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When Walmart first arrived in the Delta, in the 1980s, there was a great wailing and gnashing of teeth among writers, photographers, and aficionados of the old, crumbling, picturesque Delta, where there were no corporate businesses, and it was all Mom-and-Pop old-school Americana. Walmart was destroying the regional uniqueness of the Delta, they said, and making it more like everywhere else in America.
“Walmart came in here, and we turned them,” she said. “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.
I had met plenty of Deltans who drank modestly or not at all, but I’d still characterize it as a hard-drinking place, and it certainly thought of itself that way. Nowhere else in the world had I seen such gigantic measures of liquor poured, such widespread enthusiasm for Bloodies and Mimosas on weekend mornings, or such firm insistence on giving sixteen-ounce Styrofoam cups loaded with iced liquor to guests leaving a party, so they might have a “traveler” for the drive home.
Drunken driving is against the law and heavily penalized in the Mississippi Delta like everywhere else. But people here were more willing to take their chances, or less willing to let the law cramp their style, and some of them could barely conceive of going down the road without a beer or a traveler. As one man explained to me, “You never know what’s going to happen, especially at night. You might end up in a ditch, and damn sure need a drink of whiskey.”
It’s always a long way in the Delta, they said, but never too far to get there.
Po Monkey’s was best if you got at least half-drunk and did some dancing, but then you were looking at an illegal eighty-mile drive home, white knuckles on the steering wheel when you saw a police cruiser, and the extremely sobering possibility of a night in a Delta jail. Still, it was worth the risk occasionally, because after a big blowout night out at Po Monkey’s, you left convinced that it was the greatest nightclub on earth.
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.”
Incarceration was now the second biggest industry in the Delta, after agriculture. Twelve new prisons had been built in twenty years. If you grew up poor with limited employment opportunities, as most people did in the Delta, prison was always on the horizon. 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.
“First, God made idiots,” wrote Mark Twain. “This was for practice. Then He invented school boards.”
“It’s like this: we poor, but we raised to be poor. It’s all we know. Lord knows we need money, but I wouldn’t live anywhere else. I love the country, the peace and quiet, the hunting and fishing. I know airbody, and airbody know me. We all kin. We poor, but our spirit is strong. That’s why we sing so good. And some of these country ladies out here look so good it make you bite your finger.”
ALMOST WITHOUT EXCEPTION, the newcomers were stunned by the beauty of the place, as we had been when we first saw it. “Magical,” was the word they kept using, and ultimately it referred to the light, the way it fell through the cypress trees into the cathedral of Joseph Brake, the rolling mists that ghosted out of the sloughs into the apricot dawn, the shimmering cotton fields and painterly sunsets.
Micaela came a week in advance of the party, and arrived as a jabbering, exhausted, stressed-out wreck. After a few days of sleeping, reading, going for walks, and sunbathing on the front porch, it all melted away, and she felt more like her own true self than she had done in years. “It’s so peaceful and calming here,” she said. “You could charge people for this.”
“I’ve been getting some good advice on predicaments I never even imagined. I should watch out for Belzoni women, find a Cajun if I need a turtle butchered, and never underestimate the impact of a well-aimed piece of meat.”
“It was a bunch of big ole young guys around a card table, and they were drunk, and starting to square off, and you could see what was about to happen. So Will Jones, who was on the other side of the room, picked up the hindquarters of a deer, which happened to be there cause it was hunting season, and man, he launched that thang. You could see the fat glisten as it grazed past the light fixture, and BAM! Here it lands, right on the card table. It totally defused the situation. I mean it just changed the whole damn subject. Hindquarters landing on a card table will do that every time.”
“My god, is it always like this here? People just show up and bring you food and cocktails?” “Pretty much,” she said. “A Southern woman’s not going to show up empty-handed.”
Eddie Earl told one about an old man who invited his daughter and grandchildren over for a special meal. He had made pulled pork and ice cream. He told his granddaughter to get a plate from the draining board and fix herself some pork. She got the plate and told her mother it was dirty. The old man overheard her, and he said, “It’s just as clean as cold water can get it. Now rinse it off, and fix yourself a plate.” The same thing happened with the ice cream course. The little girl said the bowl was dirty, and her grandfather said, “It’s just as clean as cold water can get it.” Then they went
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Sometimes, when people in the South tell you to have a blessed day, it means fuck you and I hope you have a nice time in hell.
Neta said, “Mi-sippi, baby. I love it here, but I want to leave.” “And go where?” I said. “Anywhere. Everywhere. But I’ll come back. These are my people.”
Here’s to us in our high-heeled shoes, we smoke men’s cigars and drink men’s booze and when we kiss, we kiss so sweet we make things stand that have no feet!
“It’s really very simple. The meaning of life, for every organism on this planet, including us, is to procreate and die. That’s it. And you may as well enjoy the rest of it, because it really doesn’t matter a damn.”
After 250 years of slavery, 90 years of plantation sharecropping and Jim Crow, and 50 years more of unequal opportunity, deep poverty, and very slowly diminishing racism, black folks were expected to shake all that off like it was nothing and be grateful for their civil rights.
When it comes to racism in Mississippi, complexity and contradiction are the most solid, reliable things to hang on to. Southerners love black people more than Northerners do, said Barry Hannah, and hate them worse than anyone in the world.
THEN T-MODEL FORD died. Somebody tracked down his date of birth in the county records, and it was confirmed that James Lewis Carter Ford had made it just past his ninety-second birthday, on a staple diet of fried chicken and Jack Daniel’s. The cause of death was having lived a long, full life.
MARIAH AND I had been in the Delta for nearly a year, and we still didn’t feel like we understood the place well. It spread out so wide and sank down so deep through the tangled generations and fossilized family trees. It was a feudal relic. It was a showcase for modern industrial agriculture. It was a foretaste of a dystopian social future, when machines free capital from the burden of labor. Sometimes it made us want to weep and scream, and return to the familiar. Sometimes we felt ruined—rurnt, as they say—for anywhere else.
