Tag: Mississippi

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What I Want for Christmas

We’re driving to Ocean Springs, not flying. It’s a ‘fer piece, according to Apple Maps more than 400 miles, mostly east but a bit north (Yankees!), six hours and 19 minutes skirting roughly half of the north shore of the Gulf of Mexico. In our driving time six hours means seven. And 19 minutes.

We leave Friday and will be back Monday. It’s not a blue highway sort of drive, it’s I-10, the interstate that runs from Santa Monica, California, to Jacksonville, Florida, and it’s a drive I know well: from El Paso to Houston but also east. There’s Rao’s Bakery in Beaumont and the donut shop in Lake Charles where the boudin kolache was created. There’s boudin and crawfish pie at the Sausage Link in Sullivan and the 18-mile bridge over the Atchafalaya Basin. If we went earlier, Thursday evening, we could spend the night in Lafayette and go dancing. Last time I checked they still sell Haspel Suits in Baton Rouge. Once we get to Slidell above New Orleans on the northeast shore of Lake Pontchartrain I’m not so familiar with things, and every time I’ve gone as far as Mobile on I-10 I’ve turned north toward Atlanta, but we stop short of Mobile. Mobile will have to wait for a different trip.

We originally planned to fly to New Orleans, rent a car, and drive to Ocean Springs, and I had made all the reservations. A direct flight from Houston to New Orleans is only about an hour, and I’ve always got Southwest flight points: instead of enhanced Medicaid every Texan gets 10- or 20-thousand Southwest points every couple of months. With airport and driving time from New Orleans to Ocean Springs we could make the trip in about five hours. Five hours and 19 minutes. But truth is I love a good road trip, and with flying you lose the imagination of the countryside: that road would be good to bike down, that bayou would be good to canoe, would that farmer let me fish that pond? Could we live here? It’s better than buying a lottery ticket.

Plus there’s seven hours in which we can play the Mississippi playlist and finish listening to Faulkner’s The Hamlet (which I think hilarious and Kris thinks grim) and eat Cheetos and boudin and search for donuts. And how can Kris think The Hamlet grim, at least parts of it anyway? What reasonably empathetic heterosexual (or maybe not even heterosexual) male can’t see the goofier side of his infatuation in Labove and Eula Varner? I’m just lucky Kris didn’t whack me across the head.

So at TroutFest there was one of these from Four Wheel Pop-up Campers:

https://fourwh.com/product/hawk-short-bed-popup-truck-camper-regular-size/

And there was one of these from Into the Wild Overland:

https://itwoverland.com/#

And they were either one about $30,000 as outfitted–they had every possible accessory. My children have been to college and beyond, and I can imagine retirement. I was taken with the notion of driving one of those things to a donut shop in the Rockies. Out of Denver the Into the Wild campers are available for rent for $150 per night. It doesn’t seem to have a toilet, and that might be a deal-killer.

When you start looking around you can find all sorts of folk who have caught fish on a fly, or at least a fish, in all 50 states. There’s a guy and his son who did all 50 states in 50 days, which makes my stomach queasy. There’s a lovely husband and wife who did all 50 states in a year. There’s a guide in southwest Colorado who tallied up his prior experience and realized he only lacked six or so states and went out and got them. But dang, I could spend a year reading books from Mississippi, much less fishing the farm ponds and eating the tamales and listening to the blues. I’m not in any hurry, and spending less than a month in Montana seems like a crime. So this whole RV thing is really appealing.

https://mercedessprinterrvrentals.com/mercedes-sprinter-rental-fleet/

I’d thought next year of a grand Southwestern tailwater tour: the San Juan, Lee’s Ferry, and the Green. I can rent a Mercedes Sprinter Van for 10 days from Mercedes Sprinter RV Rental for about $6000, which is expensive but I wouldn’t at the end of the day have to own the thing, and it’s about the price for one of us staying in a very good lodge for a week in Alaska, not including drinks. I could pick it up in Albuquerque and not have to skip Taos or Chama or Chaco Canyon, and we could drop it off in Salt Lake City. We could also drive on that tailwater road trip and stay in motels. For cheaper. Or dig one of the tents out of the attic.

I don’t know. I didn’t much like staying in the Airbnb in Hawaii, nothing wrong with it but nothing right with it either, and I kept thinking that I’d rather be staying inThe Royal Hawaiian. Or a camper. A road trip camper. With a standard poodle named Charlie on a Blue Highway, self-contained, meandering. Of course once I got there I’d still rather be staying in The Royal Hawaiian.

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The Waw

General Jubilation T. Cornpone, from Li’l Abner, Paramount Studios, 1959.

Before we went to Vicksburg I listened to Jeff Shaara’s novelization of the Siege of Vicksburg, Chain of Thunder, because Vicksburg is a good place to think about the effect of the Civil War on the white South. The citizens of Vicksburg were besieged, starved, bombed. They lived in caves. They ate rats. From May 18 through July 4, 1863, the War was in their home, and if the War began for the defense of slavery it ended with the failure of that defense and other things besides: a deep and culturally inbred resentment of the invader, and conviction as to the superior virtues of the defeated. The misery of invasion still resonated in 1971 when Joan Baez’s cover of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down was at the top of the charts. The Band’s version is pretty good too.

And notwithstanding the modern world the resentment and conviction probably aren’t done yet either.

From The General, 1926, MGM. The General is the funniest movie ever made and is in the public domain because somebody didn’t bother renewing the copyright. Go figure.

From Twain’s Life on the Mississippi:

IN the North one hears the war mentioned, in social conversation, once a month; sometimes as often as once a week; but as a distinct subject for talk, it has long ago been relieved of duty. There are sufficient reasons for this. Given a dinner company of six gentlemen to-day, it can easily happen that four of them—and possibly five—were not in the field at all. So the chances are four to two, or five to one, that the war will at no time during the evening become the topic of conversation; and the chances are still greater that if it become the topic it will remain so but a little while. If you add six ladies to the company, you have added six people who saw so little of the dread realities of the war that they ran out of talk concerning them years ago, and now would soon weary of the war topic if you brought it up.

The case is very different in the South. There, every man you meet was in the war; and every lady you meet saw the war. The war is the great chief topic of conversation. The interest in it is vivid and constant; the interest in other topics is fleeting. Mention of the war will wake up a dull company and set their tongues going, when nearly any other topic would fail. In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere: they date from it. All day long you hear things ‘placed’ as having happened since the waw; or du’in’ the waw; or befo’ the waw; or right aftah the waw; or ’bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo’ the waw or aftah the waw. It shows how intimately every individual was visited, in his own person, by that tremendous episode.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, ch. 26, 1883, James R. Osgood & Co., Boston, Ma.

There’s a strange statue in AsiaTown in West Houston, a larger-than-life bronze of a South Vietnamese infantryman in full battle gear walking side by side with a bronze American G.I., also in full battle gear. It’s the Memorial to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. The statue is in a district where not long ago a Vietnamese city council member was defeated at least in part because he had accompanied a former mayor on a trade mission to Vietnam. He visited the Yankees. Sometimes it’s just hard to get over it. Ask the Scots or the Irish or any given Cuban in Miami. Go visit Napoleon’s Tomb. Visit Quebec. Not everyone’s a good loser.

Now mind, there is no defense of the Lost Cause, there’s no getting over the moral indefensibility of many of my ancestors going to war to defend slavery: to paraphrase Grant, pretty brave guys but man did their cause suck, and for black Americans it really sucked.

University of Alabama Students burn desegregation literature, 1956, Library of Congress.

Beginning in the 1950s and 60s, with desegregation and voting and civil rights, our insights into the causes and effects of the War changed, or should have changed, not just in the South but the North as well. Maybe they did for some, but its symbols also became the symbols for a new conflict, or at least a refocused conflict carried over from the old. Notwithstanding that it was during the centennial of the War, I’m not buying that in 1962 Dixiecrats in South Carolina for the first time raised the battle flag at the state capitol because they got hyped up about history. I do suspect that a television show starring a Dodge Charger named the General Lee with a battle flag on its roof was dreamed up in Hollywood as a live-action cartoon, was innocent if naive, and that if anyone should be offended it should be white Southerners, but there you are: there are no longer any frivolous uses of that flag, and there are certainly no innocent uses. I may miss General Jubilation T. Cornpone in the Sunday funnies, but you can’t go home again.

* * *

Meantime we’re packing for Mississippi, and Saturday we drove to New Braunfels where I caught a nice rainbow on a red and black zebra midge under a flashback pheasant tail under a tan worm under some weight under a bobber, and I caught it right at the top of a run, right where it was supposed to be. Plus notwithstanding all that hardware I only got tangled twice. On the way out of town we ate at Krause’s, which has reopened and constructed a great beer hall next to the old restaurant. At our shared table we met a couple from New Braunfels with a place for rent in Arroyo City, on the Laguna Madre. Kris loves fishing the Laguna Madre. Unlike Florida I can catch fish on the Laguna Madre. She was ready to move to Arroyo City.

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Mississippi Donuts

Sunday morning in Vicksburg we stopped for donuts at Donut Palace before we toured the National Battlefield. Donut Palace is a pretty basic donut shop, clean and well lighted, without pretensions or flourishes, and it seemed to have a reasonably steady stream of customers. The other donut shop in Vicksburg, Divine Donuts, was closed on Sunday morning, because the Divine always rests on Sunday.

I had a pretty involved conversation with two customers. Mississippi accents are richer than most, and theirs were money. They had stopped for donuts on the start of a seven-hour road trip to Throckmorton, Texas. I blurted out that Throckmorton was my home town, thought better of the exaggeration, and tried to explain that it was within my home territory. Throckmorton was a bout 70 miles from where I grew up in Vernon, and about 30 miles from where my mother grew up in Seymour. In those parts, that’s nearby.

We had a nice conversation about hunting quail and dove, and I wanted to ask them if they knew a nearby farm pond to fish but I didn’t. It was cold, and even at a farm pond the fishing would be hard, and secretly I didn’t want this to be my last trip to Mississippi. As for Throckmorton, Texas, it was named after James Webb Throckmorton, who was born in Tennessee, and in 1861 had supported Sam Houston’s attempt to keep Texas in the Union. He was one of six Texas secession convention delegates who voted against secession. He then enlisted in the Confederate army, ultimately serving as brigadier general of something or other which was not the army, and late in the War as the Confederate commissioner to the Indians.

Texas was a recalcitrant Reconstruction state, and Throckmorton was the recalcitrant first Reconstruction governor. He repudiated the 14th Amendment because Texans, meaning white Texans, didn’t like it, which meant that he refused to protect freedmen or Freedmen’s Bureau agents. He was removed from office by Phillip Sheridan. Throckmorton the City is the County seat of Throckmorton the County, but I reckon they weren’t named for Throckmorton’s dubious accomplishments but because of the sheer poetry of the name. Throckmorton. Doesn’t that just roll off the tongue? I figure his constitutional analysis was a fluke and he was the last Texan ever who thought that the 14th Amendment didn’t apply.

After the two guys Going to Texas had Gone to Texas, I asked the donut shop owners if they were Cambodian. They were, and had close ties to Texas donut shops. That means that Cambodian ownership of donut shops has now spread out of Houston through Louisiana into Mississippi. There were some other earlier minor migrations into Mississippi. Chinese immigrants arrived during Reconstruction, and there are Chinese restaurants here and there. Tamales came with cotton workers brought in from Mexico after the turn of the last century, and are a favorite of the Delta. Donut Palace was selling the sausage rolls that Texas donut shops call kolaches, and they sold that greatest of Cambodian donut shop inventions, the Czech-Cajun-Cambodian boudin kolache. Their boudin came from Beaumont. It was delicious.


Cambodian donut shops are family affairs, and the owners were charming. I mentioned to them that I had heard that Dallas donut shop owners were often Koreans, and they said yes, and that the Koreans worked very hard and even slept in their shops. They said that one Korean would often run a shop alone, and that they knew a Korean who had two shops that he ran himself. I couldn’t figure how that worked, and I didn’t ask, but it wore me out just thinking about it.

* * *

Yesterday we drove to Sattler to fish the Guadalupe. It was only the second time we’d been to the Guadalupe this year. It was crowded, and nobody we talked to was catching anything, including a guide and his clients in a raft. It was TroutFest again, and the same guys with beards were there again this year. Before we fished we ate lunch at The Real Pit Barbecue in Sattler, and in honor of the first Astros spring training game I had a Frito pie. Frito pie is Texan/New Mexican, consisting of chili spooned onto Fritos, sometimes in a sliced open single serving sack, and garnished with cheese and onion. Being a combination of salt, spice, beef, and fat they are delicious, and because I explained to the lady at the counter that the Astros’ season depended on my eating a Frito pie–I’m mildly superstitious about baseball (but oddly never about fishing), she, being an Astros fan, made me an excellent pie. The chili had beans, or at least there were beans added, but I didn’t complain. I’m no Pythagorean.

When we finally got into the water I spent most of my time untangling line or re-rigging and wondering how I could get my tippet, nippers, weights, forceps, sunglasses, readers, camera, wading stick, net, and flies ready to hand. I used to wear a vest, and then tried a different vest, and am currently using a sling pack. I’ve used satchels and hip belts and lanyards and chest packs, and they all have their problems, but yesterday was a real mess. It was that day when everything was always wrong. At one point I sat down on a limestone ledge and took everything off and started over. I also had to unwrap the fly line that had somehow twisted 20-odd times around my net.

Maybe I need a pack. I’ve never tried a pack.

Late in the day I caught a small trout on a red and black size 16 zebra midge under a bead head under some weight under a bobber, then hooked a nicer fish that flipped off the hook after a couple of jumps. I figure I need to eat a Frito pie every time I fish the Guadalupe. Not that I’m superstitious.

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Mississippi

I read too much Faulkner too early, and I didn’t understand much of it. I had an excuse for reading it: Faulkner and I were both born on September 25, different years but it seemed like Kismet. Kismet maybe, but Kismet didn’t aid comprehension. Do you know how incomprehensible Henry Sutpen or Joe Christmas can be to a young man? To an old man?

I had this notion that Faulkner would help me understand the South and what it meant to be Southern. Faulkner taught me many things: how to spell ya’ll, that classy folk come from Virginia and failed folk slide off to Texas, and that well-placed Southern dialect sholy is fun, if only in my head. He taught me that if a white guy had black ancestors then all sorts of hijinx will ensue, and that folk, black and white and in-between, are going to die violently. Because blood, maybe, or maybe just cultural failure.

Carl Van Vechten, William Faulkner, 1954, Library of Congress.

I suspect you can’t be filled with a young man’s optimism and get much out of Faulkner, except maybe The Reivers (which oddly enough is his old man’s novel). Faulkner didn’t write about glories, he wrote about failures. Notwithstanding my expectations, Absolom, Absalom! wasn’t Gone with the Wind, Intruder in the Dust wasn’t To Kill a Mockingbird. He wrote about the failures of history, personal and social, old and new, and that’s not the sort of message a young man will understand. At least I didn’t.

I don’t remember Faulkner ever talking about fishing. Maybe Faulkner should have written about fishing. I would have understood not catching fish.

Mississippi State Flag, Museum of Mississippi History.

All that incomprehensible Faulkner gave me an early and perhaps strangely skewed focus on Mississippi. Other than my friend Byron and a couple of quick drive-throughs, I haven’t had a lot of personal contact with Mississippi except Faulkner, and Byron, an expat (once for money and once for love), always seemed equally entranced with and reticent about the place–and notwithstanding a strong literary inclination has refused to read Faulkner. I had at least one second great-grandfather who landed in antebellum Marshall County, Mississippi, near Memphis at the top of the state. He stayed there long enough to marry a second great-grandmother in 1845, apparently his cousin, and then the two slid off to Texas in time for the birth of my great grandfather in 1848. Their sojourn in Marshall County was pretty much a drive-through. They didn’t start in Mississippi and they didn’t stay long after they got there.

Immediately west of Marshall County the Mississippi Delta runs for 200 miles south from the Tennessee border along the east side of the Mississippi River, to Vicksburg. At its widest the Delta spreads east for 80 miles. It is an alluvial plain, and has the richest soil on earth. West of the river there’s the Arkansas Delta, culturally and geologically and economically similar to the Mississippi Delta, but nobody talks much about Arkansas. It’s Mississippi that grabs the imagination.

Delta wealth was built on slave labor growing cotton. Cotton is still rich enough, but agriculture is mechanized, and doesn’t require the labor force that in the 19th century worked the land. Of the Delta counties 42 are considered distressed, only four are not. Why is Arkansas glad there’s a Mississippi? Because Arkansas isn’t last on every list.

Robert Johnson, c. 1935, Wikipedia.

Mississippi isn’t old, which is another thing I didn’t understand in Faulkner. Antebellum Mississippi was still the Wild West, and Faulkner knew it. In the 1850 census there were 606,526 people, less my second great grandparents who had GTT, having boomed from a population of 7600 in 1800. By 1900, the population was 1.797 million, 2.967 million in 2018. Statewide the population is 59.1 percent white, 37 percent black. About one-third of the Mississippi African American population lives in the Delta, where the African American population is 46 percent of the total. Some Delta counties are 85 percent African American. On the other side of the state, in Alcorn County, the population is 87 percent white. It’s not important, except that it highlights what is often not obvious about Mississippi: Mississippi isn’t one thing.

Jimmie Rodgers, 1935, Wikipedia.

But it is some things: it is the poorest state in the Union, between whites and blacks the most racially complex and more often than not the most tragic, the place where income, education, health care, poverty, life expectancy, teenage pregnancy, STDs, and history walk extreme racial and class divides. Within the state there’s a division between east and west, with the coast thrown in for good measure. A hundred years ago the Mississippi east was populist and progressive, and the Mississippi west was Dixiecrat planters controlling the votes of African Americans. Now things are flipped. In the 2016 presidential election Mississippi voted 57.86 percent for President Trump, but unlike much of the rest of the nation the split wasn’t urban/rural, the split was Delta and southwestern counties versus most of everybody else, black versus white. This map lays it out:

2016 Mississippi election map, stolen from Wikipedia. Forgive me.

Mississippi is also the source of some of our best good things. It’s the place of the Blues, B.B. King, Jimmie Rodgers, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Robert Johnson. It’s the place of a good half-dozen of our finest writers, past and present, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, and Jesmyn Ward, all are from Mississippi. There are whole hosts of novelists like John Grisham and Greg Iles who write pretty good if mostly forgettable novels. It can be argued that as the principal home of the blues it’s the principal home of rock-and-roll. It is certainly the home of Elvis (and directly across the River from Natchez in Louisiana Jerry Lee Lewis). All of this in one of the least literate states in the nation. Where the heck did all that come from?

Mississippi also gave us Jefferson Davis, the post-Reconstruction Mississippi Plan, 589 lynchings (539 of blacks–the most in the South), Emmett Till, and more than its fair share of the violence of the Civil Rights Movement.

We go to Ocean Springs in March to fish the salt marshes with Richard Schmidt. Ocean Springs is apparently the most charming city on that odd geographic panhandle that makes up the Mississippi Coast, Biloxi having been taken over by casinos, and it’s about an hour east of New Orleans. It is also the site of the 1699 French landing in Mississippi/Louisiana by Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’Iberville. Who doesn’t like to say Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’Iberville? The French accomplished many things in Louisiana, including the decimation of the Native American population by disease and warfare, the eradication of the Natchez Indians, and the introduction of African slavery. They didn’t accomplish permanent French settlement, losing out to the English who lost out to the Spanish who lost out to the new Americans, though the French did found Biloxi and Natchez. And New Orleans.

Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville. National Library and Archives of Quebec.

On pretty much a whim over the long Martin Luther King holiday we drove to Mississippi and visited Natchez, Vicksburg, and Jackson. Oddly, Natchez is closer to Houston than my hometown in Texas, but driving six hours west from Houston through Fort Worth and Wichita Falls is a decidedly different experience from driving through Louisiana and Mississippi. Natchez is full of sometimes pretty and sometimes magnificent Antebellum homes turned into bed and breakfasts, but as Byron had pointed out to me, nobody wants to stay in the slave quarters. We didn’t fish–it was cold, and there was flooding because of winter rains. At the Vicksburg National Battlefield, I realized that my Union great-great grandfather from Missouri via Eastern Tennessee was probably shooting at one or more of my Confederate great-great grandfathers. I could have ended right there on that battlefield more than 90 years before I got started.

At a popular restaurant in Vicksburg black and white Saturday night diners ate under decidedly Lost Cause paintings of the Siege. On the flip side, a popular country-clubby restaurant in Jackson populated by black and white churchgoers, Char, was decorated with old photos. Prominent in the entry of the place was a copy of a 60s photo of Medgar Evers. As I recall I had the catfish, or maybe the fried chicken. I definitely had the fried green tomatoes. I also kept wondering if I’d misidentified the portrait photo of Medgar Evers. It is a strange place, Mississippi, and the past there really is never dead. But black and white diners are eating happily at Sunday brunch under a photo of Medgar Evers. I reckon things are changing.

Maybe someday soon I’ll make my pilgrimage to Oxford and finally understand Faulkner.