The Best “Worst State” Ever — Part One

Thank God for Mississippi.

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Editor’s Note: John Branston has been thinking about Mississippi for a long while. What follows is his meditative exploration through what he calls, mostly fondly, the best “worst state” ever. You are encountering his musings in the form of a cover story, but these could just as easily fill a book. (The best stories defy categorization.) The moments that he shares here take place on the road, but you wouldn’t call this a travel story. John allows the unprettier parts to take up space, but neither is this another think-piece about the ills of Mississippi. It’s more like sitting in John’s passenger seat and listening as one of our best storytellers meanders through a state he’s been in conversation with for more than half his life. This is part one of a four-part series. Enjoy the ride.

Leave out the parts readers skip,” was Elmore Leonard’s excellent advice to writers. Well, nobody skips the pictures — or the captions if they’re worth a damn. I have taken most of the pictures and written the captions and the short essays. I shunned Mississippi-by-the-numbers in favor of things that struck me as memorable, personal, and worthy of a collection. No selfies, parachute journalism, PR, fake news, statistics, recipes, or dispatches from distant planets here. The hardcore travel writer Martha Gellhorn was mostly right: “The only aspect of our travels guaranteed to hold an audience is disaster,” so they can launch into their own tales.

“Mississippi is without a serious rival to the lamentable preeminence of the Worst American State.”

— H.L. Mencken, 1930 (Mencken lived in Baltimore.)

I wrote for newspapers and magazines in Mississippi and Memphis for 42 years. At a time when trendspotters are knocking themselves out to make lists of “best places” and figure out why people go where they go, there is no algorithm known to man that would explain why someone of sound mind and body who lived in Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, Nashville, and Madison, Wisconsin, would choose to live in Mississippi.

I logged a lot of miles and closely observed the people, places, and events gathered in this collection. I like most of it. Not the best state. Not the worst state. The Best Worst.

“There is no Mississippian of the present generation who has not been reared on stories of the War Between the States. And there are few Mississippians who, having heard the tales, have not wondered how it is possible that the Confederacy lost.”

— WPA Guide, 1937

The 1937 Federal Writers’ Project guide to Mississippi was inspirational. In the Great Depression, enterprising but out-of-work writers sponsored by the Works Progress Administration traveled the state to talk to people, do research, check facts, and suggest “tours” of the places they visited. They got a little money, no fame, and no byline. Much of what they wrote is dated now. But they made themselves useful during hard years and left something worthwhile behind. This project is structured, such as it is, along four north-south roads: The Natchez Trace Parkway, Interstate 55, U.S. Route 61, and U.S. Route 49. — John Branston, Pass Christian

THE VIEW FROM MEMPHIS

Memphis Men from Mississippi

Edward H. Crump came to Memphis from the heart of Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County. He gave Memphis what Benjy bawls for at the conclusion of The Sound and the Fury: order. By the time he died in 1954, his brand of order had turned into something he must have viewed with alarm. The Supreme Court issued its decision on school desegregation. Elvis Presley, he of the lascivious swiveling hips and leers, recorded his first record. Television spawned a new kind of politician and, sharp as he was, Crump’s peculiar Achilles heel was public speaking. Elvis died in 1977, the year before Fred Smith’s Federal Express went public on its way to becoming the most important company in Memphis.

Beale Street

For decades before and after World War II — before urban renewal, before the rebuild, before the tourists — Black blues musicians from Mississippi came to Beale Street. When folklorist Alan Lomax visited in 1942 to research their story, he was thrown out of a bar for being white in a “colored only” business. (Elvis and Lansky’s were more recent additions for marketing purposes.) Lomax wrote that the barman told him, “Mister Crump say, “If we gonna segredate [sic] one way, we gonna segredate the other.” — from “The Land Where the Blues Began” by Alan Lomax.

The Flooded Mississippi River

Floods figure prominently in the history, music, and literature of Mississippi in the twentieth century, particularly the catastrophes of 1927 and 1937. There is a common misconception among outsiders that Memphis is flood-prone. Because it sits on a bluff, it mostly is not. The second highest river stage — 48 feet — was reached in 2011 and barely hurt a thing, but it made for some once-in-a-lifetime pictures. Tourists and residents alike flocked Downtown to see the photo-friendly flood, the Memphis Grizzlies had a sellout crowd at their NBA playoff game the afternoon the river crested, and celebrity television journalist Diane Sawyer donned waders, stepped in a puddle, and told the world, “All we can do is pray.”

Natchez and Vicksburg are also perched above the river and afford lovely views, like the one that inspired Jimmie Rodgers (Meridian) to write the mellow “Mississippi River Blues.” The Delta, protected only by levees, is another story, as sung by bluesman Charley Patton (Dockery Plantation in the Delta) in his mournful ode to 1927 “High Water Everywhere.” At a cost of $600 million, over the next ten years the Corps of Engineers strengthened levees, dug cut-offs, and built reservoirs. The control measures worked. The great flood in 1937 was held in bounds, leaving the Delta unharmed.

Jerry Lee Lewis

Sometimes reporters are just in it for the picture, as I was when I went to see Jerry Lee Lewis, then 79, at his home in Nesbit in 2014. He was going to let his name be used for a club on Beale Street. A friend set up the interview. I wasn’t star-struck, but I didn’t have any questions either. When he came into the trophy room in blue pajama bottoms, I mumbled something about his new CD titled Mean Old Man and asked him if he was really a mean old man. His wife shushed, “Oh, he’s not a mean old man, he’s a sweetheart.” I got my quote and the picture. More recently, “The Lewis Ranch” has been opened to tours — pale shades of Elvis (who died at 42) and the tourism powerhouse that is Graceland.

Editor‘s Note: Part Two, “From Memphis to Natchez,” will be posted tomorrow.