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Some people who come here even say they have tumbled back in time, but I do not think that is true. They have merely slipped sideways into a place they do not recognize, and may never understand.
No state has a more beautiful name—Miss and Sis are sipping on something sippy, and it’s probably a sweet tea or an iced bourbon drink—but
Nowhere else is so poorly understood by outsiders, so unfairly maligned, so surreal and peculiar, so charming and maddening.
Individually, collectively, and above all politically, Mississippians have a kind of genius for charging after phantoms and lost causes.
She described it as a separate place from the rest of Mississippi, with its own unique history and culture, although nowhere on earth was more deeply Southern.
Other people cautioned me about the Delta. “Things get weird as shit down there,” said my friend Doug Roberts, and this made me pay attention, because Doug’s standards of weirdness and normalcy are fairly skewed to begin with.
“The Delta is our Haiti,” he said. “It’s the third world right in the middle of America. Crime is bad, corruption is bad. It’s seventy percent black and the poverty is hard-core. Whole towns are basically caving in and rotting away. And you’ve got a bunch of rich white farmers living the good life right in the middle of it, and trying to pretend like everything’s normal. It’s the South, we’re great at denying reality, but the strain of it makes us weird sometimes, and you see a lot of that in the Delta. Lots of eccentrics, boozers, nutballs.”
The mayor’s wife described the Delta as, “beautiful, tragic, and totally batshit crazy.”
The music was the first thing I knew of Mississippi.
Now the road swung me down on to the vast alluvial plain of the Delta, a place unlike anywhere I had seen before.
The sky yawned open and the horizons leapt out. The light turned golden and radiant, pouring down on shimmering fields of cotton and corn and soybeans. The land was as flat as the ocean, and as I drove across it, I came across primordial interruptions in the empire of modern agriculture: remnant swamps of cypress and tupelo gum, stretches of thick jungly woods. It was also a landscape of ruins. Abandoned barns and shacks were being swallowed whole by lush and monstrous growths of Virginia creeper and trumpet vines. Weeds fractured the forecourt of an old gas station with the pumps standing
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The true delta of the Mississippi River, the place where it reaches the sea, is down in coastal Louisiana. The place known as the Mississippi Delta is the shared ancestral floodplain of the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers, a place that still wants to go underwater every spring. Two hundred miles long and seventy miles...
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In 1865, at the end of the Civil War, nine-tenths of the Delta was still virgin wilderness. It was the last real frontier in the lower forty-eight states, a forbidding swamp forest full of immense trees and impenetrable canebrakes, teeming with wolves,...
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Mississippi calls itself the Magnolia State, and the Hospitality State. It could also claim the Loose Dog State, the Roadkill State, and the Dreamland of Highway Vultures.
almost a dialect. It omitted so many consonants that I could barely understand it, and Martha had to quietly translate when it came time for me to order. I thought back to Indian reservations in South Dakota, the street gangs I had written about in South Central Los Angeles, poor whites in rural Appalachia. In none of those places did I feel like such an outsider, or have such trouble with basic communication. It added to the mounting impression that I had entered another country.
The Delta is such a mess, but it puts a spell on you. I’ve lived in Paris, LA, Vermont, Minneapolis, and here I am, back home at last.”
I was a wanderer, a drifter, forever passing through, taking notes, and moving on.
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. They burned with a strange fever, and made a mockery of the usual standards of cause and effect. They were a window into a place and a culture where contradictions hung in the air like swamp gas, and eccentricity was as natural as rain.
Lyndon Johnson said, “There’s America, there’s the South, then there’s Mississippi.” To which Martha Foose added, “And then there’s the Delta. You have no idea what you’re getting into down here, and that’s what makes it so perfect.
Yazoo City, a gently decaying, once prosperous town of 11,000 people, straddles the divide between the hills and the alluvial flatland. Souvenir T-shirts describe it as, “Half Hills, Half Delta, All Crazy.”
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
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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.
“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.”
At some point, I also needed to start making sense of human society in the Delta, which many wise and thoughtful Mississippians had assured me was an impossible task.
“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.
People here talk about firearms and hunting in the same way that urban liberals go on about nutrition and exercise.
As the mosquitoes furred over the windowpanes, and the mice gnawed on the walls, and the coyotes howled, and the owls carried on three-way conversations, we sipped our drinks and puzzled over the mysteries of our new homeland.
“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.
Everywhere life was teeming, fighting, killing, dying, rotting, breeding, gorging itself on the riches of the Delta’s biomass.
“Brake is an old word still used around here, and it describes a low-lying piece of woods with a slough running through it.”
There were many terms in the Delta to describe wet swampy places. A deadening was a drowned hardwood forest. A bayou, pronounced bayo, was a stagnant or slow-moving body of water connecting to a larger body of water. An oxbow was an old meander abandoned by a river that had changed course, and it often had cypress trees in it. A true swamp was bigger than any of these. And a true Deltan didn’t use the word flood. When rivers overwhelmed the levees and inundated the land, that was “high water”—not a natural disaster, but something within the range of expectations.
The sun was a tyrant who reigned cruel and unopposed in a vast blue sky.
“It’s the Delta way,” said Martha. “We have a real broad definition of free enterprise down here, and no one ever thinks they’re going to get caught.”
During its cotton prosperity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Delta attracted and nourished thriving populations of Chinese, Jewish, Italian, Syrian, and Lebanese immigrants, and over time, many of their descendants have taken on the attitudes and manners of the white gentry. To hear a Chinese or Syrian grocery owner defending the Confederacy in a broad Mississippi accent is one of the many strange delights to be found in the region.
“We rather enjoy our eccentrics down here, and nurture them with great care and affection, so long as they’re no danger to themselves or other people.
Cruising around Belzoni, Martha pointed out a store advertising Sno-Cones, Fireworks and Gravestones. “I love a multipurpose business,” said Martha. “Juanita’s in Greenwood has a sign that says, ‘Beauty Salon, Bail Bonding, Bridal Boutique.’ We’re all about multitasking here in the Delta.”
“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. America isn’t supposed to be this way.”
Red’s required no help from architects or designers to look broken-down, shabby, and authentic, and you could still see real-deal octogenarian bluesmen like T-Model Ford, Robert Belfour, and Leo “Bud” Welch playing there. But it no longer had the energy and atmosphere of a juke joint. Instead of dancing partying locals, the clientele was now dominated by reverential white tourists with cameras.
Without the tourists, the blues would have probably died out completely in Mississippi, as an art form connected to rural black life, and all these great musicians would be out of work.
That night, after some bourbon drinking, I tried to get Martha and Bill to make sense of the weirdness in the Delta, the eccentric characters, the bizarre crimes in the local newspapers. Where did it come from? What did it mean?
“Hell, we pride ourselves on our eccentricity, and now more than ever,” said Bill. “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,” said Martha. Then she lifted her glass up to the frog-croaking, mosquito-bitten, rotten-velvet Delta night, and called out, “I love you, bitch!”
“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. I want to see bumper stickers saying, ‘When We Outlaw Baptists, Baptists Will Be Outlaws.’ We need to lynch ’em like horse thieves. They’re a thorn in the Christ-side of Mississippi and I’m sick of them.
Present-day Mississippi, especially in the crucible of the Delta, was in a kind of postapartheid situation, with wounds slowly closing and healing, but both races still highly suspicious of each other and haunted by the past.
“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.” “You mean the history of this place?” I said. “I mean racism,” he said. “On both sides. You think white folks got a monopoly on that shit?”
Matthew Johnson liked to describe T-Model Ford as “the happiest friendliest psychopath you’ll ever meet.”
I don’t let nothin get me down. I play the blues, but I don’t ever get the blues. I won’t allow it.”
There was no sadness in his music. It was rough, raunchy, juke joint blues, played on an electric guitar that he called Black Nanny, and backed up by Spam pounding out caveman rhythms on the drums. Sometimes it was angry, sometimes it was mad, sometimes it was so raw that it sounded like punk rock, but it always sounded bold, proud, triumphant.
R. L. Burnside, Fat Possum’s best-selling artist, shot a man who died from the bullet wounds, but denied that he had intended to kill him. I remember asking him about this, and he said with a smile, “I just meant to shoot the motherfucker in the head and two times in the chest. Him dying was between him and the Lord.”
“It’s a great day to be in Mississippi,” he said. “Our food, our music, our people, black and white, having a good time. Mississippi got its problems, but fuck all that shit, cause we know how to live, man. We have good times like a muh-fucker. I wouldn’t want to be nowhere else.”