Date: 2011-04-08
To: Mississippi Delta Blues
Miles today: 0.0

Today was a day of random wonder and unexpected granedeur. Last night, I bid adieu to my travel buddy Ben, and ferried my way across the Mississippi to meet up with my new rideshare mates, Jana and Beth. I missed to 10 pm ferry by mere seconds, so I had to wait for the next at 10:30. Having accidentally left my new favorite thing in the world, my bamboo walking stick, in a friend's car, I had to trudge again into the depths and craziness of the french quarter at the height of the night, backpack and all. But I made it out to canal street, stinking and sweaty, just in time to meet the girls on the side of the road. Jana is a lovely girl with west coast roots, blue hair and a bouncy attitude; Beth a chipper gal finishing up the last leg of her journey away from home in Sydney, Australia.After crashing at Jana's friends place, we made a fairly uneventful 6 hour drive up to Cleveland, Miss a.k.a. the delta. The Nav system in Jana's Honda Element couldn't exactly pinpoint our destination, Bitty's (our soon-to-be couchsurf host) house. But as we turned off of the highway and onto a bumpy rural road, and saw the tin-roofed shack with two rocking chairs on the front porch, somehow we knew we had made it. As we pulled into the driveway, the only thing I could notice was that dozens of hummingbird sized bumble bees and wasps were zig-zagging their way, fighter-pilot-style all around the porch. Out of this miniature melee, Bitty stepped out, opened the doors, gave us each a warm hug and assured us that as long as we didn't make any sudden movements, the stinging insects shouldn't bother us too badly. Then he took us inside and showed us his neighborhood. Bitty's father moved to the delta a few years back from Portland, OR to teach in the small, underfunded, underperforming educational system. Bitty came to visit last summer and hasn't returned home yet. The little loop they live on, which now consists of one nice house, belonging to their landlord, and his four semi-rundown rental properties, and a few other uninhabitable shacks, including one particularly bee infested bulding behind the house we are to be staying in. This used to be the cotton plantation town of Deeson, but after the town went bust, they simply bulldozed the remnant buildings into the woods, leaving behind only the old silo and the aforementioned shacks.Their landlord, a smallish white man with a classic mississippi accent and demeanor drives his little red SUV the 100 yards from his house to ours 3-4 times in the first hour we are there, to check the new commotion and, seemingly, to inspect his property. At one point, I hear a loud crack and look over to see him running wildly to his car after ripping one of the outer-wall boards off the shack behin the house, a loud buzzing drumming up behind him.Bitty has arranged for us to explore the area with a local civil rights survivor/activist/hero/veteran little old black grandma named Margaret. In the house that her grandfather built in the 1880's, she has certificates posted, recognizing her past and current efforts in the civil rights movement. In one corner, next to a artistically thoughtful picture of her nieces, she has a framed photo of a dozen or so men, dressed up in those white robes and those white caps, torches in their hands, all dacing around a large white cross around sundown. She later tells me that picture was taken in 2007, in a not too far away city. She is still fighting, and has a definite "take no crap from anybody" demeanor.She takes us to a local civil rights landmark: the spot where 14 year old Eli Till's body was found, washed up on a river bank, broken and mutilated some fifty years before. After that she takes us by the Dockery Plantation, the site the Mississippi Blues Comission would have you like to believe that blues music may have originated from. Maragaret tells miss this ain't the spot because people were singing the blues long before the Dockery's came along. In fact, she doesn't care much for the blues, and wonders why the state shouldn't put as much effort towards marking out all of the historic civil rights landmarks.Afterwards she leads us to a wonderfull bbq buffet with corn bread, bbq ribs, hush puppies, baked beans, cole slaw and fried catfish and poundcake for dessert.Tonight we all go to watch blues legend T Model Ford, who some claim inspired such modern acts as the White Stripes and The Black Keys.Cheers