An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

Return to Part II Day 6 (Wednesday - Greenwood and Oxford, MS): I really haven't said much so far about the group I was traveling with. There were fifteen of us overall: the young assistant rabbi from our synagogue, Rabbi Stein, plus a woman from the temple staff who was the organizer of the trip, two couples, and nine individual travelers. All told, four men and eleven women. As I mentioned in Part I, I was the youngster of the congregants. There was one woman about my age, Professor Goldstein is I would guess in his 50's, and Rabbi Stein is in her thirties, but all the rest went up and up in age. However, just about everyone was game - not a lot of curmudgeonly old people behavior. And tech savvy, too - when it was suggested that we set up a WhatsApp group to communicate, only one person had trouble joining. I had taken a chance in rooming with Alex, who I had never met before the trip info session, but he turned out to be a lovely guy - a recent transplant from Massachusetts...

Go back to Part I Day 4 (Monday - New Orleans to Natchez): Monday morning I wolfed down a quick breakfast so that I could be on the bus in time for our 8 AM departure for Whitney Plantation . In New Orleans we had been getting around by summoning fleets of Ubers; Monday marked the beginning of the chartered bus part of our tour. Whitney is an old sugar plantation which, admirably, is dedicated to educating the public about the history and legacy of slavery in the south. As bad as it was working cotton, apparently sugar was worse; the life expectancy of slaves was only a few years. That's because while cotton is processed elsewhere once picked, sugar is processed on site, so in addition to field work hacking tough sugar cane, slaves manned a 24 hour processing plant in which the sugar was extracted from the cane and then concentrated down into molasses. That meant long hours stirring huge boiling cauldrons. Terrible, hot,  dangerous work on top of all the other horrors of slavery. O...

 Here are my takeaways from the Jewish History of the Mississippi Delta trip I just participated in:  (1) People are awful (2) People are amazingly resilient (3) People are occasionally awesome (4) Music is always good The primary focus of this trip has been the history of Jews in the American South, particularly in the region known as the Mississippi Delta, but we've also touched on African-American history - slavery and the civil rights movement. So we've had ample opportunity to explore people at their worst and best. Plus, American roots music has never been far from our minds as we've traveled from New Orleans through the region known as "the birthplace of the blues", to Memphis. This was a week-long trip organized by my synagogue and I'm not going to write a blow-by-blow account of every day, but I will document some highlights. Day 1 (Friday - New Orleans): Our trip started in New Orleans during the second weekend of Jazzfest. The Rolling Stones had jus...