I hit the road early and departed Texarkana, this time for good. I drove back down to Shreveport to meet another cousin, this time on my mother’s side, for lunch. By pure coincidence, the restaurant we were meeting at was located on the boardwalk I had just been the previous afternoon. Cousin George had been not just my mom’s cousin but her best friend growing up, and after we had ordered and taken our seats, talk almost immediately turned to her.
My mother died from cancer in 2002, just a year after my father passed away. She successfully fought off cancer in 1993, and there were no signs of it coming back until it was too late. After she was gone, my younger brothers and I were cared for by my father’s youngest sister, Nancy.
“We all couldn’t believe what happened to Lynda. I just wish she had let us know sooner.” George’s bottom lip began to quiver and tears started rolling down his cheeks. I changed the subject before I started crying too. “Tell me about Mary and D.C.”
As stated before, the problem with not being raised by your parents is a limited access of family history. But unlike my paternal grandparents, my maternal grandparents lived long enough for me to know them, but not for long. I have mostly fuzzy memories of always being delighted to see them, but I never really knew who they were as people. I was surprised when George told me they lived a life of mostly hardship. “I always felt bad that Lynda didn’t have as much as my family. They made do, but that was about it.”
My grandfather D.C. was a fairly successful salesman, but at some point decided that he was called to be a preacher instead of a businessman. This is fine and noble, but unfortunately doing the Lord’s work doesn’t pay that well, unless you’re on TBN or are Joel Osteen. To pick up the slack, my grandmother became a real estate agent. “Mary was the strongest woman I’ve ever known,” George said. And if my grandparents had lived a hard life, the end of their story could be considered tragic. Mary developed breast cancer, but it seemed as if she would pull through. When things were looking up, D. C. contracted pneumonia and was hospital-ridden. Mary’s cancer came back badly, and she died while D.C. was in the hospital, who was too sick to even attend her funeral. Though he recovered temporarily, he passed away within a month of Mary.
Discussion turned to Shreveport, what I was going to do with my life, and other family members. After a good meal and equally good conversation, I told George that I regrettably had to leave and head east, wanting to cover the width of Louisiana and get to my hotel in Mississippi before nightfall. We parted ways, and I climbed on I-20, which would be my companion for the next few days. I would be following the highway from Shreveport to Jackson, Mississippi’s capitol city, then Birmingham, the largest city in Alabama, and finally to Atlanta, Georgia.
Along the way to Mississippi I exited at Ruston, a modest-sized college town about halfway across northern Louisiana. I didn’t know much about Ruston, except that my mother had lived there when she was a child. It turned out that there isn’t really much to know about Ruston. The city was born as a crossroads whose economy relied on the passing trade, but now it mostly plays host to Louisiana Tech University and its 10,000+ student population. While this doesn’t make Louisiana Tech a huge school, it is large enough to support the town’s economy. Driving through the town, it seemed that the university was all there was. I looked for a Main Street, or some old downtown area by which I could look back into the history of Ruston, but I could only find acres and continuing acres of college campus. I stopped at a gas station to fill the tank, and continued on to Mississippi.
As I was leaving Louisiana, I came across the first major geographical landmark of my journey, a feature that has defined the very core of the United States. I had never seen the Mississippi River before, and as someone who has lived 6 hours from the country’s largest river for the majority of his life, that was wrong. I was actually surprised at how narrow it was, only taking a few seconds to cross. Though it didn’t seem like much, I looked northwards, upstream, and thought of the importance of the Mississippi. It shapes the boundary of ten of states, influenced the country’s political, military, and economic history, and serves some relationship with over half of the US. About fifty feet north of where I-20 crossed the river stood the remnants of the Old Vicksburg Bridge, which used to serve the public when I-20 was only US-80. Now it serves a single rail line between Louisiana and Mississippi. I tried to imagine the former glory of the bridge, in contrast to the constant presence of the river below, and it occurred to me that even though I wasn’t terribly impressed with the size of the Mississippi, it didn’t care, as it was there long before I drove across it, and it will be there long afterwards.
Soon after I crossed the state border, I arrived at Jackson, though my day would not be over as easily as finding the city. I took I-55 north as it branched off of I-20, and drove into, then out of, downtown Jackson without any luck of finding the street my hotel was on. In a theme of being lost that I would encounter time and again during my journey, I repeated this exercise multiple times, getting back on I-55, exiting into downtown, and driving completely through the city, with no luck of finding my destination. Eventually I found myself at Jackson State University, which I figured would be as good a place as any to stop and ask for directions. I entered the first building I saw, which happened to be the college gymnasium, and asked the students working the reception desk if they had heard of Greymont Street. They were no help, but a woman who had overheard my query came over and told me how to get there. This would have been great, had it not been the exact way I had been hopelessly repeating over the last hour. I decided to retrace the route a final time, and this time I saw the street entrance out of the corner of my eye. I don’t know who decided to put 3 major motels on a road that was not much bigger than an average sidewalk, but they must not want those motels in business for very long. Triumphantly, I checked into my room and flopped down on the bed, having driven 300 miles over the majority of the day. I resolved that I wasn’t getting back into the car for the rest of the night, and I didn’t.
