Such a day today. The two extremes of America - the first peoples and the newest peoples juxtaposed and still churning in my head.
After a stormy night in Vicksburg we left early to head north to Greenville, to visit the Winterville Mounds site. This had been on my To Do list for a number of years now, and I was never going to get a chance again most likely.
We headed north under cloudy skies. We have been avoiding the news, so we were not aware that we were heading into a tornado warning. As it happened, it landed in Clarksdale, about 100 miles north of us, so we were blissfully unaware of our luck.
It took us a while to get out of Vicksburg, even with the GPS, as the road signage was still designed to confuse Northerners. The National Miilitary Park weaves over and back across the I10, so we saw most of the 16 mile route even though we had decided not to. My tolerance for American military monuments is rapidly declining as I become more aware of the impact of nation-building on its original peoples. However we passed through the woods where the Confederates held their line during the infamous siege. And we passed innumerable statues of moustached heros of one description or another and that was enough for me anyways.
Once we got clear of the city, we were out on the Delta. The sun backlit the clouds in the wide sky and made the wet ground shimmer. It was wide flat farmland; cotton, soy, corn. The soil was almost black, rich alluvium. Snaking alongside us, about a mile west of the road, was the levee that separated the Mississippi river from its callows. Now and again, a small ribbon of cottonwoods marked a farmhouse or a cluster of trailers. The road got noticeably worse.
Suddenly, an old store appeared out of nowhere. We pulled up.
The Onward Store.
Behind it was an old wagon, with a billboard depicting two hunters and a large black bear.
We went inside.
A giant stuffed bear wearing a Santa hat stood beside a revolving Christmas tree.
“Are y’all here just to look around or do you want to dine in?”
“Dine in”, we both chimed.
A young man led us through an archway into a museum with tables dotted here and there.
We ordered the all day breakfast and while he went to get us coffee I poked around in the dim light.
A giant alligator skin, head intact and also wearing a Santa hat was nailed to the far wall. Behind me a bear, Santa hat perched jauntily to one side, leaned out from under Fox newscast murmuring from the plasma tv screen.
I read the back of the menu.
Turns out this is the spot where Theodore Roosevelt went on his famous bear hunt. The hunter went ahead with his dogs, who cornered a large male bear. The bear was wreaking such havoc on the dogs, the hunter knocked it unconscious and tied it to a tree. Then he led old Teddy down there and invited him to take the shot.
President Roosevelt refused to do such a dishonourable thing and the story made such headlines that we’ve all had teddy bears in respect for decades and decades since.
The restaurant cum museum was full of wonders, like Frog Jam and Bear bells and raccoon tail keyrings and a large collection of teddy bears. In one corner there was a collection of toy chihuahuas and they were so lifelike I almost thought they were stuffed.
The all day breakfast didn’t match the delights of our surroundings unfortunately. Still, we enjoyed our stop there.
We were about a mile down the road when I realised I’d left my camera bag in the store.
We turned around.
“I was just getting ready to get the car and chase you down”, the store manager said when I reappeared.
A tall man about my age with a small child perched on his shoulder was standing at the counter waiting to pay for something.
“Never mind her. She’s was just putting it on eBay’, he said. “Another minute and she’d have sold it on up to Clarksdale.”
The poor woman was apoplectic.
“Get on now. Get outta my store” she yelled at him.
We rolled on through some more little towns and also the larger town of Rolling Fork, which had beautifully preserved nineteenth century two storey homes with deep porches and fanlights over the doors. Relics of a more prosperous time when the railroad came through and brought with it opportunity. There didn’t appear to be any sort of economic activity apart from farming though.
Despite that, Greenville was a large bustling town, full of beautiful old cars from the fifties and sixties, being driven about with families in them going about the happy chores that you have to get done two days before Christmas.
A few miles outside town we saw the first mound rise thirty feet above the flat land of the delta.
Winterville was a religious and governance centre for the people who built the mounds and so the number and height of the mounds are unusually high. About thirty have survived the land being developed for agriculture. At the nationally preserved site, there are eight mounds arranged in an oval around two large plazas.
The rain stopped as we arrived and the sun was hot. We walked along the grass pathway to the site. A flock of Canada geese watched us from a creek nearby.
In the second, larger plaza there was a bench. We sat down. Behind us was Mound A, over fifty feet high. The main religious site.
Along the Mississippi, indigenous people settled and cultivated farmland in the black soil and grew the Three Sisters - corn, squash and beans - and created the kind of food surplus that enabled them to build significant centres of spiritual leadership and governance. The mounds were an act of community, it is thought. Individuals brought baskets of earth to the site and tamped it in and built the mound layer by layer. Wooden buildings were erected on top. Excavations have shown that those buildings were burnt to the ground every now and then. More earth was placed on top of those buildings and a new structure erected on top of that.
Regime change, maybe? Or a rhythm older than that?
We sat for a while in the warm sun and tried to imagine the plaza full of people after a good harvest. Singing and dancing and the smell of good food cooking. Ceremonies on the mounds and the comfort of kinship around them. Centuries of community ripped apart when the millionaire Fernando de Soto set off on his ridiculous trudge through the swamps of South Eastern America in search of yet more gold to add to his South American haul.
In the little museum near the site, there was an excellent collection of artifacts found in various excavations of the mounds. Elegantly curved clay bottles with geese heads for lips. Squat, sturdy pots on three stumpy legs with geometric patterns inscribed on the surface. A passing similarity to the Celtic lozenges of my history, but not quite the same. Carved pipe stems that appeared to be animals or creatures of some sort.
There was a case of delicate shell necklaces. Another of gleaming hoe heads the width of my hand. The centrepiece of the museum was a perfectly carved cypress canoe. It was so narrow I would have never fitted into it. I wondered if perhaps it had been carved for a child eight hundred years ago or so.
After we had looked at everything, even the small section of the museum entitled Putting De Soto in his Place, which was in a dark corner by the mens room, we had to leave and find a place to stay for the night.
The curator gave us directions to a camp ground a few miles away on the banks of the Mississippi. The road in was narrow and bumpy and we passed what looked like a power station and some other industrial sites. Then we turned in by the sign that said “Welcome to Warford Point” and passed through a high fence topped with barbed wire. We were welcomed by two young men wearing the bright green and white striped trousers of the Mississippi Corrections Service. They were waving a leafblower around in a way guaranteed not to blow leaves into a pile. There was no one else around.
“Manager’ll be by in a minute”, one of them offered. Then, “where y’all from anyways.”
I was trying to explain where Nova Scotia was when a car pulled up and a very large very angry looking African American man got out and strode over. The leafblowers jumped into action again while I was interrogated about who I was and what I wanted but eventually we got it all figured out that we just wanted to stay one night and we didn’t need anything except a site and so he could get off now to visit his momma before Christmas, and by the end of it he was positively almost smiling at us.
By and by a van came and picked up the leafblowers who waved at us and blew a kiss at me and then we were alone by the Mississippi except for a couple of other RVs.
Our nearest neighbour was soon over to check us out. A wiry little bantam of a man, pushing 70.
“You want to turn that RV around so you can watch the barges go by” he barked.
He waited till we obeyed and then stayed on to chat for a while.
By and by he mentioned that he couldn’t enter Canada and Himself had a brain fart and asked him why.
“Well sir, I C-A-R-R-Y and my wife she C-A-R-R-I-E-S and up there in Canada y’all have some strange ideas about how to live and so we can’t go there.”
I felt along my tongue for the ridge I use to bite on when I need to. I clamped on. Put on my Canadian expression of interested but non-judgemental concern.
“We left everything behind one time and drove up in the truck and when we got to the border we had the spray….. and they didn’t like the spray, so we just turned round and came back.”
His accent was East Texas, Louisiana border. They had sold their home 18 years ago and had been on the road ever since. No family, no friends, better that way. No ties.
He wandered off for a bit, but we must have passed some kind of sniff test because he was back a number of times over the next 16 hours or so. Never has a man tested my patience so much.
As we talked and his views emerged, one by one, it was clear that I must not offer any of my own dearly loved opinions under any circumstances. As Himself figured this out, he took great pleasure in drawing the little man out on a range of topics dear to my heart.
Trump was a great man that was going to get this country back on track. “He’ll get rid of government”, he said as he surveyed his $250,000 motor home sitting on a State Park lot for $13 a night, “government has ruined this country.”
The media were a bunch of liberal nancies. Canadians a bunch of gubmint loving’ pussies.
He didn’t have much time for his neighbours to the south. I won’t repeat his remarks.
He held a special place in his cold mean little heart for the EPA.
“Climate change”, he spat out. “Job-killing hippies working together to put families out of work.”
Himself raised the subject of Obama.
He stood up on his toes and stuck his head out on his scrawny old neck and gnashed his brand new false teeth at the thought of him. Just like a rooster.
Eventually we got rid of him and night fell and we lit a fire under the trees and watched huge barges being pulled up against the tide by little tug boats and wondered at how their captains steered the immense length of them up the river. Each barge carries the equivalent of 87 container trucks and they are up to 600 feet long. It was our last night by the river so we stayed up late listening to the water and the trees and counted our blessings that we lived in a country where such petty meanness and hate as we had listened to was not in power any more.
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