Travel: A road trip through the US' Deep South
A road trip through Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee reveals the weight of civil rights history and its contradictions in small-town America
The alligator was approximately 8ft, lying motionless in the dappled shade of a bald cypress whose roots plunged into the green waters of the Atchafalaya Basin. Captain Mark, our guide from Cajun Customized Excursions, cut the engine of his boat to a murmur and let it drift closer. The gator tracked our approach with the bored menace of a species that has survived 200 million years by practising patience.
“He knows I’m not bringing snacks," Mark drawled. “These gators, they’re wild. Not like those tourist ones that come running when they hear a boat engine."
This distinction mattered. We’d driven from Dallas specifically to see the Atchafalaya in Louisiana in its natural state. Mark and his wife Peggy love this wilderness, where Spanish moss hangs like wizened beards from ancient trees and herons and spoonbills stalk the shallows with the focus of assassins. The Atchafalaya Basin sprawls across 1.4 million acres, America’s largest river swamp, and follows its own rhythms, unmoved by the Interstate 10 bridge that spans its waters mere miles distant.
From the hush of the swamp, we drifted into the riotous colour of New Orleans. Here jazz spills from doorways, the scent of jambalaya competing with the whiff of beer and daiquiris. The French Quarter is many things, but subtle isn’t one of them. It is loud, vibrant and peppered with plaques and architecture that span two centuries. On our second evening, we drove to Bacchanal, a wine shop turned garden restaurant in the Bywater neighbourhood away from the frenzy of downtown. A three-piece jazz ensemble played standards while we lingered over a cheese plate and a bottle of something French. The music wasn’t background; it was conversation. This was New Orleans beyond the tourist zone, where the emphasis is on slowness and on savouring.
Since I have a weakness for World War II history, the pull of the National World War II Museum the next morning was beyond resistance. The museum is vast, occupying multiple buildings. Of particular interest was a British Supermarine Spitfire Mk Vb Fighter on display. This aircraft, BL370, was built at the Castle Bromwich Aeroplane Factory and delivered to the Royal Air Force in November 1941. The plane’s name, Gurgaon Il Punjab, reflects the fact that the money to produce it was donated by the people of India. It flew numerous escort and defensive sorties for the RAF between December 1941 and September 1944.
ALABAMA’S SECRET
Leaving NOLA behind, we drove east, passing through a sliver of Mississippi before arriving at Orange Beach, Alabama. The Alabama coast is the Gulf of Mexico’s best-kept secret. While Pensacola in Florida, just 25 miles east, draws crowds, Orange Beach remains comparatively undiscovered. The beaches have the same sugar-white quartz sand, the same emerald shallows that deepen to sapphire, but Orange Beach feels like someone forgot to tell it that it was supposed to be a tourist trap. We could stake out a stretch of shore and revel in its solitude.
We made the obligatory pilgrimage to the Flora-Bama, the legendary bar that straddles the Alabama-Florida state line and has been rebuilt so many times after hurricanes that its survival feels less like luck and more like defiance. It’s a ramshackle temple to day-drinking, with peeling paint, and a ceiling where hundreds of brassieres inexplicably hang. We drank bushwacker (a cocktail often described as a boozy milkshake) on the deck, watching the sun sink into the Gulf.
THE THREAD OF HISTORY
From the coast, the road pulled us inland into central Alabama, and the landscape shifted from maritime to agrarian. We drove past cotton fields and small towns that announced themselves with water towers and church spires. We could have blitzed through Alabama into Tennessee in six hours, but I wanted to follow the thread of history that runs through this state, and this meant a two-day detour.
At the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, located at the precise spot where civil rights activist Rosa Parks was arrested on 1 December 1955, we watched a recreation of that night play out on monitors installed inside a replica 1950s bus. Watching it was a peculiar form of time travel, going back to the exact moment when a seamstress’s dignified disobedience kicked off a 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott that proceeded to upend an entire country’s idea of itself.
We drove the short distance to the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, a modest red-brick building where Martin Luther King Jr served as pastor from 1954-60. The church sits at the foot of the Alabama State Capitol, a positioning that feels almost too perfect because the locus of civil rights activism seems to be staring up at the seat of power that resisted it. Inside, the wooden pews were worn smooth by generations of congregants, and the pulpit seemed to hum with the echoes of King’s sermons.
The Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site, 40 miles east of Montgomery, was next, a pilgrimage of a different sort. I’ve been fascinated by the Tuskegee Airmen, who were the first Black military aviators in the US Armed Forces, since I watched the 2012 film Red Tails. The museum is housed at Moton Field, where they trained, and it’s filled with flight suits, photographs, and the restored cockpit of a P-51 Mustang. These were men who faced segregation, doubters, and inferior equipment, and still managed to compile one of the best combat records of the war.
We continued our historical meander to the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum in Leeds, 138 miles to the north. Here lies the world’s largest collection of motorcycles. Over 1,600 machines spanning a century of design filled five floors, from Victorian steam-powered contraptions to modern superbikes. There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing the evolution of an idea; how motorcycles went from motorised bicycles to lean, purposeful predators. Satisfyingly, there are several Royal Enfield motorcycles on display too.
Continuing further north, we veered off the I-65 to foray into Danville where track and field athlete Jesse Owens was born. A modest building here houses the Jesse Owens Museum, and it celebrates the man who won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and trashed Hitler’s rubbish theories of Aryan supremacy. Owens was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in Danville, and his trajectory from rural poverty to Olympic glory is the kind of story that makes you believe, however fleetingly, in the possibility of transcendence.
Helen Keller’s birthplace, Ivy Green in Tuscumbia, 40 miles to the northwest of Danville, was our final historical stop. The white clapboard house sits amid sprawling gardens, and the famous water pump where Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan, spelled out w-a-t-e-r and broke through her isolation is still there.
MUSIC CITY FINALE
Eventually, the road curved into Tennessee and deposited us in Nashville, where Broadway thrums with live music pouring from every honky-tonk. We hopped from one honky-tonk to the next with gleeful indiscrimination, the hallmark of any good night in Music City, listening to bands that ranged from excellent to enthusiastic. The South does music the way it does food and history: with abundance, with pride, and with the understanding that performance is a form of generosity. What really endeared me to revellers in this town was that none had the inclination nor felt the compulsion to shoot videos or photos. There was never a phone in sight at all the bars we hit up that evening.
Driving back toward Dallas, the landscape scrolling past in shades of green and brown, I thought about the thread that connects all of this—the swamps and seaside, the museums and memorials, the jazz and the jambalaya. The South is America’s unfinished conversation with itself. It’s where the country’s greatest sins and greatest aspirations sit side by side, where beauty and brutality share the same soil. To travel through it is to face contradictions that don’t resolve themselves and refuse to be simplified.
Rishad Saam Mehta is a Mumbai-based author and travel writer.
On The Road
*To plan a road trip, head to www.americathebeautiful.com. It's an official planning tool using AI to help travellers find tailored itineraries, hidden gems, and bucket-list experiences across the US. Use it to explore destinations, map out road trips, and discover personalised recommendations for events and attractions.
* Look for sedans on www.budget.com; book in advance to find deals that start at $42 a day. Have the counter staff explain optional charges in detail before signing the contract.
* You can get by without cash because every place, including street parking meters, accept credit cards.
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