A tour of the Delta

I just got back from New Orleans this afternoon, but went to upload those photos and realized there were a couple from earlier in this grand southern adventure that I'd yet to put up. So, I will leave my New Orleans trip for another night and give you a quick snippet of Mississippi.

First week here I signed up for a bus tour being offered by a professor here at Delta State. We drove through corn fields, and cotton fields, and rice fields, and looked at some Blues landmarks, including a crossroads near Dockery Farm where Robert Johnson might have sold his soul to the Devil to learn how to play the guitar.

Since the story itself is obviously apocryphal, the site itself is also apocryphal, and so the actual spot we stopped at looked like this.

A major highlight of the trip was (as is usually the highlight of most things for me) the food. We all got lunch at a soul food place all-you-can-eat buffet. I got fried chicken, chicken with gravy, and some pulled pork that made me suddenly mourn my five vegetarian years. Plus beans, plus greens, plus boiled cabbage. If I didn't value my cardiovascular health, I could eat like this every day.
If I didn't have to get up in less than five hours, I could go on about the other historical sites we drove past, but I'm going to be lazy, give you one more little tidbit and then throw up some photos. The last stop on our tour was a place called Po' Monkey's. Po' Monkey's is one of the last remaining Juke Houses, which were make-shift music halls where people could come and hang out and play the blues. It was built as a sharecropper's shack back in the day, and looks like it was pieced together with tin and plywood from a junk heap.
But this guy named Willie Seaberry lives here, and has lived here for sixty-some-odd years. And every Thursday the place is open for business. Sometimes there is still live music, although usually there is a DJ that works the night. Mr. Seaberry doesn't exactly have a liquor license, but he sells beers out of the fridge in the kitchen of the shack. The inside of the place was decked out in the accumulated memorabilia of sixty years. There was a definite monkey theme, with stuffed monkeys hung all over the walls, but otherwise the ornament itself didn't really seem to matter provided it covered a piece of wall or ceiling and was colorful or interesting. All 80 or so of us mostly middle-class, mostly white kids piled off the bus and within minutes were packed into this tiny little shack that maybe holds 40 comfortably, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the quaintness and oddness of it all. Mr. Seaberry was friendly and seemed happy to have us gawking about, but it felt a little like invading someone's living room and going around commenting on their family photos. I hope this place stays around for a long time.

It was oddly reassuring to me to be reminded that America doesn't all look like the middle-class East Coast suburbs I grew up in, or the upscale metropolitan areas where I've lived. Whole huge chunks of it look like rice fields and cypress-wood shacks, and to the people who live there, that's America. The view that I know I tend to have of what (or who) our country is can get so limited that it's humbling, and sometimes startling, to be reminded what exists outside whatever little concept of America we're comfortable with.