Natchez.Farish Street, Jackson. I arrived in Mississippi after dark and slept in my car in an unoccupied campsite. In the morning I chatted with a couple hunters and then another youngish white guy. They both complained about how bad things had gotten. In Jackson I had a long conversation with a black guy who also talked about how society was deteriorating quickly. That brought back a memory from Trump’s inauguration. I was stuck in a line with an old couple from Alabama and they complained at great length about how society was falling apart. One of their specific gripes was that emergency rooms were overflowing. They assumed it was the same way in all the states, but it’s not. Hospitals in Indiana, for example, are more like luxury hotels than what the Alabamans were describing. I realized that the difference was probably because Alabama refused boatloads of government money available from the Affordable Healthcare Act. As with so many problems, it was just more Republicans sacrificing the health and well being of their constituents for the sake of their shit ass ideology. On the surface it seems crazy that people cannot make the connection between their states being at the bottom in quality of life measurements and the fact that they’ve long been governed by Republicans. But humans are ultimately just dumb animals. Making things bad and blaming outsiders works incredibly well as a method of social control. Incredibly well, at least until the revolution.Rural hometown, gone to seed.Everyone is complaining about how much things have gone to hell these days. Unlike the good old days when Mississippi inspired so much great literature.Mississippi history since the time of the first wave of European invaders has been one humanitarian horror after another. From the Indians to the Africans to the African Americans, the invaders stole everything possible: land, labor, lives, homes, money, freedom. The Museum of Mississippi History, and the adjacent Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, unlike their Georgia counterparts, deal with those brutal histories competently.Not a coincidence perhaps, most of the prominent White history in Mississippi focuses on war. Apparently, white folk from Mississippi are more inclined to join armed forces, both official and extra-curricular, than similar folk from other states.Old tree. The more we learn about the lives of forests, the more space we have to wonder about the extent of their sentience. Is it possible that some trees are able to sense what is going on around them and render their outward appearance to document the experience? If the multiverse is real, then no doubt top scientists in forestry are focusing on these important questions.Pigs ear sandwich.Lavette, third generation owner of the Big Apple Inn in Jackson, grinding cabbage and boiling pigs ears. I asked her where else to eat in Jackson and she recommeneded Eddie and Rubye’s Snack Bar for the fried catfish. Sounds good to me. But when I got there the parking lot was blocked off and there was a sign saying “closed” hanging from a rope that was strung across the driveway. I drove around it and an angry black guy came out yelling at me saying something to the effect of “can’t you fucking read?” I said sorry, I’m just a tourist. That got a laugh and we chatted for a minute and he offered to get me a meal despite them being closed. Turns out he was from Chicago and had moved to Mississippi a few years prior because he had a lot of family here and life was so much easier. I’d be shocked to learn how little he paid for a nice little three bedroom brick house. Couldn’t rent a shithole in the worst part of Chicago for that money. His family had been part of the Great Migration of blacks to the north in the sixties. Now he was part of the Great Reverse Migration. We had a nice chat about fried fish, the eternal question of why they call whiting “pan trout,” motorcycles, and how bad everything is these days and how everything is consistently getting worse, pretty much echoing the white guys complaints. I didn’t do anything to probe his political beliefs, but he volunteered that he was really pissed at Biden for sending all that money to Ukraine. The U.S. is going to shit, he said waving his arms at the neighborhood, we should be using those billions to help people here.I didn’t take a picture of “Slim” or my fish dinner from Eddie and Rubye’s, but it looked pretty much like this picture from a white run fish shack in Lousiana,BB’s Fish Fry, Vidalia, Louisiana. At this point you may be asking yourself, who makes the better fried fish? Poor white folk or poor black? I’ve spent a lot of time and effort over the years investigating this and similar questions. Unfortunately, the answer is that fried fish is fried fish. It all tastes about the same no matter who cooks it.
In the next installment, we’ll continue our investigation of the sentience of trees and go much further back in Mississippi history. Keep a close watch on your inbox.
Michael H Webster