Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

by Richard Grant

“Land is family here. You can’t just move to the Delta like you’d move to a new neighborhood or a new city. You can’t separate the land from the families that have lived on it for generations. Y’all are about the only people in the Delta who aren’t related to anyone else, except you kinda are now.”

with the telephone poles listing slightly by the side of the road.

loitering men murmured, “How you doing” without eye contact or a question mark.

Even a simple trip to the grocery store was fraught with racial undertones.