The Road Trip to the East

A short detour to Greenwood, Missouri

My July road trip thus far — Highway 99, Bakersfield, desert, Barstow — raised my expectations for Flagstaff, Arizona, a town I have visited numerous times. I also have family who live there. The sight of Mt Humphreys promised relief from the heat and cooler air, the fulfillment of which would be a dinner on an outdoor patio with a breeze wafting over me and my family.

Dinner with family was enjoyable and relaxed as usual. The air was indeed fresher than the desert air, since the city was about 7,000 feet above the desert I had just driven through. But it was still hot. Heavy traffic within town, even in summer, was unexpected. Since 2017, the last time I was there, Flagstaff had absorbed thousands of emigrés from Phoenix fleeing the extraordinary temperatures there.

I understand the impetus. Having lived in Phoenix from 1995 to 2000, I’m no stranger to 105+ degrees. The novelty lay in the number of days in a row the temperature stood above 105. When I moved there in 1995, I drove a Honda Civic with no air conditioning. The day of my arrival coincided a record 3 straight days of above 112 degrees. At one intersection, traffic suddenly intensified. I was already dripping sweat. All the car windows were open in my hope that movement would reduce the heat of the air. The atmosphere gave me a bear hug that brought me closest to the sensation of being roasted I’d ever been. At a red light, I wondered how much longer I could stand it. The light turned green. The driver ahead of me didn’t move fast enough for me. In a split second, I realized I had a choice. I could either ram my car into the rear fender of the car ahead of me or I could cry. Tears streamed down my face. What had I gotten myself into? How do people live like this?

Once I bought a new car with a/c, I swore to myself that if I had a chance to find a job elsewhere, I would never live in such a hot climate again. The appeal of emigrating to Scotland began right there in 1995. Instead, I eventually wound up teaching at the university in Davis, a small California town with a hot climate. The evening breezes from the Sacramento Delta made it bearable, but I have never taken to beige landscapes.

Back in Flagstaff, the desert climate was still too close. Only a few years ago, Flagstaff was cool in temperature and culture. But no longer. Urban sprawl had arrived. New residents from southern Arizona have belatedly discovered that there is no place left to run without leaving the Southwest altogether.

After one night in Flag, I drove on. A night in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, was followed by a long day driving to Oklahoma City, where I spent the night at the home of friends and their year-old baby. It was an delightful evening of pure chaos amidst which we consumed some excellent homemade carnitas and homemade tortillas. I marvelled at the parents managing the mayhem created by a not quite ambulatory one year old, a rambunctious one year old golden retriever, my dog Billie, and a veteran cat. Their big puppy roughhoused with the baby on the floor. Billie suddenly noticed the cat on the counter and started barking up at it. When not tumbling the baby around the floor, the puppy tried to do the same with Billie, who was having none of it. Deserted by the puppy, the baby tried and failed to scale stools and sofa sections. Meanwhile, the mother patted out tortillas and made the salsa verde, while the father put the finishing touches to the carnitas he made, both of them seemingly indifferent to the racket but covertly laser-focused. When Billie leapt into her basket for safety, the mother swept her arm through the handle and swung it up on the kitchen counter. The crisp, juicy carnitas and homemade tortillas mellowed everyone out, including the animals, fortunately.

Next morning, heading northeast to Missouri, I stopped in Tulsa. Visiting the Greenwood district has been on my mind since the 100th anniversary of the attack on “Black Wall Street” came and went in 2021. In that year, The New York Times published an interactive piece on their website that visually recreated what was lost when white vigilantes destroyed the neighborhood, famous as the “Black Wall Street,” and massacred many of its residents. Now, in the city where it happened, I searched online for directions to the area.

As soon as I got out of my car in the heat of the day, with Billie tucked into her pouch, I recognized from old photos the two-storied, red brick buildings on either side of the short remaining block of a now gone street. I examined the mural and informational panels on the corner. Across from this one surviving block stood the museum.

The Greenwood Rising Black Wall St. History Center was small, modern and monumental in its architecture, like so many other recently built museums: concrete, angular, top-heavy, windowless. A quotation from James Baldwin was chiseled into the grey brick wall outside the entrance.

Baldwin’s meaning seems obvious, that is to say, if a consensus of Americans does not acknowledge the nature and extent of the injustices committed in the creation of the United States, the nation’s faultlines will always be vulnerable to a sudden, violent separation of subterranean plates. In fact, the essay from which the quotation was pulled seems to be only tangentially related to the problem of race in US history.

On January 14, 1962, The New York Times printed an essay by Baldwin about the supposed debt his post-World War II generation of writers owed to the supposedly greater generation of writers after World War I, represented by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Faulkner. At first, this suggests that by mounting Baldwin’s words on the wall of the Greenwood Rising Wall St History Center his words have been detached from their original context. Instead, the quotation seems to me to be an example of Baldwin’s powerful moral vision operating in all his work. Whether he is reflecting on literature or on white and black Americans’ fraught relationship with each other, art, he insists, demands honesty.

“In my mind, the effort to become a great novelist simply involves attempting to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more.”

Baldwin attributes Hemingway’s and Faulkner’s decline as proof that telling the truth is a moral action most artists can only manage for part of their careers as a result of the pain that telling the truth entails. In other words, creativity requires an honesty that draws blood, whether the artist’s or the audience’s. An artist must have the courage to face the truth without knowing what comes next, the metaphorical step off a cliff into the unknown. Each generation, including Baldwin’s, attempts to respond truthfully to its own political and moral environment.

Without spelling it out, Baldwin focuses the remainder of his essay on the most painful truth Americans must face up to: the costs of building this nation. In his mind, facing that truth is a condition “where innocence _must_ die, if we are ever to begin that journey toward the greater innocence called wisdom.” The trouble, he writes, is in us. The greatness of Baldwin’s words and wisdom lies in his ability to transcend the issue of race while never losing sight of it.

I was glad to sit for some minutes on a stone ledge. I was curious to see the kind of people who visited. Most visitors were black Americans, mostly couples, a few families. I was heartened to see white couples on their own and in the company of black couples visiting the building. If I had thought it through before I arrived, I would have tried to speak to the people coming out the museum. What had they known before they went in? What I really wanted to ask was why did they come? Simple curiosity? History buffs?

It was time to drive on.