The Best “Worst State” Ever — Part Three

From Clarksdale through Jackson: Thank God for Mississippi

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 three of a four-part series. Enjoy the ride.

HIGHWAY 49 FROM CLARKSDALE TO CLEVELAND TO PARCHMAN PRISON

You would think Highway 61 is the only road in Mississippi, the way people write and sing and carry on about it. Highway 49 don’t get no respect. Mile for mile, 49 can hold its own against any road in the South for famous people and places: from Helena (Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi) to Clarksdale (Morgan Freeman) to Drew (Archie Manning) to Parchman Prison (O Brother Where Art Thou?) to Indianola (B.B. King) to Yazoo City (man of letters Willie Morris, man of clean jokes Jerry Clower, alliterative man of motivation Zig Ziglar) to Jackson (Eudora Welty) to Hattiesburg (University of Southern Mississippi) to Wiggins (pitcher Dizzy Dean) to Gulfport.

En route to Memphis from a news assignment in the Delta, my photographer partner and I passed a sign for Alligator, and I insisted we turn off to have a look. There was a general store, a vacant building with a giant alligator painted on its side, and a vast expanse of flat nothingness behind it. As we slowed down, a little girl crossed in front of us and stopped, right in the mouth of the gator. In only a little more time than it takes to say Ghost Town, we turned and headed back to Memphis.

Cleveland is the Oxford of the Delta. College town (Delta State), arts and crafts, coffee shops, gift shops, tea shops, no casinos. A hearty serving of comfort food with a scented candle and a spiced muffin on the side. In a word, cute. An easy and mildly adventurous day trip from Memphis, Jackson, Oxford, or Greenville (its unfortunate neighbor 36 miles southwest). It is just far enough from Interstate 55 to be in the Delta and not be overrun by chain restaurants and fuel plazas, but not so far as to be “too far” for the day tourist. And nearby McCarty’s Pottery and Peter’s Pottery make it the peer of Shearwater Pottery in Ocean Springs, which is also catnip for magazines such as Southern Living in search of perky feature stories about “secret” getaways.

Parchman Farm

Unsurprisingly, the notorious Parchman Prison, aka the Mississippi State Penitentiary, is generally not visitor-friendly, which makes it even more fascinating to curious folk. This is how the WPA Guide cheerfully described Parchman in 1937:

“The farm is a typical Delta plantation consisting of 15,497 acres planted in cotton, corn, and truck, with cotton the leading crop. The prisoners, separated into small groups, live in camps. The present number of prisoners is 1,989. The prison is self-supporting and operates at a profit when the price of cotton is good.”

High cotton and free labor (convict leasing) by “campers” in stripes and chains made the profits very good indeed, as I learned from Delta lawmakers when I covered the Mississippi legislature for UPI in 1980-82. On a tour for state legislators and media, we were as closely guarded as inmates. I do not recall seeing a single prisoner but do remember Delta lawmaker Ed Jackson casually bench-pressing 300 pounds in the gym, so I stayed near him just in case.

Visitors’ day was the “fifth Sunday” of months with more than four Sundays, and kin came to Parchman on a train called the Midnight Special (“Let the Midnight Special shine its light on me”), made famous by blues singer Huddie Ledbetter (“Lead Belly”) who was imprisoned at Angola prison in Louisiana.

Angola is about ten miles south of the Mississippi line and worth a trip. The annual prison rodeo in April and October is a first-rate show, combining real cowboys and cowgirls and prisoners playing “convict poker” and gutsy games of chicken with angry bulls and bucking broncos. Years before Jackass, Johnny Knoxville, and YouTube, Angola warden Burl Cain realized the entertainment value of a maximum-security prison, and the 10,000-seat rodeo arena is often packed. By no means is it a slice of actual prison life. The arena is set apart from the lock-ups and has the atmosphere of a state fair. Cain is now Mississippi Department of Corrections commissioner and is trying to reform Parchman.

JACKSON AND SOUTH ON I-55 TO HAZLEHURST AND HAMMOND

A one-way ticket from Memphis to Jackson on the southbound City of New Orleans costs $43. There are no security checkpoints, no pat-downs, no take-off-your-shoes. You can bring booze and food on board plus all the baggage you want, hole up in a comfy seat, and get pleasantly buzzed. Granted, the trip takes five or six hours. The Amtrak marketing team does the best it can to highlight Southern specialties along the way, but truthfully there is not much to look at besides green trees, brown fields where cotton and soybeans sprout, and muddy streams. In Greenwood, a sign on one of the many abandoned buildings — maybe a warning, maybe advice — reads, “Don’t Bother.” Yazoo City and Flora are not much better.

The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson

My wife is from Mississippi. In the museum memorabilia, I had the uneasy feeling we might come across the name of some old family acquaintance. We lived in Jackson from 1979 to 1982 while she was a nurse and I was working for UPI. Some of the old heroes and villains were still around then, and I had a cup of coffee with James Meredith’s nemesis, former Governor Ross Barnett, and watched Ronald Reagan speak at the Neshoba County Fair in 1980 with the notorious deputy Cecil Price. The years, I wrote then, had softened them. They weren’t so bad. How little I knew.

The Civil Rights Museum is next to the Museum of Mississippi History. There is a notable lack of signs, iconic symbols, or banners outside. The most iconic thing is the word Mississippi. One building is black, the other white. Together they are billed simply as “Two Mississippi Museums” which connotes segregation and separate-but-equal, rather than assimilation and progress. (If you count the nearby Old Capitol Museum, which preceded the other two, there are actually three museums.)

The museum opened in 2017. The enshrinement and monetizing of civil rights history in Mississippi took off some 40 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Montgomery, Alabama, has five civil rights shrines. Selma has two. Memphis has the National Civil Rights Museum. Atlanta has the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and The King Center, founded in 1968.

Civil rights history sells. Mississippi violence, which is a subset of Bad Old Days in the South violence, sells. Authors, reporters, pundits, documentarians, and movie producers know this and churn out “fresh” takes on the Fifties, Sixties, lynching, and segregation every year if not every month. Some of it rehashes old work or marks an anniversary — so much easier than diving into the complexities of resegregation, school choice, and violence going on today. Some of it adds details, characters, and dialogue “based on actual events” — in other words, made up.

Well, it draws an audience, draws clicks and views, and maybe even draws readers and it serves the first mandate of column writing: Fill the space. One of the main journalistic practitioners is the estimable New York Times. Some years ago, I had breakfast with one of my heroes, David Halberstam. He praised some local work I had done and suggested I write a book about how Southern newspapers covered civil rights back in the day. The moral compass, he suggested, would be the Nashville Tennessean. The bad kid, stuck in the proverbial corner, was my employer from 1982 to 1990, The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, which treated me fairly and well. I declined. Someone else wrote the book and won a prize.

Politicians: “The Lady from Lauderdale County” and Gov. William Winter

The best friends are different from you — unless you buy into the line that people are more alike than different — and they like you even though they are not like you. Betty Jane Long, a state representative from Meridian for nearly three decades, was like that. She was a trailblazing legislator and lawyer, an opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment who earned equal rights, and the working owner of Long’s Bake Shop in Meridian.

In 1981 I was a newcomer to Mississippi and covering the state legislature for UPI. The legislature was meeting in the auditorium of Central High School that year because the Capitol was undergoing renovation, so there was a lot of newness in every sense of the word. The Meridian Star was a UPI client. “The Lady from Lauderdale County” took pity on the earnest but naive Yankee in press row. We became friends, and I would stop at her bakery for slices of apple pie and caramel cake that she would not let me pay for whenever I passed through town.

Like other Southern capitals, Jackson has tried to make its history more inclusive by renaming some roads and landmarks while leaving others alone. Medgar Evers Boulevard, for instance, was formerly Delta Drive. In the heart of the city, it intersects Woodrow Wilson Ave., named for the Southern president who segregated the federal government and enabled the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. A statue of the notorious race-baiting white supremacist governor Theodore Bilbo was moved from the Capitol rotunda to a less conspicuous conference room.

The lessons of talking to strangers on their own turf stuck, and I also got to know shrewd politicians and orators. William Winter, of course, was the most famous. As a humble scribe in Jackson in 1980-1982, I thought he got great publicity for a governor who had no Black people and no women in prominent positions in his inner circle. It was as if the Sixties and affirmative action had not happened.

He was nothing if not forthright. Yes, he told me in an interview, he had made $85,000 a year off the bootleg whiskey tax when he was state tax collector in the Fifties (Mickey Mantle made $60,000 in 1957, the year after he won the triple crown) before he abolished it. Yes, he did run for governor as a segregationist in 1967. Yes, he ran as a sharp-shooting, tough-talking Army veteran and defeated a woman named Evelyn for the Democratic nomination in 1979 and, yes, he followed the clownish Cliff Finch as governor in 1980. I included all this background in a profile for UPI and my editor snorted that it was “old news.” It was time to leave UPI.

Winter’s practical liberalism was not the youthful idealism of Ann Arbor or Madison. It was more complicated, more dangerous, and he was a leader, not a follower. The adoring writers in the Mississippi and national press could not get enough of him. The passage of a statewide kindergarten bill during his tenure helped the Jackson Clarion Ledger win a Pulitzer. But a generation later Mississippi still ranked last in Education Week’s state rankings.

Like other Southern capitals, Jackson has tried to make its history more inclusive by renaming some roads and landmarks while leaving others alone. Medgar Evers Boulevard, for instance, was formerly Delta Drive. In the heart of the city, it intersects Woodrow Wilson Ave., named for the Southern president who segregated the federal government and enabled the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. A statue of the notorious race-baiting white supremacist governor Theodore Bilbo was moved from the Capitol rotunda to a less conspicuous conference room.

In Madison County, north of Jackson, the Ross Barnett Reservoir honors another segregationist governor who kicked off the riots at Ole Miss in 1962. “The Rez” as it is often called was built mainly for the benefit of Jackson “in the event its population reaches 500,000” (the population in 2020 was 166,000). It was approved by referendum. The honorary name was added at a time when “Roll with Ross” was a segregationist war cry and Black people in Mississippi were struggling for the right to vote.

In some official documents the name has been shortened to the Barnett Reservoir. So be it. Jackson and Mississippi have bigger things to worry about.

On an oddball freelance job, I was assigned to visit folk artists in Mississippi. At her home in Kosciusko, L.V. Hull dug into the clutter and came up with a colorful dinner plate inscribed, “Do Not Try To Understand Me” in broken letters to show her visitor from Memphis. It cost me $10 and was almost thrown away but I held on to it instead. I got a bargain. Many years later I was in the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson and saw the L.V. Hull painted television set at the center of the display room for the permanent collection.

In a passage that reveals more about the writer than the subject, this is how the WPA Guide of 1937 described “Negro Folkways”: “The Mississippi folk Negro neither lays up monetary treasure nor invests in things of tangible value. He spends money for medical and legal advice, a virtue that undoubtedly would bring him praise but for the fact that he has never been known to take anyone’s advice about anything.”

The Rainbow Barn

Comin’ in over the barn!” My father-in-law, Bubba Huntington, hollered to alert me and my 11-year-old son Jack on the opening day of dove season in 1995. There were plenty of doves back then and we got a limit in a couple of hours. Bubba’s rainbow barn on the east side of Interstate 55 near Hazlehurst was a landmark until it was destroyed by storms in 2009, the year he died. A piece of everyone in our family, pictured here on the day we buried him, died with him.

He had a tennis court gouged out of the red clay with a bulldozer and rolled with a Buick Electra. At the end of the day, tired from tennis and drinking beer, we would sit on the rocking chairs on the porch underneath the whirling ceiling fans and the metal signs and old plow parts mounted on the wall and replay it. The sun would go down behind the pond and the rainbow barn west of the court, and a cooling breeze would come up from the south and blow through the pecan trees before dinnertime. Life was pretty damn good. Bubba knew most all there was to know about trees, and he could build you a house, a gazebo, a church, or a courthouse. His work is all over Copiah County. We buried him down there, under a tree.

HIGHWAY 49 FROM JACKSON TO HATTIESBURG TO GULFPORT

Jesse Brown, Aviator from Lux

Jesse Brown, a sharecropper’s son from Lux (now nothing but a sign off Highway 49) was the first Black naval aviator. He and other Mississippi airmen are honored at delightful out-of-the-way museums in Hattiesburg and the Stennis Airport in Kiln. Brown died a hero during the Korean War trying to save Marines trapped at Chosin Reservoir. Author Adam Makos tells his story in the book Devotion, which is being made into a movie scheduled for release this year. One of the producers told me it will attempt to “change the narrative” by focusing on his achievements and heroism.

Pilot Gas Stations

People look at you funny when you take pictures in a truck-stop bathroom. It doesn’t help if you tell them you are working on a book. Public bathrooms are a vital but rarely written about part of road trips — a serious omission considering a good one can make your day and a bad one, without going into great detail, can ruin it. The best option is one of the state welcome stations, among the most palatial in the country although Mississippi is the nation’s poorest state. Super-sized truck stops like Pilot and Love’s don’t always have the cheapest gas like they used to. They seem to have followed Jeff Bezos’ strategy of rounding up customers first, then raising prices. But they have reliably clean bathrooms that are well worth a few extra bucks. Having seen the filthy, fetid, slippery floor, out-of-order competition during hundreds of drives from Memphis to south Mississippi, I would say they are worth several extra bucks. The $2 coffee is better, too. Pilot’s supremacy is being challenged by even bigger Buc-ee’s, coming to Mississippi in 2022.

Bears are part of Mississippi legend and lore, but it’s a little complicated. William Faulkner wrote the famous story “The Bear” about a bear hunt. Teddy Roosevelt came to the Delta for a bear hunt but supposedly declined to shoot one on account of its being tethered, hence the Teddy bear. The University of Mississippi banished its football mascot, Colonel Rebel, in 2003 and replaced him with an anthropomorphic bear in snappy garb fit for The Grove. The image was so goofy it was ditched after seven years and replaced by the perfectly logical Mississippi landshark. (For more about Ole Miss — also a controversial antebellum name — and local sensitivity to history and monuments, read Jim Dees’ book The Statue and the Fury.) The Louisiana black bear is found in south Mississippi, but the chainsaw-carved wooden bears at the entrance to Paul B. Johnson State Park near Hattiesburg are there because they look cute and outdoorsy and are not freighted with any controversial politics. Well, Johnson did beat a newspaper editor in a hotel lobby with his walking cane. You wouldn’t think an editor would get out of line like that.

Editor‘s Note: Part four, “The Coast,” will be published tomorrow.