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I Spent No Kings Day in a Cave

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Walking over the underground before it walks over you.

By Sarah Kendzior | June 29, 2025
 

There is a salamander so rare, you can find it only in the Ozarks. It is born wide-eyed and willing, eager to explore its surroundings: blue streams, green forests.

One day, the salamander wanders into a crack in the earth. This is the most fateful decision it will make. The world darkens, but the salamander keeps going: down, down, down, until no light remains. Over time, its skin begins to mutate. A film grows over its eyelids and fuses them shut.

The salamander is now blind. But it does not know. It will live, and die, in the eternal darkness of a subterranean cave.

I spent No Kings Day in a cave because I wanted to see the salamander. But I also wanted to ensure no film comes to cover my own eyes. A cave 250 feet underground has no cell service and no surveillance. It has no AI or GPS. Lone light shines from lanterns held by humans. They reveal a labyrinthine land of stone, not dead but slow growing. I go to caves to reset my senses. They show me the peace I am missing.

On the drive to the Ozarks, I saw a photo on social media. A protester held a handmade sign with a warning I wrote years ago: “THIS IS A TRANSNATIONAL CRIME SYNDICATE MASQUERADING AS A GOVERNMENT.”

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I’ve seen these words on signs for nearly a decade. In Trump’s first term, they were plastered around St. Louis by activists from the local Indivisible group. Now they’ve been revived. I’m glad people read my words, but I wish they didn’t still resonate. I want my books housed under “History” instead of “Current Events.” I want my warnings to be heeded and an alternate America to emerge: the America we deserve.

That outcome looks less likely each year. Time is the autocrat’s weapon: that’s why DOJ lackeys crowing “Be patient” were integral to mafia state rule. Officials knew what Trump was before they let him in, in part because he wouldn’t stop telling everyone. The remedy lay not only in exposing Trump but stopping the forces behind him. No one in power wanted to do that, for it would reveal institutional complicity.

As I wrote in January, “The most important thing about the election is not that Trump was proclaimed the winner, but that he was allowed to run.”

Despite my own ominous message, I was heartened to see the sign. I am grateful for the protesters: their refusal to abide tyranny and genocide, their insistence that immigrants and migrants be protected, their creativity and defiance. Protesting is honorable. Protests show the magnitude of dissent and shape new alliances.

Protests matter in their own right. But in the 21st century, protests have not brought policy change. Americans have never protested so much yet gained so little leverage. This is not the fault of protesters but of the multifaceted mafia state.

“No Kings” is a misnomer. Trump is not in charge. A birthday with a military parade gives the trappings of a king. But Trump is only the frontman for transnational organized crime. That’s all he ever was or will be.

Trump did not rise to this position alone. US officials have grown a second skin, one that seals their eyes and their deals and their documents. They entered the darkness of the mafia state and did so knowingly. Had they not, Trump could have never run in 2016 or in 2024. Party allegiance indicates whether a US official acts as an abuser (GOP) or an enabler (Democrat). But when they speak, it is often with one voice.

Now that voice is calling for war. This is another reason I descend beneath the earth.

US officials want war with Iran. They want it because Israel wants it and they do what Israel says. Israel has been planning to strike Iran since 2024: a timeline which makes Kamala Harris’s rehabilitation of Iraq warmongers look less like a campaign and more like an audition, and November resemble less an election than a selection.

Trump showed his willingness to abet an Iran War in his first term. The only question for Iran warmongers was whether they would rather have an ambitious bureaucrat like Harris or put up, again, with Trump’s mercurial grift.

The notion of not having an Iran War is dismissed. Israel is the main instigator but not the only one. The military-industrial complex wants war, apocalypse fiends want war, and alphabet agencies have had an Iran grudge since before I was born.

I don’t like comparing US officials to an Ozark blind salamander, because it is insulting to the salamander. But US officials have been obeying and abetting so long that they don’t remember what it’s like to see the world for what it is — or realize that we can see them for what they are, too.

* * *

The cave opening was a third of a mile into the woods. We gathered at the trailhead as the guide detailed our journey. It was rare for Cathedral Cave to be open. So rare that I, a cave connoisseur, had never been inside.

There were about twelve of us: my husband and kids, a few couples, and some folks from India who had never seen a cave. Everyone was excited that their first time would be in Missouri. A man in a Cardinals T-shirt asked me where I lived. When I said “St Louis”, he gave me the eye reserved for city folk.

“I’m from Kimmswick,” he said. A town of 134 people.

“Home of the levee-high pie!” I exclaimed. “I ate that pie, that big huge apple pie. And you have the apple butter festival! And the strawberry festival. We tried to go once, but it was too crowded.”

“The strawberry festival.” The man shuddered. “Don’t get me started. We get out of town for that. Stay and it’s 45 minutes to drive half a mile.”

“You had some hard years with the floods, right? 2019, 2022.” Canceled events, sandbags on riverbeds.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “We need that festival. The apple butter one too.”

“Once,” I said, “We went to Kimmswick without even knowing it was Deer Widow’s Weekend. My husband spent the whole time wandering around like, ‘Why am I the only man in town?!”

Everyone laughed. Later in the cave, the man in the Cards shirt helped a one-armed man make his way down the slippery paths, ensuring he was safe.

“Did everyone get bug spray?” asked our guide, a peppy parks ranger. “The ticks are bad this year. And there’s that new tick, the really bad one. The one that makes you allergic to meat.”

Everyone gasped. Here was a Missouri tragedy.

“Is that real?” asked my son. “All meat? Even hot dogs?!”

“It’s real,” the guide confirmed. “Allergic to all meat. Except fish and chicken, but those don’t count. I know someone who got bit. She’s a vegan now.”

We gasped again. Someone grabbed the spray and began frantically reapplying.

“Now there’s a shame,” said the Cardinals man.

“Poor thing,” a woman murmured.

“OK!” said the guide after a moment of silence for the tragic vegan. “We’re going to hike to the cave. Does everyone have their lanterns?”

We held up our “lanterns,” which were flashlights, but we liked the delusion. Cathedral Cave used to be a show cave when it was owned by Lester Dill, who also owned its neighbor, Onondaga Cave. I wrote about Dill in my book The Last American Road Trip, for he was a quintessential American: the inventor of the bumper sticker and tacky PR stunts, and an environmentalist who spent his final years saving Missouri’s caves and rivers from destruction. Dill led a life of wild contradictions: like his state, like his country.

In the 1930s, Cathedral Cave was a show cave with electricity. When the electricity broke in the 1970s, and thieves stole the copper wire, Dill decided not to fix it, but instead make Cathedral a “wild cave” lit by lantern. Missourians excel at transforming laziness and destruction into entertainment.

At the end of the trail stood a moss-covered concrete cube with a padlocked door. Here our guide showed us photos of the blind salamander, talking him up like a long-lost friend. She noted he had been hard to spot, but we should give a holler if he appeared. She gave the requisite warnings about not touching cave formations and urged us to protect bats vulnerable to white nose syndrome. I have heard these warnings for decades, but I never tire of them, because they mean someone cares.

She unlocked the door. A blast of cool air initiated our descent. We climbed into Cathedral Cave, navigating puddles and switchbacks. The railing was gritty from age but the formations dazzled, indifferent to time. Stalactites glistened with pearls of water: the ceiling lived. The guide noted that caves are impervious to earthquakes and other natural disasters. Stromatolites outlast everything: they are older, she said, than the rings of Saturn. It would take a deliberate act of man to destroy the underworld.

 

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Searching for Bobbie Gentry

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America’s culture of cruelty and those who dare to notice.

 
By Sarah Kendzior | June 2, 2025
 

It was the 30th of December, and I was driving the Natchez Trace Parkway, looking for Bobbie Gentry.

I didn’t want to find her. I only wanted to know she was out there, eluding everyone.

I wanted her to outwit every man who did her wrong. Many are dead: Bobbie Gentry is in her 80s. She hasn’t appeared on stage since 1981, when, after a series of music industry disputes, she left public life behind with a steadfastness unrivaled.

I was not the first to explore Chickasaw County, Mississippi and other Gentry haunts, hoping for a glimpse of the singer. For over forty years, no stranger has tracked her down. Gentry wanted to disappear and she got her way. She is rumored to be happy. I am likely angrier about the treatment of Bobbie Gentry than Bobbie Gentry is.

It’s only fair when a trailblazing woman gets burned that younger women pick up the torch.

In 1967, Bobbie Gentry destroyed the Summer of Love. The Beatles crooned “All You Need Is Love”, flower-haired hippies swayed — and in July, Bobbie Gentry released “Ode to Billie Joe”, a spare acoustic ballad about a suicide whose true horror was the politesse and apathy which with it was greeted.

What America needed was not love. America needed truth served cold and clever. “Ode to Billie Joe” framed cruel indifference as mystery. Americans ate it up like a southern noontime dinner.

Ode to Billie Joe knocked Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band off the top spot. It made Gentry, who wrote and sang the title track, a massive star. The genre-defying hit — “I don’t sing white or colored; I sing southern,” she explained — dominated the Hot 100, country, easy listening, and R&B charts. Gentry was indefinable, independent, and confident in her dark lyricism.

As a result, she had to be punished. America loves to blame the messenger, especially when the message presages darker days. Some believe the flower power era ended with the Manson murders. “Ode to Billie Joe” suggests the sunny sixties never existed.

“Ode to Billie Joe” is the first-person tale of a family eating dinner on the third of June, “another sleepy dusty Delta day.” They are discussing Billie Joe McAllister, a local boy who died after jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge. Later, it is revealed that not long before his death, a preacher saw Billie Joe throw something — never named — off the bridge while accompanied by the female narrator of the song. The family members portray Billie Joe’s death as inevitable (“Nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge”) and unimportant.

They care more about their meal than his suicide. The song’s most chilling line is “Pass the biscuits, please.”

The parents do not notice how Billie Joe’s death shakes the narrator. In the final verse, it is a year later, and she spends her time throwing flowers off the Tallahatchie Bridge. During that year, “There was a virus goin’ ‘round and papa caught it and he died last spring, and now mama doesn’t seem to wanna do much of anything”.

She recites these horrors like a grocery list.

* * *

In the years after 2020 — when covid ravaged America and protests raged over the brutal murder of George Floyd, only for both tragedies to ultimately be abandoned in favor of apathy — I listened to “Ode to Billie Joe” hundreds of times.

The Summer of 2020 was no Summer of Love. But it was a summer that was supposed to mean something. The next few years were aimed at convincing us that it didn’t, and that we were foolish to believe it would. The real crime was compassion. The real crime was noticing and caring and wanting to make it right.

The biggest villains, in the Biden years, were the messengers: epidemiologists and activists and documentarians of tragedy battling a brigade of pundits and politicians who wanted us to pass the biscuits, please, and ignore that body under the bridge.

* * *

One would think that after “Ode to Billie Joe” — a commercial success and lyrical masterpiece housed in the University of Mississippi library next to Faulkner — Bobbie Gentry would be allowed to do whatever she wanted.

To believe this is to not understand how women are treated in creative industries. When a woman has an unconventional hit, the reaction is often to try to contain her, even sabotage her. Success does not protect female writers — not even from their own publishers.

Instead of gaining support, Gentry found her abilities questioned. “I am a woman working for herself in a man’s field,” she told an interviewer in 1974. Reporters insulted her intelligence. Men took credit for her ideas. She was entangled in industry lawsuits, which she won. She became so wary of management contracts that she limited them to six months to ensure her freedom. Every career move was a tightrope of painstaking navigation and vindicated paranoia.

Her follow-up, The Delta Sweete, was true to Gentry’s vision: enigmatic ballads, raucous soul, and dark southern covers, including “Sermon” (popularized by Johnny Cash as “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”) and “Parchman Farm”, about the notorious Mississippi prison. The US press largely ignored the album and it sold poorly.

“No one bought [The Delta Sweete] but I didn’t lose any sleep over it,” said Gentry in 1968.  I don’t know whether to believe her, but I’m glad she said it.

When America lost interest in Gentry, she became the first female songwriter to host a variety show on the BBC. She often co-directed, but the BBC would not give her formal credit, and she left.

When America regained interest in Gentry, she headlined Vegas revues and partnered with Glen Campbell, becoming an Americana sex symbol and a southern gothic intellectual all at once. A bandmate described her as “an overpowering presence” who micromanaged her elaborate shows. In Vegas, she married a rich man 31 years her senior and divorced him four months later, making lots of money. She signed on to an “Ode to Billie Joe” movie, making lots of money again.

Enough money to vanish in style.

The 1970s brought the voluntary end of Gentry’s career and some of her best songs. In 1969, she headed to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama to record Fancy, released in 1970, under the production of Rick Hall, one of few men to consistently champion her talent.

While on book tour this April, I visited FAME. I stood under the Fancy cover: a painting of Gentry wearing the red velvet high-slit gown of her album’s protagonist, a teenage girl named Fancy who slept her way out of destitution and into independence, unrepentant about doing what she needed to survive.

The tour guide played “Fancy” in the very room where Gentry recorded it. I felt like I was seeing a ghost, but it was the indomitable spirit of the song: Gentry’s second and final hit. Like Fancy, Gentry rewrote the rules of a rigged game before she quit it.

Gentry’s 1971 album, Patchwork, was another commercial failure. Produced solely by Gentry, it alternates between character vignettes; musical interludes; and wry, sad confessions — in particular, the closer, “Lookin’ In”:

I’m packin’ up and I’m checkin’ out, I’m on the road again
Feelin’ like I’m in a pantomime
But the words will come to me in their own good time
Tumblin’ and stumblin’ over in rhyme
And the ugliest word that I ever heard, my friends, is sacrifice
It’s an easy out for all you should have been…

She never made another record.

* * *

Bobbie Gentry was so ahead of her time that she had to leave it.

She sang of the south, where she was raised. She lived in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1955, the year Emmett Till visited and was murdered by racists who threw his corpse in the Tallahatchie River. Gentry was thirteen, a year younger than Till.

Was “Ode to Billie Joe” inspired by Till’s murder? No one knows. Gentry refused to reveal what was thrown off the bridge, believing it incidental to the indifference expressed in the face of tragedy. Scholar Kristine M. McCusker hypothesized that the song reflects changing attitudes of southern whites — including whether to show guilt — at the time Gentry penned the lyrics.

“Ode to Billie Joe” reflects 1955 and 1967 and 2025. American cruelty masquerading as respectability is timeless. What’s hard to fathom today is a cutting social critique becoming a mainstream hit. The music industry has been drained of its power to reflect the people, despite Gentry’s themes resonating now more than ever.

This is particularly true since 2021. The pandemic “ended” when officials decided to bury public health data: another sleepy Delta covid day. Sedition went unpunished until public memory became blurred enough to rehabilitate a coup plotter. Promises made in 2020 to end racist police brutality were not only broken but mocked by the very politicians who made them. (In one particularly grotesque example, Nancy Pelosi thanked George Floyd for dying.)

On social media, anyone could join the callous chat. Americans mourning loved ones were berated. Americans hit by natural disasters were told by distant strangers to “just move.” Americans stripped of rights were ignored by former allies. Emotional breakdowns in public places were filmed and posted online so that a person having the worst day of their life could have an even worse one. Americans were told they deserved what they got and what they got was horrific: the agony, and the apathy.

Cruelty was incentivized for profit and boosted by algorithm. Good-faith arguments could not happen when both “good” and “faith” had vanished. But Americans were not supposed to discuss that: not in a way that acknowledged collective pain. We were told to “move forward”, politician code for “turn your back”. Move forward, they implored, justice is divisive to the unjust.

Gentry is foremost a storyteller. Her songs are not overtly political. But tragedy feeds politics, and politics breeds tragedy, and Americans have been both the predators and the prey. There are few who convey the cruelty of abandonment, and its maddening ambiguity, like Bobbie Gentry.

“Ode to Billie Joe” is known as a sad song. But its sadness lies in the absence of mourning. Death came and people shrugged. If they grieved, they grieved alone.

* * *

In December 2023, I belted out Bobbie Gentry songs as I drove through her name-checked towns of Kosciusko and Okolona and Tupelo. I took in the lay of her land, imagining it in her time. But it is still Gentry’s time: it will always be Gentry’s time. In America, every day is the third of June.

Over the last four years, as cruelty flourished and creativity fell under fire, I turned to Gentry. She didn’t compromise; she didn’t cut and run. She outwitted the industry that sought to suppress her. She had faith that her work would endure after she left the stage — and it did. Gentry destroyed respectability and then did the most scandalous thing of all: abandoned fame for freedom.

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Tornado Daze

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On graduation, devastation, and the St. Louis blues.

 
By Sarah Kendzior | May 24, 2025
 

At a lake near my house there is a heron I call my therapist. I hadn’t seen him since October: seven months weighted with the ache of a century. Too much happened and too little changed. I wish current political horrors felt unrecognizable, but it’s like watching a reboot of a movie no one wanted the first time. Familiar in the worst ways, leaving me longing for what’s familiar in the best ways.

From a distance, I questioned if it was really him. There are a lot of herons in St. Louis. There is a lot of beauty in St. Louis, and it tends to vanish without warning.

But it was my heron, my old friend. Don’t ask how I know — do I ask you about your avian analysts? He was back in his office: a withered log under a bent branch. A flood had wrecked his last one, but he had found similar new digs.

All that mattered is that he had stayed. He stayed in St. Louis even though he could fly anywhere. I stayed, too. We stared at each other and didn’t wonder why.

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He watched as I floated, awaiting my tales of woe. I stopped paddling and started drifting. I stopped trying and let my sorrow show. The heron stood impassive. Tears don’t faze a creature that’s seen so many storms. My tears are a drop in his lake.

I needed the reminder. I stayed until his legs began to twitch in a familiar way. He was restless, having already cured one client. I snapped a photo as he launched into flight.

   

The day was warm and cloudless and bracketed in blue. It was my first “normal” day after a national book tour and requisite self-promotion. The lake was a mirror reflecting the beauty of my surroundings, but it never reflected me. Here I was free to be human: unmarketed, unjudged. I passed sunbathing turtles and ragweed gleaming like gold. I kayaked under the highway and the whole world left me alone.

For two hours, I felt sorry for anyone who didn’t live in St. Louis and didn’t know what they were missing.

* * *

I came home happy. My son was at school, but my daughter was done with classes and graduating on Monday. I was trying not to dwell on it. Nothing can prepare a parent for that particular mix of pride and pain.

“Let’s get report card sundaes!” I exclaimed. “Like when you were little.”

My daughter laughed. “Report cards? No one cares about report cards senior year.”

“We’ll get summa cum laude sundaes,” I told her. “Make ‘em real big!”

We used to get report card sundaes at The Fountain on Locust, an art deco ice cream parlor harkening to the era when St. Louis was the envy of the world. This venue is fancier than St. Louis’s usual culinary fare, like frozen custard so thick, it’s served upside down. (This is a Very Important Feat in St. Louis.) The Fountain on Locust does have a Toblerone cocktail, though, for anyone who has wondered what it’s like to drink a Toblerone, which is everyone.

But I remembered another place.

“Let’s go to The Fountain on Delmar,” I said. “It’s the new branch on Delmar Boulevard, with the same menu, and we still haven’t seen it.”

My daughter agreed and we debated who should drive. One of those conversations impossible only two years ago. One of those conversations that preludes more permanent, painful departures.

Childhood takes a long time to go by so fast.

We set off past dilapidated buildings and empty lots. St. Louis has looked like this my whole life. When I drive from my house to downtown, or to my favorite bookshop Left Bank Books, I pass homes with no doors or windows and storefronts where bricks were stolen and sold — buildings that have never been inhabited in the twenty years I’ve lived here.

When guests visited, they’d ask what happened. Was it a bomb? A tornado?

“Nothing happened,” I would answer. And I meant it.

What happened was nothing: what happened was abandonment. White flight by racists fleeing once grand neighborhoods, politicians who let plutocrats buy properties only to let them rot, generational poverty that made it impossible for homeowners to pay for repairs. The buildings were so ornate that it is easy to envision what once existed, and hard to accept the ease with which people let it fall away.

Abandonment in a grand old city reads like an act of defiance. Look what you’ve done, the houses scream. Look what you didn’t do.

The Fountain on Delmar is in a new area called the Maker District attempting to bridge the “Delmar Divide”: the separation between wealthier white areas and impoverished Black areas on Delmar Boulevard. Over the last few years, restaurants and art studios have arrived in once abandoned spaces. With them comes the risk of gentrification, but also genuine attempts at equity by folks who work in the area, and who recognize the danger of papering over old wounds with new money.

I write this in the present tense because my heart can’t handle a past tense future.

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Q & A with Sarah Kendzior

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By Sarah Kendzior | May 12, 2025
 
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And away we go…

Sylvia C: If Trump wasn’t around to fill the role of cult leader and autocrat, do you think another autocratic leader might have emerged to fulfill the goals of Project 2025? I understand that Trump has been at it for forty years or so, but did we just get very unlucky with this criminal in chief, or might another have been anointed by the extreme right wing?

SK: We didn’t get unlucky, exactly: intelligent career criminals installed a skilled demagogue frontman after decades of planning and institutional complicity. (For those who doubt this claim, see Hiding in Plain Sight.) But the question of whether there can be a Trump successor is very interesting. The GOP tried with DeSantis and Haley and failed. They tried with JD Vance, and he alienated two Popes, one who would rather literally die than spend one more minute with him. Trump is unique because of his deep connections in business, “business” (organized crime), entertainment, media, and politics. He also had an enormous amount of leverage through blackmail, threats, and bribes, and is a skilled propagandist. It’s hard to replicate that.

In 1990, when the New York tabloids thought Trump was “over”, they wrote of their relief. In 2020, when Trump lost the election, Americans partied in the streets the way countries do when a dictator is toppled. Trump has a cult of personality that doesn’t seem possible to replicate, which is to the advantage of free-thinking people. The key is to never conflate Trump with systemic problems. He is their culmination, not their origin, and those problems will need to be tackled urgently when he goes.

Laura H: Do you see us surviving this regime? Other than protesting, what can those of us trapped in red states do to help us survive?

SK: I will quote red state philosophical luminary Dalton from Road House, the greatest movie set in Missouri: “Never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected. Take it outside. And be nice…until it’s time to not be nice.”

I’m serious: this is the best “surviving a red state” advice around. And since Dalton was a NYC-to-Missouri transplant cooler, his wisdom applies nationwide. Dalton sagely noted that no one ever wins a fight. This is a call for people to live less in reaction to hostile elements and instead be proactive in building a road house of their own — a road house of the soul, if you will. Or else a real-estate developer tied to organized crime may take advantage of you! And that’s when it’s time to not be nice.

Kas: There seems to be a kind of debate brewing among leftists/progressives between those who consistently point out the most dire outcomes as increasingly likely and those who accuse them of fearmongering and discouraging folks from acting. The likelihood that some version of martial law is or is not staring us down would be an example of this. Personally, I don’t think there’s a conflict between being realistic about the extremism of the moment and continuing to act where and when we can to hold whatever ground is left, but I’d love to hear your take.

SK: Those deriding realists as “doomers” are abetting authoritarianism, whether they realize it or not. Many do realize it and collect checks to spread this sort of rhetoric. The ideal situation for Trump’s return was an unprepared population who believed his reinstallation could not happen and that his arrest was imminent — and that’s what podcasters and “legal experts” bleated for years in a manner very similar to QAnon. Those pundits should be regarded as a liberal counterpart to QAnon. Like QAnon, they caused material harm by creating a culture of conformity so rigid it led to anyone with a different view getting threatened with violence for not “trusting the plan”.

People should be realistic about Trump. That means looking at his network, its history, and what institutions have done in reaction to it. One cannot unilaterally stave off something like martial law, but your odds of surviving or combatting it increase when you discuss the topic with like-minded folks instead of being silenced by people who chide you for bringing it up. I encourage people to examine the track records of commentators and see how their past predictions panned out. Did they falsely promise “rule of law” and browbeat anyone who pointed to hard evidence of institutional corruption? Then they may be working for nefarious forces. This is more likely to be true if they have a record of fraud and/or are living in a foreign country and don’t have their life on the line here in the USA.

Norm C: Is it my imagination or are some pundits that were reluctant or afraid to suggest what your well researched and written books have been calling out for years, are now “jumping on the bandwagon”. They sell subscriptions, speaking engagements, merchandise etc. to help us resist and “fight back”. I often enjoy reading their free commentaries but wonder if I’m just being manipulated by a skillful communicator. Is the movement being “monetized”? Any suggestions on navigating among and selecting good sources of information and commentary.

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