Five Mississippi

I parachuted into Mississippi and spent 7 days riding the back roads between Vicksburg, Jackson and Natchez. Unlike top journalists who bounce from city to city to country to wherever the big story of the day is happening, I’m under no obligation to pretend I know what I’m talking about. What can you learn about a city, much less a region, in 7 days? Next to nothing.

During those seven days I had short, superficial conversations with three rural white guys, two inner city Jackson residents, several park rangers, a few museum employees, a nice old couple visiting from Dallas, and, predictably, some German tourists.

Although I don’t talk about it in my personal life, I follow politics, and sometimes I write about them, but I almost never talk politics. Not with friends. Not with my family. Certainly not with strangers. But on trips to exotic places, if strangers bring up politics, I’m actually curious to hear what they think.

Mississippi has aways been interesting to political me. It has the reputation of being a poor, uneducated state and a cesspool of white supremest idiocy. But I didn’t buttonhole any of the few people I spoke with about political issues. If they brought it up, I listened.

The most interesting political thing I noticed was actually something that was not there. Here in southern Indiana, Trump signs of all sizes are everywhere and Confederate flags flying in people’s yards or on their trucks are not uncommon. Yet in Mississippi, by many accounts the asshole of the south, I only saw one Trump banner and not a single Confederate flag. I covered a lot of ground between Vicksburg, Jackson and Natchez, and covered quite a few rural miles across the river in Louisiana without seeing any there, either. It was like when you are in pain all the time and suddenly the pain goes away. You don’t even notice it at first. Something is different, you feel good, but it takes a bit before you realize what’s changed.

Mostly, however, I wasn’t thinking about politics or social issues – or evil trees or mound builders for that matter. I was riding around in the woods and hiking and matters of grave importance were furthest from my mind. I was much more likely to be thinking about the possible consequences of whatever stupid thing I was doing at the time, which involved riding in dangerous terrain by myself far from any other people. If I had an accident, would I suffer horribly until rescue arrived? Or would I suffer horribly and then die.

Seriously though, I was mostly just thinking about how mysterious and beautiful I found the Mississippi forests.

I camped in the Delta National Forest. I had no idea what it would be like before I went there. The Mississippi delta is an exotic name that evokes mental images of young black blues guitarists and poor folk sitting out in their yards, and people with white hoods and torches galloping through the night, but otherwise it was just a place on the map to me. I was surprised that off-road vehicles were allowed on most the trails. On my first morning there, a local guy told me that any kind of rule I might see on a sign in Mississippi was actually just a suggestion. That was really good to know. It opened up a lot of country to exploration for the mobility scooter. There were many signs suggesting I not go any further, but I mostly ignored those suggestions.

On the way to Poverty Point I stopped at this roadside cemetery in rural Louisiana, near Tallulah. I don’t see a lot of raised crypts like in small, rural cemeteries and was curious what kind of people were buried there.

This crypt made me a bit jealous. It’s always sad to see a beautiful young woman die before her time, but I am more affected by the picture of her large family. I no longer have anything like that in my life, and never did quite to that extent. I’m sure there was a lot of family drama behind those smiles, but also a lot of profoundly good times, and a deeply felt comfort.

I wrote earlier about how the Don Juan books influenced my appreciation for the beauty of the natural world, particularly Journey to Ixtlan. One of the techniques the Don Juan character taught Carlito was “not seeing,” which consisted of not focusing one’s eyes in order to see the world as it really is without the intervention of our conventional brain. Don Juan pointed out that our conscious mind tends to focus on the highlights and instructed Carlito to instead focus his awareness on the shadows as a window into a different world. Over the years I internalized that advice and when I compose and/or edit photographs, I always let my eyes go out of focus and see what it looks like from the shadow perspective. I know that no one is going to see the shadow composition, but I think if it is interesting people will see it unconsciously and that ultimately increases the artistic, and maybe the emotional quality, of the photo.

That way of thinking has come in handy for photographing places and scenes that are normally considered boring. Like the patch of cockleburs above. It’s not the Andes or Angkor Wat. It’s not anywhere or anything. Life’s just better when you can see beauty in a patch of weeds. Photography, too. It pleases me to think so, anyway.

On the other hand, it takes no special insight on different ways of viewing the world to find old, abandoned buildings interesting and there are still a lot of those in Mississippi, particularly in Jackson. I was interested in going to Jackson first because of the name and all the mentions of it I’ve seen over the years in literature and history. And I was aware that it had been in the news lately because the whites in the state government are trying to strangle it. Then the hunters I met told me it used to be nice but in recent years had become a dangerous shithole where you’d be murdered if you wondered too far from the state capitol. So I was curious. I’m the type of idiot that hears “you’ll probably get murdered if you go there” and goes there to see if that’s really true.

I was surprised at how small Jackson is. The population is just around 160,000. That’s not much bigger than where I currently live. For such a small city, it has a lot more museums and gardens and cultural stuff than other small cities I’ve visited. Of course I enjoy the gardens and museums, but I enjoyed the remnants of different times as well. Many are like tombstones for different times.

Since I’m giving away some of my silly photo strategies, I’ll give you a little insight into this one. You might think it’s a picture of rural or urban decline, but in my mind it began as a picture of dappled light. As a photographer, getting a great picture of dappled light is like my great white whale. It’s my greatest obsession. There is a painting of a young priest walking down a forest path covered with dapple light that I have spent a lot of time with and deeply love. I’ve always wanted to duplicate the feeling I get looking at that painting. I never do, but some of the photos work in other ways. In the painting, the dappled light is represented with big splotches of white paint. The overall look is old-fashioned. A young priest walking down a lane, painted realistically. But the white splotches of dappled light look like they came out of a Jackson Pollack painting, thrown violently onto the canvas. The dappled light photographs are the opposite of the shadow compositions. To appreciate them, it’s best to let your focus drift and feel the highlights.

I mentioned earlier that I spoke with a man who made a comment about government money going to Ukraine when there were so many things that needed to be done right here. As I mentioned above, I don’t talk politics much in real life. He just came out with that all on his own.

He told me his name, which I don’t remember, but he said everyone called him Slim. He was from Chicago but had recently moved to Mississippi. His grandparents were from Mississippi and he had a lot of family there and had visited numerous times throughout his childhood. He moved back there because life was so easy. For far less than the price of renting a rat trap apartment in Chicago, he could buy a nice brick home in Jackson. I recognized his grandparent’s story as one of “The Great Migration,” which was documented so powerfully in Isabel Wilson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns.” And now, two generations later, he was an example of reverse migration, perhaps “The Great Reverse Migration.”

Anyway, I found the Ukraine comment interesting, shocking even, because that was not a place I was expecting to hear Republican talking points. He also talked about the Brett Favre scandal and the governor’s involvement in it. But his biggest concern was violence and he told me a few horror stories of stuff that had happened at his business and in the surrounding neighborhoods. He was basically saying the same things about Jackson as the hunters I’d met, only from more direct personal experience.

The main political takeaway I got from that is that the interests of the rural white hunters and the urban black business guy are essentially the same, It’s their eduction levels, or at least knowledge of current events, that are not up to the task of helping them understand why their world is what it is. It’s that lack of understanding that makes them easy marks for the grifters and scum that want to extract and appropriate their money and political power. Since the regular people are the great majority, they have to be divided before they can be robbed. They have to believe that others are Others, and that those Others are a threat when, in reality, the Others are the wealthy and powerful who are exploiting them, not the people who look and act a bit differently but share the same economic situation, and hopes and dreams for themselves and their families. For humanity to have any hope for a decent future, that dynamic has to become common knowledge and the political and economic world structured accordingly.