Alan Huffman

We're With Nobody the book: Open Season: Politics, America, and Two Guys Chasing the Truth

2012-01-09T07:22:00.000-08:00

If you haven't checked out the website for my new book with coauthor Michael Rejebian, you can find out about it (and watch the book trailer) here: www.werewithnobody.com. The book, which is about doing political opposition research across the U.S., will be published by HarperCollins on Jan. 24.

"Can I help you find something?"

2011-12-29T07:40:00.000-08:00

Writers like to think their work confers upon them a kind of immortality – until they come upon their books in the remainder bin, for a dollar.

Publishing today is more about commerce than literary longevity. It’s like everything else: Most of what’s produced is disposable, trafficked in volume. The days of committed editors developing lifelong relationships with writers honing their craft are gone. Instead, we have publishers whose primary (and in some cases, only) interest is in selling gazillions of mostly formulaic books to ready-made markets. Once a book appears to have peaked in sales, they’re done with it.

My book Mississippi in Africa was published in 2004 and got mostly good reviews, though a couple of reviewers attacked it quite angrily, over comparatively minor things. Writing as a guest reviewer for the New York Times, an aging curmudgeon and “distinguished university professor” named Ira Berlin built his case against the book around a citation it contained – someone else’s citation, mind you, which I cited – that got someone’s name wrong. Here was glaring evidence that I had no idea what I was writing about. Professor Berlin, clearly outraged that a non-academic would have the temerity to write history, proceeded to tell the book’s fascinating story as if it were his own and he’d snatched it from my unworthy hands.

But, I digress.

My point is, after two not-insignificant print runs, in hardback and paperback, my publisher, Penguin Putnam, lost interest in Mississippi in Africa, so they chose not to reprint it and the rights reverted to me. Fearful of the prospects of the book going out of print, I sold the rights to University Press of Mississippi, a small publisher that had done my first book, Ten Point, and has an old-school way of keeping its books in circulation. University Press isn’t exactly at the top of the book marketing game, but, if nothing else, they will keep Mississippi in Africa available into the foreseeable future. Which is not to say readers will be able to find it easily, alas.

I have a habit of looking for my books in whatever bookstore I visit, as I imagine most writers do. I note how many copies are on hand and where the staff chose to display them. It is not unusual for a book to be allotted the premium display space near the front door at the time of its release, only to be assigned to the bargain table a few short years later. It’s a brutal business, publishing.

Sometimes, as I wander a bookstore, I’ll find Mississippi in Africa in the history section; at other times I find it in the southern culture section, the African American section, or the “world” section (whatever that is). Wherever I find it, I typically ask the nearest clerk if they’d like me to sign their copies. Most stores are thrilled for me to do so, because for some reason readers really like it when their books are signed by the author, even if they never met them. I don’t really get this, but I oblige, if only because it attracts customers and the bookstores afterward get me to sign their remaining stock, which they can therefore not return to the publisher, and which they embellish with “Signed by the author” stickers and place in a more prominent display area. Once, for example, after my book Sultana was released, my friend Doug and I went into a bookstore in New York City so he could buy a few copies as gifts. As he was paying for the books he mentioned to the cashier that I was the author. She asked if I’d like to sign their stock. I said of course -- I thought you’d never ask! I then stood by the display, doing the equivalent of a drive-by book signing. No one asked me to prove that I was the author of the book. Afterward Doug and I considered going into another bookstore and announcing that I was some other author, and offering to sign copies of his books. We figured I might be able to pass myself off as William Shakespeare at Books-A-Million, where no one knows anything about, you know, books.

So: Finding my books is a favored pastime, and recently, while Christmas shopping at Lemuria, my hometown bookstore, I noticed that Sultana (“regional interest”) was there, but not Mississippi in Africa, nor, for that matter, Ten Point. Lemuria has always been good to me, hosting author events and giving me an author discount on book purchases, but I’ve noticed my books don’t excite them the same way as, for example, John Grisham’s, for obvious reasons: Lemuria is a store. They sell things. They especially like things they sell a lot of. But not seeing Mississippi in Africa on display during the Christmas season, particularly after its recent re-release, was disappointing, and my disappointment grew as I began actually looking for it in earnest and was unable to find it anywhere.

Eventually Joe, who works there and handles author events, asked if I needed any help. I said, “I don’t see Mississippi in Africa.” Mild panic appeared in Joe’s eyes. He began to scour the shelves – “southern writers,” “African American,” etc., but found nothing. Soon Johnny, who owns Lemuria, walked by and asked what we were looking for. “Mississippi in Africa,” I said, with unconcealed gravity. He then joined in the awkward search, noting, as he did so, that his inventory listed nine copies. I was impressed that he knew this off the top of his head, but it was cold comfort, given that the books could not be discovered by the person who wrote them, nor by the store’s staff. Eventually Johnny found the nine, huddled in the dark corner of a nether shelf – the part where perpendicular shelves adjoin, causing the end of one to be hidden entirely from view. In bookstore terms, this was deepest, darkest Siberia. Johnny pulled them to a more prominent spot. I didn’t even bother to ask about Ten Point, a niche market book that I’m very proud of, but which few stores seem to get.

After Joe and Johnny wandered off, I placed copies of Mississippi in Africa and Sultana in even more prominent positions, to catch potential customers’ eyes, as I always do. Typically I place my books in front of other people’s books that I think are getting too much attention.

I am in the business of selling books, and I admit that the serial dating aspect of the current book-selling market distresses me, and apparently I’m a glutton for punishment, because after I left Lemuria I went to Books-A-Million, a store I loathe, ostensibly because I needed something from the grocery next door and thought I’d pop in and see where they had Mississippi in Africa. As it turned out: Nowhere. I couldn’t find it, and when I asked a clerk, she looked it up on the computer and said, without a hint of regret, “We don’t carry that title.” Thank you for confirming everything I suspected about Books-A-Million! As she delivered this news, a man standing behind me, who had heard the title of the book I was looking for, volunteered, “Don’t believe everything your read in that book” – a comment I uncharacteristically chose to ignore, this being Books-A-Million. I later regretted it, of course. How many chances do you get to call out a hostile reader? Here he was, voluntarily instructing a stranger not to believe what I’d written in my book, not knowing who I was. He was a skinny, country-looking older guy. I would not have expected him to be in the book’s demographic, so I was kind of impressed that he’d even read it, even if he came away dissatisfied. Whatever. I satisfied myself that at least someone in Books-A-Million knew the book existed.

Afterward, I strolled over to the bargain bin to see what I could find. Sometimes you find good stuff there -- I once found Shakespeare in a bargain bin, and I took comfort in that, too.

Two Greenvilles

2011-12-16T05:20:00.000-08:00

Who knew? After posting the story about the November 2011 reunion at Prospect Hill Plantation and the two Mississippis, I came across a news item from Sept. 11, 2009, announcing that Greenville, Mississippi (in the U.S.) and Greenville, Liberia (in the area originally known as Mississippi in Africa) are now official sister cities.

Somehow I had missed that development. Serendipitously, a few days later I was informed by Evans Yancy, who is from Greenville, Liberia and now lives in Atlanta, Georgia (in the U.S.), that he had tried, unsuccessfully, to contact me in May 2011 about the sister cities announcement. Evans, who responded to an email from me, didn’t say how he had tried to get in touch, but said that he visited Greenville, Mississippi at that time as a member of the Greenville (Liberia) Development Association. The delegation met with Greenville, Mississippi Mayor Heather McTeer Hudson and the city council.

According to the news item, which ran on the website liberianconsulatega.com, the two Greenvilles entered into a sister city trade agreement in Monrovia, Liberia, with signatories including Honorary Consul General Cynthia Blandford Nash, of Atlanta; Greenville, Mississippi mayoral representative Ed Johnson; Greenville, Liberia Mayor Barbara Ann Moore Keah; and various other dignitaries, mostly from Sinoe County, of which Greenville, Liberia is the capital.

In case you haven’t read previous posts on this site about Prospect Hill and the two Mississippis, Liberia was founded by freed American slaves in the early 19th century and today encompasses regions named for various former homelands of the emigrants, including Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi and Virginia. In 2003, I published a nonfiction book on the subject titled Mississippi in Africa.

Typically, for sister city agreements, the Greenvilles’ alliance was described as a means “to further friendly diplomatic relations, enhance cultural and historic understanding and cooperation, and to promote international trade between Greenville, Mississippi of the United States of America, and Greenville, Sinoe County of the Republic of Liberia,” according to the news item.

Greenville, Mississippi is one of the more depressed cities in the U.S., located in the poorest region of the poorest state, yet no doubt seems flush compared with war-torn Greenville, Liberia (the nation was in civil war throughout the 1990s and early 2000s).

Coincidentally, Greenville, Mississippi Mayor Hudson is running for the U.S. Congress for District 2, a post currently held by Bennie Thompson. My friend Jefferson Kanmoh, whom I met while researching my book, represents Sinoe County in the Liberian Congress.

Top photo, of Greenville, Liberia, by Scott Harrison; bottom photo, of Greenville, Mississippi, pulled from the internet at cardcow.com.

Letter from Mississippi

2011-12-11T09:09:00.000-08:00

When she mentioned Mississippi, I had to ask which one. Because there are two. There is the one that everyone knows about, in the United States, and there is another, a kind of parallel universe, in the West African nation of Liberia, settled by freed American slaves in the early 19th century.

Evangeline Pelham Wayne is originally from Liberia, where her family owned a plantation-style house on Mississippi Street in Greenville, the capital of the region known as Mississippi in Africa. On a recent autumn day she visited the other Mississippi, in the United States, for an odd reunion of people who had never met, and who were, in a sense, returning to a place most of them had never been.

“When I was growing up in Liberia,” Wayne recalled, “my father always made me spell Mississippi aloud. M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i. If I missed one ‘S’, he’d make me do it again. ‘Try again,’ he’d say. ‘Think about it.’ ‘Think about what?’ I’d say. ‘Why do I have to spell this word?’ His answer: 'One day you'll find out.'”

The recitation of Mississippi’s repetitive crooked letters, humpback letters and “I”s is a childhood ritual in the U.S., but Wayne was baffled by her father’s preoccupation with the word. Years later, as a student at the University of Liberia, she was assigned to write a report about her family history, and by then her father had died, so she convinced her grandmother, Louise Ross Rogers, who was almost 90, to tell her the story. So began a personal journey that eventually led Wayne to the U.S. and, on a recent windy November day, to an abandoned plantation house known as Prospect Hill, in Jefferson County, Mississippi, where she hoped to find clues about her family and her own identity, which is complicated by many factors, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Wayne is a descendant of Africans who were enslaved and taken to the U.S., then allowed to immigrate “back” to Africa in the 1840s, to the freed slave colony in Mississippi in Africa. In 1992, Wayne immigrated “back” to the U.S to escape Liberia’s civil wars, which had begun two years before and would last until 2003, and which were, in many ways, rooted in a long-running conflict between the Americo-Liberians, as the freed slaves and their descendents were known, and indigenous groups, who vastly outnumbered them. Some of the indigenous tribes had been involved in the slave trade when the settlers arrived, and some Americos later enslaved them. Liberia’s history is among the more complicated in Africa, and though Wayne’s family had been there for more than a century and a half, she often felt like an outsider. She spoke no indigenous languages, and neither did any of her family. Now, in the U.S., she said, she is likewise considered a foreigner.

“To be honest, I’m unsure of who, and what, I am, and where I fit in,” she said. "In Liberia or America, I'm considered a foreigner -- someone who does not truly belong."

The event that brought Wayne and her family to Prospect Hill was hosted by the New Mexico-based Archaeological Conservancy, which bought the remote, endangered house in the summer of 2011 in hopes of saving it, along with whatever evidence of its complex history remains buried underground. Jessica Crawford, the conservancy’s regional director, had facilitated the purchase, and afterward was inundated with requests to see the remote, somewhat mysterious property, both from people who had a family connection to it and by others who were simply curious. She decided to hold a private event on the morning of Saturday, Nov. 12, 2011, for those connected to the house, and a public tour in the afternoon, for a suggested donation of $25 per person to a fund to be used for stabilizing the structure. The conservancy’s goal is to stabilize the structure, then resell it to someone who will fully restore and preserve it, while retaining an archaeological easement so that the buried artifacts – around the big house, in the vicinity of the vanished slave quarters and other plantation structures, and in the former fields -- might one day be unearthed and studied.

Gathered on the lawn that morning, before the looming tableau of the dramatically deteriorating house, was an array of people of mixed races, ages and backgrounds who might otherwise have seemed to possess little in common.

They included descendants of Prospect Hill’s original slave owners; of plantation slaves who had, during an uprising in 1845, set fire to the previous house on the site; of interracial liaisons between descendents of the former slave holders and slaves in the early 20th century; and of freed plantation slaves who had immigrated, more than 150 years before, to Mississippi in Africa. There was no question about who attracted the most attention: Wayne and her family. The crowd broke into spontaneous applause when the group arrived, more than an hour late, after getting lost of the network of poorly marked local roads.

Being at the center of attention made Wayne a little nervous, partly because the gathering was so freighted, and partly because her own part of the story was riddled with asterisks and asides.

She has so far been unable to prove her ancestors’ provenance, though her grandmother mentioned a Mississippi plantation and “Captain Ross,” which Wayne believed to be Prospect Hill and Capt. Isaac Ross, the Revolutionary War veteran who established Prospect Hill and who had enabled the emancipation and emigration of his slaves to Mississippi in Africa in the 1840s. Tracing African American genealogy in the U.S. is a difficult endeavor, because blacks were not included in the census until after the Civil War, but in Liberia it is nearly impossible because most of the nation’s archives were destroyed during the wars. So far, Wayne has been able to document the origins of only one ancestor, who immigrated to Mississippi in Africa from the U.S. state of Georgia. “It seems the connection is there,” she said. “But at this point I can’t be sure.”

Arriving at Prospect Hill brought on a rush of unfamiliar emotions, she said. “Driving in, the closer we got, the odder I felt,” she said. She was exhausted and dazed after driving 18 hours, all night, from suburban Washington, D.C., where she now lives. Her large, expressive eyes were bloodshot, which made her self-conscious because she knew others were observing her closely.

Everyone was looking closely at everyone, but perhaps more so at her and her family, because of who they were, or were believed to be. Wayne’s family represented a sort of triumphal return of the freed Prospect Hill slaves, who had walked away on a cold, rainy winter day in 1845.

Wayne began exploring her family’s possible connection to the place after coming across my nonfiction book, Mississippi in Africa, while researching her family’s history online. She had been researching her family since the early 1990s, but had so far reached nothing but dead ends. It seemed logical that the story would lead from Mississippi in Africa back to its namesake in the U.S., so when she heard about my book she contacted me to ask about Prospect Hill and Capt. Ross.

The subject of the two Mississippis had come up frequently when I visited Liberia in 2001. Roaming the streets of war-torn Monrovia, the nation’s capital, in search of anyone named Ross, I was frequently recognized as an American and asked what state I was from. When I answered “Mississippi,” a common response was, “Me, also!” at which point I would ask, “Mississippi, in Liberia, or Mississippi, in the States?” The answer was almost invariably: “Both.”

Liberians who hailed from the Mississippi region of Liberia were very much aware of the existence of Mississippi in the U.S., and were bewildered that the reverse was not true. Few Americans know anything about Liberia, including where it is. It is often confused with Libya, more than 2,000 miles away. During the civil wars, when Liberians on both sides called for the U.S. to intervene, a smugly ignorant Lou Dobbs warned on his news show that doing so might lead to “another Somalia,” though the two countries are as culturally and geographically distinct as Ireland and Uzbekistan.

Liberia was the first republic in Africa, founded in 1820 (though it did not gain its independence until two decades later) by the American Colonization Society, which was comprised of two groups with seemingly opposed yet overlapping aims: Abolitionists who saw “repatriation,” in the parlance of the times, as a way to make emancipation more politically palatable in the U.S., and slaveholders who were fearful of eventually being outnumbered by free black citizens (some members also saw repatriation as a way to Christianize the indigenous tribes). Liberia is located on the west coast of Africa, where prevailing winds were favorable for ships involved in the North America slave trade. As a result, many of the slaves in the U.S. came from West Africa, which played a role in the decision to repatriate the freed slaves there. Most of the freed slaves had never been to Africa, though, and in some cases were third- or fourth-generation Americans.

The colonial effort, which remains the only one that the U.S. has been directly responsible for, was private, but had the support of the federal government, which occasionally sent warships to quell disputes between the settlers and the indigenous tribes. The settlers, thrust into the wilds of Africa, typically named their communities after familiar places, much like colonial Americans gave their communities names such as New York, New Jersey and New London. In addition to Mississippi in Africa, there are today communities in Liberia known as Louisiana, Georgia and Virginia, and a county named Maryland, all harking to the original emigrants’ home states. The settlers viewed the indigenous groups with a mix of fear, disdain, pity and hostility, much the way British colonials viewed native Americans. Not surprisingly, similar hostilities quickly ensued.

The largest contingent of Liberian emigrants – about 300 – came from Prospect Hill and related family plantations, following a tumultuous decade-long court battle over Isaac Ross’s will, during which a slave uprising led to the burning of the original mansion, the death of a young girl, and the subsequent lynching of a group of slaves believed to have been the perpetrators. Most of the alleged perpetrators were hanged – ostensibly, from a white oak tree on the lawn, part of which momentously fell onto the existing house years ago, and whose dead trunk now lies in the yard, like a menacing stage prop.

The house was built in 1854 on the site of the original by Ross’s grandson, who had contested the will and managed to regain the estate after losing it in court (the will had called for Prospect Hill to be sold to pay the way for those of Ross’s slaves who chose to immigrate to Liberia). The slaves who chose not to immigrate worked in the existing house or in the adjacent plantation fields. The house is one of the few remaining landmarks of the entwined histories of the two Mississippis, and in a sense, everyone who attended the reunion was returning to the spot where their parallel stories had diverged. There are many different versions of what happened at Prospect Hill in the 1840s, and afterward in Liberia, and all of them came into play that day; everyone, it seemed, was working from a slightly different script, though with the same key players.

James Belton, whose father was born near the close of the 19th century, is descended from slaves who were involved in the uprising, though the two who directly participated had escaped into the woods, never to be heard from again. Belton’s great grandmother, Mariah Belton, chose not to immigrate to Liberia with her remaining son because she did not want to leave the other two behind. As a result, James Belton grew up in Mississippi, in the U.S., rather than Mississippi in Africa. When he and Wayne met, they came face to face with a person whose life represented what their own might have been like had their ancestors made a different choice in 1845. Neither was quite sure what to say, so they just embraced.

Everyone at the reunion was playing a stand-in role in a drama of profound historical consequence, which conferred new meaning upon their otherwise ordinary lives. James Belton was no longer simply a retired schoolteacher from McComb, Mississippi. He was Mariah Belton’s great grandson, returned to the scene of a major historical crime, which he viewed with a measure of pride and sadness, in that his family had sought to shake free the shackles of slavery, yet had been responsible for the death of the young girl. At one point Belton ventured alone to the Prospect Hill family cemetery, which is dominated by a marble obelisk erected in tribute to Ross by the Mississippi Colonization Society (a state chapter of the American group), and knelt at the grave of the young girl, whose name was Martha.

Later, as Belton spoke to the group about his research and how he had located the descendants of Mariah Belton’s long-lost sons, he was upstaged by a peacock that emerged from the bushes, strutted blithely behind him, then flew, in an awkward, noisy burst of wings, onto what remained of Prospect Hill’s front gallery and disappeared into the darkened parlor. Watching this, in confused silence, were four middle-aged sisters whose grandmother had been the last family member to live in the house, and whose more distant ancestors had fought against the immigration of the Prospect Hill slaves. Behind them was elderly Betty McGehee, descended from the side of the family that had supported the immigration, and so was divided from the sisters’ side. Then there were the descendants of the slaves who did not immigrate, as well as those who did, and finally, a woman and her children who, though they are African American, trace their lineage to Isaac Ross, the man who had set all their stories in motion.

When Crawford first came upon Prospect Hill, on a hot September day in 2010, the structure was overgrown and had been in serious disrepair for decades. Its eccentric last owner had done little maintenance and made almost no repairs, including to the leaky roof, choosing instead to paint interior rooms while exterior woodwork rotted and collapsed onto the ground. Crawford was aware of the plantation’s dramatic history, but that first visit was less like a typical old-house tour than a probe of once beautiful, now sadly deranged mind. The place had been ransacked numerous times and was in such bad shape that she had a hard time even appreciating its grand architecture. Large chunks of plaster had fallen from its 14-foot ceilings; paint was flaking from the elaborate Greek Revival trim; panes were broken in the towering windows, which were partially shrouded by ripped curtains and sagging, gap-toothed shutters. As she picked her way through the dank, shadowy rooms, Crawford observed signs of decay at every turn: Threadbare, moldering rugs, rat-gnawed tables, overturned and emasculated chairs, piles of rain-soaked, mildewed clothes. An empty bourbon bottle protruded from a mass of sodden debris atop a warped grand piano. An array of cooking pots, placed on the floor to catch water from leaks in the roof, had been overflowing for years. Books and papers were scattered everywhere, as if in the aftermath of looting. “It was as if a bomb had gone off inside,” she said.

Considering Prospect Hill’s torturous history, its transformation to a house of minor horrors struck Crawford as sadly appropriate. But for someone devoted to uncovering and preserving clues about the past, the structure’s disfigurement and the seeming inevitability of its loss were unacceptable. She had come to document what remained of the place, yet had not taken a single photo or note as she prepared to leave. “The scenes were just too ugly,” she recalled. “It made me sick.” Then, as she stepped gingerly toward the front door, wanting only to get out, she saw a patch of brilliant color from the corner of her eye. “I looked to the left, and there was this peacock standing in front of the bookcase in the front room,” she said. For the first time, she pulled out her camera and snapped a photo. In it, the peacock stands before a sunlit window, surrounded by fallen books and strewn bags of trash, its head cocked curiously toward her.

The bird had been left behind by the last occupant of the house, and because it was unaccustomed to visitors, quickly vanished from view, though not from Crawford’s memory. On the way home she thought of something her family’s housekeeper had told her when she was a child: As long as there is life in a house, its story isn’t over. As was painfully obvious, there were plenty of living things inside Prospect Hill -- rats, itinerant snakes, a beehive, at least two bats and an entire self-sustaining universe of insects and spiders. But the peacock hinted at a more engaging tale. Crawford chose its image as her take-away.

In subsequent visits, during which she began to clear the encroaching undergrowth and haul away debris, sometimes with the help of volunteers but usually alone, she began to feel an odd connection with the lonely bird, whose showy displays no one typically saw, and which she named Isaac, after Isaac Ross. He enabled Crawford to see past the enervating squalor of the scene, back to the story that had originally brought her there. She also discovered what she came to see as Isaac’s nemesis -- an unseen, unidentified creature that inhabited the debris of a collapsed rear room and growled whenever someone walked nearby. Together, the peacock and the unseen creature provided an allegory of Prospect Hill: On the one hand, the beautiful, unexpected display, and on the other, the hidden, growling thing.

In her effort to save the house, Crawford has inserted herself into a story full of interesting characters, historical and otherwise. After convincing the owner to sell the house, and her boss at the conservancy to buy it – both impressive feats, under the circumstances, Crawford enlisted the help of friends, strangers, descendants, even jail inmates, to return it to a point where it might at least evoke its outsized history. Slowly the house began to reemerge, as Crawford and company prepared it to reprise its role for the reunion. Among those who stumbled upon the house during the period was Tate Taylor, director of the movie The Help, who saw the near-ruins of Prospect Hill from a helicopter. Taylor had recently bought an antebellum house in nearby Church Hill and saw Prospect Hill while flying there from Jackson. He happened to be traveling with a friend, Charles Greenlee, who was descended from Isaac Ross, and the two subsequently returned with a retinue of Hollywood types. Greenlee recalled the strange effect of coming upon the weathered, overgrown house, framed by moss-draped trees, as Isaac, the peacock, greeted them from inside it with a disturbing cry that sent one of the actresses running back toward the car.

Greenlee also attended the reunion event, at which Crawford and representatives of the state’s historic preservation community spoke of the need to preserve the property. Before the conservancy bought the house, the Mississippi Heritage Trust had included Prospect Hill on its 2011 list of most endangered historic structures in the state, and the trust’s director, David Presiozi, spoke during the reunion, as did Jennifer Baughn, chief architectural historian at the state Department of Archives and History. But the formal presentations at the event were mere monologues. The real action took place in conversations between the guests.

Before the event, some of those who planned to attend had expressed concern that there might be tension, and many of the conversations were, in fact, riddled with tiny red flags. One woman asked, more than once, how frequently rape occurred on slave plantations. But for most of those in attendance, the default setting was to be polite. One of the sisters whose grandmother had lived in the house, and whose ancestors had fought against the immigration effort, had earlier wondered aloud how the Liberians would view them. Old times, clearly, are not forgotten, in Dixie or in Liberia, and she was concerned that her family might be perceived as somehow hostile, or be viewed with hostility. Likewise Betty McGehee, who, though she as descended from Isaac Ross and the side of the family that supported freeing the slaves, wondered if her land holdings and heirloom antiques represented “a kind of greed, really -- for me to have these things, and hold onto them?” The question wasn’t an idle exercise; as Wayne observed, McGehee seemed genuinely concerned about how differently her own life had played out than those of others whose paths ran parallel for a while at Prospect Hill. Laura “Butch” Ross, meanwhile, observed that despite the obvious, the story of Prospect Hill was anything but black and white; she was living proof of that, as a black Ross descended from white Rosses.

The stories the people at the reunion shared while roaming the dark rooms of the house, or the cemetery, or while sitting beneath the aged cedar trees, were personal, but had an epic cast, spanning two centuries and two continents. Everyone existed somewhere along the vast network of interconnected circuits, and now the circuits were all lit up for the first time; everyone seemed to want things to go smoothly.

Most, like Crawford, were surprised that the event received little media attention. National Public Radio had initially planned to cover it but later cancelled, saying the story seemed too complicated to explain in radio. Meanwhile, an NPR correspondent was elsewhere in the county, covering a more conventionally black-and-white story, about an unsolved civil rights era murder. All of which meant that the reunion unfolded more or less in private.

Toward the end of the day, as the crowds dispersed, Crawford, Wayne and I departed for dinner on the riverfront in Natchez, a few hours before Wayne and her family would set off on a midnight, marathon return drive to Maryland. As we sat at our table, debriefing each other about the day, Wayne’s thoughts drifted back to the other world -- Liberia. Each time the waiter approached to take our orders, it seemed she was in the middle of describing something tumultuous, and he politely continued on. During the Liberian civil war, her sister was raped and murdered. Wayne herself was accosted by both government forces and rebels, who attempted to kill her husband and two sons, as she wandered the dark streets of Monrovia, in labor, trying to get to the hospital. Her story is full of dramatic asides, both historical and recent, and everyone who had met her that day seemed intent on helping her nail down the necessary details, and to find a kind of closure at Prospect Hill. But like the bigger saga, the day was complicated, and not entirely satisfying. Connections were made, or reestablished, but many, many questions remained. At the center of the cultural mashup was Crawford, who, in a comparatively short time, became a key moderator of the story, as well as the protector of the house, and in her own right, a character in its saga.

Crawford’s goal, initially, was straightforward: To save the archaeological evidence. It soon expanded to encompass the existing house, without which the story would be disembodied. She noted that given the attention that’s recently been focused on Liberia as a result of the awarding of the Nobel Prize to its president as well as a Liberian peace activist and a political activist in Yemen, “It seems like the perfect time to explore the connections that were made there.”

“What struck me,” she added, “is that the place means so much to so many people, for so many – and often very different – reasons.”

Photos by author or courtesy Jessica Crawford

Returning to Prospect Hill after 165 years

2011-11-08T16:39:00.002-08:00

A very unusual reunion will take place this Saturday at an abandoned plantation in Jefferson County, Mississippi – the haunting, seldom seen Greek Revival house known as Prospect Hill.

Coming together for the first time will be descendants of the plantation’s original slave owners; of a group of slaves who escaped into the woods after setting fire to the first house on the site, in 1845; of slaves who remained on the plantation until their emancipation during the Civil War; and of freed slaves who immigrated from the plantation to the freed-slave colony in Liberia in the 1840s. As if that weren’t enough to get the conversation going, also attending will be descendants of mixed-race liaisons between Prospect Hill’s former slave owners and slaves in the early 20th century.

For $20, you can be a fly on the wall.

Most of the descendents have never seen the place, nor met each other. They’re coming together for an event being staged by the New Mexico-based Archaeological Conservancy, which in August bought Prospect Hill to stabilize the house in hopes of finding a buyer to restore and preserve it. The 10-room structure, which was included in the Mississippi Heritage Trust’s 2011 list of the state’s 10 most endangered historic properties, is one of the few surviving landmarks of a pivotal chapter in American and Liberian history, and it is in danger of being lost.

The story behind Prospect Hill, which was the subject of my 2004 nonfiction book Mississippi in Africa, begins in the 1830s, when Revolutionary War veteran Isaac Ross sought to ensure a better life for his slaves after he and his sympathetic daughter Margaret Reed were gone. Ross and Reed stipulated in their wills that the plantation be sold and the money used to pay the way for those of its slaves who chose to immigrate to a freed-slave colony established for the purpose by a group known as the American Colonization Society. Their destination: A part of the Liberian colony known as Mississippi in Africa.

Ross and Reed no doubt knew their plan would be controversial, but they could not have known how sweeping the impacts would be. Ultimately, they unwittingly set the stage for a tumultuous court battle over the estate, filed by Ross’s grandson, Isaac Ross Wade, and for the divergence, in the 1840s, of the paths of each of the groups that will be represented at Prospect Hill on November 12.

The Rosses and Wades were divided over the repatriation effort, and the slaves themselves were divided over whether to go or stay; likewise, those who sought to immigrate were divided over whether to take matters into their own hands to overcome the obstacles placed in their path to freedom by Wade.

Now, more than 150 years later, their paths will once again converge at Prospect Hill. Among the most notable guests will be 12 Liberians, the adults of whom escaped to the U.S. during their country’s civil war, in the 1990s and early 2000s, which was rooted in the conflict between the freed-slave descendants and Liberia’s indigenous groups; the 12 now live in Maryland.

Some of the descendants will speak at the public event on Saturday afternoon. Also speaking will be Jessica Crawford, with the Archaeological Conservancy; Jennifer Baughn, architectural historian with the state Department of Archives and History; David Preziosi, director of the Mississippi Heritage Trust; and me.

The Archaeological Conservancy hopes the event will draw attention to the intended sale, and meanwhile enable the descendants to compare notes on their related yet conflicting histories for the first time. The Conservancy plans to keep an easement to the Prospect Hill property so that its buried artifacts may one day be studied, and since the purchase Crawford, its southeast regional director, has been laboring to clear the undergrowth that threatened to consume the house, to remove the waterlogged debris from the last owner’s residency, and to undertake emergency repair work on its leaking roof and rotting beams.

The descendants will get a private tour of the property on Saturday morning, with public tours to follow at 1 pm and 2:30 pm. Speakers will discuss the history of the plantation, the house and the adjacent cemetery, site of a monumental obelisk erected in tribute to Ross by the Mississippi Colonization Society in the 1830s.

Prospect Hill and other related family plantations served as the point of embarkation for the largest contingent of emigrants (about 300) to Liberia from the U.S., following Wade’s failed decade-long contest of the estate, during which a slave uprising led to the burning of the first house on the site, the death of a young girl, and the hanging of a group of slaves believed to have been the perpetrators (though at least two escaped into the woods and were never recaptured). A few of the slaves chose not to immigrate to Liberia and remained enslaved, as workers in the existing house (built in 1854) or in the adjacent cotton fields.

The Conservancy is asking for a tax deductible donation of $20 per person to help with the expenses of emergency stabilization work on the house. Anyone interested in attending should call or email to reserve the number of spots needed. Crawford noted that if someone calls and gets voicemail, their call will be returned as soon as possible. The number is 662/326-6465; email is tacsoutheast@cableone.net.

Crawford also stressed that the grounds around the house were recently mowed for the first time in five years, and some of the landscape is rough, so sensible walking shoes are recommended. And because parts of the house are badly deteriorated, a temporary entrance has been constructed for viewing the interior.

Prospect Hill is about 10 minutes east of Lorman, a 45-minute drive from Natchez, about 20 minutes from Port Gibson, and approximately an hour and a half from Jackson. Because the house is comparatively isolated, Crawford suggests that attendees either bring a picnic lunch or have lunch at the Old Country Store in Lorman.

Photo by Jessica Crawford, November 2011

Letting go

2011-10-26T12:27:00.000-07:00

I had met this guy the week after Hurricane Katrina. We were on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, surveying the wreckage of historic homes. I didn’t know him well, but now he’d come to visit my home in rural Mississippi, for a party, and we’d driven to the grocery store for some last minute items.

We’d taken his car, and on the way back he drove very, very slowly, which was frustrating because I was in a hurry. My house was already full of people and many more would be arriving later in the day, and he was driving exactly as he’d driven through the debris of Beach Boulevard – about 10 mph, though we were now on a wide-open country road.

Finally, I said, “Do you mind if I drive?” He said OK, so I took the wheel. I don’t remember pulling over to make the switch. Why would I? What mattered was that I was in control. At the next turn – the next-to-last before the drive to my house, I suddenly began to feel disoriented. The world looked unfamiliar. It felt like I’d made a wrong turn, though I’d made the trip thousands of times. I wondered if I was having a seizure or suffering some kind of flashback, or – what? I didn’t know.

The road seemed to unfurl forever, and as I became increasingly unsure of myself, I saw something even more perplexing: We were coming into a town, at a place that should have been open countryside. At that point I became more suspicious than concerned. It occurred to me that I might be dreaming.

As I drove through the unfamiliar town -- which was fairly busy, with lots of people in the streets, coming in and out of gas stations, hardware stores, a small factory of some kind, the Wal-Mart -- I looked for any sign of its name. There were signs everywhere but none that sounded like the name of the town. I mentioned to the Katrina guy that I’d never seen the town before, and didn’t understand how we’d gotten there. It looked like someplace in, maybe, east Texas. He didn’t seem at all concerned. I told him to keep an eye out for a sign that might tell us where we were. Then I glanced at the backseat and saw my friend Paul, who lives in New York City, and who I hadn’t realized was with us. Though it made sense that he’d be coming to the party, the fact that I hadn’t known he was in the car made me more inclined to think I was dreaming, which of course I was.

It’s an odd feeling, to recognize that what seems real isn’t. Naturally, you resist, at first. The first time I remember realizing I was dreaming I was 15 years old, driving with my friends in my mother’s Impala. It was a beautiful summer evening and one of my friends suggested I put the top down, so I did. As we drove, with the wind tousling our hair, it dawned on me that my mother’s car was not a convertible. The only explanation was that I was dreaming. I mentioned this to my friends in the car, who were skeptical and, ultimately, annoyed. “Are you saying I’m not really here?” one of them asked. That was exactly what I was saying, I said. “That’s bullshit,” he said.

Now, as I drove the unfamiliar streets of the seeming east Texas town, I mentioned the convertible dream to Paul and the Katrina guy. I said I know it sounds weird but I think I may be dreaming now. The Katrina guy just shrugged, and continued eyeing the signs, but Paul gave me this distressed look, then vanished. He didn’t want to be a character in someone else’s dream, I guess. Oh, well, I thought. See you back in the waking world!

About that time I noticed an outdoor market up ahead, so I pulled in. I told the Katrina guy I was going to see if I could find a newspaper or something – read the headlines, find a date, just to verify whether this was real. He waited in the car. I approached a stand selling “antique” items – mostly junk, really, which included old newspapers. Here was a stroke of dream-mind brilliance, I thought. There was no way to prove or disprove that this was a dream, based on the newspapers. My mind was trying to trick itself, in plain view. I thought of asking the guy who ran the stand for the date, but it seemed kind of weird to, and anyway he was waiting on customers. So I went back to the car and we drove on. The Katrina guy didn’t even ask if I’d discovered anything. He was, I suppose, the perfect dream-mate.

Down a narrow side street we came upon a river – a very wide river, like the Mississippi. There were many oddly narrow pedestrian promenades angling off from the river, which was flooded. Every river in my dreams is flooded, for some reason, so this was familiar territory. OK, I said, now I know I’m dreaming. I’m sure of it. The street we were on descended into the floodwaters up ahead, remained submerged for a short distance, then returned to dry land. I decided to test my theory and drive into the water. The Katrina guy was alarmed, and put his hand out in front of me, as if to stop me, but I said, Don’t worry, if I’m dreaming we’ll be just fine, and if not, I’ll stop before the water gets too deep. I drove into deep water and kept going. I passed another car, also driving on the river. The Katrina guy got excited when I told him we could do whatever we wanted now -- we didn’t have to worry, because it was a dream. We could fly over buildings if we wanted to – something I’d done numerous times before. I was curious, though, what the dream was going to be about, and was repeatedly thwarted in my efforts to find out. I’ve always assumed that dreams are mechanisms for the brain to explore hypotheticals without repercussion, to help us sort through potential scenarios in our waking lives. For my purposes, however, this resulted in all sorts of dream obstacles. The Katrina guy seemed to be having a good time, even if it was a dream, but he soon vanished, too. I didn’t really notice until I found myself alone, on foot, in an abandoned factory, trying to find my way out.

At this point the dream seemed intent on capturing me, though I knew I was dreaming. Each door I passed through deposited me into an anteroom with another door. It sounds like a potential nightmare, but because I knew I was dreaming I felt a measure of control. Every door opened when I turned the knob. After several passages I realized I was in the middle of a sequence, and I began to count. I was up to seven doors when the last one opened into the sunshine. Once outside, I saw an interesting scene across the street: Some guys working on a water main, talking with a pretty, flirtatious woman. I decided to snap a picture with my cell phone, in part because I still had some minor doubts about whether I was dreaming, and I’d noticed in the past that using my cell phone – including its camera -- was a maddeningly frustrating dream endeavor. Sure enough, though the picture-taking seemed to go OK at first, the screen on my cell phone was unfamiliar and the camera kept snapping pictures before I was ready. Sloppy dream-direction, I thought.

Thus chastened, my dream-mind attempted to exert more control. I walked purposefully back to the truck and got in, drove a short distance, and arrived at my house, which, predictably, was full of guests. Even though I knew I was dreaming, I expected this to be awkward. Not many people like being told they aren’t real, and anything can happen in a dream. A series of frustrating misfires followed. An old girlfriend, waiting for me in bed, asked for a cup of coffee, and when I went into the kitchen I found I couldn’t make any because another woman was using the coffee maker to make some kind of herbal tea, etc. Predictable dream complications. As I waited for the woman to finish, someone asked me to help move some chairs, and a few new guests arrived, and before I knew it, a long time had passed.

Considering that I was at least marginally in control of the setting, and of the unfolding plot, it struck me as odd that I was running into so many problems. If I was dreaming and knew it, why couldn’t I just dispense with the complications? Probably because the complications were the point. I believe dreams can be both psychic and psychiatric exercise, so I am always aware that my control is tenuous. For that matter, even controlling my waking thoughts is sometimes tenuous. Introduce a night-bird that my sleeping ears interprets as the voice of Satan in a dream, which continues to call out after I awake, and all bets are off. In a very profound way, we are all subject to our own dreams.

As I tried to deal with a swelling crowd of imaginary guests, I fiddled with my cell phone, determined that if I could freely move between the waking and the dream world I should be able to find a way to create a record of it – to bridge the gap. This, alas, is how my sleeping mind often occupies itself. It tries to take notes, and even photographs, of an imagined world. It’s hopeless, but I often spend what seems like hours, even days, during a dream, trying to create a waking record of what happened – a note scrawled in a pad on the nightstand, or spray-painted on the wall of a building that I know to be real, to which I might actually return when I’m awake. It never works, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.

In this case, I eventually gave up taking photographs and decided to mentally record what was happening, so that I’d remember the dream once I awakened. I spent the rest of the dream studiously trying to log everything that happened, escaping now and then to a rare quiet place to go over it in my head, to reconstruct everything that had happened from the moment when the Katrina guy was driving to the moment at hand, so I’d be able to review the dream when I was awake, for clues. This is what passes for rest, in my world. This post is the inevitable result. Even in my dreams, I cannot let go.

Dreams are so rich and have such an authentic feeling that scientists have long assumed they must have a crucial psychological purpose, as an article I later read in the New York Times observed. “To Freud, dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind; to Jung, it was a stage where the psyche’s archetypes acted out primal themes. Newer theories hold that dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though current problems, like divorce and work frustrations.” OK, the judges will accept that.

The article cited a paper published in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience by a psychiatrist and sleep researcher named Dr. J. Allan Hobson, who argued that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM (when most dreaming occurs) is to warm the brain’s circuits for the sights and sounds and emotions of waking. “It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Hobson said. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: Dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”

Psychics often claim that dreams are a delivery mechanism for messages from other worlds, and who’s to say they aren’t? I’ve gotten messages from dead loved ones in my dreams, some of which turned out to be true, and which I hadn’t known about before. Psychiatrists have also speculated that dreams are how the brain sorts out its own issues, on its own time. Hobson’s position is that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but suppressed during waking. If that’s the case, I suppose it’s possible that dreaming is all of those things.

Another neurologist-physiologist cited in the article, Dr. Rodolfo Llinás, countered that dreaming is not a parallel state but is consciousness itself, in the absence of input from the senses. Once people are awake, he argued, their brain essentially revises its dream images to match what it sees, hears and feels -- the dreams are “corrected” by the senses.

In evolutionary terms, according to the Times, REM appears to be a recent development; it is detectable in humans and other warm-blooded mammals and birds. “Studies” suggest that REM makes its appearance very early in life -- in the third trimester for humans, well before a developing child has experience or imagery to fill out a dream. “None of this is to say that dreams are devoid of meaning,” the Times noted. “Anyone who can remember a vivid dream knows that at times the strange nighttime scenes reflect real hopes and anxieties: The young teacher who finds himself naked at the lectern; the new mother in front of an empty crib, frantic in her imagined loss.”

According to the article, “research suggests that only about 20 percent of dreams contain people or places that the dreamer has encountered. Most images appear to be unique to a single dream.” That is most assuredly not the case with me – my dreams have frequent, recurring sets and guest stars, sometimes over the course of years, whom I have never met in my waking life. The scientists claim to know that most dream characters are one-time walk-ons “because some people have the ability to watch their own dreams as observers, without waking up,” the Times reported, at which point I began to feel a now-wakeful sense of disorientation. As an intra-dream observer, I should not be hosting those recurring characters. All of which tells me that if you want answers about dreaming, you’re just as likely to find them in a popular dream-interpretation book. Still, the subject is interesting, particularly when reading about it on the heels of a vivid dream.

The Times continued: “This state of consciousness, called lucid dreaming, is itself something a mystery — and a staple of New Age and ancient mystics. But it is a real phenomenon, one in which Dr. Hobson finds strong support for his argument for dreams as a physiological warm-up before waking.” In dozens of studies, according to the article, researchers have brought people into sleep laboratories and trained them to dream lucidly. “They do this with a variety of techniques, including auto-suggestion as head meets pillow (‘I will be aware when I dream; I will observe’) and teaching telltale signs of dreaming (the light switches don’t work; levitation is possible; it is often impossible to scream).”

Those same sleep researchers contend that lucid dreaming occurs during a mixed state of consciousness, -- “a heavy dose of REM with a sprinkling of waking awareness,” according to the article. Sleepwalking and night terrors, Hobson said, represent mixtures of muscle activation and non-REM sleep. Attacks of narcolepsy reflect an infringement of REM on normal daytime alertness. And what to make of someone, like me, who sleepwalks, has occasional night terrors, and is often aware that he is dreaming? The article didn’t say. Hobson’s point is that those two consciousnesses are separate systems that can operate simultaneously, which begs the question: If a person can be awake enough to recognize he’s dreaming, is the converse true? Could he be awake yet not recognize he’s drifting off into a dream world? Sort of?

Sure enough, the article noted that people who struggle with schizophrenia suffer delusions of unknown origin, but Hobson suggested such flights of imagination may be related to an abnormal activation of a dreaming consciousness. “‘Let the dreamer awake, and you will see psychosis,’ as Jung said,” the Times noted.

“For everyone else, the idea of dreams as a kind of sound check for the brain may bring some comfort, as well,” the article reported. “That ominous dream of people gathered on the lawn for some strange party? Probably meaningless. No reason to scream, even if it were possible.” To which I say: Try telling that to someone who has lost control of their dream, for whom the succession of doors in the anterooms ceases to open.

In my own dream, I eventually left the party that I had virtually thrown but had never quite controlled (even in the dream sense), and decided to go for a run, which is always fun in my dreams because each step spans 10 feet or more and I have boundless energy. As I ran through a darkened city (another familiar landscape in my dreams), I eventually came upon another man, a walker who began to run, too, as I passed. I was singing aloud – this was my dream, so why shouldn’t I? – an original REM song that I was inventing as I went along. I know: REM. Rapid Eye Movement, logically filed beside the band REM in the recesses of my brain. I was enjoying the song because it was at once REM’s and mine. I’d never heard it before. Then, as I ran with the new, unidentified runner beside me, he began to sing along. Eventually I ran out of words – I couldn’t “remember” what I in fact was inventing – but he continued on, singing multiple stanzas. I have no idea who he was – I would have preferred Michael Stipe, but it was his song now, transferred from a hodgepodge of REM sound bites stored in my brain, through my own consciousness, through my dream, to him, an imaginary character who knew more about what was in my brain than I did.

Whatever; finally, I was happy to let go. I let him sing the song, though in a sense it was actually me who was doing the singing, through an imagined character. By then, I guess, the dream had accomplished what it set out to do. My brain had the sensation that it was letting go. When I awoke, I felt at rest, and only wished I’d found a way to write the lyrics down.

The intruder

2011-10-20T13:12:00.000-07:00

It took a minute to sink in. An intruder had come in my house... while I was in the shower. In the shower. If you’ve seen Psycho, the thought of a stranger coming into your house while you’re showering -- naked, alone and unaware -- is enough to send a shiver down your spine. But when it actually happened, I was more bewildered than scared, probably because I never saw the person, and didn’t even know they’d been there until I came downstairs. That's my silhouette in the picture, by the way. Scary, but me.

This was years ago, but notably, it was the second intrusion within a few days. And it wasn’t to be the last time. In the first incident, someone had fiddled with the old lock on the double doors at the back of my house until they managed to get the doors open. I was away at the time, and for whatever reason they hadn’t crossed the threshold, and so, had not set off the alarm. Nothing was taken. I was baffled that someone would take what had to have been a considerable amount of time to pick the lock, then open the doors, just to stand there, looking in.

I hadn’t gotten around to installing a more secure lock by the time they returned. The truth is, I tend to be slow to react to alarming situations. I’m definitely not the person you’d want to count on to save you if, say, your car plunged into a flooded river. That’s not just a hypothetical – it happened once. I was driving with my friend Spencer late one night when a woman sped past us, lost control of her car and plunged into the floodwaters of the Pearl River. Only after I observed Spencer running through the headlights toward her bobbing car was I prompted to act. We ended up getting the woman out of the car, though she was drunk and clung to the steering wheel as the water poured in. She was wearing several large diamond rings and a full-length fur coat (this was in the seventies), and didn’t want to get out of the car. Who knows how long I’d have stayed in the truck had I not seen Spencer running through the headlights. The point is, there are times when it’s wise to take a moment to collect your thoughts, and there are times when it’s better to let those fast-twitch muscles lead the way.

Until the intruder arrived, I’d never had to respond to a crisis at my house, which stands in rural Mississippi, on a one-lane gravel road. It’s not visible from the larger, paved road that skirts it, and the one-lane road itself is a rutted tunnel through overhanging trees. To approach requires a level of blind commitment, and usually, when someone decides to see what’s down the curious little lane, they chicken out. I’ll hear car tires crunching gravel and glance out the window to see a vehicle tentatively mounting the low hill before the house. Then the vehicle stops, and after a moment’s hesitation, slowly backs out of the picture. Only Jehovah’s Witnesses routinely possess the temerity to press on, at which point I back away from the window. I’m not into talking religion with strangers.

The house, known as Holly Grove, is very old, built in 1832. It has a long hallway through the center with double doors at each end with old-fashioned skeleton key locks, which are comparatively easy to pick, though until the intruder found a way in I hadn’t much worried about that. Owing to the relative isolation, a person could break down the door with an axe if they wanted to and no one else would likely hear it. That horrifying thought – an axe-wielding intruder -- was, for me, suitable reason to not worry. I do have an alarm system, for when I’m away, and at the time had two territorial dogs who had never allowed a stranger to approach the house unmolested, or at least unannounced. The question, on that particularly morning, was how someone had managed to make it all the way in.

When I saw the open doors I stopped midway down the stairs. I felt the blood pumping through my veins, my face got hot and I hurried back upstairs to retrieve my shotgun; I popped in two shells and proceeded to stalk my own lair. I was pretty sure I would shoot whoever it was, but I found no one. Whoever it was must have known my dogs because they hadn’t barked, and now simply stood on the porch, eagerly wagging their tails, peering in. Hey! Someone was here a minute ago! Now you’re here, and all the doors are open! Dog food is on the way! Whatever was bothering me was most assuredly not bothering them.

I wondered: Was someone playing a joke on me? My default setting is to try to come up with a more normal explanation for whatever weird thing is happening. When I later told friends what had happened, some of them had the opposite reaction – they immediately sought out a paranormal explanation. Ghosts at Holly Grove! People often ask me if I’ve seen ghosts in my house, but it’s not something I think about much. I don’t know if ghosts exist, because the workings of the universe are often inscrutable. Energy changes forms without ever going away. Anything is possible. But aside from one curious incident, during which I heard the keys being banged on the old piano in my living room in the middle of the night (a piano that, I admit, has a long and troubled history), I’ve never put much stock in the idea of apparitions. If ghosts exist, and one haunted Holly Grove, would he or she not be indebted to me for having prevented the destruction of their haunt, by dismantling and reconstructing the house, as I had done in 1990 to prevent it from falling in at its original site? And if ghosts exist, would they really use their powers to do something as pedestrian as opening doors? I figured a ghost who aimed so low would probably not be worth worrying about.

Thieves were likewise ruled out because the intruder had passed on the opportunity to steal, which left mischievous friends, none of whom seemed likely to maintain an elaborate ruse over the course of several days. Which left: Crazed former lovers; escapees from mental institutions or jails (a Hollywood studio had once scouted the house as a location for a movie about precisely that, so the idea obviously held potential); and a proverbial watcher in the woods, though it would seem to be in the nature of such a watcher to remain in the woods. It never occurred to me to call the sheriff’s office. In assessing the possibilities, I simply moved from striving, ineffectively, for normalcy, to striving for acceptable semi-normalcy, whatever that might be. I refused to accept that my house could be a scary place.

I’ve always looked askance at people who get nervous when they stay at Holly Grove alone. Most people aren’t accustomed to relative isolation, to silence that’s occasionally punctuated by unidentifiable sounds, and to very dark nights; as a result, friends often overreact to what, for me, are routine occurrences. One night, for example, a friend fled in his car after hearing what he described as “something dragging a chain through the woods.” Such a sound would not cause alarm if you had observed a neighbor’s formerly tethered dog or horse dragging their rope or chain behind them through the woods -- a familiar, normal event in my world. When it came to the intrusions, I was looking for something such as that.

It soon occurred to me that the intrusions had coincided with the onset of a mildly disturbing episode involving a woman who, for the purposes of this story, I’ll call Estelle, who had taken to standing beside my road, day and night. This was notable after three or four days; it would become a source of fascination when it dragged on for five years, give or take a few months. I am not exaggerating. The woman, this Estelle, a down-the-road neighbor, was out there, around the clock, for five years. I have no way of knowing if she was the one who entered my house on those two occasions, and, in fact, a series of more recent intrusions implicated a deranged deer hunter. But the initial interloper’s arrival had coincided with Estelle’s appearance by the side of the road, and, if nothing else, this is a story of coincidences. At the very least, she would have been in a position to know.

For reasons that are still open for debate, Estelle began standing on the side of the road in the late 1990s, as if waiting for a ride. Many mornings I would encounter her standing by my gate when I left for work. She was always immaculately dressed and usually carried either a pen and notepad or a Bible. I’d roll down my window and say good morning, to which she’d invariably respond, “I’m waiting for my ride.” Mm hmm. When I returned in the evening she would still be standing there. Sometimes she acknowledged my return, sometimes not.

I don’t know when Estelle ate or slept, but she was always perfectly coiffed, even when she was standing by the road at 1:30 A.M. under an umbrella in sleeting rain. At one point her sister phoned me – I think Estelle had been out there for a couple of years by then -- to say she was concerned about her. My first thought was: It’s about time! She said Estelle had told her that Jesus instructed her to stand by the side of the road, to which the woman observed, “Now, you know Jesus didn’t do that.” Jesus: Admittedly eccentric, but not known to be a practical joker. Telling Estelle to stand by the side of the road until further notice would seem an uncharacteristically cruel and pointless prank, and if nothing else, would indicate a highly unlikely level of divine micromanagement. Later, Estelle’s sister said she’d told her she was writing a book, and she did carry that notepad. I have to say that if that were the case, I’d relish a chance to read it.

Like most communities in rural Mississippi, our little scattering of houses has a neighborhood watch program, and when our neighborhood watch captain, an elderly man who drove a vintage Mercedes with out-of-county license plates, who looked like a tired blues musician, died, I suggested that perhaps we should press Estelle into service, since she was already out there, 24-7. The idea was not well received. No one wanted to encourage her. I don’t know if Estelle came up with the same idea on her own, but it soon became apparent that she had appointed herself captain. She began watching everyone’s houses more diligently than before, always with her notepad in hand. As I drove away each morning she would write down my tag number. When I returned that evening she would clock me in.

This went on for a while, with Estelle monitoring everyone’s activities and logging it in her notebook, until she carried the concept of watching too far and people began to see her standing in the darkness outside their windows, peering in. Around that time the family decided to try to get her into some sort of treatment program, which backfired. Estelle managed to convince a social worker that her family beat her and drove her from the house. No one who knew the family put any credence in the story, but it served Estelle’s purposes. She was released, and returned to the road after an intermission of perhaps half a day.

I eventually discovered telltale evidence that someone had been sitting on my porch while I was gone – a chair that had been moved, or, when spring pollen coated the floor, footprints. Then I found the hallway doors open, twice, including that time in the shower. I responded by posting a note on the screened door of the back porch that said, “Estelle. I know it’s you. I have you on video. Go home.” Now and then I enjoyed a respite as Estelle explored other sections of the road. Then, after about five years, she went back inside her house, for reasons that were as inexplicable as those that had led her to take up her post outside. Word was that she was now frightened of the outside world. We did not see her for many, many years – seven, I think. She was still ensconced inside when the deer hunter, who I’ll call Nick, began his own wanderings through our domain.

Nick was well known to us, and had even been a guest in my house on numerous occasions, back when he was relatively normal. But around the time his wife left him he turned delusional. Even his fellow deer hunters, with whom he shared a lease of part of my property and the farm across the road, began to avoid him. He told elaborate, crazy stories about the supposed efforts of others to frame him for various crimes, and eventually went to jail – we think – for impersonating an FBI agent at the FBI headquarters in Jackson. I say “we think” because it was never clear where Nick was taken, only that he’d been held somewhere for a while. Clear enough, though, was this little life lesson: If you’re going to impersonate an FBI agent, you shouldn’t do it at the FBI headquarters. I’m sure that when he announced he was an FBI agent and said he wanted to see the files on a guy who happened to be him, the receptionist’s response was, “Please take a seat. Someone will be with you shortly.” And after a quick phone call, someone was.

We heard that Nick had subsequently spent some time in the state mental hospital, and that he had enjoyed his stay. When he was released, he returned to the deer camp across the road, though he was no longer a paying member and was decidedly unwelcome. The other hunters repeatedly ran him off but he always came back. He ended up sleeping on the ground there, beside his truck, or occasionally in his truck, for the better part of a year. At night I could see his little campfires in the distance, and I hoped he wouldn’t wander over to my house.

One night, during Nick’s long sabbatical, a friend who was staying at my house while I was away reported hearing the dogs barking, and, upon investigating, heard the sound of footsteps in the gravel. My first thought was Nick, because Estelle was by then trapped inside her house, but I didn’t mention it for fear of frightening my houseguest, who reported finding, the next day, a crumpled pack of Basic menthol cigarettes in the vicinity of where he had heard the footsteps in the gravel. As far as I knew, neither Nick nor Estelle smoked, so I wrote it off as someone who had perhaps run out of gas and approached the house only to be driven away by the dogs. Always the safe explanation. Once you get used to the idea of not one but two crazy people wandering around outside your house, you can explain anything away.

Nick began to worry me a bit, though, after I heard that the other deer hunters were studiously avoiding him because they found him strange and a bit intimidating. One of them said Nick had asked, rather belligerently, “Do you think I’m crazy?” to which the guy replied, “Well, kind of, compared to how you used to be.”

Then I saw Nick in his truck, sitting beside me at a traffic light in town, gazing at a large Bouie knife in his hands as he waited for the light to change. In my memory the knife glints in the sun as he turns it over and over in his hands. There is also a crazed glint in his eye. He didn’t see me, but I later saw him again, sitting in his truck, backed into the woods, watching cars go by.

When Daniel, the guy who lives in a cabin on my place, reported hearing a man shouting in the vicinity of Nick’s camp, which lasted for hours, and occasional gunfire, and death metal music blaring from the speakers of Nick’s truck, I began to get more worried. Discussions with neighbors ensued. Estelle was one thing; she wasn’t armed, or angry. Nick was a different story. Soon more reports began to circulate of extended, crazed shouting, notably, “GOD DAMMIT, QUIT!” and, counting: “One thousand EIGHT! One thousand NINE!” The episodes appeared to be building toward crescendo, so I spoke with a friend who owns the land where Nick was trespassing, who had avoided intervening because he felt sorry for him because he was alone, broke, jobless and homeless. I told him that I also felt sorry for Nick, but that it was not as easy to ignore his craziness when he was right across the road (which was not the case for my friend, who lives a few miles away). I also offered this scenario: Say you read a news account of a guy who went crazy and, like, opened fire on cars on the interstate, or on people in a crowded mall, and there were quotes from neighbors who said, Well, yes, we wondered about the guy, because we heard him shouting alone for days, and saw him gazing at his knife, and backed up in the woods watching traffic… Well, what would you think of those neighbors? You’d think, My God, people, why didn’t you do something?

I’m not saying Nick is the kind of person who would inflict harm on anyone. I’m saying I don’t know, but the signs were not good, either way. Finally, after a neighbor’s wife expressed her misgivings to the landowner, he decided he had to do something, so he called the sheriff and asked them to escort Nick off the property. They arrived one morning in bulletproof vests and, using the PA system on their patrol car, commanded him to step into the open. When he did, they told him he had to leave. His response was, “Well, now, I’m homeless,” to which one of the deputies reportedly replied, “Actually, you already were.”

After this, Nick began sneaking onto the property and camping at different locations, until the locks were changed on all the gates, at which point another neighbor claimed to have caught him emerging from the woods behind his house, which prompted him to call the deputies, who, he said, told him that they had received numerous similar complaints.

The problem with this part of the story is that the neighbor’s son claimed it wasn’t Nick who emerged from the woods, but an elderly black woman with her family, who had gotten lost and had wandered down the creek to their house. Nick is white, and, of course, travels alone. There is no way he could be mistaken for an elderly black woman and her family. There is also no way that two such conflicting stories from members of the same household could be believed. Clearly, the story was morphing, which is what often happens when people are confronted by inexplicable things.

About this time, I discovered that someone had moved a few things around in my garage. Nothing was stolen. Things had merely been moved around. Seeing this, I thought of a story a friend of mine, a psychiatric nurse, once told me about a deluded woman who worked in a bookstore and reported that each night someone broke into the store and moved one book to a different location. Only one book. This woman would spend hours each morning roaming the store, trying to determine which book had been moved. As an aside, the woman also reported that she always observed at least one dwarf in every restaurant she entered, which she presumed was an indication that the federal government was monitoring her movements, because who else could afford to employ so many dwarves? The point being, once you start thinking a crazy person is moving tools around your garage, there is always the possibility that, well… who is really off-kilter here?

I got home a few days later to find that a book – yes, a book – had been moved from the spot where I had left it on my back porch. Now I was absolutely sure of… what?

When you live alone, items can remain unmoved for long periods of time, which had been the case with the book. I had been on the porch that morning and had seen it, gathering dust, and made a mental note to take it inside, but got preoccupied and forgot. Later that day I went to get the book and it was in an entirely different spot. Now, finally, I was truly alarmed, so much so that I went to my friend Paul, who lives nearby, and presented the possibilities: I was losing my mind; my house was haunted; or I had an intruder. Paul smiled and said, “I know the answer! Estelle is back outside!” He had seen her on a recent night, returned to the side of the road. I was relieved. I reposted a sign on my screened door instructing her to go home. I also installed a latch on the door. Given all of this, I thought I should explain the situation to Daniel, who lives in the cabin, stressing the fact that Estelle was, as far as was known, harmless. Creepy, but harmless. He then asked about Nick. I told him Nick was now an elderly black woman with a family.

You often encounter unusual characters in big cities, but it’s mostly in passing. In rural areas, and particularly the character-rich rural areas that are so common in Mississippi, they truly stand out. I’ve always believed that one of the reasons Mississippi has produced so much great literature is that its human dramas stand out in bold relief. And because of the state’s notoriously conflicted history, there are a lot of them. Characters aren’t relegated to background noise. They sometimes appear on your porch, more than once. They also create their own microclimates. Faced with the prospects of both Estelle and Nick roaming freely through our domains, we – my neighbors and I – not only were unable to ignore them, but began, essentially, to conjure them. During a particularly intense lightning storm one night, Paul saw the flashing outside his windows and thought it was Nick roaming around with a flashlight. When his electric gate malfunctioned and he found it open when it should have been closed, and vice versa, he suspected Nick. When I couldn’t find my car keys, I wondered if Estelle had entered my house and hidden them from me. When Paul’s wife Libby was walking in the woods and caught a glimpse of what turned out to be one of the deer hunters, who did not reply when she called out, she ran back to the house, imagining Nick on her trail.

Lately, the mysterious non-encounters appear to have abated. Everything has remained largely in place. After her brief encore, Estelle has returned to the inside. Nick, though everyone remains poised to see him, has not actually been sighted for weeks. But that doesn’t stop us from wondering. When the moon emerges from behind the clouds, and a branch breaks in the woods, I always wonder if one of them is approaching my house. “I hear you, Estelle! I mean Nick!” I might call out.

I also wonder if the two of them ever cross paths as they explore what is, for them, very familiar terrain. For us, their particular terra will forever be incognita, and thank God for that. Sometimes you just don’t know. And in the end, you may not even want to.

A world with no mosquitoes

2011-09-20T12:04:00.000-07:00

A homeless guy who set up camp down the road from my place in Mississippi suffered what I suspect was, at least partly, a mosquito-borne psychosis. The consensus among the neighbors was that he had simply lost his mind. But losing your mind is never a simple matter -- a mind has to go someplace to get lost, and if, whenever it gets there, it finds its body tormented by mosquitoes, 24 hours a day, it’s liable to do far crazier things than it might otherwise have done.

I’m talking about a guy standing alone in the woods shouting, “God-damn it! Quit! Quit!” for hours on end, so that a synaptically stable person who lived within earshot came out of his house one morning, heard it and noted: Meltdown. When the person who lived in the house returned from the grocery store several hours later, he observed that the rant was still going on; even later, as he sat on the sofa watching TV, he realized (during the brief lull in the audio), that the voice yet cried in the wilderness; it did so deep into the night.

I wouldn’t disagree that the guy’s behavior was, for lack of a better word, crazy, and there had been plenty of other signs and portents. But one day, when the incessant buzzing of mosquitoes in my ears drove me to my own tiny breaking point, and I began shouting at them, I thought of him and wondered.

Another neighbor had reported hearing endless counting in the vicinity of the homeless guy’s sad little camp, much like chants, going up into the thousands, for hours on end. Was this, I wondered, perhaps a manic enumeration of mosquitoes? Whether the mosquito mania was cause or effect is hard to say, but sitting alone in the woods for days on end, with nothing to do, is one thing, and doing so while being eaten alive by mosquitoes is another.

I never had a chance to confirm my suspicions about the homeless guy’s breaking point – the sheriff’s deputies eventually escorted him off the property. But I'm pretty confident about the role mosquitoes played in pushing him, if not over the edge, at least into a realm that most of us fortunately never go. People tend to want to distance themselves from his sort of behavior, and rightly so. It’s like wanting a screened porch. If you knew about this person, you would feel sorry for him, but you would not likely attempt to intervene. That’s what deputies with Kevlar vests and loudspeakers are for.

The homeless guy spent the entire summer squatting on someone else’s property, without even a tent. It was a long, hot summer, most of it with relatively low mosquito activity, owing to a drought, but it was bookended by the inevitable counterbalance – droves of mosquitoes that were basically looting the world, with nothing to lose. By the end of August they were emerging from high-mortality conditions and no doubt instinctively knew they were headed, in a few short months (a lifetime for a mosquito) into colder weather. Once they got the moisture they needed to reproduce, they began dive-bombing every living thing.

For those of you who do not already know, because you are, what? school children? I should point out that when I refer to “mosquitoes” I’m talking about the females, which are the ones that bite. As a result of what seems a creator’s oversight, the females need more protein than they can generate on their own to develop their eggs, and the only way for them to get it is by stealing it. I suppose you could argue that we steal protein, too, from cows and tofu and so forth, but at least we build things, right? Mosquitoes take and take and appear to give nothing in return, which is another reason to hate them, if we needed one. One wonders: Is their dreadful buzzing and biting really necessary, from a cosmic perspective? Someone (me) innocently emerges from his house, planning only to take out the garbage, and therefore has not bothered to slather on ridiculous amounts of Deep Woods Off; is this really reason for parasitic party time?

I’m into the whole positive and negative forces of the universe thing. I understand that you have to have the good and the bad. God needs Satan, and the feeling is mutual. But sometimes the balance seems to tilt too far in one direction, which appears very much to be the case with mosquitoes. Normally, nature doesn’t like it when any one organism triumphs too well. The natural response is to strike the victor down. Why is that not the case with… vectors?

Seriously, this September. I have never seen the like of mosquitoes in Mississippi. It’s not possible to go outside at my house, which, admittedly, stands near the confluence of two sluggish creeks, without being bitten. If you spray yourself down with bug repellent they go after your eyes and lips and into your ear canals. Forget peeing outside. I love summer, and don’t mind when it’s 100 degrees and 90 percent humidity outside, but at times like this the idea of a frost holds certain attractions. And I say that knowing that “we need a hard freeze to kill the bugs” is total nonsense – it doesn’t work. Even after we get hit by one of those “Arctic clippers” that keep the weather channel people engorged between tornado outbreaks, when the temperature goes down to 14 degrees and everyone’s pipes freeze, two days later it’s 70 degrees and the mosquitoes are back at it. They apparently have places they can go, unlike the homeless guy down the road.

To put this September in context, it was extremely dry in July and August, and after a tropical storm came through and dumped a foot of rain on us, everywhere became an emergency mosquito breeding ground. Wedged between protracted drought and inevitable colder weather, they went on a hedonistic binge, which required blood, and lots of it. Their behavior reminded me of how bad the mosquitoes sometimes get on Horn Island, out in the Gulf, where, when you step ashore with your attractively exposed and remarkably thin skin, word quickly spreads among a population that must otherwise stick its probosci into animals protected by fur, feathers or hides that are used in the manufacture of handbags and cowboy boots. You, in your board shorts, are a mosquito’s dream come true.

At Holly Grove, therefore, retrieving something from the woods behind the garage – a den of unparalleled mosquito fervor – means putting on a rain coat, with a hood, when there isn’t a cloud in the sky, and meanwhile withdrawing your hands into the sleeves, like children do. Even then, you’re liable to get bitten on the nose.

My dog, whose name is Girl, spends her days lying or walking in a cloud of mosquitoes, her coat frightfully adorned with scores of them at any given moment. She is a veritable moveable feast. I’ve tried spraying her with Off, too, because it’s an awful sight to see, this unchecked mosquito-feeding upon your dog, but all that’s accomplished is to make her run from me when she sees me with the can. In order to pet Girl Dog I have to let her into the house, which is not so attractive for her as it normally would be, because I have to wave my hands over her and hurry her along to disperse the hordes of mosquitoes and prevent her from escorting them inside. Even when I’m outside, slathered with Off, and see Girl Dog approaching, I dread her getting near because I know what attends her. Sometimes, in fact, the tiny universe of mosquitoes gets to me before she does. I have, on occasion, when walking to my truck, resorted to running to avoid being repeatedly bitten, and once safely inside, have heard the tiny menacing sound of mosquitoes tapping on the glass. Seriously: There is such a sound. It’s insane, which is why I felt especially sorry for the homeless guy, and also why I decided to do some internet research to find out what it would be like if there were no more mosquitoes in the world, forever and ever amen.

Would that be a bad thing – the disappearance of mosquitoes, which are, you know, one of God’s creations, etc.? I know it would be nice for us, but I also know about what biologists refer to as the “web of life,” and the interconnectivity of species, and how if you remove one thing (even if it is, to us, a bad thing), it can have dangerous consequences for everything else. Like, if you got rid of all the snakes, you’d be overrun with mice and rats and thus, the plague. Every single thing plays a role. But, I wondered, would it be worth sacrificing a few good things, if that’s what it took, to rid the world of mosquitoes? I mean, if something has to go extinct, could it not be them?

You could argue, as some biologists do, that mosquitoes provide food for birds, or whatever, or even that, like viruses, they keep various populations in check, including ours. But if you argued that, who would vote for you? Even biologists who study mosquitoes, who’ve formed their professional identities around them, and make money from studying them, tend to admit that they’re basically a bad thing. These are people who submit tranquilized mice to captive mosquitoes, which then drain the mice of their blood, for science. The mosquitoes, by the way, would do the same to you if you sat out in the woods long enough. They would actually suck you dry.

The best source of information I found online for fantasizing about a world without mosquitoes – anopheles snuff porn, if you will – was an article in the July 2010 issue of Nature magazine titled “A World Without Mosquitoes,” which summarized its findings this way: “Eradicating any organism would have serious consequences for ecosystems — wouldn't it? Not when it comes to mosquitoes, finds Janet Fang.”

Fang. OK. The author.

What Janet Fang found, among other things, was that a scientist at Maryland’s Walter Reed Army Institute of Research actually raises mosquitoes, feeding the larvae ground-up fish food and offering “gravid females” blood to suck from the bellies of unconscious mice — they drain 24 of the rodents a month, and who (the scientist) has been studying mosquitoes for 20 years, yet “would rather they were wiped off the Earth.” The last part serves as a reminder that the scientist is, in the end, comprised of flesh and blood. One wonders if she’s ever tempted to open the door to her mosquito chamber and bomb it with Raid.

The scientist’s sentiment, Fang writes, “is widely shared,” if for no other reason than that malaria, which is borne by mosquitoes, infects some 247 million people worldwide each year, and kills nearly one million. Mosquitoes also spread yellow fever, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis, Rift Valley fever, something with the catchy name of Chikungunya virus, and West Nile virus. Plus, in the Arctic, mosquitoes form swarms thick enough to asphyxiate caribou.

If, by magic, the world’s 3,500 species of mosquitoes (only “a couple of hundred” of which bite or otherwise bother humans) disappeared, the drawbacks would be largely acceptable, according to the article. Sure, some insects, birds and fish would lose a food source, and some plants would not get pollinated, but the consensus seems to be: So, what?

As the Nature article notes, “in many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. Life would continue as before — or even better.” I should point out that there’s a hidden message in that statement, which is that if mosquitoes disappeared, something else would start biting us just as bad. Insect ecologist Steven Juliano, of Illinois State University, in Normal, told Fang that when it comes to the major disease vectors, it’s difficult to see what the downside would be to the removal of mosquitoes, other than what he characterized as “collateral damage.”

“Collateral damage” is a freighted term, if ever there was one, and no doubt some scientists would disagree with the Normal guy’s assessment. A world that is safer for humans is not necessarily a stronger world, after all. But for most of us the disappearance of every last mosquito on Earth would, not surprisingly, be viewed as pretty good news.

The article also quotes a North Carolina entomologist who observed that without mosquitoes the number of migratory birds which nest in the tundras of the far North could be cut in half, due to the loss of a primary food source. The article does offer a disclaimer that some scientists believe the seasonal abundance of mosquitoes in the tundra – and thus, their importance as a food source for wildlife -- may be overestimated, for the simple reason that they’re so annoyingly attracted to us. Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the mosquitoes, in other words.

Among the potential ramifications of a theoretical worldwide mosquito eradication, perhaps the most interesting involves those caribou herds, which are thought to select their migratory paths facing into the wind for the purpose of escaping mosquito swarms. As the article notes, “A small change in path can have major consequences in an Arctic valley through which thousands of caribou migrate, trampling the ground, eating lichens, transporting nutrients, feeding wolves, and generally altering the ecology. Taken all together, then, mosquitoes would be missed in the Arctic — but is the same true elsewhere?”

Well, yes, in fact. Some species of fish would likely go extinct without mosquitoes, according to the article, including the appropriately named mosquito fish (Gambusia affinis), which would cause a ripple effect throughout the food chain. Many species of birds, insects, spiders, salamanders, lizards and frogs would also lose a primary food source. This would happen, basically, all over the world. Mosquitoes breed everywhere there is moisture, with some needing stagnant bodies of water but others requiring only a puddle in a tree stump or an old tire, or even the moisture that condenses on the undersides of leaves. Mosquitoes feed on decaying leaves, organic detritus and microorganisms, and they can do their thing in a very short time, such as during the brief summers of the otherwise frozen North.

One scientist quoted in the article agreed that despite the downsides, other organisms would fill the void if mosquitoes disappeared, and offered the not-entirely-reassuring analogy that, “If you pop one rivet out of an airplane's wing, it’s unlikely that the plane will cease to fly.” Still, some of the downsides would be impossible to predict. As a New Jersey scientist pointed out, people would also love to get rid of biting midges commonly called no-see-ums, but if that happened, tropical crops of cacao would no longer get pollinated, which, perhaps more alarmingly than the specter of a planet losing one of its wing-rivets, “would result in a world without chocolate.”

Obviously, the ramifications of planet-wide mosquitocide are debatable. As Fang notes, mosquitoes provide an ideal route for the spread of pathogenic microbes, yet those, too, are crucial to that pesky web of life. In the end, the ecological effect of eliminating harmful mosquitoes would be: More people. “Many lives would be saved; many more would no longer be sapped by disease,” Fang concludes. So: Good for us, and probably bad for the planet.

It’s interesting to think about, but that’s all we’re going to do. Planetary mosquito eradication is not going to happen. Mosquitoes are incomparably adaptable, due to their fecundity and short life spans -- that much we know. But it doesn’t stop us from imagining a world from which they are gone, or of trying to eliminate them from areas nearby.

I remember, as a child, the excitement I and my friends felt when we heard the approaching sound of the compressor on “the mosquito man’s truck,” which, on certain summer evenings, filled the city’s neighborhoods with a thick, white cloud of pungent insecticide. The sound of the mosquito man’s truck was more thrilling even than the tunes emitted by the ice cream truck when it made its presence known a block away. We enjoying running behind the truck, getting lost in the cloud, to emerge, perhaps, on another street, unsure where we were, our respiratory tracts filled with nervous toxins. No one seemed to care about the health risks back then, our only admonition being that we not get hit by cars as we ran into and out of the cloud.

Eventually, due to studies which showed that whatever insecticide was in that fog was harmful to the environment, the mix was changed and the mosquito man’s truck began emitting a clear, boring mist. We sat on our porches and watched the disappointing specter pass us by. At least there were no mosquitoes.

A friend of mine recently told me that he had a new anti-mosquito misting system installed in the eaves of his house, which periodically releases a non-toxic, natural mosquito repellant, which works very well, though only if you’re on the porch or nearby. Chemical insect repellent is likewise only moderately effective, and feels pretty gross. And scientists tell us that bug zappers – those black-light contraptions that people install by their patios, are not only ineffective at controlling mosquitoes but may kill far more beneficial insects, including some that feed on mosquitoes and their larvae. Not that people with bug zappers care. In the endless conflict between us and them, it is enough, apparently, to hear that zap and imagine that there’s one less tiny, insistent, buzzing menace in the crazy, mixed-up world.

Photo originally published in National Geographic.

Author photos

2011-09-18T22:01:00.000-07:00

There are two tasks that most writers detest: Pitching story ideas to publishers, and having their author photos made. The former will always be with us; the latter is something that rears its head periodically, dragging with it the weight of years that have somehow failed to steel the author's invariably sensitive ego, which is now charged with publicly personifying both itself and its creation, the book, for skeptical shoppers and for posterity. Vanity, is what it is. Although, I must say, this elderly gent doesn't seem to mind it one bit, and he pulls it off pretty well.

Who shall I be? The pensive author, perusing a book (inevitably, his own), sitting at a desk, refillable ink pen in hand, musing at a computer monitor or, in olden days, a typewriter? Chin resting on the palm of his hand in a paneled study? Glance around the room, surely there’s a pipe in there somewhere. But wait, this guy's actually using one for a prop, still.

Also, those look suspiciously not like books on the shelf behind him, which makes you wonder what he's staring at.

It's possible to pull off the reflective author with pipe thing, of course. This guy did it pretty well -- in fact

he's probably got 10 author photos where he's holding the stereotypical prop. It appears to have been a kind of branding, but considering that he's the greatest writer in American history, to date, I guess we should give him a pass.

Then there's the glossy head-shot, with all it evokes about success, but not to the point of implying inaccessibility. Everyone is attracted to good-looking people, right? So long as they don't appear to be overly aware of their good looks. This one works, I think, though it may simply be because she's so pretty.

There’s the happy author, the offbeat author, the serious author, the author "in the field," the author posing with his dog, each with their own special lighting, backdrops and facial expressions. And what to wear? You dress like a writer, which is to say, your clothes say very little.

But I keep coming back to... the hand, used as a prop, literally. Lots and lots of those.

The updating of the author photo is now upon me and the co-author of my next book, Michael Rejebian, and though the photographer we used had an original take, and chose a suitably decadent venue – an abandoned building in the ruined Farish Street neighborhood of Jackson, Miss., she could not quite overcome my distaste for posing for author photos, and it shows.

In most of my author photos I am borderline morose. This one is actually my slightly happy pose. Also, I’m staring away from the camera, as if to say… what? That I don’t know my picture is being taken?

For my first author photo I used a picture taken by my friend Nancy Goldman on the occasion of my 40th birthday trip to Italy. It was a truly candid shot, taken by someone I liked, at a happy time. That’s why it worked so well, right up to the point that at a signing for my book Mississippi in Africa, in 2003, someone asked, in passing, “When was this picture of you taken?” The only possible subtext of the question was that it did

not appear to have been taken yesterday. I had to face the fact that as much as I liked to think so, I no longer looked precisely as I had looked just eight years before. I didn’t even know, until the question was asked, that it had been that long.

This is how you get those occasional obituaries in the newspaper where someone who died at age 92 looks, in the photo, as if he wasn’t a day past 40. He just didn't like most of the pictures taken during the last 52 years of his life.

Thus chastened, I arranged to reshoot the Mississippi in Africa author photo for the first paperback edition, using something more “up-to-date.” James Patterson, a very skilled photographer in Jackson, took a series of photos that he and his then-assistant pronounced really wonderful, but in which, I couldn’t help but observe, I looked considerably older than the 27-year-old I still saw myself as.

Next up, the author photo for my book Sultana, taken by a photog friend in New York City, Everett McCourt. It's artistic and striking, but I look a bit ill. Also, I appear to be as grave as a monk -- actually an appropriate look, I suppose, for the author of a book in which thousands of people die, but still.

For the upcoming book, We're With Nobody, I needed to look the opposite of morose, because the book is both serious and funny – quirky, even. But in this effort I was thwarted by the photo-shoot dynamic, in which I appear to be very studiously considering what I look like, to the detriment of how I look.

So I went back to James, who had taken a series of photos at my house for a magazine article, and offered to let me use any of them for my author photo, gratis. For the purposes of the upcoming book, I’d have actually rather gone with something less mainstream, such as the next one you see, below. But at a certain point trying to look “different” speaks to a familiar paradigm – look how little I seem to care about the paradigm of author publicity photos, even as I artificially showcase my face for an author publicity photo. Also, I think this photo is about eight years old now, too. And one of my eyes is open a little wider than the other.

It could be worse, I guess. You could always come off looking strange, like these people who turned up during a Google search of "author photos:"

Or just, not someone whose book you'd want to read.

But there's always the possibility that you'll look cool, middle aged and appropriate to the subject matter, such as my friend Sebastian, who's got a lot to work with.

In the end, I’m thinking of going with this one, taken by James, but I go back and forth. I'm still not looking at the camera, but at least I'm not morose, or weird, and I'm not propping my head up with my hand. Plus, 10 years from now, it’ll look young to me.

Like I said, it's all about purposeful vanity. I've posted a note about the process of selecting a photo of myself, as if you should care, and used it as an excuse to highlight various photos of myself, in none of which does my bald spot show. That is one more reason why this is such a distasteful task. I need you to like my photo.

This is Michael, by the way, having his author photo shot by Christina Cannon:

All of us, when we see ourselves in a photo with a group of people, our eyes invariably land on our own image first. We care how the world sees us, and I can assure you that it's even worse when you need to personify a product that you very much want the world to buy.

Writing, and the Like

2011-09-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

As some of you know, my next book, co-authored with Michael Rejebian, is about doing opposition political research across the U.S., and will be published by HarperCollins in January.

As part of the publicity effort for the book, our publicist has given us a homework assignment: To expand the reader base of my existing online sites, as well as to create a new website and Facebook page for Michael and me that's specifically about the new book, to generate buzz.

If you're like me, you may be a bit resistant to promotional use of Facebook, and if that's the case, feel free to disregard the notification you may receive asking you to "like" the "Alan Huffman Like" page (for lack of a better term to differentiate it from my personal Facebook page, which is also, logically but a bit confusingly, called "Alan Huffman"). The "like" page is where I post links to www.alanhuffman.blogspot.com, as well as updates about other articles and books I've published, author signings, related news stories, etc.

If, on the other hand, you do want to know what's going on with the new book and with my other publications, liking the Facebook page will keep you up-to-date and will meanwhile help us get the word out -- something that's pretty vital now.

Here's the link to the Alan Huffman "like" page (unfortunately, you'll have to copy and paste -- blogspot doesn't automatically convert the url to a hyperlink):

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Alan-Huffman/67586220217?sid=5134bfb0b56">

You can also link to the blogspot and Facebook updates pages from my website, www.alanhuffman.com. The blogspot page gives you the option to be a follower, if you'd prefer that route over Facebook. When the new book website and Facebook page go up, I'll post the links.

Mississippi in Africa update

2011-09-16T17:42:00.000-07:00

Kaiser Railey, January 2001

It was a remarkable story that seemed to unravel into thin air. Several versions had been in circulation for generations -- for more than 150 years, in fact. But in each of them the screen went blank just as the plot started getting good.

That's precisely how writers find themselves in the throes of writing a book. Once I heard the story of Mississippi in Africa, I had to know how it ended. How could anyone hear that a group of slaves had emigrated from a Mississippi plantation, decades before the Civil War, to a place in Liberia called Mississippi in Africa, and not want to know what had become of them?

The plot was launched in the 1830s, when an antebellum Mississippi cotton planter and Revolutionary War veteran named Isaac Ross decreed in his will that after his daughter’s death his slaves should be freed and his plantation, called Prospect Hill, should be sold, with the proceeds used to pay the way for the freed slaves to a colony established for the purpose on the coast of West Africa, in what is now the nation of Liberia. A very weird story. I can't say, unequivocally, why Ross did what he did; you can decide for yourself by reading the book. But perhaps not surprisingly, some of his heirs were averse to the idea of selling the plantation, freeing the slaves, and paying their way “back to Africa,” in the vernacular of the times, though most of the slaves had been in America for many generations, and no doubt knew as much about the African continent as a person in Des Moines named O’Reilly knows about Ireland.

After a bitter, decade-long contest of Ross’s and his daughter’s wills by his grandson, Isaac Ross Wade, during which a slave uprising led to the burning of the Prospect Hill mansion, the death of a young girl, and the lynching of a group of slaves, approximately 300 of the slaves did immigrate to Liberia, beginning around 1845, to a parallel universe called Mississippi in Africa. A few of the slaves were not given the option to immigrate, for unknown reasons, and one family was freed outright and allowed to move to a free state in the U.S. What ultimately happened to the ones who were freed outright is still unknown; I hoped my book would spark some revelation about them, but so far, no go.

Because there were many conflicting versions of the story, I set out to find descendants of all the relevant groups in the U.S. and in Liberia. The immigrants from Prospect Hill were the largest group to settle in Liberia, a nation established by the American Colonization Society, which was comprised of abolitionists and slave holders who had different, yet strangely complementary reasons for wanting to export freed slaves. The book Mississippi in Africa was the result of my research; this note was prompted by a reader’s email inquiring about the people I interviewed and got to know during the course of my research.

During that research, which began in the late 1990s, I interviewed Isaac Ross’s descendants in Mississippi, most of whom were proud of his legacy of having freed his slaves (and who, in a curious twist, turned out to be both black and white); I interviewed descendants of the heirs who had contested the will, who had a decidedly different take on the story, and descendants of the slaves who had chosen to remain in Mississippi, enslaved, and, finally, of descendants of the freed slaves who had immigrated to Mississippi in Africa.

In Liberia, which was at the time mired in a bloody civil war, I found that the immigrants had largely assumed the role formerly assigned to their masters, occupying the top tier of Liberian society, and that while some had been benevolent toward those less fortunate than them, others had oppressed and even enslaved members of the indigenous population. That disparity contributed directly to the nation’s two civil wars, from 1989 to 1996 and from 1999 to 2003, illustrating that Dixie isn’t the only place where old times are not forgotten.

The Prospect Hill story became more remarkable the deeper I probed, and along the way I met a remarkable cast of characters who shed light not only on its outcome but on the complex racial dynamics and cultural legacy of Ross’s actions. As readers of the book may recall, among those characters were three young men, the Railey brothers, native Liberians whose ancestors had come from Mississippi, who were, in 2001, when I arrived, trapped in a war zone. The Railey brothers made sure I was safe while I was in Liberia, and we remained in touch for many years. I still occasionally correspond with one of them, Augustus.

I also occasionally get emails from readers who are curious about certain aspects of the story, and I recently heard from one who wondered how the Raileys and a few other people mentioned in the book are faring today. Here was a reader after my own heart, someone who recognizes that no story ever truly ends, that as long as the characters live and breathe, it continues to unfold. I only wish I had more information to impart.

In any event, herewith is what I do know, 10 years later.

In her email, the reader, a woman named Susan Hataway, wrote that she wondered “if the people all survived these past ten years... especially the Railey brothers and Peter Robert Toe and family. Well, actually, I wonder about all of the Raileys including ‘The Old Ma’.”

Among those, Peter Toe Roberts (whose name, I regret to say, I transposed in the book, as Peter Roberts Toe) was the man who was to have guided me to Mississippi in Africa from the nation’s capital, Monrovia, until that plan fell apart. The Old Ma was the Raileys’ grandmother, a delightful, indefatigable woman who had carried on her Mississippi ancestors’ tradition of quilting, at which she was quite accomplished. As far as I know, the Railey brothers themselves – Edward, Kaiser and Augustus -- are all well, but I only know bits and pieces about Peter.

For many years the Railey brothers and I corresponded by phone and by email, as they sought to extract themselves from the poverty and violence of a nation at war with itself. What they really wanted was to go to college, either in the U.S. or at the University of Liberia, in Monrovia. I was never able to find a U.S. university or institution to sponsor them, and it takes money to attend the University of Liberia, which is something that was always in short supply. Theirs was not an easy lot, but the brothers are, if nothing else, persistent.

During our correspondence, I received this thoughtful email from their sister, Princess:

Hi Alan,
Hope you are doing fine as we are. We, my brothers and myself would like to wish you happy belated birthday and pray God's choicest blessings upon you.

Augustus is getting married on the 19th day of July and has chosen you as one of his Patrons. Hope it meets your approval. Have a pleasant Easter as we all retrospect on our risen Lord and Saviour.

Bye for now and stay blessed.

From all of us:
Princess, Kaiser, Augustus and Edward Railey.

Just so you know, a patron, in this context, is just what it sounds like – a benefactor.

In another email, Augustus informed me that their mother and grandmother, the Old Ma, had died within a few months of each other. The Old Ma had suffered a stroke during a meeting to discuss funeral arrangements for another family member. Edward emailed to say that before she died “she asked us as to weather we can still hear from you, and we told her only by e-mail.”

Ouch. OK.

Also since deceased is Rev. Charleston Bailey, a descendant of freed American slaves whom I interviewed, at the Raileys’ suggestion, in Monrovia. Rev. Bailey was a font of information, and I was sorry to hear that he was gone. He was 90, which is impossibly old by Liberian standards.

My other guide while I was in Liberia – he was really more of a “fixer,” in the parlance of journalists, the chief person I relied upon to ensure that I didn’t get into trouble -- was Jefferson Kanmoh, who I identified in the book only as a “student activist” for fear that he would suffer repercussions from the insane and violent government of then-President Charles Taylor. Only after the war ended and Taylor was exiled did I feel comfortable revealing his name.

More than anyone I met there, Jeff, who was imprisoned, nearly starved and was shot during his time as a student activist, serves as a shining beacon for Liberia -- brilliant, fearless, circumspect, noble and morally upright. Once legitimate elections were held in postwar Liberia, he was elected to the national Congress, representing Sinoe County, which encompasses Mississippi in Africa, as well as Louisiana, which was settled by freed slaves from that state. Jefferson and I continue to stay in touch.

Through a mutual acquaintance who introduced us, Jefferson had set me up with the Raileys, and with Peter Toe Roberts, who planned to host me in Mississippi in Africa, before the Taylor government intervened and prevented me from going there. Peter, who endured his own travails, was more or less a doctor in Mississippi in Africa, and, like Jefferson Kanmoh, is an honorable, compassionate and committed man who has saved many lives. He and I remained in touch for several years, but have since lost contact. Sorry, Susan. And sorry, Peter.

I contacted a mutual friend of Peter’s in hopes of finding out how he is getting along, but I haven’t heard back, and my googling produced no results. I did find a younger man named Peter Toe on Facebook who hails from Sinoe County and now lives in Monrovia, but so far I’ve gotten no response to my message asking if he is related to the Peter Roberts I knew. The last word I got about Peter was from an American doctor working for a missionary group who had rented a house from him in Greenville, the capital of Sinoe County, in 2008. At the time, he was doing well.

Another key character, Nathan Ross Sr., the son of a Prospect Hill slave who emigrated to Liberia and fathered him when he was an old man – remarkably, the math adds up -- died in 2004 in Maryland (in the U.S., as opposed to Maryland, Liberia). I have lost touch with his son Nathan Jr., who, at last report, was living in the U.S., and his nephew Benjamin, who I interviewed in Monrovia when he was attempting to emigrate to the U.S.

Among the notable sites I visited in Liberia, two institutions are still in operation: The J.J. Ross High School, a private school in Monrovia established by the Ross immigrants; and the National Museum, which was looted numerous times during the civil war and today houses a collection of only about 100 of its original 6,000-plus artifacts. Fortunately, several historical paintings were protected during the fighting by a man who barricaded himself inside a building across the street to prevent their destruction.

Back in the U.S., Ross descendant Turner Ashby Ross, who I quoted in the book, is also since deceased. But Ann Brown, who helped me piece together the Ross family’s genealogy, is still around, diligently documenting graves throughout Jefferson County. And James Belton, who is descended from Prospect Hill slaves who chose not to emigrate to Liberia, and who filled in some of the most important blanks in the story, is retired now, living in McComb, Miss., busying himself with researching his family history and organizing reunions.

The Prospect Hill house itself, which is the second on the site, having been built in 1854 after the first was burned in the uprising, by Isaac Ross’s grandson (the one who contested the will, and somehow managed to regain the estate), still stands, but it is badly deteriorated. It was recently bought by a New Mexico-based group called the Archaeological Conservancy with the aim of stabilizing it until someone can be found to buy and restore it; the conservancy plans to retain an archaeological easement to ensure that the plantation’s buried artifacts remain available to scholars in hopes that they can shed light on the property’s history.

The conservancy’s regional director, Jessica Crawford, who facilitated the purchase of the house, represents the newest addition to the cast of characters of the Prospect Hill saga, having put in countless hours cleaning out the structure, nailing down rusty tin on the roof, and clearing underbrush from the grounds and the adjacent cemetery, which is the site of a towering monument erected in Isaac Ross’s honor by the Mississippi Colonization Society. Jessica has also located several descendants whom I never came across, and has befriended a peacock left behind by Prospect Hill’s last owner. The peacock is currently the only occupant (unless you count the unidentified growling thing that inhabits the rubble of a collapsed rear room); Jessica named him “Isaac.”

Among the other key figures in the Liberian saga, former Liberian President Charles Taylor remains imprisoned in The Hague following the conclusion, in March 2011, of his three-year trial for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Liberia and neighboring Sierra Leone during those nation’s civil wars. A judgment of his guilt or innocence is expected before the end of the year.

"Isaac" on the grounds of Prospect Hill; photo by Jessica Crawford

In search of Jan-Michael Vincent

2011-09-12T16:26:00.001-07:00

It started with an old episode of “Gunsmoke,” about a troubled kid in curiously tight pants who brings grief to everyone, including himself, before finding redemption through the decent folks of Dodge City.

TV’s Dodge City was a painted backdrop of a town, fabricated in the sixties to represent all that was popularly viewed as right and wrong about the American frontier. Redemption was a common theme that often took curious forms in Dodge, where the most unassailably upright citizen was U.S. marshal Matt Dillon, who thought nothing of drinking whisky shots, while on duty, in a whorehouse at 10 a.m.

The plot of this particular episode was mildly provocative yet ultimately reassuring, typical of a formula that made “Gunsmoke” the longest running dramatic serial on TV (until it was supplanted by “Law & Order”). Each show revealed something poignant about a character’s life story. The positive forces of the universe usually prevailed in the end. Some of the details in this episode were revealing in other ways, such as that the fledgling actor who played teenaged Travis Colter was the only young man in town who apparently had to be shoe-horned into his pants. That, and the carefully framed shots of his chiseled face, indicate that the director knew what he had to work with, which was a young actor with the makings for a major TV heartthrob.

Guest appearances on “Gunsmoke” were a starting actor’s dream in the sixties and early seventies, much as they are on “Law & Order” today. Among the lucky ones who went on to great things were Harrison Ford, Jodie Foster, Charles Bronson and Kurt Russell. Not all parlayed their appearances into stardom, of course. One frequent guest, Zalman King, became a successful producer of soft porn. Others went into sales. You can find out easily enough through search engines on the Web, if you’re so inclined, which I am.

Like many nosy people today, I need only half an excuse to google anything, and I am particularly interested in stories that illustrate the wildly variable things that can happen to promising people over time. By the time I encountered Travis Colter, I had already developed a habit of wasting potentially productive hours piecing together the random life stories of actors whose careers began as I lay on the floor in front of my family’s black-and-white TV. For this I blame not only myself and Google, but TV Land and Tivo.

When “Gunsmoke” first aired, I was a boy growing up in the quiet suburbs of a sleepy southern town, and one summer day, an actual troubled youth showed up and supposedly tried to kidnap me and my best friend. We were about six years old, sitting barefoot in the grass, watching a steam roller pave our street. I say “supposedly” because I have no way of knowing the man’s intensions. All I know is that he appeared out of nowhere and suggested that we go with him to the creek, and instructed us to go home and get some shoes, then meet him at his car on the corner. Our mothers prevented the follow-through, and another group of women on a nearby street, whose sons had been similarly approached, called the police. After they caught the alleged kidnapper, the police informed our parents that he was 19 years old, the son of a doctor, and had escaped from the local mental institution. That was it. In the years since, I have often wondered what his intentions were, and how his life played out, but there is no way to know. I cannot even google him, because I do not know his name. Finding things out is easier with someone whose life unfurls in full public view. You may never know what it is like to be that person, but you can see the structure of their life in bold relief, and draw your own conclusions about what can happen to people over time.

When the credits rolled on the Travis Colter episode, I learned that the actor who played him was Jan-Michael Vincent, who, I later found, went on to fame in scores of movies and as the star of the eighties show “Airwolf”, which reportedly made him the highest-paid TV actor at the time. One of Vincent’s best known flicks was 1978’s Hooper, starring Burt Reynolds, in which he plays a hunky stuntman who comes up with an idea to pilot a rocket-propelled Trans Am across a gulch. Vincent also appeared on “Lassie”; played a journalist in Nicaragua who falls in love with a beautiful Sandinista (in 1983’s Last Plane Out); was immortalized in a loin cloth in The World’s Greatest Athlete; and hosted the Disney series “The Banana Splits Adventure Hour”. Sadly, my googling also unearthed a darker vein: Vincent’s career eventually ended in a massive train wreck, the result of substance abuse problems. If you can believe what you hear, the marshal of Dodge City wasn’t the only one taking shots at 10 a.m.

It is hard to know how much of what has been said about Vincent is accurate – we’re talking about Internet gossip, for the most part, but there is no question that his career crashed, and that it was related to his drinking. He eventually went on the “Howard Stern Show” no less than four times to talk about it, and his behavior grew increasingly notorious even after his televised confessionals. He was reportedly arrested for public drunk on multiple occasions (one court case, in September 2000, involved his wife of then-three months, whose name was Anna; more on that later). The deal was cinched when Vincent crashed his car and suffered a broken neck and permanently damaged vocal chord. At that point his career was finally disabled. In his last movie, a lamentable gangsta flick called White Boy, released in 2002, Vincent plays a drunk cop whose rheumy eyes look absolutely authentic, and the camera seems intent on exploiting the damage, lingering over the disturbing ruins of his formerly perfect face. After that, Vincent disappeared. A 2004 blog, posted when Vincent was 60, indicated that he was living in seclusion in a remote cabin near Redwood, Mississippi, with a few horses and a female companion who possessed “an outrageous wardrobe.”

In addition to spending hours googling different combinations of anything, I happen to live about 30 miles from Redwood. So while I had only passing interest in Vincent beforehand, I could not ignore the fact that his flaring bottle rocket had spent itself and landed in my own backyard. Redwood, Mississippi is an unassuming encampment of old houses and mobile homes just off Highway 61, a few miles north of Vicksburg, where a line of steep bluffs overlooks the flatlands of the Mississippi Delta. There are waterfalls in the wooded hills and great expanses of brooding swamp below, which give the area a certain presence, but it is not the kind of place that rich, famous, good-looking people dream of ending up. When someone mentions trailers in Redwood, they are not talking about movies. It is, however, a place where a truly outlandish wardrobe might actually set someone apart, and that fact, coupled with the interest that a tragic former movie star naturally engenders, held the promise that Vincent’s strange saga might be attractively within my reach. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed time to log off and hit the road.

I suspected that Vincent had probably abandoned Redwood by now, that his move there had been another in a long series of misadventures, but it’s always nice to have a focus for a leisurely outing, especially if it gives you an excuse to stop everyone you see and ask questions while glancing over their shoulders to see how they decorate their living rooms and what they’re watching on TV. If nothing else, the search held the potential to produce any number of women whose neighbors considered their wardrobes to be in bad taste. It was possible that Vincent really did not want to be bothered, and had moved to Redwood to basically disappear, but if that were the case, it would be evident soon enough and I would leave him alone. All I needed was a little prodding, and it came from my friend Neil, who listened to my idea and said, “Let’s go.”

Neil and I are old friends. We are both former farmers, and for about two days in the eighties I worked as a cowboy on his family’s cattle operation, until I was demoted to carpenter because I was scared of horses. We once made a memorable road trip out West, during which we entertained ourselves with odd characters we encountered against passing backdrops of lonely neon signs and purple crested buttes. The idea of solving the riddle of Jan-Michael Vincent attracted us both for several reasons, not the least of which was the question of how he had ended up in Redwood, Mississippi, of all places. Our interest, I hasten to add, was not of the Brangelina sort, but sprang from a simple fascination with plot. Though Vincent’s one-time celebrity was obviously part of the equation, we were more intrigued by the unfolding tale, which, despite its haplessness, had an epic cast. If we were lucky, perhaps we could view at least one scene from this oversized drama at comparatively close range – something between seeing a movie and actually watching the “based-on” story unfold. As is no doubt painfully obvious, we also had some time on our hands.

It was a balmy day in late November when Neil and I set out for Redwood. Our first stop, just north of Vicksburg, was at an Orbit gas station with a Bud Light sign advertising fresh bait, including worms, minnows, crickets, as well as ice and cold beer. Inside, a friendly woman greeted us from behind the counter. “Can I help you?” she asked. Her smile sagged a little when I asked if she knew where Jan-Michael Vincent lived. “He’s an old actor,” I added. She said sorry, she didn’t know, but that she’d ask. A moment later an older woman with a gray ponytail came out of the kitchen drying her hands. “I’ve heard of him,” she said. “I’ve heard he lives off Redwood Road. I hadn’t met him. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.” She offered a half-smile, indicating that Vincent’s fame still faintly flickered, though at about the same level of intensity as the burgers sizzling on the griddle behind her. At least it appeared that Vincent was still in the area. We had reason to drive on.

There was another store on the other side of the highway, which was also a barbeque joint. Rural stores typically serve multiple purposes, such as selling gas and groceries, renting movies, and doing your hair and your taxes. A few miles back, on the outskirts of Vicksburg, stood Margaret’s Grocery, which at one time doubled as a bar and church, and presented to passing motorists a candyland façade of red and white striped cinderblock turrets and other fantastically quirky constructs, surmounted by a hand-painted sign proclaiming, “All is Welcome Jew and Gentile.” Inside, an elderly man named Rev. Dennis preached the gospel while his wife sold beer, aspirin and chips to a ragtag band of regulars who sat around playing cards at a table scarred with cigarette burns. In the corner, next to a shelf loaded with paper towels, was a homemade Ark of the Covenant, which Dennis crafted from a wooden box, some castors, a glass doorknob symbolizing the all-seeing eye of God, and some PVC pipe spray-painted gold. At least that’s the way it was the last time I was there, when cats were sleeping in the Ark. We had decided to pass on Margaret’s Grocery this day because it was doubtful that Rev. Dennis had ever heard of Jan-Michael Vincent, and anyway, he always made it so hard to get away. He tended to follow you out to your car, preaching even as you rolled up your window.

In the combo store-barbeque joint we found a group of men in hunting caps drinking coffee at a table. Two others worked the counter. Everyone called out good morning when we came through the door. I approached the counter and asked the older of the two, who turned out to be one of the owners, John Harper, if he perhaps knew anything about a guy named Jan-Michael Vincent. “I sure do,” he said. “He comes in the store all the time. He came in a week or so ago.” This was something of a surprise. We had expected Vincent’s presence to be more of a secret. The younger guy, Shane Davis, added, “He’s got a old girl he lives with. She’s always driving him around. I remember him from movies but he don’t look like that anymore. He’s wore out.” I sensed interest stirring at the table behind me, and one of the coffee drinkers volunteered, “You go up Highway 3 to Ballground, past Ballground Plantation to Bell Bottom Road, past the big ammonia tank. When you get to Bell Bottom Road, it goes straight, and when you come to a curve there’s a house on the right. It’s behind that house.”

“It’s a trailer,” a man in a camo hat said. “But I tell you who you should really talk to: Old Man Henson. He’s 95. He used to be a logger. If you sit up here in the morning with a cup of coffee and ask him a few questions, you’ll be shocked by what he can tell you. How many men you know who logged with oxen? If his knees weren’t bad, he’d work you to death.” Clearly, for him, Old Man Henson and Jan-Michael Vincent existed on the same plane. I liked the idea of talking to Old Man Henson, because who knows, he might have a story to tell, but we had our plans for the day, and anyway Old Man Henson had already gone home.

“The lady he’s with said they live at Eagle Lake now,” Harper said, steering the conversation back to Vincent. “She’s from California someplace, too. Evidently he knew somebody here and he was tired of all that. He don’t get out much now.”

“I live right there by him and I don’t know anything about him,” another of the coffee drinkers reported. “I bet it ain’t one percent of the people in Warren County even knows he lives here.”

“I’ll tell you what you need to be writing a story about: The mayor,” the camo hat said. “He’s corrupt.”

“You can tell at one time she was a looker,” Harper said of Vincent’s companion. “You’d never recognize him. Looks like he’s 90 years old, probably don’t weigh 100 pounds. I was a big fan. I recognized him ’cause I knew he was in the area.” He added, cryptically, “We’re on the barbeque circuit,” then unfurled a barbeque contest poster with pictures of his cooking crew.

Davis, the young guy, added, “They got a convertible Mustang.”

Harper then asked if anyone remembered the movie Vincent was in with Burt Reynolds, but didn’t seem entirely convinced when I said Hooper. At that point it seemed we had pretty much exhausted their Vincent knowledge, so we thanked them and drove on, toward the big ammonia tank at Ballground Plantation. If we didn’t find evidence of Vincent there, we’d try Eagle Lake, about 15 miles to the west.

Contrary to what you might expect, Bell Bottom Road is named not for the pants but for creek bottom land settled by the Bell family. The first thing you see after turning off Highway 3 is an outpost of trailers clustered around a weathered wooden house, in what is essentially a low hollow at the base of the bluffs. On this day, a month or so before Christmas, the landscape was overwrought with lawn decorations, solar sidewalk lights from Wal-Mart, decomissioned appliances, small tractors, both freestanding and trailer-mounted yuletide decorations, and other assorted items that tended to get lost in the dazzle. As with Redwood, one got the impression this was basically an encampment, the only question being: For how long? Some of the trailers were homey and neat, but overall the place expressed tentative, rural disorder.

Most of the residents appeared to be at work, but there were a few operational vehicles parked here and there, so we started at a double-wide whose yard was a fenced corral of small concrete animals. There were the requisite Christmas decorations, an inordinate number of stylized metal suns affixed to the trailer’s front wall, and two identical orange plastic baby swings hanging side by side on the porch. The gate was open.

Approaching a country house unannounced in the middle of a work day is problematic. Everyone has guns, even if they’re just hunting rifles, and owing to the proliferation of crime, strangers are often suspect. Here, the blinds were closed on all the windows, so the place didn’t exactly beckon. Beside the front door was an unexpected fixture that both invited and repelled: An intercom. I pushed the button and a woman’s raspy voice replied, “Can I help you?” A small dog barked in the background. I heard it both through the wall and over the intercom.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I’m looking for Jan-Michael Vincent. I was wondering if you could help.”

There was a pause, then the disembodied voice croaked back something unintelligible. It was a cheap intercom and the sound quality was poor. I begged the voice’s pardon, asked for a repeat. Speaking more slowly and loudly, which actually emphasized the dissonance, the voice said, “Used to live in that single-wide right in front of my house, but he’s gone. You might check the place across the way, the junky looking one. They might know.”

I glanced back at Neil, who had opted to wait in the truck so we did not seem too threatening, and at the trailers and the rustic house, trying to determine which one looked the junkiest. It was a judgment call.

Back at the truck, we deliberated. There was what could be construed as a junky hodgepodge of used appliances waiting to be recycled beside the house, but in its front yard, directly before it, was the most woebegone mobile home imaginable, rusty and mildewed, with a few broken windows and three washing machines lined up on the sagging porch. It had a shed built over it, perhaps because the roof leaked so badly that it was easier to build another one on top. This, I had just been informed, was lately the home of former movie star Jan-Michael Vincent. It looked grim, so we opted for the house, where a white Chevy truck was parked at an odd angle, as if it had crawled out of the woods. As I approached the house I got an ominous vibe. A chain was wrapped around a porch post, at the end of which was a spiked and glaringly empty dog collar. This menacing country still life evoked all sorts of disturbing sensory images, despite the comparatively welcoming presence of a group of wicker chairs, a porch swing and a barbeque grill nearby. I took one look at the empty dog collar and headed back to the truck. Neil and I agreed that it made sense to leave the driver’s door open so I could beat a hasty retreat if necessary. Then I went back and rang the bell. The blinds, as with the double-wide, were closed. There was no sound from within. After a moment, I gave up.

We backed out across the yard, because there was no real driveway – in fact, we basically had to drive across a shallow ditch to enter, and nosed our way back past the original double-wide. We rocked across some ruts and emerged through a screen of brush to another trailer that managed to be even more uninviting than the last, its defensive aura strangely enhanced by the presence of haphazardly strung Christmas lights, which were on. There was not a shred of vegetation in the yard and the windows were sealed off with aluminum foil, an indication that the person probably worked at night and slept by day. “Do not approach,” the trailer said, unequivocally. Out front was an old, rusty, Deliverance-set piece of a truck, complete with Georgia plates. We backed away.

Fortunately there was another double-wide nearby, so we stopped there. There were three small blue cars out front, all in an orderly row, and the trailer's windows were open to the breeze. Evenly spaced poured-concrete stepping stones led from the drive to the door. There was some actual landscaping as well as a plywood Santa and an odd blue fountain sunk into the ground, of a configuration that brought to mind a small, weirdly shaped hot tub, at the center of which was a narrow pipe dribbling water.

“Hello,” I called out when I reached the heavily tinted storm door, which swung open to reveal two women wearing shirts emblazoned with the logo for a store called Big Dog. I apologized for interrupting, and stated my mission. “He don’t live here anymore,” the older one, who wore a ring in her brow, said. “He moved about a year ago. I heard he’s living on Highway 465.” This was the road to the aforementioned Eagle Lake. Then she added, “He’s not well,” and hesitated, trying to decide if she should say more. “He could tell you some stuff,” she said, measuring her words. “His girlfriend is named Anna.” Something in her tone indicated that she felt empathy for Jan-Michael. I couldn’t help thinking of Miss Kitty talking with Matt Dillon on “Gunsmoke” about the trouble in Travis Colter’s life.

Back on Highway 3, a gentle breeze sent yellow leaves fluttering past a man with a garbage bag slung over his shoulder, who was picking up cans on the road shoulder. Living in Mississippi, you have a tendency to get inured to the poverty, but when you take the time to stop and talk to basically everyone you see, and get a close-up view of things, and put it all into the context of someone like Jan-Michael Vincent ending up there, you realize just how poor a place it is. At one point Neil asked, “Which county in Mississippi do you think has the most trailers?” Based on what we had seen so far, we agreed that it must be this one. There was every kind: New, faux French Provincial ones; old, rusty ones; put-together-side-by-side ones; concealed-under-a-new-roof-and-vinyl-siding-so-they-look-more-like-a-real-house ones; others that you know the owners would prefer you call manufactured housing; and the worst, the abandoned and forsaken ones. There was no question that Vincent for a time existed at the very bottom of the local shelter scale.

The road to Eagle Lake passed through the lowest part of the low-lying Delta, bordered by farm fields that go under water during river rises almost every year, along with a few houses elevated on stilts and a labyrinth of bayous and swamps studded with moss-draped cypress trees. Posted at the entrance to every side road were signs warning, “You are entering a flood-prone area.” My grandparents once lived here, in a camp house with no telephone, drawing their water from a rain barrel. It was a lifestyle choice for them; they were attracted to isolation. Before Highway 465 was built, the area was accessible only by a circuitous gravel road that crossed the Yazoo River on a ferry, after which the road turned to dirt, of a variety known as gumbo, which is incredibly malleable and sticky when wet. When the water rose as a result of runoff up north, you could only reach their house by boat.

My grandparents found an affinity with the river rats, as outsiders called the commercial fishermen who lived in houseboats beached on the riverbank -- the first step toward living on land. My grandparents’ favorite neighbors were a family called the Boozers, who generally kept to themselves but were open to the free currents in a way that more settled people in the area were not. They spent a lot of time roaming the woods and watercourses by boat, on horseback, or in my grandfather’s old Willys Jeep, until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers condemned the land for a new levee and a floodgate across Steele Bayou. Today the Corps has plans for a huge pumping plant designed to lift the floodwaters out of what is actually, officially known as the Backwater Area. When people dream of making their area a somewhat drier backwater, there is not much to go on. Still, certain types are clearly quite happy there, in the margins of American life, such as a man I once knew named Jimmy Vickers, who ran the last local ferry and had served 12 years in prison (typically the first opportunity for parole from a life sentence). Vickers sometimes took jobs diving in the Mississippi River to inspect ruptured pipelines or sunken towboats, using a modified motorcycle helmet with a foam rubber gasket around his neck to keep the water out, and a 50-foot hose for breathing, which was inserted through a hole in the helmet and connected to an air compressor manned by his 12-year-old son in a johnboat above. These modifications kept Vickers alive on the bottom of an absurdly powerful, deep and muddy river. He and his family lived in a beached houseboat, too, and although I suspect he was clean, he was fiercely protective of his tribe, no matter where they stood with the rest of society and, in particular, the law. This, I was given to believe, was a solid covenant among the river people. Vickers and his family were tolerant of everything except unnecessary meddling, and generous with what they had, and I always knew that if somehow my life turned south, and I got into big trouble and needed to escape, I could find refuge in their little warped houseboat in the mud, no questions asked. From the outside this might look like indifference, but it was far from it.

Farther west along the highway is Eagle Lake, an old, wide bend of the Mississippi River that was cut off more than a century ago by a change in course, which is today lined mostly with camp houses and, of course, trailers. Its architectural centerpiece is a three-story antebellum mansion known as Buena Vista Plantation, or, locally, as “the old Conway place,” whose builder survives in local lore for once hosting a grand ball for his slaves, during which he allowed the women to don the cast-off finery of his wife, who chose to be out of town that weekend. Another maverick of Eagle Lake was Larry Crowe, a shadowy businessman who in the eighties wanted to build a horse-racing track on Australia Island, but who, owing to a confluence of legal and financial logjams, went down before he could transform the place into a world-class resort. Also getting star billing, for what it's worth, are various Civil War generals, a few Civil Rights heroes, a scattering of blues musicians, some millionaire hunters and, more recently, one washed-up former surfer dude turned international action star who drinks too much and reportedly bums smokes at the local bar.

As we neared Eagle Lake we saw two guys in gangsta wear pouring gas into the tank of a decrepit Mercury Marquis beside a cotton gin. We rolled to a stop, exchanged the wussup nod, and I asked if they’d ever heard of Jan-Michael Vincent. They shook their heads. “He’s supposed to live here,” I said. “He used to be a movie star.” They laughed, then suggested we ask at the gin.

At the gin, two men were preparing to weld something and the machinery was loud, so I first asked an elderly couple loading gin residue – a popular garden composting material – into the back of a pickup with a sign advertising “Fresh Greens Home Grown.” They had no clues, so I approached a toothless man who looked like he was in charge of the welding, who turned out to be very helpful and knowledgeable, and gave us explicit directions. “There’s some kinda black sports car,” he said. “I don’t know what kind.” We followed his directions and there it was, the house overlooking the lake, with the locally famous Mustang parked beside it. It was a vast improvement over the trailer on Bell Bottom Road, though it needed some work, and overall there was a feeling of inertia, atrophy and neglect. A struggling rose bush determinedly bloomed out front, hinting of better times. The rail was missing from the tall stair to the front porch and the treads were littered with fallen leaves. A wooden pier extended into the lake, which shimmered under blue skies. A small boat knifed past, against a backdrop of bare, stark white cypresses that had been shitted to death by hordes of roosting cormorants. The steps to the rear deck, facing the lake, appeared to be the primary approach.

Getting to Vincent's house had proved remarkably, almost disappointingly easy, and although we were about to show up at another stranger’s house uninvited, there was no way Neil was going to wait in the truck this time. I found myself wishing I knew more about Vincent’s movies, and wondering if I was really there for the reasons I claimed – to glean the details of the complex human experiment that was Vincent’s life, or merely to gnaw on some once-famous bones. But it was too late to turn back now. As we walked across the deck, past a bowl piled with discarded pork ribs and an Elvis novelty tag leaning against the wall, a dog commenced barking inside. We stopped before a single French door, beside which hung a wind chime bidding “welcome.” I knocked. A moment later the door opened and a middle-aged woman stood eyeing us doubtfully. Then she stepped onto the deck, leaving the door open behind her. “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “I’m looking for Jan-Michael Vincent.” There was an awkward pause. An old black dog sniffed my feet, wagging its tail.

Then the woman asked, “How did you find us?” Harper was right. You could tell she had been pretty once.

“I just kept asking people,” I said, and offered a slightly convoluted explanation – I was a journalist who happened to live in the area, I’d heard Jan-Michael Vincent was living here, I was wondering how that came about, etc. It all sounded kind of lame now. I might as well have said, “I’m on a scavenger hunt.” But she seemed OK with it. She looked a little tired, a little world weary, but she offered her hand and said, “I’m Anna.” She wore an iridescent blue sweatshirt and some kind of blue synthetic pants, which weren’t outrageous at all. “Who do you write for?” she asked. I named a few publications. “Tabloids?” she asked. I said no, and could not tell from her expression if she was relieved, disappointed or incredulous. No doubt she and Vincent had had their share of trouble from the tabloids, but it was also possible that they had considered selling their story. Anyway, she said, “It’s not a good time right now. My
husband just got out of the hospital with a broken hip. I’m just getting him up.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “I don’t want to bother you. This all started when I saw him on an old episode of ‘Gunsmoke.’”

For the first time, she smiled. “I know that episode,” she said. “If you give me your card I’ll have him call. He just got out of the hospital three days ago.” Then she added, politely but finally, “He can’t talk to you right now. We don’t really give interviews. We had some trouble in Vicksburg a while back. We try to keep to ourselves.”

“What kind of trouble?” Neil asked, way too eagerly.

“I don’t want to get into it,” she said. “If you give me your card, I’ll have him call.”

I handed her a card and as she looked it over, stole a glance through the door. I saw a guitar leaning against the couch. I felt a little ashamed for prying, and wondered if Vincent was listening, or if he was prostrate on a bed somewhere in the recesses of the house, out of it. “I appreciate it,” I said. That was it. We turned and left.

As we drove away, I recalled that one of the men back at the barbeque joint said people in the area did not really see Vincent as an actor, that for them, he was just a guy down on his luck, the sort of guy who, as it turned out, was too young to have a broken hip but had one just the same. From all appearances, the locals were only vaguely curious about him, and we were starting to see why. “We probably came within 30 feet of him,” Neil said, not so much disappointed that we didn’t get to hear Vincent’s story in his own words, as he was crestfallen that we had to stop asking people about him. So we decided not to. I don’t know what I intended to ask Vincent anyway. What I mostly wanted to know was how he ended up in Eagle Lake. I did have a few questions about “Gunsmoke”, such as what, exactly, was up with James Arness and Amanda Blake, who played Marshal Dillon and Miss Kitty, the owner of Dodge City’s Long Branch Saloon. One of the curious things about so many ostensibly wholesome, family-oriented shows from the sixties is that they so often veered into alternative terrain without anyone seeming to notice. On “Gunsmoke”, it is no secret that Matt and Miss Kitty are having sex while maintaining their independence from each other, which to a pubescent boy seemed ideal. I was hoping to ask Vincent if they ever talked about that, and if he kept up with Arness or Blake, and whether she called him when his life started falling apart and perhaps lectured him, saying something like, “Remember what I said to Travis Colter…” I know, it was a TV show. Vincent’s life is real. There have been broken bones. There has been blood, and alcohol. It was none of my business. Yet he was interesting, and he had wandered into my zone. I wanted to know the stages of the plot, and how the characters interacted over time.

A few miles down the road we came upon a bar, so I pulled in. I had no doubt that Vincent frequented the place, that it was the place he reportedly bummed smokes, and I figured someone inside might be able to fill us in. Before entering I took a moment to scratch down some notes in the truck, and I noticed a man who looked to be the proprietor eyeing us. When we entered the bar he followed us inside. He was evidently not pleased to see us. The bar was big and charmless, populated only by the sullen proprietor and an old man in Coke-bottle glasses who appeared to be mesmerized by a football game on the suspended TV. I knew immediately that neither would have anything to say to us about Vincent or anything else, but felt I had to ask for something, so I blurted out, “We just came from Jan-Michael Vincent’s house and I have their house number so I can send them something, but I don’t know the rest of the address.” This was true; Neil had suggested that I send Vincent a copy of a book of my grandmother’s photographs of the area, to try to break the ice. The proprietor glared at me, looking even more pugnacious than before, then reluctantly gave me the information. As we strolled back into the sunlight, I pictured Vincent propped on one of those barstools, beside some other saggy-eyed guy, perhaps with his own story to tell.

Vincent’s life isn’t a movie – not yet, but it’s been on public view for a long time, and I have read more than once that his roles often reflected his lifestyle choices. He seemed particularly attracted to rebellious characters, which he portrayed to full effect in movies such as White Line Fever (a rebel trucker battling corruption) and Baby Blue Marine (a soldier who is dishonorably discharged from the military). As the Internet Movie Data Base points out, he seems to have been equally comfortable playing men on either side of the law.

The first notable turn in his life had been fortuitous. Vincent, who was born in Denver in 1944, was reportedly finishing a stint in the California National Guard when he caught the eye of a talent scout. His first acting job was a bit part in a 1967 movie; afterward his career took off. In the seventies he starred or appeared in 12 films and 18 made-for-TV movies and shows, including “Gunsmoke” and a film that many consider his finest work, Big Wednesday, in which he plays an aging surfer grappling with the erosive forces of time. In the eighties he appeared in 12 movies, many of them action flicks, and six TV shows, including “Airwolf” and the mini-series “The Winds of War”. He continued to get work in the nineties, and in fact made more movies than ever – 21 between 1990 and 1999, but the parts were getting smaller, his acting was growing increasingly uneven, his drinking was causing trouble on the sets, and many of the films went straight to video. Today, according to the Internet Movie Data Base, “ongoing health issues and personal problems seem to preclude his return to the screen.”

There is no question that Vincent was a talented actor, but his success clearly had something to do with his square-jawed, all-American face and his taut physique, both of which suffered from increasing abuse. Now he appeared to be playing the anti-hero for good, marooned in Warren County, Mississippi with a broken hip, borderline destitute, almost unrecognizable, and dependent upon Anna for everything, including fending off random journalists and their friends. Perhaps it was just as well that he didn’t have to deal with us.

As Neil and I speculated about whether the conversation would have been productive, whether he would call, and whether we would eventually meet, we came upon a little store named Eagle Lake Candle Company, with a food vending stand out front called Hotdogs Plus. Maybe it was the name of the hotdog stand, but we could not resist asking about Jan-Michael Vincent again. A sign on the door to the candle shop announced, “Barber On Call,” and inside, a diminutive woman invited us to browse her wares. “I’m actually looking for Jan-Michael Vincent,” I said, feeling a little guilty, because now, I wasn’t really.

“Hmm,” she said, thinking. “Why don’t you look over our candles while I check the book?” I feigned interest as she leafed through the pages of the slender local phone book. The scent of the candles was overwhelming, like a potpourri of oversanitized gas station bathrooms. “I see a couple of Vinsons,” she said, “but…”

“That’s OK,” I said, and shrugged. Just then a gold El Camino pulled up outside, crunching gravel, and a man with a thick mane of curly orange hair got out. “He might know,” the woman said. “That’s his hotdog place.” Before we could get out of range she added, “We make all our candles. We can custom-make anything. We got special ones for Christmas. We got the barber chair and a tanning bed. I also make quilts.” I felt obliged to inquire about the candle-making, and she said, “We order wax out of Alabama. It’s soy wax -- totally, 100 percent child safe. They may drink it and it might give ’em diarrhea, but that’s it. The wicks are cotton, from the Delta.” I nodded as I sidled over to Hotdogs Plus.

The hotdog man said sure, he knew where Jan-Michael Vincent lived. “He’s a nice guy,” he said. “Been here about a year.” He described the house, gave us the directions we already knew, said, “Just look for a little Mustang convertible.”

As Neil pointed out while we were driving away, Vincent’s whereabouts were well known. “I mean, if he really didn’t want to be found, he could use a different name,” he said. “It’s not like people would recognize him now, if he looks like he’s 90 and weighs 100 pounds.” Then, when we passed a game warden, Neil said, “Want to talk to him?” but at the moment, I didn’t. I was thinking this would be a sad story indeed if it weren’t for Anna.

So far the consensus was that Anna was always with him. “You never see one without the other,” was the common refrain. From all appearances, Vincent had little to offer her now. His looks and, apparently, his money were gone. He was in bad health. Yet she stood by him. “Obviously a lot went wrong,” Neil said. “You could see it as a sad story for sure, but he’s got a place on a lake, with a pier, and a good woman beside him. It could be a lot worse.” Then: “Who do you want to ask next?” I suggested we return to the barbeque store and report our findings, as John Harper had asked.

The barbeque place was now crowded with lunch customers, and Harper was nowhere to be found. Davis was happy to hear that we located Vincent, sorry to hear about the hip, but had little time to talk amid the noonday rush. Instead, a woman behind the counter, whom I had not noticed the first time around, listened to our brief conversation, then leaned over, resting her elbows on the counter, and said, “Her ex-husband’s name is Lester Birdsong.” Actually that's not the name she gave us, but since we never ended up talking with the man and have no proof of his existence, much less of his involvement in the Vincent saga, we will call him Lester Birdsong.

“Whose ex-husband?” I asked.

“Anna’s,” she said.

I introduced myself. Her name was Brenda Welch. When I mentioned how nice Anna was, she said, “She’s always very nice.” Then she asked, “Is her hair dark?” I shook my head.

“It’s actually sort of blondish,” Neil offered.

Welch looked surprised. “Lester is from Redwood,” she said. “He moved off to California where he ran a restaurant. I believe it was in Los Angeles. He’s got a barbeque shack by the post office in Redwood now. He’s real nice. He’d talk to you. His barbeque place is on Highway 3, where the road is shut off. All three of ’em came together. Lester married this lady, Anna, in California somewhere, and Jan-Michael used to come in his restaurant, and they all became friends, and then she left him and went with Jan-Michael. Lester has a son by this lady. So when he come back to Redwood, they came, too.”

“And they’re still friends?” Neil asked, surprised.

She nodded. “He’s just real quiet,” she said of Vincent. “But his wife is steady talking. They been here, maybe eight years?” She said she thought Birdsong lived off Bell Bottom Road. So naturally, we headed back. We were now as interested in Birdsong as we were in Vincent, which raised the question: Just how far into voyeurism had we strayed? When I mentioned this, Neil said, “But Lester’s a part of the story.” Neil also pointed to a telephone repairman working on a line by the road, and said, “Maybe we should ask him if he knows Jan-Michael. Or we could ask him if he knows where we could find Lester.” I decided to pass on the phone guy, but we did stop at the post office in Redwood, a short distance from Birdsong’s garishly painted barbeque shack, which, according to the portable sign out front, was scheduled to open soon. The door and windows of the post office were wide open, and behind the counter, amid the wanted posters, was a display of teddy bears, commemorative stamps and seasonal items for sale. No one seemed to be around, but when I called out, the temporary walls of a grayish cubicle trembled. Apparently I had startled someone.

A woman emerged from the cubicle and asked what I needed. I said I was looking for Lester Birdsong, and asked if that was his barbeque shack down the way. She stiffened. “As an employee of the post office, I’m not allowed to give out addresses,” she proclaimed, somewhat indignantly. How is it that the officious air of the U.S. Postal Service permeates down to the lowest possible level? I asked if she could at least tell me whether that was his barbeque shack. She stared at me, said, “It’s scheduled to open soon.”

I asked for a phone book, hoping to find Birdsong’s address, and Neil said, “If we went to Ballground, would we be getting warm?” She glared at him, as if we were subjecting her to a surprise audit. “Have you heard of Jan-Michael Vincent?” he asked.

“We’re kind of quiet,” she said. I was unsure what she meant, and when I asked, she said, “We’re kind of protective.” I could tell: Despite her pretense that she did not know anything, she actually did not know anything, and in fact, she now said as much. “All I know is that’s Highway 61 and that’s Highway 3,” she said. “That’s all I know. I’m not from here. I’m from Onward.”

“Like that’s another planet,” I said, then laughed, to make sure she didn’t get even more defensive. Onward was about 10 miles down the road.

As we made our way back to Bell Bottom Road, Neil said he had a feeling that Birdsong was the trailer-lord whose house, the one with the empty dog collar, sat at the middle of the compound. “I bet he rents out those trailers,” he said. If this was true, it meant that Birdsong had rented out the worst trailer in the hollow to the fallen stud who had allegedly stolen his wife.

It made sense to return to the double wide with the sunken fountain, where the women in the Big Dog shirts live. “We’re back,” I said as I navigated the stepping stones to the door. This time, only the mother was home. “We found him,” I said, “and we were told that he followed Lester Birdsong to Redwood. Now we’re looking for Lester.”

She leaned against the door jam, surprisingly patient with this exercise, and seemingly more inclined to talk than before. “He did live here,” she said. “She stayed with him all the time. If you ever saw one, you saw the other. She never left him alone, and he hardly ever came out of that trailer. Half the time he don’t know where he is. They didn’t even have a car when they lived here. A guy who works with my husband is a big fan, and when he found out he lived behind us, he said, ‘I bet he lives in a big mansion,’ and we said, ‘Unh unh.’”

I asked how they got around without a car. “He called a cab from Vicksburg!” she said. “No telling how much that cost.” What about the horses, I asked, and she said, “There were no horses.” She mentioned Vincent’s outdated website, which once linked to an email address. “People can ask him questions, and somebody asked him once if he lived in Redwood, and he gave some smart response and never did really answer. Most of the stuff on it’s old,” she said. As she talked, a shirtless teenager on a four-wheeler, with a younger boy on the seat behind him, circled the surrounding terrain. Occasionally, they set off fireworks. “Lester lives in that house,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder in the direction of the wooden house. “He drives a white pickup. He pulls a little trailer behind it. He’d probably talk to you.”

“OK, we’ll try there,” I said. “But first, I have to ask what you made that fountain out of.”

She smiled. “It was the tank they baptize people in at the church. They got a new one and they were gonna throw it away, so I asked if I could have it, and we buried it in the ground. It’s deep.”

“I bet it is,” I said, now recognizing the steps leading down into its murky depths.

I felt a little more comfortable approaching Birdsong’s house this time. At least I could say I’d been to Jan-Michael’s. Also, I had convinced myself that there was no attack dog lurking beneath the steps. The truck was still there, along with the unhinged little trailer, but the blinds remained closed, and when I rang the bell, no one answered.

“I bet he works at night,” Neil said. “I think we have to come back. So many people know about what happened. Someone’s been talking. Maybe it was Lester.”

But for now we had run out of options, so we reluctantly headed back into the hills, past trees glowing gold and red in the autumn sun. I thought of something Brenda Welch said, back at the store: “People here know who he is, but so what if he’s had some bad times? There’s a bunch of us up in here that’s had bad times. He’s a just a human being, like the rest of us.” I thought that maybe, under the circumstances, Vincent was now right where he needed to be. But who am I to say? I just googled the guy, and asked around.

We never went back to Birdsong’s house, and Vincent, not surprisingly, never called. Two years passed before I noticed a brief in the Vicksburg paper, under the headline, “Former Actor Treated After Wreck on 465.” It said only this: “A Vicksburg man was treated and released following a single-car accident Sunday on Mississippi 465. Jan-Michael Vincent, a former actor for whom officers declined to release a Vicksburg address, was taken to River Region Medical Center after he lost control of his vehicle.”

That was it. Jan-Michael Vincent was still deconstructing his own life, and people still felt the need to more or less protect his privacy, though he hardly needed it now.

From Lost magazine

The Valley of the Moon's bridge to nowhere

2011-09-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

During a recent outing in Claiborne County, Miss., my friend Chad and I took a side trip to a scenic rural area known as the Valley of the Moon. I’m not sure of the origin of the poetic name, other than that it alludes to a local plantation. A Google search shed no light on the subject, though it did turn up a place by the same name in California.

Claiborne County’s Valley of the Moon is a broad, gently undulating section of farmland northeast of Port Gibson along the Natchez Trace Parkway, where the landscape slowly descends from low hills to cypress brakes along Bayou Pierre. The valley is bisected by a minor road that leads, on the opposite side of the bayou, to the extinct village of Willows, aka Willow Springs.

This seldom-traveled route used to cross the bayou on an old iron bridge, which we found was no longer there, having been replaced a few years back by a nondescript concrete crossing.

We were sorry to see that, as both of us appreciate visual throwbacks to previous eras, and tend to be averse to anything that further homogenizes the landscape.

Also disappointing: The bucolic and historic old trace road that led from the bridge to Willows was in the process of being bulldozed

and its canopy of overhanging trees pushed into windrows as part of a major widening project. It was odd to see such a big project being built in the middle of nowhere. For someone who’s done a good bit of investigative research, it was, well… curious.

Government waste is obviously a big topic today, and it’s not surprising to find evidence that it extends beyond what’s popularly cited in conservative bombast -- that it sometimes encompasses projects, such as roads and bridges, that service local governments and contractors as much as, or even more than, local job markets. As often as not, local governments undertake such projects with state and federal subsidies, using dubious cost-to-benefit ratios, heedless of how they will be maintained later on. In some cases spending public money to build infrastructure makes perfect sense. In others, as is arguably the case with the Valley of the Moon bridge and what’s known as the Willows Road, it seems misguided, or worse.

Crossing the anonymous concrete bridge, I imagined that many people were glad to see the old bridge across Bayou Pierre replaced. Progress. The old bridge was narrow -- one lane wide, though that hardly seems an insurmountable problem considering the route handled only about 40 vehicles per day, according to a website that surveys historic bridges. The odds that two vehicles would meet on the bridge were slim. Viewed from the vantage point of an outsider, the “solution” – spending millions of dollars to accommodate those 40 vehicles, seems to be more of a problem, and not only because it resulted in the destruction of a quaint old bridge. Notably, the routes that connect with Willows Road at each end were not being widened, so what you had was a strangely isolated "improvement."

It's possible the old bridge was structurally deficient, beyond some bureaucratic designation aimed at justifying the expense of building a new one, but I didn't come across any evidence of that. On the contrary, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History observed in what was otherwise, ultimately, a meaningless historical review, that the bridge was “well-maintained, unaltered, and in very good condition.” Given the lack of true accountability for government expenditures, I've observed that projects of questionable economic value often proceed apace, with an elected official, contractor or large landowner acting as the driving force. Along the way, it’s not unusual for historically significant infrastructure to be sacrificed, such as happened to a row of 19th century storefronts in downtown Jackson, Miss., razed in the 1980s by the city’s redevelopment authority for a parking garage that was never built, or to the pretty little bridge across Bayou Pierre, which was both scenic and historic.

Remarkably, there are rarely repercussions for government agencies that undertake such dubious and destructive projects. A few people shake their heads, perhaps someone writes a letter to the editor, but the government and its contractors afterward move on to the next grazing ground. In the case of the Valley of the Moon bridge and once-lovely Willows Road, the result is, essentially, nothing. Here: You have this note.

"Major connector." In the map below, Willows Road runs southeast from near the center (marked as Willows) to the crossing at Bayou Pierre.

On the day that Chad and I crossed the new bridge we came upon a “Road Closed” sign, which (typically for us) we disregarded. We drove around the barricades and navigated the construction zone, where we were surprised to find crews working on a Saturday. We also noted that someone had set aside the more valuable logs of uprooted cedar trees that had previously shaded the road, of which there were many, for what would certainly prove to be a lucrative trip to a sawmill. One could only hope that the county had actually sold those saw logs to help offset the cost of construction, though that seems unlikely. Chad would later learn that the old iron bridge itself, as well as part of a similar structure upstream in the vicinity of Carlisle, Miss., had likewise been hauled off – also, no doubt, earning someone a hefty sum, considering the current high value of metal salvage. Again, who knows if the county’s taxpayers shared in the profits of the salvage. If I had to guess, I’d say the sale was considered part of the cost of disposing of the bridge. It would have been nice if they'd at least left the old bridge as a monument to the past, though I'm sure the argument would be that it would've been a liability.

It was disheartening to see so much beauty destroyed for what seemed no good reason, and the more I thought about it the more I wondered how, precisely, it had happened. Once I got home I set about googling, and found that the new bridge had been built at a cost of approximately $3.5 million and that the road widening project would cost another $1 million or so, which meant that the total cost of the work would be $4.5 million, for a three-mile-long route that, again, carries about 40 vehicles per day. Unless you’re among a handful of local residents with very specific travel plans, the road basically goes from nowhere to nowhere. The cost figures for the bridge, by the way, came from the website of one of the contractors, WGK of Clinton, Miss., which in 2006 received an industry award for its design of the new crossing.

Remarkably, I found that the old Valley of the Moon bridge was still listed in the National Register of Historic Places, a program designed to protect such properties from federally funded destruction, even though it no longer exists.

When I later contacted the state Department of Archives and History, which administers the National Register program for the National Park Service, I was told that, considering that the bridge had been destroyed, the agency might consider writing a letter to the Mississippi Department of Transportation to express their dismay. My thought, upon hearing this, was, oh, well.

While it is true that the damage is already done, the question begs to be asked: What would the failure to seek some sort of redress say about the National Register program? I was told that local and state governments often consider state-funded projects exempt from National Register guidelines, because the funding does not come directly from the federal government, although that is debatable. The Department of Archives and History has done a lot to preserve historic landmarks in the state, but in fact has a checkered history when it comes to enforcing the National Register guidelines, having been called to task by the Federal Highway Administration for attempting to use federal funds to take down a designated National Landmark house on a Civil War battlefield near Edwards, Miss., after which it (Archives) was compelled to rebuild the structure, known as the Coker House.

From my communications with Archives and History (which provided the black and white photos posted here), it was not even clear whether the Valley of the Moon bridge was still there at the time it was listed, though it had been under consideration for years. But say the destruction predated the listing by a matter of a few months; how could the county not know that the bridge was historic, and eligible for protected status? Clearly, the need to spend money had overwhelmed the need to preserve a piece of history. Archives and History learned about the bridge demolition in October 2005, eight months after the new bridge opened. Richard Cawthon, who retired as the agency’s chief architectural historian a few months later, responded to the news by dictating a memo to his own files, as follows:

“On Thursday, 27 October 2005, I received a call from Kenneth Ross of Claiborne County, who said he had gone in search of the bridge that we had placed on the National Register as the Valley of the Moon Bridge, but he couldn't find it. He was in the area, calling on his cellular phone, so I talked him through the directions to it according to the maps in our files, and he said that the bridge at that location had been taken down and replaced about a year ago. It was locally referred to as the ‘Willows Creek Bridge,’ and was not recognized as being the same bridge during the National Register nomination process. He will send me photos of the pilings that are all that remain of the old bridge, so I can match them to our photos. It would appear, however, that the bridge is gone and should be removed from the National Register.” For the record, the bridge remains on the list, and it spanned Bayou Pierre, not Willows Creek.

It’s all water under the bridge, now, I suppose, yet it’s hard to get past the fact that there, in the remote Valley of the Moon, a series of curious events had unfolded, almost totally off the radar. A huge sum of money had been expended for a road and bridge of questionable economic value, which had resulted in the destruction of a federally protected historic site. And it had happened without any repercussions.

As readers of these posts know, I am a strong believer in historic preservation, but I am also a journalist and investigative researcher, and for all those reasons the destruction of the Valley of the Moon bridge and Willows Road piqued my interest. If I were employed full-time by a large publication, or even if I were working a story on kickstarter.com rather than being an unaffiliated, freelance writer, I could perhaps devote the time necessary to fill in all the blanks in the story, though I’m not sure many large publications would see the significance of this particular outcropping of government waste, which, in fact, is part of the problem. Sadly, as the print media collapses, there are fewer and fewer public watchdogs to monitor the potential for abuse of the public trust – a role the print media once embraced, almost solely, and which its successors in the blogosphere and corporate media franchising have shown little interest in evenly documenting. Despite the pervasiveness of the Internet, what happens in out-of-the-way places like the Valley of the Moon is in many ways less widely known than it was before, and government officials are no doubt aware of that. Still, what I managed to find out about the Valley of the Moon bridge through personal observation, websites, email exchanges and phone calls (not all of which were returned) proved revealing.

According to the records at the Department of Archives and History, the one-lane, wooden-decked bridge was built in the late 1920s and listed in the National Register in 2005. It was the site of a locally famous Civil War skirmish that, in much the same way the bridge replacement project serves as a microcosm of a bigger issue involving government spending, was one component of a much larger battleground -- the pivotal Vicksburg Campaign. Willows Road, which is mentioned in the state Scenic Byways Program, until recently remained much as it was at the time Union and Confederate troops fought over it. Today, notably, there is only one residence along it, a cluster of trailers belonging to a seasonal hunting camp.

The 1920s Valley of the Moon bridge was not the first to be sabotaged, as it turned out. According to a Union Army dispatch dated May 23, 1863, the Confederate Army, which had been routed by Gen. U.S. Grant’s troops during the Battle of Port Gibson, had attempted to burn the wartime bridge during their retreat, but the Union troops had extinguished the blaze “by considerable effort” and were able to repair and use it to continue their pursuit. “The rebels,” the dispatch continued, “commenced disputing our passage soon after we crossed the bayou,” and managed to slow the progress of the Union troops as they, themselves, sought refuge in Vicksburg. Among the casualties resulting from the bridge contest were one Union soldier killed and “two or three wounded,” and at least two hundred Confederates captured as prisoners.

A suspension bridge spanned the bayou during the war. I’m not sure what type of bridge existed during the six decades between the war and the 1920s, but the later bridge was documented by the Department of Archives and History before its destruction at the hands of the Claiborne County Board of Supervisors and its contractors.

Beyond the question of the economic justification for the project, it is natural to wonder how a National Register property (or even one that was eligible for listing) could be destroyed by a government agency using state and, likely, federal funds, without the knowledge of anyone who cared. I say “likely” because so much of what is considered state funding has its origins in federal allocations. It is also natural to wonder who the ultimate beneficiaries of the taxpayer funds were, and who, for example, owns the adjacent land, which might directly benefit from a bigger road and bridge. What were the connections between those contractors and elected officials?

Claiborne County Board of Supervisors president Charles Short was quoted in a news release about the WGK engineering award saying the project’s purpose was to provide “a major connecting point” for employees and suppliers of the Grand Gulf Nuclear Station. That seems something of a stretch, considering the nuclear plant is comparatively distant and is already served by four-lane U.S. 61 and numerous other local roads. Shorts also observed that residents “now enjoy a safer, more streamlined bridge… Not only is traffic flow improved but thanks to the overall design, the problems with flooding and erosion associated with the original bridge have been eliminated.”

All of which may be true; it’s hard to say. The newspaper in Port Gibson seems not to have covered the story, or at least has not published anything about it that can be found on the Internet, nor did the Jackson newspaper, The Clarion-Ledger. When I called the office of the Claiborne County Engineer, seeking more information, I found that he wasn’t a public official, nor did he live and work in Claiborne County. He was Jeffery Knight, a principal in WGK (he’s the K), the firm that had been awarded the project to design the $3.5 million bridge. As they say in Disneyworld, it’s a small world, after all.

The woman who answered the phone at WGK sent me to Knight’s voicemail, and I left a message explaining that I was trying to find out what had become of the old Valley of the Moon bridge. Perhaps not surprisingly, he did not return my call. I followed up once more, and asked the woman who answered the phone if I had, in fact, reached the Claiborne County Engineer’s office, to which she responded, “That would be Jeffery Knight, but he’s not in.” When I pressed her for information about WGK’s relationship with the county engineer’s office, she replied that WGK was both an engineering firm and Claiborne County’s engineering firm. I later found, on the WGK website, that Knight is also the county engineer for neighboring Jefferson County. Perhaps contracting out the job of county engineer makes sense to a cash-strapped local government, and is perfectly legal. But is it really logical to hire, as a government advisor on the building of roads and bridges, a firm that will design those roads and bridges, for millions of dollars?

On its company website, WGK noted that it had designed the bridges and approaches in the Valley of the Moon “to meet the design criteria of MDOT [the Mississippi Department of Transportation] and Federal Highway Administration,” and that the project had been completed a year ahead of schedule. Whether the project’s fast-track status related to concerns about the potential for controversy over the destruction of the old bridge is unknown; the old bridge isn’t even mentioned on the website, though it should have been part of the project’s environmental assessment, which WGK undertook. My plan is to request the complete documentation of the project from MDOT, which I will detail in a future note.

Early completion was one reason cited in the June 29, 2006, news release concerning the American Council of Engineering Companies of Mississippi’s presentation of “the Honors Award to Williford, Gearhart & Knight Inc. [WGK] for outstanding engineering projects in the State of Mississippi.” WGK published a photo of the new bridge (included earlier in this note) on its website; among the other contractors were Key Constructors LLC of Madison, Miss., and Dirtworks, Inc., of Vicksburg, Miss. WGK, according to the release, completed its design work in December 2004 and the new bridge opened in February 2005. The company was clearly proud of the work.

By this point in my research, almost anything concerning the Valley of the Moon was of interest to me, so I decided to find out who all the principal characters were. Who owned sprawling Valley of the Moon Plantation, for example? I don’t mean to imply that the landowners had any specific role in the project, or directly benefited from it, but this is a story about public money passing through the Valley of the Moon, so it seemed worth finding out. What I found is that Valley of the Moon Farms is jointly owned by William N. Cassell, Moon Planting Company, and James E. Cassell of Port Gibson. There is also a private, one-strip airport in the vicinity that goes by the same name, owned by Valley Aviation Inc., of Port Gibson, which appears to be used primarily by cropdusters.

According to the website of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group, Valley of the Moon Farms has been “a top recipient” of federal farm subsidies – a staggering $2.75 million between 1995 and 2010. The funds, distributed by USDA, included conservation easements, disaster payments and crop subsidies for cotton, corn, wheat, sorghum and oats. EWG noted that in 2007, when Valley of the Moon Farms received about $500,000 in federal payments, the average adjusted income for people living in its zip code was $22,000. It would be interesting to compare USDA subsidies and government road and bridge funds allotted to Claiborne County with the total annual investment in, say, school lunch programs and other oft-reviled “entitlements.” But who, really, has the time to piece all that together? Considering how much I’ve invested in researching the destruction, six years ago, of a little-known bridge in a rural area of southwest Mississippi, you might think that I do, but I don’t.

Again, it’s possible that many local residents -- wealthy, poor and in between -- were only too happy to see the old bridge and narrow tunnel of a road replaced by a more efficient, modern route. It’s also likely that everyone in the U.S. would like to be the beneficiary of millions of dollars in government contracts or government subsidies. But at issue, really, is who decides how such money will be spent, based on what criteria, and who will be there to bring the hammer down should the process goes awry.

As part of my continuing, sporadic research, I reviewed the political campaign contributions of elected officials that were available online, because that’s one of the best ways to uncover meaningful links. All I found – and I should point out that my review was not exhaustive – was that Key LLC has given Central District Highway Commissioner Dick Hall a total of $3,000 since 2009. Hall, like the state’s other two highway commissioners, routinely accepts contributions from people who benefit from state highway contracts, for what it’s worth.

A full review of the contributions to every elected official involved wasn’t really within the scope of my research. To review the contributions to the Claiborne County Board of Supervisors, for example, requires requesting the documents in person at the courthouse in Port Gibson. Perhaps, out of continuing curiosity, I’ll do that, next time I pass that way. But, as potentially telling as such documents can be, it’s highly possible that there is nothing untoward about those relationships, and that the project was just one of many that are concocted to spend available money in the name of economic development, which doesn’t exactly qualify as front page news. What we know is that a lovely old bridge and a scenic tunnel of a road beneath a canopy of venerable trees came down, and a bunch of money got spread around. It happened in the Valley of the Moon, but in the end, it’s just the way the world goes round.

Lost art of Katrina

2011-08-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

This article originally ran in the Aug. 29, 2006, edition of Lost Magazine (www.lostmag.com)

Katrina’s Art: The Lost Art of the Gulf Coast, One Year Later
By Alan Huffman

“As paintings go, it was not that good, really,” Madeleine McMullan recalls in a voice still gilded by pre-war Austria after 60 years in the United States. “I don’t even know who painted it. It wasn’t considered valuable — in fact, my father hated it.” McMullan is talking about a portrait of her mother that was painted in Vienna in 1920, smuggled out of the country when the family fled the Nazis on the eve of World War II, and lost on the surge of Hurricane Katrina last year.

The last time McMullan saw the portrait, it was hanging above her prized Louis XVI settee in the hallway of her family's summer home in Pass Christian, Mississippi. It was a centerpiece of the house, which was built in 1845 with tall windows and broad galleries to catch the breezes and a sweeping view of the Gulf of Mexico. The moment she hung it there, in an alcove, McMullan knew she had found the perfect spot, or so it seemed.

Done in oils in a style known as decote, the portrait was among precious few mementos of her family's peripatetic saga, which unfolded across four turbulent years as Europe disintegrated, and culminated in their arrival in Baltimore in 1940. On a bright autumn day in Lake Forest, Illinois, where McMullan and her husband Jim live for most of the year, she recalls her family shuttering their three-story manse on Vienna's Hofzeile Strasse, preparing to flee. It was a defining moment in her own history of loss and survival.

As they were preparing to leave, everyone knew the importance of concealing valuables from the Nazis, she says. Already her grandmother had taken the family silver to Geneva on repeated train trips, hidden in her handbag a few pieces at a time. Someone — McMullan doesn't remember who — removed the portrait from its frame and folded it before the family fled, first to Switzerland, next to France, then to England, and finally to the U.S. The grand old house in Vienna, with all their remaining possessions, including a large collection of art, was bombed to rubble during the war.

McMullan inherited the portrait, which still bore the crease marks from the folding, after her father’s death, and she took it to the summer home in Pass Christian. After trying it in several rooms, “I finally found that perfect spot in the alcove, and there I put my mother,” she says.

Though the house was among a handful to survive Katrina along Pass Christian’s East Scenic Drive, it was gutted by 145-mph winds and a 30-foot tidal surge, which carried away two-thirds of its contents, ripped out some floors, exploded walls and battered the arching live oaks on the lawn. With so much loss all around, with bodies being pulled from the wreckage up and down the war zone that the Gulf Coast had become, and with neighboring New Orleans descending into chaos, McMullan realized that her family was comparatively fortunate. Her mother’s portrait was a footnote to the worst natural disaster, the worst historic preservation disaster, and — as is only now becoming apparent — arguably the worst single loss of cultural artifacts and art in U.S. history. In New Orleans there was unimaginable ruin; in Pass Christian and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, there was obliteration. Still, her mother’s portrait was something that had seemed destined to survive, and now it was gone and no one knew where it went.

Across Mississippi’s coastal counties, more than 65,000 homes were destroyed by the storm, and on the beach facing the Mississippi Sound, a residential esplanade running intermittently for perhaps 50 miles was reduced to flotsam and jetsam in a matter of hours, the wreckage interrupted here and there by the husks of the few ravaged structures that survived. Amid the bewildering enumeration of lost lives, it took a while for most people to recognize what else was gone: The feeling of permanence that had set the Mississippi Coast apart from typical beachfront communities of stilted houses and fake stucco condos.

Hundreds of historic buildings were destroyed — buildings that had survived countless hurricanes, some for as long as two centuries — and many, including the McMullans’ house, discharged upon the wind and surge extensive collections of art. Countless collections, such as one that vanished from a home across the bay, which reputedly included works by Rembrandt and Picasso, were irreplaceable. Because the Gulf Coast was also a mecca for artists, the loss of such private collections was exacerbated by the destruction of artists' studios, museums, galleries and public buildings in which local art was on display. “We’ve lost art on a grand scale,” is how Biloxi attorney and art collector Patrick Bergin describes the cataclysm. Bergin, who rode out the storm with his family in their home on the Back Bay of Biloxi, recalls frantically moving as much of his art as possible upstairs as the rising water swept through the ground floor, but says much of the collection was lost anyway. “And it’s heartbreaking,” he says, “to think of everything in those 100-plus-year-old houses on the beach — all the antiques, heirlooms, art, sculpture — washed out into the Gulf or buried under debris.”

Even as the losses are being reckoned, random pieces of art have been found among the sodden drifts of clothing, building timbers, broken china cabinets, blinded TV sets and rank refrigerators. In one odd coincidence, an Ocean Springs, Mississippi, woman found a water-damaged watercolor, of a marsh scene, in a marsh. Such finds have provided a source of both inspiration and bewilderment, leaving artists and collectors to wonder: Where, exactly, did it all go? For many, including Long Beach, Mississippi, collector David Lord, this is anything but an idle exercise. Lord lost a personal art collection whose value he estimates at more than $7 million, and he has no idea where it went or whether he will see any of the pieces again.

Today, a year after the storm, as the Gulf Coast echoes with the din of backhoes and dump trucks hauling away the last of an estimated 40 million cubic yards of debris, “gone” is not a satisfactory — nor, in many cases, an accurate — explanation, which makes it hard for collectors and artists to find closure or to envision what the future might, or should, hold. With so many places to search, with so much inscrutable evidence constantly assaulting the eye, “I do lie awake at night wondering,” McMullan says. Might her mother's portrait one day be recovered, or, barring that, might she learn how it met its end?

The possibilities, of course, are endless. McMullan’s portrait might lie buried in the muck and sand of the offshore waters, or it could be hanging in a treetop with the drapery and clothes that flutter like tattered prayer flags across the coast. It could have washed up on a beach in Texas, or Yucatan, or it could be buried with all the other unseen treasures in the scores of landfills that were hastily permitted in inland counties after the storm. It could, conceivably, eventually show up on eBay. The storm surge of Katrina was the largest ever recorded in North America and swept as far as ten miles inland, leaving a swath of destruction 150 miles wide. Beyond reckoning the losses, finding out precisely what happened has become a preoccupation for those seeking to salvage evidence of the shattered past.

The surge of Katrina was not, as might be imagined, simply a giant tidal wave that struck the beach, then carried the resulting wreckage out to sea. Instead it mounted steadily, bounding higher until it overtook the sea wall that lines much of the beach, advancing further with each crashing wave to slosh across streets and highways before roaring in a whitewater torrent over embankments, into buildings, back out, and in again. The tide reached the third floor of some structures, crowned by breaking, wind-driven waves, the force of which grew exponentially when coupled with the increasing weight of the water. Foundations were undermined, walls yielded to the stress, and rafts of wreckage, vehicles and boats collected and acted as battering rams. Once the eye passed, the water began to fall and the flow reversed, but not uniformly, because the winds had shifted and the obstacles had moved. Debris was scattered everywhere.

Not surprisingly, locating art was not a high priority for most people in the immediate aftermath of the storm. Faced with recovering bodies and finding food, water, and shelter, “People were overwhelmed,” says Gwen Impson, who heads the Hancock County artists' association known as The Arts. “People were dealing with life and death issues. But slowly it began to sink in, and people began to go through the piles of debris.”

There is still no official estimate of the total value of the artwork that was lost, and there may never be. Because so many collections were uninsured, often the only documentation was contained in the personal records of their owners, and sometimes those records, too, have vanished. Some of the artwork was never photographed. Jim Lamantia, a retired architect who is now an art collector, dealer, and part-time appraiser, says he lost the majority of his own collection, though his gallery in New Orleans was spared. “Monetarily, my loss was significant,” he says. None of his art, including his inventory in the gallery, was insured. “I can’t afford the sort of insurance I’d have to have,” he says.

Lamantia, who lives in Pass Christian and New York City, says he retrieved some of his paintings from debris piles, shipped a few to New York for restoration, and is creating collages from the remnants of his 18th century Piranesi paper prints. He says he is skeptical of some of the losses claimed by other collectors, but is not surprised that people would evacuate without their art. “The extent of Katrina was unimaginable,” he says. “We boarded up and comfortably left.” In some cases the only evidence of the value of the lost art is in surviving examples. Prior to the storm, Lord says he donated one painting from his collection, a watercolor of a Central Park scene by Maurice Pendergrass that appraised at $980,000, to the New Orleans Museum of Art. The museum’s director, John Bullard, confirms the donation.

“It’s a beautiful piece,” Bullard says, adding that although the museum did not participate in the appraisal, “$900,000 is certainly not out of line for a major Pendergrass painting.” (The museum's collection survived.)

Blake Vonder Haar, whose New Orleans art restoration studio has traditionally drawn clients from the Gulf Coast, says her business has been deluged with artwork that was soaked with saltwater, caked with mud, ripped, faded, or disintegrating. “We’ve taken 4,000 pieces of damaged art since Katrina, but very few are from the Gulf Coast — I can count them on one hand — because most of them are just gone,” she says. Among the rare survivors, which she is currently restoring, is the oversized “Portrait of Jan de Groot” by artist Jerry Farnsworth, whose work also hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York. The painting, which features de Groot with an owl on his shoulder, was pulled from a debris pile blocking a Biloxi street.

The incentive such finds gives to the continuing search is undercut by the preponderance of debris, the bewildering array of places to look, and the lack of an official clearinghouse for lost art, which makes it difficult to reunite found pieces with their owners. Most of the happy endings have come about by happenstance, and through word-of- mouth. As the storm retreats into history, the chances of finding more are rapidly dimming, yet many are reluctant to give up the search.

In addition to the portrait, the McMullans lost 700 volumes of books, photos taken during the Depression by author Eudora Welty, a set of original Audubon prints, and a letter from author William Faulkner describing his visit to the home. “I picture those bookcases falling over, and then the floors going, and all that water rushing under the house, and the books just fell into the hole and were carried away,” McMullan says. “That’s the only way I can visualize it.” Not long ago, she adds, “A woman called me and said she thought she'd found my portrait. It had washed up on the edge of the bay, in Bay St. Louis. But she described it to me and the color of the hair was different — it was black and my mother’s was reddish-blonde. The tilt of the head was different. I didn’t even get the woman's name. It gets to the point that this whole thing is so painful you want to erase it. But you can’t.”

On a balmy, late spring day the narrow streets of old-town Bay St. Louis are bustling with the trucks of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, roofers, and painters. Like every other city on the Gulf Coast, Bay St. Louis, some 50 miles east of New Orleans, is recovering incrementally from the hurricane. Progress is measured by the degree to which signs of destruction are removed, like so many negatives reaching toward a positive conclusion. A church steeple still blocks the sidewalk on Main Street, but it has been repositioned, upright. A field of debris that once stretched to the horizon along the beach is slowly being whittled down. The National Guard staging area is gone, as are most of the relief workers. In the hollowed-out downtown, the clatter of nail guns mingles with the drone of a road grader on the scoured beach, where the driftwood is interspersed with antique windows, bits of architectural molding, a computer hard drive, toys. Shimmering like a mirage on the placid bay, a barge-mounted pile driver floats beside the topless piers of the old U.S.-90 bridge, which was washed out by the storm.

In what was once the South Beach historic district, amid the muddy, overturned cars and the mountains of architectural and household debris, Charles Gray’s immaculate silver Rolls Royce sits parked beside his tiny FEMA travel trailer. Gray’s domain is basically a clean slab, with large ferns in urns positioned at the front corners, carved from the ruined streetscape. Gray’s home, in a former warehouse that was undergoing restoration, was leveled by the storm, as were most of its neighbors. The back wall was the first to collapse, and fell inward, he says; the other three walls collapsed outward after the interior filled. Gray knows this because a family across the street — a man, woman, and two children — saw it happen as they struggled to save themselves. The family, he says, “was floating, trying to get to my roof, and when they got to within two or three hundred feet of it, my building collapsed, too.” The mother drowned, a fact that gives sobering context to Gray’s own material loss. “I’m 72, and I would only have used those things for ten more years or so, anyway,” he says, sounding only partly convinced.

Most significant among Gray's losses, he says, were two Picassos and a painting reputedly done by Leonardo da Vinci, called “Boy with a Violin.” Also washed from the house was a self-portrait etching attributed to Rembrandt that, remarkably, Gray managed to recover from a debris pile a block away, a month after the storm. The etching is now at an art conservator, he says. Gray’s collection was also uninsured, and his explanation for the lack of coverage is that his provider refused him on the grounds that his building was only partially complete. The point is now largely moot because few insurance companies have honored hurricane policies, claiming the losses were the result of a flood, and many of the buildings lacked flood insurance because they were elevated atop comparatively high ground, outside the designated flood zones.

The contents of Gray’s collection were known to many in the local arts community, but the lack of insurance makes it impossible to verify his or many other losses, or to affix values. “Only one of the Picassos had been certified — a line drawing of a male nude with a strange little Queen Victoria-looking woman gawking at him,” he says. The reputed da Vinci, by his account, was once the subject of a controversy after an art critic suggested that it might actually be attributed to Rafael. After that, Gray says, it was removed from the Royal Academy of Art in London, and he bought it at an auction in the 1950s; in fact, there are very few known paintings attributed to da Vinci — Gray might just as easily say that he had a second rendition of “The Last Supper,” but that it is now sadly gone.

Gray has not come up entirely empty handed, as many have. In addition to the Rembrandt, he has found parts of his two crystal chandeliers, more than 1,000 of his 3,000 miniature figurines, several damaged museum-quality lacquered boxes from the former Soviet Union, “and a complete eight-piece setting of Chateau Chantilly china, which I found as recently as the day before yesterday, while I was digging in two or three inches of mud in my back yard.”

He says he hunted every day for three months. “My 1921 Chickering parlor grand piano, which is irreplaceable, I found a block away, upside down,” he says. “I’ve gone and sat on the carcass of that piano and cried a hundred times. It gets to the point where I was actually happier not to find the carcasses of things. Otherwise you can still hope they're alive. It's like that line from Tennessee Williams: ‘Ruined finery is all I have.’”

In addition to private collectors, many local artists were hard hit, in some cases losing their life's work, their supplies, their studios, and their homes. Lori Gordon, a painter and mixed-media artist, lost her Clermont Harbor home and studio along with more than 800 pieces of her own art spanning a 40-year career, including her portrait of her late father. Most of her last year's work survived in galleries that either did not flood or flooded to depths below the level at which her pieces were hanging. By far the biggest surprise, she says, was finding an intact stained glass window that had been given to her by an artist friend, which had been mounted in the front door of her house. Though the structure and the door were nowhere to be found, she found the stained glass on the ground, unbroken. Thus began the next phase of Gordon's career — incorporating detritus from the storm into her mixed-media art. Gordon's designs now include "pieces of the storm," as she describes them — lost figurines, antique plates, stamped tin, clocks, dolls, carved angels, masks, Mardi Gras beads, watermarked sheet music and anything else that catches her eye amid the ruins. Searching the debris, she says, "fulfilled an emotional need. That broken plate takes on a significance way out of proportion." During her first month of searching she found four of her paintings, damaged but still whole, as well as a few pencil drawings. "The vast majority of what I found were bits and pieces of paintings and bits and pieces of furniture, and as time went on and I was finding less and less of our own things, I started talking to friends and neighbors who invited me to go through their lots and see what I could find. Yesterday I found two more pieces of a friend's African art collection. I know she'll want those back." Only once has someone recognized a personal possession in Gordon's nascent, post-Katrina mixed-media work. In that case, "I had incorporated a fragment of a broken chair back, and she walked in, looked at it, pointed at it and said, 'That's it, that's it — I need that piece of my chair!' She needed it for a pattern to replace what she had lost, so I took it apart and gave it to her."

Another artist, Bay St. Louis potter and painter Ruth Thompson, recalls roaming the wreckage of her neighborhood after the storm “feeling like I was in the middle of a Salvador Dali painting — it was surreal. And I noticed that after the storm, when I started painting again, my style had changed dramatically.” To illustrate, she pulls out examples of her work, pre- and post-Katrina. Before, her style was impressionistic: A typical scene was a serene garden reminiscent of a Monet. Since the storm, she has painted bold, abstract studies, often of demons and birds with gaping mouths.

Hundreds of other artists have experienced similar losses. The Gulf Coast Art Association, founded in 1926, with 80 active artists, was hosting an exhibit in the Gulfport library when Katrina hit, and none of the art has been found, says member Shirley Sweeney. Another member had paintings hanging in the visitor’s center of the Gulf Islands National Seashore in Ocean Springs, all of which were lost. The Singing River Art Association, based in Pascagoula, also had works hanging in the Gulf Islands visitor's center, a few of which were later found on the beach, and in Biloxi’s J. L. Scott Marine Center, all of which were lost. Some artwork belonging to another Singing River member was returned after being uncovered in the debris along four blocks of Pascagoula's Market Street. The consensus is that much of the lost art certainly washed out to sea, but, says Impson, “We'll never know how much washed out. There are people still unaccounted for. There’ll be mysteries, always, after the hurricane.”

Yet because the surge was so powerful, an unusually large amount of debris was snagged by obstacles further inland, and so, observes Mary Anderson Pickard, daughter of renowned Ocean Springs artist Walter Anderson, “Every time you try to make a generalization about where things were going, it gets contradicted.” Almost all of her father's work, which was the subject of an exhibit at the Smithsonian in 2003, was lost or damaged by the storm. Still, volunteer searchers recently found several paintings done by Pickard's uncle, Mac Anderson, across the Ocean Springs harbor, a mile northwest of the Shearwater Pottery compound where the family of artists lived and worked before the storm. Other items, meanwhile, have been found in opposite directions. “We found a good many things buried in muddy sand, and I think we’ll probably continue to find things,” Pickard says. “Last week we had chicken bones turning up on the Gulfport beach again, from the trucks that were parked at the pier when the storm hit, going to Russia or somewhere. Things are washing in. When we have a storm, or a very high tide, more things will wash back in.”

In addition to art that was never seen amid the piles of debris, some works were actually discarded as waste in the bewilderment and confusion after the storm, Bergin says. In Gulfport's Whitney Bank building, where his office was located, the lobby contained several pieces of high-quality abstract art, and most of what did not wash out on the surge was later hauled away, he says. “I dream about those pieces, being able to find them in the area where they take all the debris, being able to pull them out and do something with them. I imagine the debris sites are just inundated with so many works buried.”

Among those who searched the debris for art, photographs, or anything of value to its former owners was Gulfport attorney and art collector Tom Teel. “All that’s left of my office is some old tabby steps,” he says, referring to the mixture of ground oyster shells and cement that was once a common building material on the coast. “And we’d find all these pictures, all gnarled and wet, and we didn’t know who they belonged to, so we’d stick them there on the steps, and every few days I’d go by and some of them would be gone, as people found them, so we’d add a few more.” Teel, who lost an eclectic collection of art ranging from 19th century oil paintings to an original photograph of Martin Luther King Jr., expects other pieces to turn up over time, though not necessarily in salvageable condition. “Tons of things will be found by shrimpers,” he says. “Already I know one shrimper found some World War I relics, including a bugle that had washed out and came up in his net.”

The closest disposal site to Pass Christian is the Firetower Landfill, just north of I-10, which was among 50 or so emergency burn pits, disposal sites and transfer stations set up after the storm. “We have seen some art come in,” says Herman Kitchens, who works for Advanced Disposal, the operator of the landfill. “But none of it’s worth salvaging. It’s mostly wet stuff and broken frames. After all the machinery handling, it’s torn to bits. I haven’t seen anything you’d want to keep — it’s mostly things without much value, like you'd see (hanging) in a nursing home.” In the months immediately after the storm, Kitchens says, “You did see a lot of people going through the debris piles. And I know a guy who hauls in here who was a shrimper, and he said he brought up some artifacts in his net that came from Beauvoir (Jefferson Davis’s last home, in Biloxi). But we go flounder-gigging just about every night, and about all we've seen is all the Wal-Mart stuff that’s washed up against the jetty.”

On this particular day a steady stream of dump trucks comes and goes along the rutted gravel road to the former dirt mine, which has been transformed into a mass of pulverized debris perhaps 50 feet high and several hundred yards long. At one end is the so-called “vegetative debris” — mostly trees and brush. Beside that sprawls a mound of tires, beyond which is the sorting area, where other types of refuse, including construction and demolition materials, are shunted to the main landfill, where any art would have likely ended up. It is hard to imagine finding anything recoverable in the waste, which was battered by wind and waves and steeped in salty, bacteria- and mold-laden piles before being bulldozed, loaded into trucks, dumped at the landfill, then compacted and covered with compost. Still, people look.

During the height of the cleanup, as many as 240 dump trucks per day unloaded at the Firetower site, which now contains about 700,000 cubic yards of debris. (By comparison, about ten million cubic yards were removed from the World Trade Center site). “Everyone just wants to get the stuff out of the way as quickly as possible,” says Billy Warden, who heads the solid waste permitting division of the state Department of Environmental Quality, adding that during the collecting and sorting of debris, “We had spotters looking for (chemical) drums, electronics, tires. It was all a jumbled mess, as you can imagine. The tidal surge just rolled all this stuff together. It was everything that would be in your house — clothes, cell phones, photo albums. I never heard of anyone finding any art.”

Even among those in a position to recognize art at the debris sites, knowledge is typically rudimentary and of only passing interest. When asked about the prospects for finding lost artwork, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers employee suggests talking with “someone at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum” — an apparent reference to the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum, under construction in Ocean Springs to house the pottery of local master George Ohr, otherwise known as “the Mad Potter of Biloxi.” Ohr-O'Keefe Museum director Marjie Gowdy laughs when she hears of the mistake. “It happens all the time,” she says. Yet the museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian, had already begun to make a name for itself before its Frank Gehry-designed facility was finished. The museum now has the bittersweet distinction of owning the most valuable collection of art on the Gulf Coast that remains intact. The campus itself is another story; gone is the Pleasant Reed House, built by a freed slave, which was being converted to an African American museum, as well as antebellum Tullis-Toledano Manor, considered by many to have been the best example of Gulf Coast vernacular architecture, which was flattened by an unmoored casino barge. Also damaged was the African American Art wing of the museum, though the graceful live oaks around which Gehry designed the complex survived. Ohr is widely regarded as a pottery genius, known for his pinched, folded, and twisted clay designs that were both eccentric and refined. A single piece has sold for as much as $84,000. His unconventional style reportedly attracted Gehry — most famous for the Guggenheim art museum in Bilbao, Spain, to design the project. Ohr’s pottery came through the storm unscathed on the second floor of the Biloxi library, but “deteriorating security,” as Gowdy puts it, prompted its relocation to the Mobile Museum of Art a week later, where it stayed for one year. It is now in an undisclosed vault north of the Gulf Coast.

Deteriorating security — otherwise known as looting – may have been a factor in the loss of artwork elsewhere, observes Lord, who evacuated with 60 pieces from his own collection but says that of the 200 he left behind, 17 survived on the second floor and were believed to have been stolen later, including works by Jose Orozco, George Luks, and Mark Rothko. “Those 17 were assessed at $2.6 million,” he says. While he did have insurance, Lord says it was not nearly enough to cover his loss. He leafs through a long list of the missing pieces, which include 19th century American landscapes by artists Ralph Blakelock, George Bickerstaff, and Edward Willard Deming as well as modern art by Joseph Meert, Max Weber, and Man Ray. Others say that in the rarefied atmosphere of the cleanup, finders of lost art no doubt occasionally turned into keepers, whether by design or by default.

In the weeks after the hurricane, the entire Gulf Coast was cordoned off and permits were required of anyone seeking to travel to the beachfront. Nowhere was visitor scrutiny more rigorous than in Pass Christian, which was a wealthy enclave of waterfront mansions that claimed the oldest yacht club in the South. Though devastated by the storm, Pass Christian retains more of its lavish residences than any other city on the coast, and those that survived were blown open by the storm, often with valuable furnishings and still hanging artwork visible through gaping holes in the facades. The Pass Christian beachfront is now a scene of architectural triage, with several of the surviving mansions undergoing restoration or being painstakingly returned to their foundations by house movers, and others being demolished or rebuilt from the ground up. At the McMullans’ house, blown-out windows and doors and a large hole in the front wall are now patched with plywood, awaiting a construction crew.

McMullan says that she initially hesitated about repairing the house, but decided to proceed after realizing it was now the oldest structure in town, after the previous titleholder was destroyed by the surge. Today, the lawn is mostly clear of debris, the live oaks are sprouting new growth, and the jasmine is blooming. The sounds of nail guns reverberate from the gutted house next door, while in the other direction, a backhoe groans. McMullan’s initial uncertainty stemmed in part from the pain of loss, she says. “Some of those things — the Audubon prints, the Welty photos, you can still get them. But it’s just too painful to think of hanging anything on those walls right now.” Others express fear that the empty spaces of the Gulf Coast will be filled by garish casinos, condos, and commercial strips. There is also the question of why anyone would invest so much — including priceless collections of art — in what has proved to be an untenable hurricane zone. As if acknowledging the obvious, the logo of the Corps of Engineers’ recovery program features the agency's symbol — a castle, but in this case built of sand.

Lori Gordon laughs when asked why so much valuable art was placed in harm's way, and why so many people are rushing to do it again. “It has to do with this little thing called home,” she says. “No matter what’s staring you in the face, when you get emotionally attached to a place, when you get emotionally attached to things, it defies logic. The people who aren’t emotionally attached — they’re already gone.” Gordon says she has no choice but to move inland herself, in one part due to the wildly escalating cost of hurricane insurance (in some cases, by as much as 400 percent) and the planned construction of high-rise condos in her neighborhood. “That hurts more than the storm,” she says. “Katrina took my house, but circumstances are now robbing me of my home.”

McMullan’s daughter, Margaret, says she always felt trepidation about leaving valuable possessions in the family’s beachfront home, even though the house had survived innumerable hurricanes during its 160 years. “I was always the one closing up before a hurricane, and I’d be thinking, what are we going to do if all this stuff goes? I had a friend visiting once from Los Angeles, and we were walking through the library, where the Eudora Welty photos were, and she said, ‘Why are you keeping these in here? It’s the worst place, with the salt air.’ And my father said, ‘So what? This is where I want to enjoy them.’ My parents, they just want to be amongst that stuff.” She agrees with her mother’s assessment of the monetary value of her grandmother’s portrait. “It’s not a great painting. It’s overly pretty — she looked like one of those Gibson Girls. I always thought the artist should have given her more substance, but the funny thing is, even though my mother got it framed and restored in New Orleans, you could still see those crease marks where it was folded, and that was what I really liked about it. To me, that was its substance.” The same could now be said of the watermarks and muddy stains on much of the art recovered after Katrina, though Pickard, for one, says the scars are too fresh to see it that way now.

Notably, many of the surviving collections, both public and private, are expected to return to their beachfront venues once the necessary restorations are complete. Before Katrina, Vonder Haar’s studio had restored 168 pieces of artwork from Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis’s home, which was built in 1852 and elevated about eight feet above the ground on Biloxi's beachfront boulevard. The last of the artwork was returned to the house two months before Katrina, and much of it was subsequently soaked or ripped by debris, including portraits of Davis and of his daughter, the latter of which Vonder Haar says took 200 hours to restore the first time around. The three most valuable of the damaged paintings are being restored, again, at Delaware's Winterthur Museum, and will eventually be returned to the house.

The Ohr-O’Keefe Museum, which had been scheduled to open in June, is now expected to open in 2008 at the same location. All the necessary protective measures — including reinforcing the walls of the lower level — will be put into place to ensure that the collection is safe, and FEMA has ruled that the building does not have to be further elevated, Gowdy says. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and it does seem risky,” Gowdy says of the extensive collections of art and artists’ studios on the Gulf Coast. “But when it’s beautiful here, it’s so beautiful, and you want to be by the water. People just get enchanted by the Gulf Coast lifestyle. That’s why the artists are going to come back.” She says the art community has also been bolstered by emergency funding from groups such as the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Ford Foundation, and government agencies including the Mississippi Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Bergin predicts that collecting will resume in earnest once some semblance of normalcy returns. “It’s like I told my wife when we were sifting through the debris: You work all your life to collect, you go to the auctions, you make day trips to galleries in New Orleans and meet artists, you preserve and restore, yet in one fell swoop all that effort is washed away.” Yet soon after the storm, Bergin says he began decorating the RV his family moved into with reclaimed artworks, including paintings by Alexander Calder and Peter Max. “It’s our fix to surround ourselves with what we’ve salvaged,” he says. “It’s an addiction. After the storm, rather than go for food and the file cabinets, what the hell do I do? I go for the artwork. It’s total nonsense. We were without food for nearly three days because of that. We should have been saving food.” The days of searching are now something of a blur, he says. “In the beginning we were all feeling hurt and shocked, and I threw out some things, and I wish I had it to do over again. It was so hurtful to see things that were no longer what they used to be. I wanted to be removed from reality, did not want to salvage or save. The pieces seemed somehow less valuable, and at first you don’t want anything that will remind you of this horrific event. But the further along we go, it’s like a death, where years later you can deal with it. And I realize that what’s left — it's all even more valuable now.”

In the old days, before August 29, 2005, the Anderson family's Shearwater complex in Ocean Springs was an enclave of weathered wooden buildings set amid towering oaks, magnolias, and pines, overlooking the water. Several of the Andersons were or are painters, sculptors, or potters, and many lived and worked in the 28-acre compound, which was anchored by a house built in the 1830s. The most famous among them was Walter Anderson, who produced vivid paintings, murals, and journals recording natural scenes along the Gulf Coast. For many, the damage and destruction of his work represents the most tragic loss of art as a result of Katrina.

Pickard, Anderson’s daughter, stands before the surviving potters’ sheds, which were wrecked by the surge but are being meticulously, lovingly, and somewhat feverishly reconstructed by her son Jason Stebly, using boards and beams retrieved from collapsed buildings or from the nearby marsh, and new lumber milled from old-growth pines felled by the hurricane. “He won’t quit,” Pickard says of her son. “It’s his raison d'etre. He quit his job to do this.”

Pickard, whose soft, open smile occasionally fades as she fights back tears, normally exudes a palpable sense of purpose that now seems on the verge of wavering. She says of her son’s heroic efforts, “I think: Why is he doing this, giving up his whole life, trying to rebuild something that’s gone?”

Stebly is a tall, strong, concentrated man. His skin already brown from the late-spring sun, he is soaked with sweat down to his khaki shorts and running shoes. “Aren’t these boards beautiful?” he asks, gesturing toward the wide planks in the floor of the main potters’ building, which he rescued from a wrecked building nearby. His carpentry is solid, and is a work of art itself. Stepping outside for a smoke, he picks up a few pottery shards and says, “Here’s what I found today.” The pottery was illustrated by his grandfather, he says. Then his eyes roam up the artfully twisted trunk of a tree that appears to embrace the trunk of another beside it, smiles, says, “Black gum,” as if entering a note in a log.

There has been a great deal of cataloging at Shearwater during the last nine months, both on paper and in the minds of the Anderson family. “There were treasures in every building,” Pickard says as she strolls past the empty foundations. “The buildings themselves were art. They were sacred spaces. I lie awake at night trying to reconstruct how it happened, how it was all here and then it was gone. I don’t want to know, but I’m driven to know. What happens is, if you find something like a doll my father made for me from a cypress knee, it’s magnified and made more precious and sanctified. I’ve never been a ‘thing’ person who attaches to dishes or silver, but I had so many treasures that I will never get back again. And I’m coming to realize that those things are an illusion.”

Among the structural casualties were most of the Anderson family homes as well as the Shearwater Pottery showroom, which contained works by family members and others who visited during the decades since the artists' colony was founded in 1928. The losses also include collections of museum-quality ceramics and pottery as well as a portrait of Pickard’s great grandmother by painter Cecelia Beau. Walter Anderson’s studio cottage survived the storm, though it was washed from its foundation, and has since been moved back. Anderson's most famous murals, which once adorned the interior of the cottage, had been moved to the local museum that bears his name years ago, and survived.

Perhaps most traumatic, not only for the Andersons but also for the art world, was the flooding of the vault in which the majority of Walter Anderson's watercolors were archived. Though designed to be wind- and waterproof and elevated three feet above the height of the surge of Hurricane Camille, in 1969 (the benchmark storm prior to Katrina), the vault was breached by debris that smashed the double-sealed steel doors. Today it has the feel of a dank, pilfered mausoleum, and the dented doors look as if they were burst open by a SWAT team. Many of the paintings bled onto their separating papers, which created shadows of their images on the blank page — art that was essentially created by the storm, at the expense of the originals.

The primary motivation behind Anderson’s art, based on his journals, was his desire to understand and exalt nature — to “realize” it, in his words, and toward that aim he frequently rowed alone to Horn Island, a low-lying barrier island a dozen or so miles offshore, to paint for weeks at a time. He saw art everywhere there, and sculpted “The Swimmer,” one of the featured pieces at the Smithsonian exhibit, from a tree felled by the 1947 hurricane. In 1965, the year he died, Anderson rowed to Horn Island to experience Hurricane Betsy, alone and unprotected.

“My father always saw his art as ephemeral, though he had his box of favorites,” Pickard says as she stands beneath wind-stripped trees that now sport clumps of verdant, exaggerated re-growth. “He had an intense admiration for the power of storms. He was awed by them and wanted to be in them. He saw them as a catalyst for change. I’m trying hard to get to that place, to see that it’s going to push us all into being different people. I’m sure he would have known about global warming, and my own feeling is that this has been an indication that this part of the coast is no longer to be occupied. I don't think we’re meant to stay on it now. Each time I go out I feel like I'm going out on land that’s already been taken. The earth is trying to cool itself. Yet it’s human nature: We scurry back.”

Over the years, some of Anderson’s paintings have been sold — usually examples of subjects of which there were many iterations, but for the most part his life work had remained in one place. The family created block prints of some of his works to make them available to the general public, and more than 300 silk screens were recovered and are temporarily stored in a tent at the center of the compound. But Pickard’s brother John Anderson, who acts as the curator of the family’s collection, estimates that more than 80 percent of his father’s work was damaged, and 300 of his best paintings were destroyed. “We’re talking about paintings that have been published in books — icons of his work,”
he says. Some were buried in the muck at the bottom of the vault, while others floated away.

Many of those that survived are now housed at Mississippi State University, awaiting restoration, which Anderson says “will take years and cost millions of dollars” — money that the family does not have, because the collection was not insured. “In the past, people have told us we should take Daddy’s art to New York, that we could get rich, but that was not the objective,” Anderson says. “We kept the art here to keep it in close proximity to the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, and people came to us, which is part of the miracle.” He says he has given a lot of thought to how his father would have reacted to the loss. “He’d probably say we’re focusing on preserving too much,” he says, and offers as evidence an episode that took place at Oldfields Plantation, which belonged to his mother’s family, and where his parents lived for a time. At some point, he says, his mother’s father “needed some money, so he cut a large section of old growth timber, this very beautiful forest, and Daddy cried. Then the next year it received sunlight where it hadn’t been before, and flowers sprang up in incredible profusion, and he painted a mural of that rebirth called ‘The Cutover.’ It was about the endless circle of destruction and creation, about the resurrection. But what Daddy did — he wasn't really just painting birds and fish, he was painting a moment in time, a quintessential moment in time, and if one of them is lost, it can’t ever be recovered.”

In the days after the storm, the family searched feverishly for lost art, Pickard says. “We recovered at least three paintings, and lots of people tried, but it was very hot and dangerous. We hunted very intently for two months and after that I got sick of it; then after it got cool I did it again. I think there are probably still things there to be found, but a lot of what I found was just empty frames.” Among the found works was a mural called “The Saints,” which Walter Anderson painted on boards, and which originally hung in his first studio, built by the water in 1930.

“On the wall of his studio he painted Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, as well as St. George and the dragon and the princess,” Pickard says. Though the studio was destroyed by Hurricane Camille, its foundation was incorporated into a patio of Pickard's home, also now gone. After Camille, she says, “We found the boards all over the Shearwater acres and across the harbor. When I built my house, they were mine, so I put them back as close as I could to the place where they’d been, where the studio had been. When Katrina came, again the boards were taken and again we found them, all but one. About three were in the same place in that marsh behind where the showroom used to be. My feeling is they were meant to stay on the property. Jason made it one of his priorities when he was going through the debris to find those boards, and one day he was really tired and he closed his eyes and said please let me find one, and he felt someone looking at him and he turned around and saw half of a saint’s face.” The mural, short one board, now leans against a wall at the home of another of Anderson’s daughters, Leif. Though the boards are weathered, the gilded faces of the saints shimmer like stylized images from a pre-Raphaelite painting.

Pickard is visibly proud of her father’s mural, but the look in her eyes reflects her assessment that things of value are an illusion, that they cannot be depended upon. She is chastened by the cumulative losses, and is as dubious about the future as her son is driven to rebuild the past. Back at the potters’ sheds, she finds Stebly hard at work, as always. The sheds are becoming works of quiet, functional beauty, as he prepares them for the creativity of others. Stebly works all day, every day, Pickard says, then falls asleep, exhausted, in a bed set beneath a tarp by the water. “Why is he doing it?” she asks. “I just keep thinking: It’s all going to be gone.”

The question could be asked of many people across the Gulf Coast, and, for that matter, anywhere: Why does anyone create or preserve, knowing that nothing ultimately lasts? Over the phone, John Anderson mulls the question. Then, in a voice so soft that it is sometimes difficult to hear, he says, “The truth is, Jason seems to have found himself. He has found an identity after the storm. He's found what matters to him.”

Note: About a month later, I wrote the following, as a sort of postscript, which ran in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger:

In September 1965, as Hurricane Betsy was bearing down on the Gulf Coast, Walter Anderson set out in a rowboat from his home in Ocean Springs for Horn Island, 12 miles offshore.

Anderson was a painter, sculptor and potter from a family of gifted and eccentric artists, and was so enthralled with nature, especially storms, that he wanted to experience Betsy’s raw power unprotected and alone.

The storm hit that night, and when the surge began to wash over the island, Anderson picked a tree to tie himself to in case the waves engulfed him, then moved his camp to a high dune and crawled beneath his overturned skiff. He survived the storm, but his family had no way of knowing it. Apparently oblivious to their concerns, Anderson explored the island for days after, concluding in his journal, “Change — it is magical.”

He died two months later in New Orleans, of lung cancer at 62.

The natural world of the Mississippi coast, in all its fecundity, beauty and occasional violence, was Anderson's lifelong milieu. His belief that the highest art is created in union with nature provides the context for an exhibit at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, Jewels of the Sea: Walter Anderson's Aquatica, through May.

The exhibit showcases 80 works, many of which were damaged by the surge of Hurricane Katrina. Included are two remarkable watercolors of seashells, a species known as apple murex snails. One, Anderson painted. The other was actually forged by the storm.

The watercolors are among an as-yet uncatalogued collection of damaged artworks and reverse images imprinted on their separating papers when they were inundated by the surge — so-called ghost or shadow images. They illustrate both the cataclysm of the hurricane and the strangely fitting way it breathed new life into the late artist's work.

An estimated 80 percent of Anderson's artwork in his family's large collection was damaged by Katrina, and as many as 300 of his best paintings were destroyed. But, noted his grandson, Jason Stebly, “I think he would have been jazzed by the fact that the storm destroyed some of his work while creating new works. He would have loved that.”

Most of Anderson’s work went unseen until after his death, when the doors were opened to his private cottage at the family's Shearwater Pottery compound in Ocean Springs. The cache of artwork eventually received wide acclaim, and Anderson became something of a cultural icon. Nine books, including his journals in 1973 and a recent biography, explore his life and art.

The Smithsonian staged a major exhibition of his work in 2003, using as a centerpiece a wood sculpture named “The Swimmer,” which Anderson carved from a tree downed by a 1947 hurricane.

Anderson saw his paintings more as process than product, as a vehicle for “realizing” nature, in his words. The paintings were more or less seen as byproducts of the moments of realization, and often expendable ones at that: Anderson typically painted on typewriter paper using impermanent pigments, and was known to use his drawings and paintings to light fires in his hearth.

The Anderson family chose to keep the majority of the collection at the Shearwater compound, a fateful decision when Katrina struck. Though the artwork was housed in a concrete vault elevated three feet above the surge of Camille, Katrina's unprecedented 30-foot surge breached the double-sealed steel doors and flooded the building.

After months of feverishly working to salvage and conserve the remaining works, his son, John Anderson, conceded that his father “would probably feel we're focusing too much on preservation.”

In fact, it is Walter Anderson's view that art is ephemeral and that its highest forms are created in tandem with nature which makes the ghost images so compelling.

During the desperate recovery effort, family members and volunteers found that many of Anderson's paintings had been torn to bits or had simply floated away, while others had been saturated but remained intact. Hundreds of watercolors and ink drawings had bled onto their separating papers, creating the reverse imprints, or ghost images.

No one fully recognized, amid the wreckage, that the ghost prints were valuable. Instead they were viewed as residue of waste — stains left by the storm. Hundreds were simply thrown away.
“We were peeling the acid free papers away and setting them aside, and setting the originals on sheets on the floor to dry... We had no idea they were important. It was just a pile of wet paper,” John Anderson said.

At some point the family began gathering the remaining imprints, and stuck them in a box. Only later, he said, did anyone realize that the creation of the ghost prints represented “something truly powerful, and it was totally about the storm.”

After a long day of digging through the muck, John Anderson said he awoke in the night and felt compelled to return to the sodden art.

Because there was no electricity, he donned a headlamp and began sorting through folders of soggy paintings, “And there was this painting, just glowing, full of powerful energy— perhaps more than it had before,” he recalled. “The colors were more vibrant than before. They looked like they'd just been painted... This same process, which was extremely destructive to so many of the paintings, had actually intensified these.”

All of the paintings in the folder focused on sea life, and when Anderson mentioned this to museum director Libby Hartfield, “She said, 'We've got to do an exhibit.'”

Recognizing beauty amid the ruins of the coast even now is an awkward enterprise, because there is a feeling that to do so is somehow to betray what was lost.

John Anderson remains circumspect about the beauty of the ghost prints, which were created at the expense of the originals. He estimates that less perhaps as few as 50 of the shadow imprints remain, and of those, some are poor replications and do not qualify as art.

Surprisingly, the colors of the original paintings on display, including of the murex snails, remain vibrant, and the watermarks and mud stains do not compromise their integrity.

The ghost print of the snails, which hangs beneath the original, is more pastel, abstract and minimalist, and is crisscrossed by folds indicating that at some point it was wadded up as waste, before someone had second thoughts and flattened it out it again.

Each of the paintings tells its own story, embellished with its own overlays, illustrating both the original moment captured by the artist and the moments created during and after the storm.

The museum exhibit focuses less on the tragedy than on the transcendence of art and nature, and the damage to the collection is explained almost in passing.

In November 2005, the museum hosted an auction of artwork in which a few ghost images were sold, along with works donated by other area artists, to raise money for conserving and restoring the damaged Anderson paintings. That’s expected to cost millions, and the collection was not insured.

During a recent talk at the museum, Mary Anderson Pickard observed that her father once capsized while boating to Horn Island in rough seas, and lost a clipboard of watercolors.
Remarkably, the clipboard, with paintings still attached, was found long afterward by a boat captain near Ship Island and returned to the family. “It had been floating around in the open sea for who knows how long,” Pickard said, “and I was reminded of the look of those paintings when I saw the ghost prints after Katrina.”

Hartfield said the ghost prints can be seen as “an extension of his art, coming from nature. It’s the storm creating for him.

“What I hoped the exhibit would do — what I hope the visitor will take away, is to make us look at nature the way Anderson did, in a fresh way.”

Six years ago today

2011-08-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

I wrote this article, about the aftermath of Katrina, the full force of which struck Bay St. Louis, Miss., on Aug. 29, 2005, for the Sept. 25, 2005, Atlanta-Journal-Constitution. The actions of people like Tricia Bliler bear remembering.

BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. -- Tricia Bliler was wandering the ruins of her hometown, searching for a dry place to sleep after the squalls of Katrina, when she and a group of friends came upon the darkened gym of the Second Street Elementary School.

Like everyone she knew, Bliler, a waitress at the Good Life restaurant, had been forced into the open by the winds and storm surge of the hurricane, which flooded or blew away nearly every building in town. At this point the gym, though filled with stinky mud, beckoned. So her group cleaned out one corner to bed down for the night, then cooked what food they could scrounge on a reclaimed grill outside.

That is how it started.

"We were out there cooking, and people we knew would walk by and see us and I'd say, 'Come eat while it's good, we've got plenty,'" Bliler recalled recently, during a millisecond break in her work at what was officially known as an unauthorized shelter at the Second Street school. Bliler, a diminutive, focused, straightforward woman, soon found herself with far more than she had bargained for, although not more than she could handle. "People started bringing frozen things that were going to spoil, and we'd cook it on the grill, and from there it was like the fishes and the loaves; the food and the people just kept coming," she said.

Although something clearly went wrong with the official response to Katrina, it is not as if the storm's victims simply sat on their heels and waited. There was too much to do, and inevitably, someone rushed in to fill the void. In Bay St. Louis, one of the hardest-hit communities in the hurricane's path, no one was destined to do more than Bliler.

Within a week of the hurricane's passage Bliler and friends were cooking 300 meals a day on a single wood-burning stove, and the school had become a clearinghouse of information and goods donated to the storm's local victims.

Bliler began seeking aid from various relief organizations, but basically got nowhere. Undeterred, she found cots for the homeless and even began taking in patients evacuated from area hospitals. She adopted stray pets whose owners had vanished. She stockpiled and distributed clothes, medicine and other staples, gave whatever guidance she could to families looking for help in getting their kids back in school, somewhere, and in general offered every kind of aid and comfort she could muster. Finally, representatives from relief organizations including the Red Cross, FEMA and the National Guard began trickling in. Like almost everyone else, they initially just asked questions. But by now Bliler wasn't interested in questions; she wanted answers.

Ten days post-Katrina, the shelter's frenzied volunteers were scrambling to unload truckloads of donated items, tend to the evacuees and cook and serve meals, and Bliler had little time to talk about any of this. When Red Cross worker Liz Goodburn, hovering nearby with a notepad, asked how many meals Bliler was serving and said she might be able to supply a mobile kitchen if the shelter fell within her jurisdiction, Bliler said, "I've got three cooks. Talk to Andy. He's the one with the less stress." Then she was on to something else.

Behind her, stacked in the school cafeteria, were cases of Germ-X disinfectant soap, diapers, bottled water and canned food, all free for the taking. The day was suffocatingly hot and humid, inside and out, there was no power, and everyone was soaked with sweat.

A volunteer spoke to Bliler and she immediately sat down at her police radio and sent out a call for an ambulance. "I've got a diabetic who hasn't had insulin since the hurricane and he needs to go to the hospital," she said into the mouthpiece. There was no response. She repeated the request. Still no reply.

Then she looked up at the group standing nearby: A sunburnt National Guardsman, two Red Cross workers, a uniformed FEMA representative and a journalist. "Does anybody have a vehicle?" she asked. "We've got to get this guy to the hospital."

No response.

"I need a vehicle to take this guy to the hospital," she repeated.

Finally there was nothing to do but volunteer, "I've got a vehicle."

"Will you take him?" Bliler asked, and a minute later Mike McGee and I were off to a MASH unit on the hospital grounds, following directions from the guardsman. As one volunteer later said, "All you have to do is watch Tricia for five minutes, and if she asks you to do something, by God you do it."

Speeding through the ravaged town, bumping across countless downed power lines, with overturned cars intermingled with boats in the median and houses straddling the bent rails of railroad tracks, it was hard to imagine a clearer window into the problem of the notoriously slow response to Katrina. No doubt everyone had their hands full, it was easy to feel overwhelmed by the breadth and intensity of the need, and representatives of bureaucratically controlled agencies certainly needed clearance before undertaking what, on paper, might seem like a risky endeavor -- transporting a sick or injured person to a hospital. Yet everyone -- everyone -- was there, and who was really in charge?

Tricia Bliler, waitress.

Away from the strip malls on U.S. 90 and two garish dockside casinos, the heart of Bay St. Louis was a small, quiet village of narrow streets and alleys lined with arching live oak trees and Victorian mansions interspersed with cottages and stores.

Founded in 1818 and ruled variously by France, Spain, Great Britain, the Confederacy and the United States, the town developed a reputation for being racially and economically integrated, much like New Orleans, 50 miles to the west, and surprisingly open and tolerant given Mississippi's conflicted history.

Before Katrina, the beachfront historic district was home to art galleries, cafes and antique shops that managed to stop just short of being precious. More than 100 buildings were on the National Register of Historic Places. South of downtown, the beach was lined with multimillion-dollar estates and antebellum mansions overlooking the Mississippi Sound. It was, said resident Kevin Webster, "like a hip Mayberry."

"Not too long ago I was walking my dog through town and it just hit me: I am so lucky to live in this place," said Estus Kea, who was at that moment digging out a thick coating of muddy sludge from his 1880 shotgun house. "I realized, it's my great good fortune to be here, just walking my dog through this wonderful town, with these beautiful trees, these great old houses, and all these people who have so much joy in life. Now, it's gone."

Throughout that day people stopped by Kea's house to offer help. One family invited him and a friend to lunch, and to barbequed brisket and jambalaya for dinner. A policewoman stopped to ask whether the dog in Kea's yard belonged to him. When he answered that the owners were nowhere in evidence, the officer suggested that they might be dead. She later returned with a large bag of dog food.

A plumber stopped to check Kea's water meter after being told there was no water in the house. As he scooped soupy water from the meter box Kea asked about the man's house and he replied, "It was wiped clean. The yard was wiped clean. I don't have nothin' to clean up." A carload of strangers stopped to ask if anyone wanted anything to eat or drink. "We've got red beans and rice," the girl in the front seat said.

Despite the tragedy --- or perhaps because of it --- there was a beguiling sense of camaraderie in the days after the hurricane. "Every night on this street we have a neighborhood party," said one resident, Sandra Bagley. "We take that Hawaiian Punch the National Guard gives out at the Sav-A-Center and mix it with vodka and call it the Katrina."

But there was also work to be done. Back at the Second Street school, Tricia Bliler was grappling with an onslaught of new evacuees, enlisting the aid of guardsmen from Pensacola, Fla., and others to restore electricity to the entire school, and working with a church group from Oxford, Miss., to install a mobile water purification system.

Across town, Alorna and Richard Kay were probing the ruins of their house by the railroad tracks, searching for a cabinet containing important papers and worrying about their son, who had assumed a role not unlike Bliler's in his own community, the Desire neighborhood in New Orleans.

The Kays are from New Orleans, and it was there that they chose to ride out the hurricane, in their son's apartment. He spent the first days of the flood evacuating people in his canoe, and they soon found themselves helping victims, many of them elderly people who chose to stay or who could not leave. "He's not coming out," Alorna Kay said of her son. She and her husband only returned to Bay St. Louis after nine days to check on their house, she said.

Kay said the kind of support networks that had coalesced in Bay St. Louis had also formed within the neighborhoods of New Orleans. Such de facto communities came together in the Bywater and Desire neighborhoods, in the French Quarter, in the Garden District, even within the hell of the Superdome, where groups actually formed defensive enclaves --- circles of chairs with men ringing the outer perimeter to stand guard.

"There were pockets all over town," she said. "People are just trying to cope."

"It's unfortunate because of the circumstances," she said, "but something like this, in the end it draws people together, and you see who you can depend on."

Wildlife and the flood

2011-08-23T14:29:00.000-07:00

Of all the possible responses to finding yourself trapped on a shrinking patch of dry ground during a flood, burying your head in the dirt seems the most ill-advised. Yet that is what Paul Hartfield, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, observed a pack of armadillos doing as the Mississippi River flooded the lowlands north of Vicksburg last spring.

“It was like the height of denial,” Hartfield said of the four armadillos’ behavior, which he observed while exploring the floodwaters by boat with his wife Libby, director of the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, and Mississippi River guide John Ruskey. The armored rodents had dug a group hole, buried their heads, then clumsily attempted to cover the rest of their bodies with sticks and leaves.

Aside from being successful pioneers (they invaded the southern U.S. from South America), armadillos aren’t known for their intelligence. In fact, based on empirical road-kill evidence, it would be easy to conclude that they’re born dead on the side of the road. But their response to the threat of drowning seemed, well… downright stupid.

Armadillos are in fact able swimmers, capable of dog-paddling great distances, swimming for up to five minutes underwater, and even walking on the submerged bottoms of streams and ponds. Their behavior that day last spring seems to indicate that despite being able to do such things, sometimes they would just as soon not.

Though armadillos often bury their heads in response to a threat, it’s usually a defensive posture, not part of a long-term flood-survival plan. Hartfield said he expects the armadillos changed that plan once water began to fill their hole, that they were merely holding out until the last, and that, given their ability to swim, perhaps it wasn’t as dumb as it seemed.

Hartfield’s story raises an interesting question about wildlife during this year’s historic Mississippi River flood: How did they survive the inundation of millions of acres of land, from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, in many cases for months at a time?

Deciding whether to stay or go was on the minds of pretty much every animal in the Mississippi’s floodplain this spring, and unlike human residents, who made a run on every available U-Haul, farm trailer and hill-country storage building, wild animals had only their own legs, wings, fins or… wiggly muscles… to get them out of harm’s way. Making the wrong choice could mean death.

Seasonal fluctuations of water levels have been a part of life along the Mississippi River for millennia. Most of the region’s wildlife are hardwired to recognize the cues that the water is rising and move to higher ground, or, if necessary, swim or climb onto driftwood or into trees. Their responses to a major flood, such as occurred this year, are not unlike those of animals that have evolved within the context of wildfires in the American West, who typically graze as they move, unexcitedly, ahead of the advancing flames. That’s not to say animals don’t suffer, or, in some cases, die.

As Ruskey observed in his blog about a canoe trip he took from Memphis to Vicksburg at the height of the flood, the number of human evacuees along the river paled in comparison with the millions of wild animals that were either swept away or driven from its islands, sandbars and adjacent forests and fields. Still, Ruskey reported seeing only one dead deer during his entire trip.

As the flood retreats into history, biologists, hunters, fishermen and others have begun to assess how wildlife populations fared and how their habitats will be changed. Floods are integral to the ecosystems of the Mississippi River lowlands, but the 2011 event was unusually large in some areas, and a non-event in others, primarily as a result of manmade alterations that concentrate flows outside the protective levees. In many cases, those levees were the potential line of demarcation between life and death.

Ruskey, who operates a canoe guide service in Helena, Ark. and Clarksdale, Miss., noted that during his trip the flooded forests between the protective levees seemed eerily empty aside from an occasional, raucous flock of birds, and he predicted it will be “many seasons” before wildlife demographics return to normal. Along the way, Ruskey saw that one dead deer; another swimming in the surging river; a few snakes in trees; a black squirrel leaping through the forest canopy; and an armadillo, a raccoon and a wild boar that had taken refuge together on a small section of dry ground. Among the other species displaced by the flood were bear, fox, bobcats, coyotes, rabbits, opossums, raccoons, mink, bobcats, moles, beaver, wild turkey, turtles, frogs and skinks.

Given the general lack of wildlife that Ruskey and others observed in the flood zone, one might assume that there were widespread wildlife deaths, and that the ecological balance of the floodplain was significantly disrupted. Neither was likely the case, according to Hartfield, a recognized expert on the Mississippi River. He said that while some old, weak or very young animals no doubt died, most climbed into trees or onto driftwood, or walked, flew, slithered or swam to whatever higher ground they could find. The majority, he said, will eventually return to their home turf.

It comes as something of a surprise to learn that deer, with their spindly legs and small hooves, are actually remarkably strong swimmers, and can swim for miles, even in strong currents. Still, even they must eventually reach a resting spot, which posed a challenge during a flood that in some areas spread 30 miles wide.

For other species, such as wild turkeys, the challenge was to find a place to nest, because the flood coincided with their reproductive season. For still others, such as slow-moving, ground-dwelling moles, voles and earthworms, escape wasn’t really an option.

The danger of animals being forced into the open was primarily about human contact – encountering poachers, vehicles, dogs or manmade obstacles. Wild animals tend to become strangely tolerant of each other during floods, with mortal enemies sometimes congregating together, without controversy, of necessity.

As reports circulated about alligators basking on levees alongside animals that might otherwise have been their prey, I was reminded of something my grandparents told me about floods at their home along Steele Bayou, in the lower Mississippi Delta. The area was accessible only by boat during “high water,” as they referred to the seasonal inundations -- what we now routinely call a “flood.” A flood, in my grandparents’ view, was an unexpected, disastrous event, such as had occurred in 1927. This year’s event would have qualified as a flood, too, but most did not. In that sense, their vantage point was closer to that of the area’s wildlife than to typical contemporary human residents. When the water rose, a person either found a place to ride it out or migrated to higher ground. The biggest problem for my grandparents was the attractiveness of the doorsteps at their elevated house to rattlesnakes and water moccasins. When high water came, my grandparents entertained themselves by taking boat rides to various Indian mounds on which animals with conflicted histories had taken refuge, and where the consensus seemed to be: We’re in this together; let’s not have any trouble on the mound.

Such scenes were repeated during this year’s flood. For the most part, high ground meant the bluffs that abut the river in Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez and Baton Rouge; the levees that in places run along both sides of the river; and scattered Indian mounds. In some cases the only refuge wasn’t ground at all: During the height of the flood, deer and other animals were frequently seen marooned on the roofs and porches of homes. In places such as tiny Rodney, Miss., which is unprotected by levees, the dispersal of wildlife added an unexpected edge to the flood, as alligators were seen swimming along submerged streets.

Hartfield said the flood likely dispersed a great many animals, and may have fragmented the small surviving populations of bear, though they are also accustomed to swimming and climbing trees.

As for the impact of the flood on lowland habitats, some riverbanks, sandbars and farm fields were scoured by the currents, and some trees were uprooted. But in most cases the flood will be a boon to wildlife because it will rejuvenate habitat and introduce new food sources. Some animals will feast on the occasional carcass or on sluggish fish trapped in shallow, diminishing pools.

“The floodplain is fertilized, and blooms following a flood,” Hartfield said. “Food is abundant, and wildlife populations rebound and prosper. Oxbow lakes are replenished, and fishing should actually improve.” He added that it is also worth remembering that floods are the reason those areas remain comparatively wild.

Photo courtesy John Ruskey

Good night, Irene

2011-08-23T08:08:00.000-07:00

This just in! Hurricane Irene is trending on Twitter!

That was the notable nut graph (as journalists used to call it) of a news story today on the approach of the “monstrous” Irene to the U.S. mainland. The nut graph, for those of you who weren’t around when newspapers were primary news sources, is the paragraph – usually about the third or fourth, but sometimes much farther down – that essentially tells you why you’re reading the story.

There can be more than one nut graph, and in this case the notation about Irene's Twitter trending was actually pretty far down. But when you got to it, you knew: Beyond the actual possibility of a multibillion dollar natural disaster, complete with loss of life, what mattered was that people thought it mattered, and so, tweeted.

Look for the nut graph next time you’re scanning a news item. Be forewarned that today it sometimes gets left out altogether, so you don’t even know that the reason you should care about some random board vote is that the board had previously voted to award a contract to a child molester who had contributed to the board president’s campaign, etc. Sometimes, as was the case with Irene, the actual nut graph is more or less buried.

Why, you might ask, would you need a reporter to tell you why you're reading a story? Because otherwise the board vote might seem inconsequential, and you would not be inclined to read on. With most any news item, after you get past the lead paragraph, which is designed to get your attention, and a couple of follow-up paragraphs, which kind of make the lead make sense (the beginnings of the who, what, where, when and why), you will, presumably, wonder: Why should I read further? Why do I care to know more? At which point the reporter answers the question: Here is why. And the reason you need to know about hurricane Irene’s approach is not so much because it poses a physical threat, though there is that (Be frightened! Tweet about it!) but precisely because it’s trending. That's where we are now.

Awareness of reader (or viewer) interest is at the heart journalism, but the notion – and its practical applications – have been perverted over time, so that it’s now like some weird hybrid of voyeurism and autoeroticism. For this, I find it convenient to blame the 24-hour cable news cycle. Short on actual news to fill the hours, cable news producers began to find new ways of framing the story, and of fabricating the significance thereof. Soon “what you think” became enough to carry a story. And from there it was just a hop, skip and a jump to “what we think” being enough to carry a story. That’s how you end up with the news covering the news. Who knows better how to find its own g-spot, after all? And you get to watch!

Hence, today’s article, in which hurricane Irene is validated by “trending on Twitter.” Not to get all Andy Rooney about it, because immediate access to news, via Twitter or any other mechanism, is pretty amazing, and at times can be extremely useful. The question is, what messages are we receiving and sending out? If we have an opportunity to tell the world about something, is it going to be that our cat is sick (Facebook), or that we're interested in tweeting about what you're tweeting about (Yahoo! News rotator)?

Sadly, the revealing nut graph about Irene's twits wasn’t found on a news item carried by the self-absorbed and shameless Fox News network, or the juvenile Yahoo! News, but on venerable old AP, which is apparently trying to seem cool when it’s way too old for those pants, and anyway the pants suuck, duude.

This sort of needy come-on, this “Hey, have we met? I just heard this really interesting story!” is basic to journalism. It's what gave the world those newsboys in knee socks on the corner shouting “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” But when how you perceive the story becomes an important component – perhaps the most important part -- of the actual story, it not only corrupts the news process, it trivializes everything. When you care about something because you are perceived to care, and because you perceive that others perceive that others care, and when that is the nut graph... well, that’s a trend worth noting.

Saved! (hopefully)

2011-08-15T16:08:00.000-07:00

Readers of Mississippi in Africa, and of these notes, may recall that the most prominent surviving landmark of the Southern Gothic saga of Prospect Hill plantation is a monumental old house that’s in a sadly advanced state of disrepair. (http://alanhuffman.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html).

The Prospect Hill house – the second on the site -- was built in Jefferson County, Mississippi in 1854, at the close of a particularly tumultuous period. Two decades before, Revolutionary War veteran Isaac Ross had decreed in his will that his plantation be sold and the money used to pay for his slaves to immigrate to a West African colony known as Liberia. The colony had been set up as a repository for freed slaves by a group called the American Colonization Society, which, oddly enough, was comprised of staunch abolitionists yet funded by slave holders, the two groups having found common ground -- literally -- on the West coast of Africa.

Faced with the prospects of giving up his family land, and freeing the slaves who were the engine of his prosperity, Ross's grandson had balked. With his mother's help, he contested the will, and during a decade of litigation, a slave uprising allegedly aimed at killing him resulted in the burning of the original Prospect Hill house and the death of a young girl, after which the slaves suspected of being behind the uprising were lynched.

In a case of going against historical type, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld Ross’s will in 1845, and about 300 slaves from Prospect Hill and other family plantations immigrated to Mississippi in Africa, as their region of the Liberian freed-slave colony was called. Ross’s grandson managed to regain control of the property (either by buying it outright or receiving it as payment for acting as executor of the estate – the record is unclear), at which point he built the existing house. The Mississippi Colonization Society, which was responsible for the repatriation effort, later erected a monument to Ross in the family cemetery. Curiously, the tombstone at his grandson's grave, nearby, is the only one in the cemetery installed backward, so that as one stands at the foot of the other graves it is possible to read the inscriptions, while his appears blank.

The freed-slave immigrants (including others from scores of plantations across the South) meanwhile built their own Greek Revival houses in Liberia, alluding to the structures they'd built for their former masters, and in some cases subjugated and even enslaved members of the indigenous tribes, which eventually contributed to the nation’s civil war in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s a twisted, and enthralling tale, and the existing Prospect Hill house, in its romantic ruin, serves as a fitting centerpiece.

Unfortunately, the house has been lurching toward doom for decades, which is why a preservation group recently bought it from its absentee owner, hoping to protect the archeological evidence of the site and to find a buyer to restore the house, which, as you can see, will be a major undertaking. In a news release announcing the purchase, Jessica Crawford, Southeast regional director of the Albuquerque, New Mexico-based Archaeological Conservancy, said Prospect Hill is worthy of the effort. The house and surrounding grounds represent some of the best physical evidence on this side of the Atlantic of a little-explored facet of American history. Despite the many complications of buying and preserving it, its history made it too hard to pass up, she said.

Photo courtesy Charles Greenlee

The house is a departure from the Conservancy's typical projects, but after telling the Conservancy’s president about the foundations she'd discovered of the vanished slave quarters, and the back yard kitchen, and the nearby slave owners’ and the slaves’ cemeteries, Jessica presented him with a copy of Mississippi in Africa, and a few days later, she recalled, he said, “Let’s go for it.” Due to its volatile mix of slave-owner and slave history, and its broader ramifications regarding the African American diaspora, the site holds clues that likely can be found nowhere else, she said. The idea is to find a buyer to restore the house, and to retain an easement for the archaeological sites.

For those who don’t know Jessica, she is an extremely committed, driven and accomplished archaeologist, and judging from the way she handled the difficult negotiations of the Prospect Hill sale, is also a master of diplomacy. Having observed her wielding a hammer on the rusted roof of the house, and hauling away truckloads of moldy garbage and debris, I can attest that she is, perhaps just as importantly, a hands-on operator. If the house is in fact saved, it will be because of her.

Photo by Jessica Crawford, from the roof of Prospect Hill

I first encountered Jessica last year when I visited Prospect Hill with my friend Chad and saw someone standing high above, on the crumbling widow’s walk. It was a woman I'd never seen before, waving. (At that moment, she also took the photo above -- the tiny figures in the distance are Chad and me.) To even get to the widow’s walk proved to be an adventure; it required scaling a rickety, 15-foot-tall homemade ladder positioned on a rotten porch, passing through a tiny ceiling portal, navigating the attic by stepping from beam to beam, then climbing another ladder onto the rotting platform high atop the roof. Jessica did not own the house, and had no way of knowing if her organization ever would. But the roof needed fixing, so she and Jennifer Baughn, architectural historian at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (a person of similar commitment, effectiveness and drive) decided to do what they could, themselves. They enlisted the help of others, including, on that day, me, Chad and Mississippi Heritage Trust director David Preziosi. But Jessica and Jennifer did the bulk of the work, and it eventually became clear that Prospect Hill was going to be Jessica's baby.

Soon Jessica was traveling from her home in the Mississippi Delta to Prospect Hill to clean up debris,

mow grass, and probe the nearby gullies and sheds for artifacts and clues. Eventually, she named the sole surviving resident, a peacock abandoned by the last owner, after Isaac Ross, and on each visit took him treats. She also commissioned a consultant to assess the structural integrity of the house. The consultant's conclusion was that despite significant cosmetic damage that would, if left unrepaired, eventually lead to its destruction, Prospect Hill was structurally sound. He also pronounced the roof, with its long, mathematically-engineered free spans, "intelligent." The house was clearly built for the ages, as evidenced by its survival with almost no maintenance for the better part of a century. It deserved better than the ignominious fate of its builder.

Everyone that gathered at Prospect Hill that day felt they had a stake in saving the house, but it was Jessica who ultimately sealed the deal.

As Jessica pointed out, Prospect Hill wasn't merely another remote Greek Revival plantation house in desperate need of a friend. In addition to harboring archaeological and visual clues about life on an early 19th century cotton plantation, Prospect Hill represents something like the “old country” for descendants of the largest group of immigrants to Liberia. Preserving the house and grounds will provide a point of entry to a remarkable archaeological site that could shed light on the repatriation effort, the uprising and fire, and the lives of Prospect Hill’s slaves under two very different masters.

Due to the site’s historical importance and the house’s disrepair, the Mississippi Heritage Trust included Prospect Hill on its 2011 list of the state’s Ten Most Endangered Historic Places. After her first visit to the property, Jessica realized it posed both a unique challenge and a unique opportunity for the Conservancy, a nationwide, non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of significant archaeological sites for research and educational purposes. The house, an elaborate, raised cottage of 10 rooms standing on a secluded knoll amid moss-draped trees, “is the point of entry to an amazing, and important episode in American history," as she noted in the Conservancy's news release. "The house, the cemetery and the grounds represent the visible evidence. We’re also excited about what can’t be seen – the clues buried underground.”

Even in its current state, Prospect Hill is hauntingly beautiful. But the structure is running out of time. Jessica said that while the Conservancy doesn't have the means to undertake a full restoration, the group can apply for grants and look for funding that will enable emergency stabilization of key stress points, including the front porch and roof. Meanwhile, the Conservancy will work with the Mississippi Heritage Trust, the Historic Natchez Foundation and the Department of Archives and History to find a buyer to take on a full restoration.

Before Jessica came along, the future for Prospect Hill was undeniably bleak. The Wade family had sold the house in the 1960s due to the expense of upkeep, and the fact that no family members wanted to live there anymore. The man who bought it had promised to restore it, but never did; he subsequently sold it to another man who likewise planned to restore it, but never did, and eventually abandoned it. By the time Jessica arrived on the scene, no one even knew where the current owner lived. Yet she managed to find him, then set about the difficult task of negotiating the sale. No matter what she says, if the house is ultimately saved, it will be because of her. And in the meantime, the surviving archaeological evidence, which offers clues to a crucial, little-known chapter of Mississippi, American and African history, is secure.

The Conservancy is still working out the details of the planned sale, but anyone who is interested should contact Jessica Crawford at 662/326-6465, or by email at tacsoutheast@cableone.net, or the Conservancy's Albuquerque office at 505/266-1540.

Serpent in the garden

2011-08-11T17:57:00.000-07:00

When I pulled up to Holly Grove and got out of my truck today, I heard a ruckus high in the old cedar tree that stands rather forlornly by the walk. The cedar is a very old tree, the last of a line that was probably planted in the 19th century, and it shows its age. Hurricane Katrina took out its top, and it is riddled with crevasses from which poison ivy vines grow, high above ground, and tiny, open portals to its rotten heart, into and out of which traipse giant carpenter ants, anoles, blue-tailed skinks and a large and rather obscene-looking species of lizard whose name I do not know.

Warblers nest in the Spanish moss that adorns the tree, and at dusk it murmurs with cicadas and sings with tree frogs. It’s full of life. But it is not a tree that is prone to any sort of ruckus, other than that imposed by hurricanes. So when I heard the noise I glanced toward the source, and was surprised to see a very large – perhaps five feet long – green and yellow snake falling, head over tail, from the high branches, bouncing off a couple of palmettos before hitting the ground behind the picket fence with a very loud whump. It then promptly disappeared into the vinca.

I’ve seen snakes fall out of trees before, as I have squirrels, sometimes from great heights. But what was most remarkable in this case was that as the snake was cartwheeling toward the ground, it was being pursued by a fox squirrel. It was a mid-sized squirrel, so it’s hard to imagine that the snake had been attempting to make a meal of it. That being the case, why might the snake have been in the tree, harassing it? And why, whatever the reason for the harassment, did the squirrel choose to pursue the hapless serpent?

I assume that I had interrupted whatever was going down. After the snake disappeared into the vinca, the squirrel ran round and round the trunk, peering into its crevasses as if looking for something, meanwhile glancing at me. I have no idea what was going on, but I veered wide from the vinca on my way into the house.

No snow globes!

2011-07-30T08:02:00.001-07:00

You heard me, no snow globes! This, according to several emphatic signs beside the security line at New York’s Laguardia airport. Seriously, at this point in the evolution of air travel, no snow globes was apparently the one thing the authorities most wanted us travelers to know.

When you think about it, you can kind of see their point, I guess. Because an evil person could, conceivably, fill a snow globe with acid or something flammable or explosive or what have you. And considering that possibility, the snow-globe ban will no doubt be the career highlight of some TSA employee-idea-box-enthusiast who potentially saved us all from the potentially inevitably-named Snow Globe Bomber.

Still, I say if they’re going to make people give up snow globes at Laguardia, they may as well just outlaw them altogether. Because who buys those snow globes on sale in Times Square, with the tiny Statues of Liberties amid the floating plastic shavings? Tourists do. And what do they do with them? They fly home with them. Do they pack them in checked bags? Are you kidding? A breakable orb full of water? Have you watched them load baggage from a window seat? No, they carry the snow globes on. Hence, the security-line snow-globe problem. Basically the signs said: Let’s not even discuss this, people. If you are entering the security line with a snow globe, turn back.

And yet, notable as the snow-globe ban was, its advent wasn’t the most noteworthy aspect of my trip from New York to Mississippi. The recipient of that honor would be a tie between the Ancient Flight Attendant and the Inspiring Bionic Guy.

I saw the former (the AFA) in the departure lounge at Laguardia: A wobbly old lady dressed, oddly, in a red Delta flight attendant’s dress and black high heels. I wondered: Why she is dressed up like that? Like, is it some kind of joke? Or maybe they’re going to film a humorous Betty White-type video about the World’s Oldest Flight Attendant as some sort of Delta Airlines promo, as a follow up to the in-flight safety video with the hot-babe flight attendant that ended up going viral, to the point that people (me and my friend Avin, anyway) not only watched the in-flight safety video on the plane (a first), but reviewed it repeatedly on our computers at home?

Then I thought, No, maybe the AFA had been a stewardess for, like, 40 years, and she had connections, so when she had to move into an assisted living place and, I don’t know, just… somehow, someone said, Yeah, let her fly in the getup one last time or something. Because it was her dying wish.

I’d have to say she was doing pretty good in those heels for being – and I’m not exaggerating – at least 80 years old, while pulling two roll-ons. What was a little distressing was the way she stared out the gate area window at the jet, almost as if it (or she) was some kind of ghost, like this was a movie about a flight attendant who got to go back and fly one more time, and that particular jet was where the most important event of her life took place, or something. You might also say she stared at the jet the way a very old Labrador retriever with cataracts stares at a bird flying by, while sitting on the porch.

She was a bit stooped and it looked like she may in fact have suffered a small stroke at some point. Her neck was stiff and twisted a little, and one eye was open more than the other. Admittedly, I could not take my eyes off of her. I heard the ticket agent whisper to one of the other flight attendants, “How old is she?” but unfortunately I couldn’t hear the answer.

Then we got on the plane and not only did she turn out to be an actual flight attendant, she was ours! Perhaps Delta couldn’t force her to retire for legal reasons, or called her back up at her former pay grade, and was therefore saving money. There were lots of possibilities. But as I watched her stiffly mime the safety procedures, I thought: The gods smiled on you, lady. Because you no doubt originally got your job (which was called being a stewardess back then) because you were young and pretty, and you stuck with it, and then, lo and behold, just about the time you stopped being young and pretty the world stopped requiring you to be young and pretty. Stewardesses were now flight attendants, and they could be old and homely and even guys. This due to a lawsuit, I think. Now look at you – you’re ancient, and you’re still here! The stories you could tell. About changing air travel, for example.

I did observe her drop a cup full of ice and it took a long time for her to clean it up, and I saw one passenger roll his eyes when she had to ask him to repeat something, twice, which actually made him seem like an asshole, because, you know what -- everyone gets old, unless they die young, and is that what have in mind to do, mister?

The woman seated next to me, who kept asking me to get things out of her carryon bag in the overhead, noted that the AFA was very stern, like a 3rd grade teacher. For example, when a woman got up to use the restroom just before take-off, the ASA (who, by this point, I’d been able to identify from her badge as “Shirley”) snapped, “Ma’am!” and jabbed her finger in the direction of the woman’s seat. The woman sat back down.

Even though she was elderly and a bit stern, was it not kind of amazing that she was still there? Even if she had to hold on to the beverage cart like it was a walker when we hit some minor turbulence? I studied her every time she came by. I noticed that her eyes unexpectedly glimmered now and then, and that, overall, she was quite efficient and nice. Her hair was faded blonde – she didn’t color it, though I’m guessing she’d had a lift here and there, and her makeup was surprisingly current. But what was most important was that she was pushing a beverage cart in high heels at 30,000 feet, at 80, through whatever meteorological eventualities might present themselves, and meanwhile asking us if we wanted some hot coffee. Although, she wasn't exactly obsequious. When someone asked for a cup of water she said, with some authority, “I can’t get you anything else right now because I want to get this coffee out while it’s hot.” After which she concentrated as she poured the coffee; I noticed her tongue moved forward and rested against the back of her top teeth as she did this. True, you should not ask her for anything else right now, but she was doing OK.

I thought to myself, Good for you, Shirley. One day you’ll drop dead midflight, or at the very least, ride in the Delta van straight from the tarmac to the nursing home. I’d love to hear what you have to say about the history of air travel. Because think about it, if Shirley was 80 and had started young, she could have been flying since circa 1950 (on prop planes! Back when people smoked on planes, and could carry on snow globes and perhaps pocket knives). And from the look on her face when someone asked for Splenda instead of sugar, I'd say there’s a good chance that if anyone in management suggested it was time for her to retire, her answer would be, “Like hell it is.”

Eventually, as we approached Memphis, Shirley disappeared into the back of the plane, strapped herself in for another landing, and we never saw her again.

So it was an interesting day of air travel, if you’re into the macabre. And if all you wanted was something Readers Digest-y and inspirational, it turned out we had something for you, too. As we waited at the gate in the Memphis airport, I saw a very handsome young guy wearing a Morehouse t-shirt, waiting to board a flight to Jackson, who was obviously an athlete, and who, I only noticed after watching him for a few minutes, had one mechanical leg. It was when he got up to walk around. Whoa. Missing leg.

Yet, what was most noteworthy was that it was quite beautiful to observe him just walking around, because it was like he didn’t even know one of his legs was missing. It was no doubt more beautiful to observe than it would have been if he had just been a very handsome young athlete, proving the value of humanity while walking on two good legs. Because never once did he falter. The way he moved was a product of strength and grace inside. You could take away one of his legs and it didn’t mean that much, really, didn’t change what really mattered. He had perfect balance.

I remembered how horrified I was when they discovered a tumor on my right leg, and I thought, What if I lose my leg and I can’t run anymore? Could I go on? Everything turned out OK, but the idea of losing a leg was absolutely terrifying. Now here was this happy, handsome guy, in short pants and Nikes, not at all self-conscious about his mechanical leg, and not at all hindered by it, either. I saw him grab the handle of a woman’s roll-on when it tipped over, and later, carrying his separate “sports leg” – with a spring on the bottom, rather than a shoe mount – onto the plane, joking about the fact that the plane was small and at six-two he was going to suffer from the lack of leg room.

“Lack of leg room,” I thought. And I was kind of in awe of him, too.

Passing through

2011-07-13T19:13:00.000-07:00

I knew I’d passed a milestone when I intentionally ran into a woman on the street. It was on 8th Avenue, in Chelsea. She was wearing an orange dress. I saw her coming, and I ran right into her. At that moment I realized I’d moved from the infatuation phase of my life in New York, during which I was gaga over the teeming mass of humanity on the streets, to the relationship phase, during which I began making adjustments to my viewpoint and my behavior, such as by maintaining a collision course with a perfect stranger.

Back when I visited New York City only infrequently, friends would often ask what I planned to do while I was in town. Would I go to a Broadway play? Visit the Metropolitan Museum? My answer was always the same: I planned to walk the streets. In a city of eight million, where you encounter representatives of every age and economic class and almost every culture on Earth, what could be more interesting than that parade of changing faces? Going to Starbucks was like a time-lapse trip around the world.

Walking has always been my favorite thing to do in big cities, and few lend themselves to it better than New York, which, in addition to its unparalleled diversity, is relatively flat and laid out on a manageable grid. I’ve walked a hundred blocks across Manhattan without getting bored. Blisters I got, but never bored.

Now that I spend more time in New York, I’ve come to see beyond the cultural mosaic of the crowds to their essential and remarkable mechanics. Pedestrian traffic on the city’s sidewalks, especially during rush hour, is like a million very subtle improvisational dance routines taking place in proximity to each other, the common theme being the avoidance of contact or personal disruption. It’s a different kind of motion, falling midway between, say, ballet and a rugby scrum. It feels almost choreographed, though choreography is contrived and, by definition, about design. There is no script, and no master plan, for the communal footwork on 8th Avenue at 5 p.m. It's just about what works, given the unplanned variations inherent in the barely controlled, mass distribution of people.

At its best the movement of crowds in New York (and perhaps most big cities) is spontaneous and honest, and in its way is more remarkable than the stylized choreography you see on a Broadway stage, or perhaps glimpse through the window of the studio across the way, where a group of dancers are practicing their hip swivels, kicks, sudden head-tilts and fist-thrusts. The results can be exhilarating: To see a huge, dense crowd of people up ahead, moving in all directions, to walk right into it, feel it part around you, but only so much, as you adapt to its rhythm and flow, making almost imperceptible corrections that enable you to move through unhindered, and to not hinder it. I’ve gone out of my way to pass through Grand Central Station during rush hour just to experience it.

It's mostly a series of tiny dodges. Almost without thinking, everyone reads the movements of those around them, at short range, and makes their own moves accordingly. No one is shy about darting in front of anyone else, the unwritten rule being only that, preferably, you do so without causing anyone to appreciably slow down, or to stop. People do break the rule, obviously, just as people run red lights, but overall the resulting crowd movement is sublimely efficient, which gives an unexpected sense of purpose and order to an otherwise bewildering universe.

The pacing tends to remain fairly uniform, aside from the occasional, notable aberrations, such as can be observed along the aerial, linear park known as the High Line, in which people walk in single file above the city streets, at a decidedly slow, un-New York City gait (which, particularly when viewed from the street below, makes it appear is if they were ascending to the afterlife). There are the occasional languorous lovers, forgiven in advance for impeding the flow of the sidewalks, and perhaps an intrepid old person with a cane. I also once came upon a blind man with a seeing-eye dog who had stopped, midway through a temporary sidewalk construction zone, due to the confusing sensory perceptions brought on by nearby jack hammers, which prompted one of those stereotypically callous New Yorkers to stop and guide him, gently, by his elbow, to the more manageable environs of the familiar sidewalk up ahead. But for the most part, aside from traffic, the only meaningful obstructions you routinely encounter are the clutches of tourists, ignorant in their bliss, and the evil, rogue pedestrians, such as the woman in the orange dress, who steadfastly follow their own matrix, at the expense of the rest.

I saw the woman in the orange dress approaching as I was going with the flow along 8th Avenue, late in the day. She materialized from a storefront doorway, and even glimpsed peripherally, was identifiable as a contra, moving toward me with unyielding focus, clearly intent that I would take full responsibility for avoiding the forceful intersection of our paths. For some reason, at this particular juncture, I decided not to give in. It was not about being polite, about arriving at the same point as someone else, and stepping aside. This was about sheer, unadulterated aggression. Perhaps you have to experience it to understand, but there are people who will walk in a beeline in your direction, without giving an inch, and attempt to bulldoze through as if you weren’t even there. She was one of them. Such people refuse to alter their gait or angle even incrementally to accommodate the fact that others are already under way, in a crowd.

In this case, my refusal to submit meant that the woman and I collided, after which she snapped, “Ex-CUSE me!” (in the command, not the apology mode), as if I had rudely run into her, which in her mind I had, and which, arguably, I had, in the sense that I had knowingly allowed her to run into me. Unlike the hapless, oblivious tourists who clog Times Square, such people are vile. They are utterly selfish. They’re the ones who cause wars.

In my current New York City state, in which I spend a lot of time in the city but don’t actually live there, I saw the woman in the orange dress as running counter to everything that is beautiful, true and graceful about the flow of human beings on the streets. I also see her as something of a warning about what potentially can go wrong in a crowd, and in the human race as a whole. She was a single errant, negative electron, capable of upsetting the physiology of the whole, and as such, served as a useful reminder that even when things go smoothly, life isn’t exactly a Bollywood musical. Despite the appearance of order, terrible disorder waits in the wings.

Compared with such selfishness and aggression, the other primary source of street disorder in New York City – the tourists -- seem tame, but they are also insipid, and I, like actual New Yorkers, am impatient with them. I have come to avoid Times Square, the tourist epicenter in New York, because, despite its stunning visuals, the flow is constantly disrupted by out-of-towners who are utterly oblivious to the moving mass of the city, who amble into the human currents and stop, then stand there looking around, or at each other, unaware of their immediate surroundings or of their role in the outcome of things. These people, unlike the woman in the orange dress, have no aim. They’re temporarily blinded by the lights, and block everyone else’s path.

And yet: I was once one of them! As much as I now enjoy running interference through a rush-hour crowd, I once very much enjoyed wandering aimlessly through Times Square, gazing up at the buildings and the dazzling lights, mindless of the hurried, harried New Yorkers who were, at that moment, parting around me, as if I were a boulder in mid-stream. If I thought of them at all, I scoffed at their jaded impatience in the face of such dazzling beauty. Now, I look back at the old me and wonder: Where are the streets of New York taking me? If Times Square no longer personifies the vibrancy of the city, and instead represents the annoying disruption of its beguiling syncopation, where is this process headed? At what point will I lose sight of the humanity of the streets? Given my itinerant status, I don’t think I ever will. I suspect I’ll remain in a state of arrested development, somewhere between a hapless tourist and a jaded New Yorker, which, from my current vantage point, doesn’t seem like a bad place to be.

(I can't take credit for this photo of Grand Central Station -- I just pulled it off the internet.)

Two ways of doing things

2011-06-24T12:40:00.000-07:00

I went for a run in Central Park today. When I came out, I passed a very old man on Fifth Avenue, who was probably in his 90s, walking alone, with a cane, dressed in a suit and tie and an elegant straw fedora. His face had long since fallen, and his eyes were a bit glazed. He didn't immediately respond when I called out, "You look dapper today." When I repeated what I'd said, the words finally penetrated his consciousness, and he looked up and gave me a tip of his hat.

Farther on I passed a woman who, from a distance, looked like a beautiful model, but, as she came closer, began to look monstrous, her face a plastic travesty of Botox backfill. With her fashionable shades, her long tresses, and her puffy lips, she looked like the ever-so-slightly bloated corpse of a very beautiful drag queen. I'd guess she was about 70. She was walking at a telling, measured gait, in those dangerous high platform shoes that even young women wear at their peril.

The lost license

2011-05-26T08:14:00.000-07:00

We were in an abandoned building on Farish Street, an old commercial district in Jackson, Miss. that's in the process of being rejuvenated, to shoot author photos for the book my co-author, Michael Rejebian, and I have just finished. We’d chosen the location because the book itself is kind of gritty, and it seemed more appropriate than posing in some hermetic environment.

Anyway, as Michael was having his picture made, I poked around in the debris on the floor of the gutted building and came across a driver’s license. It belonged to a young blond woman whose name was something like Courtney Layne Holloman or Holcomb, of Hattiesburg. I figured her purse had been stolen, and decided that if I could get in touch with her she might want to know where it was, if only because it meant her ID wasn’t floating around, possibly being used.

Then, as I looked out the empty frame of a window, I saw a cop sitting in a car behind the JPD substation down the way. I figured it made more sense to give him the license, in case it was evidence of a crime.

I walked up to the cruiser cautiously because I was coming from a blind alley, and I’ve noticed that cops are typically a little skittish when being approached while they’re sitting in their cars. When he looked up I held up the license and gestured toward the empty building behind me. He rolled down his window and I told him about finding it.

He was polite, but it was almost like he wasn’t sure why I was telling him. He was listening to talk radio with the AC on. I said we’d been taking pictures in the abandoned building when I found the license. He said, “People take pictures there all the time,” like that was kind of curious to him, and I said, “Yeah, well, anyway, that’s how I found this license.”

I handed it to him. He read the woman’s name aloud, as if to jog his memory. Then he handed it back to me and said perhaps I should try to get in touch with her. Well, OK… But really, that didn't seem logical, so I told him I'd just as soon not have a stolen license in my possession if I could avoid it, and perhaps it made more sense for him to take it, unless he didn’t want it because it would require him to file a bunch of paperwork or something. He said, no, no, he’d take it, so I handed it back. He then tried to call directory assistance on his dark pink Razor, but he couldn’t get a connection. It was kind of strange. It was also very hot standing in the sun with the heat emanating from the cruiser’s engine, so I said I needed to get back to the photo shoot. I thanked him and he thanked me.

All of which is to say that if anyone knows a woman by that name, or something like it (I didn't write it down) perhaps they could let her know that the Jackson police have her lost license, for what it’s worth.

Complexities

2011-05-25T06:32:00.000-07:00

With hip hop artists from Ludacris to Jay-Z singin’ about niggas all day long, it may seem like a quaint question to contemplate, but if you’re a writer living in the American South, it’s fundamental: When should you identify a person’s race in print?

The question, which came to mind as I was reading an article about a local robbery in Jackson, Miss., first presented itself several years ago, when a New York Times reporter traveling in the Mississippi Delta described passing “an old black man sitting on his porch.”

The image is familiar to anyone who’s traveled through the Delta, but referencing the man’s race struck me as telling. I wondered if the reporter would have mentioned seeing “an old white man sitting on his porch.” My guess is: No. If the old man had been white, the reporter would almost certainly have described him, simply, as “an old man sitting on his porch.”

The article wasn’t otherwise about race, when such an identification might have made sense. As it was, mentioning the man’s race told me that the reporter himself was white, and that he viewed the old man as “other.”

I often mentally transpose “black” and “white” when reading stories where race is an issue, as a sort of test. Does the story still ring true with the races reversed? It doesn’t always work – there are plenty of asterisks and special considerations where race is involved, but as an exercise it can be illuminating. In this case, trading “black” for “white” made the description seem kind of weird.

A writer chooses which details to highlight, and ideally those details bring vividness and insight to the story. In some cases, though, the details come straight off the rack, and tell us nothing we didn’t already know. Sometimes they actually steer us in the wrong direction. Reducing an old man to being black is just that – a reduction. If his race mattered, it would be better to let other details do the telling – the man’s own words, perhaps, the precise hue of his face, or the scars from sharp-edged cotton bolls on his hands. He could be described as being among the few who remain of the region’s former sharecroppers, if the reporter was sure that was the case. Basically: Anything that goes beyond making him a generic old black man, a prop.

Maybe I’m wrong, and describing the man on the porch in racial terms is no different than identifying him as old – or, for that matter, as male. But what if the reporter had said he passed “a heavy man” sitting on his porch. It would just be a description, yet would seem to indicate some intent, to confer specific meaning.

When I was writing my book Mississippi in Africa, about a group of freed slaves who immigrated to Liberia before the American Civil War, I chose not to identify anyone by skin color. The characters in the book were black, white and all shades in between, and I didn’t consider it my role to determine anyone’s race or position it relative to my own. It was either identify everyone’s race, which would have been tiresome (and in some cases, complicated), or identify no one’s. So I chose the latter. What mattered was what a person said or did; if a person’s race was important, for whatever reason, it would be self-evident. Since then I’ve generally adhered to this rule, but I’ve noticed that most writers – at least, most white writers -- don’t.

It’s not that we all don’t take note of people’s races, but when attempting to create an objective account, which is what journalists are supposed to do, it’s important to identify and minimize your own bias. There are cases where it makes sense to note that a person’s perspective is influenced by the fact that he or she is black, white, Asian or Native American, but to mention it in passing reveals a subtle form of bias. It’s the same kind of bias I noticed in the best-selling novel The Help, in which the white characters speak in normal grammar while the black characters speak in dialect, indicating that in the author’s view whites are the norm and blacks, even when they are the protagonists, are “other.”

On the flip side, it’s possible to reveal a personal bias by not referencing race, as when writers ascribe certain characteristics to “the South” when those attributes are actually indicative of a specific southern demographic, not the population as a whole. As the historian Bill Ferris has noted, it’s inaccurate to even say that the South lost the Civil War because it was technically the white South that lost; the black South was liberated by it. Likewise, to say that fancy hunting camps and antebellum homes are popular in southern culture is only half true. So, ascribing race does sometimes matter. A journalist has to be able to recognize when it does and when it doesn’t. The point is to see beyond one’s personal bias to report what is factually known, not to rely upon perceptions or even the desire to change them.

If it were just a matter of ignoring a person’s race in print, a journalist’s job would be easier. But in some cases failing to mention a person’s race can actually do a disservice. A case in point was an article in the May 21, 2011, edition of the Jackson newspaper, The Clarion-Ledger, which reported that local police were looking for a gunman who’d robbed a Church’s Fried Chicken and fired into a car in the parking lot as he fled. The article described the robber as being about five feet six inches tall, weighing about 150 lbs., wearing a black hat and hoodie and white gloves. According to the police report, he fled in a maroon Ford Contour.

OK, so… anything else? Since we’re talking about the colors of things, in hopes of identifying the suspect, it was natural to wonder: Was the guy, like, black or white? The article didn’t say. Omitting his race was not a simple oversight. It is apparently The Clarion-Ledger’s editorial policy to not identify a person’s race when a crime is involved, even when the public is being asked to participate in the search. Never mind that skin color, like hair color, is among the more salient details of a person’s physical description. In this case, the question of whether to identify race was very different than in the article in the New York Times.

Black crime, a common news topic in Jackson, isn’t the issue. This was a story about finding a criminal. Though the Church’s robbery may seem like comparatively minor news, for anyone who was there it no doubt seemed pretty major, and it’s distressing anytime a criminal gets away, which is why that one omission by the newspaper struck me as absurd. It’s not a matter of implying or reinforcing a perceived link between race and crime. It’s about identifying a suspect based on a physical description released by the police. To refuse to provide the pertinent information makes it seem like there’s something to hide.

In all likelihood, the newspaper’s policy is a reaction to a perception among many of its readers that most local criminals are black, which they often are, for a multitude of reasons, including that the dominant race in Jackson, by a very wide margin, is African American. Most of the people on the police force are also black. Most people who work in the city’s fast-food restaurants are black. Most victims of crime are black. That doesn’t mean a black person is more likely to rob someone than anyone else, only that more people are robbed by black people in Jackson than by people of other races. It’s just the way it is. We don’t need to know the race of the investigating officers, or the cashier who was robbed, or the people in the car that was fired upon. But we do need to know what the alleged criminal looks like. Otherwise, are we simply to assume that he is black, because that is the default setting? If he was white, which he may have been, we would need to know that, too, if we were trying to identify him for police.

Facts – not perceptions – are what matter. By attempting to subvert a presumed prejudice, the newspaper arguably reinforces it, as if to say, “Read between the lines. We can’t say whether he or she is black or white. But you can figure it out on your own.” The robber was in a predominately black part of town, wearing a hoodie, right? Yet white guys wear hoodies, too. They also commit crimes and drive Ford Contours. The newspaper was alerting us to look for someone specific, yet his face was intentionally obscured. The details are certainly known at Church’s, in the police precinct and at the newspaper. They’re just not known to the readers.

I don’t mean to give the impression that an old man on a porch isn't the right choice to rep his race, but a criminal is. In general, I don’t think race should be a salient detail. But in the case of the robbery, knowing if the gunman was black or white could eliminate a lot of possibilities for people observing drivers of maroon Contours in the area, and prevent investigators from wasting time following up on pointless leads. Not that locating a Contour-driver of the same race as the suspect would mean the driver was guilty. That is for the courts to decide. It’s about recognizing a person in hopes that you can identify him and report his whereabouts, because he is suspected of having committed a crime. It isn’t about a reporter’s bias or about legal prejudice or racial profiling.

My guess is that The Clarion-Ledger considers its policy progressive, and on the surface it might appear to have some merit, in that many residents, black and white, will assume that the crime was committed by a young black male, because that is who they most often see being arrested on TV. That, of course, actually is racial prejudice. But if you had witnessed the Church’s robbery, and the police investigating the crime asked the suspect’s race, would you refuse to say out of concern for how it might be perceived?

At the end of The Clarion-Ledger article was this notation: “Anyone with information about the incident is asked to call the Jackson Police Department at (601) 960-1234 or CrimeStoppers at (601) 355-TIPS.” I’m guessing that among the first questions the police would ask a caller is whether the guy being reported was black or white. It’s one of the details available to them to help narrow the search.

In the old days, when The Clarion-Ledger was a shameless racist rag, the fact that an alleged criminal was black would have been given too much prominence; the current policy is no doubt a reaction to this. But when the police are describing a criminal suspect, in hopes that the public can identify him, race is among many characteristics that matter. It’s useful in the same way that identifying the color of his car is useful. Leaving the reader to make his or her own assumptions about his race, based upon his or her personal biases, is a disservice. Referring to a person’s race when it isn’t germane reveals the limits of our own understanding, but declining to mention it when it matters actually does limit our understanding.

As you have probably figured out by now, I’m white. It matters, I suppose, in this context. Race sometimes influences my personal views, in myriad ways, and I think it’s important to take that into account when holding forth as an objective chronicler of the times. After that, it’s either address the issue or dispense with it. The point is to not let it get in the way of the stories we have to tell.

The flood, as it were

2011-05-20T06:30:00.000-07:00

It’s strange being in the Mississippi Delta right now. In many ways life feels routine, yet there is a tandem feeling that something truly terrible could happen at any moment, and in fact is already happening nearby.

The Delta is part of the floodplain of the Mississippi River, which is something the river is very much interested in reclaiming right now, the only constriction being the levees built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The irony is that without the levees there would be a minimal threat of floods. There would be only a natural fluctuation of water, spreading out over a broad plain perhaps 150 miles wide. With levees, people can farm the remarkably fertile land and build houses and towns, but they can also enjoy what is, potentially, a false sense of security. Right now the levees, which are as much as 30 feet tall, are holding back the equivalent of a slow-moving tsunami that is hundreds of miles long. All of which means that you dwell in, or even merely enter, the Delta at your peril.

Everyplace outside the levees is already flooded, to heights higher than ever known before in recorded history. It’s hard not to see this within the context of the disturbing series of natural disasters that has gripped the planet this spring, including the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and six weeks of intermittent tornado strikes across the American South. Yet it is also hard not to see the hand of man in it. Communities outside the levees are flooded at higher levels in part because those levees contain the water in a narrow channel that has itself been hastened toward the Gulf by dredging and the straightening of bends. We have disrupted and defied the natural flow.

My grandparents lived in a house raised perhaps 10 feet off the ground, outside the levees, on a low ridge along Steele Bayou in the low-lying south Delta. Water got into their house only once, though almost every year the place was surrounded by a vast, temporary inland sea, which meant that the only way to come and go was by boat. Still, I only heard my grandparents refer to one “flood,” that being the great one in 1927, when the levees (which were lower than they are now) broke and hundreds of people died. In my grandparents’ view, a flood was an unexpected disaster, and everything else was just “high water.” Today, that view is mostly gone. Any time a river spills from its banks it’s considered a flood, though by that standard you may as well consider the incoming tide at the beach a flood, too. People live in tornado zones, in regions swept by hurricanes, landslides and wildfires. There are risks anywhere. But you have to acknowledge those risks and plan accordingly. Fully relying upon the government to protect you is foolhardy. If nothing else, the current flood, and the looming potential for greater devastation, makes everyone aware of that.

So far the levees have held, which made it possible for me to drive, yesterday, to Rolling Fork, in the south Delta, for an event at my friend Drick Rodgers’ house, Mont Helena, which stands atop a high Indian mound.

Such mounds were built for ceremonial purposes, not to escape floods, which would have been much less frequent in the natural flood plain, and would have rarely come as a surprise to people closely attuned to the fluctuations of their environment. That said, I have no doubt they provided a safe haven on those occasions when the Native Americans found themselves in the grips of an unusually high water event, and I figured if the levee broke, a mound would be a good place to be. It was the getting there that was a bit unnerving, knowing that that tsunami was rolling past just beyond that long earthen dam, the effects of which were being felt, in a less dramatic yet meaningful way, along all the tributaries, which are now flowing backward as the river attempts to distribute the flow.

My usual route to Rolling Fork, along U.S. 61, was closed because the Mississippi Department of Transportation built one section lower than the rest, and it is now underwater. Likewise, my second choice, to the east, along back roads, had been swallowed by the inland sea. Next, among the possibilities, was U.S. 49 West, which was open, for now.

The water was lapping on the edge of the pavement of 49W as I drove north from Yazoo City, and by the time I returned, later that night, this route had gone under, too, illustrating how fast things can change. That meant my third possible route was now denied me as well. The government’s help, at this point, consisted of a flashing portable sign saying the highway was closed and that motorists should choose “an alternative route.” Thanks! To get back to the hills I had to follow a network of unfamiliar back roads to another highway, 49 East, which is now the last conduit into the Delta from the south that remains open. Wandering across a vast floodplain in the middle of the night, with the water rising, made me more aware than ever of how much we rely on others to keep us safe. After seeing what happened during and after Katrina, the government does not seem like a reliable choice, yet there I was, driving on a highway the government had designed and built, partially protected by levees that the same government had designed and built, hoping for the best. In the end, I made it home safely.

A few things came to mind as a I drove, including that people in the Delta don’t let something like a mortal threat get in the way of a party. That, and the matter of how we choose to believe we can manage the menaces of life. We face myriad perils every day, and to some extent have to just get past that. But there is also the potential for sheer hubris, for ignoring the realities of mounting perils. Where do we draw the line? I also noticed this: People tend to see the Delta as a uniformly flat expanse of flood plain, yet the flood reveals variations that are both subtle and profound. There is no question, at this moment, of the importance of math, of the difference between an elevation of 98 feet above sea level and an elevation of 110. Driving across the Delta, I passed through areas where many thousands of acres of farms, forests and dwellings had been inundated, which had caused deer, snakes, alligators and other wildlife to congregate in strange places (such as people’s yards, and, I was told, in one case on the porch of a house). But elsewhere, life went on, largely unchanged, with tractors plowing the fields and children shooting hoops in yards. There was a clear, though potentially deceptive, line of demarcation.

The flood comes at a time when it's unusually dry in the Delta, and I saw farms in which the lower reaches were inundated while crops on higher ground were being watered by massive irrigation systems.

I also came upon a lovely little cemetery, on the banks of a bayou that I'd have expected to be flooded, but wasn’t, where cornfields were growing unmolested and magnolias bloomed.
This is the world we’ve made, overlaid upon the natural one, which could break through those levees at any time and take us back to where we began. So far, the disaster has been minimized, but it’s a very fine line.

I'll have a Big 'Un

2011-05-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

Ever find yourself walking down a street, doing your own thing, and suddenly you feel as if you've stepped outside of yourself, just a little? Nothing celestial or even drug-induced, just a feeling that your consciousness has ever so slightly broken stride, enabling you to see, for a moment, yourself walking down that street, from the vantage point of an outsider?

OK, well, I have. I distinctly remember it happening once when I was a boy, as I was riding my bike. I was resting, with my toes barely touching the ground beneath the pedals, at the corner of Lawrence Road and Ames Avenue, in Jackson, Mississippi. For a moment I saw myself there, and I committed the image to memory. When such episodes occur, I become both more and less self-aware. For the moment I forget that the universe revolves around the clever, laboriously tended construct of my self. It's not as lofty as it sounds -- it's akin to watching a video of a crowded room in which you, yourself are watching a video on TV -- but it can change the way you feel about yourself and your surroundings profoundly, if only for a time. You are, temporarily, able to observe your activities from a slight remove.

It's possible that this is something like what happens at death, but I have no way of knowing, yet. No doubt there are natural chemical fluctuations involved, though it could just as easily be related to some spacial magnetic pulse, of the kind that occasionally cause ship navigation systems to go awry and birds to fall from the sky. It's something Walker Percy also touches upon in his excellent novel The Moviegoer, when the protagonist, Binx, sees the lines blur between himself and characters in movies. He is particularly moved when he sees himself, in his mind's eye, entering a movie theater, after which he watches the lead characters in the movie... go to see a movie. Percy calls it a replication. I'm talking about something slightly different, but there are similarities, and in any case I like it, in measured doses, and even in recurring sequences, such as happened recently, and fortuitously, on the morning when I set out for a long day of potentially boring work. It doesn’t feel like a dream, though it’s close.

In the most recent episode, which was actually a series of episodes, it was as if I'd awakened to find myself as an extra in a low budget art film, as a walk-on in a series of oddly freighted, otherwise forgettable scenes, struggling to find meaning in bits of mundane or overwrought dialogue, meanwhile chatting up strangers between takes over doughnuts and coffee in Styrofoam cups. In the opening scene, culled from a rambling mishmash of clips, I play the part of a passerby on a small town street. The viewers would never see the earlier scene in which I open my eyes and lay in bed listening, annoyed, to the sound of a squirrel chewing on a wooden shutter at my bedroom window, after which I grab a book from my nightstand and throw it at the wall beside the window, startling the squirrel, which leaps into a nearby tree and scurries to the ground and off into the woods, causing two crows to take flight and my dogs to jump from their rocking chairs on the front porch and give raucous chase. The problem with that scene is that I am, on account of chemistry and/or the pulse, now a bit player on the street, and the squirrel scene is too focused on me. Despite its amplification of my self, when the moment comes, the story no longer tightly revolves around me.

To illustrate, the town I’m walking through is somewhere in the American South -- Bolton, Mississippi, to be exact. As the character I play strides toward the tiny, Mayberry-esque bank, he encounters a Very Large Country Man who remarks, in passing, “Cool today,” to which my character replies, “It is.” In the art film the intentionally jerky camera then pans to Very Large Country Man No. 2, passing from the other direction, who interjects, “Feels good to me,” to which my character responds, “It does,” adding, “Both are true.” I then pass through the bank’s metal-framed glass door, a retrofit from the 1960s that doesn’t suit the building’s 19th century architecture but serves well as a cinema verite detail.

At that point I revert to being me, but a portal has opened. The world feels slightly different, the way home feels changed when you return from a long trip (which is one of the reasons travel is so satisfying). If the universe were still, at this moment, revolving around me, a better scene would be the one that took place a few years back, when I, as myself, came running down that same sidewalk, in the rarified space before an advancing tornado, after having abandoned my truck in the middle of the street, and for a brief moment was lifted a foot or so from the ground by the wind, then deposited at the glass door, through which I saw Jim, the branch manager, hurriedly locking up as the employees and one customer scurried toward the vault (which was also my intended destination). Jim, seeing the fear in my eyes, had unlocked the door and let me in, after which we’d all stood by the vault and watched through the windows as the tornado blew away the car wash and sent the roof of the police station tumbling down the street. But that was then and this is now. Today, like the Very Large Country Men, I am reduced to short, cryptic asides. And because it suits my allotted tasks, I will embrace this newfound role.

Over the course of the day I will make other appearances, so that if this were actually an art flick an observant viewer would note the recurring extra playing different roles. During segues I drive my truck, off-screen, from the original small town to a series of other small towns, the most notable of which are, in order of appearance, Bay Springs and Paulding, Mississippi. These towns are separated by large expanses of hilly, cutover forests, over which unexpectant clouds scud by. For continuity, the weather never changes. In real life I'm doing courthouse research, the details of which are not relevant to the unfolding narrative.

In the next scene I am having lunch at a local fast-food joint in Bay Springs named Ward’s, which is the culinary equivalent of Dollar General – a limited chain that has chosen not to forsake small towns, and in fact has found in them a third-tier economic niche. Ward’s is not a place I would pick, though I did pick it, the alternative being Hardee’s, which I have a deep-seated aversion to because when I was a child Cass Elliott was doing ads for them at the time she choked to death on something she was eating. There was no connection except in my mind, but there the connection is secure. I don't care if the burgers are charco-broiled.

As I enter Ward's it is precisely noon, on a Monday, and the women who work there seem unnecessarily frenzied considering there are only two other customers. My first thought is that the place must be terrible if no one’s having lunch there at noon. The employees – there are six of them – vastly outnumber the customers, yet from their agitated behavior you'd think they were short staffed and the President’s motorcade had just pulled into the parking lot, hungry and impatient, accompanied by the national media. There’s lots of inexplicable scurrying and sudden turnings, knitting of brows, and occasional sniping. Even more noteworthy is the Ward’s PA system, which is by far the most theatrical aspect of this strangely strange day. After I peruse the faded words on the overhead menu, and decide to go with the “Big One,” a chili cheese burger, the voice of the woman behind the counter is transformed by electronic amplification to a volume that brings to mind an arrival announcement in a particularly busy bus station, complete with reverb, as she passes on my order with the words, “I NEED A BIG ’UN.” She does this without any apparent consideration of how this might sound to a visitor from another clime, her proclamation echoing through the nearly-empty restaurant, so that the two other customers cannot help but glance our way. So loud is the woman’s plaintive cry that I imagine it can be heard down the street, over the din of the log trucks, pickups, SUVs and old Sentras and Buicks with busted mufflers that characterize the town’s noonday vehicular crawl.

It soon becomes apparent that “I NEED A BIG ’UN” is Bay Springs’ midday mantra, starting on cue, like a tornado siren on the first of the month, or the tolling of church bells. Within moments there is a surge of customers – perhaps 10 of them, causing the women behind the counter and in the kitchen and drive-through window areas to glance anxiously toward the door, to see if even more are on the way. Notably, all of the customers are male. They line up at the counter, as if at a casting call, ranging in height from about three feet to six-and-a-half feet, and every one proceeds to order a Big One. I sit by the window, trying with limited success to pass through that portal again, watching and listening as the woman at the register repeatedly proclaims, for all the world, “I NEED A BIG ’UN,” whether in response to Small Boy, Muddy-Booted 30-Something Construction Worker or Old Man Leaning on Cane, it matters not. The sign out front doesn’t even mention the Big One, but all of us, to a man, wants us one, and the woman responds in kind, which makes it sound like she most certainly does, too.

I feel the pulse, or the chemical surge, coming back: I am sitting in a booth in Bay Springs, Mississippi, wantin' a Big 'Un, like everyone else in the currently known universe.

After the scene at Ward’s I depart for my next location, the tiny, isolated yet remarkably insistent town of Paulding, where, after surveying the facsimile of a square, I enter the courthouse, wander down the hall past a discarded metal detector, and pass through a restroom door where the placard reads, meaningfully, not “Men” but “Gentlemen” -- a nice detail. The Paulding set could never be fabricated. It is clearly a location, and is destined to be the most memorable of the day, if only because it is so site-specific and so off-balance. No one would or could have dreamed it up. It is a clear summary of 180 random years in a specific place, of a process illustrating (again, in order of appearance) the promise of the frontier, boom times, the calm of human settlement, the onset of stasis and inevitable decline, and finally, the astonishing power of inertia.

At the center of things stands the courthouse, a small, low, 1970s monstrosity that feels totally out of place in a town that, according to not one but two identical historical markers, is historical. The sign out front says “Paulding Courthouse” rather than the more accurate “Jasper County Courthouse.” It is actually one of two courthouses in the county, the other being in Bay Springs, so I guess it makes sense to call it the Paulding one, but they don’t officially call it the Bay Springs Courthouse in Bay Springs, and the fact that they call it the Paulding Courthouse in Paulding seems to hint at something, which turns out to be a rather misguided sense of local importance lingering from better days. The implication is that while there is no longer anything substantial in Paulding, there is, in fact, substance, and we are not talking about the kind that gets abused, though there is, admittedly, and not surprisingly, some evidence of that, too.

In a prominent location at the front of the courthouse parking lot are piled two dump-truck loads of red dirt, indicating that utility trumps aesthetics in Paulding now. Perhaps it always has. Nearby stands the official historical marker, its hapless twin being overgrown by vines in the yard of a small house on a side street. The markers explain that the town was founded around the time of the War of 1812 and (despite what you see!) was, until 1860, “one of the chief towns of Southeast Mississippi.” Also, as the signs point out, rather embarrassingly, Paulding was once known as “The Queen City of the East,” the “east” being east Mississippi. The markers are among the precious few props that actually evoke history in contemporary Paulding. To have been around for so long, the town is short even on conventional – which is to say, comfortably old -- ruins, the mainstay in such forgotten places elsewhere in the rural South. But for our purposes it will do.

Behind the courthouse is what looks to be an abandoned school from the 1930s, surrounded by pickup trucks, dump trucks and a tilting “modular building” – a kind of trailer – that appears to have recently arrived. To the right stands the metal building housing the volunteer fire department, and in the distance, on a knoll, an edifice described in a hand-painted sign as Saint Michael’s, “the second-oldest Catholic church in Mississippi,” with a nice cemetery, though the building itself doesn’t look all that venerable.

Beside the church is a recently completed residence, easily dubbed the New House in Paulding, which is basically a Home Depot-inspired outcropping of “traditional” southern vernacular architecture, with an ongoing bonfire of construction scraps adding an element of drama on the lawn.

Across from the courthouse, to the south, are a pair of rusty tin storage buildings; a small metal tool shed housing the Paulding Water Association (a woman, another bit player, can be seen returning to her job there!); the U.S. Post Office, housed in a trailer; the brick, vine-shrouded ruins of the former jail; and a line of shotgun houses, one of which appears to be an occasionally-open gift shop.

West of the courthouse are three residences representing the full spectrum of Paulding Living Today: A medium sized house from the 1920s, clad in vinyl siding; a mobile home surrounded by the requisite fleet of cars in various stages of repair, as well as a La-Z-Boy lounger (cloth upholstery, color and texture of mildew) which appears to be still in service, alongside a Big Wheel and one of those tiny, motorized vehicles designed for use by children; and the aforementioned New House. Passing before this streetscape: A pickup truck that appears to have been fabricated from scrap metal, which is hauling… scrap metal.

East of the courthouse stands an abandoned wooden building that proclaims itself, in faded lettering, and no doubt accurately, as simply a “Country Store,” which gives it a decided back-lot feel, beside which languishes the disturbing wreckage of a Ford Explorer, an inexplicable set piece. Beyond that is an abandoned trailer that seems to have once served as a bank, as indicated by its drive-through window and the stainless-steal money door mounted in the wall. Across the way the Big House of Paulding has long since fallen from grace, and stands resolutely flaking its paint, its broad, rotting galleries augmented by a crudely cobbled wheelchair ramp. It’s as if the entire town is at once a tribute to and a lamentation about time.

Overall it’s a masterpiece set, in its way.

After a few brief scenes in the courthouse that will inevitably be cut, most of which involve conversational asides with an elderly woman from Texas, a smoker, who is researching “colored marriage licenses” and is having trouble with the copier, I depart. Driving along the two-lane highway, through the high, rolling cutover land, I recall having visited Paulding many long years ago, when I was a reporter at The Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson. The Clarion-Ledger is now a shadow of its former self, as most newspapers are, but even more so. It’s essentially a forgotten colonial holding of the greedy, monolithic and defiantly declining Gannett Corporation, which has whittled the staff down to nothing, forcing them to labor thanklessly under its fealty, while exacting tribute from advertisers who have no place else to go. But back in the day The Clarion-Ledger was the newspaper equivalent of the Queen City of the East, with the largest circulation in the state, and had recently won a Pulitzer Prize.

On the occasion of the newspaper’s sesquicentennial, which called for a large, ad-laden special edition, I was dispatched to tiny Paulding, to which, as it turned out, The Clarion-Ledger traced its origins, before its owner sought greener pastures in Jackson. The idea was to “return to Paulding,” to the newspaper’s roots, for a human-interest piece. I had expected the populace to embrace their roles as denizens of the Old Country, but instead found that people there either didn’t know anything about it or else were strangely defensive. The one woman I quoted, who worked in the courthouse, responded to my questions by saying, with surprising rancor, something to the effect of, “I’m sick and tired of people showin’ up here, sayin’ the only thing worth knowin’ about Paulding is that The Clarion-Ledger used to be here. There’s lots that’s happened here.” These were her only lines in what was basically our own low-budget art house film, also shot on location in Paulding. I was mystified by the woman’s dismay, because: Why would it bother you that someone saw your town as having been the launching pad for a comparatively successful newspaper? But over time, and particularly after having ruminated about the scenes of the day on the drive back, it occurred to me that while stepping outside yourself for a moment can be energizing, no one wants to be reduced to performing a walk-on role in someone else’s low-budget drama. When it comes to our role in life, we all want a Big ’Un.

In his book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, author David Eagleman, a neuroscientist who also writes fiction, has one story in which disembodied souls are reduced to bit players in the dreams of the living. In this version of the afterlife, Eagleman observes that there are always background characters in our dreams: “The crowds in the restaurant, the knots of people in the malls and schoolyards, the other drivers on the road and the jaywalking pedestrians.” Those characters, he writes, “don’t come from nowhere.” In this concept of the afterlife, “We stand in the background, playing our parts, allowing the experience to feel real for the dreamer. Sometimes we listen and pay attention to the plot of the dream. More often we talk among ourselves and wait for our shift to end.”

In sum, Eagleman writes, “when we’re done with our night-time haunts in other people’s skulls, we fall into restless slumbers of our own. And who do you think populates OUR dreams? Those who have finished their time here and pass from the world. We forever live in the dreams of the next generation.”

It’s an interesting concept, and a bit unsettling, too. While we may not want to play the role of extras in someone else’s drama, or someone else’s dream, now and then that’s how the narrative unfolds. If nothing else, it makes otherwise forgettable scenes worth remembering.

Tim Hetherington

2011-04-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

Journalists tend to be cynical by nature. The work of reporting is about being there and doing that, about seeing the world naked, again and again. Particularly when violence is involved, it’s unrelenting and psychologically erosive work, which is why it helps to be driven, to have a healthy skepticism for authority, and, as often as not, to possess an oversized ego.

There are myriad potential dangers to such a line of work, beyond the physical ones. There are the risks of becoming jaded or self important, of looking askance at people who haven’t seen momentous episodes at close range, of falling prey to the tendency to reduce those you cover to subjects in a drama of your own orchestration, for which you will earn the accolades. Journalists matter immensely because they are the only way the world can truly know what’s going on, and fortunately, there are notable exceptions to the hard-bitten, self-serving paradigm – journalists who are in it for the right reasons and who happen to be generous, empathetic, affable guys who care very much about the people who inhabit their stories, books, films and photographs. Sebastian Junger is one of those, as was the brilliant and dedicated photojournalist whom I met through him, Tim Hetherington, who was killed yesterday as the result of a rocket-propelled grenade attack in Misrata, Libya. For many, many reasons, Tim’s death represents an irreconcilable loss not only to his friends but to the world.

Tim would do anything, take any risk, to reveal the humanity – or inhumanity -- of the people he photographed and filmed in the world’s war zones. He seemed to have everything: He was dashing, charming, intelligent, funny, thoughtful, brave, and something you don’t encounter much in the world today -- gallant. Yet none of that went to his head. What mattered most to him were the experiences of people under extreme duress -- that, and his professional skills as a photographer, which he used to great and lasting effect to illustrate those lives, and which ultimately cost him his own.

The individuals who populate Tim’s photos and films were his subjects only in the loosest sense of the word.

He was not there to mine the terrain of their lives for his own gain but to reveal the details of those lives to the world. Toward that aim, he had the courage to live and travel with warlords during the unimaginably violent Liberian civil war, yet had the sensitivity to create haunting images of unexpected scenes, such as sleeping soldiers in Afghanistan.

I'm a decidedly junior-level journalist, and when I met Tim I was struck by the fact that he seemed unaffected by the considerable difference in scale of our respective work in Liberia, which was always the focus of our conversations. What mattered to him was what I had learned about the people there, and how I had presented it to the world. I'd traveled to Liberia on my own, and because I was fearful and untested in a war zone, ultimately avoided entering rebel-held territory; Tim, by contrast, had traveled with those warlords, and survived having a bounty placed on his head by the insane, embattled government, which resulted in one of the most remarkable documentaries of any conflict I’ve seen -- Liberia: An Uncivil War, released in 2004 (http://www.docurama.com/docurama/liberia-an-uncivil-war/).

As evidence of his dedication, Tim remained in Liberia after the war ended, when most journalists departed, to investigate human rights violations for the U.N. Security Council’s Liberian Sanctions Committee. No one did more to tell the world the full story of what happened in Liberia than he did. You can hear him discuss his work in Liberia here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4W97bmAHSo

Tim also compiled a stunning series of images of

people blinded by the fighting in neighboring Sierra Leone, and went on to work in Chad, Afghanistan and finally, Libya.

Tim was born in Liverpool, England, studied literature at Oxford University, later returned to college to study photojournalism, and eventually settled in New York City. Most recently he worked as a contributing photographer for Vanity Fair magazine. You can see some of his personal favorite photos on his website www.timhetherington.com. He published or contributed to three books: Healing Sport (Thames & Hudson, 2003, part of group project, Tales of a Globalizing World); Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold (Umbrage, 2009); and Infidel (Chris Boot Ltd., 2010), a stunning illustrated account of the experiences of a group of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

In film, Tim worked as both a cameraman and director/producer. In addition to his Liberian documentary, he shot The Devil Came on Horseback (2007), and filmed and made his co-directorial debut, with Sebastian,

of the film for which he will probably be best known, Restrepo, about a year in the life of a platoon of soldiers in Afghanistan, which was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and made the short list for an Academy Award this year for best documentary.

Restrepo (www.restrepothemovie.com) tells the story of the 2nd Platoon of Battle Company in the 173rd Airborne Combat Team on its deployment in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008.

The title refers to the platoon outpost, named after a popular soldier, Juan Restrepo, who was killed early in the fighting. Tim also produced pieces for ABC News' "Nightline" and won the World Press Photo of the Year award for his coverage of those same U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley.

His last project was a highly personal, experimental short film called Diary. Next week he and Sebastian were to receive an inaugural award from the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, for Restrepo, which no doubt thrilled him more than all his other awards and accolades because it came from people who had personally experienced what the film was about.

If anyone was intimate with life and death, it was Tim. His own death would have been lamented at any time, but was particularly shocking now, when he was getting the attention he deserved, and because he had so much more to say and reveal about the conflicted world. At the time of his death, at 40, he was covering Libyan rebels under fire from government forces. Also killed was photojournalist Chris Hondros,

who worked for Getty Images. Two other journalists were injured but survived.

In an interview with the Associated Press before the Oscars, Tim said of Restrepo, “We wanted to bring the war into people's living room and put it into the movie theaters, and get people to connect with it. It's not necessarily about moral outrage. It's about trying to understand that we're at war and try to understand the emotional terrain of what being at war means.”

If anyone understood that emotional terrain it was Tim, and because of him, the rest of us have a far greater sense of it, as well.

Tokyo

2011-03-29T12:20:00.000-07:00

It was almost midnight. The boys came running into the kitchen and grabbed my hands, and led me outside to the darkness. A soft breeze was blowing. The sky was full of stars. They didn’t say anything. What is it? I asked.

Their father, David, was standing in the doorway behind us. “They want you to see the stars,” he said. The boys nodded enthusiastically, staring up at the sky.

The boys, Joshua and Jonathan, had spent their entire three and four years, respectively, inside the skein of perpetual manmade light that envelopes Tokyo.

That skein was recently invaded by radioactivity, which is how the boys and their parents ended up at Holly Grove, my home in rural Mississippi. I knew David from back when he lived in Jackson. We'd emailed back and forth after the earthquake in Japan, and once they were evacuated they needed a place to stay, for an indeterminate time.

Considering that the family had been uprooted for reasons that the boys could not fully grasp, and that they live in a city with a greater population of almost 30 million, it’s not surprising that Mississippi was an alien world to them. For starters, it was very dark when they arrived. Then: Magic. The stars.

Their mother, Ryoko, had cried when she got out of the car and saw the stars. It was such a relief to be away from the turmoil of Japan, and it had been so long since she’d seen a clear night sky. Plus they’d been traveling for more than 24 hours, after days of uncertainty and gas masks in Tokyo.

When I asked about the quake Ryoko did a little slo-mo dance, illustrating what she felt in her office in a Tokyo high rise. It began with up-and-down motion, after which came the violent lurching from side to side. She acted it out without even realizing it, as if her body were recalling muscle memory. The boys followed suit, dropping to the floor the way they’d dropped to their hands and knees on the playground when the earth began to move. The quake went on for so long that many of Ryoko’s coworkers began to cry out, thinking they were about to die. By then everyone was under their desks and tall furniture was tipping over, everything making grinding and slamming noises. Through the windows she could see the other buildings swaying.

After the worst ended, Ryoko and her coworkers crawled out from under their desks and watched on TV as the tsunami engulfed towns along Japan’s northeast coast. There wasn’t a lot of damage in Tokyo but communications quickly broke down and she didn’t know how David and the boys were. There was no cell phone service and she and her coworkers were not allowed to leave the building. Finally David called from a pay phone and told her they were OK, and when the workers were allowed to go outside she walked five hours across Tokyo to get home. David had skate-boarded to the daycare center where the boys were. The family was safe. Then came the disaster at the nuclear plant.

Now, on the lawn of Holly Grove, the boys crouched to feel for stones in the gravel drive, momentarily trading the visual spectacle of the night sky for tactile sensation. Each of them picked out two stones to keep, which they later carried with them to bed.

Once the boys were tucked in, we returned to the porch. It was a balmy night, with the scent of jasmine from the flowering vines nearby. Soft air. Ryoko walked through it, arms outstretched to feel it caress her skin. “The air,” she said. “I never want to leave this air.”

It was the air of Tokyo that had ultimately driven them away. There had been little structural damage because the city was designed to flex. The effectiveness of its structural engineering, as well as the taciturn social order, which prevented looting, was almost as remarkable as the disaster itself. Tokyo was also spared the direct effects of the tsunami. It would have been OK to stay were it not for the partial meltdown of the three reactors at the Fukushima nuclear plant, about 120 miles to the north, and the dispersal of radioactivity in the direction of Tokyo, which held the potential for both incremental and sweeping perils. Because David is a U.S. citizen, the U.S. government assisted in his and his family's evacuation.

The next day, we gingerly indoctrinated the boys about the tiny new perils of Holly Grove in spring: Wasps, fire ants, poison ivy, snakes.

All unknowns, piled atop unknowns. We tried to break it to them gently while on a walk to a spreading live oak whose limbs arch down to the ground. The boys were thrilled with the openness around them, and by the stones, and the acorns along the trail, but they were chastened by our admonitions to not step there, to not touch that plant, and by the insects, large and small, that crowded the airspace on their various missions. Then we came upon three horses on the edge of the woods and the world became tantalizing again.

Clearly, anything could happen. Anything at all.

Each time Ryoko, David and I talked about the quake, or Tokyo, or the future, in adult words, the boys turned gloomy very quickly and began to cry. The crying didn’t last long – soon a bug

was tapping at the glass of the window, attracting their attention, but while it lasted the crying was intense and deep.

They were picking up the scary vibe. Then there were the stars, or the stones, or the horses, or the dogs, or the golf cart, and everything changed again.

It put the unpredictability of our lives in perspective. As we stood outside again the following night, I saw all those stars, each part of its own universe, full of orbiting planets that are cracking open, rumbling, tilting, and thought about how much we take for granted, and perhaps necessarily so. Our planet is a whirling mass of soil and water floating atop molten rock, sheathed in a thin membrane that keeps us alive. It all seems very tentative, and risky. Our vantage points seem narrow, brief and focused. The stars excite us. The quake makes us feel grateful and wary.

Later that next night Jonathan, the oldest, made origami, of a tree, and taught me how to write my name in English and Japanese, as he sat on the floor of the kitchen in his Batman suit, the legs of which were a foot too long.

Nearby Joshua wore his own Batman suit; he beamed each time I glanced in his direction.

Meanwhile, radiation spread through the Tokyo water system.

Nitta Yuma

2011-03-25T12:49:00.000-07:00

It was something like a Google Earth image, circa 1840: A bird’s eye schematic of Nitta Yuma Plantation, in the Mississippi Delta, showing the arrangement of two neighborhoods of slave quarters, cabin by cabin, as well as barns, cemeteries, roads, stream crossings and the all-important cotton fields, each of which was hatch-marked to indicate the direction the long rows ran.

The map, undated but obviously drawn before the Civil War, had been discovered by consultants surveying historical sites that lay in the path of a project to four-lane U.S. 61. It delineated the physical world of antebellum Nitta Yuma in a way that was both illuminating and bewildering. Seeing it projected onto a screen in the Old Capitol museum, during the Mississippi Historical Society’s recent annual meeting, I found myself wanting to zoom in on that line of slave cabins to see who and what was there.

Because most of the visuals I have of slave life on antebellum plantations come from popular culture, I pictured Cicely Tyson, dressed in period garb, washing clothes in a cast-iron pot over a fire in one of those cabin yards on the banks of Deer Creek.

The map predated the construction of the big house, so it was clear that its fields, footpaths and slave cabins constituted the original core of what is now the community of Nitta Yuma. The Delta was wild country before the Civil War, with most of the development taking place along remote lakes, bayous and rivers. The cabins of Nitta Yuma, all of the same size and configuration, were surrounded by sprawling fields, beyond which lay wilderness marked as “heavy timber” or canebrakes, which were the province of alligators, panthers and bear. Planters and their families typically maintained primary residences elsewhere, to avoid fevers and pestilent mosquitoes, but the slaves who lived in those little sketched squares weren’t so lucky. They had to learn to make do. Unfortunately, much of how they went about making do, along with the typically rudimentary and ephemeral evidence of their lives, has been lost to history. The majority of what was recorded and preserved relates to the master class. For that reason my first thought, upon seeing the map, was to wonder what might be left of the world it described.

As it turns out, there are a good many reminders of the past in present-day Nitta Yuma – enough, in fact, to fill several museums. Among them is one survivor from the map’s epoch: A log slave quarters on the banks of Deer Creek, in the vicinity of what was designated therein as the “lower quarters.” The cabin, like seemingly everything else in and around Nitta Yuma today, is owned by the Phelps family, descendants of the original owners, who apparently have not parted with much of anything they’ve ever owned.

I visited Nitta Yuma before a talk in nearby Rolling Fork about my book Sultana, which was part of a series of programs organized by a group known as the Lower Delta Partnership. Meg Cooper, who leads the group, had offered to show me around, and brought with us her daughter Ashley, local resident Lynne Moses, and my old friend Melissa Darden, who’s from the Delta and also works with the partnership, which is trying to find new ways to develop the largely depressed local economy, including capitalizing on its history and musical traditions.

The area, which encompasses communities and towns with such romantic names as Onward, Anguilla, Nitta Yuma, Rolling Fork and Panther Burn, has its share of remarkable historic buildings, and was the setting for President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous bear hunt, in 1902, which led to the creation of the teddy bear.

It was also the birthplace of blues musician Muddy Waters, aka

McKinley Morganfield, whose song about the life of a rolling stone was the inspiration for the name of the rock band the Rolling Stones. In short, the area’s culture and history are more diverse than the miles and miles of flat farmland might suggest.

Our first stop on the day’s tour was Mont Helena, a Colonial Revival mansion that stands on an Indian mound north of Rolling Fork, which is owned by Drick Rodgers, a descendant of the builder who farms the adjacent land.

Mont Helena is an archetypal wedding cake of a house, built around 1900, commanding an impressive view of its 5,000-acre plantation, and is now the focus of an innovative effort by a group known as the Friends of Mont Helena to fund its complete restoration through dinner theater productions.

Mont Helena was built by a woman named Helen Johnstone Harris (known in local lore as the Bride of Annandale) and her husband. It is most often portrayed as her house, because she was one of those larger-than-life southern characters whose personal history is perfectly suited for the kind of stage drama the Friends have put together. Helen, who grew up in the hill country east of the Delta, appears to have led a charmed life before her betrothed (of the Vick family, which founded Vicksburg) was killed in a duel a few days before their intended wedding. As the story goes, the flowers and victuals shipped upriver from New Orleans for the wedding were instead used for Vick’s funeral.

Following her disappointing first engagement, Helen married an Episcopal reverend who was the rector at her family’s church, and moved from Annandale to the Johnstones’ Delta plantation, known as “the Helen Place.” There she made her mark upon the land through Mont Helena, which became not only a showplace (and, considering its site atop a sacred mound, perhaps a temptation to fate) but a notable destination for Delta socializing. The existing house is the second on the site, the first having been lost to fire just before its completion, in the 1890s.

After its heyday, the current structure was converted to apartments, then abandoned, and was very nearly lost to decay. In 1993, Drick began sinking a small fortune into it, not because he wanted to live there but because he felt it was an important icon of local history that should be preserved. By the time he began his restoration, the fourth-floor widow’s walk had collapsed, channeling water and rot through the center of the house, all the way to the basement, and trees had taken root in the walls of some of the rooms. He set about stabilizing the structure and restoring its exterior, after which Mont Helena looked great from a distance, though inside it was a very impressive husk, with all but a few of its interior spaces unfinished; it was possible to walk from room to room through the open, studded walls.

Eventually even the maintenance of the exterior became overwhelming, which is when the Friends of Mont Helena formed and began staging theatrical productions of Harris’s life story, along with dinners in the restored dining room, to raise funds to complete the restoration and put the house to work for a variety of events, including weddings and other formal gatherings. I haven’t attended one of the productions, but from what I hear they are anything but the hackneyed fare of typical dinner-theater. Both the play and the accompanying feast are said to be top-notch. The script was written by Rolling Fork resident Leslie Miller, with a cast that includes three Helens – young Helen, older Helen and dead Helen; all of the actors and understudies are locals. Every event quickly sells out, including all of this year's productions. The maximum capacity is 40 people, each of whom pays $50 plus change. The Friends also offer guided tours of the house, with the option of a boxed lunch or a sit-down dinner. As a side benefit of all the attention being focused on the house, the group has begun conducting tours of other historic sites in the area, and Drick has undertaken the stabilization of an adjacent Africa Methodist Episcopal church, built by Helen for the plantation’s workers.

Drick is an old friend of mine, and Mont Helena has long been one of my stops when I’m in the area, but it was especially nice to see it coming back to life. From Mont Helena we headed north to the community of Nitta Yuma, a collection of historic buildings straddling Highway 61. Most noticeable is the rambling, Greek Revival plantation house known as Cameta, which was moved to its current site by the Phelps matriarch, who had long admired it, wanted to add it to her collection of historic buildings, and oversaw its relocation in 1977, on the day Elvis died. Henry Phelps, whose mother remains the matriarch at 99, showed us around.

No one seemed to think it odd that moving the house had no real purpose other than preserving it, in that the Phelps family already owned the nearby Nitta Yuma Plantation house, which overlooks Deer Creek, as well as three 19th century commissaries (one of which contains a preposterously large collection of dolls) and several other historic buildings, including a carriage repair shop and a cotton gin, all of which are unused.

The family also owns a chapel built in the late 1980s, an old gas station, a few more modern houses, and an early log cabin and a garconniere (the latter of which Mrs. Phelps had moved to the grounds of the Nitta Yuma house years ago).

Just down the creek, there are more historic buildings -- an old cypress barn, the log slave quarters facing the creek, and the impressive ruins of what’s known as Mrs. Crump’s house, which was a peer of Mont Helena before a tree crashed through it during a 1973 storm, and whose survival as a ruin for going-on 40 years is a testament to both the quality of its construction and the durability of cypress wood.

On the day we visited Nitta Yuma, the route of the highway widening project was marked by orange flags and earth movers were digging into the deep alluvial soil on the opposite side of Deer Creek, bisecting the terrain described in the old map. The log slave cabin is presumably the only landmark from the map that remains, though it’s hard to say, in that many of the buildings aren’t documented.

Melissa also showed me an old African American church, now abandoned, the construction date of which is unknown, sagging and hollow-eyed, across from its stark, modern successor. Both churches are known as the Chapel of the Cross – the same name given to the church that Helen Johnstone Harris’s family built at Annandale. Likewise, Henry Phelps’s son is named Vick, in reference to the family’s Vick predecessors, offering one more indication that local history in the south Delta is an intricate, closely-contained web of relations.

Most of the buildings owned by the Phelpses are crammed with antiques and memorabilia, including a Civil War sword, a library of thousands of books, various oil portraits, a remarkable billiard table with carved elephant-heads for legs, all kinds of china and glassware, an old wine press, even an assortment of ancient TVs, computers, adding machines and portable phones.

It’s almost too much to take in, strolling through the musty rooms. But one impression is clear and resounding: This is a family that has been acquiring things for a very long time, and rarely lets anything go. And you know what? Good for them. So much has been lost elsewhere.

Lynne Moses, who was present the day Cameta was moved, remembered that Mrs. Phelps, the elder, was a model of decorum and poise as she watched the spectacle she’d launched from the roadside.

“It was hot as blazes that day,” Lynne recalled, adding that Mrs. Phelps was nonetheless dressed in the full regalia of a southern lady of the era, including various unmentionable structural components that Lynne went ahead and mentioned, and that while everyone else was sweating profusely, she appeared to perspire not one drop. She was a product of a world that has all but vanished, Lynne said, but she did her part to preserve its reminders, even in cases where the reminders were awkward.

As we were touring the commissary, Lynne asked Henry Phelps about a pair of slave shackles she remembered seeing there, and he said they were in a drawer somewhere. He seemed not to want to delve into the subject, but after thinking it over for a moment, added, “What’s really sad is that one pair is small – it was for children.”

Continuing on our walking tour of Nitta Yuma, Phelps said he hopes the buildings can eventually be a part of the historical tours being developed by the Lower Delta Partnership. It’s a pretty good tour, as it is. As we stood before the ruins of the old Crump house, I commented on its surprising integrity, considering its condition, which prompted a local farmer to nod and say, “It’s still hanging in there,” which is something you could say about the south Delta in general, and, for better or worse, about the world described in that old, hand-drawn map.

It should be said that the Lower Delta Partnership’s efforts are decidedly inclusive, and that the Sultana talk at the local library that night was well attended, and by every demographic of the area – black, white, wealthy, poor and middle class, young and old. Looking out at that diverse group, greater Rolling Fork seemed a remarkable community. I wish them the best in holding it together.

Moose and Cheree

2011-03-20T10:29:00.000-07:00

A reader sent this pic and suggested it goes with Booger Love Sissy, which it does. It was taken in an empty house in Natchez, Mississippi.

Booger love Sissy: The back story

2011-03-05T07:58:00.001-08:00

Several years ago my friend Steve was driving to the Delta National Forest when he passed a garbage dumpster west of Satartia, Mississippi, on which someone had painted a memorable proclamation: “Booger love Sissy.”

Steve’s first thought was to wonder why anyone would choose a dumpster to profess his love. He second was: OK, the guy was named Booger.

For some reason this roadside glimpse into the heart of a man Steve now calls “possibly the most romantic dumpster graffiti artist in Yazoo County” stuck with him. As random roadside glimpses go, this one had staying power. Steve was preoccupied with the message on the dumpster for most of the day, and found himself telling others about it, always with deadpan delivery, for weeks, then years after. He wondered how the message had been revealed to Sissy -- whether Booger had left it to chance or had driven her out there, perhaps at night, to reveal his true feelings in the glare of the headlights, accompanied by the nervous scurrying of raccoons. Regardless of how Sissy reacted, she would have been reminded of Booger’s love every time she heaved a stinking bag of garbage over the side. Plus, everyone in the area knew.

I shared Steve’s fascination with the public imagery associated with Booger’s love, and came to believe, over time, that I had actually seen it myself. Perhaps I had, since I had visited Satartia several times and was aware of the dumpster, thanks to Steve, but I can no longer be sure. It's possible my brain compressed all of its Satartia dumpster files into one, that once the image of the “Booger love Sissy” dumpster got in my head it became mental clip art. Thanks to Booger’s choice of venues, his profession is part of the public domain.

So it was that recently, as I was telling my friend Chris about seeing it, I began to feel that something was slightly out of whack, as if the narrative feed had changed fonts midway through, indicating some kind of cut-and-paste, which turned out to represent the presence of a secondary source, Steve. At which point I informed Chris, “…well, now that I think about it, it was Steve who first saw it, and then I saw it… later?” Then: “Actually I think just Steve saw it, maybe, and I just remember him telling me about it, but anyway it was there.”

Fortunately, at the time Steve told me, which was perhaps 15 years ago, his memory was fresh. Booger’s profession of love was there for all the world to see. And hearing about it now, Chris’s brain captured the information and accepted the truth that there had once been a dumpster in Satartia that said “Booger love Sissy,” or, as I recollected, “Booger (heart) Sissy.” That's what matters most for the purposes of this story.

Chris and I had arrived in Satartia midway through a day devoted to dismantling a century-old log corncrib on his family’s land in the nearby hills, where he lives. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in these notes, my friend Chad and I are prone to undertaking projects that involve dismantling, moving and reassembling endangered historic structures, most recently the smokehouse at sadly destroyed Altorf plantation. A week before I had brought Chad to Chris’s family land to see if the corncrib could be saved. Chris had offered it to me to move, because his grandmother had decreed that it should be bulldozed.

It is worth noting that the Altorf smokehouse was Chad’s second smokehouse, even though he doesn’t smoke meats, and that Chris’s grandmother’s corncrib would be my second, though I don’t stockpile corn. Chris’s grandmother seemed not to entirely understand this sort of behavior, or maybe she did. As we looked over the dilapidated structure she asked if I’d also like to have the old mule collars and such that were hanging from its walls, and when I said yes she asked, “What about that old rusty cross-cut saw with no handles?” When I answered in the affirmative she turned to Chris and said, “He’s like that ol’ washerwoman who used to work for us – took whatever we gave her.”

Following that first visit to Chris’s family land, Chad and I had roamed around the countryside scanning for interesting abandoned buildings, of which there were many, and at one point had come upon a rather disturbing trio of men riding around in a low-slung pickup truck. We were stopped on a remote gravel road when the weird guys rolled past, very slowly, the driver eyeing us with an unsettling grin; in back rode a huge man with the largest head and neck I’ve ever seen on a human being, who was reclining against a pillow propped against the tailgate, and who was also grinning. It was very Deliverance-y, if crystal meth had been around back then. Chad and I aren’t particularly skittish about such things, but we remembered those guys when we got out to explore the next abandoned house, and as a result we didn’t tarry. I later told Chris about them and naturally he knew exactly who I was talking about. The guy driving, he said, was named Tater. He added that my general assessment of the crew was accurate. The fact of the slowly roaming Tater would come up later on, in the newly unfolding Booger-love-Sissy saga.

On the day that Chris and I began deconstructing the corncrib, which his grandmother wanted razed because it was tilting and had termite damage, I slipped while prying up a piece of rusty tin and sliced a finger open, which caused me to bleed like a stuck pig all over the place and compelled us to head back to Chris’s trailer to clean up the wound and find something to staunch the flow. At that point I realized that I hadn’t had a tetanus shot since, like, 1979, so I called my veterinarian, Milton, and asked if I really and truly needed to get one now. He said absolutely, the sooner the better, not to wait until even the next day. Which interrupted our day in a way that might have been completely annoying and counterproductive, but as it happened, paved the way for what Chris later described as “the most eventful, interesting, fun and productive day I have had in a very long time.” That is not usually what happens when tetanus looms. Of course, you don’t normally expect your friend to be packing when he gets in the truck to accompany you to the doctor’s office, either. When I asked about the handgun Chris placed on the floor of the truck he said, “Yazoo City is a war zone.” He was referring to crime, and given that Chris experienced combat in Iraq, this struck me as noteworthy. I’ll go ahead and say we encountered no thugs, though the gun, as Chekhov requires, did go off further in the tale. The victim was an armadillo, an invasive species on which Chris’s grandmother has placed a bounty.

Before we left for Yazoo City, where the nearest clinic was, Chris had called the only doctor he knew and told the woman on the phone that we were on our way. But when we got there, after having driven 25 miles, she said they were out of tetanus vaccine, and sent us to another doctor’s office, where we were told that it was going to be a long wait and would cost something like $200, which was unacceptable. I could not help noting that she provided the grossly inflated figure only after asking if I had insurance. When I balked, she suggested that we instead go the state health department. Great, I thought. Now we were talking about a really long wait, and we wouldn’t make any headway on the corncrib. Surprisingly, it ended up taking less than an hour and cost $10, during which we met an older lady who had also injured her finger (in a door) and likewise needed a tetanus shot. She was the only other person there, so the odds of this happening… well, it was strangely in keeping with the day. Anyway, in this case "socialized medicine" totally worked.

On our way back to work on the corncrib we stopped at the store in Satartia, where they serve lunches. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows everybody, and no one uses cash because everyone has a credit account there, and the food is great. Satartia is a very small place on the banks of the Yazoo River, where the hills meet the Delta. As Chris and I were eating lunch I told him my one Satartia story, which involved the Booger-love-Sissy dumpster. He’s too young to remember the dumpster, but was intrigued, and asked the women working in the store if they knew anyone named Booger or Sissy. They said yes, and Satartia being a small place, wanted to know why he wanted to know. He told them about the dumpster. They were young, too, and didn’t remember it. They said they didn’t know if Booger ever dated Sissy, but said they were definitely not together now. This was a bit of a disappointment, but not really much of a surprise.

The ladies didn’t have much more information, and we got interrupted by the brief appearance of the second-string quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs, who hunts in the area and came in to buy a soft drink, during which the two women got palpitations and went on about him after he left, until Chris steered the conversation back to Booger and Sissy. Apparently the message on the dumpster had long since faded away, or had been repainted or whatever. It was gone. But its very evocation stirred interest. So it was that the idea of it, and the glaring absence of it now, sparked interest in remedying the situation. The result was a new can of spray paint and the resurrection of the old dumpster love message, an homage to Booger’s original. I’m not going to say who did it but it seemed, communally, like the right thing to do.

Chris wanted to take a picture of the dumpster homage, which is when he realized he’d left his phone at the Satartia store, so I took one with mine. When we stopped by the store to pick up his phone the ladies were going through his text messages, reading them and giggling.

“Who’s Allison?” one of them asked.

“None of your business,” Chris said.

Back at the farm, Chris and I considered how the reemergence of Booger’s publically-stated Sissy-love might ripple through the community. We also discussed another message that adorned the dumpsters, likewise scrawled in spray paint, apparently by a punctuationally-challenged county worker intent on stopping people from putting tree branches in the dumpsters (which no doubt cause problems with the unloading), which read: NO LIMBS? The question mark had apparently been used when what was intended was an exclamation point. Everywhere you looked across the county the dumpsters asked the same plaintive, cryptic question.

As we discussed these things we realized that the ramifications of the new icon for Booger-(heart)-Sissy extended beyond people thinking, “What, are Booger and Sissy back together?” With just a bit of alarm, but also amusement, we imagined this scenario between him and his presumed current wife:

Her: “You said it was over between you and Sissy! I knew you were lying!”

Him: “It IS over! It’s been over for years!”

Her: “Then why did this just now show up on the dumpster down by the river?”

Him: “I don’t know! Somebody else must have written it!”

Her: “Why would anyone else paint ‘Booger loves Sissy’ on a dumpster? That’s ridiculous!”

Which would be true enough.

I later posted the dumpster pic on Facebook with the caption “courtship.” I wasn’t trying to mislead anyone; the image had once been there, before cell phone cameras, and had essentially been recreated. Whether it was original or not, it now adorned a dumpster in the Delta, and offered an arresting image, an evocation of the past.

I like invoking the past, including for sport. Physical evidence of the lives of others offers clues to life in any time, which is why I'm inclined to preserve old structures such as the two corncribs, a slave cabin, and my house, the latter of which was originally built in 1832, and which I dismantled and moved to prevent its destruction. After reconstructing my house I had to repaint it, which posed a conundrum. On the walls throughout it were penciled messages chronicling the heights of children, the births and deaths of puppies, and yes, professions of love among people long since departed, the oldest dated 1870. I didn’t want to paint over those written memories, which spoke to the lives of the people who had called the place home, so my solution was to trace over the messages with an indelible pencil, which showed through the paint that I subsequently applied, after which I retraced the words in a regular pencil. Therefore the writing is still there, though the argument could be made that it is not, in the most technical sense, authentic. The words and handwriting are, but it was me who actually applied what you see on my walls.

Likewise, though the corncrib was said to be over 100 years old, Chris's grandmother had dismantled it and reconstructed it on her property in the 1970s because, in her view, it made no sense to destroy it (as its then-owner planned to do) when it could still be used to store corn. She had marked the logs with shoe polish, after which she and her oldest son had taken it apart and reconstructed it, which, in a sense, undermined the authenticity of its current locale, while also making me wonder how someone could put so much effort into saving a building, only to decide, 40 years later, to tear it down. But then, I’ve never been 83. It was her call. The point is, the corncrib had not always been there along the old road, and it was soon to become part of a collection of buildings on my property that appeared to have always been there, but hadn’t.

People like me, we hate for things to be forgotten, and that includes Booger’s dumpster message proclaiming his erstwhile love for Sissy. Life is riddled with asterisks, and you can’t always take everything at face value, nor even be sure of all that you see or hear. But the messages are out there, recirculating, and among them, once again, is Booger’s. As my friend Les pointed out, it was a restoration project, of sorts.

My Facebook posting received a lot of comments, ranging from “how romantic!” to one from Foster, with whom I went to high school, who obviously has a keen eye for detail, and wrote: “Suspiciously well formed letters for a guy named ‘Booger’... could be he repeated the second grade a few times or his real name is ‘Hollingsworth the III’ or ‘Alan’.”

For the record, that is not my handwriting on the dumpster.

Later that night I received some breaking news: An email from Chris, who, after I left, had been hauling his garbage to the dumpster near his trailer when who should come rolling to a stop but ol' Tater. Chris, realizing that Tater had the same surname that the ladies at the store had given for Booger, asked if he was related to a guy by that name.

"Hell yeah,” Tater said. “Booger’s my brother.”

Chris then asked if Booger had ever dated a woman named Sissy. Tater said, “Hell yeah, but they ain’t together no more.” He then related, in the crude, vernacular language of guys who spend their days slowly riding around the countryside, grinning, how Booger had commenced engaging in sexual activities indicative of an alternative orientation. What he specifically said was, "Booger sucks dicks now." Then he added, "Got hisself a life partner, too."

No shit, Chris said.

I don’t know which was more newsworthy – that Booger changed his public preferences or that he was Tater’s brother. You can say this much, though: There’s always more to the story, and the story never really ends – not, at least, when you have people like us probing the ruins of a saga that was randomly evoked, years before, on a rural dumpster seen from a passing car.

It was now apparent that the recycled dumpster message held the potential to spark a different set of complications, though somehow I doubt it will. It’s all pretty ephemeral. It's a love story projected onto a dumpster. Whatever the outcome, a rusty dumpster appears to have been the perfect place for Booger to profess his highly perishable love for Sissy in the long ago – a message that, for better or worse, has resumed its rightful place in the Delta landscape, for all the world to see.

A final note: I cannot personally vouch for the existence of said Booger, much less for the accuracy of anything attributed to him, or to others who claim to know him or to be otherwise related. As readers will no doubt conclude on their own, this is a story about imagery and second- or third-hand accounts, neither of which should be construed as representing documented truth. Just sayin'.

Henbit

2011-02-22T08:05:00.001-08:00

After posting Facebook pictures of the purple wildflowers that currently blanket the fields around Holly Grove, my home in rural Mississippi, a friend asked me their name. I’m sure any self-respecting naturalist would recognize them immediately, because they’re common, but I’ve never heard anyone call them anything and I didn’t find them in my grandmother’s dog-eared Golden Nature Guide to Familiar American Wildflowers, the reference to which is about as deep in that vein as I typically go. It was several weeks before the subject came up in conversation and two friends simultaneously blurted out "henbit." As in hen + bit.

I’ve seen what I now know to be henbit before – they’re weeds, more or less, but never in such profusion, and there’s a touch of magical realism in their magnificent, unexpected flowering this spring. One day it’s bleak and wintry; the next, a landscape painter’s dream, or a really good trip on acid. It would be possible to glance out a car window and see only a stereotypical, calendar-worthy scene, but I can also imagine the flowering as a prop in some old-time legend -- how the world turned lavender around some noteworthy event. The individual plants look a little like mint, and the flowers themselves appear insignificant up close, exerting their presence only en masse, when their color may change from purple to pink or blue, depending on the light.

If you’re prone to such musings, as I obviously am, it’s reasonable to consider this proliferation in scientific terms, perhaps even as an outgrowth of climate change -- of a specific set of meteorological circumstances that enabled the plants to flower on such a grand scale, at the expense of something else that normally consumes their space. The weather has undoubtedly been unusual of late. First there was last summer’s relentless drought, when the temperatures were in the hundreds for two months straight, followed by an unusually, enduringly hot autumn that collapsed into a notably sustained and bitter winter, which deposited snow and ice seven or eight times in a region that normally sees it only once every five years or so. We’ve been in the grips of a climatic free-for-all for the last year that illustrates, more graphically than usual, the shifting tides of temperature-mixing on our wobbly planet.

Continuing in that tend, the infamous winter receded in mid February as abruptly as it had begun, like a retreating jet stream tsunami, and the world once again turned unusually warm, and has remained so for a suspiciously long period. A sustained south wind at first brought slightly warmer yet still cool air that had previously been driven toward the equator, and after that came the familiar, muggy air of the Gulf of Mexico. It is logical to envision tornadoes ahead, as accompanied the abrupt transition from autumn to winter, and to suspect that cold still lurks in the wings, waiting for its unwitting victims to grow complacent and plant tomatoes. But for now, we have the caress of deserved warmth, and the unexpected majesty of purple fields.