Cyclist discovers voices of hope and anxiety on a 700-mile ride across the Gulf South
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
It's Independence Day, and this year finds the U.S. restless, divided and grouchy. We wanted to hear what people are thinking about in small towns. And as it happens, Reporter John Burnett rode a bicycle through the Gulf South this spring and took a recorder with him. Here is his audio road journal.
JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: When reporters venture out to survey regular folks - gathering vox, we call it in the trade - we usually have a list of questions or issues. Not this trip - I spent two weeks on a bicycle in early April, pedaling from St. Augustine, Fla., to New Orleans, La. I'd climb off the saddle, introduce myself, and ask simply, what are you concerned about?
LAKESHA HILLS: Safety for my children, for them to remain kids and keep that innocence as long as they can.
BURNETT: Lakesha Hills is a 40-year-old correctional officer at a state prison in Florida. Her kids are 13, 11 and 6 months. I caught up with her taking a walk on her day off in her hometown of Florahome. It's a quiet, leafy settlement a half-hour east of Gainesville, where people still practice old-fashioned politeness.
HILLS: It's still holding on to what we lost years ago, when television stopped going off (laughter) - that innocence.
BURNETT: Did you say when television...
HILLS: Stopped going off - you don't remember when TV used to go off at 11 o'clock? They'd play the national anthem. And then for the rest of the night, it was like that (vocalizing) until 5 o'clock, when the news came on. So let's go to bed. Let's calm down.
BURNETT: And try to live life before TV stayed on 24 hours.
HILLS: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.
(SOUNDBITE OF BICYCLE WHEEL SPINNING)
BURNETT: From a bicycle, the Florida panhandle is lush and inviting - tall trees bearded with Spanish moss, crystal-clear water ponding on the roadsides, cafe specials for fried green tomatoes and shrimp and grits. Traffic is usually light on U.S. 90, part of the U.S. bicycle route system.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAR PASSING)
BURNETT: Of the two dozen folks I talked to, they were worried about, in no particular order, grocery prices, immigration, errant children, toxic social media and polarized America.
In the town of Alachua, northwest of Gainesville, a financial adviser named Weston Gallop was overseeing his daughters at a car wash, raising money for cheerleading camp. He lamented the loss of e pluribus unum - out of many, one.
WESTON GALLOP: If you're Democrat, I'm Republican, we can't even do what we're doing now. It's - you got to fit in my box, and there's nothing else that - to be discussed.
BURNETT: But Gallop said he thinks folks are overly pessimistic.
GALLOP: I feel like we're just fed negative news constantly, and we dwell on it. And I think there's so much more than that. There is hope and positivity. And we see that a lot of times in a small town, you know, just different folks helping others in need.
BURNETT: Continuing westward, I wheeled into Quincy, Fla., not far from the Georgia state line, and wandered into a boutique gift shop on the historic courthouse square. John Henson is the owner of the White Rabbit Market.
JOHN HENSON: Quincy is a beautiful, small, Southern town with a rich heritage of Coca-Cola history, tobacco history. I grew up here. I lived in Tallahassee for 20 years and then moved back here about five years ago.
BURNETT: John and his husband, Robby, were married last year at the local Presbyterian church in Quincy.
HENSON: It's surprisingly been very open and accepting.
BURNETT: And you're here in the Bible Belt.
HENSON: Yes. Times are changing, and people are changing with it.
(SOUNDBITE OF BICYCLE WHEEL SPINNING)
BURNETT: On a lazy Sunday, I pulled into Suwannee River State Park in North Florida and spotted a middle-aged couple eating lunch by their pickup. Chris Campbell is an electric power line worker. His girlfriend, Angie Sutton, is an auditor and former Air Force. They were wearing matching T-shirts that said, we, the people, are ticked off, but the wording was much stronger. Among their gripes - inflation, immigration and foreign aid, crime and homelessness where they live in Tallahassee. So I asked if they were hopeful about anything.
ANGIE SUTTON: I don't see any hope anywhere right now. I really don't. All we can do is prepare for what might come. And that means ammunition. That means buy - we're talking about buying rice and beans in case [expletive] really goes down. It's bad right now. I don't know...
CHRIS CAMPBELL: The border crisis - people are just pouring across. I mean, and then they're saying all of them have all these rights, and they're not U.S. citizens. They just don't have any rights until they go through the procedures.
BURNETT: I deliberately did not ask people who they're voting for in November. But Donald Trump's motto, make America great again, seemed to hover over this conversation.
SUTTON: I can remember just being so proud to be, you know, a United States citizen, and I was born here, and this was my country. And now it's just - it's almost embarrassing. I mean, it's true. It's nothing like it was when we were growing up. It's terrible.
BURNETT: Terrible means something different for every generation. She was born in 1978. In 1961, when Alphonso Petway was a teenager, he was thrown in jail for drinking from a whites-only water fountain. I met him in Bayou La Batre, Ala. He's 79 now, a retired AME minister, an old man in overalls sitting beside the bayou with a fishing pole.
What are you fishing for today?
ALPHONSO PETWAY: Red fish, white trout, drum, flounder.
BURNETT: Reverend Petway was a Freedom Rider - in his case, one of the few who flew. When the other Freedom Riders were trying to desegregate interstate buses, young Petway, his older sister and their father took a Delta Airlines flight into the Jackson, Miss., airport. As police stood by, they refused to use the water fountain designated for Black people. They were arrested for disturbing the peace. His police booking photo is on his business card.
PETWAY: There's my mug shot there. At the age of 16 years old, I was in Hinds County Jail. Me and my daddy shared a cell together for trying to get a drink of water.
BURNETT: They were released three days later. The experience deeply affected Petway, and he committed his life to racial justice.
PETWAY: If you're trying to go back to the '50s or '60s and talk about making America great again and, you know, that kind of thing, and that's what you think a great America is, you know, if you aren't careful, you'll have colored and white signs up at the water fountains again (laughter).
BURNETT: As my bicycle odyssey from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River neared an end, one of my final interviews was in the artsy town of Ocean Springs, Miss.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC BOX PLAYING)
MERILEIGH MINER FURR: This is a pretty one. This is more jolly.
BURNETT: On Washington Avenue is Miner's Toy Shop. They sell hand-cranked music boxes.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC BOX PLAYING)
BURNETT: The woman behind the counter was Merileigh Miner Furr. The destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina looms large in the collective memory of this stretch of the Gulf Coast. Temporal existence is uncertain. And so her watchword is to always live her best life.
MINER FURR: To me, to live in integrity is very important. And I've decided that that is the only little part of the world that I have any influence or control on.
BURNETT: Miner, too, believes the current political and cultural chasm in the country is unnecessary and unnatural.
MINER FURR: I think the noisiest people are the most pessimistic people. And the optimists don't get heard, or maybe they're just quiet, but I know they're there. So I think America is going to be great.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAR PASSING)
BURNETT: Voices, mostly hopeful, from the rural Gulf South, 248 years into the great American experiment.
For NPR News, I'm John Burnett on U.S. Route 90.
(SOUNDBITE OF LOUIS ARMSTRONG SONG, "LA VIE EN ROSE")
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