![mason dixon line mason dixon line](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Mason-dixon-line.gif)
They show the crests of the Penn family on the Pennsylvania side and the Calvert family on the Maryland side. Crown stones marked every five miles along the border and carried an "M" and a "P" for the colony on either side. The survey was needed to settle a dispute between the Penn and Calvert families - years before the Revolutionary War. A sign in the middle of the bridge says WELCOME TO TENNESSEE.Two years ago, one of those stones was uncovered - possibly one of the only left that had not been disturbed since they were used to create the Mason-Dixon Line. I see downtown Memphis winking in the sun with its low-rise skyline. I have a moment of panic where I try to remember if I am supposed to take I-40 or I-55, and then I drive up onto the huge M-shaped bridge. We will have to slip through a corner of Missouri and then wend our way through more flatness, Mississippi River flatness, passing soybean and cotton fields beneath an unforgiving sky, past ugly fast-food marquees through dusty West Memphis, Arkansas, and then again, “Oh, look, girls! Look, there’s the bridge!” The second Mississippi crossing is right in front of me, wider than the first. Is it the bridge? Is it the water? It will be three more hours until Memphis. If the kids are in the car, I holler at them instead: “Look, y’all look, it’s the Mississippi River! Oh, look!” And just like that, my accent is there, the second “look” has two or three extra syllables for emphasis. The 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.
![mason dixon line mason dixon line](https://www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/preview/A/A823/A823009_Mason-Dixon-Line.jpg)
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.
![mason dixon line mason dixon line](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/e5/eb/fc/e5ebfc191bb194a193dbad0b4beb6b14--country-roads-country-life.jpg)
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.