“My uncle has one of them powder flasks.”
“If it’s got the apportioning spigot spout in working order, your uncle’s a lucky guy.”
Some were reenactors, a man in a Confederate uniform, another dressed in period cowboy costume, looking like a vindictive sheriff, black hat and tall boots and pearl handle pistols.
It was not the first gun show I’d been to, and I would go to others, in Southhaven, Laurel, and Jackson, Mississippi. In Charleston, South Carolina, I’d seen a table set up like a museum display of World War I weapons and uniforms, as well as maps, books, postcards, and framed black-and-white photos of muddy battlefields. This was a commemorative exhibit put on by Dane Coffman, as a memorial to his soldier-grandfather, Ralph Coffman, who had served in the Great War. Dane, who was about 60, wore an old infantryman’s uniform, a wide-brimmed hat, and leather puttees, the getup of a doughboy. Nothing was for sale; Dane was a collector, a military historian, and a reenactor; his aim was to show his collection of belts and holsters, mess kits, canteens, wire cutters, trenching tools, and what he called his pride and joy, a machine gun propped on a tripod.
“I’m here for my grandfather,” he said. “I’m here to give a history lesson.”
Back in Natchez, a stall-holder leaning on a fat black assault rifle was expostulating. “If that damn vote goes through, we’re finished.” He raised the gun. “But I would like to see someone try and take this away from me. I surely would.”
Some men were wandering the floor, conspicuously carrying a gun, looking like hunters, and in a way they were, hunting for a buyer, hoping to sell it. One private seller had a 30-year-old weapon—wood and stainless steel—a Ruger .223-caliber Mini-14 assault rifle with a folding stock, the sort you see being carried by sharpshooters and conspirators in plots to overthrow wicked dictatorships. He handed it to me.
“By the way, I’m from Massachusetts.”
His face fell, he sighed and took the gun from me with big hands, and folded the stock flat, saying, “I wish you hadn’t told me that.”
As I walked away, I heard him mutter, “Goddamn,” not at me but at regulation generally—authority, the background checkers and inspectors and paper chewers, the government, Yankees.
And that was when I began to understand the mood of the gun show. It was not about guns. Not about ammo, not about knives. It was not about shooting lead into perceived enemies. The mood was apparent in the way these men walked and spoke: they felt beleaguered—weakened, their backs to the wall. How old was this feeling? It was as old as the South perhaps.
The Civil War battles might have happened yesterday for these particular southerners, who were so sensitized to intruders and gloaters and carpetbaggers, and even more so to outsiders who did not remember the humiliations of the Civil War. The passing of the family plantation was another failure, the rise of opportunistic politicians, the outsourcing of local industries, the disappearance of catfish farms, the plunge in manufacturing, and now this miserable economy in which there was no work and so little spare money that people went to gun shows just to look and yearn for a decent weapon that they’d never be able to buy.
Over this history of defeat was the scowling, punitive shadow of the federal government. The gun show was the one place where they could regroup and be themselves, like a clubhouse with strict admission and no windows. The gun show wasn’t about guns and gun totin’. It was about the self-respect of men—white men, mainly—making a symbolic last stand.
“Where I Could Save My Kids”
You hear talk of people fleeing the South, and some do. But I found many instances of the South as a refuge. I met a number of people who had fled the North to the South for safety, for peace, for the old ways, returning to family, or in retirement.
At a laundromat in Natchez, the friendly woman in charge changed some bills into quarters for the machines and sold me some soap powder, and with a little encouragement from me, told me her story.
Her name was Robin Scott, in her midforties. She said, “I came here from Chicago to save my children from being killed by gangs. So many street gangs there—the Gangster Disciples, the Vice Lords. At first where I lived was OK, the Garfield section. Then around the late eighties and early nineties the Four Corners Hustlers gang and the BGs—Black Gangsters—discovered crack cocaine and heroin. Using it, selling it, fighting about it. There was always shooting. I didn’t want to stay there and bury my children.
“I said, ‘Gotta get out of here’—so I quit my job and rented a U-Haul and eventually came down here where I had some family. I always had family in the South. Growing up in Chicago and in North Carolina, we used to visit my family in North Carolina, a place called Enfield, in Halifax County near Rocky Mount.”
I knew Rocky Mount from my drives as a pleasant place, east of Raleigh, off I-95 where I sometimes stopped for a meal.
“I had good memories of Enfield. It was country—so different from the Chicago streets. And my mother had a lot of family here in Natchez. So I knew the South was where I could save my kids. I worked at the casino dealing blackjack, but after a time I got rheumatoid arthritis. It affected my hands, my joints, and my walking. It affected my marriage. My husband left me.
“I kept working, though, and I recovered from the rheumatoid arthritis and I raised my kids. I got two girls, Melody and Courtney—Melody’s a nurse and Courtney’s a bank manager. My boys are Anthony—the oldest, he’s an electrician—and the twins, Robert and Joseph. They’re twenty-one, at the University of Southern Mississippi.
“Natchez is a friendly place. I’m real glad I came. It wasn’t easy. It’s not easy now—the work situation is hard, but I manage. The man who owns this laundromat is a good man.
“I got so much family here. My grandmother was a Christmas—Mary Christmas. Her brother was Joseph. We called my grandmother Big Momma and my grandfather Big Daddy. I laughed when I saw that movie Big Momma’s House.
“Mary Christmas was born on a plantation near Sibley. They were from families of sharecroppers. My grandfather was Jesse James Christmas.”
I mentioned Faulkner’s Light in August and Joe Christmas, and how I’d always found the name faintly preposterous, heavy with symbolism. I told her the plot of the novel, and how the mysterious Joe Christmas, orphan and bootlegger, passes for white but has a black ancestry. Before I could continue with the tale of Lena Grove and her child and the Christian theme, Robin broke in.
“Joe Christmas was my uncle,” she said, later explaining that he lived in a nursing home in Natchez until he died recently, in his nineties. “It’s a common name in these parts.”
“Repent”
Another beautiful back road in the Deep South—a narrow road past pinewoods and swamps, the hanks of long grass in the sloping meadows yellowy-green in winter. Some orderly farms—a few—were set back from the road, but most of the dwellings were small houses or bungalows surrounded by a perimeter fence, a sleepy dog inside it, and scattered house trailers detached and becalmed under the gum trees; and shacks, too, the collapsing kind that I only saw on roads like these. I had crossed into Jefferson County, one of the poorest counties in the nation and well known to public-health experts for having the nation’s highest rate of adult obesity. Every few miles there was a church—no bigger than a one-room schoolhouse and with a similar look, a cross on the roof peak and sometimes a stump of a steeple, and a signboard on the lawn, promoting the text for the week’s sermon: LORD JESUS HAS THE ROADMAP FOR YOUR JOURNEY.
I was as happy as I had ever been driving in the South. There is a sense of purification that seems to take place in sunshine on a country road, the winking glare in the boughs passing overhead, the glimpses of sky and the stands of trees, wall-like pines in some hollows, enormous oaks and columns of junipers in others, and a fragrance in the air of heated and slightly decayed leaf litter that has the aroma of buttered toast. Oaks and pine trees lined the road for some miles and narrowed it and helped give the impression of this as an enchan
ted road in a children’s story, one that tempted the traveler onward into greater joy.
And it was about that point that the ominous signs began to appear, real signs nailed to trees. For some miles, large, lettered signs were fastened to the thick trunks of roadside trees, their messages in black and red letters on a bright white background.
PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD
—AMOS 4:12
HE WHO ENDURES TO THE END SHALL BE SAVED
—MARK 13:13
THE EYES OF THE LORD ARE IN EVERY PLACE BEHOLDING THE EVIL AND THE GOOD
—PROVERBS 15:3
FAITH WITHOUT WORKS IS DEAD
—JAMES 2:26
STRIVE TO ENTER AT THE STRAIT GATE
—LUKE 13:24
REPENT
—MARK 6:12
In a church of believers, these sentiments, spoken by a pastor in a tone of understanding, could be a consolation, but painted on a tree in the backwoods of Mississippi they seemed like death threats.
“One of the Great Places”
In my ignorance, I had believed the Delta to be solely the low-lying estuary of the Mississippi River, round about and south of New Orleans, the river delta of the maps. But it isn’t so simple. The Delta is the entire alluvial sprawl that stretches northward of that mud in Louisiana, the floodplain beyond Natchez, emphatically flat above Vicksburg, almost the whole of a bulge west of Mississippi, enclosed in the east by the Yazoo River, all the way to Memphis. It is a definite route, as well; it is Highway 61.
I swung through Hollandale, which was just as boarded-up as other places on and off the highway I’d been through, but I heard music, louder as I entered the town. It was a hot late-afternoon, dust rising in the slanting sunlight, the street full of people, a man wailing and a guitar twanging: the blues.
When I hesitated, a police officer in pressed khakis waved me off the road, where cars were parked. I got out and walked toward a stage that had been set up against a stand of trees—this was the limit of the town, and a powerful, growly man was singing, backed by a good-sized band.
“That’s Bobby Rush,” the police officer said to me as I passed him.
A banner over the stage was lettered HOLLANDALE BLUES FESTIVAL IN HONOR OF SAM CHATMON. Stalls nearby were selling fried chicken and corn, ice cream and soft drinks and T-shirts. Bobby Rush was screaming now, finishing his last set, and as he left the stage to great applause from the people—about 200 of them—standing in the dust, another group took the stage and began stomping and wailing.
A black biker gang in leather stood in a group and clapped, old women in folding chairs applauded and sang, children ran through the crowd of spectators, youths dressed as rappers, with low-slung trousers and hats turned back to front—they clapped, too, and so did 17-year-old Shu’Quita Drake (purple braids, a sweet face), holding her little boy, a swaddled 1-month-old infant named D’Vontae Knight, and Robyn Phillips, a willowy dancer from Atlanta, who had family in Hollandale and said, “This is just amazing.”
But the music was so loud, so powerful, splitting the air, making the ground tremble, conversation was impossible, and so I stepped to the back of the crowd. As I was walking, I felt a hand on my arm.
It was a man in an old faded shirt and baseball cap.
“Welcome to Hollandale,” he said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“I’m the mayor,” he said. “Melvin L. Willis. How can I help you?”
Melvin Willis was born in Hollandale in 1948 and had grown up in segregated Delta schools. (And, alas, in November 2013, some months after I met him, he died of cancer.) He went to college and got a job teaching in York, Alabama, a small town near the Mississippi state line. He had become a high-school principal in York.
“I worked there forty years, then retired and came back home to Hollandale in 2005. I ran for mayor in 2009 and won. I just got my second term. This festival is an example of the spirit of this town.”
The music, the crowds, the many cars parked under the trees, the food stalls, and the festive air—none of it could mask the fact that, like Rolling Fork and Anguilla and Arcola and other places I’d visited, the town looked bankrupt.
“We’re poor,” he said. “I don’t deny it. No one has money. Cotton doesn’t employ many people. The catfish plant was here. It closed. The seed and grain closed. The hospital closed twenty-five years ago. We got Deltapine—they process seeds. But there’s no work hereabouts.”
A white man approached us and put his arm around Mayor Willis. “Hi. I’m Roy Schilling. This man used to work for my daddy at the grocery.”
The grocery was Sunflower Food Store in the middle of Hollandale, one of the few stores still in business. Roy, like Mayor Willis, was an exuberant booster of Hollandale and still lived nearby.
“Over there where the music is playing?” Roy said, “That was Simmons Street, known as the Blue Front, every kind of club, all sorts of blues, bootleg liquor and fights. I tell you it was one lively place on a Saturday night.”
“One of the great places,” Mayor Willis said.
But it had ended in the 1970s. “People left. Mechanization. The jobs dried up.”
More people joined us—and it was beautiful in the setting sun, the risen dust, the overhanging trees, the children playing, the music, the thump and moan of the blues.
“My father had a pharmacy over there, City Drug Store,” a man said. This was Kim Grubbs, brother of Delise Grubbs Menotti, who had sung earlier at the festival. “We had a movie theater. We had music. Yes, it was very segregated when I was growing up in the sixties, but we were still friendly. We knew everyone.”
“It was a kind of paradise,” Kim said.
Mayor Willis was nodding, “Yes, that’s true. And we can do it again.”
“Closed. Went to Mexico.”
“What you see in the Delta isn’t how things are,” a woman in Greenville, Mississippi, told me.
“But they don’t look good,” I said.
“They’re worse than they look,” she said.
We sat in her office on a dark afternoon, under a sky thick with bulgy, drooping clouds. Scattered droplets of cold rain struck the broken sidewalks and potholed street. I had thought of the Delta, for all its misery, as at least a sunny place; but this was chilly, even wintry, though it was only October. For me, the weather, the atmosphere was something new, something unexpected and oppressive, and thus remarkable.
Things are worse than they look was one of the more shocking statements I heard in the Mississippi Delta, because as in Allendale, South Carolina, and the hamlets on the back roads of Alabama, this part of the Delta seemed to be imploding.
“Housing is the biggest challenge,” said the woman, who did not want her name published, “but we’re in a Catch-22—too big to be small, too small to be big. By that I mean, we’re rural, but we don’t qualify for rural funding because the population is over twenty-five thousand.”
“Funding from whom?”
“Federal funding,” she said. “And there’s the mindset. It’s challenging.”
I said, “Are you talking about the people living in poverty?”
“Yes, some of those people. For example, you see nice vehicles in front of really rundown houses. You see people at Walmart and in the nail shops, getting their nails done.”
“Is that unusual?”
“They’re on government assistance,” she said. “I’m not saying they shouldn’t look nice, but it’s instant gratification instead of sacrifice.”
“What do you think they should do?”
“I grew up in a poverty-stricken town”—and having passed through it the day before I knew she was not exaggerating: Hollandale looked like the plague had struck it. “At any given time there were never less than ten people in the house, plus my parents. One bathroom. This was interesting—we were never on any kind of government assistance, the reason being that my father worked. His job was at Nicholson File. And he fished and hunted and gardened. His vegetables were reall
y good. He shot deer, rabbits, squirrels—my mother fried the squirrels, or made squirrel stew.” She laughed and said, “I never ate that game. I ate chicken.”
“What happened to Nicholson File?” The company made metal files and quality tools, a well-respected brand among builders.
“Closed. Went to Mexico,” she said. This was a reply I often heard when I asked about manufacturing in the Delta. “I could see there wasn’t much for me here. I joined the military—I did ‘three and three’—three active, three reserve. I was based in California, and I can tell you that apart from Salvation it was the best decision I’ve made in my life. The service provided me with a totally different perspective.”
“But Greenville is a big town,” I said. I’d been surprised at the extent of it, the sprawl, the downtown, the neighborhoods of good, even grand houses. And a new bridge had been built—one yet to be named—across the Mississippi, just west of the city.
“This is a declining town. River traffic is way down. We’ve lost population—from about forty-five thousand in 1990 to less than thirty-five thousand today. This was a thriving place. We had so much manufacturing—Fruit of the Loom men’s underwear, Schwinn Bikes, Axminster Carpets. They’re all gone to Mexico, India, China. Or else they’re bankrupt. There was once an Air Force base here. It closed.”
“What businesses are still here?” I wondered.
“Catfish, but that’s not as big as it was. We’ve got rice—Uncle Ben’s, that’s big. We’ve got a company making ceiling tiles, and Leading Edge—they put the paint on jet planes. But there’s not enough jobs. Unemployment is huge, almost twelve percent, twice the national average.”
The Best American Travel Writing 2015 Page 43
