The Tennessee Two

Thanks to poor internet connectivity at the Holiday Inn Select we're staying at, we weren't able to post last night. So you'll have to endure two days of our trip at once. Fortunately, they were both fairly low-key days, especially a 2-hour stopover at the Coin Express laundromat on 21st street in Nashville today (recommended!) with our coffee and a copy of the New York Times. It was like being back in Brooklyn.

Yesterday morning, we spent our last two hours in Memphis hitting a few sites associated with the American Civil War, or, if you're a monument in the South mentioning the Civil War, the "War Between the States". As it turns out, Confederate Park was located directly across from our hotel, overlooking the mighty Mississippi river. The site marks an important spot for the Second Battle of Memphis, in 1864, when Confederate forces briefly took the city. A large plaque installed by the "Confederate Dames" in 1909 details this battle -- making specific mention of the Union generals who hid or fled during the battle -- and also mentions the First Battle of Memphis, in which Union naval forces crushed the South's navy... although you need to read between the lines to figure this out. The South is full of plaques and parks like this, honoring Confederate victories and valor etc., mostly installed between 1890 and 1930 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. This was the period when the South did a fantastic job of retroactively winning the Civil War -- or rather, winning its memory -- by rewriting the way the war was remembered. In short, this meant establishing that (1) both sides fought in the Civil War for noble and glorious reasons (and not for the preservation of slavery, even though it was added as a specific right in the hastily-assembled Confederate Constitution), and (2) both sides must surely agree that Reconstruction was a misguided and corrupt enterprise. By the 1950s, historians started to question this approach, leading to a trickle (and later of flood) of books arguing that the Civil War was not necessarily a noble undertaking for either side, and that Reconstruction wasn't all bad by any means. Still, the Southern view of the Civil War and its aftermath lives on, thanks to monuments like the one of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Confederate Park (noted as a "True American Patriot" on the monument pictured above) and the successful addition of anti-northern terms like "carpetbagger" and "scalawag" to our vocabulary -- terms still being taught without an explanation of possible bias when I was in high school in the early 1990s.

From Confederate Park, we headed to Nathan Bedford Forrest park, something we had to see to believe. Sure enough, in the center of Memphis -- a city that is 61% African-American -- is a park named for the hero of the Second Battle of Memphis, but also the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (although his defenders argue that he really tried to disband the Klan...). Underneath this equestrian statue of Forrest are his mortal remains.

After this, we hopped in the car and headed for Nashville. At 3 hours, it seemed like a mercifully short drive in our trip. Along the way, we detoured to Franklin, a small community about 30 miles outside Nashville, with beautifully-preserved old homes and a walkable, high-end town center.

We arrived in Nashville around 3 PM. Here's what we discovered quickly: Nashville, while definitely the home of country music, is also a hip, East Coast kind of place, with lots of construction, renovation, and innovation visible most places we went. We stayed across from Centennial Park and its famous replica of the Parthenon (modeled on the Parthenon before the Ottomans managed to accidentially destroy it, and 7th Earl of Elgin made off with its statues).

We had dinner (both last night and tonight) in Hillsboro Village, an active part of town near the Vanderbilt campus. (I got accepted to Vanderbilt, but did not attend -- a good thing, or else I would not have met D). We also wound-up having breakfast there today at the excellent Pancake Pantry after the aforementioned respite at the laundromat up the road.

This afternoon, I managed to drag D over to Tennessee's capitol building so we could visit the grave of American's 11th President, James K. Polk. D and I met in college through a pseudo-political debating society that chiefly consisted of members trying to publicly create the most absurd debate arguments possible while clandestinely circulating alcohol around the room in new and innovative ways. President Polk was the patron saint of our organization, because (1) he fulfilled all of his campaign platform promises, and (2) more importantly, there was an eponymously named, very wordy They Might Be Giants b-side (later remade for one of their albums) that detailed Polk's career. We took a few pictures at Polk's grave site (including this "Hey! Look who we found!" one), apparently raising the suspicion of a capitol guard who eyed us curiously until we left. Our guess is that President Polk doesn't get a lot of visitors these days.

We also passed statues (but not the mortal remains) of Presidents Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson (the two Drews?) on the grounds before coming across this interesting statue of Alvin York, a hero of the First World War who single-handedly killed 28 Germans and took another 128 prisoner in the closing days of the war.

We also passed the War Memorial Building, built to honor WWI veterans, and surrounded by later memorials to the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. The base of the Korean monument was marked with the words, "Where Communistic Military Aggression Was Defeated", an accurate but awkward way of describing the Korean War. (A similar claim is absent, unfortunately, from the nearby Vietnam War memorial).

(D's note: If it looks like P dragged me all around Nashville looking at relatively boring monuments, well, that's because he did. But I love him anyway. And he agreed to join me after dinner Tuesday night at the Douglas Corner Cafe for open mic night, for which I love him even more. If you're ever in Nashville on a Tuesday night, head on over to this place (though probably best not to walk there... we did - a nearly 3 mile walk - and it's not in the best neighborhood). No cover, $5 beers, and singer-songwriters that were really good (mostly). In general, it was really nice to just chill in Nashville. We did not go to any museums and, monuments aside, we spent most of our time just strolling around Vanderbilt University and its environs. Ahhh, to be a college student again. I especially liked sitting next to a neo-hippie undergrad at breakfast and overhearing him exclaim: "I agree God blesses America, but what about all the other countries? I mean, dude, God loves Iraqis, too!" Loved it.)

Tuesday's step count: 13,000+.
Wednesday: 17,000+.

Tomorrow, we'll be trying to catch-up with the Olympic torch. Or, driving to Charleston. One or the other.