Virginia

And so my seven day car trip came to an end after my last stop at...Appomattox, the tiny hamlet where the Civil War came to an end and America was assured to be a world superpower and free.  Lee signed the surrender terms on the afternoon of April 9, 1865, men died on both sides on the morning of the ninth.  (The Confederate Cemetery at Appomattox; it has an unknown Union soldier buried there also with an American flag at his gravesite.)

The great war was over and the southern men made their way south to return home in the best way they could, the trek of the vanquished.  But they soon set about terrorizing the freedmen of their communities and instituted another century of slave-like Jim Crow dominance before federal power finally broke to pieces the ways of the past.  (The Civil War ended here, at the McLean Hose behind me.)

In wandering about the McLean house yard, in which the armistice was signed in its parlor, where the slave quarters were behind the main house, the obscene difference between the single room with loft shack out back and the mass'a's 3-storey house was stark.  A South American couple was examining the placards describing the conditions of lifetime enforced servitude and I could sense their disapprobation and I felt embarrassed to be an American.  (The big house and the shack in back.)

But slavery was abolished there at Appomattox, in effect, and the great country was bound up to heal from its divisions.  A century and a half later, after yet another great war and many, many little ones, are we better now?  (The slave quarters at the McLean House.)