Down in the Land of the Delta Blues

I’m in Mississippi as a guest of the Visit the Delta tourism board. Nearly all my travel expenses are paid for.

I’d been driving for an hour or more and it didn’t seem possible that I was heading in the right direction. The land was flat and open and mostly brown and above the sky was a mottled expanse of gray and there was a strip of uneven two lane highway heading right to the place where those two things met, but there didn’t seem to be anything there. Sometimes there was a house far, far off to the left under the trees that lined the river. Sometimes there was a church close to the road with a little pull out and a dirt lot, but given that there didn’t appear to be any communities around, I couldn’t figure out who was going to those churches. Sometimes there were grain silos. Rusting tin sheds. Farm equipment, some of it cared for and working, some of it tangled up in kudzu vine. I looked at the gas gauge and wondered where I’d get fuel if I ran out. I looked at my map and wondered who I could ask if I got lost. I looked at the runoff ditches and wondered how long it would be until someone drove by if, god forbid, I swerved to avoid a critter and ended up off the road.

I stopped on Money Road to read the marker. The Bryant General Store is where a black teenage boy named Emmett Till flirted with a white woman named Carolyn Bryant. Emmett Till was murdered for his boldness, but mostly for being black and his killers were not convicted of the crime, even though they confessed. I sat on the front steps of the renovated but empty gas station for a while considering what I don’t understand about history, about racism, about America. It was quiet and there were no cars.

§

But I was in the right place. Just a few miles up the road there was a man directing drivers into the field on one side of the highway, on the other side, Tallahatchie Flats, a collection of sharecropper shacks renovated as a bed and breakfast — and a big roadhouse bar, just up from the Tallahatchie River. The wind was blowing and on the wind, the sound of a guitar wailing, winding out across the dusty flat plains. I couldn’t help it, I just started laughing.

Yeah, I was in the right place.

The shacks — where I’d planned to stay, but couldn’t because of the festival — were taken over by Mississippi artists who used them as pop-up galleries. I walked up the wooden steps into the first one and maybe an hour later, I walked out again. I’d got talking to the artist Howard Miller and his sister, Carol and her husband, and a guy named Andy from up the road who moved to Greenwood from Chicago and really, Andy wasn’t his given name because he was Hong Kong Chinese, he told me. And Howard insisted he knew me from somewhere, and I said that was simply not possible as I was a long way from home and had never been to The South before, so if we’d met, it was not in this lifetime. And later, I talked to another young woman, an artist from Jackson, who said, honestly, I know you from somewhere and I just laughed and laughed some more. I explained what was so funny and then she asked, in this bossy southern way I am just learning to adore, “Well, what are you doing here? How did you end up here?”

That wailing guitar on the front porch belonged to a kid who goes by the name of Kingfish, he’s a teenager, 15 now, I think, and he was recently recognized at the The National Arts and Humanity Youth Program Award Ceremony, he’s played the White House, for crying out loud. I got a plate of six dollar fried catfish which was okay and hush puppies which were a little dry and oven fries which I probably could have done without and tartar sauce which made everything better and also, a dish of cole slaw that was surprisingly peppery. I sat in a plastic folding chair while the wind took all those notes from that wailing guitar and blew them all out into dry fields around me, across the road, and up into the gray, gray sky.