Y’all, I drove from Atlanta to Tulsa last month, and I want to tell you what the drive was actually made of.

Not the mileage (808 miles from door to door) or the hours (a little over eleven if nobody stops, and somebody always stops). I mean what’s under the road. Because you cannot drive across the southern half of this country without driving through its history of racial and tribal injustice. It is not a detour you can choose to skip. It is the route.

I wasn’t on a pilgrimage. I want to be honest about that up front, because it changes everything about how this drive worked on me. My cousin David’s mother had died, an aunt I never met, and I was going to help him deal with her estate. So this was a working drive, the kind with somewhere to be at the end of it. But I’m also a person who stops. I stopped all the way across; for a butcher counter in Birmingham, for cheese dip in Little Rock, for a whole evening with a friend in Memphis. I am very good at stopping for the living.

What I drove past, mile after mile, was the dying.

And that, it turns out, is the whole thing. It’s not that I didn’t stop. It’s what I stopped for.

You leave Atlanta and you’re already in it; Georgia is a two-hour reminder before you even reach the state line. Then you ride I-20 west through Alabama, and I-20 in Alabama is the Freedom Riders. It is Birmingham, and Birmingham is the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where four girls were killed by a bomb on a Sunday morning in 1963.

I stopped in Birmingham. I stopped at Mr. P’s, a butcher shop and deli, and I had barbecue, and it was wonderful, and the church was a few minutes away the whole time. I want you to sit with how ordinary that was, because it’s the uncomfortable engine of this whole essay. I did not skip Birmingham. I gave Birmingham an hour and a good lunch. I just gave it to the barbecue and not to the four girls. The church is right there. I stopped for brisket.

You cut across the northeast corner of Mississippi, which most people know as Tupelo, which is to say Elvis. But it’s also Oxford, which is Ole Miss, where in 1962 a man named James Meredith needed federal marshals and a riot’s worth of resistance to enroll in a public university his taxes helped fund. It’s Starkville. This is hill country, not the Delta; the Delta is the other Mississippi, southwest of here, flat and river-fed, and I didn’t drive it this trip. But I can’t pass through the state, on a food blog, and not stop the catalog for a minute to tell you about the thing the Delta gave the country. Because this is a food blog, and because the food is the argument.

There is a thing called the Mississippi Delta hot tamale. If you didn’t grow up near it, it sounds like a mistake; tamales, in Mississippi? But they’re real and they’re old, simmered in their husks, sold for generations by Black vendors out of carts and corner stores and the backs of trucks. Nobody fully agrees how they got there. The likeliest stories run through Mexican migrant laborers who came to pick cotton in the early twentieth century and worked the same fields as Black sharecroppers, and the dish passed between two groups of people who had almost nothing except each other and the work. That’s the Delta hot tamale: two displaced peoples, one piece of cornmeal-wrapped evidence that they fed each other. You can still buy them. The history is edible.

This is the part I keep coming back to. Every stop on this drive is also a foodway, and the road through American racial injustice is the exact same road through the food that the people living under that injustice built anyway. Memphis is where Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, standing on a motel balcony the night after he told a church full of sanitation workers he’d seen the mountaintop. Memphis is also barbecue, and Memphis barbecue is Black barbecue, the slow pit tradition the whole country has spent a century enjoying and a century forgetting to credit. You do not get one Memphis without the other. The grief and the smoke are the same city.

I stopped in Memphis. I stopped hard; I stayed the night. My friend Anna lives there, and we had drinks at Old Dominick, the distillery downtown where her son works, and dinner was a fried green tomato BLT, and it was one of the best nights of the whole trip. I skipped the famous barbecue, actually, because I’d already had mine in Birmingham. So let’s be clear about what I did in the city where they killed Martin Luther King: I had a fried green tomato BLT and a good drink with a friend a few miles from the Lorraine Motel, and I did not go to the Lorraine Motel. I had a lovely evening. That’s the truth and I’m not going to dress it up.

Then it’s Arkansas and I-40, and Little Rock. And in Little Rock, going out, I stopped for cheese dip.

There’s a place called Mexico Chiquito that has been arguing, more or less since 1935, that Arkansas is the birthplace of cheese dip; that a man named Blackie Donnelly, who came up from the Texas-Mexico border, invented the gooey yellow stuff at a dirt-floored restaurant outside North Little Rock before Texas can prove anyone did. Texas disputes this, loudly and forever. Even Lisa Fain, the Homesick Texan herself, has had to concede that the term started with the Donnellys. It’s exactly the kind of contested-origin food fight I love, a small, cheesy version of the bigger question this whole drive keeps asking: who got there first, who said so, and who got believed. I went through the drive through, got a order with chips, and ate it in the car. It was exactly what I expected it to be: rich, salty, flavored with chili powder and cumin.

Little Rock is also Central High School. But I didn’t stop there going out, and there’s a reason that matters, so I’m going to make you wait for it the same way the trip made me wait for it.

West of Little Rock the land starts to rise; the Ozarks come up, and the Arkansas River keeps you company, and you reach Fort Smith on the border. Fort Smith deserves its own post and is going to get one, so I’ll only say this here: it was the edge of what the United States called Indian Territory, the receiving end of the Trail of Tears, the place the federal government marched the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Seminole nations to after stealing the homelands they’d been promised they could keep forever. You cross the river there and you are driving into the country that displacement created.

Here is where I have to be careful with my numbers, because I almost wasn’t.

Oklahoma is home to thirty-eight federally recognized tribal nations, the third most of any state. Driving from the Arkansas border to Tulsa, you don’t cross all thirty-eight; you cross the reservations of three of the Five Tribes. You enter Oklahoma on Choctaw Nation land. You move into the Cherokee Nation, whose reservation covers fourteen counties in the northeast, including the part of Tulsa east of the Arkansas River. And the city of Tulsa itself, most of it, sits inside the Muscogee (Creek) Nation reservation.

I want to make sure you understand that last sentence, because it’s not a historical footnote; it’s current law. In 2020 the Supreme Court ruled in McGirt v. Oklahoma that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s reservation, three million acres, was never legally disestablished. Most of the city of Tulsa is, as a matter of federal law affirmed five years ago, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Not “was.” Is. The reservation didn’t reappear; it was always there. The map just finally admitted it.

Three nations to get there: Choctaw, then Cherokee, then Muscogee. And here’s the part that actually rearranged something in my head. Once I was in Tulsa, I wasn’t sightseeing the history; I was running errands. Helping David look at houses. Killing a Saturday at a flea market. Ordinary stuff. And in the course of that ordinary stuff, just driving around the metro for a week, I crossed into three more: the Osage Nation, the Pawnee Nation, the Sac and Fox Nation. Six nations on one trip, and three of them I touched not on some solemn drive but on the way to look at somebody’s listing and dig through a folding table of other people’s dishes. You can pull up the Oklahoma Department of Transportation’s tribal boundaries map and watch the borders stack up under you. I did. It is not abstract. It is the ground.

And then you’re in Tulsa. Which is where Greenwood is. Which is where, in 1921, a white mob burned the wealthiest Black community in America to the ground and killed an unknown number of people and then arranged for the country to forget it had happened. That one I’m not going to tell you about today either, but for a different reason than Birmingham and Memphis; Greenwood is getting its own post, later this year, because it needs more room than I can give it at the end of a list.

I spent a week there. I’ll spare you the estate paperwork. What I won’t spare you is what it did to the drive home.

Because on the way back, I stopped at Central High School. The one in Little Rock I’d skipped on the way out, the one I’d driven past with a belly full of cheese dip and somewhere to be. In 1957, nine Black teenagers walked into that building behind a wall of federal troops because the governor of Arkansas would sooner have called out the National Guard to keep them out than let them learn. It is a gorgeous building. It is still an operating high school; kids are in there right now. I stood across the street for a long time, and I want to be careful not to make this sound like a conversion, because it wasn’t a lightning bolt. It was smaller and more embarrassing than that. It was just that after a week of Greenwood and six tribal nations and the whole weight of where I’d been, I could no longer drive past the schoolhouse the way I’d driven past the church. Same trip. Same person. I’d stopped for cheese dip going out and I stopped for the nine going home, and the only thing that changed in between was that I finally started paying attention.

So this is what the drive was made of. Eleven hours each way, five states, and a through-line nobody assigned me, running under the whole length of the interstate like rebar. I didn’t go looking for it. I went to help my cousin sort out his dead mother’s things, and I stopped for barbecue and cheese dip and a fried green tomato BLT along the way, because that is who I am and I won’t pretend otherwise. The history was there the whole time, under every one of those happy little stops. It came up through the tires whether I was ready for it or not.

Michael Twitty writes that Southern food is, at its foundation, Black Southern food; that you cannot lift the plate off the history that set the table. I’d add the obvious extension, which is that you can’t lift the road off it either. The barbecue, the hot tamale, the corn and beans and squash that the removed nations carried west and planted in the territory they were exiled to; it’s all the same story as the church and the motel and the schoolhouse and the burned-down neighborhood. The food is what those communities made while the rest of it was being done to them. That’s not a side dish to the history. That is the history, the part that survived in a form you can still taste.

I’ll be writing about the individual stops including a whole post about Tulsa. But I wanted to start here, with the drive whole, because the size of it is the point. You can do this drive with the radio on and never think about any of it. I’ve done it that way before. I won’t ever be able to again.

P.S. If you’ve driven a long stretch of the South and want to know what you passed, the Equal Justice Initiative‘s work and the Southern Foodways Alliance‘s documentation are both good places to start.

P.P.S. Yes, Tulsa names its north-south streets after American cities, numbered east of downtown by the alphabet. There is an Atlanta Avenue. I drove from Atlanta to Atlanta Avenue. I am still thinking about that.

P.P.P.S. I’ll take questions, and I’ll take corrections, especially on the tribal-nations geography and the reservation boundaries; if I’ve got a county wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it, because getting this right matters more than my pride does.