Honey Island Swamp

Lunch the last day in the delta at The Cafe, Winona, Mississipppi: hamburger steak & gravy, purple hull beans, broccoli with cheese, cornbread, and unsweetned ice tea. The menu's written in hand on a 3 x 5 index card.

I ask the waitress, "is the broccoli with cheese any good?" She says, "we all like it."

When I ask for hot sauce she slaps a bottle of Trappey's Peppers on the table. Where has Trappey's been all my life? Waiting for me in a bottle full of red jalapeno peppers and just a little water, so that the water infiltrates the peppers and comes out of the bottle as the super hot mess a lover of the blues insists on. 

Walking through the little towns in the delta where so much great American music comes from--Greenville, Clarksdale, Merigold, Quitman, Cleveland--knowing what I know of the region's past, seeing how lost now their 'downtowns' are, the little shops either boarded up or their windows covered in old newspapers--I lose almost all my illusions and so what I've come to see, what I've waited for over 40 years to see, exceeds expectations.  

I no longer mourn my apple crate full of classic blues albums--Muddy Waters, Fred McDowell, Lightning Hopkins, B.B. King, Elmore James--stolen from the dormitory of a college I attended briefly in the early 1970's. I'd had to leave the college abruptly, and when I returned to gather up my things for final departure the apple crate had vanished. The suspect was a guy named Greg from Vacaville, California who said he loved the blues and would borrow a record from time-to-time. I kept meaning to hunt Greg down, but the years passed and it's only here in Mississippi that I can finally let bygones be bygones.

Once in conversation with the writer Renate Stendhal, we agreed that a writer could only write 3 to 4 hours a day and still maintain his or her physical health. Renate's written a gorgeous book, Kiss Me Again, Paris (IFSF, 2017), a memoir of her years in Paris which reveals just about everything about life there in the late 1960's/early 70's, while also preserving certain unalienable mysteries of that time and place in order to further intrigue the reader. I really don't know how Renate did it, but she did.

The Mississippi backroads are a pleasure to drive; it feels natural to go more slowly on them than you might if you were driving backroads in other more populated states, though once in awhile a Dodge Charger reserves the right to blow right around you.

Just outside the tiny town of Taylor I see a turtle in the middle of the road and, there being no one around, pull over, get out of the car, pick up the turtle and place it safely in the lush grass near the forest. The turtle looks old enough to have seen the great Robert Johnson at the crossroads, and it's entirely possible that it did. 

Mississippi's a red state, and like most red states is misunderstood by those who live in blue states. I'm almost certain that the people in Mississippi who voted for Donald Trump for President wouldn't like him if they actually met him; not that they'd tell him that to his face, they're much too polite.

After lunch in Winona we drive to Mt. Olive, once the home of daughter-in-law Tasha, and call her from downtown. "Yeah," she says, "there's not much there, a post office, a couple of stores..." Sitting in the car in Mt. Olive talking with Tasha 1,800 miles to the west, it begins to rain, and soon we're sitting in the midst of a real deluge.

Saying goodbye to Tasha we drive south to New Orleans, seeing a road sign in Louisiana for Honey Island Swamp. Someday we'll get there too, and it better be soon.