dow-Dixie-cup-full-of-pee travelled all the way to the very back opened-up window of the car where Barbara (at least we agree on this part) was sitting. Barbara got the front seat for a few turns and we all quit sending anything out of any of the windows. We did lose a kid every now and then. In Vicksburg, we left James at the Piggly Wiggly. We only noticed he was gone when, a few miles out of town, my father, at the steering wheel, said, “James, I thought I told you to make sure your mother got some ice. James?” And so it went back through the car, “James?”, “James?” When we got back to the Piggly Wiggly, he was just sitting there on the curb, waiting, not particularly perturbed. It was right around then, on the Gulf Coast, that Barbara and Margaret decided to try their luck at getting a Southern tan, thinking that the Southern sun didn’t know they were of straight Scottish descent and never got anything darker than pink. By the end of the day, they were bright red with Barbara’s eyes swollen shut. Now that was something for the photo album. When we got to the campgrounds, there was another routine that went into play. As we drove around the grounds, should we spot a place we sort of liked, my parents would drop off a kid to sit on the picnic table. They could hold up to five sites that way, then choose the best one before picking up all the other kids from the unchosen sites before the park rangers showed up. At a campsite near Mobile, Alabama, James went missing again along with William. It seems they lost themselves in the woods by the campsite along about sunset. After a lot of wrong-headed attempts to find their way back, they decided to use the Underground Railroad way by following Orion in the sky. It turns out that Orion is kind of a vague direction to head. But it did get them to a ranger’s house who knew something abut getting them back to the campground. This was the mid 60’s, the centennial of the Civil War. We toured, I swear, every Civil War battlefield in the South. And, in between stops, my mother read to us from all her collected-up Life Magazine Civil War articles. It also happened to be the time of the Freedom Riders. One night, in some campground mid-Mississippi, flashlights started flashing all around our campsite. Then the tent fly got whipped open and flashlights flashed all over us. State policeman, of a sort, were behind those flashlights. “We’re just checking,” one of them said. “We’re just trying to protect you good White folks.” There were still Colored restrooms even in the 60’s and James, again in dire need to relieve himself, picked the bathroom most convenient. He says it was Colored Men’s, but the way William tells it, it was Colored Women’s. Anyway, no one gave him any trouble. We went to Shiloh, Pickett’s Run, Appomattox Court House. Saw the great cities Sherman burned on his march to the sea. At Gettysburg, we walked the tombstones and, prompted by my mother, took turns saying lines from the
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Santa Fe Literary Review