After Arkansas, we finally headed down into Mississippi, the apex or nadir of the deep south. Excited for the birthplaces of Blues, Jazz, and Rock, interested to get more of the Civil Rights Trail story, and, to be honest, anxious about the deep poverty and strained race relations. We both agreed that we were a little on edge, but rested and ready to go.
Highlights included:
Clarksdale - Jumping into the deep end of the Delta Blues Country: food, music, and local company.
Tupelo - The home, er, shrine of Elvis, and therefore the home of Rock & Roll.
Jackson - Another terrific civil rights museum. Incredibly terrible roads. Occasionally undrinkable water. Good Barbeque.
Biloxi - Yet another gulf coast experience. Sun & sand.
First, a caveat . . . as much as we don't like to admit, the weather ALWAYS affects how we feel about a place. If it's sunny, even the most down and out places have a sense of optimism about them. Unfortunately, it rained pretty much the whole week we were in Mississippi. As a result, perhaps it's inevitable that as we think back on the week it seems to have been painted only in tones of gray.
As a result though, the people we met were the only consistently shining moments.
Clarksdale, MS
First, we needed 2 bits of background on Clarksdale. Number 1 is that it's mostly famous for being the location of "the Crossroads" in Blues music lore. This is the junction of Mississippi highways 49 and 61. It is here that it's claimed that fabled blues musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to become a famous bluesman. A description of the story is here and there's a big guitar statue at the intersection.
Second, is the economic story of Clarksdale itself. Mississippi is widely regarded as the poorest state in the union and in fact ranks near the bottom of almost every social, health, & economic category (a few stats here). The overall state poverty rate is a shade above 19%. However, the poverty rate in Clarksdale is 49%. This means that 49% of the population lives in a household of about 3 people where the total income for the household is ~$25,000/yr. There are a lot of other measures you can look at, but through any lens, the community is in desperate need. In the Mississippi delta (the NW part of the state), this is not a unique story.
Food, Drink, & Blues in Clarksdale
A classmate of Randy's from business school, Eric, has over the years moved part of his life to Clarksdale. So much so that now he has a house, a restaurant, and a part ownership in a blues club. It turned out that his schedule didn't end up working out that he could be in town while we were there, but he very kindly let us stay at his place. And he even connected us with several of his friends, so we got lots of local flavor over dinner.
Eric's place is amazing old building, called the Pink House (for obvious reasons), that used to be a creamery which he renovated. It sits next to the restaurant (Hooker Grocer) and we ate there our first night in town. Eric connected us with his friend Jon, who is deeply involved in a variety of different economic development initiatives locally, not least of which is how to create a regional healthcare place that can stay solvent and still meet the challenging healthcare needs of the community. The meal was amazing, but the conversation was even better. Oh, and our server was a 20-something Stanford grad who grew up in Clarksdale!
After dinner, we walked over to the Ground Zero blues club for a little music. The artist for the night was Zach Koch , a 20 year old who can really play. With her usual flair, Joan struck up a great conversation with a couple local duck hunters. The one with the Wilfred Brimley mustache has a hole in his waders that he's just too cheap to fix. But he loves to duck hunt nonetheless!
The next night we had dinner at the Bayou Bend Country Club with another friend, Sykes. He's a 5th or 6th generation Mississippi cotton farm who'd been out duck hunting that day with 3 buddies and we got to meet and eat with all of them. Betty at the club makes a terrific burger. While there, we also met Mike "Catfish" Flautt (literally no one called him Mike though), a sometime television personality who runs a guided hunt business called Tallahatchie Hunts. He brought about 20 of his guides and their families to dinner there after a long day in the field. Needless to say, Joan & I were almost the only people not dressed in camouflage that night!
We also did a lot of walking around town, ate breakfast at Our Grandma's Pancake House down the street and attended a bit of the Clarksdale film festival (that's Terry Harmonica Bean below speaking just before a movie about himself).
Schools & the legacy of Brown v. Board
These last two pictures are of two of the local high schools - it's hard to stop Randy from finding schools. While we had a great time in Clarksdale indulging in food, drink, conversation, and music, these schools are a reminder of the backdrop against which everything in Mississippi takes place.
Background: After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Mississippi, like many other states, dragged its feet on school integration. After the Civil Rights act of 1964, the state adopted the "freedom of choice" approach which allowed students to choose any school in the district. in 1968 and 1969, two more Supreme Court cases forced Mississippi's hand and school desegregation finally arrived in 1970. In the meantime however, whites in many black majority districts set up private academies and in the second half of the decade attendance at these schools tripled.
In Clarksdale the private academy (the last picture) is called Lee Academy and it doesn't seem to release statistics about it's students, but from the senior photo, they're approximately all white. In contrast, at the two local public high schools, we couldn't see the racial makeup of the students, but we could look a their on state testing. Clarksdale High's the school in the first picture) pre- COVID report card is here and Coahoma Jr/Sr HS's pre-COVID report card is here.
The public schools math proficiency scores are 15% and 16.2% respectively. While the facilities of the public and private schools look very similar from the outside, it seems likely there are some differences that persist on the inside.
Make America Great again
It was astounding to us when we realized some of the similarities between this area and the Ohio Valley and Wheeling, West Virginia. In both cases, the area used to be virtually on top of the world. Whether it was based on cotton or iron nails is almost immaterial. They were both on top of the world in the mid-20th century. Then the bottom dropped out both economically and demographically. Of course "Make America Great Again" resonates with them. Something went drastically wrong and it's easy to imagine that they want a politician to fix it.
All along the trip we've taken pictures of buildings, especially rural buildings; grain silos, barns, homes, and businesses. We've tried not to be voyeurs, but we wanted to be able to remember what we saw. The buildings and the land often seemed to us to tell the story of the place for us and to flip that switch that causes the memories to flood back into our consciousnesses. Also though, these pictures of the Mississippi delta tell the story of the poverty and hardship of rural life in ways that neither of us can quite manage with words.
Tupelo, MS - A shrine to Elvis
After much discussion, we decided that "when in Rome . . . " and so we just HAD to go to Tupelo to see Elvis's birthplace & childhood home. It's now a great tourist attraction and, well, pretty much a shrine to the guy. I mean we get the love for the music and at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame people absolutely flocked around the Elvis exhibits to listen to old recordings.
HOWEVER, this was maybe just a little over the top. We were invited to pause at various times as we wandered the grounds to think about the changes in little elvis and the joy he must have had playing in these hills. At a recreation of his boyhood church services we got to pretend to play the pastor and the pianist. We posed with a variety of Elvises (Elvi??)
And there were even Elvis videos playing on screens above the urinals in the bathroom.
Jackson, MS - The core of the white south?
I have to admit it was hard to dig back into the Civil Rights movement again and again as we rode across the south. The history is so painful in every single sentence. Of course, it was a million times worse to live through. 60 years later though it seems so incredibly insane and like watching and rewatching a train wreck in slow motion . . . and on top of that, there are so many echoes of today.
The museum in Jackson is a more Mississippi-focused museum and thus very special because of the state's place in the South. Four parts of the museum's presentation struck us in particular.
No Lost Cause: They began with, and maintained, a very unambiguous focus on slavery and white supremacy as the core of the Confederacy and the post-Reconstruction eras. There was NO suggestion of any of the Lost Cause whitewashing.
Other Countries Are More Free: In the Post WW2 south, they made a big point of the experiences of black soldiers abroad as key to creating a vision of a better world for America's black communities
Emmett and Mamie Till: More so than other museums, they focused on Emmett Till's murder in 1955 and his mother's work to publicize it, about a year after Brown v. Board, as the turning point moment that galvanized people to act.
The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project - Education and voting, two topics near and dear to our hearts. This is one of those moments in history that didn't result in immediate change, yet seems so incredibly relevant to all that followed it . . . and much that we do today.
By the way, Vernon Dahmer is one of those thousands of small players on the Civil Rights stage that you often miss in the telling of history, but whose work was so incredibly inspiring.
Natchez, Biloxi, and the Lowe's Parking Lot
There were too many interesting stops we made criss crossing Mississippi for us to dwell on them all. It just would get too boring. A few vignettes though might be fun.
The Bass Pro Shop Parking lot - You can park overnight for free at any Bass Pro Shop, so that's where we stayed in Jackson (because it was much closer to downtown than any park or camping area. We did tour the store though and our favorite product was the Bug-A-Salt: a multi-shot "gun" that shoots a shotgun like blast of salt to kill bugs and keep them away from your BBQ.
The Home Depot & Lowe's Parking Lot: We had another leak in Doris. We ended up disassembling a large part of the middle of the van to get at it . . . and watching some incredibly great videos online (the ONE good use of Facebook we've found), it was nothing that 6 hours at Home Depot and Lowe's couldn't solve.
St. Mary's Basilica, Natchez, MS: An amazing, beautiful, and Catholic church in the middle of rural Mississippi. Joan has a penchant for marching in to almost any Catholic church we find (there really haven't been many yet). This one was so, so lovely that she lit candles for her parents, Hal & Bev, who passed away a few years ago, and for our niece Carly, who's having a tough time lately.
Carved dead trees, Biloxi, MS: Along the gulf coast of Mississippi (which is beautiful by the way!) they seem to have a tradition of not getting rid of dead trees, but instead carving them and leaving the art for all to enjoy.
Jefferson Davis's Presidential Library: In Biloxi, we stayed in a nice little RV park right across from the beach. However, we kicked ourselves for not looking around more. It turns out that Jeff Davis's old mansion is now the home of his presidential library in Biloxi, and you can park your RV there and stay for free, under the oak trees. We did visit the grounds, but decided not to pay up to go in for a tour.
Thought for the day: "Some kids really don't belong there"
At one point during our time in Mississippi Randy was talking to a parent about his 6th grade daughter's private school. This dad was saying all the same things that Menlo dads might say about how difficult the school is, how much hard work his daughter does, and how every kid ends up going to a really good college. Also, his wife has been asked to chair the Board of Trustees for the school and she works a 40 hour week to help the school & her child succeed. It really was an amazingly familiar story, until he started talking about diversity.
While he was broadly supportive of the school's efforts to include more kids from different backgrounds he noted, "Some of them really don't belong there."
How does one respond to that? . . . He tried to clarify that he was talking about their behavior and study skills, that they just didn't put as much work into their schooling as the other kids (the non-diversity kids, I guess). I had a response, one that I've used before, about how high school grades are rarely predictive of success. You never really know how a young person will evolve or the dramatic impact you may be having on him or her. Getting a C in Geometry, for example, rarely means much about the rest of your life, but having teachers and a school that cares about you often has a dramatic impact.
Yet I couldn't get this conversation out of my mind. First, is this a conversation where I should try to do more? Should I try to question the possibly racial motives for his comment? Should I try to pin the blame on the school? Should I talk about PTSD and childhood trauma? Maybe a younger version of me would have tried that.
Second, I'm positive that this thinking also happens at home. People just don't say it that way and they don't say it while silhouetted against a background of 300 years of white supremacy. But I'm sure they think it. How many blacks do we have in AP classes? How many Latinos do we have in student government? In both cases the numbers are vanishingly small. Does that mean "they don't belong"?
I suppose I wouldn't still be a teacher if I thought that way. There are way more kids who don't "succeed" at school than those who do. Yet somehow they "succeed" eventually at some part of life. All across our trip, we've met people, usually small business owners or employees who we've found to be fascinating, amazing, and inspiring. And we've tried to keep notes about them -- for a blog post someday. It was fascinating though that the day after my conversation with this dad that we ran into Whitney Daniels. She
Runs a cute little boutique in a small Mississippi town.
Surfs the internet to find interesting, colorful clothes that she thinks people will like and buys an appropriate volume and range of sizes to supply her store.
Has a playpen in the back for her 1 year old son
Used to work in a variety of banking & commercial real estate related jobs, so she has a good head for numbers.
Has used that head for numbers and social media savvy to take the business online successfully
Also used that head for numbers, though she isn't a CPA, to start a separate side business now doing taxes.
Is a tireless marketer and sales person (and, yes, we bought several things) with a natural way of connecting with folks
So, she's a single mom who runs two successful business in the poorest part of the country. We had to wonder, when she was in high school, did it seem like she belonged? Maybe there's something messed up about the way we think about life when someone "belongs" because they can get good grades in high school.
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