The humidity and the heat came off the river from above and below and the summer heat kept my truck moving just enough to keep the air flowing thru the cab. I drove fast enough to avoid suspicion from the local Constable and a possible shake down, but slow enough to experience Cairo’s history as best I could from the road.
Being caught between sightseeing and the deadline for a steel pick-up in Chicago, after rush hour, kept me rolling and pray’n the scale house was closed. I half expected the scale master to stop me at the Illinois scale near the bridges, and ask what the hell are you do’ in here, and “let me see your log book”. If I made it past the scale house, I would want to just keep moving, thinking the DOT would come and get this trucker from 550 miles to the North…
Those skinny two bridges were just the antidote to keep you awake. While meeting another trucker as I crossed the river from MO, I caught his mirror side bracket and cracked my driver side mirror. The fractured glass stayed in its frame for the most part, with chards landing in my lap.
How a place so important and its people could fall into disrepair and depression, is what makes me less a capitalist. Especially if your carrying cheap stereo equipment out of California to Rent-a-Centers in the South Chicago burbs.
A driver in the trance of fatigue and falling in to a midday dream at a run down fuel stop near the interstate, made the near reality experiences of Cairo a mystery that kept me coming thru for 20 years and in love with a the tainted history of a place I could not understand and though I tried, could never feel welcome.

I lived in Cairo in stages of my life, birth to age 7, after graduating from high school for two years, and eight years after college. The writer’s description of the modern ghost town is so true, as well as the people and the community itself. It’s amazing how much it has changed between the middle 70′s-90′s.

Even so, I have wonderful memories of my early childhood in Cairo, as well as a few unjust memories. Summers spent with my grandmother and extended family, some of the best fried fish and Bar-B-Q in town. Sitting at the river, and churning homemade icecream on those hot summer days. Going to college at Shawnee Community College, later to graduate school at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and eight wonderful years of teaching kindergarten at Egyptian Consoliated (Elementary ) School, in Tamms.

Here are just a few examples of the prejudice that stays with me, a hand grenade being thrown in my grandmother’s backyard by an unknown racist. Thank God it didn’t explode.
A child’s fear at night sleeping on a pallet on the floor, scared that the “white hats” would come over the bridge from Kentucky and Southeast Missouri into Cairo. Not really realizing that some of those “white hats” were neighbors and people from surrounding counties.

I also have proud and fond memories of my family members standing up for their rights, boycotting, in Cairo during those turbulent times, going with my aunts to the capital at Springfield to protest with Rev. Jesse Jackson at age 10 or 11. My uncle s serving in the military and coming back to Cairo where there was little change in racist attitudes, economics and employment for younger blacks. Who would have thought back then, that my uncle would later become the mayor of my beloved homeplace.

Cairo once described as “The Gateway to the South”, had the atmosphere of true south and southern politics, though we resided in rural Midwestern America. Described in this article (2009) as a modern ghost town by an outsider, causes me to remember and reflect. How different a person I might be were it not for those experiences in Cairo.

RMLN