A River Drowned

The names of the places where the civil rights movement in Alabama mounted anti-segregation protests, to the point where sometimes it meant death, have become standard High School history in this country: Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham.
Yet the northern Alabama hill country where I stayed there is little of this haunted period in evidence. Instead, they drowned a river.
The Tennessee Valley Authority blocked up the Tennessee River with dams to provide electricity to areas so poor people lived in unlighted shacks. Now the river is split into artificial lakes. On the weekends they are filled with people jet-skiing, boating, and catching Bass.
Wealth has come to the South. No surprise there. The lake houses stand empty most of the time, as Huntsville, 20 miles away, has prospered after the US rocket program was stationed there. There is a huge tower that was used somehow in launching the Saturn spacecraft.
The only reminder of segregation is the courthouse square in the center of Scottsboro. Like most other towns of its size, the square is practically empty most of the time, the commerce having spread out to the highways.
The Scottsboro Boys case was initially tried there. This was a series of trials of black young men that were accused of raping two white women. This was aboard a boxcar, yet somehow the conducter was summoned by some white youths that had been beaten up by the black men.
There was a lynch mob already forming in the next town. The governor of the state calmed them down by saying, essentially, let the state kill the boys (the penalty for rape of a white woman was death).
The case went on and on in the 1930s into the 1940s when, incredibly (with the behind the scenes aid of a New York Jewish lawyer), everyone was found innocent.
But look around today, there are not many blacks around, there in the heart of Dixie. The hill folk had little interest in defending the plantation owners to the south in a civil war. They had no slaves. Now the best evidence that you are in the rural South is the number of structures that are some kind of church (Christian, of course. Even Papists are suspicious).
On the up side, you can buy alcohol and guns at Wal-Mart, in one easy trip. And if traveling through nearby Ft. Payne, you must stop and pose with the larger-than-life statues of the 1970s country band Alabama.

Those of you who know Chris, he seems to be getting into the lifestyle there. We shot air rifles at cans, and went bass fishing a lot (Chris eventually caught a two-and-a-half pound one, which put up a hell of a fight). His mother is living with her (second? third?) husband.
In a scene out of Vonnegut, me, Chris, and his mother drove up this heavily wooded small mountain in Huntsville. At the top was a "golf community." This means that the houses are right by the painstakingly maintained immaculate course.
We had lunch at the hill-top mountain clubhouse, looking down at the sprawl of Huntsville. Peasants.