46 pages • 1 hour read
William Least Heat-MoonBlue Highways: A Journey into America
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “South by Southeast”
Heat-Moon leaves the monastery, travels through Georgia, and heads into Alabama, where he finds a place to park Ghost Dancing and stay the night near a community college. It is here that subsequent events would “change the direction of the journey” (91). While at the tennis courts near the college, Heat-Moon finds himself in a discussion with a pair of white gentlemen, one of whom seems to hold some racist views. This man mentions to Heat-Moon that he ought to take a trip into Selma.
As Heat-Moon drives toward Selma, he notices people seem friendly, waving at him as he passes on the country roads. Heat-Moon decides to stop in for a drink at a place called Mickey’s, an apparent tavern (“apparent” because of the necessity of subtle advertising for bars in the Bible belt). In the tavern, Heat-Moon has a discussion during which explicit and grotesque racism is on display.
Heat-Moon travels into the Black neighborhoods of Selma and befriends two reluctant Black men, James Walker and Charles Davis. He meets them at a basketball court and asks them about race relations in Selma—whether things have improved since the famous Civil Rights marches of 1965. Eventually, Walker and Davis notice a sheriff keeping tabs on the meeting and tell Heat-Moon that the sheriff is not watching them as Heat-Moon assumes; instead, the sheriff is keeping tabs on him. Heat-Moon sees this as somewhat of an imperative to leave Selma.
Heat-Moon continues his journey through Mississippi, following along the Natchez Trace, a historic Native American trail. He stops in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The town that now stands was initially built over a Choctaw village.
On toward Louisiana, Heat-Moon picks up a hitchhiker, a Black man who was out searching all over for work. This is the first of a number of hitchhikers that he will pick up along the journey. Heat-Moon becomes motivated to find authentic Cajun food and music, or “Chanky-chank.” He finds both. While in St. Martinville, Heat-Moon befriends a Black woman named Barbara St. Pierre, and, once again, he asks her about race relations in the South. The chapter concludes with Heat-Moon calling his cousin and spending the night at her house. He realizes that “[i]t had been a long time since I’d eaten among faces I’d seen before, and I knew it would be hard leaving.” (128).
Chapter 3 Analysis
The third chapter’s primary focus is the state of Southern race relations, especially in Selma, Alabama, home to the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge over which Martin Luther King Jr. led Civil Rights marches. The site is well-known for the televised confrontations between marchers and police officers. On March 7, 1965, the white officers inflicted such brutal violence upon the marchers that the day became known as “Bloody Sunday.” The reader must understand that Heat-Moon’s trip takes place in 1978, only 10 years after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and 13 years after the incidents in Selma.
Heat-Moon decides to sojourn to Selma only after an exchange with the white man at the tennis court. On his way into Selma, he also overhears blatantly racist discourse inside a bar. While segregation is illegal, the bar’s patrons are only white. As Heat-Moon proceeds into Selma, he follows the same route as the peaceful Civil Rights marchers in the 1960s.
While Heat-Moon can ask white bar patrons their opinion of race relations, he is motivated also to ask African Americans. He befriends two men, Charles Davis and James Walker, and their discussion is revealing. Neither the white bar patrons nor Walker see progress in local race relations. In fact, Walker tells the author, “Ain’t nothin’ changed” (98). As the world around Heat-Moon seems to be in flux, racial relations’ stagnation is a stark contrast.
Heat-Moon learns firsthand how tenaciously Selma’s white residents protect the status quo. Walker notices a sheriff spying on their encounter, and while Heat-Moon assumes it is his Black interlocutors being profiled, Walker points out that Heat-Moon is the target. The sight of a “white” man hanging around in a Black neighborhood and chatting with Black men cannot simply be taken for what it is: men chatting. Instead, law enforcement project nefarious motives onto the three men’s meeting. Nothing illegal is happening, but it doesn’t seem to matter. When Heat-Moon experiences such insidious and informal segregation, he further understands the sheer immorality of it.
After Heat-Moon departs from Selma, he ventures into Philadelphia, Mississippi, a place once home to a prominent Choctaw village. What stands out is the abject negligence of the original white settlers, who made no effort to preserve anything of the village. Unlike the Star Fort, nothing of the Native cultural heritage remains, and commerce and enterprise have replaced everything. This is one of the book’s recurring considerations: how “new” people have appropriated for themselves what previously existed.
