Hope and devilment in the Mississippi Delta

Traipse and wander, maybe catch a train. Sing the blues, cry tamale-juice tears, seek the crossroads of your soul. Anybody asks, you’re looking for the Shroud of Itta Bena.

Well, Abe said, “Where you want this killin’ done?”
God said, “Out on Highway 61”

— “Highway 61 Revisited,” Bob Dylan

She spoke low in a voice that had some lilt when she slowed it down, though she rarely ever did. Words came out the girl’s mouth like birds sprung wild from busted cages. But a sky full of birds wasn’t enough for the girl. Mere flying would not do. She wanted them to be like the crop dusters that buzzed the Mississippi Delta in that summer of boys and girls. She wanted them to swoop and plummet and do the loop-de-loop. She wanted them to strike fear, awe, wonder, and want in the boy.

— from my novel EVERYBODY KNOWS (JackLeg Press, 2023)

Someday we’ll be together
Father south than the train line
The Delta mud will be there

— “Live Free,” Son Volt

Time passed like a month of Wednesdays.

“Ivy. Ivy. What’s so important you cain’t come to church with me?” Her mama was making for the door; the woman clutched her purse as if some freshly unearthed religious artifact of the Delta region, the Shroud of Itta Bena or some such, were inside.

— from my short story “I’ll Take You There,” Harper Perennial’s Fifty-Two Stories with Cal Morgan (2010)

Was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day

— “Ode to Billie Joe,” Bobbie Gentry

This was in the small river town of Prophet, county of Ishtehotopa, on the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta. The whole town had turned out, seemed like. The sheriff, a wedge-shaped man whose name really was Law, stood beside the town preacher, the Reverend Judge, on the edge of the crowd. They shrugged at one another, each as if to say, Ain’t there something you should be doing about this?

— from my short story “Strange Things Happening Every Day,” The Pinch (2009)

The land was perfectly flat and level but it shimmered like the wing of a lighted dragonfly. It seemed strummed, as though it were an instrument and something had touched it.

— “Delta Wedding,” Eudora Welty

She pulled him close and they laughed good and long, and became, for a few moments, teenage American children trying to escape together that long, hot Mississippi Delta summer in a rusted-out Fleetwood with four flat tires and no mirrors to see what they were leaving behind.

— from my short story “I’ll Rob for You a Bank or Two,” Southern Hum (2005)

We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61

— “Highway 61 Revisited,” Bob Dylan

“Jackson’s a good place to say you’re off to,” Ivy said. “It gives you options. I think there’s upwards of twenty. The Tennessee one, you know, it’s not thirty miles that way.” Ivy pointed in a random direction, more for show than anything. “Now, if you mean Jackson, Mississippi, well, you’ve got an hour to Memphis and then three hours south — four if you drive through the Delta. You should do that. You’ll have some adventures, for sure, in the Delta. You’ll be serenaded and maybe saved, and robbed, too — maybe all by the same man or men. You’ll dance to the country blues and cry tamale-juice tears. Maybe the car will die and you’ll have to hop a train. There’s always a train, coming or going in Mississippi.”

— from my short story “Sources of Outlaw Country,” Eucalyptus Lit (2024)

The Mississippi Delta is not always dark with rain. Some autumn mornings, the sun rises over Moon Lake, or Eagle, or Choctaw, or Blue, or Roebuck, all the wide, deep waters of the state, and when it does, its dawn is as rosy with promise and hope as any other.

— “Wolf Whistle,” Lewis Nordan