8/17/2023 0 Comments Mason dixon lineThe bridge is enormous, you drive over one more hill and then there it is, looming in the distance, a long, high bridge of steel arches, and if I’m alone in the car, when I drive up the quarter mile of ramp it takes to get onto the bridge proper, I roll down my window and holler like a Razorback fan. There are pine trees growing beside the highway instead of cornfields, and the blood in my veins feels the tug of the Mississippi River, slow and inexorable, so powerful it can’t be swum. Usually the first rumblings of joy happen as the hills begin to bubble up. My heart simultaneously leaps up in joy and fills with a dull thudding anxiety. There is no Mason-Dixon line for me to cross over when I travel from Chicago to Memphis.īut there’s something there. When I was a child and people talked about the North (boorish Yankees) and the South (home), they spoke of anything above Tennessee as being “above the Mason-Dixon line.” It turns out that line, demarcated by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon back before the Declaration of Independence, ends way east of Chicago: it simply keeps Pennsylvania out of Virginia and Maryland, and divides Delaware in half. My uncle was a truck driver, and he used to talk about driving up to Cairo. The right vowel can make all the difference.Ĭairo, Illinois, and the rest of the state, I had always believed, was above the Mason-Dixon line. If you need to back up and read again with a corrected pronunciation, go ahead. For those of you not from around these parts, I should probably tell you that Cairo, Illinois, is pronounced Kay-ro (just like Cairo, Georgia). I always sing it fast and twangy, and I get louder on the “black them boots and make ’em shine” part. If I’m the only one in the car (oh, who am I kidding, even if I’m not), at some point I will begin singing “Going Down to Cairo” at the top of my lungs. The accents change with the landscape, from flat Midwestern nasal vowels to a twangy drawl that Southern Illinoisans swear is Southern, and that as a child in Memphis I doubtless called Yankee. And yet somehow in the stretch of I-57 from Chicago to Cairo, probably around the time the flat land suddenly becomes a hill-and-gully descent toward the Mississippi River, the world changes from North to South. It’s one of the most boring drives imaginable. It’s a long straight drive down through Illinois to get to Memphis, cornfields repeating themselves beneath a flat, unwavering sky.
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