“Vicksburg is the Key” – Part 3: My Journey

We all come from the past,

and children ought to know

what it was that went into their making,

to know that life is a braided cord of humanity

stretching up from time long gone,

and that it cannot be defined by the span
of a single journey from diaper to shroud.

 – Russell Baker, Growing Up

It’s hard to believe that I barely knew anything about G. Oliver Riggs four years ago.  My research has unearthed an abundance of surprising discoveries and meaningful stories.  And occasionally, I've stumbled upon some interesting coincidences:

• G. Oliver’s father, Jasper Riggs, lived for many years in the town of Joy, Illinois.
• G. Oliver was born in Louisa County, Iowa, which my Iowa-born husband and I didn’t know when we named our daughter Louisa.
• G. Oliver was a master of PR, and much of his music career is detailed in newspaper accounts.  I grew up to be a journalist with a keen interest in history and music, and much of my career can be traced through my newspaper articles.

And then, there’s my family’s history with Vicksburg.  These coincidences make me wonder about the invisible connections between generations.  How often do we unknowingly follow in the footsteps of our ancestors?

• • • 

It was in Memphis that the impact of what I’d done smacked me in the face – or, more accurately, assailed my Yankee ears.  Dad and I had parked at a fast-food restaurant and walked inside to stretch our legs and order a meal.  The teenager behind the counter spoke, and the unrecognizable words that issued from her mouth could have been Portuguese, they were so different from my Minnesotan, long-o accented speech.

“Yawlredde te ahwda?”

I glanced at my dad, uncertain how to respond.  What in the world had she just said?

For a few uncomfortable seconds, we froze.

“I’m sorry, could please you repeat that?” Dad said politely.

She looked at us as though we were stupid and repeated what to her was a perfectly simple question: “Y’all ready to order?”

Through a clumsy method of pointing and emphasizing key words loudly, we communicated an adequate answer, while a more important question lodged in my mind: “What have I done?” 

I continued to ponder this as we left the restaurant and drove the final five hours of our 25-hour journey from Alexandria, Minn., to Natchez, Miss.  What I had done, what seemed like such a great opportunity and now seemed like a regrettable mistake, was accept a reporting internship at The Natchez Democrat for the summer of 1998, after my sophomore year of college at Drake University.  As soon as I checked in at my place of employment and got settled at my temporary apartment, my dad would fly home and I’d be on my own in this land below the Mason-Dixon line.  Even though I knew the chances were good that I’d survive – Heather, the previous summer’s intern, had returned to Drake with encouraging anecdotes and impressive newspaper clips – my courage faltered.

Me in front of the newspaper office, July 1988.

Things might have been different if I’d known then what I know now:  I wasn’t the first 20-year-old in my family to leave familiar surroundings in the North for a job in Mississippi.  My great-great grandfather, Jasper, arrived in the Magnolia State in 1862 as a member of Grant’s Army of the Tennessee.  If Jasper, too, felt fear and uncertainty, he had far more reason than I.  No one was trying to kill me.  I was just trying to be understood.

Communication problems persisted during my first few weeks at the newspaper.  My very first interview subject was a hard-of-hearing, elderly black woman.  As I began to ask her questions, I knew I was in trouble.  She couldn’t hear me, and I couldn’t understand her, even though we were both technically speaking the same language.  If I hadn’t received translation assistance from the photographer who’d accompanied me, I would have been sunk.

I discovered that summer that words weren’t the only stumbling block.  I had a new culture to absorb, in a place where most residents were as clueless about Minnesota as I’d been about Mississippi.  People generally were friendly and curious about why I’d come to their town, even though I was a Yankee, and they still referred to the Civil War as the War Between the States or the War of Northern Aggression.

I learned to speak more slowly, and I learned why Southerners move more slowly and take longer lunches – it’s so oppressively humid in the summer, you can’t do anything quickly.  I learned to rethink some of the assumptions I’d made about the South, gained from reading Gone with the Wind and watching episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard.  I did meet some good ole boys, like the Vidalia, La., sheriff who didn’t think females should worry their pretty little heads about gaining access to public records.  I also met many well educated professionals who were dedicated to improving education, health care and other quality of life issues.

For a young, white woman from a mostly white small town in central Minnesota, it was such an eye-opening and rewarding experience that after I graduated from college in June 1990 and completed a fellowship in Indianapolis that summer, I returned to Natchez and worked for about a year as a general assignment reporter.  One of my assignments that year was to cover a seven-day libel trial in Vicksburg involving a white county clerk and a black journalist who worked for Newsweek and was originally from Natchez, Vern E. Smith (in an interesting sidenote, after the jury found that the Newsweek article did not defame the clerk, he appealed.  Elena Kagan, the newest U.S. Supreme Court Justice, was one of Newsweek’s lawyers for the appeal).

These are the experiences I carried with me when I returned to Vicksburg last month with Steve and the kids, this time tracing the paths of Jasper, who’d fought at Vicksburg, and G. Oliver, who visited the city in 1906 as part of a delegation that dedicated the Iowa State Memorial at the military park.

We stopped first outside the old courthouse.  Built by slave labor and completed in 1858, the building now houses a museum.  This is where the Confederate flag flew during the Campaign and Siege of Vicksburg and was visible from almost any point along the Union line.  When Confederate Gen. Pemberton surrendered, the flag was replaced with the Stars and Stripes, and 30,000 liberated men and women came to Vicksburg.  The U.S. Army built schools for the freedmen, and for a time after the war Vicksburg was a model of reconstruction.

In front of the Old Courthouse in Vicksburg, Miss.

It was moving to stand in front of the courthouse, on one of the highest hills in the city, and ponder how far our country has come in 150 years.  The struggles and accomplishments on civil rights issues feel more personal because of my family’s own ties to this Mississippi River city.  My great-great grandfather fought here to preserve the Union.  His son, G. Oliver, visited in 1906 during the tenure of Mississippi Gov. James Vardaman, who advocated white supremacy.  And now, I was visiting with my kids in 2010, two years after our country elected its first African-American president.

Although we’ve taken steps backwards at times, I choose to remain optimistic that my kids and their generation will continue on the path of progress.  I hope they take their own kids on a pilgrimage to Vicksburg someday, and add their stories to the braided cord of our family history.