Spying on the South by Tony Horwitz *** ( of 5)

In 1854, Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer-to-be of New York City's Central Park, took off on a six month exploration south of the Mason Dixon line. The United States was on the verge of becoming dis-united over the issue of slavery and Olmsted wanted to meet slave owners, southerners, and slaves. He filed regular stories with the New York Times in hope of opening dialogue in a country where right and left, red and blue, black and white, held different truths, read different sources of news, and had almost no means for communicating with one another.

Using Olmsted's route, Tony Horwitz set out on Olmsted's path, in rental cars instead of horse-drawn conveyances, to see how the country had changed. Horwitz's travels took place in the year before Trump was elected and as you might have guessed, America's divide has not narrowed nearly as much as it might have. In West Virginia and Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi, blacks and white live separate and very unequal lives. Too many in The Old South are clinging to an air of white superiority. Rural residents of Appalachia are as left behind and as anti-immigrant and anti-black as they ever have been. No surprise to anyone staying abreast of current events.

Unfortunately, by half way through this book, Horwitz makes the same mistakes his forbearer did. Two stand out in particular. Neither man expends any real energy meeting African Americans turning the central characters in America's division into an invisible other. Olmsted somehow does not speak with any slaves and Horwitz meets people only in white bars who describe what they think life is like in the black parts of town (often described in really racist terms.)

Both men, too, passed an inordinate amount of time in Texas. Yes, Texas, is sprawling, diverse, complicated, self-aggrandizing, gun-toting, conservative, and impressive. But neither man makes it very interesting.

It is important to be reminded of America's seminal events -- the enslavement of Africans to support a chattel-based southern economy run by force, rampant brutality, and a concurrent mythology about inherent inferiority among people with extra melanin in their skin.  Following Horwitz on an interminable, butt-breaking mule ride across Texas hill country probably isn't.