In the spring of 2019, a little less than a year before the COVID pandemic shut down the world, my wife, Mary Pat Treuthart, and I took a road trip through the American South.

As I wrote in a travel story that later ran in the print edition of The Spokesman-Review, “aside from the food, the scenery, the music and literature,” it was our way of learning about a part of the United States that hasn’t always been captured in the best light.

We started in Memphis, which is where our friend Andrew lives. We rented a car that just happened to be a new orange Dodge Challenger, which was an updated version of the same brand of car that was featured in the television show “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

(One of my favorite moments of the trip was during a stop for gasoline in Tuscaloosa, AL, when a young boy called out to me, “Hey, mister, I really like your car.”)

Memphis, of course, has its own, famous and infamous shrines. Among the more infamous symbols of the civil rights movement are the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and which is now part of the National Civil Rights Museum. Another is the less-well-known Slave Haven Underground Railroad Museum.

Of course, Memphis also boasts Graceland (former home of Elvis Presley), the music and food venues of Beale Street, the “birthplace of rock ’n’ roll” Sun Records and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. One day we even walked the length of what’s called the Big River Crossing, which is said to be the longest public pedestrian bridge across the Mississippi River.

After our short Memphis stay, we drove south toward Alabama. Our first stop was in Tupelo, MS, Elvis’ birthplace, mainly just to say that we’d been there. But after a quick bite to eat we forged on to Birmingham, where we spent the night.

Our hotel, the Hampton Inn & Suites, was founded in 1914 as the Tutwiler Hotel. It was renovated in 1986, and aside from its historic charm and Beaux-Arts architecture, one of the charms of the hotel is that it’s within walking distance of some of the central area’s more famous sites: the 16th Street Baptist Church, Kelly Ingram Park, the Alabama Theatre and the Birmingham Museum of Art.

If you have a car, you can, of course, take in a lot more of what the city has to offer. Since we were there for only one full day, we missed out on a lot. But we did choose to drive up to catch the scenic view of the city from Vulcan Park.

Leaving Birmingham, we headed 90 miles south to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital city. Here’s how the city is described in the city’s official website: “Once home to the First White House of the Confederacy, Montgomery grew to become the center of the Civil Rights Movement, notably the Montgomery Bus Boycotts.”

Evidence of the civil rights struggle is most evident at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a starkly artistic outdoor installation funded by the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal nonprofit founded by attorney and author Bryan Stevenson.

As I wrote, “The EJI’s outdoor memorial is a distinctly mournful tribute, an installation of life-size, coffin-shaped monoliths, each bearing names (by individual county and state) of the thousands of lynching victims throughout U.S. history.”

We also visited the EJI’s Legacy Museum, the Rosa Parks Museum, joined a tour of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church (which Martin Luther King Jr. served for a brief time as pastor), the offices of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Freedom Rides Museum (dedicated to the activists who were attacked on the night of May 20, 1961).

Leaving Montgomery, we headed northwest to Oxford, MS, home of the University of Mississippi. More important to lovers of literature, though, Oxford is where William Faulkner resided on and off for most of his life. And from 1930 until his death in 1962, he owned what is known as Rowan Oak, the house set on 33 acres of land that since 1972 has been owned by the university.

I’ve visited other former homes of famous writers, from Dante Alighieri’s house in Florence, Italy, to Ernest Hemingway’s estate outside of Havana, Cuba. And while Hemingway’s is the most impressive, Faulkner’s Rowan Oak can’t be bested as representative of the writer and his work.

Though Faulkner began his literary career in New Orleans, and is where he wrote his first novels, it was at Rowan Oak where he gained his greatest fame. Based on the strength of such novels as “The Sound and the Fury,” “Sanctuary,” “As I Lay Dying” and “Light in August,” Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

This is how he began his acceptance speech: “I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust.”

Faulkner’s work is still being recognized. The Modern Library ranks “The Sound and the Fury” as No. 6 on its list of “100 Best Novels,” while “As I Lay Dying” sits at No. 35.

Walking around Rowan Oak, which has been maintained much as it was during Faulkner’s life, you can without much effort picture him there at work. His typewriter (manual, of course) still sits at his desk, in front of a window through which it’s possible to see the area’s natural beauty.

And if we’re still talking about completing an education, it’s through that window that you can easily catch, even if only in your imagination, the world of Yoknapatawpha County just as Falkner created it.

At least I did.