Chapter One

LET US BEGIN WITH THE LAND.

It was in its prehistory implacable, brooding, and unyielding, and most of it remains so to this day. Like many southern writers, I believe that the special quality of the land itself indelibly shapes the human beings who dwell upon it.

Mississippi occupies 1/4,198 of the total surface of the earth, just a tiny fraction of the planet, which is itself only a minuscule part of the universe. The state consists of 46,865 square miles, being 180 miles across at its widest point and 330 at its longest. It is thirty-first in size among the fifty American commonwealths and ranks thirty-fourth in population. It became a state in 1817, the twentieth admitted to the union. Its population is 2.7 million, and the median age of its people is 33.4 years, 1.8 below the national average. Thirty-six and one-tenth percent of its citizenry are African American, the largest percentage of any state. Of its eighty-two counties, twenty-two have a black majority. In the census of 1940, the state as a whole was slightly more than 50 percent black, the only black-majority state remaining at the time, and the decline in black population since then is testimony to the out-migration that lasted until the 1970s. To comprehend Mississippi, the outlander and the native alike must recognize that this is still an emphatically white/black society, and that its white people and black people are deeply bound together--and, together, to the land.

    Its purlieu is principally one of forests, which cover more than half the state, agricultural fields, and small towns. Metropolitan areas and factory complexes definitely take a second place. There are only seven cities with populations of more than thirty thousand. The state's most populous metropolitan vicinities are Jackson, Gulfport-Biloxi, and Pascagoula. Its most dramatic population increases in the 1990s were on the Gulf Coast, in the northwest corner of the state near Memphis, and in the counties surrounding Jackson; its most pronounced population decline was in the Delta. There are 12 acres for every person and 55.3 persons per square mile, which compares to the national average of 7.2 acres and 75.7 persons. Stretches of land exist where you see few people; the expansive horizons and the dearth of movement on the roads once prompted visiting writer William Styron to remark how much it reminded him of the countrysides of Poland and Russia, and visiting Russians likewise comment on how the powerful, unpeopled landscape reminds them of home. This perception of empty space is enhanced by six substantial national forests encompassing 1,155,518 acres of federal land, the largest holdings of public land in the state, as well as by three areas in the National Park System, twenty-eight state parks, and six reservoirs for flood control and recreation. Travelers have ranked the state first in the nation in environmental air quality.

    Mississippi has four interstate highways connecting it to the nation at large: 1-55 from the Louisiana to the Tennessee line at Memphis; 1-59 from the southernmost Piney Woods town of Picayune to the Alabama border east of Meridian; 1-20, which cuts on a direct west-east axis across the center of the state from Vicksburg to Meridian and beyond to the Alabama boundary; and 1-10 in south Mississippi, which runs parallel to the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico. (The magnificently bucolic Natchez Trace runs from Natchez all the way to the extreme northeast of the state, and eventually to Nashville, but that glorious road is nothing like an interstate.) Once you leave an interstate, you are quickly in a genuine countryside of small villages, open distances, and sparse populations, and that, as the song says, is what I like about the South.

    The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, known here as the "Tenn-Tom," with its intricate system of locks, connects the Gulf Coast to the Tennessee River in northeast Mississippi, a 235-mile-long inland water route utilizing the existing channel of the Tombigbee River. According to the compendious Encyclopedia of Southern Culture produced by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, the Tenn-Tom required the removal of two times more cubic yards of earth than the excavation for the Panama Canal, making it the largest earth excavation project in world history. It was a volatile undertaking, its antagonists charging that it was Deep South political pork barrel and environmentalists that it was destructive of the ecology, but on its completion in 1984 it linked fifteen states along thousands of miles of inland waterways. The Tenn-Tom also draws pleasure boats, water-skiers, and bass, bream, crappie, and catfish fishermen.

    Water is everywhere--rivers, oxbows, lakes, bayous, creeks, ponds, swamps, and latter-day man-made catfish ponds. Need one be reminded that this was where life itself began--in the waters of sloughs, rivers, and creeks? Indeed, eons ago even in geological time the Gulf of Mexico covered more than one-fifth of today's Mississippi. The Petrified Forest outside of Flora in Madison County, the largest collection of trees petrified east of the Mississippi, is stark testimony to the tumultuous prehistoric streams that swept into this region as early as the Pleistocene period. Our state is laced with deep rivers running north to south, enveloped by mossy swamps and verdant woodlands.

    The Almighty has been benevolent in regard to climate, providing a lengthy growing season, relatively agreeable subtropical weather, and adequate (perhaps at times more than adequate) rainfall. The normal annual mean temperature is sixty-two degrees; only Florida, Texas, and Louisiana have higher averages in the United States. The price we Mississippians pay for our moderate winters comes in the often torrid summers and oppressive humidity. And, as in its human affairs, the state's meteorological composition can be one of palpitant extremes--inundating rainfalls, floods, hurricanes, gales and high winds, and tornadoes, which always seem to seek out house trailer settlements. In midwinter it can be thirty degrees one day and seventy the next. The highest recorded temperature was 115 degrees at Holly Springs in 1930, the lowest 19 below zero at Corinth in 1966.

    There is a languor to our Novembers, when the foliage is profound and varied and the landscape is suffused with a poignant patina of golden warmth. During the rare snowfalls you can observe the wild frolic of young children who have never seen snow and the dogs trying to bite the descending flakes. Destructive ice storms are not out of the ordinary. An exhilarating, perfumed Mississippi springtime is forever a song in the heart, and those long-ago childhood nights when we "played out" in its warm and fragrant shadows are among my own finest memories. "I saw sixteen shades of green between Mathiston and Jackson today" the homegrown painter William Dunlap once commented after taking a drive one April morning.

    "In the beginning it was virgin--" Faulkner observed in "Mississippi," the only nonfiction piece he ever wrote on his state, "to the west, along the Big River, the alluvial swamps threaded by black almost motionless bayous and impenetrable with cane and buckvine and cypress and ash and oak and gum; to the east, the hardwood ridges and the prairies where the Appalachian mountains died and buffalo grazed; to the south, the pine barrens and the moss-hung live oaks and the greater swamps less of earth than water and lurking with alligators and water moccasins where Louisiana in its time would begin."

    Geologists have classified the state's six distinct major areas into lowlands, piney woods, hills, plains, and prairies: the Delta in the northwest, the rich alluvial crescent formed in the old floodplain of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers; the Piney Woods of south Mississippi; the Gulf Coast; the Black Prairie; the Loess Hills-Central Hills; and the hilly, almost mountainous extreme northeast, the Tennessee River Hills. To that I myself would add as a matter of history and culture the "Old Natchez District" from Vicksburg south through Port Gibson, Natchez, and Woodville to the Louisiana line, physically part of the Loess Hills. David Rae and I have tarried in each of these neighborhoods, discovering in our perambulations that differences not merely in physiography but in custom and personality continue to exist in considerable lucidity as we enter a new millennium.

    The wonderful WPA Guide to Mississippi , published in 1938, is still a fine joy to peruse and follow, and there are elementary things in it that will never alter, mainly those pertaining to the everlasting land itself, but, at the turn of the century, it is inevitably a little frayed and dated and quaint and paternalistic.

    Were a person to ask, "What is Mississippi?" he undoubtedly would be told, "It is a farming state where nearly everyone who may vote votes the Democratic ticket," or "It is a place where half the population is Negro and the remainder is Anglo-Saxon," or, more vaguely, "That is where everybody grows cotton on land which only a few of them own." And these answers, in themselves, would be correct, though their connotations would be wrong. For while the white people of Mississippi are mostly Democrats, Anglo-Saxons, and farmers, they are not one big family of Democratic and Anglo-Saxon farmers. Rather, Mississippi is a large community of people whose culture is made different by the very land that affords them a common bond. The people of the Black Prairie Belt, for instance, are as different culturally from the people of the Piney Woods as are the Deltans from the people of the Tennessee River Hills. Yet for the most part they all farm for a living, vote the Democratic ticket, and trace their ancestry back to the British Isles.

    This is a land of ghosts: the vanished Indians. In 1540, when the rapacious Hernando de Soto traversed the almost impenetrable jungle of what would later be north Mississippi, the region was already populated by ancestors of the Chickasaw; add to that the Choctaw and Natchez and the smaller tribes, Yazoo, Choula, Algonquin, Tunica, Biloxi, Sacchuma, Alimamu, and Pascagoula. They worshiped the sun and the sacred fires and, like a few contemporary Mississippians, believed in spirits. Then the Spaniards, greedy incubuses as they were, passed along the diseases of their animals to the natives, who had no immunity and died in ghastly epidemics. The Natchez were driven off by the French, and the Chickasaws and Choctaws were forcibly removed in the 1830s to the Oklahoma Territory and beyond. Miraculously, some six thousand Choctaws still remain in the state, on a reservation in Neshoba County, which now quarters a prodigious gambling casino replete with hotel, thirty-six-hole golf course, spa, six restaurants, and eight bars.

    Otherwise, that faraway time lingers in the Indian names of the towns, mainly the small ones, and rivers and counties: Yazoo ("river of the dead"), Biloxi ("first people"), Tallahatchie ("rock river"), Tishomingo ("warrior chief"), Yalobusha ("tadpoles abounding"), Panola ("cotton"), Tunica ("little people"), Satartia ("pumpkin patch"), Noxubee ("stinking water"), Coahoma ("red panther"), Amite ("friendly river"), Iuka ("place of bathing"), Tchula ("fox"), Hiwannee ("caterpillar"), Conehatta ("white polecat"), Natchez ("to break off from"), Byhalia ("white oak tree"), Nanih Waiya ("slanting hill"), Hushpuckena ("little sunflower"), Ofahoma ("red dog"), Tupelo ("make a noise"), Neshoba ("wolf"), Okolona ("people gathered together"), Itta Bena ("home in the woods"), Winona ("first-born daughter"), Issaquena ("deer branch"), Senatobia ("rest to the weary"), Shuqualak ("hog wallow"), Tougaloo ("where the three creeks meet"), Wantubbee ("off-hand killer"), Osyka ("the eagle"), Bogue Chitto ("big river"), Yockanookany ("catfish land"), Coila ("little panther"), Pontotoc ("weed prairie")--and on and on in the mysterious, lost euphonious litany.

    As children we came to the spooky old Indian mounds in search of arrowheads and earthen fragments of pottery. In the Delta flatness the mounds are the only rises, resembling miniature grassy hills. A substantial group of them, at the Winterville site on Highway I north of Greenville, includes a fifty-five-foot temple mound. Emerald Mound, not far from Natchez and the second-largest Indian mound in the United States, dating from between A.D. 1250 and 1600 and covering eight acres, is like an elongated pentagon, with an oval-based temple at one end. Not far from Noxapater in east central Mississippi, Nanih Waiya, the sacred mound of the Choctaws, was their nucleus of life before the white settlers arrived. The Indians called it "Great Mother" and considered it the birthplace of their entire race; before the coming of the white man it was a large, fortified city from which the Choctaw nation was governed by its wise men. In Yazoo County, near Holly Bluff, where the Yazoo and Sunflower rivers run their course from the upper Delta and come close together, are the remnants of a highly advanced Indian settlement occupied continuously from at least 700 B.C. to A.D. 1600. Many mounds are here, including a huge central one, a forested promontory rising out of the cotton fields, where on stormy winter nights locals claim to hear ephemeral shouts and wails.

    There were shifting sovereignties in ownership brought on by the often arcane Old World treaties. Faulkner describes how for a brief and evanescent time the native people here

had the privilege of watching an ebb-flux of alien nationalities as rapid as the magicians spill and vanishment of inconstant cards: the Frenchmen for a second, then the Spaniard for perhaps two, then the Frenchmen for another two and then the Spaniard again and then the Frenchmen again for that last half-breath before the Anglo-Saxon, who would come to stay, to endure: the tall man roaring with Protestant scriptures and boiled whiskey. Bible and jug in one hand and like as not an Indian tomahawk in the other, brawling, turbulent, usurious, and polygamous.... He endured, even after he too was obsolete, the younger sons of Virginia and Carolina planters coming to replace him in wagons laden with slaves and indigo seedlings over the very roads he had hacked out with little else but the tomahawk. Then someone gave a Natchez doctor a Mexican cotton seed ... and changed the whole face of Mississippi.

"With us when you speak of `the river,'" William Alexander Percy wrote in Lanterns on the Levee , "though there are many, you mean always the same one, the great river, the shifting unappeasable god of the country, feared and loved, the Mississippi."

    There is considerable ambiguity about where in 1541 de Soto actually "discovered" it. Several river landings from Rosedale to not far south of Memphis have at one time or another claimed the honor. In 1938, no less than an official presidential commission gravely concluded that the Father of Waters was first sighted by the Spaniard at Sunflower Landing near Rosedale, but this has been garrulously disputed. I once had an irascible friend, the son of a Delta planter, who after several brawny drinks at a Red Tops high school dance in Belzoni declared that de Soto first saw the river from a certain spot on his father's land around Friars Point; he was sure of this because he had recently found a rusty belt buckle under a cistern with the initials "H. de S." on it. I was not convinced. Never mind. The river itself is still there, as momentous to us now as it surely was to de Soto then.

    Faulkner wrote unmitigatingly of the river, especially about the great flood of 1927, and before him, of course, so did Mark Twain: "And all this stretch of river is a mirror, and you have the shadowy reflections of the leafage and the curving shores and the receding capes pictured in it. Well, that is all beautiful; soft and rich and beautiful; and when the sun gets well up, and distributes a pink flush here and a powder of gold yonder and a purple haze where it will yield the best effect, you grant that you have seen something that is worth remembering."

    It was my river, too, in so many ways. Twenty-eight miles to the west of my hometown of Yazoo City, it was a living presence to my contemporaries and me: the settlements along its mighty traverse, its bluffs and promontories and oxbows gleaming in the sun, its tales and lore, its fealties and treacheries. Twain once noted that the Mississippi receives and carries water to the gulf from fifty-four subordinate rivers that were navigable by steamboat. Not the least of these was the river that ran through my own town, the Yazoo, a notable winding stream that takes in the Tallahatchie, the Sunflower, the Yalobusha, and God knows how many less ambitious rivers and creeks in its southward course through the Delta before it empties itself into the greater river a few miles north of Vicksburg. One of the palpable images of my boyhood was the Yazoo appearing and reappearing before us everywhere in its unremitting twists and turns through the swamplands and thickets, its grassy banks lined with willows, the cattails dancing in a whispery breeze, the duckwood thick and emerald green in the melancholy brakes of cypress, the cotton blossoms in the far-reaching fields dazzling white and soon to turn blue, then lavender.

    My own three favorite views of the Mississippi are from the grounds of the modern-day Ramada Inn in Natchez, near a manse called The Briars where Jefferson Davis married Varina Howell; from a section called Jewish Hill in the old Natchez cemetery; and from a rough-hewn observation tower in a minuscule state park south of Rosedale. All three afford an inestimable perspective of the Mississippi, its sweep and majesty and power, making me proud that my state is named after it.

    Not long ago we buried a beloved friend named Charlie Jacobs, who died at thirty-seven. He was an indomitable musician who, like another white Mississippi boy named Elvis, immersed himself in the authentic black rhythms and, as with George Washington Carver and the peanut, found more in the saxophone than was in the saxophone before he started. The funeral was held in an ancient family burial ground not far from the river in Bolivar County in the Delta--Charlie's great-great-grandfather was a transplanted Yankee who was governor of the state during the Civil War. All around us mourners, black men on tractors were plowing the earth for the cotton planting, and everywhere was the deep, rich aroma of the fresh inestimable land. From the map I had in hand, I noted that only a quarter mile or so away is a distinct and self-contained stretch of earth on the Mississippi side that is actually Arkansas , having been shifted there by some colossal change of course in the river years before. As Charlie's band played "I Walk Through the Garden Alone" I could feel in that moment of death-in-life the presence of the river, and what it means to all of us.

    There is more commercial activity on the river now than there ever was in the halcyon days of Twain's paddle wheelers. What one sees today along the river's course from Natchez to Memphis are the tugboats, each being a trifling apparatus that possesses enough sinew to drag an interminable parade of massive paraphernalia. The U.S. Corps of Engineers and its hundreds of Mississippi employees have pretty much tamed most of the river, erecting concrete embankments here and there and contriving all manner of diversions and stratagems. But do not take too much for granted. Old houses and bluff-top streets in Natchez still disappear into the rushing torrents below. The Old Man is a capricious master, never to be trusted when he really gets angry.

Tucked away here and there all over the state of Mississippi are unaccountable edifices that demand serious attention. Just north of Vicksburg on old Catfish Row is Margaret's Grocery, which Reverend Dennis, Margaret's elderly husband, built for her out of mortar, brick, and block as a shrine to the Lord, America, and his wife. Reverend Dennis will give you his own private sermon there. One of the signs reads "All Is Welcome, Jews and Gentiles, Here at Margaret's Gro. and Mkt. and Bible Club" Some places have been here for many years, such as Mammy's Cupboard on Highway 61 south of Natchez, with its twenty-eight-foot-tall black woman on top of a rise, the small cupboard beneath her crinoline skirt offering Mississippi plate lunches and blueberry lemonades. The Palestine Garden in Lucedale is a re-creation of the Holy Land on twenty bucolic acres (a scale of one yard per mile), where you can admire the miniature Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Jericho, and numerous other biblical locales. D'Iberville on the coast quarters a two-story structure that contains more than twelve thousand beer cans and ten thousand beer bottles from eighty-five countries, Monaco to Togo to Mongolia. Almost anywhere in Mississippi bizarre distractions may leap out at you all of a sudden, such as the row of establishments outside Alligator with the separate signs on each store--Bruno's Quik Shop, Bruno's Package Store, and Bruno's Laundromat, leading one to believe that Mr. Bruno must be a good man to know if you live in Alligator. In the dying hamlet of Benoit there is the down-at-the-heels columned antebellum house, an anomaly among the collapsing unpainted shacks--a former planter's home, it turns out to be--where the movie Baby Doll , made from Tennessee Williams's only screenplay, was filmed. At Mrs. Hull's home in Kosciusko, the front lawn is filled with probably a hundred shoes on stakes that resemble wild tomato plants, along with typewriters, computers, and other brick-a-brac. This is known as a shoe garden. Mrs. Hull is called the shoe-lady in Kosciusko.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from My Mississippi by WILLIE MORRIS. Copyright © 2000 by University Press of Mississippi. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.