David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [4]
Davy Crockett quickly became our obsession. Until he came into our lives, we had mostly played cowboys and Indians; other times, we went to war as pretend soldiers, using the helmets and canteens our fathers and uncles brought home from the war. The nearby woods where we skinny-dipped in the creek turned into our hunting ground for imaginary ferocious bears like the ones Davy stalked. The dusty hill topped by a stand of oaks on the edge of the playground became our Alamo, and every day we pretended that we were in pitched battle against the forces of Santa Anna. We became Davy Crockett, William Travis, and Jim Bowie, the trio of legendary Alamo heroes. No one wanted to be with the Mexican side, so our enemy, as if borrowing a page from the cold war, was largely invisible. In the end we died anyway, just as our heroes did so long ago, but we knew we would miraculously be resurrected and come back the next day for another round of combat.
The following year, in the summer of 1955, Walt Disney unveiled his fantasy world, Disneyland, in southern California. But our family, eager to introduce me to the historical origins of Davy Crockett, opted not to go west on Route 66 and visit the Magic Kingdom. Instead we headed due south out of St. Louis to the state of Tennessee. Proudly wearing my new coonskin hat, with Mom riding shotgun and Dad at the helm of our dark green 1952 Plymouth—dubbed the Green Dragon—we cruised into real Crockett country.
After crossing the Mississippi River and entering Tennessee, we skirted Reelfoot Lake, studded with cypress trees, not far from the last place that Crockett called home. In Nashville, we saw the regal Capitol and the cavernous Ryman Auditorium, at that time home of the Grand Ole Opry. We paused at the Hermitage, the residence and final resting place of President Andrew Jackson—a Crockett political mentor who was to become his student’s chief nemesis.
During those dozen or so days spent traversing my new hero’s old stomping grounds, we experienced southern culture—the South that carries on with its own state of mind. We dined on crunchy southern fried chicken, catfish and hush puppies, country ham, biscuits and gravy, and pecan pie. I even recall that we sampled those creamy grits that came on every breakfast plate whether ordered or not. When we tangled with succulent Delta barbecue I pretended it was bear steak. At Chattanooga, near the Tennessee–Georgia line, we obeyed the commands of the signs that seemed to be painted on every barn rooftop—see beautiful rock city and seven states—from atop Lookout Mountain.
Everywhere we went we also saw flags and decals bearing the Confederacy’s stars and bars, as if the Civil War had not ended ninety years before. And, in every town we drove through, life-size stone likenesses of Confederate soldiers stood at ease in the tidy courthouse squares where old men in open-collar white shirts and straw hats sat cross-legged and traded yarns about the past. The tableau seemed endless.
From the car windows I watched harvest hands stooped in the fields, tending cotton that once was king when great plantations flourished. In Memphis, where Elvis was on the verge of stardom, we ate a picnic lunch in a city park near a huge bronze statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the planter and slave dealer who became a Confederate general and first imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. To those who recall the South of the midtwentieth century, these icons were both all too familiar and hardly considered invidious.
In that distant summer of 1955, not only throughout the South but well beyond, we saw signs designating which toilets and drinking fountains people could use depending on their skin color. These were images that were likewise familiar and staunchly accepted. Six months after our trip, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, began after a resolute black seamstress refused to give her bus seat to a white man. But the summer of 1955 was before we knew of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., or Medgar Evers and James Meredith.
In fact, nothing could distract