As we sat, a group of about half a dozen women came out of the building next door, all dressed for an occasion, a baby shower as it turned out. With them was an adorable two-year-old named Addison wearing a pair of oversized sunglasses. She was naturally attracted to Albie. Still adapting to Albie’s new, more docile road personality, I tensed up hoping he wouldn’t be spooked. He was happy to have Addison pat him on the head, a big relief since I didn’t want to have to make apologies for him scaring a cute little girl and making her cry. Albie was really doing me proud. I expect him to shed, he is mostly Lab after all, but I was beyond pleased that here on the road he had shed not just fur, but the more ornery side of his personality, the one that in recent years had made him something of a wildcard when it came to interactions with strangers.
When we’d finished the coffee, whipped cream, and bacon, Albie and I ambled across the street to wander the grounds around the courthouse. One marker commemorated radio station WELO’s broadcast of weekly jamborees from this spot, begun in 1946, and hosted by the hillbilly singer Carvel Lee Ausborn, better known as Mississippi Slim. Slim later arranged for a young Elvis Presley, who aspired to be as famous as Slim and to have his own radio show someday, to perform at one of the jamborees, one of Elvis’s first public appearances.
Just a few feet away was a granite slab about five feet tall in the shape of the state of Mississippi. Dedicated in 2009, it depicted eight people—some black, some white, some male, some female—holding hands. The inscription read:
This monument is dedicated to honor all the Lee County citizens who worked, served and participated in the 1950’s, 60’s & 70’s movement to achieve civil & human rights. They placed their lives, families and livelihoods in jeopardy to fight for justice and equality. Their names are too numerous to list here, but their legacies live on.
I wondered: was the decision to establish this memorial controversial? How long did it take to get the powers that be in Lee County, named for the Confederate general, to honor those engaged in the great civil rights struggle? Who backed it? Who opposed it? People in town would surely know so I started asking.
A few yards away two young black women were taking pictures of a young girl—her elementary school graduation pictures I learned—under a huge magnolia tree.
“Hi. Are you from Tupelo?” I asked.
“Yes,” one of them answered.
“Do you know if there was any controversy about that monument?” I asked, pointing to it.
“What monument?” the other answered.
“The one at the corner there.”
“I don’t know, I’ve never looked at it.”
“It’s dedicated to people from here who gave their lives to the civil rights movement.”
It was clear they were not interested in my questions and were uncomfortable being asked. I tried to put them at ease by saying I was glad to see a monument to the civil rights movement here.
“Well,” said one of the women, “I haven’t read it, so I don’t know.” The conversation was over as far as they were concerned. I wished them a good day and they perfunctorily wished me the same.
I wondered if these were just not conversations blacks and whites have here, or whether they truly had no idea that the monument was there and what it commemorated. Or maybe they just wanted to go about the business at hand, capturing a good graduation picture, without a meddlesome outsider pestering them with questions.
We continued around the courthouse grounds past a modest monument dedicated to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union† and another to the veterans of Vietnam, Korea, the two World Wars, and Iraq. On the opposite corner, and out of sight from where the civil rights monument stood, was the largest monument on the courthouse grounds. More than twenty feet tall, a statue of a Confederate soldier stood atop a large pedestal. Unveiled in 1906,‡ the monument bore several inscriptions:
Erected in honor of
and to the memory of
Confederate soldiers
by their
comrades, their sons and daughters.
The love, gratitude,
and memory of the
people of the South
shall gild their
fame in one eternal
sunshine.
Those who die
for a right
principle, do
not die in vain.
The loyal and true,
their faith sealed
with their most precious blood.
Within yards of each other, here were monuments to those who fought and died to preserve slavery and those who, a century later, did the same to erase the lingering stain of racial injustice, one step in a long march that began with the Civil War and continues to this day. The jarring juxtaposition of these two monuments, on opposite corners of the same small courthouse grounds but out of sight of one another, seemed to epitomize the complicated legacy of race relations in the South and of the Civil War itself.
We checked into our hotel, and around 6:30 P.M. headed back to downtown Tupelo. I’d checked Yelp for some restaurant ideas and had decided, for no particular reason, on a sandwich and pizza place called Vanelli’s Bistro on Main Street, just a couple of blocks from where we’d parked in front of Tupelo Hardware earlier in the day. The town was more alive than it had been in the afternoon; it was a Saturday evening, after all.
In front of Vanelli’s two men were sitting on a bench just to the left of the entrance: a young black man and an older white man who was noodling around on a guitar. The guitar player was wearing a baseball cap, jeans rolled up into cuffs above his moccasins, and a large, baggy open sweater over a checkered shirt. He had round, black-framed glasses which offset snow-white hair that fell well beneath his shoulders and an equally long white beard and moustache. He looked like Santa’s little brother. He was all of about five feet five inches tall and as we approached he gave me a hearty greeting. His friend was showing him a few chords. I introduced myself and Albie, and he introduced himself as “Voz.” His friend was Jason.
I assumed they were just hanging out in front of the restaurant because there was a bench to sit on. Then Voz told me he owned the place. He goes by Voz Vanelli, but his real name is Vasily Kapenakas, and over the next three hours we became well acquainted.
Voz defied every stereotype of the South you can imagine, except for his unremitting hospitality. Albie and I even had to decline his invitation to spend the night at his house on Lake Elvis Presley (yes, Lake Elvis Presley), partly because we had already unpacked all our things at the hotel (which I would have undone for the opportunity to accept Voz’s invitation), but mainly because we weren’t sure how Albie would take to Voz’s cats. (Well, Voz wasn’t sure, but I was confident that given the opportunity Albie would have disemboweled them.)
Born and raised in Detroit, Voz attended Eastern Michigan University. His father, Demetrios, was born in Greece and moved to Tupelo from Detroit in the early 1970s. When Voz graduated from college in 1975 he came down with the intention of going to law school or getting a graduate degree in English. Instead he went to work in his father’s restaurant business. Demetrios didn’t think people would buy pizza from a Greek so he named his place Vanelli’s. In 1991, Demetrios and his two sons, Voz and his brother, built a larger restaurant that was destroyed by a tornado in 2014. The current restaurant is the third incarnation of Vanelli’s in Tupelo. Demetrios had an American dream and he made it come true.
Voz told me he’s an anomaly in Tupelo, a confirmed progressive in a deeply conservative town. But he’s also, for reasons that became obvious, widely beloved. As we chatted, there wasn’t a person who walked by who didn’t get the full Voz treatment. He had a good word for everyone, friend and stranger alike, black and white, young and old. He organized families to get together for photos he’d take with their smartphones, he hugged the women and put his arms around the men. He told little children to go inside and tell the staff Voz told them they could have a soda, or he would p
roduce a Tootsie Pop from the pocket of his oversized sweater. It was hard to tell who knew him and who didn’t; he was buoyant and chipper and quick-witted. He seemed to love everyone and vice versa. He was the star of his own sidewalk show, the maître d’ of Main Street, the tummler of Tupelo.§ He improvised riffs and songs on his guitar, including one he stood up to perform about my cross-country trip with Albie. Cops came by and he bantered with them, too, and offered them a soft drink. He could have been one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters—small of stature, big of heart, and a twinkle in his eye. His philosophy is that if you give to people generously, they will do the same. All this time Albie was his best self, making friends with the passersby who stopped to chat with Voz.
Voz asked me what I wanted to eat and had one of the staff bring dinner out in a takeaway container, so I could eat outside on the bench with him.
I asked Jason and Voz about the civil rights monument I’d seen earlier in the day and neither of them was familiar with it. Then I asked Jason, a musician and audio engineer, if everyone seemed to get along as well as he and Voz do.
“Black and white coexist here,” he said. “Especially younger people. They don’t carry the same baggage as the older folks.”
As I was finishing up my dinner a fellow named Dan Widdington joined us, and Voz quickly filled him in on Albie and me and our trip. Dan took a seat next to me. He was dressed in rugged work clothes and an Ole Miss baseball cap with a camouflage motif. Dan is a long-distance trucker with a full beard and a very thick southern accent, and I struggled, as I had the day before with the Richard Petty look-alike we met in Sparta, Tennessee, to understand him. Dan was born and raised in Tupelo.
“Tupelo was nothing until Elvis died,” he told me. “Then people started showing up.”
For close to an hour Dan regaled me with Elvis stories. He’s fifty-seven, a good twenty-five years younger than Elvis would have been, but he has many memories of the times when he and groups of local kids of all ages would gather on the local playing fields for pickup games of baseball and football.
“Almost every year a fancy car would pull up, and Elvis would step out from behind the wheel wearing jeans and a white shirt,” Dan told me. “He’d ask each kid to introduce himself and then join the pickup game. He’d drive himself down from Memphis and come home just to play ball with the local kids.” Dan surmised it was a welcome break from the pressures of stardom and the controlling personality of Elvis’s manager/Svengali, Colonel Parker.
“One year he came back to give the mayor heck for not doing something with money he had given the town,” said Dan. “It was in all the local papers. He was always giving money to the town.” Dan also had a theory about why Elvis started touring again in 1965.
“After he was in the service he had a contract to make thirty movies and was doing studio albums and the Beatles passed him,” Dan told me. “That’s why he started doing live shows again.”
How much of what Dan had to say about Elvis—and it was about a good hour’s worth—was accurate, I don’t know, but it was sure fun listening to him. Like a lot of people, Dan thinks his hometown is the best place in the world.
“I’ve been lots of places, even used to drive my truck to Boston a lot, and the people here are real good people.” He nodded toward Voz, who was taking yet another family portrait with a smartphone. “OK, say ‘world peace!’ Peace, love, pizza!” Voz said to get everyone smiling for the picture.
“Now there’s a good man,” Dan said. The truck driver and the hippie; an odd couple. Dan first met Voz when Dan was a teenager and used to frequent the original Vanelli’s.
“I could retire,” Dan then added, apropos of nothing, “but I know too many people who retire and die within a year because they have nothing to do and no purpose.”
As the evening wore on Voz shared more of his story, too. He was widowed in 2012 and it continues to be a source of great sorrow. He has a daughter in her twenties who works in the restaurant; we met her briefly after they’d closed, and she was headed home. His daughter was the result of what he described as “a three-day adventure” he’d had with another woman. His brother, who was in the restaurant business with him for a while, is serving time in federal prison and has three years left on his sentence. I didn’t ask why his brother was serving time, and Voz didn’t volunteer that information, but he calls his brother several times a week and sends him money.
After the restaurant closed and the streets had emptied, Voz and Albie and I were still together, and he invited us to walk with him over to his office near the courthouse. In addition to the restaurant, Voz creates short animated videos and he wanted to show me some.
As we walked, his demeanor changed noticeably. All evening he’d been positively buoyant as he played the host with the most on Main Street. With no audience to play to, he was quieter and more subdued. He obviously thrives on the bonhomie he creates on the street, and I surmised that for this 65-year-old widower the quieter hours when he’s alone are harder. We watched some of the videos he created, and he told me he needed to learn more about that civil rights monument just yards from his office. As a parting gift, he gave me a T-shirt with the Vanelli’s logo on it. I think we were both a little sorry Albie and I weren’t spending the night out at Lake Elvis Presley.
Reflecting on the evening we‘d spent with Voz, I thought, This is why we travel. We travel for the chance encounters that enrich us in small ways. I could have picked another place to eat, one that served me a meal and nothing more, or picked up something at a grocery store. Instead, serendipity played its hand and we met one of the unforgettable characters of our journey across America. How many other characters had we passed by or just missed by a minute or two or a mile or two?
The whole evening also had me rethinking the sense of unease I’d had while driving through small towns in the South. Maybe I had it all wrong, though I was still deeply troubled whenever I saw the Stars and Bars. Everyone we’d met—and Voz introduced me to a lot of people that night—was friendly, polite, and warm. The anger and vitriol that spill out on social media and in our politics seemed out of sync with what I was experiencing on a person to person level. You’d never know the country was busy tearing itself apart.
A couple of days after we left Tupelo, Voz e-mailed me, an e-mail that seemed to capture the spirit of the independent, free-thinking man we’d just met:
[W]hat I’ve been witness to in my 65 years is an endless cycle of misguided individuals and groups whose moral hypocrisies are masked in the guise of “patriotism” or “good intension-ism” whose real intent has been to propagate ideologies crafted upon manipulation and commercialism whose resulting effect has been the proliferation of poverty, ignorance and war.
So, I’ve come to recognize the only purposeful change I or any have control over is within “our/my own being.” The future, our futures, are tales yet to unfold; “crafted in the moment.” Moments; precious to all, in every instance we’ve the privilege to exist in. To share good counsel, to give kindness, to encourage, to bring joy is something purposeful all are capable to do.
Thank you for the considerate individual you are. Searching, Seeking, Exploring. I wish that Albie and You will find the America you are hoping to find.
It was signed, “Peace / vOz.”¶
Rain fell heavily as we got back to the Natchez Trace Parkway on the outskirts of Tupelo the next morning. It was a Sunday and I turned on the radio for the first time since we’d left home. My self-imposed news blackout had been rather enjoyable. On the very first station we tuned to, a female host, an evangelical Christian, was railing against other evangelicals who were having their doubts about Trump, and against “Democrats and liberals” who were ruining the country.
“He won the election,” she crowed. “Get over it!”
With no apparent sense of irony, she went on screeching about the “intolerance” conservative evangelicals faced from some churches as those churches moved toward liberalism. “If yo
u don’t believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God,” she said, “you cannot be a Christian! You cannot be a Christian!”
I turned to the next station. The program host was singing the joys of sharing your faith every day with others.
“It’s the most fun you’ll ever have!” he exclaimed. “I know a famous tennis champion. Now that he’s found God he’s sharing his faith every day and he says that even the high of winning a championship doesn’t compare to it!”
I switched stations again. Another host was telling his listeners how to befriend Muslims in their communities. Because they tend to be isolated in American communities Muslims are very open to people who approach them in friendship, he explained. But the whole point was to earn their friendship and their trust so you could turn them away from the darkness of Islam and “lead them to the Lord Jesus Christ.” Friendship was just a ruse for proselytizing.
Next up was American Family Radio out of Chattanooga. I listened for as long as I could take it, which is to say about five minutes.
“What pain would you suffer for his forgiveness?”
“There’s nothing free about salvation.”
Family. Freedom. Faith. Heaven. Hell. Light. Darkness. Forgiveness. Grace. Kingdom. Sin. Jesus is the only way. Come to Christ or die without hope.
I understood the words but failed to grasp the message because I don’t speak the language. Faith, it seems, allows for no dissent and no deviation from someone else’s idea of absolute truth with a capital “T.” If what they are pushing was so wonderful, why does it need such a hard sell? Under all the nice-sounding words lurked an intolerance of anyone who is not “a believer.” Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, and agnostics are all on the outside looking in. “Lord have mercy on their souls.” It was all very oppressive.
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