacles.  

We followed a winding road off the main drag in Henderson to the Audubon State Historical Site.  It was sunny but the bare trees standing above the ravine through which the access road passed gave the landscape a stark and gloomy aspect.  Big swamps showing bluish open water filled the river bottoms not yet spoiled by small factories and warehouses and poor neighborhoods comprised of shacks with auto bodies strewn under trees on which tire swings were suspended.  Backed against a low bluff, a brick chalet stands in the middle of a sloping brown-yellow lawn.  When we visited, the place was closed except for a volunteer, an elderly lady, selling merchandise just beyond the front door to the museum.  The exhibits were upstairs but inaccessible.

There are four small birds killed and preserved by Audubon in the Smithsonian Institute.  (A number of bird pelts prepared by Audubon are also at the Museum of Natural History in New York City.)  Pictures of the Smithsonian birds show them arranged belly-up on a white tray.  The birds have a silky inert appearance and their little beaks are like surgical instruments.  I imagine that the birds are stored in a vault behind the scenes, an interstitial place between galleries full of stuffed animals, totem poles, and carved masks.  Maybe, they are in a basement archive adjacent to a metal drawer containing a skull with red hair and a necklace made of 20 fawn hooves.  But most likely, the birds are kept in a vast ornithological mausoleum in a dimly lit, climate-controlled maze of rooms – the Smithsonian Institution is said to house more than 695,000 bird specimens.  

59. 

The novelist and poet, Robert Penn Warren, wrote a long poem in 1969 called Audubon: A Vision.  Warren was born in Kentucky’s “Land between the Rivers” near Clarksville.  He flourished when regional literature was still prominent and may be regarded as a culturally conservative Southern writer after the model of Faulkner and Warren’s colleague, Cleanth Brooks.  Warren is best-known for his roman-a-clef, a novel in which the protagonist is a thinly disguised Huey Long, All the President’s Men, but he also wrote a noteworthy book about someone like Floyd Collins; that book is called The Cave.  

Audubon: A Vision published in 1969 is said to have inaugurated Robert Penn Warren’s “late style’, characterized by Harold Bloom, who was friends with the writer, as ‘hard, riddling, substantive,” verse written in a dramatic, declarative tone that has a prophetic aspect.  In A Vision, the poem describes a night Audubon spends in a filthy cabin somewhere in the wintry wilderness.  Apparently, the shack is a warren of murderers – a slatternly woman, who may be a prostitute, whets a knife and there’s an Indian lying on the floor, wounded, with one of his eyes gouged out.  (Warren lost the sight in one of his eyes in a childhood accident and, in the sixties, had the damaged eye replaced with a glass one.)  The woman’s two brutish sons come into the cabin in the dark.  (The thugs remind me of the psychopathic Harpe brothers who murdered people on the Natchez Trace.)  Audubon is strangely passive – he has dreamed this scene before and waits to be slaughtered.  At dawn, three men who have been pursuing the two killers (we assume) arrive and unceremoniously hang the mother and her sons.  The mother is fierce and regards the execution with a sort of hilarity; Audubon is said to be in a “manly state” as the three malefactors slowly strangle to death.  This odd episode comprises half of the poem.  The latter part of the verse consists of short vignettes from Audubon’s life.  The great paradox, of course, is that the naturalist has to murder great, majestic birds in order to study them.  One of the highlights of this part of the poem is a depiction of night advancing across the land as the planet spins.  As the darkness spreads, Warren describes a great Yggdrisal lying on a “mud-bank of the Mississippi” – the dead tree is “white as bone” and, in the “flood” by the fallen giant, a star is reflected in dark water.  Overhead, another flying being travels westward with the night – It’s “The Northwest Orient plane, New York to Seattle...winking westward.”  (I like this line because when I was a little boy in the suburbs of Minneapolis, I recall ads on television touting Charles Lindbergh’s airplanes – the “Northwest Orient” company with its hub in Minneapolis.)  Near the end of poem, Warren quotes Audubon’s diaries:

He died, and was mourned, who had loved the world.

Who had written:

“...a world which though wicked enough / in all conscience is perhaps as good / as worlds unknown.

60.

In southern Indiana, near the border with Illinois, a sign on the freeway points the way to New Harmony.  The town’s name seems familiar to me, although I can’t quite remember why, and, so, we exit the Interstate and drive seven or eight miles to the village.  The land stretches to a river, a flat terrace , embroidered with field crops in fertile soil: in January, blonde patches of stubble in some tracts, other acreage fallow with furrows clawed into the land, desolate section roads running under palisades of winter-mutilated trees and low wooded bluffs marking the edges of the flood plain. The town is isolated from the freeway that runs straight as a geometric exercise across the farmland and, then, yet again, isolated, dead-end, on the river bank from the two-lane highway that arcs over the fields and toward the hills.  

At first glance, New Harmony is a typical Midwestern town – these places are old in this part of the country with a commercial district erected almost two-hundred years ago, a commune of well-kept, if ancient, brick buildings clustered around a right-angle intersection.  The facades of the buildings are subtly ornamented, carved pilasters with pediments enclosing entrances to little vault-like bank buildings, bits of sculpted garland, chalk swag on pale stone, Italianate eaves and cornices on roof rims over the sidewalk, elaborate lightning rods on finials symmetrically placed over the shop fronts, a scatter of taverns behind firehouse-red brick walls, elongated gaps in the retail buildings where fires have taken down businesses that the place is either too poor or too remote or too indifferent to replace.  There’s a brewery with signs announcing that the place is also where spirits are distilled and a few holistic medicine salons on Main Street, an abundance, it seems, of small art galleries and New Age shops preaching various forms of Enlightenment, an oddity for a hamlet this far from any city.

On closer inspection, however, there’s something distinctly odd about the village.  Several historical markers with embossed letters stand alongside alleys and at street corners.  There are a couple of old buildings that seem disproportionately large just off the Main Street, hulking heaps of cut stone that have a fortress aspect: high ramparts with small embrasure-like slits in the wall under heavy mansard  roofs.  The Wabash River runs past New Harmony, hidden behind levees, the bore of current flowing in the channel marked by linear forests on both banks, old ravaged-looking trees growing where the flooding makes building untenable.  

The town presents the aspect of a dead end, cul de sac.  None of the roads cross the Wabash into Illinois across the river.  What seems to be an abandoned railroad trestle spans the channel, a slim iron arcade on metal stilts.  (Although I didn’t know it at the time, this trestle is the abandoned two-lane Wabash Toll Bridge, first built by a private firm around 1930 and closed due to irreparable structural deficits in 2012 after many years of concerns about fissures developing in the span’s deck.)  On the northeast side of the town, in grassy coffers between levees, some old white houses stand guarded by white picket fences, neat outbuildings to the rear and small, roto-tilled garden beds.  The house are all marked with plaques and bear family names. In another backyard, I can see some graves haphazardly tilted over the turf, slabs of dull grey stone.  An ornate wall surrounds another garden where there is a dome also on structural stilts, wood-shingled and the color of a morel mushroom.  Next to a lagoon, some tall evergreens, out of place among the deciduous trees here, protect a path soft with red fallen needles, a cedar-colored loop between carved boulders and statues.  A café closed in this season stands across from the little memorial park and a trail runs out of town atop the embankment along the slate-blue river – it looks like a bike path and hiking trail dropping down into the narrow forest along the Wabash.  There are more markers, a labyrinth in a circular disk of stone, maze-pathways marked by dark polished rock that glints in the wan January sun like ebony embedded in the pale paving.  Beyond the labyrinth, a strange white structure sprawls across a grassy embankment overlooking the river.  The bone-white building is a fantasia of balconies, outrigger columns and buttresses supporting nothing, huge pale ramps and airy milky towers.  From some vantages, the building looks like a perverse insecticide factory or a crouching spider or a tangle of columns and pillars accessed by a ziggurat.  Some sidewalks lead up to the structure, but, of course, it is closed and the doors sealed for the season.  A small car marked Southern Indiana University patrols the old frame buildings with their white fences and small barren gardens.  At each place, a woman wearing sunglasses gets out of the car, walks around the building checking windows and trying the locks on the doors to make sure the houses are secure.

The white palace on the river bank, deconstructed into stark elements exploded out from its center, is the Atheneum, designed by Richard Meier and built between 1976 and 1979.  Apparently, in season, the building displays art and historical exhibits documenting New Harmony’s unusual history – there is a performance hall behind the white ramps and pillars where lectures or musical concerts are scheduled.  The egg-shaped mushroom or baldachin in the walled garden is an ecumenical church designed by Philip Johnson, the so-called Roofless Church dedicated in 1960.  The shingled form represents an inverted rose, the symbol of the Society of Equals that once occupied this place.  An oculus in the dome of the rose admits shafts of light that illumine a large bronze sculpture gilded in gold leaf that represents the descent of the Holy Spirit.  (The bronze is by Jacques Lipschitz who also designed the high brick wall around the garden and the gate ornamented with metal garlands, also plated in gold leaf, in which a heraldic lamb appears.)  Within the garden, there are sculpted yew trees and benches of oolitic limestone. In the little memorial park, evergreens towering over the red-needle path shelter a bust of the Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich, his sharp-featured profile gazing toward some remote horizon, rough-hewn, with whorl-patterns in the bronze under truncheon-shaped knobs of metal hair.  The object is imagined a bit after the manner of Giacometti so that the figure incorporates into its surface the distance from which it is seen – the bust with its pointed nose and firmly set, resolute chin and abstracted schematic eyes emanates space, creating a buffer of distance between the viewer and the object even though, of course, you can walk up to it and stroke the bronze surface.  A chest-high boulder is lettered with this inscription: Man and Nature belong together in their created glory – in their tragedy and in their salvation.  Tillich’s ashes were scattered here after his death in 1965. Although Tillich wrote highly sophisticated and difficult books on religion (he was a colleague of Martin Heidegger and taught a course on Hegel with Theodor Adorno in Frankfurt in 1931), he was the only member of the faculty at the Union Divinity School at Harvard to attend Billy Graham’s revival Crusades. 

61.

The monuments of New Harmony beg this question: What happened here?  Why is a town with population of 875 blessed with structures by world-famous architects? 

The town’s secrets are scattered and not entirely coherently displayed and, so, it takes a while to reconstruct New Harmony’s history.   The fortified structure with slit windows and the barn-like mansard roof is identified as a “grange” on the nearby historical plaque.  In this application, “grange” means a large barn or granary – here, the structure seems to have been a warehouse, although constructed from massive field-rock as a place of refuge.  In the 1820's, this area was still frontier and there were occasional Indian raids and, to the south, the Natchez Trace, a woodland trail crossing Tennessee, was notorious for brigands.  (The Trace was a vector for the spread of charismatic Christian cults arising during the “Great Awakening” and, also, for homicidal banditry.  Wiley and Micajah Harpe, serial killers, haunted the trace at the end of the 18th century as did the “land pirate” Samuel Mason.)  The”grange”is said to be an “Owenite” structure.

Also “Owenite” is the Workmen’s Institute, another impressive building with a red, brick campanile tower and two steep gables above a square three-story block of heavy masonry.  The building is open and houses an old library, said to be the oldest public institution of this sort in Indiana.  A commission of some sort is meeting in the library at a round table under some big windows.  The commissioners are mostly elderly, old women, but there are several talkative young men with beards and pony tails, probably gay.  One of the young men asks if he can help me, a phrase that usually means something to this effect: you’re not welcome – please leave.  Except for a convenient toilet off the main room and behind some wooden book shelves, I have no reason to linger here and so exit into an impressive stairwell adorned with a big mural between floors.  The mural is painted in the style of Maxfield Parrish with cartoon figures bathed in golden light conferring around another round table.  At the center of the composition, there is a cleric with a peaked hood who looks a bit like Gandalf the Grey.  The cleric has a neck beard but his chin and cheeks are completely clean-shaven so that the whiskers seem attached to his face by his ears.  Some other industrious figures are arrayed around the wizard and there is a sort of vellum map showing the intersections in a small village, draped over the table, displayed so that the viewers can see it.  A man in elegant leather boots and wearing a waistcoat brandishes a quill.  The subject of the painting is identified in mercantile block letters, as if painted on a sign: Father Rapp deeding the site of present day New Harmony to  Owen.  It’s a peculiar subject made more baffling by the presence of various witnesses – a woman in a bonnet with a bemused expression on her face and several other folk, including a traveler in a medieval cloak and hood carrying a long staff.   Why exactly someone would paint a lavish, romantically idealized picture of a real estate closing is unclear to me.  

The upstairs is a Wunderkabinett, that is a collection of strange, even uncanny, curiosities.  Cases in one room contain zoological specimens – there’s a fat cloddish bullfrog, embalmed somehow (how do you embalm a bullfrog?), a cayman and several small alligators and, standing upright in a glass box, a monstrous calf – the thing has two heads blurred together and eight legs, including two that protrude from its spine like withered, aborted wings.  There are monstrosities in jugs of formaldehyde, yards of yellowing intestine or, perhaps, parasitic worms pickled in jars.  Other glass cases display examples of bricks, marked with strange emblems, iron nails manufactured in one of the town’s factories, and various books and documents also printed by a press that once existed in New Harmony.  On a wall, there are replicas of painting by Raphael and an original by Winslow Homer, several small stormy Bierstadt landscapes.  A humble black casket rests on the floor, rather crudely made and said to be the only example of a “Rappite” coffin “still above the ground.”  Next to the casket, there’s a horse-shoe shaped desk, also black and crafted in raw primitive style – Father Rapp, a sign declares, preached from inside this desk.  A wall display depicts sketches of a “boat of knowledge”, apparently, a flat-bottomed barge that plied the waters of the Ohio and Wabash, carrying books and Chautauqua lecturers from town to river-town.  The vessel was divided into three sets of living quarters depicted as lean-to huts and tents on the barge’s deck.  One of these dwellings was for women, named “Paradise”.  Children lived in another hut called “Purgatory”; the men who piloted the vessel were at its stern – there’s no record what their dwellings were called, but, of course, on might make a reasonable conjecture on that topic.  A modern painting hangs next to the historical exhibit – it shows “the boat of knowledge” manned by well-known women, professors, poets, and legislators.  Owens is said to have sponsored the “boat of knowledge.”   Some old women, volunteers in the library and museum, are eating lunch at a table in the corner of a meeting room across from the museum with the two-headed calf.  The women have sandwiches and plastic containers of chicken salad, it seems.  A video is broadcast on a TV in the opposite corner of the meeting room – it’s a program about Carl Jung’s theories as to dreams and landscapes.  The sound is turned down to silence, but there are closed captions at the lower borders of the images,  An artist from Switzerland has painted some abstract panels on the subject of Jung’s theories and these adorn another wall in the room.

62.

I buy a yellow pamphlet displayed in a rack at the top of the stairs in the Workingman’s Institute.  No one is around to take my cash and, so, I stuff the bills into a jar next to the postcards and booklets.  The yellow pamphlet is printed by a press called “Golden Rose” and provides a history of New Harmony.  

As it turns out, New Harmony’s landscape and buildings are complicated to unravel because the site embodies not one, but two, experiments in Utopia as well as a mid-19th century commercial hub and, then, later structures including of course Meier’s Atheneum, the Johnson church, and the park where Tillich’s ashes were scattered.  In this regard, New Harmony is a bit like Nauvoo in Illinois, a town that bears traces of successive Mormon, Fourier, and Icarian communes although in Nauvoo, the Mormons have returned in force, rebuilt their temple, and, more or less, eradicated traces of the other utopias once on the site – the place is now full of wholesome LDS families recreating in the shadow of their grandiose alabaster temple.  

The first utopia erected on the banks of the Wabash was founded by Father Johann Georg Rapp, a Pietist who emigrated with his followers from Wurttemburg, Germany around 1805.  Rapp declared himself a prophet in 1791, much to the chagrin of the local authorities, and his sect separated from the Lutheran church with which he had earlier been affiliated.  Persecuted in the Old Country, Rapp with about 800 disciples crossed the Atlantic and set up a commune in Pennsylvania.  Rapp’s village, called “Harmonie” was well-organized according to sober and rational German principles and his flock was hardworking, They developed a peculiar business model – the group would found a town, make it prosperous, and, then, sell the place with all buildings, businesses, and factories at a great prophet, moving westward into what they called “the land of Israel” – that is, the United States.  In 1814, Rapp, who exercised complete authority over the commune, sold Harmonie to a group of Mennonites for a price ten-fold that which had been paid to acquire the site in 1805.  Rapp’s congregation moved en masse to the banks of the Wabash and founded a second “Harmonie” – this time called “New Harmony.”  

Father Rapp, as he was called, preached the return of Jesus within the lifetime of his congregation – indeed, he declared that Jesus would return in 1829 ending the reign of the Sun Woman, a being whose order prevailed in the present-day epoch. God ruled in heaven as a male principle next to Sophia, or Wisdom, the female avatar of the divine. Rapp said that Adam was a hermaphrodite with the genitals of both male and female and that man’s original fall occurred when this primordial figure divided into man and woman, thus instituting the fallen realm of disharmony.  Since sexual cleavage caused man’s fall, Rapp argued that “harmony” could only be achieved by a strict policy of celibacy.  A celibate society, in any event, was more productive economically because women could enter the work force, spared the drudgery of childbearing and child care.  Everyone worked in Rapp’s enterprises and the communes were financially successful and, in fact, remarkable harmonious.  

New Harmony flourished to the extent that Rapp decided that the enterprises which included a brick factory, a foundry that made nails and other iron objects, as well as a brewery that produced a much-admired beer (as well as a distilled spirits) should be sold.  Rapp transferred New Harmony, lock, stock, and barrel to Robert Owen in 1825.  Owen was a wealthy industrialist with textile factories at New Lanark, Wales.  But he was also a Utopian socialist and deist who declared that all institutional religions were equally false and pernicious.  In many respects, Owen was the opposite of Father Rapp in his beliefs and industrial practices.     

Owen transformed New Harmony into socialist community.  His plan was to build a great rampart around the enterprise, a three or four story wall with arcades and retail establishments on the ground level and worker housing above.  The wall-city would enclose a tract of meadows dotted with fairy-tale factories, all arches and turrets and decorated smoke-stacks.  (There are pictures showing this plan in schematic form.)  Owen had his workers begin firing bricks to build New Harmony after his vision, but things collapsed into disunity within two years – people in the surrounding country began to call the town “New Disharmony”.  By 1827, the community succumbed to internal dissension.  Owen built several other communities in the Midwest and upstate New York but they all failed as well. 

Owen pioneered the eight-hour day and the Workingman’s Institute was his innovation.  He subscribed to feminist principles and women were accorded equal rights.  Owen’s New Harmony was a liberal socialist utopia in contrast to Rapp’s authoritarian religious cult.  Thus, New Harmony bears traces of the two great paradigms in communism – the religious society organized along the lines of primitive communism as espoused in the Book of Acts and the rationally designed socialist utopia with centralized economic control.  

63.

Father Rapp and his celibate followers migrated back to Pennsylvania where they established a new commune called Economy.  With characteristic industry, the sect built new factories, a maze representing the labyrinth of the world, grottos and religious structures.  As good Germans, they loved music and were said to have a fine orchestra and bands.  Rapp miscalculated, however, when he invited Maximilian Count de Leon and his forty followers into his community.  Maximilian Count de Leon as he called himself (Bernard Mueller was his given name) said that he was the “Lion of Judah” and Jesus’ representative on earth.  Rapp’s commune had been in crisis after 1829 when Jesus didn’t return to Earth as the preacher had prophesied.  Mueller (Count de Leon) stirred up dissension in the community and, ultimately, Rapp, ever practical in his own way, had to buy out the Lion of Judah, paying him and his followers to depart on basis of a severance package in the sum of $105,000 – an enormous amount in that era.  (Rapp had sold all of New Harmony in Indiana to Robert Owen for about $200,000.)  The policy of celibacy, declared by Rapp as a result of a revelation, proved fatal to his commune.  Rapp died in 1847 and many left the community.  However, the last of its members survived into the 20th century and the commune wasn’t legally dissolved until1906.

Owen returned to Wales and wrote several books describing his radical ideas as to the economy.  His sons took up the cause of utopian socialism and many of his ideas (for instance public libraries and museums) became mainstays in both Europe and America.  (Owen’s daughter, Julia, remained in New Harmony and became a prominent advocate of public education in Indiana.)  Curiously, Owen survived his own death in 1858, communicating with the living until, at least,1871.  Owen had converted to spiritualism in 1854 at the age of 84 and spent the last years of his life corresponding with the illustrious deceased – Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and others came to him in trances and advised that these men with a choir of like-minded angels was conspiring to bring about an era of universal peace and happiness on earth.  In 1871, Owen dictated his last book to the British spiritualist Emma Harding Britten – the book was called The Seven Principles of Spiritualism.  Marx and Engels were both familiar with Owen’s ideology and, although they criticized his theories, both acknowledged him as a precursor.   

64.

On October 19, 1832, the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, with his patron Prince Maximilian von Wied, arrived in New Harmony, traveling by river-boat down the Wabash.  Bodmer’s task was to illustrate the Prince’s diary of his adventures in the New World and he made brisk, efficient sketches of the various places that he saw on his tour of the American rivers and the West.  (Today, Bodmer is most well-known for his portraits of Indian leaders and the documentary paintings that he made of the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians in what is now North Dakota – these tribes were largely wiped-out by small-pox a few years after Bodmer sketched them and his drawings, oil and watercolors, and engravings are important cultural records with respect to these people.)  Bodmer and Maximilian were interested in American fauna and flora and, so, they stayed several days in New Harmony, conferring several zoologists located in that place.  These scientists were affiliated with the Workingman’s Institute and, although Owen’s utopian experiment had collapsed five years earlier, some of the luminaries associated with his “Boatload of Knowledge” remained in the town.  

Bodmer made two notable images of the village.  One is a vantage drawn from the location of Meier’s Atheneum now at the edge of town.  The picture shows Father Rapp’s church, retrofitted with an octagonal tower spiked with a little lightning rod; some mundane-looking houses stand behind unpainted wooden fences and there’s some livestock and a man riding a horse that casts a little shadow on the lane that he is traversing.  I value the picture for its acute circumstantiality – some structural lumber, including a strange box tilted upright on a post pounded into the lawn, are strewn across the lawn under the tower.  To the left, clothing is drying on a line.

Bodmer’s other view of New Harmony is ambitious, and, perhaps, conventionally picturesque.  From a vantage on a low hill, we look down across an autumnal landscape to where the Wabash seems to bend into an oxbow.  Some old trees, all tangled in curlicues of thick vine stand like personages, gesturing over the landscape from the left.  In the center of the picture, in the middle distance, there’s another noble stand of trees, a copse with trunks hidden under a froth of green foliage.  New Harmony is pictured as a cluster of buildings, all shoved together by distance, an outcropping of structures including the octagonal tower, the heavy fortress of the Workingman’s Institute, and the Grange warehouse.  The village seems completely isolated in the wilderness and the engraving’s real subject, perhaps, is the various bare trees, blasted trunks, and gnarled branches that seem to be signaling (vainly) to the small, remote town.  On a path leading down the hillside to the village, two dappled hogs are visible – one is resting on its belly; the other seems to be ambling back down to the village.  It’s hard to make sense of this detail – is Bodmer telling us something about human nature, about piggishness, or are the animals a mere punctum, creatures that really were present on the afternoon in mid-October 1832 when the artist made the sketch later elaborated into the painting and its engraving?

65.

The highway across central Illinois to Springfield is two-lanes, a flat, abstract transit across level, empty plains.  There’s an Illinois State vehicle, with a government plate, ahead of us – sometimes, we pass the pale white car; sometimes, it passes us.  After eighty miles or so, we’re on a divided highway albeit one with many crossroads.  From the southwest, you come into town past big, stark grain elevators on which the profile of Abraham Lincoln has been painted.

66.

Julie is tired and stays at the motel.  It’s about 4 in the afternoon and I drive across town, twenty minutes, to see Lincoln’s grave.

The cemetery is mostly denuded; some sort of tree disease has swept through the gently rolling hills crowded with graves and little classical temples of the kind shown in the Telemachus wallpaper, mausoleums surrounded by thickets of granite tombstones.  Lincoln is buried under a towering obelisk with bronze soldiers and sailors from the great War of the Rebellion under fire, seemingly engaged in desperate combat in clusters at the corners of the pedestal upholding the monument.  The sky is darkening and the masses of troops gesticulating against the heavens are black, like perverse bouquets of roses clinging to the big stone spike.  The inside of the tomb is completely empty of visitors.  In fact, there are no signs of life anywhere in the cemetery except for some crows squabbling with one another atop the bare limbs of trees.   

The inside of the tomb seems buried miles deep in the hollow earth.  Richly colored marble corridors lead past several bronze statues of the Great Emancipator: Lincoln looks mournful, lost in deliberation; his gaunt form stands like a rustic topless pillar against the bright bands of veined stone comprising the walls and ceiling of the mortuary passage.  Lincoln looks down and seems to be weighing the words that he is about to speak.  Around the corner, a big porphyry altar, cut into glazed scrolls along its top, marks the shaft where Lincoln’s body is buried deep in a crypt below the obelisk.  The porphyry is polished to a sheen that reflects the lights embedded in the ceiling of this underground chamber.  (In fact, the chamber is at grade, but the impression that the place imparts is of a subterranean vault somewhere near the center of the Earth.)  The altar is the color of blood or raw meat, maybe, liver.  Inscriptions on the wall show where Lincoln’s wife, Mary Tod, is immured as well as three of their children.  The inside of the chambers seem clad in glass and there’s a floral scent in the air, the essence, I suppose, of the mountains of flowers that have been left in the corridors of this tomb over the decades.

Emerging from underground, there’s still a pinkish ribbon of light stretched taut against the western horizon.  In the hollow places between tombs, some snow is still cupped, dirty and decaying.  A good-looking man drives up in a sports car, dismounts, and a showy woman with blonde hair follows him from his convertible to the portrait bust of Lincoln, big as a globe of the earth, perched on a vertical upthrust slab of granite.  Lincoln’s bronze nose is smooth, glazed by touch, a bright mirror in the middle of his face.  The man stands by the bust and strokes Lincoln’s bronze nose and, then, the woman also caresses the nose.  Some birds flying overhead honk at the encroaching darkness.  The man’s phone rings and he fishes the device from his breast pocket and says: “Well, I’m just now standing next to the place where a guy named Lincoln is buried.”  He laughs.  Still talking on the cell-phone, the handsome sportsman returns to his car and gets back in.  The blonde woman follows and, a minute later, they are gone, tail-lights vanishing among the tombs. 

I return to my car.  The soldiers and sailors at the corners of the monument seem to be desperately signaling for aid.  The clumps of military men in agitated action are like shipwrecked sailors, waving their hands in the air in hope of rescue.  But no one will come to their aid.  The darkness increases and the quadrant of the City of Springfield where Lincoln is buried is poor, sad, decrepit, the houses in disrepair with little dirty yards and the intersections hopeless with veiled, claustrophobic bars and closed clinics and shuttered retail establishments ruined by COVID.  It seems to take a long time to get back to the hotel.  

67.

An hour later, Julie and I are at Blue Margarita, a Mexican restaurant a quarter-mile from our hotel. It’s become cold outside and the night is dark.  There are only four or five people dining in the restaurant.  The booths are made from some kind of dark, funereal wood and intricately carved.  Pictures of bright, sun-burnt villages decorate the walls.  I have an eponymous drink, blue as the sea off Cancun.  I’ve ordered soup and enchiladas rojas.  The soup comes in an enormous bowl, big as a  skull.  In the broth, I find tangles of tortilla, onion, shredded chicken, potatoes, chili peppers, some hominy, round black beans, bits of jicama and sour, acid tomatillo all swirled together with fat finger-long slices of bright green avocado – it seems that just about everything in the world is floating in the soup and it’s very good.   

February 16, 2023