Grant - Dispatches from Pluto: lost and found in the Mississippi Delta

Contents

For Johnny, who would have loved it here

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.

Rick Bragg, New Delta Rising

A strange and detached fragment thrown off by the whirling comet that is America.

David Cohn, Where I Was Born and Raised

Nothing in this world is a matter of black and white, not even in Mississippi, where everything is a matter of black and white.

Richard Rubin, Confederacy of Silence

Prologue

I WAS LIVING in New York City when I decided to buy an old plantation house in the Mississippi Delta. It was out in the cotton fields and cypress swamps of Holmes County, the poorest county in Americas poorest state. Theres No Place Like Holmes, Catch The Southern Spirit, announced a weather-beaten sign on the county line. It was illustrated with magnolia blossoms and perforated by shotgun blasts. The nearest neighbors were three miles away across fields and woods. The nearest supermarket was twenty-five miles away. It was well stocked with pig knuckles, hog jowls, boiled peanuts, and hunting magazines, but it was another twenty-five miles to find organic eggs, strong cheese, or crusty bread.

A few close friends understood why I wanted to live there, as a misfit Englishman with a US passport and a taste for remote places, but most people were genuinely mystified, or doubtful about my sanity. Why would anyone in his right mind choose to live in the backwoods of Mississippi? No state has a more beautiful nameMiss and Sis are sipping on something sippy, and its probably a sweet tea or an iced bourbon drinkbut no state is more synonymous in the rest of the country with racism, ignorance, and cultural backwardness.

When I told them about my plans, many friends and acquaintances felt compelled to sing me the chorus of a 1964 Nina Simone song, Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam! In bad imitation Southern drawls, they cracked wise about toothlessness, banjo music, men named Bubba, and the probability of getting myself raped in the woods one Saturday night. One white woman accused me of being racist for wanting to live in Mississippi, even though its the blackest state in America and Holmes County is more than 80 percent African-American. All Southerners are racists, and Mississippi is the worst of all, she opined. She had never set foot in the state, and never intended to, because she already knew everything she needed to know about Mississippi.

One of my hopes in writing this book is to dissolve these clumsy old stereotypes, and illustrate my conviction that Mississippi is the best-kept secret in America. 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. Nowhere else in the world have I met so many fine, generous, honorable people, but if you look at the statistics, and read the news stories coming out of Mississippi, the state gives every appearance of being a redneck disaster zone.

As I was scrabbling around for a mortgage, and trying to persuade my liberal girlfriend to move there with me, Mississippi was found once again to be the poorest state in the Union, a position it has held consistently since the end of the Civil War. Once again, it was the fattest state, with more than a third of its adult population classified as obese. It was number one in the nation for teenage pregnancy, illiteracy, failure to graduate high school, religious devotion, political conservatism, and sexually transmitted diseases. The Republican-dominated legislature, caricatured by Saturday Night Live as thirty hissing possums in a barn, was trying to close down the states last abortion clinic, and a fifty-two-year-old Delta man had just been arrested in a police sting operation while having carnal relations with a show hog.

Do yall even know what a show hog looks like when they get through with all the shampooing and blow-drying and beauty treatments? said my friend Martha Foose the cookbook writer. She was calling from her house in the Delta town of Greenwood, less than a mile from the unnatural crime scene. Its a beauty pageant for swine, and they get those hogs dolled up . They shave their underparts, and curl their eyelashes, and buff their little trotters, and I guess its just more than some guys can stand. I call it dating down the food chain, and frankly, its a wonder it doesnt happen more often.

I first met Martha a few years ago in Oxford, Mississippi, the elegant, cultured, slightly dissolute university town in the northern hills of the state, where William Faulkner lived most of his life. I had stumbled across Oxford while interviewing elderly blues singers in the mid-1990s, fallen under its charms, and visited regularly ever since. Martha was there promoting her first cookbook, Screen Doors and Sweet Tea , a collection of recipes and stories drawn from her upbringing in the Mississippi Delta, and influenced by her training at a top cooking school in Paris. The book went on to win a James Beard Award for American Cooking. At the reading, she served high-octane bourbon cocktails, told some outlandish tales, and then we all decamped to the mayors house for more drinks and an impromptu dance party. At that time, the mayor of Oxford was the owner of the local bookstore, Square Books, and he and his wife kept their doors open to visiting writers and anyone else in the mood for fun.

At the party Martha kept imploring me to visit her beloved home ground in the Delta, a part of the state I didnt know at all. 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. She offered to take me on a grand tour of the Delta, and said I could stay for as long as I liked at her familys farm, in a remote and mysterious sounding place called Pluto.

GPS doesnt work there, it just spins round and around, and thats the way we like it, she drawled in my ear as the mayor cranked up the music. They took away our zip code, because we ran out of people and the postmistress drank too much. And its so beautiful there, uh! Youll never want to leave.

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 Dougs standards of weirdness and normalcy are fairly skewed to begin with. A law school graduate who couldnt face being a lawyer, he sometimes appears at social functions wearing a penis gourd from Papua New Guinea and a coyote pelt on his head.

The Delta is our Haiti, he said. Its the third world right in the middle of America. Crime is bad, corruption is bad. Its seventy percent black and the poverty is hard-core. Whole towns are basically caving in and rotting away. And youve got a bunch of rich white farmers living the good life right in the middle of it, and trying to pretend like everythings normal. Its the South, were 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 mayors wife described the Delta as, beautiful, tragic, and totally batshit crazy. Then she resumed go-go dancing with Martha to Booker T. and the MGs until the mayor boogalooed headlong into the stereo and sent the needle skittering across the old record.

IT TOOK A couple of years, but I finally freed up the time and money for Marthas grand Delta tour. I drove down from New York City, where my girlfriend was on edge and my dog was depressed, all of us crammed into a tiny Manhattan apartment we couldnt afford. Our plan had been to live in New York for a year, because life is short, and our best friends were there, but four months had emptied out our bank accounts in a way that scarcely seemed possible. Lying awake in bed at night, I had the persistent illusion that the citys molars were gnawing on my skull, while its fingers rifled through my pockets for yet more money.