CAIRO, ILL. — One of this town's few successful entrepreneurs stood at the grill of his barbecue joint the other day, tending to half a dozen hamburger patties as he contemplated the central mystery of Cairo -- how could a vibrant American community tumble into such a blighted, broken-down condition, and why can't it pull itself back up?
"I don't understand it," Darrell Shemwell said. "We've got rivers, we've got rail . . . we've got history. It's really just pathetic that we are at such an ideal spot and can't get any growth."
Protected on all flanks by levees, Cairo (pronounced care-oh) sits at a point where the mighty Mississippi and Ohio rivers converge, a watery crossroads navigated by the canoes of French fur traders and the pirogues of Lewis and Clark, by Mark Twain's riverboats and, in the pre-interstate era, great flotillas of freight barges.
It also is often said to be where the North ends and the South begins, a description freighted with meaning beyond geography. Cairo, President-elect Barack Obama wrote in his book, "The Audacity of Hope," marks the "confluence of the free and the enslaved, the world of Huck and the world of Jim."
Here was where plantation runaways would ford the rivers for the North. Here too was where one of the last major battles of the civil rights movement was waged -- a pageant of marches and boycotts and sometimes bloodshed that erupted in the late 1960s and lasted several years.
We had stopped in Cairo on our way to the Obama inauguration, wanting to visit a community that, unlike much of America, actually had some ground-level experience with the president-elect as a public servant.
"He has been here and he has seen Cairo," said town librarian Monica Smith. "He knows the shape we are in."
While campaigning for the U.S. Senate, Obama had made an appearance here and, among other complaints, heard from Cairo residents about a decommissioned hospital that had become a public nuisance.
He left those in attendance with the impression he understood the problem and would try to help fix it. In "The Audacity of Hope," he described taking a later trip to southern Illinois and en route telling an aide about "the progress we'd made in tearing down the old hospital in Cairo."
As it turns out, the progress wasn't enough. The old three-story hospital outlasted Obama's time in the Senate. Still, we didn't find anybody complaining about unfulfilled promises. The folks we met were satisfied that the feds at least had cleaned up the asbestos and boarded up the lower-level doors and windows, warding off vagrants.
