On my road (Phuong Nguyen - Fee Fee)

The memoir “On my road” by Holland Cotter tells what and how the writer saw the world during and after a bus trip from Boston to Texas. At first, he said that he was going to visit his friend in a reform school in Austin, Texas. However, the main purpose of the young man was to know more about the USA, especially the things that he would never see in his place. He chose bus for the trip. He brought with him a lot of novels and a “romantic view of bus travel” because a character in his favorite book “On the road” came to New York City with his teenage wife. Ironically, he soon found out that buses were the transportation for poor people, especially black people. It was June of 1964 when Cotter started his trip; the whole country was heated up by Kennedy’s assassination and the Vietnam War. It was a good chance for him to realize that reality is not as romantic as novels.

Things that he saw during the trip supported the idea more strongly. As he went south, he gradually realized the gap between the white and the black. First, he was told about “apartheid”. Although he was “immersed in African America”, which was meant by pop culture, he was still a white guy living in such a place that there was hardly a black person. People in his place tried to ignore the issue, that’s why he couldn’t have any idea about it. The second thing that he saw was poverty of black people in North Carolina. He was also very surprised when knowing about the disappearance of 3 civil-rights workers, two of them white and from the North. Then, he knew that the white were not welcomed there, even if they were “civil-rights workers”. Next, he went to Atlanta, where he witnessed racial discrimination at another level. Restaurants had side windows to serve black, drinking fountains were labeled “black” and “white”. There, discrimination was public. No one protested against it, no one could protest against it. On the trip, he met a “scared teenage soldier” on the way from his home to his base then on to Vietnam. However, the young soldier didn’t know anything about the war. Neither did Americans.

After the trip, Cotter changed his viewpoints to his favorite novels. He realized their descriptions of African-Americans “seemed cartoonish, false, often mean” because they were written by white Americans. New experience that he gained during the trip made him much more knowledgeable and helped him see the country more familiar. Then he decided to read less and discover the world by his own eyes and ears. Finally, he chose art to be his thing, but he reflected reality in his works and didn’t include any “color lines”.

The trip totally changed Cotter’s perspectives and viewpoints about the world. It even helped him figure out which way he should go for the rest of his life. I always believed that the more we go, the more mature we can be and that’s definitely true in Cotter’s case. The youth should go as much as possible, to learn and discover the world, societies and the life.