by Tena Starr
Okay, some trivia. Although neither Steve nor I are big on guided tours, we took a tour of the supposedly haunted McRaven House, an antebellum mansion in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where few such houses survived the Civil War.
There, we learned a couple of odd and useless things, like the root of the phrase “mind your beeswax.” Women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sometimes used beeswax to cover scars, such as smallpox marks. In heat, when wax started melting, someone might say, “Ahem, mind your beeswax.”
And, if you’ve ever wondered where “born with a silver spoon in his mouth” came from, here is our guide’s explanation: Southern ladies, upon getting married, collected silver coins, which they had melted into spoons engraved with their children’s initials. If the kids ran into hard times, they could hack off part of a spoon and cash it in.
We went back to the mansion that evening for the ghost tour, but it was a disappointment. Our melodramatic host seemed more interested in startling us than seriously addressing why the house is considered so haunted, which it may well be, given how many soldiers died rough deaths there. The oldest part of the building was once inhabited by a robber, a “highwayman,” and the guide said he’s always feeling her up. Umm hmm.
And then we packed up and headed north and soon ran into the aftermath of what we’d set out to avoid by staying in Mississippi. Western Tennessee was badly flooded. Fields looked like lakes; enormous irrigation rigs stood incongruously in water. Sometimes we had to detour for mudslides or flooded roads. We got lost a lot.
We had a destination in mind, a strangely beautiful fishing lodge near Tiptonville, Tennessee. We’d stayed there ten years ago and were charmed by the balconies, the wooden walkways and bridges over Reelfoot Lake lit with fairy lights, shifting colored lights on the cypress trees, the log buildings. To me, it had looked like a scene from Rivendell, the land of the elves in Lord of the Rings.
As we got closer, we grew more skeptical. The lake was flooded, the state park closed, buildings and machinery up to their knees in brown water. Steve and I looked at each other and said, yeah, not likely it’s open.
But it was. Water was crawling up the decks, the walkways were submerged, the outside lights mostly extinguished, but it was open for business. It was chilly, and the wind was vicious. The woman at the desk, which is inside a crowded gift shop and bar, was wearing a puffy winter coat. Yes, she said, she had rooms. She was a little giddy. I said I was surprised they were open. “Barely,” she said.
She put us on the second floor of the main building. It wasn’t clear if the water was still rising or going down. The restaurant and bar were open, and we had a good fish dinner while watching the wild water outside the windows.
In the morning, men splashed around, cleaning up. A motorboat cruised the hotel’s front yard. We hauled our luggage through the mud and puddles and headed to Tiptonville for breakfast.
A woman with graying hair, lovely blue eyes and a grease-stained gray T-shirt took our order at an old, diner-type restaurant, just what we’d been looking for. She brought us mugs of a grayish liquid she claimed was coffee. But the eggs were good, and our server was chatty. She wasn’t surprised by the flooding. You’re in lowlands here, she said, this ain’t unusual.
I said to Steve: It’s okay, we’ll just stop at the next McDonald’s we run into and get coffee.
Except we didn’t. We drove through a couple towns where there was nothing much, but we were sure that in Cairo, Illinois, a relatively big black dot on the map, we’d find some kind of chain because they’re everywhere. We eat what’s local, but McDonald’s pretty much can be relied on for decent coffee and a bathroom.
We hit Cairo’s main drag around midday and were so shocked that I asked ‘Steve to turn back and try again. Surely, as happens in some places, the city center had simply moved.
It had not.
Of all the decrepit towns we’ve seen travelling in this country, Cairo was the most astounding. It was once a promising city with a peak population in the 1920s of about 15,000. Today, its population is under 2,000.
There is no sign of an economy in Cairo anymore. Everything from grocery stores, to KFC, to gas stations, to motels to buildings once lofty but no longer identifiable, are empty, crumbling, boarded up, trashed. There is no useful downtown, though you can see there once was. The motel’s doors are missing. Abandoned homes are covered in weeds. Long-closed fast food restaurants are collapsing.
We’re not talking here about a small town where you wouldn’t expect much. No. Cairo is a once busy place gone to ruin.
We drove through residential areas, and there were a few fine houses butted up against empty homes with windows broken, and lawns grown up. People had apparently just up and left.
“This is depressing,” Steve said, which was such an understatement that I couldn’t think of a response. We had to pee, but there was no place — no fast-food chain, no mini-mart, no gas station, no diner, and no town close by. So, we headed to the public library where we asked to use the bathroom.
The library was huge, handsome and made of brick. It smelled like mold, damp and age. I wondered if the librarians were volunteers, doing what they could. It seemed inconceivable that Cairo had a library budget.
We ran into Preston there, an aging black man who once was a higher-up at the NAACP, but had retired to his hometown of Cairo in part to write its sad history.
Once he figured out that we were genuinely curious about what to hell had happened to this town, he hauled out a box of booklets he’s written about Cairo. He’s even documented the city’s history of prostitution. And prejudice, which he said he’s never really understood, and still doesn’t.
The city limit sign says Cairo has a population of 2,900. That was from the 2020 Census, Preston said. Since then, it’s dropped to 1,400. There isn’t a working gas station in Cairo anymore. He wants there to be a sign on the Interstate saying no gas this exit so the town doesn’t have to dole out gas from municipal supplies to desperate travelers.
We spent a good hour with Preston and the children’s librarian, then went to look at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers at Defiance Park. But the park was flooded, and it wasn’t entirely clear which river was which. It was just a godawful lot of muddy water.
A reason I travel is to see what’s beautiful, but also to see what isn’t, to figure out the story of a place and why it’s what it is rather than something else.
Cairo had a lot going for it once. It was General Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters during the Civil War’s early years. It had a port and a railroad. It was home to national banks. It was prone to flooding but had serious levees. Everything I’ve read about its decline, everything Preston mentioned, is about shortsighted economic decisions and “racial tensions,” which seems to be code for rampant racism. Black people left for more progressive places.
Cairo is mostly referred to online as a “ghost city” these days. It’s a dismal place, and I have no clue what a person would do there, for a job, for entertainment, for civic involvement. Preston said he needed to replace a roof on a house. But was that sensible when the cost of the roof would be more than the whole house is currently worth? People up and leave because there are no jobs, no stores, and as the tax base and population dwindle, the cost of everything, like utilities, goes up for the few who remain.
Later, I told Steve: “Okay, I’ve got a new baseline. No matter what down-at-heel town we run across from here on out, I can see myself saying, well, it’s not as bad as Cairo.”
And then we crossed the flooded Mississippi once again and were in pretty, and busy, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, about an hour and a world away from Cairo. A result of different decision-making from its Illinois neighbor?
We stayed at the cheapest hotel in town, where we had a close-up river view, outlets for laptops and phone chargers, an espresso machine in the room, a Starbucks downstairs, and an in-house casino. We were not interested in the casino, but it’s likely the reason the hotel was cheap — the money came from gambling, not rooms.
It was not the sort of place we typically like to stay, but after Cairo, where the hotel was overgrown with weeds and someone had spray painted a warning about wasp nests, where there was barely a place to pee, where there was a general air of despondence, that clean, sunny room with coffee and a view of the Mississippi and a tidy neighborhood in what looked to be a healthy Missouri town seemed a good place to be that night.
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