Now, I knew that I was taking the road (or roads, as it were) less traveled. (I could have driven to Memphis and taken Interstate 40 all the way.) I tend to opt away from interstates whenever possible both because I like driving slowly and because I feel safer on back roads with my car. Help just seems more likely. (Perhaps this is very naive considering the South's history. Sorry, but I have a beyond middle age colleague who grew up in Holmes County, and you can hardly pay him to get off of the Interstate.) On I-40 or any Interstate for that matter I feel unprotected, anonymous, and minds and bodies are just moving much too fast. So, the day before my trip, learning that I could avoid the bridge to Arkansas in Memphis, I easily chose an alternate route in which the bridge to Arkansas is gotten in Mississippi across from Helena.
Out my door in Holly Springs (North Mississippi), I went through town and caught highways 4 and 7, which led to a 4 cut-off, which I took all the way to Senatobia in Tate County. Btw, Marshall County needs to work on 4 badly! I am ashamed at how much the road improves at the Tate County border. The countryside along 4, which I have taken a few times now to visit the courthouse in Senatobia, is interesting enough--with a few old churches along the way. Leaving Senatobia--having ignored the directions and instead hanging a right at the first major road in town--it wasn't too long before I came to a junction with Hwy. 3. When it split off again, I remained on 4 for who knows how long, well, until I finally arrived at the infamous Hwy. 61, which takes one to the Mississippi Delta region.
I was excited to be in the Delta. It was foreign country to me although when I was nine years old our family took a trip deep into the Delta--to Mound Bayou--that all-black town familiar to so many African Americans, founded by the Montgomery family. I was on 61 for what felt like a really long time, and--just when I was about to conclude that my having ignored directions (to look for Panola Rd. in Senatobia) placed me perhaps too far south of the next highway--I came upon it--Highway 49. I was glad to see 49 not just because I had worried I was lost and not just because I expect that the Blazer is going to quit on me one of these days but because 61, beyond the casinos of Tunica County, was so desolate it was eerie. Folks who live out west may be used to huge expanses of undeveloped land, but I am a Midwestern girl. Prairie in Michigan comes with tall prairie grasses. Along 61, the land is covered in what look like stationary tumble weeds (an oxymoron I realize).
Highway 49 wasn't much better in this respect, at least not until I was ten miles or so into Arkansas. There was an occasional house along the way, and of course I was wondering what I would do if my car stopped. I had packed my gym shoes in a backpack, but I wasn't sure just how far I could walk in the hot sun. It was only in the 70s yesterday, but I knew that the sun would feel as hot as fire on my head if I were forced to walk in it.
Into the third hour of my journey, I came to Highway 17, which I was supposed to take but didn't because I had already seen a sign indicating I wasn't far from my final highway--70, which would take me to DeVall's Bluff, Arkansas, where I believed they were holding the Lincoln Freedom Festival. Well, I haven't looked at a map, but Highway 17 appears to loop back, which may mean it's a shortcut, but I kept straight on 49 and then got 70, ten miles down the road. I still felt rather lost because I seemed to have been on 49 far too long, causing me to worry in the same fashion I had when I'd skipped the other suggested route. I thought about turning around. Thank God, I had a tank full of gas--not something I'm known for having (or I should say I had a full tank when I left Holly Springs. Near the end of my time on 49, I was already down a half tank.) Do I exaggerate when I say that in the entire trip (with exception of Senatobia) I saw less than a half dozen gas stations and only two really, really, tired looking grocery stores, the second from which I bought a big yellow onion--reminding me of the food that sustained Zero in the book Holes. (Really, I bought the onion because it was the only fresh produce in the store, which had about five drink machines full of every soda known around the country. I don't say this to talk down about the grocer, only to give readers an idea of what has happened to the South.) Well, anyway, I left there, and it wasn't long before I reached my final destination, and when there were no people milling about Sycamore St., where the festival was to be held, I suddenly realized my error--I was a week too early. I thought about going to visit my sons in Little Rock, another hour and a half away, but decided the Blazer had had enough and still needed to get me back across the state line. I deliberated the option of returning the way I had come, more or less, maybe the second time following the directions to the letter, but decided instead that as much as I hate interstates I could not stand the idea of going back through the Delta.
Maybe in a newer car I would not have minded the Delta so much. Then again, maybe the landscape engenders fear. How many times have I read about the horror with which African American enslaved people contemplated being sold to the deep South, meaning Mississippi and Louisiana? The expanses of barren land certainly were once, and still may be, cotton fields on which our ancestors toiled without the shade of trees. When I'd passed into Coahoma County, I thought about Lucien Bailey, brother of Africa Bailey, who having been bequeathed in 1844 to a son who would find his fortune in Coahoma, had had to add another journey to that which he'd already experienced between Virginia and Mississippi. How alone had he felt in that wilderness? Flat land offers no nooks, or crannies, no curvatures of the earth into which one may escape mentally if not physically. And spying that land, casting one's eyeballs upon it must have made it hugely difficult to contemplate escape or to envision returning to one's mother or father back in Virginia.
Moving too quickly is what made me take to the road yesterday without consulting a calendar or double-checking the date of the Festival, but I gained an important lesson, an experience of the land that cannot be learned either from a history book or even from a friend, a white Clarksville, Mississippi native who tried in vain some years ago to explain to me the difference between hill country and the Delta. I realize now that one has to drive it; our ancestors may even have walked it. Little wonder that they sometimes felt like motherless children...a long way from home.
