On my recent road trip, I listened to the audiobook of Sarah Vowell's
Assassination Vacation, and even though I did manage to make my way through Ohio without hitting any of the state's myriad presidential birthplaces, homes, or gravesites, her accounts of her pilgrimages to various sites realating to Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, and their assassins did greatly influence my trip. While not going to any site she mentions, at three stops that I did make, I was definitely hearing her voice.
Before I reached her discussion at the end of the book of that list of spooky similarities between Lincoln and Kennedy, like "President Lincoln's secretary, whose name was Kennedy, advised him not to go to the theater. Kennedy's secretary, whose name was Lincoln, advised him not to make the trip to Dallas" (It can indeed be found by typing
Ann Landers and
eerie into a search engine.), I was thinking of it at The Henry Ford Museum. "Yes, this is the car that President Kennedy was assassinated in on November 22, 1963," begins the interpretive sign. Meanwhile, on the other side of the museum, a less flippant interpretive sign describes the chair in which Lincoln laughed at the sockdolagy of
Our American Cousin when he was assassinated. Despite the eerie coincidence that the last seats of both presidents would end up in the same museum, all I could think was "Am I standing where Sarah Vowell was standing?" Well, that and that I have said the word
sockdolagizing way too many times for one roadtrip.
Later, after winding my way through the horse farms of central Kentucky, I found myself looking up the 56 stairs leading to the Doric temple where Abraham Lincoln was born:
Oh, the simple, one room log cabin is inside. It and a bored park ranger are the only things inside. I immediately recalled Vowell bringing up how not everyone was happy with the neoclassical Lincoln Memorial on the Mall in Washington, most notably the Prairie School architects from the "Land of Lincoln." Am I too harsh? A marble replica of the cabin would look pretty stupid, and the cabin probably did need to be protected from the elements, but a memorial paid for with subscriptions from elementary school kids in 1909-1911, it should not leaving me feeling down. Greek temples for the president famously born in a log cabin? It now seems so natural.
Then on my way back to North Carolina, I stopped at the Cumberland Gap National Historic Park, and hiked up Tri-State Peak, the Tennessee-Kentucky-Virginia tri-state point. At the summit, a plaque for each state shows me the state seal of Virgina--the Amazonian goddess Virtus, standing upon the breastplate of the tyrant she has just slain with her now sheathed sword, is above the Latin phrase which is the state's motto:
Sic Semper Tyrannus, which as Vowell points out is just what John Wilkes Booth yelled as he did the same to "Tyrant" Lincoln. I also noticed that the plaque notes that the state song of Virgina is "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny," which I had recently learned from Vowell is now the State Song Emeritus, having been redesignated so in 1997 because the song--the longing of "this old darkey's heart" to return to the land of his "massa"--was finally offensive enough. Although I suppose that a southern state in 1940 choosing to adopt as its state song a first person narative of a former slave could somehow be construed as "progressive."
