A SHORT TIRADE

NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI: MARCH 25
A parade of chuches marched through my head as I lay in bed at the Day Inn motel in Natchez. I intended spending a day here admiring the architecture. Natchez is pretty-pretty. Trees shade Southern houses. Southern houses have pillars. Pillars are romantic. So is the South. And the South is gallant. Both Hollywood and Southern tourism projects the image. Visit an old plantation house, inspect the slave hovels. Tourists go home happy...they have flirted with history.
Sadly, it is too recent a history for years to have softened the evil. Slavery existed in the South during my great grandfather's lifetime.
Racial segregation continued into my adult years...And Jews were banned from resorts and great hotels, not only in the South, but in New York City and Chicago and San Francisco - Restricted Clientele was the euphemism.

Institutional segregation and anti-Semitism continued through the Presidencies of Truman and Eisenhower. We knew of the Holocaust. We had seen film of Dachau and Belsen and of Ravensbruck where my Aunt Helen's sister was executed.
This is very recent history. The white elders of the myriad churches here in the South were complicit as are the white Southern pastors of my generation.
This is not company that I wish to keep.
I shall move on tomorrow.

CHRISTIANITY IS A CASINO

NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI: MARCH 25
I have cruised, on this journey, the Beagle Channel and the Madeira River, crossed the Amazon, Orinoco, Panama Canal and Rio Grande (a muddy trickle). This evening I ride across the Mississippi into Natchez. The Southern States are a fine market for white paint: first the churches, now a casino disguised as a virginal white paddle steamer moored up-stream. Life is a gamble. So is the after-life. Pick your Christian sect or pick your number on the roulette wheel.