I don't even know how to write about the Mississippi Delta

Mississippi is pretty much a foreign country to someone like me.  I have no idea how to talk about race and poverty and privilege without sounding really ignorant and dorky, so I'm just going to write my impressions as best I can.  People, both black and white, have been friendly to me, but a lot of times I can't understand what they are saying at all, and I have to ask them to repeat themselves.  Their accents sound really pretty, not like any southern accents I have ever heard.  I guess this shows how sheltered I am.  When I think of Mississippi, I think of a place where people have been killed for registering to vote, for registering other people to vote, for speaking up, for acting friendly towards another person.  People are always talking about the "culture" or the "southern culture" and I wish I could figure out what that means.  It seems like there are three almost totally separate cultures.  One is heinous culture, frankly.  That's all I can call it.  It's the one I refer to as a "gracious way o' lahf," and involves torture, murder, sexual violence and pretty much any other crime you can think of with almost total impunity. It's still around, because there is at least a whole generation alive that remembers it vividly, and it seems like there are quite a few people who still think that way.  It is completely impossible for me to imagine that mentality.  The men who tortured and killed Emmett Till weren't young thugs in their 20s.  They were family men with children of their own.  I guess it's like trying to understand the Nazis.  But would Germany put the Nazi flag as a mini-piece of their new national flag?  I don't think so?  But every time you look at the Mississippi state flag, you see the Confederate flag.  I just can't get my head around it.

 It was really challenging to find Money, Mississippi.
It's not even visible on my Google maps.  But it was
on the Mississippi Delta paper map, the one with
the famous Blues landmarks on it.  Bryant was the
name of one of the two murderers of 14 year old
Emmett Till.  He was a kid visiting from Chicago, and he just didn't believe that he would get in trouble for being friendly to a white woman.  He said a few friendly words to her, possibly including, "Bye, baby" as he went out.  Her husband and his half brother kidnapped him and took him to the store, then out to a remote location where they tortured him to death.

His mom insisted on having his body brought back to  Chicago, where she not only had an open casket funeral, but allowed photos of his body to be published in the media.  The two murderers were acquitted in about an hour by an all white jury.  I guess you could say Emmett Till's death was not in vain, because they say it sparked the Civil Rights movement.  Rosa Parks said the reason she refused to give up her seat on the bus, exactly 100 days later, was because "I thought of Emmett Till."

The second culture here in Mississippi is based on a community of people who spent hundreds of years in captivity, poverty, oppression.  They have churches full of music, strong families, and some kind of resilience that I also don't understand.  I am so incredibly privileged that I can't even begin to understand what it's like to live with segregation and racism.  I have had a couple of conversations with people, where I have to ask them to repeat themselves a lot, about how the separation continues.  One lady said, "Maybe we'll even have a separate heaven and hell after we die."  She recalled picking cotton when she was young, having to work from sunup to sundown, teaching school for 30 years and only having maybe 5 white kids in her class in that entire time.  Anyway, I don't want to romanticize black people down here, or put them into some big category.  I feel really ignorant, and at a loss.  I do like blues music, however.  

 We had a lot of fun driving down Highway 61, looking at the crossroads where Robert Johnson is supposed to have sold his soul to the devil, visiting the BB King Museum (which is like having BB King take you on a tour of his life, because he obviously helped design the museum and he is still alive).  It was just as great as the Woody Guthrie center in Tulsa, with interactive exhibits, little films with interviews from all these musicians who were influenced by BB, lots of headphones where you could listen to his music, and so forth.  The whole blues culture came from the culture of poverty and      suffering in the south, and I guess it was considered mainly "black" music for a really long time, which is why Elvis was so important.  BB King was even more important, when he started playing for white hippies in San Francisco and introduced them to the blues.  From that introduction has come the third culture of Missippi that I observed today.  Well, and I guess from the Civil Rights movement.  This is the culture where the two cultures meet.  The cooking is one thing:  did you know that the Mississippi Delta is really into tamales?  There are like 9 or 10 tamale restaurants in Greenville alone!  Everyone has his or her own special tamale recipe.  It goes with barbecue.  Wait, I got off track with the food. And I didn't even start talking about the barbecue.  As Bill Clinton said, it's not just a food; it's a way of life.  Now that's the way of life I'm talking about!  Mmm!  After the museum, we went to this tiny little place and this white guy that I couldn't understand at all made us a plate of pulled pork and potato salad and sauce and beans and toast, and another plate of tamales, and YUM!

 Dang, I just got sidetracked again.The point is that I guess some well-meaning white people want to get to know black people in Mississippi.  Not all white people down here are full of creepy hatred. Some have died because they tried to help out during the Civil Rights movement.  For instance, there was this lady from Detroit, an Italian-American mother of five, Viola Liuzzo, who was shot by the KKK while she was helping to drive marchers from one place to another during the Selma-Montgomery march.  I thought a lot today about Paul Raymond, who came down here to register voters and was beaten and arrested himself.  He taught me about Emmett Till, and about the blues (he was the first one to play "Strange Fruit" for me and explain what it meant) and he wore silk shirts like BB King.  

There are some weird byproducts of this third culture that some might say are in poor taste.  For instance, there are these "Tallahachie Flats" that tourists can stay in.  They are replicas of sharecroppers' shacks, except with indoor plumbing and air conditioning.  And I assume there aren't any red ants and other pests crawling around inside.  People who drive down the Blues Trail (highway 61 and its environs) in their rental cars can stay there, for a lark.  Can you also have, for an extra fee, people dressed in white hoods come and terrorize you, for a lark?  It just seems excessive.  Especially when literally just across the road are actual wooden shacks and run down trailers where people are really living.  We saw a lot of poverty today, that's for sure.

We are staying in the casino hotel, where we got to play craps with some locals and chat with them (I guess Matt finds it easier to understand people, since he used to live down in Macon, Georgia), and now there is a huge thunderstorm. The last impression I want to share of the Mississippi Delta so far is that it is really out in the middle of a remote area.  There's not a lot around.  Just a lot of farms and dirt and cotton and little tiny towns with what seems like a big gap between rich and poor, which I guess is just like the cities in the US. I wish I could spend more time here getting to know people.  Like I said, I don't even know how to write about this foreign country that is Mississippi, but I look forward to tomorrow, when we go even farther into the Southland!