The Best “Worst State” Ever — Part Two

From Memphis to Natchez: 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 two of a four-part series. Enjoy the ride.

MEMPHIS TO TUNICA ON HIGHWAY 61

Cows and Casinos

In 1993, I stood outside the original Harrah’s Casino in Tunica on opening day. CEO Mike Rose, standing next to me, muttered, “Unbelievable,” as he looked at the line of cars stretching far beyond the levee to get into the parking lot. Bigger casinos were yet to come, including Grand Casino, which boasted the closest location to Memphis, the “biggest” casino and hotel between Vegas and Atlantic City, and a lot of questionable frills like a golf course, shooting range, off-site hotels, and a play center for kids. It did not work. Ownership changed hands a couple times until Harrah’s bought it in 2007, pumped in $43 million more, and hired Paula Deen to brand its restaurants.

“The land has a fertility equaling that of the Nile and making it one of the world’s finest cotton producing areas. For this reason the section is colloquially called the Delta.” — WPA Guide, 1937

Harrah’s closed the casino in 2014, demolished it a year later, and leased one of the hotels and the parking lot for auctions of farm equipment. Appropriate, perhaps, that there were cows grazing on the levee when I revisited the property in 2021. Despite competition from the West Memphis, Arkansas, market — closest to Memphis — North Mississippi casinos grossed $700 million in 2021, better than the $582 million gross in pre-pandemic 2019, according to the Mississippi Gaming Commission. Legal sports betting helped.

Casino Fever

In a business full of men with wet, slicked-back hair and cool demeanors, Jack Binion spoofed his “aw shucks” everyman appearance in commercials (You Don’t Know Jack!) that belied his skill as a land developer and political operator. He became Tunica’s first celebrity. He had seen his downtown Las Vegas casino miss the action as the business moved to The Strip. “I’m not going to miss it this time,” he vowed after visiting Mississippi shortly after the first casino opened. Binion’s Horseshoe boasts the highest revenues and profits in Tunica. A vintage 1950s red Cadillac with a set of longhorns for a hood ornament honors Benny Binion, a Texan who set up shop in Las Vegas in 1946.

(That was 1996. This is now: No red Cadillac, no Jack Binion ads, no Jack Binion poker tournament. The former face of Tunica gambling has been erased. The only picture of him on display — and finding it took a bluff and the assistance of a friendly security guard — is in the bathroom of the high roller room.

Schilling Brothers Made a Splash

Mhoon Landing is where the aptly named Splash casino and two casino novices named Rick and Ron Schilling provided screaming proof of the raw power of legalized gambling in a virgin market. Splash, a refurbished disco on a barge, opened October 19, 1992, without restaurants, entertainment, or a single hotel room. And it made so much money they couldn’t count it fast enough.

HIGHWAY 61 FROM CLARKSDALE TO GREENVILLE

Crossroads Sign in Clarksdale

The exact location of the famous Crossroads where blues guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil is and ever will be a subject of great debate. This much we know. Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, lived in Tunica County, and died at the age of 21. Blues historian Alan Lomax, who interviewed Johnson’s mother in 1939, wrote that a jealous woman poisoned Robert’s coffee (others say it was a jealous husband and whiskey, not coffee). Robert’s last words, she told Lomax, were, “That what got me messed up, Mama. It’s the devil’s instrument, just like you said, and I don’t want it no more,” as she hung his guitar on the wall. Almost sounds too good to be true, but who’s to say?

“There is hardly a planter, tenant, or sharecropper on the surrounding plantations whose business does not bring him to Clarksdale every Saturday.”— WPA Guide, 1937

Johnson is often praised but rarely listened to. His signature song was called “Cross Road Blues.” Cream, the British rock trio featuring the driving electrified beat of Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton, and Ginger Baker, recorded “Crossroads” in 1966 and it became part of the soundtrack of that raucous year. As for the location, this sign near Clarksdale, where Highways 61 and 49 split, is certainly a worthy contender.

Like most of the Delta, Clarksdale has fallen on hard times, but not everyone is singing the blues. A 2021 story in the Clarksdale Press Register noted that it is one of the least expensive places to live in America, with an average home price of $62,000.

“Mississippi topped the list as the most affordable state in the union,” the story added.

Greenville

On a road trip a few years ago in Montana, of all places, I stopped for breakfast at a mom-and-pop restaurant and found a copy of Look magazine from 1957. The cover story, “The Shrinking South” by Greenville newspaper editor Hodding Carter, could just as well have been written in 2022. “The ghosts of departed people are walking the dusty roads of the rural Deep South. ... The buses, the trains, and the highways bear northward and westward young men, young women, whole families seeking greener pastures. Much of the South itself has not faced up to the melancholy facts of this emigration — indeed, it has denied them.”

“The social songs of the Negro run the gamut of his social activities and range from the coarse song of the roustabout to the sentimental message of the lover. This group includes nursery songs, play, dance, and animal songs as well as ‘the blues’ and more sophisticated jazz and swing tunes. Contrasting with the gayety and homeliness of this song is a long line of melancholy blues developed from the Memphis Blues and St. Louis Blues.” — WPA Guide, 1937

Carter was a white liberal in a business dependent on local advertisers. He wrote 3,000 words for Look on the shopworn theme of balancing industry and agriculture to halt the flow of emigrants. One of those emigrants, also from Greenville, was the writer Shelby Foote. This is how he summed up his hometown’s decline in only a bit more than 100 words in a 1996 interview with me:

“Greenville was once known as the Queen City of the Delta, but downtown has become a shell of what it once was. It’s a great shame but there’s a certain justice in it. The whole glory of the life that I lived up until I was 30 years old was based quite frankly on the exploitation of Blacks. There was not a morsel of food in my mouth, not a shred of clothes on my back, not an hour of education that I had that did not come out of exploiting some Black somewhere or other. Either the servants in the house or the workers on the plantation that brought the money in. And then that was shut off when you couldn’t get a cook for $3 a week.”

Foote, who was no prude, also said this: “I’ve only been to the casinos one time. Made me want to cry. It’s just terrible. Greenville has two of them. I don’t know what’s going to come of all that. I regret very much the state being mixed up in it. I regret anybody being mixed up in it.”

And there was this from state lawmaker Sonny Meredith of Greenville, who pushed the open licensing part of the casino bill to passage. “There’s too much money going to gambling that should be going to groceries. You can walk through the crowds and tell they’ve got people gambling that should be home cutting the yard. From the state’s standpoint it’s clearly been a plus across the board. It remade the coast.”

THE NATCHEZ TRACE PARKWAY, FROM IUKA TO TUPELO TO NATCHEZ

The Natchez Trace Parkway is a beautiful 444-mile anachronism. Lovely dogwoods in the spring and autumn leaves in fall line the route. But soft subsoil and hundreds of culverts make it expensive to maintain and always under repair somewhere. Perfect for a bike trip but dangerously narrow for a bike and one RV, much less a pair of them. An enforced 50 mph speed limit tests the patience of even the least hurried drivers after an hour or two.

Following a trail used by Native Americans, rivermen, and bandits in the early 1800s, the New Deal project began construction in 1938 when Ford Model A cars were still in service. The Trace is no match for today’s pickup trucks, SUVs, and motor homes. A 1931 Model A weighed 2,265 pounds, with a cruising speed of 35 miles an hour. A 2022 Ford F150 pickup truck with a full payload weighs 8,400 pounds, with a cruising speed of 75 miles an hour. Commercial vehicles are banned, but a truck and trailer or an RV can be 55 feet long and 14 feet high. When one of them approaches, if you are on a bike, or in a small car for that matter, you’d best beware.

Biking the Trace from Iuka to Natchez is no easy feat. My son and I set out to do it after he graduated from college. I made it as far as Tupelo. The hills of Tishomingo County were murder in the summer heat. After 60 miles we both cramped so badly we had to pull over into the grass and gently fall off our bikes and pull them out between our legs. I quit. He rode on to Pontotoc, the Barnett Reservoir in Ridgeland, a sanctuary at his granny’s house in Jackson, and Natchez in the next three days, logging more than 100 miles a day and dodging snakes on the hot pavement. A tale to tell his children when they grow up, no doubt about it.

Tupelo was described thus in the 1937 WPA Guide: “Perhaps Mississippi’s best example of what contemporary commentators call the ‘New South’ — industry rising in the midst of agriculture and agricultural customs. It has a pattern-like consistency of one-story clapboard residences and two- and three-story red brick business buildings.”

Old joke: A poor Mississippian who led a blessed life is told at the Pearly Gates that his services are still needed and he must go back. He is sore afraid and begs and pleads but finally agrees to return on one condition.

“Lord, will you go with me?”

“I’ll go as far as Memphis.”

With an above-average newspaper, schools, medical center, average household income ($69,000), downtown, and a Toyota manufacturing plant, Tupelo is gaining population. A nice place to live, even if I wouldn’t want to visit there. The birthplace of Elvis, visitors to the town can tour a simple replica of his first home, memorabilia from his 1956 “homecoming concert” at the Mississippi-Alabama Farm and Dairy Show, and, more recently, an Elvis museum. Graceland Lite.

When I drive through Tupelo on U.S. Route 78 I think of the Donald Fagen song lyric: “Good citizens at work and play. Normal folks, doin’ business in a normal way.”

Natchez, on the other hand, is a cautionary tale. When an isolated city bets its future on antebellum mansions and history it must be prepared to suffer the same fate as Nellie’s whorehouse, the elevator operator in the Eola Hotel, the International Paper mill, and the DAR. Natchez is losing population. Not even the best bluff-top view on the Mississippi River can save it. A nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

The bluff is built on fertile but unstable loess soil. To build something on that ground, you have to be either reckless or insane — as the owners of a snack shack learned the hard way in 1980. It had been raining for three days but the shack opened anyway. I was there the night the bluff gave way and two people working in the shack and a third person in the Under the Hill Saloon were killed. I was working for UPI and had the scoop on the AP for a full news cycle thanks to a tipster. A movie crew was working nearby on “Beulah Land” and had been using the saloon as a set. A decade later, the casino came in and set up shop on the relative safety of the river.

Editor‘s Note: Part Three, “From Clarksdale Through Jackson,” will be posted tomorrow.