Letter from Bill Heat-Moon to the Watts Family

Dear Marilyn, Thurmond, Virginia, and Hilda Watts,

I haven’t found anyone looking for a good store, but I thought I’d write anyway. Ever since I left Nameless to pad along the back-roads of the Republic, I couldn’t get my mind off of your stories and your store and the best goddam slice of buttermilk pie I ever had. In fact, I included your stories and your picture in my book. Yes, I wrote a book. It’s called Blue Highways. I hope you don’t mind being in it. I’m sending you a copy, but it probably won’t arrive for two-three weeks.

I wonder if you’ll like it. I know traveling is a bit trifling for old-fashioned folk such as yourselves. Frankly, it tuckered me out sometimes too. Maybe my book will give you a taste of the America you never got to see for yourself. Maybe it won’t. I reckon you’ll feel like you know some people, some towns like the back of your hand. There were some men in Shelbyville refurbishing a log cabin. Ignore the pop from the corner store. I’m sure the stuff you sell is better – real cane sugar. Focus on the log cabin. Bob, Tony and Kirk are preserving a piece of America that’s going endangered. Then there’s Walker and Davis from Selma. Things haven’t changed too much since King marched all those people across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Racism: that’s an old piece of America that stinks like an old sock. I don’t know how many blacks you see out in Nameless. I don’t even think I mentioned to you that I’m Indian. You would have found out when you read my book. But these were good boys, boys who liked basketball and the Air Force and grape Nehi. Boys you would rely on in a pickle. It’s a shame how they’re treated by the police. I hope you like them. Then there’s the Desert Den Bar & Filling Station in Hachita, New Mexico. Somehow it reminded me a little of your place. The proprietor’s name was even Virginia! Virginia Been. She’s been there for a long time by now. And the town has a similar story, too. Population exploded back when a copper company put a smelter right between them and the border, so the smoke would blow over to Mexico. Eventually a town popped up right by the smelter, and since it had better TV reception, everybody picked up and moved. Now the Desert Den is like a dried-up watering hole. Not that Virginia minds. She likes it that way, even if there isn’t much to do but work.

I don’t know why I hit the road. I think I give a reason in the first couple of chapters, but I forget what it was. You’ll have to write back and tell me. It might have had something to do with my ex-wife. But I know why I wrote Blue Highways. It’s because of meeting you in Nameless; and Bob, Tony and Kirk in Shelbyville; and Walker and Davis in Selma; and Virginia Been in Hachita. I figured out It’s true what they say – that America is the world’s melting pot, where all different sorts of folk have somehow hitched to one post. We are different, but united some how. But that’s changing. All the interstates getting built, all the chain restaurants, even all the legislation that claims to be new but isn’t, you’d think they’d be connecting us, but it feels like they’re driving us apart. Like they’re choking out backwoods America. In ten years, folks will never know that Cajun chicken can taste different from one side of the river to the other. The whole country is really starting to melt together, and I don’t like it. It makes it easier to cross over to your side of town, but what’s the point if it looks, feels, tastes just like my side?

These are the things that worry me. I hope you enjoy the book. I hope you find someone who wants to buy your store. But if you don’t, I hope that every time someone pulls up in front and asks you how your town got its name, you tell them the story of Nameless, because it’s America’s story, and a country should never forget its own story.

Sincerely,

Bill

Letter to John Steinbeck

Dear Mr. Steinbeck,

Of your travels through the Monterey Peninsula, you wrote, "The place of my origin had changed, and having gone away I had not changed with it. In my memory it stood as it once did and its outward appearance confused and angered me" (205). I particularly liked this insight, because I think it highlights something I've always known to be true but never though specifically about: the way change is so closely tied to a place. Of course people change. We grow up, we find new interests, we make new friends. But, as you pointed out, people don't change without any influence; no one exists in a vacuum. People change with their surroundings, and I think this is an important distinction. Maybe that's why travel is so influential--it gives you a new surrounding with which to change. 

When I reflect on my own life, it makes sense that I've changed with the places I've lived. I've moved multiple times, and at times I've found it difficult to relate to my friends in my former towns. This isn't because we're fundamentally different people; instead, it's always seemed to be more of a result of our different styles of interacting and different senses of humor. Though we still get along for the same reasons we always have--we're kind and easy-going people who can have fun together--it sometimes feels that we don't click in the way we used to, because I've adopted a way of speaking and joking and relating to others that is acceptable in my new home town but not in my old one. And I too get confused and frustrated when something changes in my absence. I'm well aware that my life continues when I leave a place, but sometimes forget that everyone else's lives continue also. When I go home during breaks, I expect my sister to be 10, just as she was when I left home after high school, and am always surprised when she's 13, even though I'm fully aware that three years have passed in my life. It's so easy to forget that time passes everywhere at the same speed.

I appreciated your insights on change, memory, and home in this passage, and enjoyed your travels and writing as a whole. Thank you so much for a wonderful read!

Best,

Devon

Letter to William Least Heat-Moon

Dear William,

Blue Highways is a gem in many different respects. Your circular route of travel was indeed unconventional. Yet, your search for a sense of understanding America in a different light and understanding yourself after some unfortunate events in your life has been a common theme in the books we have read in On the Road. Your approach as a Native author gave me greater insight to American history that I was completely unaware of, which I greatly appreciate. For example, you were able to give nuanced comparisons to the towns of Mateo and Wanchese based on your knowledge of the Native men who visited London in a colonial exploratory ship in 1584 before their return to present-day North Carolina. Have you received pushback, or mostly praise, for including Native history and themes within your writing or critiquing race in America?

If you were to go on another road trip throughout the US and a part of Canada, where would you most likely revisit? Would you base your decision on the people you met (and often photographed) there, or the overall connection you had to the place? 

Best,

Joy 

Letter to Isabel Wilkerson

Dear Isabel,

I enjoyed the Warmth of Other Suns, as you portrayed the rich experiences of 3 protagonists with such depth that it successfully described a movement that spanned decades. How did your training as a journalist prepare you for undertaking of nearly 1,000 interviews? What helped you determine that the stories of Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Joseph Starling, were sufficient in portraying the Great Migration? Aside from their accounts, I was struck by the explicit retelling of Claude Neal’s lynching in Florida.  In particular, I was taken aback by the details of the lynching party, his actual death, and the resulting lack of justice on behalf of the American government despite substantial evidence. I appreciate that you weaved in crucial events that both affected and reflected the political climate during the Migration. These pieces of history helped me contextualize the stories you were describing in detail. 

I also have a couple of lingering questions: How do you counter criticisms of your comparison of migrating African-Americans to that of fleeing refugees? Or, perhaps that there has indeed been a good amount of scholarship on the Great Migration before the publishing of your book? 

Thank you for your time,

Joy

Letter to Martha

Dear Martha,

I wanted to write to ask you about how you viewed your book Travels with Myself and Another as you got older and perhaps matured some more. I don't know if that's a fair description of things, the maturation, but I wanted to know if your views changed at all. You were really unfavorable and kind of insulting of some places and I wondered why you kept things that way. You were particularly harsh with your account of traveling through China, and I wanted to know if you felt the same way as you did later. I thought personally that you criticized it perhaps unfairly harshly, but that might just be my opinion from reading it so much later than when you wrote it and with a much different cultural context for it than when you had written it. I know part of what made the journey so interesting is that it was so much of a challenge and that the conditions were so poor, especially with that infection which you got towards the end, but I thought that perhaps you could have focused onto some better parts of the journey. It seemed like it was unfairly overshadowed by all the negative things which happened, which isn't a bad thing, the negative should have a place in the story, but they shouldn't be the only part of the story. At least that's my thoughts on the matter.

I thought that you did a much more balanced accounting of things when you were in Africa and appreciated your style much more at that point than otherwise. You covered the things that were bad, the weather and bugs and how you came in woefully underprepared, but you also highlighted the moments which were better. I really appreciated how you described meeting the sultan or whatever his proper title was out in the bush. I thought it was much more keenly observant and looked at him and his culture in a more complete and sensitive way than when you wrote about your experiences in China and in the Caribbean islands during World War II.

I also wanted to mention your travel to Russia. What was it like? It seemed hard for me to get a sense of the actual place from your writing. You focused it more onto the interactions that you had with your friend there, which I found strange because nowhere else did you drive the story with people. What caused you to make that choice? Because it seemed like a conscious decision, you mentioned going sightseeing, but you said you could hardly recall what Red Square looked like. Was it because the reason you went to Russia was specifically to visit Mrs. M, or was there something else behind the choice of centering your account onto her? 

Letter to William

Dear William,

I wanted to write to you to ask how you felt about finding the essence of America. It seemed to me like you were looking for much the same thing that Steinbeck was looking for when he set off, and had a similar sort of experience while you were out there. Maybe I'm not looking deeply enough into this, because I don't really want to say that you were copying Steinbeck, I just wanted to mention that your two journeys seemed similar to me.

I don't think there were any areas where this was particularly evident, and I don't even mean to say that you had similar experiences while you were traveling, but it was just a sense of similarity that I couldn't shake. Let's take for example the experiences that both of you had there in the South and what transpired. I'll focus on when you were in Selma and met those three gentlemen. You had a profound conversation with them about the effects of racism that they still carry in their lives, and also a mention of how the police officers who are black treat them worse than the white ones do out of some sense of fitting in. At least that's how I remember it being described. Steinbeck didn't really have any experience at all that's analogous to this. He had the situation where he talked to the man. I can't remember quite if it was the Monsieur Ci Git or not, but he talked about how blacks wouldn't be satisfied with gains. I guess his point was more that the blacks had to learn to look at the whites just about as much as the whites had to learn how to look at blacks both of them needed to see each other as people and he wasn't so sure that was going to happen. For some reason it just seemed to me that you two had a similar sort of experience there even though the content between the two is pretty much entirely different.

I also wanted to ask you how much you felt like you were in contact with your Native American heritage while on the trip. I noticed that you fairly often mention the tribes who are residents of an area, and kind of use them to get a sense of the place for us in the story. I was wondering if you felt like through the trip and going through all of these areas that you were able to get a better sense of your heritage or if it remained much the same?

Letter to Ann

Dear Ann,

I wanted to write to you to ask how you felt about your mother. It seemed like your feelings towards her changed throughout the novel. You used to really look up to her, do you think that was a product of age or just genuinely loving her? For instance when you got into the car accident in Arizona you let her place the blame for the accident squarely on you despite the fact that all you had really asked for was to go on to the inn where you could use the credit card, Comfort Inn was the place I think. When you were younger it seemed like you realized things were strange with her but didn't really ever think about mentioning anything to her about it. For instance at the very beginning she just left you by the side of the road, and apparently she'd done this a few times before, and she returned and you didn't really say anything about it at all. Did it just seem pointless to say anything to your mom or did you just think that things were normal with how she acted despite the fact that it was unlike anything else you'd ever seen or really heard of. 

I guess I also wanted to ask about how you treated Peter Keller. It seemed like he was really nothing except nice to you and you just treated him wretchedly and manipulated him quite a lot. It seemed like something that your mother would do, well not necessarily that she would be able to, but something that she would do if she was able to get in close enough to one of the men which she thought were interested in her. Did she influence you with your treatment at all? Did she know about you and Peter or was it really just something more that you had picked up through osmosis as a set of expectations and then you just enacted them after that. 

What did you think of how your mother handled her search for men? It seemed very strange to me. She just became so dependent on the men even when they had nothing at all that they could offer her. For instance the man she had living with you at the beginning in Los Angeles. I can't remember his name but I do recall that he was a developer and that your mother thought that he might be involved with the mob. Anyways he did really nothing and your mother put up with him despite that fact. I thought the strangest thing was how she only got rid of him after he yelled at you. She had no problem herself with yelling you, and if I recall correctly even hit you sometimes. Why do you think it was such a big deal to her that the man yelled at you? Because it seemed to me that pretty much anything else that he did wasn't really a problem at all.