In which Sid and Doris visit the Mississippians, pass by Booker T Washington to stay at an Indian-owned Wind Creek casino resort, which may be a bit like Monte Carlo or Las Vegas.
Doris is one for an early civilisation and so it is off to the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park. Both are thrilled that the 1935 design for the visitor centre did finally get finished in the 1950s, but mostly we are here to see how Americans lived before the civilised people got here with the guns, which the Indians were pleased to trade for deer skins. The deer had no opinion.
The centre’s museum, which looks spookily like a London surburban Lido, takes us from early mammoth hunting to the time of the Mississippians (900 to 1500AD) who farmed, built small towns with post and beam houses and these soil mounds up to what happened when the Europeans came.
Were the mounds look-out towers? Bigger than necessary and you can only see trees. Forts? Not many people can live up there and there is no water. Places for the elite of the day to stay and direct Thunderbird ceremonies? A way for manipulative priests to extract more money from people while doing no work themselves? We do not know, but are very interested that they did not ride ponies or drag teepees around after bison herds. Apparently Marion Robert Morrison was never seen around here, though the railway company sliced one of its lines straight through the sacred site of the Ancient Creeks, giving a handy cross-section of a mound that would not be permissible with modern archaeology.
The www.naps.gov site is very thorough on what archaeologists and historians have found at Ocmulgee though their site runs in alphabetical order rather than timeline, which took Sid a minute to work out. Anyway, S and D march up the long grass of the mound and tick it off and hopefully get off the ticks too.
On the way out of the park we stop to read a board about the unique brick railway bridge, only to be accosted by a “four-term Congressman for Macon” who tells us how important this park is and how he got federal funding for it. He also tells us that his Dad drove their family of eight 500 miles a day across the USA in a 1959 Ford Country Squire. Mr Jolly attracts all sorts.
We have a bit of Sid drives, Doris drives pausing to look at the sadly-not-in-action-today Phenix drag strip…
…and stop to eat in a bleak American Deli in Tuskegee.
It is a sad little town best known for Booker T Washington’s Normal School for Colored Teachers (founded 1881) and the 1932-1972 Tuskegee Syphillis Study. African American men offered free medical care were not treated for syphillis and the effects of the disease on them and their partners were studied even after cures were available. 1972…
Alabama was one of the states where whites had worked most effectively to disenfranchise black would be voters. In 1901 the Alabama constitution required voters to be poll tax payers and to have passed a literacy test. 
In 1957 blacks outnumbered whites in Tuskegee by four to one but a cunningly redrawn boundary put virtually all blacks outside the city. African Americans responded with a selective buying campaign, boycotting white businesses and putting 26 out of business.
Now the statue of a Tuskegee Confederate soldier has a bin bag pulled over his head. Tomorrow we will see more when we go to Montgomery, capital of Alabama, where the Confederate flag flew over the Capitol until 1993.
Because this is Sunday we have taken extreme precautions to ensure our hotel has dinner, so despite all our misgivings we are staying at a modern casino. Now we will brave the slots and gaming table on our way to dinner. The slots aren’t slots anymore, no bandit arms to pull. You put your card in and for every $100 you put in you get $83 back. Great business.
‘Explore incredible dining options from our award-winning upscale steakhouse, plus American favourites and refreshments in casual settings’, yum yum.
The steakhouse is shut. No alcoholic refreshments are available on Sunday (house rule, not county. You can gamble but not drink. How prohibition.) The ‘casual setting’ would make a hospital canteen look rather glamorous. We hope we do not have to submit to this.
Doris goes on-line and spots a walkable Mexican Cantina. Arriving damply into it an hour before closing time we find it has just shut because of a problem in the kitchen (sigh) but our would-be host puts us in his top-line 500bhp Dodge Charger and drops us really quickly at the Waffle House for a $25 dinner, including the root beer and tip.
Miftah Bat thinks Wind Creek is very funny. The experience is not so Monte Carlo but the Indians have to get their own back on John Wayne somehow.