Where to begin? With the lanky saxophonist on St. Charles Street that I persuaded to let me take a silhouette of him? At the fragment of the confederate flag lying on the grass at the Cedar Hill Cemetery in Vicksburg? Or at the Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, where Jadyne and I joined four hundred voices singing "We Shall Overcome" loudly enough to awaken its former pastor, Martin Luther King? Eight days later, an amazing sequence of events turning what we had hoped to be an interesting journey into something far more interesting, inspirational, and heart-warming.
So the beginning. We spent our first day and a half in the Garden District of New Orleans, taking the St. Charles Streetcar ($.40 for seniors) to the end of the line (Canal Street), then meandering through the French Quarter, stopping for the first of three times at Café Du Monde for beignets. Our New Orleans adventures are chronicled below:
Leaving New Orleans we stopped at the photogenic Oak Alley Plantation, then headed north to Vicksburg, pausing at Natchez just to see St. Mary's Basilica, an out-of-place Italian Renaissance Cathedral in a sleepy 19th century Mississippi River Town. We saw the cathedral. And so much more.
From Natchez to Vicksburg and the Vicksburg National Military Park, commemorating the months long siege at Vicksburg, a turning point in the Civil War. We also visited the Cedar Hill Cemetery, where thousands of the Confederate dead are buried.
We left Vicksburg for Jackson, meeting the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus and the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir on the steps of the State Capitol building for an impromptu photo op, before heading down the street for the Mississippi State Fair.
A magnificent concert in Jackson, Mississippi, then a three and a half hour drive to Selma, Alabama, where in the company of four hundred other voices belonging to the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus and the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir we sang "We Shall Overcome" in the Brown Chapel, the church where Martin Luther King organized the Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus bridge.
Jadyne and I left the next day for Montgomery, where we visited the Civil Rights Museum, the Rosa Parks Museum, and the home where MLK lived when he was pastor at the church. On our drive home, we stopped at Monroeville, AL, Harper Lee and Truman Capote's hometown, (they were friends), before bedding down in Biloxi, then heading back for one more morning in New Orleans.