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Show RIVER "What kind of trouble?" asked Rosie. "Nigger trouble," the old couple said in chorus. Nigger trouble indeed. The police and the blacks had shoot-outs in the Cairo ghetto, not just now and then but pretty much on a nightly basis. The old man in the hardware store had a police radio blaring behind the counter and a shotgun beside it, clearly waiting to resist a Ripple-crazed black tide bent on plundering his nail bins. Cairo, Illinois. Except for Solomon's junkyard, which turned out to be a junkyard among junkyards, I had no fond memories of the place. Back in my rowboat that March morning, the riverbank between Olmstead and Cairo proved to be some of the least inspiring scenery in the United States- long, low, treeless banks broken by an occasional grain silo. Still, it was a fine warm morning, lots of blue sky broken by white clouds. I laid back and let the boat spin along with the current. Toward noon I could see the river wall of Cairo. Squat concrete walls shelter the low-lying towns along the great heartland rivers, bringing a little bit of the middle ages to the middle West. As I came down to Cairo's waterfront a police car drove out a gate and cruised along the road in front of the wall. After it had gone back into the town, I hid my boat in some bushes and went up to the main gate. Over it hung a large sign reading, CAIRO, GATEWAY TO THE SOUTH. The street leading away from the gate had been dead for fifty years. Old and decayed, it was lined with empty two-story buildings the rust color of decaying brick. Weathered boards covered eyeless windows that looked old enough to have seen Ulysses S. Grant launch the offensive from Cairo in 1862 that would split the South. The worn, cracked sidewalk was littered with soggy trash. I -12- |