Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

by Richard Grant

We drank a glass of wine on the front porch, and the Thompsons made some generalizations about black people that made us feel uncomfortable, although I had certainly heard worse from my father and his friends in London. They loved Lucy and Monk like family, and Cadi loved to go to black church, but there were a lot of worthless blacks on welfare who didn’t want to work, and we should never stop in Tchula, even if we ran down a pedestrian, because the people there would surely rob us, and quite possibly rape Mariah by the side of the road.

One of her classmates asked a prisoner what was the worst thing about being there. “The first time they fuck you in the ass,” he replied, and this was the first time that she and her classmates learned about that kind of rape.