It seems impossible that four years have passed since Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the coastlines of Mississippi and Alabama. As the secondary tragedy of New Orleans’ levee failures compelled the world’s attention, the destruction strewn across the Mississippi coastline faded into the background. In a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial, the South Mississippi SunHerald put it succinctly:
There is no question that the New Orleans story, like ours, is a compelling, ongoing saga as its brave people seek to reclaim those parts of the city lost to the floods. But it becomes more and more obvious that to national media, New Orleans is THE story – to the extent that if the Mississippi Coast is mentioned at all it is often in an add-on paragraph that mentions “and the Gulf Coast” or “and Mississippi and Alabama.”
Christ Episcopal Church, Bay St. Louis, Mississippi
Given the nature of things, neglect of Mississippi probably was inevitable. Given the realities of human nature, it also was inevitable that some Mississippi residents would express bitterness at their relegation to the fringes of the story. The bitterness surely was understandable, as was the accompanying anger at the unfairness of life, but in the end it was the sadness which touched me – the deep, pervasive sadness of people who know the living death of surviving a cataclysmic event. Standing in the rubble of his life, a man from Waveland who was interviewed shortly after the storm captured all the poignancy and pathos of events when he turned to a reporter and said, “You know, we had a storm here, too.” (more…)
Highlighted by savvy museum curators and hawked within an inch of their beautiful lives by mass-market retailers and online poster-and-frame shops, the French Impressionists remain popular painters. Once derided and criticized, their landscapes, serial studies and portraits are as pleasing to the art establishment as they are accessible to people who just want a pretty picture on their wall. It’s easy to imagine Mssrs. Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, Cézanne and Manet (late to the movement, but influential in its inception) sitting around a celestial hillside, watching the play of light on the clouds and congratulating themselves on their remarkable staying power.
Less concerned with realistic form than with natural light, atmosphere and color, the Impressionists sought to paint the world as they perceived it rather than in accordance with conceptual guidelines. In its brief online overview of the movement, the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that, “Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris) exhibited in 1874, gave the Impressionist movement its name when the critic Louis Leroy accused it of being a sketch or “impression,” and not a finished painting.”
“It demonstrates the techniques many of the independent artists adopted: short, broken brushstrokes that barely convey forms, pure unblended colors, and an emphasis on the effects of light. Rather than neutral white, grays, and blacks, Impressionists often rendered shadows and highlights in color. The artists’ loose brushwork gives an effect of spontaneity and effortlessness that masks their often carefully constructed compositions.”
Claude Monet ~ Impression, Sunrise
Traditional landscape artists tended to depict the individual phenomena of the natural world – leaves, blossoms, blades of grass – as carefully as an illustrator and with an eye to accuracy. Monet, on the other hand, wanted to paint what he saw ~ not separate leaves or discrete blossoms, but splashes of constantly changing color and light. According to William Seitz, art historian and author of the Monet volume for the Masters of Art series, ”It is in this context that we must understand his desire to see the world through the eyes of a man born blind who had suddenly gained his sight: as a pattern of nameless color patches.”
Reading his words, I can’t help but wonder if Seitz knew of Marius von Senden’s 1932 study called Space and Sight. Quoted extensively in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, von Senden had collected stories of men and women blind since birth who regained their sight with newly available cataract surgery. For most, it was a difficult transition, full of necessary learning. As von Senden puts it, for the newly sighted, “Space ends with visual space…with color patches that happen to bound his view.”
Beginning with Manet, the idea of “color patches” was integral to the development of the impressionist vision, and it’s entirely possible that von Senden picked up the phrase from the painters themselves. In any event, it’s easy to imagine a painter like Monet roaming the countryside with his easel and palette, painting whatever he happened upon and in the process giving us a record of the world informed by these new techniques and a unique vision.
In his award-winning book, The Impressionist Garden, Derek Fell notes the Impressionists’ commitment to ”capture and record the fleeting moment” through their brushstrokes. Perhaps the development of photography and the new ability to take “snap shots” influenced their thinking. The phrase “fleeting moment” recalls photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous commitment to his own “decisive moment”. Whether Monet’s reflections on his art were known to Bresson I can’t say, but the lives of Monet (d.1926) and Bresson (b.1908) briefly overlapped, they experienced the same technological advances and no doubt shared some of the same artistic concerns.
Monet’s Garden at Giverny
In 1883 Claude Monet moved to Giverny, and began to develop his garden. In the process, nothing escaped his attention. As avid a gardener as painter, his legacy still lives in the water-lily ponds, wisteria-clad Japanese bridge and grand central allée strewn with nasturtiums. Just as lovely is the collection of paths and beds in the walled Clos Normand, the large, traditional Normandy flower garden just outside the house. When Monet acquired the old farmhouse in 1890, he sacrified an old and tired orchard in order to plant new gardens and install the custom-designed metal hoops and pergolas that carried his roses and clematis.
Eventually, he turned his attention to the water garden. He rerouted a river, selected hybrid water lilies for their color and designed his bridge all in a deliberate act of creation – he was an artist creating his own subject. He left nothing to chance. Renoir may have built a glass-walled studio in his garden in order to paint his beloved olive trees, but Monet commissioned a studio boat, the better to paint his water lilies.
Claude Monet ~ Le Bateau-atelier 1876
“Apart from painting and gardening, I’m not good at anything,” Monet once remarked. Amusing self-deprecation aside, his talents in both areas resulted in the creation of the garden at Giverny. Composed as if it were a painting and over time the subject of much of his best work, it is considered by many painters and gardeners alike to be his greatest legacy – as beautiful, inspirational and pervasive in its later influence as it was for Monet himself.
Until my recent trip to Mississippi, I hadn’t fully appreciated the significance of Monet’s double role in shaping our vision of the world. Fairly adept at recognizing his work as a painter, I’d never considered the possibility that his life as a gardener and nurturer of the very world that informed his work might someday affect my own perception of the landscape.
Imagine my surprise when I turned down a muddy gravel road in the midst of the old Doro Plantation, halfway betweeen a clapboard house flying the Confederate flag and the fishing shacks moored along the levee, only to discover a landscape so purely impressionistic it was hard to believe it wasn’t already on canvas. Stopped in my tracks by what appeared to be rippling curtains of white wisteria hanging from the heavens, I decided to disregard the likelihood of snakes and the possibility of tetanus. Scrambling and tumbling my way across half-buried barbed wire and through piles of fallen brush into the old pecan orchard, I found my footing and looked up in astonishment.
It wasn’t that the orchard reminded me of Monet, it was as though Monet already had been there, dappling the leaves with light, capturing the pristine translucence of new growth and then washing the world’s canvas with a sheen of new rain and unnameable colors. I’d have been less astonished had I walked into Monet’s studio and discovered the canvases suddenly alive, or walked into his garden and surprised him painting a few new shrubs into place.
In Giverny, Monet constructed a garden for himself. That day on the Doro Plantation, where accidents of nature and history had rerouted the Mississippi, reshaped the land and left a secret, unexpected collection of trees, flowers and grasses to shimmer in the springtime afternoon, the only thing missing was the artist himself, to record the miraculous beauty of that first impression.
Doro Plantation ~ The Pecan Orchard in Spring
Doro Plantation ~ Wisteria Drifts
Doro Plantation ~ Hidden Lavender
Doro Plantation ~ Turning of the Season
Looking at the photographs today, I see them primarily as photographs, snapshots, lovely compositions in their own right and touching reminders of those unexpected bits of beauty found tucked away into the silence of a Mississippi afternoon.
But now and then I see again the play of light, and feel the warming breeze, and catch my heart leaping up as the first impression comes back. Breathless, I re-experience a truth as unexpected as the plantation orchard. Once ~ just once, or at least once ~ I was granted the privilege to see the world as Claude Monet would have seen it -tumbled into light, drenched with atmosphere, and patched with color so piercingly pure no response is possible except to be astonished by what Monet spent his lifetime revealing – that brushes, paint and canvas are sufficient to capture first impressions for a lifetime of enjoyment.
Doro Plantation – Daffodil Bridge
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Generally speaking, the anticipation and pleasures of a vacation compensate for the hassles involved in preparing to leave. It can be exhausting to make those lists and check them a hundred times to ensure the cat will be fed, the newspaper stopped, the plants watered and the mail picked up. On the other hand, every chore ticked off the list means being one step closer to a truly light-hearted leaving, and no one regrets the effort.
Coming home is another matter. Coming home means unpacking, sorting through mail, discovering bills you forgot to pay, doing piles of laundry and being informed that the Cat from Hell, who gets truly annoyed in your absence, has run off yet another kitty-sitter. Even worse, coming home means it’s time to deal again with that troublesome co-worker, the boredom of school or any of the daily irritants that never are as exciting, enjoyable or intriguing as days spent away.
On the other hand, as I think about vacations from even a decade ago, things clearly have changed. Back in the day, vacations were separate from daily life. No matter how greatly we enjoyed the fishing, the drive through the mountains, the concerts or the galleries, when the time came to leave, we left – and left all those vacation pleasures behind. Oh, we remembered them, of course. School kids wrote “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essays while their parents showed photos to co-workers. Still, vacation moved very quickly into the past. As the demands of ordinary life began to impinge on the present, “vacation” seemed no more alive and vibrant than the piles of souvenirs cluttered into a corner.
Today that’s changing. This is the internet age, and more and more often we’re able to bring our vacations home – not in the form of postcards, rocks, souvenir mugs or refrigerator magnets tucked into a bag, but through modern connectivity - a web of pages, sites, emails and videos that allows us to continue absorbing and appreciating where we’ve been and what we’ve seen even after we return home. It’s a Law of the Universe that there’s never enough time to see it all, learn it all, or enjoy it all, but thanks to the internet, it’s easy to keep enjoying, learning and participating as long as we wish.
When I drove away from Mississippi’s most famous crossroads just over a week ago, I’d come to regard it as Mississippi’s most famous metaphor, primarily because the highways involved - US 61 and US 49 - don’t actually cross but merge on the outskirts of town. No one seems to mind the poetic license. For one thing, so many historical events and mythical stories are centered on those two roads they’d deserve to be known as The Crossroads even if they ran parallel.
As the joined highways head north out of Clarksdale toward Memphis, the four-lane road is smooth and wide. Eventually, Highway 49 veers west across the Mississippi toward Helena, Arkansas. Where it turns, the crossroads has a flashing light, and each of the lesser crossroads – Jones, Moon, Coahoma, Friar’s Point – has its own helpful sign. In 1937, when the Moon Lake Club was in its prime and today’s Blues legends were just performers on their way to another gig, it was a different story. The road was narrow, two-laned and dark. The truck parked near the intersection of US 61 and Friar’s Point Road would have been nearly invisible to Richard Morgan, driver of the speeding car that hit it from behind and carried Blues singer Bessie Smithto her death.
There have beeninnumerable storiestold of what happened that night, with wild variation in details. There were claims the ambulance chose to transport a white woman injured when another car hit Morgan’s after the initial accident. Some insisted that Bessie Smith was taken to an all-white hospital but was refused admittance and died in the ambulance while it searched for a colored hospital. (Edward Albee’s 1959 play The Death of Bessie Smithpromoted this view.) In fact, she died in Clarksdale’s Black hospital, and lay for years in an unmarked grave until, in 1970, Janis Joplin and Juanita Green, the child of a former employee of Bessie’s, raised funds and provided a proper tombstone.
I knew nothing of this while in Clarksdale. I’d become lost on Friar’s Point Road while trying to find Uncle Henry’s at Moon Lake and I’d seen The Riverside Hotel in town, but had no idea the hotel was the old hospital where Smith died. Only later, as I was pulling up a map to see how I could have gone so far astray on the back roads of Coahoma County did I discover the stories of Bessie Smith and Frank Ratcliff’s hotel - yet another bit of Blues history I’d missed while in Clarksdale. Fortunately, a more knowledgeable traveler had sought Frank out during his own trip down the Blues highway and recorded a tour of the historic hotel.
However distressing Bessie Smith’s crossroads tragedy, for sheer mystery and drama the story of bluesman Robert Johnson cutting a midnight deal with the devil at his own, unknown crossroad is the stuff of legend. The story is simple enough. Obsessed with becoming a great blues musician but often shooed away by the likes of Son House because his playing was so – well, bad - he received mysterious orders to show up with his guitar at an isolated crossroad at midnight.
As promised, the Devil appeared, tuned the guitar, played a few licks and then gave it back to Johnson, along with the technical mastery he’d been lacking and a few good songs to go with it: my favorite Sweet Home Chicago, Come On in My Kitchen and, of course, Crossroad Blues. His songs are classics and his influence pervasive. During one of his Robert Johnson sessions Eric Clapton said, ”My take on Robert Johnson so far is that it needs two people to play what he plays, and sing along at the same time.” Well, yes.
I don’t believe anyone knows for certain where the Devil and Robert Johnson held their midnight meeting. I do know wherever Robert Johnson’s crossroad might be or whatever happened to him there, I’ve yet to tire of the song that captures the experience and gives it life. Crossroad Blues is deep, pure art, and as Michael Maurer Smithnotes, ”All good art has more to give each time (we return) to it—ideally wiser and more experienced.”
What is true for art can be true for vacations. Astonished as I was by the absolute flatness of the Delta, it took some time to remember the River hidden behind its levees and begin to appreciate how the Mississippi had shaped the land. Riding the highways, variously puzzled or bemused by things I saw, I stopped time and again to ask my touristy questions. Sometimes I got an answer and sometime I didn’t, but by the time I left Mississippi I was seeing the landscape in an entirely new way. Now that I’m home, other mysteries have been resolved - why brick obelisques are strewn across the Louisiana delta, where the cotton has gone, why slide guitarists like open-D tuning. With more reading, listening and study, I’ll be able to plunge even more deeply into Delta life and culture when I go back – a wiser and more experienced traveler.
Despite the counsels of cruise directors and casino marketing staffs, there’s no reason leisure time should be devoted solely to escape, indolence and unthinking ease. Engagement and active, thoughtful participation in the world to which we’ve traveled is always appropriate. No matter our destination or chosen activity, there always is a land, a people and a history waiting to be discovered. We may not meet death or be courted by the Devil when we head off in new directions, but every vacation is a little crossroads – a place to stand and ponder the questions life loves to pose: shall I turn back? or shall I go on? Should I return home, tell a silly story or two, poke a bit of fun at the “native customs” and then settle back into my comfortable routine? Or should I go forward, taking a turn this way or that as I journey into deeper understanding, more gracious appreciation and a willingness to be shaped by what I find over the horizon?
The questions are not entirely rhetorical, and answers will come. In the meantime, one of the gifts of the Blues – malleable, open, receptive to improvisation and revision – is that songs expand to contain life. Mississippi Writin’ Bluesdid just fine for a start, but we’re not nearly at the end. There’s always room for another verse or two, and I’ve found one to take me on to my own, next crossroad.
Gonna find me a crossroad,
Brand new place and time,
Gonna bet me the Devil
won’t pay me any mind,
Gonna stop movin’ backwards,
gonna’ ride that forward line…
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Uncle Henry’s at Moon Lake is a fine place to mark a literary anniversary. Tucked between Yazoo Pass and the Mississippi River just north of Clarksdale, Moon Lake itself is an oxbow, good for fishing if not for navigation and commerce. Across the road from the lake, Uncle Henry’s awaits its guests with a spacious gallery, a west-facing view perfect for sunset-watching and no scheduled activities. On the other hand, there’s all the time in the world for sitting and thinking, two activities particularly dear to writers. While robins stitch their song through dogwood and azaleas and morning blooms more yellow than the iris, I’ve been sitting with all my might, and doing some thinking, too - about the nature of persistence, and how quickly a year can flee down the corridors of time.
Uncle Henry isn’t my uncle, of course, but the fellow whose name was given to a traditional Mississippi establishment. Uncle Henry’s started life as an Elks’ Lodge in 1926. Sold in 1933 to William Wilkerson, it became known as the Moon Lake Club, a Prohibition landmark known for good food, high living and assorted illegalities. It lost and then re-gained respectability when the locals cut its connections to the Chicago mob. Finally, in 1946 it was purchased by Henry Trevino, the foster father of Sarah Wright. Sarah and her son George now run Uncle Henry’s, an Inn and Restaurant by its sign, a Bed & Breakfast in the tourist guides. It’s a little shabby, quite a bit quirky, imbued with fading elegance and filled with piles of indiscriminate memories. You don’t have to have been raised in the South to recognize that Uncle Henry’s actually is a “she” - the prototypical genteel Southern Lady who’s just a little down on her luck.
On the other hand, Uncle Henry’s is a treasured part of local lore and legend - not to mention local life. On Friday and Saturday nights, there are “regulars” in the restaurant, the kind of folks waitresses ask, “Will you be having the usual?” even while knowing the answer to their own question. When I mentioned Moon Lake to some fishermen eating breakfast in the Cleveland, Mississippi Huddle House, their first question was, “Did you stop by Uncle Henry’s?” When I said I’d been staying there, one of the men said, “Well, it’s not the Holiday Inn, that’s for sure. But that’s the good news – it’s not the Holiday Inn.”
It certainly isn’t the Holiday Inn. George himself told me that when I made my sight-unseen reservation. A late and impulsive decision to attend Clarksdale’s Juke Joint Festival had left me scrambling for a room. Motels were booked, and had been for weeks. When I called the Shack Up Inn (perfectly respectable lodging, by the way), they were full, too. But with the solicitous kindness I’d already come to associate with Mississippians, the proprietor said, “You better call up at Uncle Henry’s. I do believe I heard they had a cancellation and they might be able to put you up. Of course, they might not, but you call George. He’ll tell you how things are.” (more…)
When circumstances converge to produce an unexpected or unusual result, some people call it ”intuitive planning”. Others call it temporary insanity, or taking leave of one’s senses. Roger Stolle, proprietor of Cat Head Delta Blues and Folk Art in Clarksdale, Mississippi, has heard it all. A St. Louis executive with a love for the Blues and high tolerance for risk, he left a lucrative job in advertising to move to the Mississippi Delta and start promoting musicians with names like Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, Robert “Wolfman” Belfour and Bill “Howl-N-Madd” Perry. “A year ago, I was meeting with the CEO of May Company and traveling to Hong Kong on business,” explained Roger, speaking of his changed life. “Last week, I booked a blues musician named T-Model Ford for our grand opening and set up a store display that included a chair made out of painted cow bones. You tell me which sounds more fun.”
I’ve had my own experience with the kind of intuitive planning that turned Roger into a combination entrepreneur and impresario - I ended up varnishing boats for fun as well as profit, after all - so when I spot the first signs of circumstantial convergence drifting over the horizon like high cirrus, I start looking for the storm. Not so long ago, a casual browse through Words..Music..and Sometimes Baseball, an obviously eclectic blog, sent me over to Cat Head for the first time. Browsing their site, I discovered something called the Juke Joint Festival, a gathering of home-grown Delta blues musicians taking place just on the fringes of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. I could sense an impulse running down the tracks toward me like the 3:09 out of Memphis when it still barreled straight for the heart of the Delta. I found Clarksdale on the map. I looked at the calendar. I thought about my old twelve-string guitar and wondered, ”Whatever did happen to Howlin’ Wolf?” There was no turning back.
The town of Clarksdale sits in the heart of the alluvial plain known as the Mississippi Delta, at the convergence of two highways traveled in spirit by Blues lovers around the world. Running north from Baton Rouge, US 61 reaches to Vicksburg, and then on up to Rolling Fork, home of Muddy Waters. It crosses US 49 in Clarksdale and continues on to Memphis. From Clarksdale, US 49 extends south to Greenville, home of the Mississippi Blues and Heritage Festival and northwest to Helena, Arkansas, where “King Biscuit Time”,the radio show that helped popularize the blues, began broadcasting in 1941. ”King Biscuit Time” is still on air, hosted by its longtime emcee, John W. (Sunshine Sonny) Payne and preserving an irreplaceable part of American culture. (more…)
Walking the docks of the Galveston Bay area, you’ll find most boats registered in Texas, with a good representation from Florida and Louisiana. There are always a few vessels from the East Coast and the Caribbean, with an occasional hailing port of San Diego or Seattle. But now and then, something truly unusual appears. One day I noticed a pretty sailboat with ”Oxford, Mississippi” painted on its stern. I’d never seen Oxford used as a hailing port, and it caught my attention.
In the first place, Oxford is a town in the red clay hills of Mississippi. It lies on the Holly Springs, Grenada, and Lisbon geological formations, which are characterized by high rolling hills, deep, densely wooded ravines and river bottoms. The hills lie at the very edge of the Appalachian range, rising up from the plains to the south. Not only is Oxford without ocean access for a deep-draft sailboat, with its hills, pines and red sandy clay soil it’s the very definition of “inland”.
As these things happen, I met the owner of the boat on the dock one day. “Are you really from Oxford?”, I asked. “Well, yes and no,” he replied. ”I live in New York, but I registered the boat in Oxford because I’m from Yoknapatawpha County.”
After I stopped laughing, I looked at him and said, “Faulkner fan, huh?” He was, indeed. He’d been reading and studying William Faulkner, Oxford’s most famous resident, since his youth. We spent the next hour talking about the Snopes clan, the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the importance of time and the past in Faulkner’s work, Quentin Compson and Yoknapatawpha County itself, the place created by Faulkner as a setting for his work.
I had been to Oxford – and, thus, to Yoknapatawpha County - only once. The year after I graduated from high school, my parents asked me to choose our summer vacation destination. We knew that it might be the last vacation we would take together, and they wanted it to be special. I already had started reading Faulkner, and there was no question in my mind. Oxford, Mississippi had to be the choice.
Bemused but willing, my folks agreed. We gathered up maps and books and tourist information and headed off. For the first time in my life, I was a pilgrim, bound for the Holy Land, filled with all the intense fervor that pilgrimage entails. When we reached Oxford, the first thing I wanted to see was the house. Since it was 1964, only two years after Faulker’s death, and the Chamber of Commerce hadn’t yet figured out they had something worth promoting to within an inch of its life, things weren’t always obvious. We drove around a bit, trying to find Faulkner’s home, and finally pulled into a gas station to ask directions.
Two boys, about high school age themselves, were working the pumps. “Say,” my Dad asked, leaning out the car window. “Where can we find William Faulkner’s house?” The first fellow stood for a minute, then turned and yelled to his pal, “These folks’re lookin’ for Bill Faulker. You know ‘im?”
“Bill Faulkner?” the other replied, “Don’t believe I do. Can’t remember that he trades here. You folks kin or somethin’?”
No, we weren’t kin, and yes, we did find the house – eventually. Whether the boys ever found out who Bill Faulkner was or where he bought his gas, I can’t say.
But the irony is delicious and inescapable. Two years after Faulkner’s death in 1962, a couple of kids working the pumps at a gas station less than a mile from his house didn’t have a clue who William Faulkner might be. Forty five years later, a man from New York registers his boat in Oxford, Mississippi and anchors himself in Yoknapatawpha County, a purely “literary” construction if there ever was one. In the end, the imaginary world Faulker built became as real as the house in which he lived, and the truth is that, for many people, Yoknapatawpha County is as real as Oxford, Mississippi.
Faulker would have loved it. After all, he’s the one who said, “Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.”
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