On the Road Again

When we go away, usually for Kimberly's job, we arrive a day ahead of schedule so we have a little "together time"--for seeing the sights and so we have something to remember the trip by. For our Nashville trip, after some consultation (or because we did not do a whole lot of planning from guidebooks, mea culpa), we chose to take a chance on a tour and leave the driving to them. Tix at the hotel were $106 for the historic tours of The Hermitage, the home of Andrew Jackson, and Belle Meade, a mansion long associated with horse racing.

Our bus driver, who introduced himself as "J.C" ("not that one upstairs" ha-ha) had a dj's voice and the gift of gab, and was full of info about Nashville sights and history. Our first stop was a strip mall, his company's office, so that we could pick up tourists from feeder buses from other hotels. We were given time to visit the shops and we were drawn to the Ernest Tubb Record Shop 2, associated with the famous original in downtown. In addition to racks of country music and related stuff there was the actual tour bus that Ernest Tubb traveled in. It is a quintessential example of economy of space, and fun to climb into, to boot! We purchased an item called "Hillbilly Cookin'" which has some old recipes such as Hashed Hominy, Mush Biscuits, Squirrel and Sweet Taters, Aunt Liza's Pickled Okra, and Rebel Cake.

So back on the road, with J.C filling us in with facts and anecdotes from his world, and soon we pulled into the grounds of the Hermitage. All of these places usually have a visitors center where you start out and finish, with bathrooms, restaurant, and shops. It quickly became clear to us that we were to go through by ourselves, and J.C was to stay behind. Had we paid a good amount of money for essentially a shuttle with two stops? It looked that way and we started to have regrets that we did not rent a car, which would have given us independence.

Anyway, there was a small exhibit in the visitors center on slaves, naming them and their occupations, along with reproductions of pictures of life at the mansion. In a way the exhibit honored the slaves, because it clearly underscored their importance to the mansion, and it featured them as individuals with achievements of their own. It also was interesting to learn about some of their lives before and after emancipation. But in the back of our mind was: what is going on here? Andrew Jackson owned more than 100 slaves. While there were stories of benevolence on his part, such as buying a slave from a neighboring farm at his own slave's request in order to reunite a family unit, you can't get past the big fact that he bought and sold them, and their lives could not have been far different from what we have read about the "peculiar institution," as it is sometimes called. We had both been curious as to how the South was going to present this aspect of their/our history, and we were still not sure.

The mansion tour itself was conducted by a woman in period costume, and many of the rooms were closed off by glass panels, open for viewing from the doorway only. The Hermitage does not compare with a really rich person's mansion, such as Casa Loma in Toronto, but we are talking about the president whose name is associated with democracy. While the rooms in Old Hickory's house seemed large and spacious to me, we were told that that bedrooms were shared by several people--with nanny slaves sleeping on a mat on the floor in children's rooms. Included in the tour was a lot of information about the Jackson family and the house, as well as interesting facts and customs of the day. Guestrooms were necessary and used often for long stays. In Tennessee, I guess, fish and visitors do not smell in three days. Oh, and there was an interesting piece of furniture, a chair made of animal hides and antlers that was given to a later Jackson by Teddy Roosevelt.



On the grounds we saw the kitchen which was separate from the house for fire reasons, and near the main house was a cabin designated as "a slave's quarters." Kimberly found a nice creek and a summer cottage that was out of the way, and we came upon a family graveyard, including a marker for a family servant. There was a beautiful garden, and we saw some cows in a field!





We made the bus just on time, and J.C. took us to Belle Meade, a mansion belonging to a family that acquired its fortune by raising notable race horses, including Enquirer, Man O'War, and others whose names I have forgotten...No farming at all was done on the property; it was totally dedicated to grazing. (The surrounding town of Belle Meade, an exclusive community of "old money" that never welcomed any country singers, is on former grounds of the estate, which had over 5,000 acres.)



Our guide--or docent, or museum educator--for this tour was in jockey or groom costume, and we learned that he was training to become a curator. His tour, he told us, had a theme: "money, riches, signs of wealth in the house." He began with the entranceway, with its pink glass window over the doorway, which is an indicator of wealth as that glass is made from gold. He pointed out paintings and photographs of the family members of several generations, explaining who owned the house and when. There were an equal number of horse pictures, and he named each one and explained their importance as race horses and as studs. He traced the lines of most of the name horses in major races back to Belle Meade studs. The rooms were full of fancy and rich items such as musical instruments, which he explained were played by slaves who were trained on them (Not the children in the house?). The dining room had a silver pourer, fine china, a gas lamp, and more pictures of horsies. Our guide had a subtheme of language, and, as he explained the use of fans he pointed out a cloth mask which he told us were worn by ladies who, back in the days, women waxed their faces. They had to be careful when sitting near the fireplace, and the cloth masks helped prevent the wax from melting. Sometimes a woman was told to "mind your beeswax" meaning "mind your business." That got an Aha! chuckle from the group.

I loved the design of the house, which had an entranceway in the center, and two rooms to the left and right, with sliding doors from each to the other. A later owner added a second piece, behind these rooms, with a corridor separating the two parts. There were doorways leading outside to verandas everywhere. Upstairs were the master bedroom and bath, children's rooms, and guest rooms. We learned that in those days guests stayed for long periods, and that it was their choice when to leave! As at the Hermitage the kitchen was separate from the main structure of the house, for fire safety reasons, though the open area between them had long been closed off. The grounds had a large stable/barn for the horses, a doll house for the kids, and a small garden. There was also a tomb/grave for the great horse Enquirer.

On the ride back, J.C.explained the long-standing enmity between the old money of Belle Meade and the new money of the music business. He also pointed out what he called the "slaves walls," which were low walls made of piled up limestone, that evoked the style of walls back in Ireland, where a lot of immigrants came from at one point. They were called "slaves walls" not because they were intended to keep people in, but because the slaves built the miles and miles of wall.

We were pretty tired when we got back to fortress Gaylord, so we decided to defer our trip to town for dinner at the Mad Platter. Perhaps we would have seen more and done more if we had rented a car that day, but we had some time together, and we have some precious memories.