Milepost 8: Pay Attention / In A World of My Own
“Spider Lilies, I”
charcoal & acrylic on canvas
24” x 24”
2019
Excerpts from Eudora Welty’s, “Some Notes On River Country,” appear in italicized text *
* * * * *
A place that was ever lived in is like a fire that never goes out. It flares up, it smolders for a time, it is fanned or smothered by circumstance, but its being is intact, forever fluttering within it, the result of some original ignition. Sometimes it gives out glory, sometimes its little light must be sought after to be seen, small and tender as a candle flame, but as certain.
I have never seen, in this small section of old Mississippi River country and its little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez, anything so mundane as ghosts, but I have felt many times there a sense of place as powerful as if it were visible and walking and could touch me.
Actually, I’m excited. Mama and Uncle Kenny have let me tag along on their adventures in the past, usually with Aunt Paula in tow, but they’ve never planned an adventure for me specifically. Mama’s been talking about this place, Rodney, some Mississippi ghost town with an old Presbyterian church she wants me to see, and Uncle Kenny is all about some burned out plantation house. Mama’s made him our driver for the day because he’s the only person she trusts to get us there and back. Unsurprisingly, it’s in the middle of nowhere.
It all sounds a tad macabre, but I love being with these two, regardless the occasion. The resulting laughter from their competing recollections could launch a rocket. I live for their stories and their laughter. It fills me up.
My only instructions for the day were to bring lots of black & white film for my manual Nikon, Dad’s old camera he picked up in Germany where he was stationed during Vietnam. I just wish Aunt Paula were in town to come along. The three of them together, Mama, Kenny, and Paula, light up my heart.
Before leaving downtown Natchez we stop to fill up Kenny’s Honda. He jumps out, feeds the machine his credit card, and begins pumping while Mama and I both go into the gas station. Despite her inevitable protestations, I’m buying cigarettes. No way I’m going to a Mississippi ghost town and not have enough nicotine to survive a flat tire or a few wrong turns. She’s accustomed to seeing me smoke by now. Besides, I’m twenty-three. I should be able to smoke a cigarette in front of my mother without feeling disappointed in myself, right?
I get back to the car with my Camel Lights just as Kenny is returning the gas pump to its holster. Climbing into the back seat I see Mama emerge from the gas station with a bag of, what I assume to be, road-snacks, Cokes and chips and crackers and the like. She slips into the front seat and puts the bag on the car floorboard between her feet. Kenny climbs in too, shuts his door, triggering his Honda to automatically bring his seatbelt from the steering wheel along the doorframe over his left shoulder to its secure position. Mama’s does the same upon closing her door, and the two cousins look at each other and applaud in unison.
“Lord, what will they think of next?!” Mama says through tears, laughing. “I love your new chariot!”
“It beats the old one for sure; it runs. God bless the high-paying gig of a public high school English teacher!” he proclaims sarcastically.
“Cha-ching, says the high-paid preacher lady,” Mama adds with the same intent, imitating the sound of a cash register making a sale.
Mama and Kenny are second cousins, or so they used to say. They’re actually first cousins once removed. Kenny and my grandmother, Helen Mae, were first cousins. Kenny and Mama just happened to be born around the same time, and so they grew up alongside one another as cousins sometimes do, forming a tight, life-long bond. That makes Kenny my first cousin, twice removed, not actually an uncle, though it makes no difference to me. Cousin or not, he’s always been my Uncle Kenny.
Kenny pulls us out of the gas station and heads north away from downtown towards the terminus of the Natchez Trace. The day is gray and overcast; it’s cool but not cold, my kind of day. Since getting to town for the Balloon Races there’s been lots of rainy weather, typical for this time of year, and puddles have formed along the sides of the road.
To get onto the Trace from Natchez, you drive up Highway 61 towards Port Gibson. There’s talk of extending the Trace closer to Natchez, maybe even to downtown, since originally, the trail terminated at the Mississippi River, but recalling the years it took to pave Highway 84 from Brookhaven to Natchez with two additional lanes (making a total of four), I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime.
The Natchez Trace is an old migratory trail, originally tread by bison, and later used by Native Americans as a hunting and trade route. Centuries of use wore a deep groove into the earth creating a path through the landscape that helped level out the hilly topography, therefor, making it easier to traverse than the rambling forests surrounding it. American colonists eventually claimed it for themselves and used it for similar purposes, connecting two disparate regions.
I don’t have a lot of experience riding the Trace. My parents often avoided it on our trek to/from Georgia/Mississippi because the speed limit, 50 mph, is much slower than that of the interstate. Besides, everyone swears it takes longer to get to Jackson that way. Truthfully, it doesn’t. It just depends on which side of Jackson you want to end up on. Instead, my parents, eager to get two boys from Destination A to B, would choose to jump onto I-55 at Jackson and take it south to Brookhaven before heading on to Natchez or vice versa. Opting for the scenic, slower-paced, two-lane Natchez Trace Parkway (which also meets I-20 at Jackson, albeit, on its west side) just wasn’t worth the hassle on an eight-hour drive.
So this stretch of road is foreign to me, but now in possession of a fresh pack of smokes, I’m ready for whatever the day brings. Kenny said that the entrance to the Trace is just north of town, and in just a few minutes we find ourselves exiting Highway 61 onto the much-lauded, limited-access, 444 mile route from Natchez to Nashville, now designated a national parkway and All-American Road.
The clatter of hoofs and the bellow of boats have gone, all old communications. The Old Natchez Trace has sunk out of use; it is deep in leaves. Boats from Liverpool do not dock at these empty crags. The old deeds are done, old evil and old good have been made into stories, as plows turn up the river bottom, and the wild birds fly at the level where people on boat deck were once strolling and talking of great expanding things, and of chance and of money. Much beauty has gone, many little things of life. To light up the nights there are no mansions, no celebrations. Just as, when there were mansions and celebrations, there were no more festivals of an Indian tribe there; before the music, there were drums.
Traveling north up the two-lane wilderness road, my mother, an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church, leans down, reaching into the big brown bag from the gas station on the floorboard, and pulls out one of the biggest beers mine eyes have ever seen. She pops it open and passes it to Kenny. Mouth agape, I stare in disbelief. Then she opens yet another can of beer in a moving vehicle on a national parkway, and without looking, passes it over her left shoulder back to me. With the strength of two hands, I take the beer from her, a Coors Light, and bring it to my lap. She leans forward again, sits back up, and the sound of a third huge beer popping open rings though the Honda. How could this be the same woman who made her teenage son come to her bedside to prove that he was home by curfew (an obvious ruse to determine if he and his friends had been drinking and, thus, driving)?!
Mama throws back a big glug and follows it up with a satisfied, “Ah! Ain’t nothing like an ice-cold beer.” I take a sip of my own and silently nod in agreement. Ain’t nothing so wonderful, indeed. I swear Mississippi is a world unto itself. I had no idea anyone canned beer this size. Bottled? Of course. I’ve seen that back home in Georgia, forty ounces per bottle. Canned? Definitely not. Though not quite that size, this thing is still huge. I’m basically holding a small keg. That’s what this is, a hand-sized keg.
I hear a rumbling from the front seat and realize Mama’s not done pulling things out of the bottomless bag. The familiar sound of chips being opened fills Kenny’s Honda, and I watch as Mama passes something to him.
“Mmm. Thank you, ma’am!” Kenny says to his cousin.
The bag is clear, but I can’t make out its contents. Again, more ruffling from Mama, the sound of another bag being pulled open, and then comes her hand again, reaching back over her shoulder without looking, handing the bag to me. I lean forward and retrieve it from her, realizing as I do that she’s bought us all cracklins (or pork rinds or fried pork skins, depending on where you’re from). Then I hear Mama open a third, hers, followed by the sound of crunching, and I smile to myself.
As a young mother rearing her family in an unfamiliar metropolis, Mama so greatly missed the farm animals and pastures of her southwest Mississippi home that it pulled my parents north out of the city of Atlanta to the hilly countryside of the North Georgia Mountains. There she found the peace she missed from her pastoral home, and together with my father, they built a log cabin high in the mountains, a peaceful respite from the hustle and bustle of busy Atlanta. Along with my brother and our little dogs, Lucky and Ruby, together as a family, we went up there every weekend.
The drive out of Atlanta became more and more rural as we moved further north into the foothills of Appalachia. The occasional roadside fruit stand or an open tailgate next to a big ol’ pot of boiled peanuts would eventually pop up along the roadside, usually tended by a lone old man. These little impromptu markets brought so much joy to her Mississippi heart that we rarely passed one by, picking up country melons and heirloom tomatoes and wild blueberries all along the way.
“Just poor farming folk,” she’d say. “That I can relate to. Let’s support ‘em. Now tell me, is there anything better than an ice-cold Coca Cola and some hot boiled peanuts?”
Mama exclaims, “There’s nothing better than an ice-cold beer and pork rinds!”
Kenny agrees with an enthusiastic, “Mmm hmm!” as he turns on the car radio and begins flipping through stations. A collective, “YES!” emanates from mother and son when he lands on a station playing Patsy Cline’s, “Walkin’ After Midnight.” (I acquired my love for Patsy honestly; she was one of my mother’s favorites.)
“One of my favorites,” Mama says, sipping and munching with enthusiasm, excited for the day’s adventure.
Nursing my beer and contemplating a taste of the pork rinds, I work to settle into the moment and take in my surroundings. Looking out the back passenger-side window from Kenny’s moving vehicle into the passing woods, I notice the blurred density is browner than the Georgia pine forests I know from home. Those are grayer and sit atop an orangey, pine needle-colored forest floor, but like the woods I know from home these, too, are dense and speckled with penetrating streaks of sunlight (in the moments the clouds choose to part). The most noticeable difference is the occasional drop off along either side of the road. Suddenly, without warning, the ground disappears, dropping twenty, thirty, forty or more feet straight down to the deepest parts of the forest floor where little streams of runoff race to meet the bayou.
Near the southern terminus of the Natchez Trace one of the first stops is a small parking lot of five to six parking spaces that faces a sheer drop rising twenty to thirty or so feet above the paved area. There, the calving of the bluff has revealed its innards, cream-in-coffee-colored soil, and a placard stands below, providing information about the site, describing this natural process.
Kenny drives right on past begging me to ask, “What was that stop we just skipped, y’all?”
“That was a sign highlighting the loess bluffs along the Trace, honey. Loess is the type of soil here. Remember? It’s that fine particulate that brings endless dust to any still surface,” Mama says with the knowingness of a childhood tasked with the endless chore of dusting the contents of a farmhouse on a dirt road.
“Erodes quickly too,” Kenny adds. “Think of the Natchez bluffs along the river.”
Loess has the beautiful definition of aeolian – wind-borne. The loess soil is like a mantle; the ridge was laid down here by the wind, the bottom land by the water. Deep under them both is solid blue clay, embalming the fossil horse and fossil ox and the great mastodon, the same preserving blue clay that was dug up to wrap the head of the Big Harp in bandit days, no less a monstrous thing when it was carried in for reward.
“Not worthy of a picture?” I ask.
“Not in comparison to Quitman Road down to Anna’s Bottom,” Mama says. “The bluffs there are much higher, but you knew that already, right? You’ve been down that road to your Paw Paw Frank’s a thousand times!” she says, slightly bothered by my lack of recognition.
“I guess so. I hadn’t really thought about it. Obviously, this isn’t Georgia red clay, but yeah… I hadn’t given it much thought.”
Loess also exists in China, that land whose plants are so congenial to the South; there bluffs rise vertically for five hundred feet in some places and contain cave dwellings without number. The Mississippi bluffs once served the same purpose; when Vicksburg was being shelled from the river during the year’s siege there in the War Between the States, it was the daily habit of the three thousand women, children, and old men who made up the wartime population to go on their all-fours into shelters they had tunneled into the loess bluffs. Mark Twain reports how the Federal soldiers would shout from the river in grim humor, “Rats to your holes!”
“How far are we from Windsor?” Mama asks Kenny.
“Not far. It’s just up near Port Gibson, past Fayette and Alcorn. We can get there from either Alcorn or Port Gibson via Rodney Road. What say you?” Kenny asks her.
“Well, should we drive through Alcorn’s campus to show him the college and the wrought iron steps they moved from Windsor? Do you want to see that, Jamey? Might make a good picture. The campus is gorgeous.”
“Y’all tell me. I’m just along for the ride. But I will say, the beer and pork rinds were an inspired beginning to the day, so y’all have my full trust. Who doesn’t love a huge beer at ten o’clock in the morning?” I ask jokingly.
“No friend of mine,” Kenny says as he and Mama chuckle, reveling in their rebelliousness.
The radio sings us along, and Mama asks Kenny about someone she hasn’t seen in a while, some old friend or classmate I’ve never heard of, and so I disconnect from their chatter and begin to zone out, staring through the car window back into the density of the woods again, taking notice of the unusual bright-reddish flowers that seem to pop up out of nowhere across the forest floor.
It’s so good to see Mama so happy. I never really understood how much she missed Natchez until this moment, the three of us humming along the Trace with hand-kegs of beer and cracklins. She’s at home here. She speaks the language. Atlanta, only being where she reared her boys, it never really occurred to me that it couldn’t hold the same place in her heart as it does in mine. It’s my hometown, not hers. This is one of the few defining things that separates us. Atlanta, to me, is civilization; it represents a progressive South, one that moves forward. There, in “The City Too Busy To Hate,” I’m surrounded by like-minded people. This corner of the world, “Where the Old South Still Lives,” is all about yesterday; it revels in it and sees the past as its future. In the twenty-first century, what’s redeeming about that?
I just never imagined my parents could be content here after thirty years in the real world, but the change I see in her is undeniable. Mama seems less harried, less in charge. Her years as the director of the preschool at our home church in Atlanta were wonderful years for us all, and I can tell she misses the kindred spirits of that community but not the responsibility of her former job. Of course her duties as Associate Pastor here at her home church in Natchez keep her busy, but there’s more joy in this busyness. Her efforts are more purposeful. She has more freedom and maneuverability in caring for her congregation as opposed to organizing the daily needs of a large preschool. Perhaps it’s just the sheer proximity to her family or the joy of being back atop the loess soil of southwest Mississippi. Maybe she has finally hit her stride since answering the call to enroll in seminary, or maybe, simply, it’s all of the above.
Raucous laughter interrupts my thoughts, and I turn to the cousins up front and demand to know, “What are y’all cackling about up there?”
Mama lets out a hearty laugh and says, “Kenny was teasing me about the time Aunt Gebby and my other Chi Omega girls up and left me at the damn Krystal in Jackson on a Saturday night, all in a hurry to get back to campus before Millsaps shut the gates for curfew. You know, they used to do that back then?”
Bypassing her question about curfew I ask incredulously, “Your friends left you?”
“Not intentionally,” she replies. “It was the Coors Light’s fault they said.”
“Once the girls realized they were a passenger short…” Kenny begins.
“And without their sackful of Krystal burgers!” Mama adds.
“The girls u-turned that car and hauled ass back to the Krystal to find your mother sitting on the curb in the parking lot with their burgers, a half-eaten Krystal in hand and one empty wrapper on the curb beside her!” They both cackle over the memory. “That’s how I’ll always remember you, Faye, there on the curb in front of the Krystal,” Kenny daringly proclaims. “I can see you now!”
“Then I say I’m getting off lucky!” Mama chuckles. “And I’d like to add that we made it back to campus before curfew, so be proud of your mama!” she directs to the backseat.
“But you know, competing with that image of you at the Krystal is one of you with Millsaps-purple lips!” Kenny lets slip, intimating another tale from their shared past.
“Don’t you dare tell my baby that story!” Mama threatens.
“Oh Lord! Now I have to know, y’all,” I plead.
“Nope. Story time is over!”
“Faye, it’s a cautionary tale! Enlighten him so he doesn’t repeat the same mistake,” Kenny suggests, barely getting the words out before roaring with laughter over the steering wheel.
“Hush, Kenny! Jamey, drink your beer and don’t tease your Mama,” she says with a no-way-in-hell-are-we-discussing-this tone of voice, one I’m quite familiar with. “Besides, I think he’s made most of his big mistakes by now,” she adds without malice.
Knowing better, I don’t chime in. She is absolutely right, or at least I hope. God willing, my biggest mistakes are behind me and I’m done with do-overs in this lifetime. Wickedly, I smile at the memory, thinking back to my nine months in Charleston, South Carolina, where I enjoyed more than Coors Light and Krystal burgers.
She reaches forward and flips the stations on the car radio landing on Elvis’ “Suspicious Minds” and turns up the volume to prevent any further discussion about her mysterious purple lips from their Millsaps days. I make a mental note to corner Kenny and finagle the story from his memory sometime down the road. A sign for Port Gibson pops up along the roadside of the Trace and Kenny slows the vehicle and takes the exit.
This was the frontier of the Natchez country. Postmen would arrive here blowing their tin horns like Gabriel where the Old Natchez Trace crosses Bayou Pierre, after riding three hundred wilderness miles from Tennessee, and would run in where the tavern used to be to deliver their mail, change their ponies, and warm their souls with grog. And up this now sand-barred bayou trading vessels would ply from the river.
“Church Street is the main drag here in town,” Mama shares. “Coming up you’re going to see lots of pretty old houses along the road, and you’re just going to love the steeple on the Presbyterian Church.”
“Sounds good to me,” I say, reassuring her that I’m open to whatever the day brings.
“Just get that camera ready, honey,” Mama instructs me. “We’re not making a stop here today, right?”
“Not unless y’all really want to. I’d like to get down and back up Rodney Road before any rain sets in. This Honda is equipped with lots of new features but getting out of deep mud probably isn’t one of them.” Kenny warns.
“Good point,” Mama agrees.
Port Gibson is quiet today with little activity along the road. As we near the center of town we begin to pass the grand old houses Mama mentioned, houses that have long since seen their best days it seems. Most appear to have settled into a long, slow decay, much like Port Gibson itself.
“Here it is, baby. Look!”
Coming up on the right I see a sweet little church hugging the road, Romanesque in its appearance. Branches obscure its steeple at first, but as we move closer, the foliage begins to clear. As if on cue the clouds part slightly allowing bright sunshine to illuminate what appears to be a huge golden hand with its pointer finger aimed straight up to the heavens above. It’s completely unexpected, something I’ve never encountered before, and its glow, the result of sunlight reflecting off gold leaf against an overcast sky, burns intensely, momentarily, before the clouds snuff out the sun’s light again. In two shakes of a lamb’s tail it’s behind us.
“What did I just see, y’all? Was that a hand pointing towards the sky?” I ask in disbelief as the Honda motors on.
“Do you love it?” Mama asks, filled with satisfaction by my surprise.
“I do,” I answer softly realizing that my opportunity to capture it on film had just passed. “Wow. How incredibly unique. Touches the heart somehow, huh? It’s much more effective than the cross in my opinion.”
“See? There’s a lot to appreciate around here. You just have to look a little harder to find it,” Mama says as Kenny agrees silently with a nod. Apparently, my lack of enthusiasm about this part of the world has been discussed at some point in my absence. Kenny slows the car and takes a sharp left turn in the middle of town.
Port Gibson is on a highway and a railroad today, and lives on without its river life, though it is half diminished. It is still rather smug because General Grant said it was “too pretty to burn.” Perhaps it was too pretty for any harsh fate, with its great mossy trees and old camellias, its exquisite little churches, and galleried houses back in the hills overlooking the cotton fields. It has escaped what happened to Grand Gulf and Bruinsburg and Rodney’s Landing.
“Onward, chariot!” Mama commands, as Port Gibson becomes a reflection in the mirrors of the Honda as we progress along the little two-lane road. “Up next, the Ruins of Windsor! How far is it do you think?”
“Only about five to ten minutes, I believe,” Kenny predicts.
Hunger gets the best of me, and I finally dig into my bag of cracklins. Honestly, they’re damn good, and I knew they would be. What’s not to love about fried pork skins? Chasing them down with cold beer, they’re gone in a blink. Why did I resist?
Winding through this land unwarned, rounding to a valley, you will come on a startling thing. Set back in an old gray field, with horses grazing like small fairy animals beside it, is a vast ruin – twenty-two Corinthian columns in an empty oblong and an L. Almost seeming to float like lace, bits of wrought-iron balcony connect them here and there… This is the ruin of Windsor, long since burned. It used to have five stories and an observation tower – Mark Twain used the tower as a sight when he was a pilot on the river.
Kenny’s prediction was right on when about eight minutes later he slows the car to make another turn. The words, “Holy shit,” escape my mouth as the site comes into view.
“Told you!” Mama says. “Don’t ever question your mother! And watch that tongue. You’re not a sailor.”
As Kenny parks the car I buckle my huge beer into the seat next to me to secure it from tipping over while we’re gone from the car. There’s just no way it’s going to fit into one of these infinitesimal Honda cup holders, and God forbid it spill and leave the car smelling of beer. An open container is against the law after all, even in this part of the world, and dealing with the potential fallout is a consequence I want us all to avoid. How did the art student (and not the high school English teacher or Methodist preacher) end up as the responsible member of the day’s party?
I grab my Nikon and exit the vehicle. Mama takes their trash, two empty cracklin’ bags, two empty hand-kegs, and the paper bag and tosses it all into a random trashcan there at the site. Mortified that two sixty year olds have just bested the college student, I turn back to the car, grab my beer from the backseat, and chug it down with determination. There! I’m fully initiated I think to myself. I add my trash items to the receptacle, too, and get on with the business of capturing this architectural anomaly on film.
How in the world is this even here? And why doesn’t everyone know about it? How didn’t I already know about it!? My family knows I’ve been knee-deep in antebellum architecture for the last year since finally finding my footing in art school, realizing the purpose of my work has something to do with these existent, historical, palaces built by the forced labor of enslaved people.
My fascination goes way back. As a kid coming up in Atlanta stuck at home on a Sunday afternoon with nothing to do and nowhere to go I’d find myself curled up on our living room sofa. Like other homes, our living room featured the nicest of our furniture such as my grandmother, Ruby’s, piano, a chest of drawers for fancy linens, a couple of wingback chairs, a tall set of shelves displaying fancy knickknacks, our shimmery pearl-colored sofa, a couple side tables, but most adored by me, oversized coffee table books.
There was an assortment of themes, the history of the automobile, a nod to my Paw Paw Smylie, Dad’s father, a lifelong Ford salesman, and instructional books on how to dry flowers and craft homemade wreaths, Mama’s favorites. The objects of my affection featured historic American architecture, most notably, antebellum structures of the Deep South, and more specifically, those of my parents’ hometown, Natchez, Mississippi.
Natchez is best known for its surviving antebellum architecture, its homes and various outbuildings, the greatest concentration of any such structures remaining anywhere. The first half of the nineteenth century saw the accumulation of untold wealth thanks to the proliferation of the African slave trade and the plantation economy it supported. Cotton made Natchez the commercial and cultural capital of the Old South, serving as home for the wealthiest of America’s planters, whose plantations were mostly elsewhere but whose showplaces were erected atop the loess bluffs here, many of which remain inhabited today.
Since Natchez was a Union-loyalist town, it was spared the torch, and being so geographically isolated, it missed many of the economic revivals larger, more well connected places experienced in subsequent decades. Therefor, much of what was constructed remains. America’s history is illustrated here in architecture, style after changing style, from the late 1700s on.
Curling up with the coffee table books was like falling down the rabbit hole. Page after page, I’d find myself transfixed by the unbelievable scale, craftsmanship, design, uniqueness, and history of the structures pictured in the books, especially in contrast to my 1960s Atlanta-sprawl, ranch-style house with its eight foot ceilings, pine paneling, and linoleum floors. And it wasn’t just their aesthetic qualities that commanded my gaze, but also their survival to the present day and how that, also, contrasted with the history of my hometown, thriving, bustling, international, New South, Atlanta, which unlike Natchez, is well known for its fiery, wartime annihilation.
Now rising before me, like the pictures of the historic structures in the coffee table books I so adored, is the skeletal shell of one of their own. Clearly, long ago, this was the site of an impressive pile of handmade bricks that now exists as this, marking time like Stonehenge in the middle of nowhere. Even with all my creative efforts it’s difficult to imagine a dwelling existing within the perimeter of these vertical towers. People lived here. This was home to many, a privileged few voluntarily but most, of course, involuntarily. It’s hard for the mind to recreate for the eyes, and it hurts the heart to try.
“What happened here?” I ask Kenny.
“A single discarded smoking cigar brought the whole thing down is what I always heard. Right, Faye?”
“That’s my understanding. It lit up the night sky for miles according to old accounts. Supposedly, passengers on a passing riverboat said they could see the glow of the fire from the river.”
“So it’s Twelve Oaks,” I suggest, referencing the burned out plantation home of Ashley Wilkes, Scarlett O’Hara’s love interest, in Margaret Mitchell’s novel, “Gone With The Wind,” an antebellum tale from my hometown.
“In a sense,” Kenny says. “But not fictional, and not a casualty of the war. It stood until 1890.”
“So more like Homewood, the old mansion where Granny and Aunt Alice spent part of their youth?” I ask.
“Similar, but this fire was an accident,” Mama asserts.
“That’s a hell of a story too!” Kenny says. “Another adventure for another day.”
I file away Kenny’s last statement to inquire about later just like Mama’s purple lips. For about fifteen minutes we walk about the site moving individually, all taking interest in its various offerings, tall fluted columns, cast iron Corinthian capitals topped with opportunistic foliage, places where the second floor wrought iron balcony railing managed to remain connected more than a century since the conflagration.
Repeatedly, I try my best to fit the enormity of this ruin into one frame of film but fail to manage the task. It’s too large, and there’s not enough clearing from the tree line to get it all in one shot. The poetry of that futile task hits me as Mama says, “There’s something poetic about it all.” The coincidence nearly knocks me over.
“Poetic?” Kenny, the high school English teacher asks, suggesting there’s another story to be shared in there somewhere.
“You are not going to survive the day, Kenneth Michael,” Mama threatens. “You know what I mean!”
The two share a knowing smile as they turn to head back towards the car. They’re just far enough ahead of me to be out of earshot, so whatever Kenny is ribbing Mama about is lost to me. I just hear her burst into laughter, a good sign indicating her cousin will likely live to see another day.
We climb back into the car and fasten our seatbelts. Kenny pulls us away from the site, and I’m suddenly overwhelmed with gratefulness for these two. We’ve buried most of our old folks now, both of their parents gone, but I can see them alive in these cousins, in their shared upbringing and dually recollected stories.
In Sunday school I remember being introduced to the idea that those whom we have loved and lost can still exist on earth if we let them live in our heart. I always thought of the idea as pure sentiment, wishful thinking for the lonely earthbound, but in this moment I am actually seeing it in real time, feeling those folks riding along with us, reveling in the camaraderie.
Refusing the impulse to condemn the idea as fruitless hopefulness, I allow its realness to fill me up. My Paw Paw Frank and Grammaw Helen Mae and Great Granny Clarabelle and Aunt Bobby are all here, alive in this moment, living out loud through these two cousins, joking and laughing with the three of us. I know Mama and Kenny draw much of their strength from one another, not just from a life shared, but likely in part from being forced to press on without the ones who shaped them, seeking out that familiarity in one another. Finding myself present in the moment in the backseat of Kenny’s Honda in the middle of nowhere Mississippi I see and feel and become aware of this happening in my heart as we ride along this old, foreign, country road, and I sense the day’s experience will continue to work upon me, somehow, in the years to come.
Thank God we still have so many years left together. I can’t imagine the world without them. I finally get to tag along as an equal (of sorts), and just look at how much we’ve shared in a single morning. I’m finally being allowed into their years’ worth of inside jokes, and I begin to realize I’ve got a lot to learn from the two of them. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so dismissive of their backwards world for so long. Maybe going backwards can actually mean moving forward and vice versa. Hmm. Not sure that makes sense, but one thing is certain, having not paid attention all these years means I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
Staring off into the passing woods again, running errands with Mama around Natchez the other day pops into my mind. While stopped at a red light she began sharing how much she missed her mother, my Grammaw, and how she wished that Helen Mae had lived long enough for the two of them to be in Natchez concurrently, having just missed that opportunity by a couple years. She became a little teary thinking of the time she couldn’t get back, and it hurt my heart to see it. What a gift that would have been for the both of them after more than thirty years separated by the state of Alabama. Then the realization hits me. Mama and I likely won’t ever live in the same place again either, and now, I’m a little teary, too, riding along behind her.
With the ruins of Windsor behind us we head south, making a loop of sorts away from Port Gibson down to Lorman, home to Alcorn State University, America’s first land-grant based historically black college. As we approach the campus Mama says she wouldn’t mind a Coke and Kenny adds he wouldn’t mind a snack. What I’d like is a cigarette, but instead, I say that both sound good to me, and we make an unscheduled stop at the little country store there adjacent to the college to stock up.
Inside we find more than we deserve, all emerging with ice-cold Cokes in hand, three sacks of ‘tater logs and some fried chicken, a leg for each of us. With fresh provisions we ride through campus to get to Rodney Road.
“Don’t forget what the guy behind the counter said about the road to Rodney,” Mama reminds Kenny.
Kenny laughs and says, “Did you hear what he said about my new chariot?”
“I did!” I interject, present in the moment again. “He said, ‘We’ve had a lot of rain lately. Y’all be careful with them muddy shoulders on that dirt road.’ And then he pointed at Uncle Kenny’s new car and said, ‘That thing don’t stand a chance if y’all get stuck, and ain’t nobody likely to come down that road for hours or even days. Y’all be smart, stay in the middle, and be sure to head back before dark.’”
“Bless him,” Mama says, offering a prayer for the good-hearted soul generously looking out for strangers, “…especially for these ‘tater logs. Sweet Jesus, they’re divine!”
“This ol’ chicken leg ain’t bad neither,” Kenny adds.
I love how country these two get around one another. Both are college educated, but all rules of the English language are left behind in favor of a more authentic form of communication, crude in its elocution, but effectively expressive all the same. They both got it honestly too. Growing up in rural Mississippi, Mama used to joke that they were too country to even know it, but what they lacked in lacked in worldly knowledge was made up with lots of love, full bellies, and warm beds.
Mama was the eldest of the four siblings and the first to leave home. Sometime during her college years at Millsaps, her father, my Paw Paw Frank, a struggling but resourceful farmer, struck oil on his acreage in Anna’s Bottom, thousands of acres of farmland north of Natchez along the Mississippi River, acres that have changed hands many, many times. Mama would tease that they were like the Clampetts from the Beverly Hillbillies, just poor country folk one day and then, suddenly, the recipients of (seemingly) bottomless wealth the next as though a wish had been granted for the benefit of their whole family, bringing prosperity back to their share-cropped farmland, Quitman Plantation.
The black gold changed their reality and provided opportunity for them all, myself included — it paid for part of my college education. But that great wealth was pumped out and gone in one generation taking the many thousands of acres with it, leaving behind only Quitman House, the family planter-style farmhouse on ten acres to be split between the four siblings, and the rest, the thousands of acres, going to my Paw Paw Frank’s only son, my Uncle Buster, as was customary in those days (in an effort to preserve the whole).
Bless him though, for much of what he inherited became a great burden and had to be sold off to pay his father’s debts, and after seeing generations of Junkins get their start on Quitman Plantation, nearly every corner of it belongs to someone else now, except for the strip Uncle Buster’s children, my devoted cousins, another generation of determined, resourceful Junkins, have heroically managed to hold on to, preventing our family’s complete dissolution from Anna’s Bottom.
Quitman House is a family member itself, and the Junkins saved it time and again, carefully moving it about the acreage further and further from floodwaters to its present spot at the foot of the bluffs. It witnessed Aunt Sarah Graning born in the front room, my Paw Paw Frank reared there and later laid out in the center hall for his visitation, Mama’s youngest sister, my Aunt Ellen, marry there on the front steps, later taking her last breaths in the back bedroom, and Mama’s ashes spread about the house and its ten acres the year following her death. Plus, there were innumerable Easter egg hunts, summers by the pool, Thanksgivings and Christmases shared around the family table, fireworks at New Years, and wedding showers and baby showers and birthdays and anniversaries scattered across the century of our family’s short tenure atop that consecrated strip of Mississippi floodplain, sowing, reaping, rejoicing, repeating.
My Aunt Ellen moved into Quitman House and the ten acres after her daddy died, raised her two girls there as well, and thanks to her creativity and unrelenting commitment, she managed to hold on to it for another twenty-seven years until our family’s blood-disease came for her too. Upon her passing, Quitman House and its ten acres was finally sold off as well and is now rearing someone else’s family.
Snacking and sipping we make our way across the beautifully manicured university campus, Mama pointing out the massive wrought iron steps brought over from the ruins of Windsor long ago and added to the stunning Oakland Memorial Chapel, a structure from the original incarnation of Alcorn, Oakland College, a Presbyterian school that shuttered during the Civil War and failed to reopen at its end, eventually becoming the centerpiece of the Alcorn campus seen today. Approaching the rear entrance, we find what will eventually become Rodney Road and follow it away from Lorman towards the last scheduled stop of our day’s adventure.
A narrow gravel road goes into the West. You have entered the loess country, and a gate may have been shut behind you for the difference in the world. All about are hills and chasms of cane, forests of cedar trees, and magnolia. Falling away from your road, at times merging with it, an old trail crosses and recrosses, like a tunnel through the dense brakes, under arches of branches, a narrow, cedar-smelling trace the width of a horseman. This road joined the Natchez Trace to the river. It, too, was made by buffaloes, then used by man, trodden lower and lower, a few inches every hundred years.
It’s getting awfully dark out here for early afternoon, and we’ve been on the road less traveled for miles now with the two cousins chatting and laughing and the radio now beginning to fade in and out as the Honda occasionally loses its footing on the soggy dirt road (causing my heart skip a beat each time). The trees along the sides of the road meet above us fully encapsulating our party as we move forward as though in a tunnel, further and further into the wilderness.
Honestly, it’s a little foreboding to me. Why don’t Mississippi dirt roads intimidate these two (other than the obvious, they grew up on one)? All I can think of is how far off the beaten path we are now without a phone for miles. Plus, we haven’t seen a soul since Lorman. Isn’t this the type of setting where things usually take a turn for the worse? For them, this is still an adventure, but for me, it’s becoming a challenge to keep my cool, and now, I’m becoming desperate for a cigarette. Best keep this big city mouth shut and not spoil the day. If they aren’t worried then I won’t be either. At least it’s not raining yet, and those muddy shoulders seem to be draining a bit, a welcome sight for this restless tagalong.
[T]hrough twenty miles of wooded hills, you wind sharply round, the old sunken road ahead of you and following you. Then from a great height you descend suddenly through a rush of vines, down, down, deep into complete levelness, and there in a strip at the bluff’s foot, at the road’s end, is Rodney’s Landing.
“We’re here, baby! This is it! A real-life Mississippi ghost town,” Mama announces as the Honda slows to a stop. “And look! The sun is trying to come out. That’s a welcome sign. Perfect timing.”
Today Rodney’s Landing wears the cloak of vegetation which has caught up this whole land for the third time, or the fourth, or the hundredth.
From the back seat there’s not much to see yet except for an impressive stack of red bricks, which has to be the Presbyterian Church Mama wanted to visit again. Escaped sunshine falls down across the facade of the old structure. It’s as though it’s greeting us in a warm, friendly way, welcoming us down to its world and brightening up the cool, gloomy, overcast day of our travels.
The red of the bricks defies their element; they were made of earth, but they glow as if to remind you that there is fire in earth. No one is in sight.
One by one, we peel ourselves out of the Honda after the long, slow trek down the old dirt road and give our bones a little stretch as we do.
“That was a haul,” I say. “Pretty though. What were all those reddish flowers I’ve been seeing all along the way?”
“Spider Lilies,” Kenny answers. “Don’t you love ‘em?”
“They’ve always been a favorite of mine,” Mama says. “Don’t you remember them from your Nanny’s yard in town? They’re all over her hill this time of year, all the way down to the bayou. I love them in a big, joyful bouquet or a single one in a tall, slender vase, an elegant presentation if I say so myself.”
“Indeed. They’re beautiful. They almost seem to hover above the ground, no leaves on the stems or anything, like a magic wand. Sort of adds to their uniqueness,” I reply.
“Yep. They’re pretty special. They spring up from old bulbs and are gone in one to two weeks, usually. I saw some growing in rows when we passed the cemetery. Must’ve been planted long, long ago,” he says.
“We passed a cemetery?” I ask. “I didn’t see it.”
“We pointed it out, honey, but you didn’t say anything. It’s Rodney’s cemetery. It was back up there atop the bluff before we came down the hill. Hard to see, really.”
[T]he cemetery has remained as the roof of the town. In a mossy wood the graves, gently tended here, send up mossy shafts, with lilies flowering in the gloom. Many of the tombstones are marked “A Native of Ireland,” though there are German names and graves neatly bordered with sea shells and planted in spring-flowering bulbs. People in Rodney’s Landing won silver prizes for their horses; they planted all this land; some of them were killed in battle, some in duels fought on a Grand Gulf sand bar. The girls who died young of the fevers were some of the famous “Rodney Heiresses.” All Mississippians know descendants of the names.
“Oh. I must’ve been lost in thought, y’all. Point it out on the way back for me, please. I’ll try to remind y’all. Wait. Why didn’t we stop to see it?”
“Snakes,” Kenny replies menacingly, drawing out the latter “s” in the word imitating the sound that snakes don’t actually make.
“Do you think they’re out this time of year,” Mama asks him.
“We haven’t had a freeze yet, so I’d say they’re still lurking about,” he answers.
“Say no more. I’ll appreciate it from the car,” I offer.
Mama and Kenny instinctively move towards the Presbyterian Church, the largest of all remaining landmarks. It’s bordered along one side by historical markers detailing the history of the town and the various remaining structures scattered about the site. Desperate for that cigarette I start looking for distant subjects to walk away to and photograph so I can finally burn down one of these Camel Lights in my pocket. I spot a little white chapel in the distance.
“I’m gonna walk over here and shoot this building, y’all. I’ll catch up in a few.”
“Watch for snakes,” Mama warns, knowing that I’m sneaking off to smoke and hoping I won’t go too far off the beaten path into reptile territory just to hide my habit.
Having moved along about forty paces I look back over my shoulder and see Mama and Kenny engrossed with the information on the plaques. I pull my smokes and lighter from my pocket, unwrap the fresh pack, stuff the wrappings away, pull out the first of twenty and ignite it. Two deep drags in and I feel my body and mind begin to relax with the rush of nicotine. I find myself present again and begin to take in my surroundings, offering up all my senses to the moment.
Though you walk through Rodney’s Landing, it long remains a landscape, rather than a center of activity, and seems to exist altogether in the sight, like a vision. At first you think there is not even sound. The thick soft morning shadow of the bluff on the valley floor, and the rose-red color of the brick church which rises from this shadow, are its dominant notes – all else seems green.
It is like a town some avenging angel has flown over, taking up every second or third house and leaving only this. There are more churches than houses now.
For the first time today I’m alone. It’s quiet, and my cigarette is my reward for the long, brave journey down to the unknown. I raise my camera and begin snapping away, recording the precious little half-white, half-brown, flood-stained, clapboard chapel before me, being watchful for snakes in the tall grass as warned.
[T]he imminent thing is a natural danger – the town may be flooded by the river, and every inhabitant must take to the hills. Every house wears a belt of ineradicable silt around its upper walls… Life threatened by nature is simplified, most peaceful in present peace, quiet in seasons of waiting and readiness. There are rowboats under all the houses.
In just a few minutes I‘ve snapped through the remaining available frames on the roll, and I drop to one knee and begin rewinding the film in the camera while my Camel Light dangles from the corner of my mouth. Once it’s safely wound back into its canister, I pop open the back cover of the Nikon, remove the spent roll of film, and replace it with a new one, stretching it across the shutter and connecting it to the take-up spool.
Closing the back cover and advancing the film to the first available frame I look up to see Mama and Kenny just before they disappear into the Presbyterian Church, Kenny first followed by Mama. Hiding my cigarette, I call to them to wait for me, though not in time. They’re already gone, out of sight, abandoning me in the openness of the ghost town. I snuff out my tobacco saying to myself, “Take only pictures. Leave only footprints,” and tuck the butt of the extinguished cigarette back into the pack with its brethren. Rising to my feet, I begin to make my way back down the dirt road to the Presbyterian Church.
Upon my approach, I pause before it and nod to the old house of worship, introducing myself respectfully. Then peering through the viewfinder of the Nikon, I frame the subject and click the shutter, capturing it on film for posterity. Looking back up to the church I notice what looks like an old cannonball protruding from its facade. It’s curious. I make yet another mental note to remind myself to ask Kenny about it later. Feeling appropriately acquainted, I push open the old wrought iron gate, step into the churchyard, and ascend the steps to its doors.
The door is never locked, the old silver knob is always the heat of the hand. It is a church, upon whose calm interior nothing seems to press from the outer world, which, through calm itself here, is still “outer.” (Even cannon balls were stopped by its strong walls, and are in them yet.) It is the kind of little church in which you might instinctively say prayers for your friends; how is that both danger and succor, both need and response, seem intimately near in little country churches?
Peering past the doorway I see Mama kneeling at the altar in prayer and Kenny walking about, looking up at the structure with his hands clasped behind his back. It’s a beautiful, simple space of symmetrical proportions. The interior walls are the same red brick as the exterior. The pews are spaced in neat rows and look as though they could easily accommodate forty to sixty people, probably more. Feeling as though snapping a picture of the interior would somehow disrespect the solemnity of this peaceful place I choose instead to join my mother at the altar and take part in the moment. I walk up behind her, remain standing, and bow my head like any good preacher’s kid would, offering up a prayer for my kith and kin, both past, present, and elsewhere.
After a couple minutes Mama rises and turns, surprised to find me standing behind her. Her eyes are a little teary, and I know, instinctively, she was missing her parents, saying prayers for them in heaven and likely a few for those of us left below. She walks over with her arms outstretched to embrace me, and I mirror the gesture and wrap her up in my arms with a big bear hug. Kindly, she declines to acknowledge the smell of tobacco on her son.
“It’s just as I remember it, so peaceful. But wouldn’t it be a wonderful place for a wedding? That’d certainly breathe new life into its old bones,” she says.
“And it’s still holding up pretty well too. Not much water damage or deterioration. I wonder who’s caring for it these days?” Kenny wonders aloud.
“Some devoted soul, bless their heart, whoever they may be. I’m grateful for their efforts. This place is special despite its lack of Sunday services and a devoted congregation. I can feel something here, I swear. Don’t y’all?”
The three of us lock eyes, and without a word, we realize, we’re all feeling the same thing. Whatever this place was, is, and whatever it’s destined to become, there’s life in it yet, and that energy envelops us, making itself known. All around us is peace. Then, suddenly, without warning, the sunlight that has blessed the last stop of our day’s adventure dissipates completely, and the moment has passed, leaving us in the cool, sunless interior of the old abandoned church house. Mama’s first to move. Stepping between us, she pats both her cousin and her son on the shoulder and then makes her way to the front doors. Kenny and I follow her out.
Walking back to the car, I say, “I can’t believe I haven’t thought to ask y’all this before now, but what happened to Rodney? Where did everyone go? What made this a ghost town?”
Kenny, walking alongside me, answers my question. “Rodney was a river port, and the river moved away. It devastated their local economy, as there were easier ports of access north and south of here. It made Rodney obsolete more or less. Years later came a great fire, burning much of what was still standing, and that, pretty much, put the final nail in the coffin. It’s sad, really. Rodney was four votes shy of becoming Mississippi’s state capital.”
“Really? And you say the river left? Forgive me for asking, but how does a river leave, and where does it go?” I ask.
“Good question, city boy!” Kenny proclaims, satisfied with my level of interest. “Before the Army Corp of Engineers began building levees in an attempt to control the river and prevent flooding, the Mighty Mississippi took the path most travelled, like any river, stream, or creek. And upon spring’s arrival, impregnated with the great snowmelt from up north, the river would overflow its banks sometimes, forcing it to shift its course, leading it in a completely new direction. And that’s where it went, miles off in that direction somewhere,” Kenny explains as he points westward.
The river is not even in sight here. It is three miles beyond, past the cotton fields or the bottom, through a dense miasma of swamp.
I try to wrap my head around the river’s abandonment and attempt to picture the landing at Rodney somewhere nearby before it moved away. It kind of hurts the heart to think of such a sad fate. What did Rodney do to anger the river and rip away its lifeline so cruelly?
“Kind of poetic, don’t you think, baby?” Mama turns to ask me before looking at her cousin to say, “Kenny, I’m not asking you!”
Kenny laughs at his cousin, and again, Mama and I have shared the same thought. It wasn’t the first time today and surely not the last. We’ve been on the same wavelength as long as I’ve known my own name.
“It is. Truly, it is. Thanks, y’all! This has been one hell of an adventure,” I share with honest gratitude.
“Eye-opening?” Kenny asks, Mama perking up at his question, trying to appear unconcerned with my coming response.
“Indeed! Show me more, y’all. Where do we go next?”
Hiding her satisfaction, Mama says, “Back to the country store for some more damn ‘tater logs! I’m gonna need a snack for the ride home.”
“I wouldn’t mind another Coke,” Kenny adds, self-satisfied, having facilitated the day’s transference of appreciation for this part of the world, one generation to the next.
“I wouldn’t mind both, myself,” I say, unaware of the altruistic posturing that has landed me exactly where the two cousins hoped I’d be by the day’s end.
“Well, let’s do it before the rain arrives. Time to move on. Goodbye, sweet Rodney! Godspeed,” Mama says, blessing the site with a wave of her hand.
We pile back into Kenny’s new Honda, and he points us towards the bluff and the rest of the world. “Don’t forget to slow down so I can snap a picture of the cemetery as we pass,” I remind them, this time anticipating the coming moment.
“Will do!” Kenny replies as Mama begins trying to tune in a song from a distant radio tower.
Kenny’s mighty chariot begins the climb up the bluff, and I turn to see Rodney Presbyterian once more before it’s completely out of view. A fullness washes over me, and again, for the second time today, I feel as though this day, this place, our day’s adventure will follow me back up this old country road for some unknown reason.
For a moment I indulge an impulse to try and imagine a life for myself in Mississippi. It doesn’t sit well, and I wince at the possibility. I don’t know how Uncle Kenny has lived his whole life here, and to some degree I’m still somewhat baffled that my parents wanted to move back. There are just so many concessions to be made from commerce to entertainment to healthcare to politics. I just know I could never do it. Nope. Never. Not me. No way in hell.
Besides, after I finish this degree I plan to head off to graduate school somewhere then on to teach the masses drawing and painting, moving from college campus to campus, working my way up, hopefully, eventually, to tenure somewhere nice, someplace I can call home. It’s time for a new experience and time to leave Atlanta. I never intended to attend college there having first attempted my freshman year at the College of Charleston, an experience still referred to in my immediate family as the “expensive mistake.” Mama’s adamant I apply to the University of Georgia’s study abroad program in Tuscany, and I’ll admit, the idea excites me. Who wouldn’t want to study art Italy? It just makes more sense for me to go ahead and apply to graduate school now, but like she said just a couple hours ago, “Never doubt your mother!”
I’ll admit though, there is something magical about this place, this corner of the world. These spider flowers — or whatever Kenny called them — are fascinating botanical specimens. They’re so unique to me. I’ve never seen one in Atlanta (that I can remember), let alone a mass of them, indeed, a whole forest floor blanketed in floating coral-red. It’s magical. Maybe they’re in Georgia, and I just haven’t been paying attention, a likely possibility. I’ve really got to remember to work on that.
Suffice it to say, I’ll spend the rest of my days every place but Mississippi. Of course I’ll return for holidays and breaks from teaching to visit my family as I always have, but I feel my path is leading me to a world of my own, and only an act of God could shift my river’s course at this point. That noted, it was one hell of a day with these two old country hams. I’m grateful now for the long ride back to civilization. I can survive without another cigarette for a while. Instead, I‘ll take in all these two cousins are willing to offer between here and there and try to remember not to let another moment pass me by.
But life does not forsake any place. People live still in Rodney’s landing; flood drives them out and they return to it. Children are born there and find the day as inexhaustible and as abundant as they run and wander in their little hills as they, in innocence and rightness, would find it anywhere on earth. The seasons come as truly, and give gratefulness, through they bring little fruit. There is a sense of place there, to keep life from being extinguished, like a cup of the hands to hold a flame.