Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

by Richard Grant

“The Delta is our Haiti,” he said. “It’s the third world right in the middle of America.

I took off my shoes and lay back in the grass, feeling relaxed for the first time in months. “Martha, this is just . . .” “Isn’t it, though? The Delta is such a mess, but it puts a spell on you.

I’d been toying with the idea of living in Mississippi, and writing about it, for a long time. I liked the food, the music, the warmth of the culture, the easy conviviality and drawling repartee. Most of all, I liked the storytelling. It was an integral part of life here, an art form respected at all levels of society, and the stories themselves got so wild and improbable.

not many places in this world can out-fecund the Mississippi Delta in early summer.

Outsiders often see it as a paradox, that such a poor, conservative, religious state should also have such a rich literary tradition, but it makes sense to Mississippians. Not only are they great tellers and admirers of colorful stories, with a rich supply of material. There’s also an intangible, mysterious quality to life here that Mississippi writers have felt compelled to tackle, a kind of magical realism that comes out of the state’s long insularity, the urge to mythologize its history of defeat and oppression, the deep influence of the Old Testament and faith-based thinking, and perhaps the drama of the natural landscape.

Things have come a long way in Mississippi. That’s the usual shorthand. Perhaps nowhere else in America has made more progress in its race relations, but then again, nowhere else had so far to go. Mississippi had the most lynchings, the worst Klan violence, the staunchest resistance to the civil rights movement.

“There’s a secret to living here,” she said. “Compartmentalize, compartmentalize, and then compartmentalize some more. If someone tells you that the Muslims are plotting to destroy America, or Obama is the Antichrist, you just seal that away in its own separate compartment, and carry on till you find their good side. There’s no sense in arguing with them. Folks around here are stubborn as they come.”

Let no one underestimate Southern hospitality, or Mississippi generosity.

a snake shot out from under my feet. It looked too thin and narrow-headed to be poisonous, but what did I know? I was a fool here.

“Farming is like life,” he said. “You try to take everything into account, and do the best you can with what you have. The rest is up to God, so they ain’t no sense worrying your mind about it.

the history of the Delta as a struggle between white capital and black labor,

People here talk about firearms and hunting in the same way that urban liberals go on about nutrition and exercise.

Everywhere life was teeming, fighting, killing, dying, rotting, breeding, gorging itself on the riches of the Delta’s biomass.

He spoke with a genteel Mississippi accent. The vowels were long with a Southern swerve, the diction precise, and there was an obvious pleasure taken in the sound of words and the music of language.

Mississippi Delta—“the South’s South,”

I felt sad, upset, shaky, and proud all at the same time, and it occurred to me that these were boyhood emotions in Mississippi, where parents start their children hunting young.

No one was gluten free, lactose intolerant, vegetarian, or vegan.

we were living in a place where the normal rules of cause and effect didn’t apply.

“Don’t be a culture vulture,”

“Juanita’s in Greenwood has a sign that says, ‘Beauty Salon, Bail Bonding, Bridal Boutique.’ We’re all about multitasking here in the Delta.”

Blacks and whites took their cars to different mechanics and car washes. They shopped at different florists, who arranged flowers in different ways. There were black funeral homes and white funeral homes. They buried their dead separately.

the Yazoo County Fair, whites and blacks came on different days. Their children played in different parks, swam in different swimming pools. They worshipped in separate churches, and sixty years after Brown vs. Board of Education, their children went to separate and unequal schools. African-American children went to underfunded public schools with extremely low graduation rates. Whites went to private schools known as “academies.”

In Leland, “Birthplace of Kermit the Frog”—Jim Henson had played here as a boy—we joined the all-white crowd for lunch at the Fratesi Brothers Grocery.

There was a sign that read, “Let Shaw Be Seen as Neat and Clean.” Behind it was an empty lot full of trash and rubble.

“The kids who live here have never seen one thing built,” said Martha. “They can’t imagine building something themselves, or someone else building it for them. When you grow up in the Delta, everything around you is falling in, and emptying out, and it really affects you.

“All the normal, sensible people have left the Delta and moved to places that are less screwed up. You’ve got to be at least half-weird to live here, otherwise you won’t make it.” “Sometimes, I swear to God, living in the Delta is like being in love with a crazy person,”

“There’s only one way we’re going to fix the poverty in the Delta, and everybody knows what it is,” he said. “We’ve got to legalize that shit and grow the hell out of it. We’ll be happy as clowns and rich as kings, but first we’ve got to get rid of these goddamn Baptists, Martha. They won’t let us do nothing.

“Mississippi is the center of the universe,” he said. “The two biggest issues in western Christian civilization are the white-black race issue and the rich-and-poor issue. Mississippi is at the apex of both. And if anybody in the world can solve the problem, it’s Mississippi.”

-james meredth

“The whole problem in this Delta is that nobody can see past black and white. Very, very few. So all our energy goes into stopping the other ones, blaming the other ones, trying to get what they have. It’s so obvious that we need to work together, but we can’t get out from under that other shit.”

with my senses focused so acutely on my surroundings, I had altered my normal consciousness. I had done the thing that modern life conspires against. I had fully inhabited the present without distraction.

Greenville, which had once been the grandest town in the Delta and was now one of the most dilapidated and crime-ridden.

They didn’t hate blacks, or even dislike them, but thought they were absolutely inferior to whites, and here to serve us.

We thought it was so terribly wrong, and we tried to make up for it by doting even more on Margie, and being as nice as we possibly could to all the black people we came into contact with.

In most of the Deep South, the ordeal of slavery had run straight into the misery of sharecropping, but that wasn’t how it happened in the Delta. After the Civil War, hundreds of freed slaves voluntarily migrated to this swampy new frontier, because it was the only place in the South where they could rent land, clear it, sell the crops they could raise on it, and work toward owning their own land. By 1900, two-thirds of the Delta’s farm owners were black. That all changed during the next twenty years. White planters and corporations exerted their power and, crucially, their access to credit, to dispossess black farmers of their land and establish large-scale plantations. Many disenfranchised black farmers now found themselves sharecropping on the new plantations, in a new era of stricter white supremacy, and often moving from one plantation to another, searching for better treatment and a fairer deal. This was the era that gave birth to the blues. It was not an ancient ancestral moan but the cry of alienated, uprooted modern man, craving independence and strongly individualistic in a way that African music had never been.

“There’s nothing more Delta than a Delta Walmart.”

I realized that I’d taken on Martha’s philosophy, which was laughter to keep from crying. People needed tools to cope with all the poverty, tragedy, and dysfunction in the Delta, and the most popular ones were denial, religion, gallows humor, drugs, and alcohol. All these tools have warping effects on the clear rational mind, and they seemed to feed the weirdness.

Driving fifty miles home on a long, straight, empty road with the moonlit fields streaming past, hoping not to run into a stray dog, or a deer, or a DUI checkpoint, became a familiar experience, as it was for many people here. It’s always a long way in the Delta, they said, but never too far to get there.

A GQ journalist covering the story wondered “if the air down here perhaps contains an element that causes dreams to ignite and burn hotter and stranger than anywhere else in the world.”

Mississippians could be the nicest, kindest people in the world, but when they felt grievously wronged, their thirst for vengeance could drive them into insane feuds.

Parchman was so big, isolated, and remote—18,000 flat and virtually treeless acres in the middle of Delta nowhere—that it had never needed fences. Where could a prisoner run to?

Incarceration was now the second biggest industry in the Delta, after agriculture.

If you graduated from high school, and stayed out of trouble, you could get a job in prison that paid more than Walmart and had benefits. If not, there was a good chance you’d end up there anyway, on the other side of the bars.

The wretched state of the public schools was a constant topic of conversation, argument, blame throwing, and handwringing.

Cubdeerix, Darshavious, Divirious, Dequintance, Dantonieon, Dietrecanna, Stevondria, Teairra, Xzeavius.

But still, sixty years after the US Supreme Court ordered the South to integrate its schools, education in the Mississippi Delta was almost entirely segregated by race.

If whites had stuck with the public school system, things would be very different now in the Delta. When they removed their children, they also removed their money, influence, experience, and personal investment in the public school system. In rushed the influence of poverty.

At present, the biggest employers in the area are the state penitentiary at Parchman, the big private prison at Tutwiler, and the floating casinos at Tunica on the Mississippi River, all of which lie outside the county limits. Inside the county, the biggest employer is the school district.

Mariah and I got on just fine with Bobby T. We compartmentalized what we didn’t agree with, and focused on the things we liked about him:

He raised one eyebrow at me, and said, “S’up ma nigga,” as he sauntered past. Nicely played, I thought. Situation acknowledged, dominance established, a note of humor introduced.

“How many churches are there in Clarksdale?” “A hundred and twenty. We’ve got the most churches per capita of anywhere in the country.”