farmed. All of these places, and the history buried around them, aren’t disparate dots on a map but threads in a tapestry, woven together, so that the defining idea of the Delta is to me one of overlap, of echo, from the graves of bluesmen to the famous highways. Many times I’ve sketched these mother roads on a bar napkin. Which is to say that the Delta is my home, my family’s home, for generations now. I know it well, and I’d never heard about the barn until Patrick Weems told me I needed to take a ride, just as I had somehow never heard the story of Emmett Till until I went to college out of
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