Day 57: Communing with the dead

Bentonia to Jackson. 20.7 miles/992.2 total

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Today's just a journey from one parking lot of an abandoned gas station, in South Bentonia, to the parking lot of another abandoned gas station, at the northern edge of Jackson. The walk will take me through Flora and Pocahontas.

The temperature's in the 40s under mostly sunny skies, with some high clouds coming in. I don’t think it’s going to get much over 50, if that.

I might as well get this out of the way while I'm walking through several miles of nothing before Flora. My comments yesterday about the cause of the Civil War elicited, as I expected they would, a response from someone out there in the blogosphere. For those of you who don’t read the comments, I’ll summarize. The person agreed to a certain extent that slavery was the cause of that war, with the qualification that it was the secession of the states that forced the north’s hand, and that the “nullification of secession” was perhaps the chief impetus for the war. This seems to me to be a little bit of a tapdance. The only issue over which the states seceded was slavery—its continuation where it was and its expansion into new territories. So we’re back again to slavery as the prime cause of the Civil War, and the cause over which the two sides fought. I’m not sure why that’s so difficult for southerners to admit. I think it’s just too simple and straightforward for the obfuscating and self-deluding minds of some people.

I’ve left Yazoo County and am now in Madison County. I veer left off of Highway 49 in the direction of Flora. The first place I pass is the Primos Hunting Calls fulfillment warehouse, which looks like it employs to a few scores of people. Duck calls and the like, I suppose.

The road down to Flora, population 1500, is lined with horse pastures and middle class houses. I take a look to the left at the downtown of Flora, and am satisfied that I will not miss anything if I skip it. I get a snack at one of the three stores at this intersection, and walk on down the road. South of town I come to the municipal cemetery, a handsome-looking place. I wander around a bit and sit on the stone of Elizabeth H. Bentley, while a dog from a big house across the street comes over to bark at me. I don’t know if he’s trying to tell me this cemetery is part of his territory, but I can understand if he takes a proprietary interest in the place. It must be great to urinate on all these stones. I put out my hand for him to lick, but he’s a little shy, although he does quit barking.

At a little over eleven miles, I enter Hinds County, of which Jackson is one of the county seats (the other is Raymond). It was named for Thomas Hinds, an early U.S. Congressman from Mississippi.

I’m thinking of modifying the format I’ve been using for the blog so far. It’s getting a little hackneyed, and I’m growing tired of the “at so many miles I enter such and such a place” language. Maybe you are too. Also, I won’t guarantee that I’ll give you the weather every day, which is not to say that I won’t talk about the weather if it’s important to the walk. For now, since I don’t have anything to put in its place, I’ll probably keep doing it this way, but after the new year, all bets are off.

I guess I’m just tired of this whole thing, feeling generally out of sorts today. I think I’ve said it before, but I thought I’d get to the point where I felt pretty good walking twenty miles a day. Instead, I’ve just gotten used to being achy and tired for a good portion of the time.

I go over to the other side of the highway to the cemetery of the Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church, to have a little stroll around and see if it helps my mood any. Cemeteries seem to have a salubrious effect on me, which I suppose is a bit odd. I wander for a bit then sit down on the tombstone of Delouis Kennebrew. Her husband Robert is still above ground, waiting things out. Seeing what develops. I put my feet up on the stone flower vase on his side of the double marker and look around, thinking about the meaning of this walk, my life, and of all things. This is what walking all day by yourself will do to you, and where being by yourself all night in a motor home will take you.

Now that I’ve communed with the dead a bit, I can think more clearly. I should be thinking about all the things I have to be grateful for in connection with this walk. First, I have the leisure to undertake the project in the first place, and can afford to do it. Also, I have the health for it, and have enjoyed good health throughout the walk so far. Sure I have aches and pains, but I haven’t been injured so far. And the motor home and my car are working reasonably well, and all systems in them work okay, too. Each day I leave the motor home and the car and so far no one has touched either one. I’ve had safe places to stay every night. Everything I have planned to do I’ve been able to do. People on the road have treated me decently, and I’ve been offered rides by friendly folks all the way from Indiana to Mississippi. And I have friends and relatives who follow the trip and offer encouragement. So what am I bitching about?

Next I come to Pocahontas. It's a row of old shops on the east side of 49. There’s the Big Tee Pee (Barbecue and More), J.C.’s General Store, The Buck Shop (Quality Deer Processing), and some houses behind the shops. Also there is a rest area between the lanes of Highway 49 which I cross over to. It looks like this rest area was where there was once an Indian village. Cool. There’s something called Mound A, which is a big man-made hill, about thirty or forty feet high, with a flat top. I decide to walk up the mound, out of which are presently growing about a dozen large oak trees.

Well, that was fun, and I trot down the other side. It isn’t until I get down that I see the signs (facing the other way) that say “Keep Off Mound.” Too late for that. I see another marker with some descriptions of the mound culture. This was a platform mound, and the other kind is a burial mound, which is conical. I love the way they talk about these Indians as if they weren’t like us at all. “The burial of individuals in conical mounds was undoubtedly an elaborate and dramatic ritual meant to bestow honor upon the deceased.” Well, duh. That’s what our burial rituals are for, too, isn't it? Not to mention creating a place where people can go and commune with the spirits of the dead.

I pass a sign in front of a church that says, on both sides, “Jesus Love You.” He sho’ do. I stop to talk to a horse, but he doesn’t want me to pet him. A cow a few hundred yards down runs away from me. Maybe she knows that my favorite meat is beef.

At 18 miles I see the sign that tells me that Tougaloo College is off to the left. Tougaloo is where my brother taught English for about twenty years. In fact, the last time I came to Mississippi was when he was there on the campus, in the late 70s. He left Tougaloo years ago, but his son still lives around here and he’s just been appointed the city attorney for Jackson.

It’s time for me to get the iPod out and listen to Howlin’ Wolf singing “Highway 49.” It’s the version from the album entitled The Howlin’ Wolf London Sessions, recorded in 1970. To me, this is the best of all possible worlds, as far as the blues is concerned. It combines the top English guys who established their careers by covering the old bluesman with the masterful voice of the Wolf himself and the guitar work of Hubert Sumlin, his longtime accompanist. On the Brit side it features Eric Clapton on guitar, Steve Winwood on keyboards, Bill Wyman on bass, and Charlie Watts on drums.

I’m gonna get up in the morning, hit Highway 49,
I’m gonna get up in the morning, hit Highway 49.
I’ll be looking for my baby, Melviney’s the gal on my mind.

It’s a real up tempo piece, whose cadence exactly matches the speed at which I’m walking now. I give it a couple of listens.

Suddenly I come upon a bonanza of coins. Twenty-seven pennies, a dime, and a nickel--forty-two cents. Somebody emptied their ashtray out the window, I’ll bet, and forgot they had this stuff in it. That brings my Mississippi total of change up to $1.38. A good note on which to end this day.

Day 56: To The Vanquished

Yazoo City to Bentonia. 18.8 miles/971.5 total

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

I'm in front of the Sunflower grocery store at the corner of Fifteenth Street and Highway 49 in Yazoo City, headed toward downtown, then out the south end. I'll end the day in Bentonia.

I'm headed west to Grand Street, then left and down the numbered streets toward the center. Yazoo City is the home town of the writer Willie Morris, who was once editor of Harper’s magazine. Also the hometown of Haley Barbour, a blowhard Republican who is the current governor of Mississippi. Additionally, Yazoo City is the birthplace of the actress Stella Stevens, who was born Estelle Eggleston in 1938. One of her first film roles was in the musical Lil Abner, where she played a character named Appassionata Von Climax.

Weatherwise, it’s a bright sunny day in the 40s, with a bit of a wind. It’s supposed to get into the 50s, but I don’t know about that. But it’s dry, and that’s good.

In terms of anything worth talking about, this walk is definitely front loaded. Once I get back out on Highway 49 south of Yazoo City there’ll be a lot of nothing until I reach Benzonia, which isn’t a hell of a lot, either.

Grand Street is wide and residential, filled with handsome late 19th century houses with wide porches and columns. The shacks and lesser houses are on side streets. The First Baptist Church is looking fat and happy between Sixth and Fifth Streets. In terms of money and influence there’s no doubt that the Baptists have it all going on here in the south. These premier Baptist Churches, one in each town, usually called First Baptist (Southern Baptist denomination), seem to be where the serious money reposes. It goes almost without saying that these are white churches. Most of them have several things in common. First, they’re very large, built on prime parcels in the nicer parts of town; second, they’re made of red brick; and third, they’re pretty new, built within the last quarter of the last century. What I’m trying to say is that the Baptists take very good care of themselves and they’re certainly part of the power base of the southern economy and political scene.

At Canal Street I turn right. I go past the Canal Street Laundr-O-Mat, about which I wrote a few things on Monday. As I stop to take a picture of the front a couple of people gawk nervously at me from the front window, and I see that one of them is the old woman I talked to when I was in there. Well, let her wonder and worry.

Next I pass El Palenque, the pleasant if undistinguished Mexican place where I ate lunch on Monday. Across the street are the Yazoo City Police Department and the Yazoo County Jail.

I turn south from Canal Street onto Main, which splits into two one-way streets. Here in front of an old building that might once have been a courthouse or city hall, is a Civil War monument dedicated to the Confederates. The inscription on the pedestal is so outrageous and absurd that I’ll set it out in full:

1861 – 1865. AS AT THERMOPYLAE THE GREATER GLORY WAS TO THE VANQUISHED. THIS MONUMENT IS ERECTED TO PERPETUATE THE MEMORY OF THE NOBLE COURAGE CONSTANCY AND SELF-SACRIFICING DEVOTION OF THE WOMEN OF THE CONFEDERACY, AND THE PATRIOTISM AND HEROIC VALOR OF THE CONFEDERATE SOLDIERS.

Oh my God, what a bunch of horseshit. Did I miss something? Wasn’t this glory and nobility and valor all expended in order to perpetuate chattel slavery? Wasn’t that the cause for which the south fought, and against which the north fought? I’m aware that there may be some blue dogs out there in blogland who think there was something more (or less) going on during that war, but guess what? There wasn’t. The Civil War was fought primarily over the issue of slavery, let revisionists try as they might to divert us from that essential truth. It matters little that many northerners were also racist. The essential difference between the sides was that the southerners were willing to fight and die so that white people could buy, sell, whip, and work to death black people, and northerners were willing to fight and die in order to end, or in the short run at least limit, that practice. Period.

You’ve got to wonder when people are going to take the wrecking ball to some of these monuments. Well, I have to climb up the outer edges of the base of the monument to get close. Then I summon forth from my lungs and sinuses everything I have available, and expectorate it onto this monument. Ah, that’s better.

I come to the Yazoo County Courthouse, built in 1872 and renovated and added to several times, most recently in the 1990s. It’s a white building. I go inside, but it’s undistinguished. No rotunda or clever marble work. Just a working courthouse. I’m aware that the courtrooms may be very nicely appointed—they usually are. But I don’t have time to go upstairs.

I take a quick turn around the downtown business district, with its empty stores and a few brightly painted ones, then head uphill on Broadway, toward the highway. The painted buildings are obviously an attempt to jazz up the downtown so people will come there, but the real business district is on the Highway 49 bypass. I could make a fortune as an urban planner in these little cities if people were willing to listen to the truth, which is that they should abandon their downtown business districts. Convert them to housing or raze them and make parks. I’d say to Yazoo City, pay more attention to development on Highway 49, which appears pretty willy-nilly and ugly and functional. Impose a few inexpensive design requirements out there just to beautify it a little, and forget Main Street. Nobody goes there. And while you’re at it, make these big fat churches pay some taxes. Oh, and tear down that Confederate monument.

The two branches of Highway 49 that parted in Tutwiler have merged again, just north of Yazoo City. I make my way across the four-lane divided road and begin trudging along the wide gravel shoulder, which is remarkably dry, considering how much rain we had last night. I guess it’s because it’s so hilly.

While I’m walking along with nothing to do, I might as well air another grievance about the south. It’s this obsession with nicknames and diminutive first names for men. Like Jimmy, Willy, Billie Bob, Johnny. Some people actually have those for their given names. I can see having a nickname and all that, but they should be given a respectable first name to begin with, not a nickname or something that makes them sound like a child for their entire life. Take me, for instance. I have a few nicknames, to be sure. I’m known as Pete, Petesie, the Petester, or even His Royal Peteness, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing, but I was given what I consider to be a fairly dignified fullout first name—Peter. And that goes for most of the rest of you guys out there in the blogosphere.

So what’s the deal down here? Is it that the men of the south don’t want to be thought of as men--just as boys? It seems to me that if you come into the world with a name like Willie, which evokes an image of a boy in short pants, you’re going to live up (or down) to that name. It’s a statement by your parents. You’re destined to work at a gas station, like Goober, not to be a president, a general, or a mogul. This is a form of subtle preemptive emasculation. It’s a sign that this is a place with diminished expectations. People responsible for giving children their names have a responsibility. Maybe your name is Edward and they call you Booger at home, but at least when you go out into the world you can present yourself as Edward and hold your head high. But if your given name is Booger, well, that’s a different story altogether.

At 12.7 miles I come to the village of Little Yazoo, a collection of stores on the west side of Highway 49. I go into one of them, a sort of general store, and get a drink for the second half of the walk, then walk on down the access road, which is probably the original Highway 49, a two-lane affair. This must be the road Howlin’ Wolf traveled down in search of Melviney.

Eventually that piece of road stops, and I get back on the big road, and in a few miles I veer left onto Mississippi 830 into Bentonia, a town of about 500. Route 830 is called Railroad Street, and the tracks are on the west side while the east side is lined with tidy middle class houses. White peoples’ houses, in other words.

After a mile and a half I get to the downtown. There’s a little place called the Blue Front Café. A historical marker says this place was started in 1948 as a blues club by a couple named Holmes, whose son, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, still operates it. Every year there’s a blues festival here in June. Bentonia considers that it has its own style of blues, as played by Holmes and, before him, a guy named Jack Owens. Bentonia Blues.

Day 55: Gimme shelter

Mileston to Yazoo City. 20.7 miles/952.7 total

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

It’s a fairly warm day as I leave Mileston, in the high 40s and going up into the 60s, with some very fast moving clouds coming from the southeast. They predict thunderstorms for later today, but I hope I can avoid them. It rained all day yesterday and was raining when I awoke today, but for the moment it is dry.

I’ll just make it into the northern outskirts of Yazoo City today, and won’t be walking through the downtown until tomorrow.

There’s a bit more to Mileston on the back end, but not much. A handful of trailers on the east side of 49E scattered over half a mile. A regular neighborhood. Off to the west I see a church steeple and some small houses. I’m not sure whether it’s more of Mileston or if I’m getting into the environs of Good Hope, the next place down.

I’m noticing in quantity along the bayous and swamps down here what I think is the palmetto plant. Yes, it's the saw palmetto. Today’s the first day I’ve really been conscious of seeing it, and it’s another indicator that I am moving south. At twenty miles a day, it's hard to notice the changes as they occur. Then suddenly there is something, like palmettos or cacti.

Beside me on the west is Bee Lake, an interestingly shaped body of water. It’s a loop of a river--I suppose the Yazoo--that got separated from the river proper. So now it’s a lake, but it is thin and snakelike, almost circling around on itself. Narrow bodies of water like this are common around here, where until recently the Delta area was so prone to flooding and lacking in natural earthen constraints, such as hills and rock formations, that the rivers just meandered, taking often more than twice as long to get between two points than a straight line would. Moon Lake up near Clarksdale also is one of these river-created lakes. Now that the levee system has been in place for over a century, I imagine such lakes aren’t being created as often. The border between Mississippi and Arkansas and Louisiana is interesting because there are a number of little islands and peninsulas between the states that are disputed territory. They used to be part of one state or the other but now they're in neither.

In an hour or so I enter Thornton. I think this might be the last place before Yazoo City where I can buy anything to eat or drink. There’s a place called Tiffany’s, but that isn’t a store. I think it’s a bar, and it’s not open anyway. There’s also a trailer called M & M’s, which is a food store, but it isn’t open either. On the front porch of M & M’s is a wooden cross on a plywood stand. I ask some old men who are gathered outside around a few cars and they direct me to a gas station about half a mile down the road. That’s where I head, and I get my drink there.

Just down the road from the Thornton BP station what do I see but another dead bobcat. I didn’t think I’d see a second one of these. This specimen is in much better shape than the last one. Also I see a whole dead armadillo, the first I've seen since Arkansas. I have seen lots of shells and bones, but very few whole animals. I'll bet they taste good to other animals and get eaten quickly. Probably like a cross between pig and rat.

The sky ahead is black and it looks as if the thunderstorms are approaching as predicted. I put on my emergency poncho just in time. The rain comes down in sheets, instantly soaking my legs and feet. Fortunately I’m a few minutes from a highway bridge, where I seek refuge and wait out the storm for about twenty minutes.

The topography has changed noticeably. No longer flat and alluvial, the land is hilly now. At 9.5 miles I leave Holmes County and enter Yazoo County. Yazoo City is the county seat, of course, and the whole business was named for the Yazoo River. It was old Bobby LaSalle who first named this river for the French, back in the seventeenth century. The name, as I mentioned a few days ago, is thought to mean “river of death.” It was in Vaughan, in Yazoo County, that Casey Jones, the famous engineer, met his end in a railroad accident in 1900.

The wind is blowing hard from the south right into my face, causing me to have to lean into it. Finally I get behind a ridge and it provides a little relief. The road begins to wind down and around toward the city, still some ten miles off. I go through Eden, another little place with very little going on.

I have hit the wall hard today. Usually I get to a point in a walk, at around fourteen to sixteen miles, when fatigue causes me to flag a bit, but then I recover. Today I have been feeling that way since about two hours into the walk, with no relief. I don’t want to be walking today, I don’t want to be walking tomorrow, I don’t want to be walking any time. I'm just bored and tired as hell, aching from my waist down to my feet. If someone offered me a ride right now I’d take it, and just end this whole project.

Well, someone did offer me that ride, about an hour after that little diatribe, but from force of habit I didn’t take it. At 18 miles I stop to sit on a guard rail and eat a snack in front of a refinery called Terra. A curl of yellow smoke rises discreetly out of one of the shorter stacks. It has a certain beauty against the gray-black sky, even though I’m sure it’s noxious as hell. Stygian and sulfurous.

Another thunderstorm comes up suddenly and I again happen to be near a highway bridge, and so take refuge again for about ten minutes, and when the rain lets up a bit I start back out. I can’t stay out of the rain forever. I have to get finished with this walk. It’s already about 3:40, and there are three more miles to walk before dark.

At about 19 miles I’m at the place the map calls Yazoo Junction, and I pass a sign that says “Welcome to Yazoo City, Gateway to the Delta.” I think, however, that from my perspective Yazoo City is the gateway from the Delta.

Now the rain is intensifying again. There’s really nothing to do at this point but to keep walking. It’s coming down so hard that I can barely see through my glasses. The good news is that my legs and feet can’t possibly get any wetter, and I don’t have to be choosy about where I walk. I just slog through the puddles and let the passing vehicles splash me. I’ve taken my wallet out of my back pocket and put it and the camera and recorder and notebook and phone in a couple of plastic bags and have them in my deepest front pockets on the vest This rain is beyond being kept out by a poncho.

When I get back to the motor home it’s nearly pitch dark and I’m soaked from head to foot. Fortunately it’s well up in the 60s, so the rain isn’t chilly.

Progress Report: Yazoo City, so far

Monday, December 7, 2009

I rolled into Yazoo City last evening after four days of walking, in need of a rest. There's no Walmart here, but I saw an internet ad for an RV park. However, when I got there I was informed that the owner lives in Jackson. I called him but wasn't able to connect last night, so I ended up staying in the Days Inn on 49E. Nice enough place, with lots more channels than I get in the motor home on my portable TV, and other amenities. So I relaxed and enjoyed the comparative luxury, taking the hot shower to end all hot showers, and checking out this morning only when prompted to do so by the front desk. Then I did get through to the owner of the RV park, a very friendly man named Montie Ramsey whom I met when he came over this afternoon to collect my money. So I'm here for the next three nights, with water, electricity, and sewer. The electricity especially is a semi-luxury, since it means I don't have to keep the generator running, rumbling and sucking down gas, while I use the appliances.

The Canal Street Laundr-O-Mat in Yazoo City was typical. It had a floor of grimy linoleum tiles, once white, many of them cracked and chipped, exposing the concrete underneath. About a third of the machines, both washers and dryers, were out of order, their coin slots covered over with different kinds and colors of tape. The machines ringed the outside walls, and there were a couple of rows of tables in the center area along with some falling-apart laundry baskets on wheels. This place had two bill-changing machines, which was exceptional. Sometimes you have the machines but no way to get change, or you have to go next door to another business to get change and ring the bell to get the employee to come up to the cash register.

Everything was filthy except the insides of the machines themselves. The idea of there being such squalor in a place where people go to get things clean has always been a bit mystifying to me, but it's more the rule than the exception. The smell inside was the same as the smell inside every laundromat. In spite of the dirt on the walls and floor, the deposits of dust and grease and slimy spilled soap under, in front of, and atop all the machines, the smell was more or less a smell of cleanliness, that is to say, it was the smell of detergent and bleach and moist heat.

As usual, there were a couple of older women who might or might not have been employees who were thoroughly knowledgeable about how to use the machines, how many quarters it took to to run them, which ones worked, and which ones would take your money and give you nothing. There were top loading washers and front loading commercial-sized ones. I couldn't get any of the top loading washers to work or to accept the six quarters they were designed to take. I was advised to use one of the front loaders, which took eleven quarters, but which, I was assured, would wash all the clothes in my basket. So I abandoned my original plan to do a dark load and a light load, and threw everything in together, except for a new t-shirt I bought at the Delta Blues Museum with a picture of Muddy Waters on the front and two lines on the back that said, "Got my mojo working but it just won't work on you." That one I kept out for fear of having it turn another color, in spite of the fact that in my experience it's the red stuff that turns the white stuff pink, and I had nothing red to wash. Nevertheless, better safe than sorry, especially with such a primo shirt.

Also typical of laundromats, the customers, mostly women, were tending children, yelling at them between their tasks while competently caring for the clothes, folding them just so on the reasonably clean tables, talking on cell phones, laughing, and carrying on conversations with one another. I took one of the seats in a row of cracked, sit-at-your-own-risk molded fiberglass chairs and half-read The New Yorker while answering the persistent questions of a three-year-old boy next to me.

Owning a laundromat must be a lucrative proposition, especially when you spend no money on maintenance or upkeep. It certainly doesn't take anything close to $2.75 in water and heat to do a load of wash, or $2.00 to dry them. The patrons don't seem to care much, either, since they are only there to do one thing, then get the hell out. Anyway, it's the only place they can go, if they have no appliances at home. The people who can least afford to spend this money. There's certainly some old acquisitive bastard behind this place, who probably lives in another city, I thought.

As I was folding my dried clothes an old white woman came by and commented on the broken handle on one of the front loaders. "Someone must have decided to tear this off." I looked over my shoulder and said, "From the condition of the rest of the stuff in this place I'd say it's more likely that the handle fell off." Suddenly I had a moment of realization that this woman worked at the place. "Well, they come in here and let their kids run all around the place." As she said this she gestured with her head in the direction of a black woman, without kids, who had enough folded clothing in front of her to outfit a small army. It must have cost her twenty or thirty dollars to do all that laundry. I knew then that the old woman's "they" meant not just the customers, but particularly the customers of that other woman's race. For a second I thought about responding to the ridiculousness of her comment--as if someone without a washer and dryer could afford to hire a babysitter to watch the kids while she went and did the wash. But I just said, "I'd rather let my kids play outside in the mud than on the floors in here." I'd hit a nerve. She sighed wearily. "Well sometimes I just don't think I can keep on doing this. Back when Jack Gilmore owned the place he used to keep it up, but then he sold it. Old Mr. Dawkins don't hardly ever come in here now, and you can't get nobody to work for what he wants to pay them." She was angling for sympathy, I could tell. "Yeah, but I'll bet he doesn't have any trouble coming in here and emptying out the change from these machines, does he?" With a gleam in her eye, she nodded.

Day 54: Ease on down the road

Sidon to Mileston. 21.3 miles/932 total

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Leaving from just south of Sidon, heading for Mileston. The only town of any size I’ll be going through will be Tchula, at about the two-thirds mark.

It’s cold. The sun is trying to shine through some high clouds. There are a few clear spots over in the west. The forecast is for the temperature to reach 52 today, but that doesn’t seem likely.

Less than an hour into the walk I leave Leflore County and enter Holmes County, which was named in honor of David Holmes, the first governor of Mississippi. Actually, Holmes was the last territorial governor of Mississippi, for about eight years, then in 1817 became the first state governor for two years. After that he served one term as U.S. Senator, then was governor again briefly. But more importantly, Holmes County is the birthplace of the great Elmore James.

I enter the outskirts of Cruger. The churches on both sides of the highway are busy, souls being saved and sinners being admonished on this Sunday at mid-morning. Down a side street I see a small group of young men congregated around a few cars and a dumpster, drinking from containers in paper bags, worshipping God in their own less formal way. At the Cruger First Apostolic Faith Church it’s a little early yet for the worship service. Across the street is the Cruger Washeteria in a dilapidated yellow building, combined with the Cruger Bait Shop and Quick Stop, featuring “snocones, hair, t-shirts, caps, slacks, men’s jogging suits”--all of this written in uneven white lettering on a red sign.

Just as the commercial strips in cities have their repeating cycles of businesses—a McDonald’s, an auto parts store, a Burger King, a dollar store, a Wendy’s, a car lot, a beauty shop, a gas station, a tanning parlor, a Taco Bell—repeating every couple of miles or in the next city, so also does the seemingly barren roadside have a repeating cycle of debris—a single work glove, a child's shoe, beer and soda cans, a dirty diaper, a used ink pen, a four-inch lag bolt, a chicken bone, a dead animal, a Styrofoam container, a rubber strap from a truck. It’s an almost endless succession, interrupted once in a while by something unique or an empty space, then happening all over again, so that sometimes I feel as if I’ve been yanked back in time and distance to a point I experienced five miles or five days ago.

I’ve now left the cotton fields behind and am walking along next to the Morgan Brake National Wildlife Refuge, at about ten miles into the walk. Where the entrance to the wildlife refuge is located the map says there’s supposed to be a place called Wyatt. But there’s no Wyatt, and not even the suggestion of a Wyatt. This is truly a phantom village. Maybe there was a railroad station here once. There was supposed to have been a place called Keirn about two miles back. No Keirn, either.

Once in a great while, as the commercial shopping strips occasionally offer you something a little different, so does the road. Maybe a nice tool, some coins, a different species of dead bird. It invogorates you for a few moments. Just now I saw a dead bobcat, the first I’ve ever seen. It’s mangled and flattened, but unmistakably a bobcat, lynx rufus.

At 14.1 miles, I enter Tchula. This is a community of some size, relatively speaking, with a population of over 2,000. It’s all laid out on both sides of 49E, but only goes a couple of blocks in either direction from the highway. I drove through the downtown of Tchula on the way back up from Mileston this morning, and I don’t think I need to visit it again. The old downtown has seen better days, although there was never any chance that it was going to be one of the ten most beautiful places in the country. What commercial activity they have is visible from here on 49E. Tchula has no fewer than two (count ‘em) gas station/convenience stores and a grocery store, not to mention several little pork, chicken, and booze emporiums, housed in tiny windowless trailers. And of course churches. There’s the Rock of Ages Church of God in Christ, where they’re still rocking, even though it’s almost 2:00 p.m. At the Lampton Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church, the lights are still on, but no one’s home. There’s even a Presbyterian church in Tchula, which indicates that there are white people here (or were, since at the last census the white population was 3.4% of the total). Children in their Sunday best are getting dropped off at home. But the real action is at the Shell mini-mart, where cars come and go regularly and men chat beside their cars. I stop to get some refreshments, then sit outside and take a rest.

Tchula has a slightly hostile feel to it that I can't quite put my finger on, and I am happy to ease on down the road. I stop first at a historical marker that says Tchula was settled in 1826 by Charles Land. Then I go by the Holiness Pentecostal Church of Christ near the intersection of 49E and Route 12, which has recently burned to the ground. I ask a couple of passersby if they know anything about it. One guy says he thinks it happened just last Thursday night. This was a bad fire, and there’s little left of the church but ashes and a few small sticks of black wood. The metal front doors are warped and melted.

Wouldn’t you know it, I’m on Martin Luther King Drive now, as I pass the Klub Kitty Kitty, with a cypress swamp on the other side of the road, red and green algae covering the water.

A couple of miles down I pass Mr. T’s Mid-Night Grill Lounge. At 20 miles I breeze by what must be Westfield, about a dozen houses sitting a half mile to the east of the highway. Then I stop at the graveyard next to the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, Pastor Joe Jackson. I sit on the heart-shaped tombstone of Jessie L. Holmes White, who lived from 1946 to 2002. Rest in peace, Jessie.

Just before the end of the walk I enter Mileston, which isn’t much but at least has a sign. The motor home is in front of the farmer’s market, a converted gas station. It's been cold all day and I'm happy to get inside.

Day 53: Glory glory hallelujah

Shellmound to Sidon. 20 miles/910.7 total

Saturday, December 5, 2009

This morning I'm leaving from the ruined abandoned gas station—the haunted gas station—on Highway 49E south of Shellmound, headed through the city of Greenwood to a spot south of the village of Sidon.

It’s a beautiful cloudless day here in the Delta. It’s cold this morning, and there was a thick layer of frost on the car windows. Already the sun is warming things up, and it feels warmer than it did yesterday, although I’m sure that’s not the case this early in the morning.

Got another ride offer just now. I had several yesterday when it was really cold. These Mississippi country folks are very nice. Twice yesterday I talked to people who had seen me walking on two different days. Once I got to talking to two women who were stopped at road construction, one of whom asked me if she’d seen me up by Clarksdale the day before. Then right before I finished last evening a guy stopped to ask me, “Where have you been walking to the last two days?” I told him the whole story and he just kind of shook his head and looked down at my feet and said, “I hope you’re wearing thick socks.”

One of the toughest things I have to do on these walks is turn down the rides. People are so kind to offer that I wish I could take the rides and walk the walk. But I can’t do both.

Down where it merges with U.S. 82, Highway 49E heads east into Greenwood for a couple of miles. I’m now officially within the corporation limits of Greenwood, although this is still country at this point. Greenwood, as I mentioned yesterday, is the county seat of Leflore County. Its population is a little over 18,000. The Tallahatchie and Yalobusha Rivers come together here to form the Yazoo River. Yazoo means “river of death” in some Indian language.

Greenwood is the birthplace of bluesman Furry Lewis and also of Hubert Sumlin, who was Howlin’ Wolf’s guitar player during most of his Chicago career, until Wolf’s death. Hubert Sumlin is still alive, at the age of about 79. Morgan Freeman lived in Greenwood while growing up, as did Byron De La Beckwith, the man who shot Medgar Evers. And most significantly, from the blues perspective, Greenwood is where Robert Johnson met his end in 1938, after (most people say) drinking poisoned whiskey. Robert Johnson has no fewer than three gravesites in the Greenwood area--one in or very near Greenwood, one in Quito, and one somewhere else out in the country. Frankly it’s hard for me to get too excited about visiting what is, at best, a one-in-three shot at being his real grave. Anyway, we all know that wherever his body might be, the Devil has his soul. A deal’s a deal.

I pass the site of Fort Pemberton. This was a Confederate fort, where Grant’s attempt to attack Vicksburg from behind was halted early in 1863. The Union forces broke the Mississippi River levee up around Clarksdale to fill up Moon Lake and float some troops down the Tallahatchie to Greenwood and from there down the Yazoo to the Mississippi down in Vicksburg. But the Confederates scuttled a ship in the channel, and attacked the Union flotilla and forced them to retreat. So this is where it happened, and Mississippians celebrate this great victory. The only trouble is that a couple of months later the Union took Vicksburg anyway, so what the hell. I walk on down the road, singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

I stop at the Cottonlandia Museum, but unfortunately it’s only open from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. today and tomorrow, so I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to visit it. I turn off 82/49E onto Park Street and take that up to Grand Boulevard and turn south. There’s a plaque in front of a huge house that once belonged to Captain Samuel Gwin and his wife Sally and their children, built in 1912. “Missy Sally” planted a thousand oak trees along Grand Boulevard in 1916. I’m guessing that Missy Sally probably had some of her faithful colored hands do the real work there. At any rate, this is a magnificently tree-lined street, and many of the original trees remain, nearly a century old. Grand Boulevard was once considered one of the ten most beautiful city streets in the country.

Grand Boulevard contains an eclectic mixture of large houses. Many are big solid colonial style buildings, many more are Tudor style, some are overgrown craftsman style bungaloes. The oaks actually are of several varieties. There are willow oaks and water oaks and a few southern red oaks (got my tree book with me again).

I come to a bridge over the Yazoo River. Just south of it is the handsome Leflore County Courthouse, which is not open for my inspection since today is Saturday. A sign on the courthouse lawn says Greenwood was founded by John Williams in 1834 and called Williams Landing, but since 1844 has been chartered as Greenwood. Since 1917 Greenwood has been the world’s largest long staple cotton market. As we know from the Cotton Exchange Museum in Memphis, long staple cotton has longer fibers than short staple cotton, making it more valuable for finer thread applications.

Out in front of the courthouse is a large memorial to the Confederate dead, erected in 1913, when it was still respectable to be in favor of, well, fighting and dying for the preservation of slavery. I’m thinking that in the 21st century this monument is pretty much an eyesore, not to mention a gross insult to a large portion (about 67%, as a matter of fact) of the population of the county—folks who have been insulted far too often for far too long.

Downtown Greenwood is very quiet on a Saturday afternoon. I’ll bet these streets have many sad tales to tell from the days of segregation and the early years of the civil rights movement.
Down at the south end of Greenwood things aren’t looking quite as spiffy as they were up on Grand Boulevard. Lots of shotgun shacks, rib shacks, fried chicken shacks, and just plain shack shacks.

As happens in virtually every American city with a significant African American population, the crappiest street in the crappiest part of town is named after Martin Luther King, Jr. That’s got to be one of the biggest insults to black people in their recent history. And what an insult to King himself--a guy who dedicated his life to lifting people up--to name some of the most wretched places in the country after him. Just once I’d like to see a city name its most magnificent street after King, instead of some crack-ridden whore-lined place that not even the people who live on it give a shit about. This phenomenon is one of the most disgusting aspects of modern urban life. Let them rename the street that runs in front of the Confederate war memorial for Martin Luther King, Jr., to remind everyone of which side actually won that war.

Cities do this all the time, as if to say, “You can have your stupid street name, now just leave us alone. Haven’t we done enough for you? We gave you your holiday on January 15th. What the hell else do you want?” God forbid white people should want to have their own streets named after Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who was, without qualification, the greatest American public figure of the 20th century. But nobody seems to mind having the faces of Virginia slave owners on the dollar bill and the nickel and the quarter. We're all supposed to accept that.

I rejoin 49E and head south into the country. Greenwood is behind me and the cotton and soybean fields are in front of me. A CN freight train lumbers by, hauling a hundred cars, and the sun is directly in front of me in a beautiful pale blue sky.

I stop to take a rest under a large spreading tree, which I identify from my book as an overcup oak. There are so many small variations in the leaves of oaks, almost like ethnic variations, that it’s not always easy to identify a tree just from its leaves. But the acorns don’t lie. These acorns have a cup that almost covers the nuts. The northern cousin of the overcup oak is the burr oak (after which that cemetery in Alsip, Illinois was named), with larger leaves and acorn cups ringed with fringe. So wide and spreading is this oak (typical of the white oak family) that as I stand under it I wonder how long it would take for rain to reach me.

I come to Hudson Park Cemetery. Sometimes I get curious when I’m in a cemetery, sometimes wistful, sometimes just peaceful. And occasionally I am overwhelmed with emotion. Today I see the tombstone of a nineteen year old girl who died last year. In front of the grave is a little purple teddy bear and a card that says “I miss you” on the outside, and inside it says, “Wherever you are is where I wish I were.” And it’s signed, “From your son, Drell” in the handwriting of a first or second grader. Here is a girl who was born in 1989 who died and left a son who's six or seven years old. I grieve for them both.

I’ve seen quite a few forks in the road today, as well as knives and spoons. If I had started picking up pieces of stainless steel silverware from the roadside when I began this journey, I’d probably have two or three hundred by now. That’s how prevalent the stuff is. So odd that people throw perfectly good silverware out the window.

I come to the community of Rising Sun, most of which lies a bit to the east of 49E. Across the road is the Staplcotn Compress Warehouse. There’s a water tower for the town and I imagine a little business district back there. I don’t intend to find out.

At 18 miles I come to Sidon, population 672 at the last census. A sign says it was originally named Marion Landing. Right next to the road is a small cemetery behind the Mt. Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church. “Mt. Pisgah” sounds like something Daffy Duck would say. Over next to that cemetery, filled with black folks, is another cemetery enclosed by a chain link fence. Some pretty old tombstones in there, probably from back when the white people were in charge around here. This is the Sidon Cemetery. I guess the fence is to keep the riffraff out.

Day 52: Road of infamy

Albin to Shellmound. 21 miles/890.7 total

Friday, December 4, 2009

Departing from the side of the road near the pretty much nonexistent village of Albin, I'm heading down Highway 49E to a long-abandoned gas station near Shellmound.

Today’s walk will take me through practically nothing in the way of settled communities. A little bit of commercial activity at about 12 miles, near Minter City. The rest of it is just walking down the road.

Overnight it got down below freezing. As I departed this morning from the parking lot of the Clarksdale Walmart, bidding goodbye to the city where I have spent five nights (and where the motor home spent another ten nights by itself before that), the sun shone weakly at the southeastern horizon. At the moment medium high clouds blanket the sky, leaving clear strips only in the east and west. The thick clouds hang like an enormous cap over the countryside, like a gentler version of one of those enormous alien spaceships in the movies, hovering over practically the entire visible firmament. It’s colder than yesterday, and the temperature is only expected to break into the low 40s. Tonight it might snow.

About a hundred yards to the east is a row of trees beyond a plowed soybean field, their late fall leaves a variety of yellowish greens, browns, reds, and coppers. They stand alongside a narrow crescent-shaped body of water with the elegant name of Swan Lake. About three miles to the east is a village named after the lake.

Today’s walk promises to be one of the coldest and loneliest I’ve taken. All the little towns hereabouts are on small thin roads mostly to the east, but those roads wind and snake so much that to take them through the communities would have added five miles to the trip. You can see what an advantage Highway 49 provided to the traveler when it was first created, cutting straight through the fields, while the train tracks followed the circuitous trails that predated it.

I’m always looking for themes for these walks, and today’s trip down lonely Highway 49E might be retracing a trail of infamy. The towns of Money and Glendora figured in the murder of Emmett Till, and the bridge I’m crossing right now over the Tallahatchie River could well be the one where they threw his body into the water.

Of course there’s no one place here where murderous hatred dwelled more than in others. Certainly the outsiders, like Till, didn’t suffer any more than the locals did. But often it takes someone coming down from another place and meeting his end as a stranger in a strange land to really get the attention of the outside world—Schwerner and Goodman from New York, Viola Liuzzo from Detroit, Emmett Till from Chicago. Even, when you think about it, Martin Luther King coming to Memphis from Atlanta or JFK leaving Washington for the hostile territory of mid-Texas. What each of these famous victims of murder had in common is that he was carrying a message from outside—a message that the locals didn’t want to hear. Even young Emmett Till had a message—that he was entitled to behave like a white person if he felt like it. And in a few hours, or days, or weeks, all of the people I just mentioned would have been gone back to the far flung places from which they’d come. If the locals could have just been patient, and waited them out, they wouldn’t have attracted so much attention with their murders. Mississippi and Alabama might have gone on killing their own for many more years. But they just couldn’t stand the thought of people from up north, or outside, coming in and criticizing their status quo. It was their Achilles heel, but if they’d been patient, everyone would have gone back home sooner or later, just like the Federal troops did a few years after the Civil War. What sane outsider would want to stay down here, after all? But the stupidity of the locals triumphed, and they were exposed to the whole world, along with their corrupt legal system and their nullifying juries.

Now here's an interesting coincidence. As I walk down this road, named in memory of Emmett Till, past Money and Sumner and Glendora, the places that loomed so large in the story of his murder, I think back on something that happened just last Sunday, when I was driving back down here from Michigan. I missed the exit or interchange to get on I-57 south, up in the Chicago area, and had to get off the expressway to turn around. As I stopped at the end of the exit ramp, in front of me was a large gated cemetery called Burr Oak. I was in the city of Alsip, Illinois, south of Chicago. Last evening I read that Emmett Till is buried in that very cemetery.

[Tonight as I prepare this post I have also discovered that two great bluesmen, Willie Dixon and Otis Spann, both from Mississippi, also are buried there, and that the cemetery itself has very recently come under a cloud because of some illegal exhumations.]

I enter the outskirts of Minter City. The town was started on land owned by James Minter, and was called Walnut Grove. But it turned out there was another place with that name, so they put names in a hat and Minter's was drawn. The post office is out here on 49E, but what's left of the old town is over to the east, hidden behind trees and fields. What I do pass here on the highway are an abandoned doctor’s office, an abandoned auto repair place, several more empty storefronts, and a neighborhood consisting of five ratty trailers whose lawns are strewn with old autos, bicycles, junk, and garbage. But there is one open business, Sanders Grocery, a convenience store and fried food restaurant with a lone gas pump out front. Here’s where I take a travel break, and sit on the bench in front to relax.

After Minter City, things get very quiet for a long time. I run into some road construction about five miles down, and chat a bit with the flagman as I pass, but otherwise it’s all plowed cotton and soybean fields.

I have left Tallahatchie County and entered Leflore County, whose seat is Greenwood, where I’ll be staying tonight. Interestingly, the county and the city were named after the same person, a Choctaw Indian chief with the improbable name of Greenwood Leflore. He signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, opening the area up to settlement by the white man (and his slaves). How did a Choctaw Indian get a name like that?

A couple of miles before the end of the walk I spot a shed antler from an eight-point buck. I pick it up and brush off the dirt and take it with me. Very nice.

I’m listening to Blonde on Blonde as the motor home comes into view. It’s 4:30, about the same time I finished yesterday, but it’s much closer to being dark because the clouds now cover the western sky. As I walk the last few hundred feet, and “Visions of Johanna” comes to an end, so does today’s walk.

Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles.

Day 51: Bertha D. Blues

Lurand to Albin. 21.6 miles/869.7 total

Thursday, December 3, 2009

I’m leaving from the northern edge of Lurand, headed south on Highway 49 to a point a little south of Albin, on 49E. Lurand, by the way, is spelled that way on maps, but on the signs on the way into and out of the village it’s spelled “Lu-Rand.”

It’s in the high 30s this morning. The sun is visible from time to time under sporadic thick low clouds. It promises to get only into the high 40s this afternoon. Although it's chilly, I soon realize I’m wearing too many layers of clothing. I have on a t-shirt, another knit undershirt with long sleeves, a heavy outer shirt, my walking vest, and two oversized hooded sweatshirts, one lined with imitation fleece. Well, clothing can always be shed if necessary. From the young guys I’ve seen lately, it looks as though I'm dressed somewhat stylishly. The oversized hooded zip-up is all the rage. If my jeans were only baggier and about eight inches longer in the legs, I’d be right in fashion. Sort of.

At about five miles I enter Dublin. Dublin has a post office and an old gas station converted into a store, which may not be open any more. I don’t bother to check it out. The rest of the village lies about a quarter mile to the west of the highway.

All down through the Delta I’ve seen signs for Delta Plastics. It makes polyethylene plastic irrigation tubing, but it also seems to encourage or promote recycling of its plastic, which gives it bragging rights on its signs, as an environmentally concerned company. Delta Plastics--making the world safer and better and more righteous.

At a little less than halfway through today's walk I enter Tallahatchie County. This makes me think of Bobbie Gentry’s song from the 60s, “Ode to Billie Joe,” and that thing about throwing something off the Tallahatchie Bridge. I guess Bobbie Gentry lived in Mississippi, but I don’t think it was in this county. She went to school in Greenwood, which is in LeFlore County, the next one south of here. There are probably bridges to jump off of down there.

Right after the sign for Tallahatchie County, and also the sign that I am entering Tutwiler, “Where The Blues Was Born,” is a huge jail on the west side of Highway 49. It’s a pretty new one, too, built of light grey concrete, with at least seven two-story cellblocks, featuring slit windows about three inches wide by two or three feet high. Wide enough to stick a gun through but too small to escape out of. The name of this grim-looking place is the Tallahatchie County Correctional Center. It's surrounded by the usual fifteen-foot-high double chain link fence topped with barbed wire. Actually this looks a lot more like a prison than a county jail, and it’s much bigger than a jail would be, especially for a little county like this one.

[I looked it up on the internet after the walk. Turns out it’s one of those private prisons, run by a company called CCA--Corrections Corporation of America. The capacity is 2,500, and the population of Tallahatchie County is only about 15,000, which means there’s room in there for every sixth person in the county. But guess what? The web site says its “customer base” is Tallahatchie County (for which it serves as the jail) and California. So most of the inmates, probably ninety percent, are from California. Its “customers.” I love that. “Tallahatchie County Correctional Center. How may we serve you?”]

I’ll bet the prison provides a number of minimum wage prison guard jobs for the locals. Once again, old Oscar Wilde comes to mind, as he always seems to when I go by a prison:

In Tallahatchie jail by Tutwiler town
There is a pit of shame,
And in it lies a wretched man
Eaten by teeth of flame,
In a burning winding sheet he lies,
And his grave has got no name.

And there, till Christ call forth the dead
In silence let him lie:
No need to waste the foolish tear,
Or heave the windy sigh:
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.

And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

As far as Tutwiler proper is concerned, there’s the whole birth of the blues thing to consider, as noted on the water tower and one of the signs welcoming strangers into town. I imagine that back in 1903 when W.C. Handy heard that weird music being played at the train station, the city fathers would have been horrified to know that someday people would be boasting that Tutwiler was where this black music genre originated. Of course the blues wasn’t born here anyway--that is, not specifically in Tutwiler. Some guy from out of town just happened to hear the blues being played here on a certain day. But then, that’s how history oftentimes is made. Somebody prints something in a book and it becomes the truth. Of course now, with not much else going for it, this little agricultural community wants some claim to fame, and here it is. And with a population about 87% African American, it also attests to the fact that, politically, things have turned in favor of the majority, at least in matters involving civic pride. So that’s a good thing.

It suddenly occurs to me why two young black guys asked me for directions to Tutwiler the other day, as I was walking south out of Clarksdale. They weren’t going to pay homage to the spot where the blues was born, but rather going to visit someone in the joint. Maybe they’d flown into Memphis from California.

A mile or two on down Highway 49 there’s another water tower, an older blue one that bears only the name of the town. Probably built before the birth of the blues became a good thing. I stop at the Double Quick gas station and convenience store. From the front door comes the delicious smell of fried food—chicken, catfish, shrimp. Fried food, which is absolutely everywhere down here, is one of the allurements of the south I have successfully avoided, for the most part, even though its smell tempts me at every turn. The Double Quick is quite a center of social activity, and I get a drink and relax out front, watching the steady procession of customers. A stray dog comes by and licks my hand.

I start back out after my travel break, greatly refreshed. Highway 49 splits at this point, into 49E and 49W. I take the left fork, to 49E, which goes toward Greenwood. The 49W branch goes to Indianola and Belzoni before rejoining 49E just north of Yazoo City.

Highway 49E out of Tutwiler is named the Emmett Till Memorial Highway. Emmett Till was a fourteen year old black kid from Chicago who was down near here in 1955 visiting relatives, in Money, Mississippi. He allegedly whistled at and made some comments to a white woman, for which transgression he was beaten, had his eye put out, and was shot to death, and his body weighted down and wrapped in barbed wire and thrown into the Tallahatchie River near Glendora. (Hey wait! Maybe that's what Billie Joe McAllister was throwing off the bridge!) His killers were tried in Sumner, just down the road from here. They were acquitted by an all-white jury. This killing is considered to have been one of the early galvanizing events in the civil rights movement in the south. What a price to pay to have a highway named in your honor. But I guess this, too, is progress that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago.

The clouds are dissipating, and the afternoon is becoming more sunny, but the temperature still has not reached 50. I stop to sit on a galvanized guard rail by a bridge. These rails are my favorite places to stop and rest during my walks. They’re just the right height.

Next I arrive at the outskirts of Sumner, a town of about 400. The sign on the highway has a wreath around it, complete with twinkling lights. Most of the village is over to the east, and I’ll bypass it. Sumner’s water tower is painted and shaped like a cotton boll.

At the south end of Sumner I stop to visit a cemetery behind the Old Antioch Baptist Church. As I’m sitting on the tombstone of Lawrence L. Dodd, a Tallahatchie County Sheriff’s car pulls up next to the cemetery. The deputy gets out, an African American guy about six and a half feet tall, and asks me if I’m looking for a particular grave. I say no, that I’m just visiting the place, and he says he owns the cemetery. I tell him that it’s a nice cemetery, and that I’m just walking through. He seems a little peeved, but he gets back into his car and takes off. This state just gets stranger and stranger.

Not long after this I come to the Emmett Till Walking Trail. I take a little walk on it, to the extent that it runs parallel to 49E. A little while later I come to a historical marker about Tallahatchie County. It says it was organized in 1833, and that the name means River of the Rock. Tillatoba was the first county seat. Today the county seats are Charleston and Sumner.

At 17.3 miles I enter Webb, a town of about 600 that was named after Judge James L. Webb, a Confederate veteran from North Carolina who settled here in 1882 and opened the only store. Now Webb’s got it all going on. A Dollar General, a Napa Auto Parts store, a couple of gas stations, one on either side of the highway.

The next little place is Albin. It might exist, but it’s well hidden. No sign on the highway, no other serious indication of a village. Just a cotton gin and a big old plantation house. Well, that’s enough.

The late afternoon sun’s shining hard into the right side of my face. The sunset is going to be beautiful. About a mile and a half in the distance the white side of the motor home reflects the sunlight like a beached whale.

Progress Report: Stuck at the Crossroads

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

It's raining, which in an of itself would not keep me from walking. But the temperature is around 45 degrees, with no likelihood that it will go any higher today. When I woke up I went through the motions of getting ready to walk, and even set out from the Clarksdale Walmart parking lot to begin the day's trek, but by the time I got to Tutwiler, about nine miles from Lurand, the rain was hard and steady. Drizzle and light rain are fine, and even hard rain isn't bad when it's warmer. I could have gone on, but it wouldn't have been fun at all. Not that I absolutely require fun, mind you. None of these walks, taken individually, is exactly fun. The five-day forecast for this area promises cool sunny weather for the next several days after today. So I decided to cash it in and go back for yet another day in Clarksdale. My only regret is that I wasted gas going as far as I did before making up my mind. Maybe Robert Johnson's ghost took exception to something I said yesterday and was playing with me, making me stay here until I get it right.

After today's R&R I'll need to put together at least four days of walking without a break if I'm going to keep to my schedule, which is to do fifteen or sixteen days of walking before going home for the holidays. (Another break? When is he going to get serious about this project?) Yeah yeah. You try it. I don't think I'll make it into New Orleans before then, but I'll be close. I'm going to go down on the west side of Lake Ponchartrain, parallel to I-55, since the New Orleans airport, from which I will fly on December 19th, is over that way. When I return on January 2nd I'll walk the Crescent City from west to east, then turn around and walk back through it again from east to west by a different route. After that it'll be pretty much west all the way.

The signs when you enter Tutwiler say it's "Where the Blues was Born." That's because an Alabama musician and folklorist named W.C. Handy said he first heard the blues being played at the railroad platform in Tutwiler in 1903. He called it "the weirdest music I had ever heard." I drove through the town and I can tell you that if the blues was born there, it probably couldn't wait to leave and go to Chicago. But then, that's how it went down, wasn't it? The serendipitous explosion of talent and innovation and style that took place here in the Delta during the first three or four decades of the 20th century would never have been more than a few archive discs in the Library of Congress and some vague local memories if its brightest lights hadn't gone up north. Even Robert Johnson spent most of his short career on the road--Memphis, New York, Chicago, and everywhere in between. His famous recordings were made in Texas.

The blues had to spread far and wide to germinate and grow, and everybody went north as soon and as often as they could. Most of them are living or buried in Chicago, or maybe Detroit. Almost nobody, except Robert Johnson and a couple of old timers like Mississippi John Hurt, died here, and Johnson almost certainly would have ended up in the north permanently if he'd lived. If everybody had stayed in the Delta there would have been no Chess Records, and probably no English guys would have picked up the records in the 1960s, and I wouldn't be writing this. When I was touring the blues museum yesterday I couldn't help noticing that the only other people there besides the kid at the desk were older white folks. I wonder what will happen to the blues after my generation dies? We grew up on Clapton and the Stones and Johnny Winter, and then got to see the original guys at places like the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, but practically nobody younger than us, black or white, really embraces the genre, except perhaps from a scholarly perspective. What passes for "blues" on the radio is for the most part urban R&B--a distinctly different offshoot. Nobody's been able to so much as give Delta blues away, much less sell it, to African American audiences since the 1950s. So what's left is white boomers and some Europeans. Who knows? Maybe the blues will live on in some place like Bulgaria. But in all likelihood in this country it will be as dead as old W.C. Handy is by the middle of the century.

Then again, as Muddy Waters said, "the blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll."

Day 50: The Crossroads

Near Coahoma to Lurand. 20.2 miles/848.1

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Here I am again at the intersection of Highway 61/49 and Mississippi Route 316, not far from Coahoma. I’m walking through Clarksdale today, and my destination is the town of Lurand, several miles south of Clarksdale.

For you weather hounds out there, the temperature is in the low 40s, and the sun is trying to shine through some very high clouds. It will be cloudy all day, with no rain, and probably won’t get much over 50. Yesterday it was sunny and in the low 50s.

I’ll be walking down this road, forbidden to pedestrians up in DeSoto County but evidently okay to walk on here in Coahoma County, for several miles before heading back over to Old Highway 61 for a few last miles. Although the shoulder of this road is wide, it’s not too friendly for pedestrians. The reddish brown earth is packed hard, but strewn with stones of about two or three inches in diameter, which must be stepped over and around. Nevertheless the stones are interesting—the type that split easily and must have been used for arrowheads and cutting tools.

I see a dead white animal in the median between the two directions of the highway and go to take a look. From a distance it looked like an albino deer, but when I get close I see that it’s a large dog, with a small streak of tan on its back, lying on its side, belly distended. So many dead dogs down here.

When I get to Eagle’s Nest Road I turn right, to head diagonally down toward Old Highway 61. This road got its name from the plantation of James L. Alcorn, which is about three miles to the east of this intersection. There’s a historical marker about him at the crossroads. James Alcorn, 1816-1894, was a general, U.S. senator, and governor of the state of Mississippi. He was the founder of the state levee system, which opened the Delta for cultivation. Also, there’s an institution of higher learning, Alcorn State University, which I think is named after him.

At just under eight miles I reach Old Highway 61. I head south toward Clarksdale. On the iPod Muddy Waters is singing “She’s Only Nineteen Years Old.”

Three miles later I enter Lyon, a town of about 400. It's an upper middle class suburb of Clarksdale. For you Frenchies out there, it was named for the French city of Lyon. But I'll bet it's not pronounced like Lyon in France. This village is impressive, its few small streets lined with generous-sized ranch houses with impeccable lawns and gardens. At the center, near the new town hall and the post office, is a suite of law offices. I’m out of the town in a matter of two or three minutes, going past several dozen acres of black ash trees. The ash grove, how graceful.

I’m on Lee Road now, going past a large field planted in winter wheat that looks like a magnificent green carpet. Lee is a wonderfully quiet tree-lined road, within the city limits of Clarksdale, but still out in the country. Pin oaks and Spanish oaks still have their leaves, brown and copper-colored. (I have my tree book with me, in case you're wondering.)

I arrive at Friars Point Road, which I take south toward downtown Clarksdale. Friars Point lies several miles to the north, but is worth mentioning because it was the birthplace of bluesman Robert Nighthawk, and also of Conway Twitty (born Harold Jenkins). Muddy Waters said he first saw Robert Johnson playing at a place in Friars Point. Friars Point also was the Coahoma county seat during the 19th century.

One of the first things I see on Friars Point Road as I turn south is, of all things, a Jewish cemetery, Beth Israel. Jake and Molly Krieger, Louis and Goldie Raines, the Bernsteins, the Kantors. I go in to commune with the Jewish dead of Coahoma County. I sit on the Binder tombstone and eat my apple, looking at a photo of Sadie Engelberg, who lived only 32 years. The photo is pressed into the stone. This is a very neat and well-maintained place, filled with aspens, their reddish leaves fluttering on the branches.

The northern part of downtown Clarksdale is where the upper crust resides, or used to, anyway. Clarksdale, a city of about 20,000, was named after a guy named Clark, who was the brother-in-law of James Alcorn, general, governor, senator, and bossman. It has been the birthplace of several famous figures in music, including Ike Turner and Sam Cooke. John Lee Hooker was born on a plantation south of town. Muddy Waters lived on a plantation a few miles away, in Stovall. Son House was born here.

I pass the Carnegie Public Library and the Levee Board. The downtown isn't bad looking, with a few elegant restaurants and not too many empty storefronts. The blues theme pervades the businesses along this street.

I'm in the Delta Blues Museum now, looking at the funeral program of Son House, who was born here in 1902 and died in Detroit. I spend an enjoyable hour in the museum, which is housed in the former Clarksdale train station, a pretty good-sized building. There are exhibits about Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Son House, B.B. King, Otis Spann, Pinetop Perkins, Sam Cooke, and many others. Muddy Waters’s house from Stovall is here, a rough-hewn log cabin about fifteen feet square. However, there’s nothing about Howlin’ Wolf. I ask the guy at the desk about that, and he says Howlin’ Wolf has his own museum down in Rolling Fork, and the family wouldn’t give them any memorabilia for this museum. So I’ll have to check out that museum when I’m down there. Yazoo City is as close as I’ll get on my walk, but I can drive over there.

I’m now on Issaquena Street, going under the railroad tracks and into a dumpier neighborhood. I pass a historical marker dedicated to Sam Cooke in front of a long-closed theater called the New Roxy. Cooke was born in Clarksdale in 1931, but moved with his family to Chicago when he was two years old.

I move down Martin Luther King Drive to DeSoto Street, which used to be Highway 49 before they rerouted it and combined it with Highway 61 over to the east. So Highway 61 doesn’t run through Clarksdale any more, either. The famous Crossroads, where Highway 61 and Highway 49 used to meet, is now the intersection of Mississippi Routes 322 and 161, DeSoto Street and State Street, for those who have been trying to find it.

At the Crossroads there’s a commemorative sculpture of three electric guitars and the highway signs for the two old roads. For this momentous moment I have my iPod playing “Crossroads.” But not (and this may disturb the purists among you) the original Robert Johnson version. I do have that on the iPod, along with other Johnson songs, and I listened to it earlier today. But I have to say that Johnson, while he wrote a number of immortal blues standards, does not sing or play the guitar much to my liking. Frankly, I think he has been hyped over the years to the point where people uncritically accept that he was fantastic, when he simply was not. He was very good, to be sure, but many who came after him were and are much better. The guy actually didn’t have a very good sense of rhythm, and his voice is whiny and indifferent.

It was Son House, as I understand it, who started the thing about how he sold his soul to the devil, here at the Crossroads, in exchange for guitar greatness. The reason I think House did it was that when young Johnson tried to sit in with House and others up in Robinsonville, they wouldn't let him, because he sang and played so poorly. Then he went away for awhile and came back an accomplished guitar player. It was the contrast that amazed them, and after that the story about the deal with the devil started. As far as I’m concerned, if Robert Johnson did sell his soul, he sold it rather cheaply.

So the rendition of “Crossroads” I play is the live version performed by Cream on Wheels of Fire, from 1968. It holds up well, even if it does get played a hundred times a day on a hundred classic rock stations. Eric Clapton’s guitar playing is better than Johnson’s, too. But my favorite part is at the very end, when Jack Bruce, in his well-mannered way, acknowledges his band mate: “Eric Clapton, please . . . . vocal.”

Down south of the crossroads Clarksdale tapers off. After the expressway bypass this road, Route 322, officially becomes Highway 49 again. Soon after that I come to the Hopson Plantation at Hopson-Pixley Road. There’s another historical marker. It says that in 1944, on this site, the Hopson Planting Company and International Harvester revolutionized modern cotton farming by introducing the first commercially-produced mechanical cotton picker. Now that was big. In its time as big as the invention of the cotton gin by old Eli Whitney back in the 1790s. Only this invention had the opposite effect, in terms of labor. Instead of increasing the need for warm bodies it decreased it drastically.

I come to my destination for the day, the town of Lurand. The motor home is parked out in front of a store that I hope isn't in business, next to a pink trailer that I hope is abandoned.