Cairo (pronounced KAY-row) is where the Mississippi River meets the Ohio River, and where Huck and Jim were supposed to have turned NE from their southern journey on their raft (which, counterintuitively, gave them a better chance of escaping to the North whithout Jim being caught and sent back) but fell asleep and later woke up deep in the South. A 35%-black county near Chicago would vote heavily Democrat, but Alexander County is geographically and culturally closer to the State of Mississippi than it is to Cook County, and its white voters are far more Republican than those in Chicagoland.
But I didn’t understand what you said about Mark Twain. Did Twain, while visiting Cairo, call the Mississippi River “hateful”? Or did Huck say that in the novel (because staying on the Mississippi would have meant that Jim would eventually be caught)?
At length, upon the morning of the third day, we arrived at a spot so much more desolate than any we had yet beheld, that the forlornest places we had passed, were, in comparison with it, full of interest. At the junction of the two rivers, on ground so flat and low and marshy, that at certain seasons of the year it is inundated to the house-tops, lies a breeding-place of fever, ague, and death; vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope, and speculated in, on the faith of monstrous representations, to many people's ruin. A dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away: cleared here and there for the space of a few yards; and teeming, then, with rank unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo.
Alexander indeed is like a southern county. It is more like the Missou bootheel than adjacent counties in Illinois. It's whites aren't quite GOP enough to swing it our way. Last time it voted GOP for President was 1972, before that Ike. It was GOP in the early 20th century and closely divided in the 40's.
Edgar's 94 landslide was the first and last time it went GOP for Governor since 1952.