If you go More on the South
It's the Bible Belt, all right
By Beth Healy, Globe Staff, 07/14/02
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If you go More on the South
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The shops are closed and Oxford's picturesque town square is silent, but for the hum of the cicadas, winged insects that emerge from the dirt every 13 years to mate. Their high-pitched song fills the trees and sky, like crickets on a summer night, and the carcasses of spent males litter the sidewalks.
A few blocks away, folks are filing into churches on nearly every corner. Only the Bottletree Bakery, an oasis of warm, fresh croissants and espresso, dares open its doors. Inside, the counters and tables are filling up by 9:30 a.m.
"Can I get you some breakfast, ma'am?" a blond waitress in shorts asks politely, unhurriedly. The church crowd soon begins to stream in, pulling up extra chairs for children and friends. The preacher comes along too.
Redemption is part of the fabric of Mississippi, the land of great Southern writers, of haunted cotton fields and the Delta blues. Professors here at Ole Miss, or the University of Mississippi to Yankees, refer often to the riots that erupted in 1962 when James Meredith became the first black student to attend classes. And they boast that in May, Meredith's son received his doctoral degree in business at the school, finishing first in his class.
Mississippi has seen much change in 40 years, but it wears its past like a favorite old shawl. Oxford, a town of 12,100, offers a view of the old and the new. You still can't buy cold beer in stores here, nor anywhere in Lafayette County for that matter, but you can revel in Southern civility for a few days and feel the pulse of American history and music. Oxford is 80 miles south of the Memphis airport, and it's less than a two-hour drive from Clarksdale, the western Mississippi town where the blues were born, and Tupelo to the east, where Elvis lived as a child.
William Faulkner found his inspiration in Oxford, and, more recently, John Grisham was known to soak up the scent of ink and parchment at Square Books, a charming independent bookseller on the square. Double-decked porches protrude from the storefronts, a constant reminder of summer's heat. The state's Confederate flag flies in front of the county courthouse, a solemn building in the center of the town that was built in 1873 — after the town had been all but burned to the ground in 1864 by Northern troops in the Civil War.
Only one building is believed to have survived the fire — Little's Jewelers on South Lamar Street. Nearby, J. E. Neilson Co. is the oldest department store in the South, dating to 1897. The Southside Gallery shows and sells the work of local artists and is a community gathering place of sorts. In June, the gallery was showing an intoxicating series of black-and-white photographs from the civil rights era, taken by Ernest C. Withers of Memphis.
Oxford's best eating is right on the square — and do plan to indulge while you're in this part of the world. The Downtown Grill's fried green tomatoes are not to be missed. There are tasty gourmet pizzas at the casual and inexpensive Old Venice Pizza. And the City Grocery offers upscale Southern fare and a fine wine list.
The university is a 15-minute walk from town and well worth a visit. Its central green hosts some 30,000 tail-gaters on fall football weekends, when the Ole Miss Rebels draw fans from miles around. At the entrance to the green is the tall white Confederate Monument to the Civil War Dead, built in 1906. See, too, the Barnard Observatory, built in 1859 by a professor, and stop into the college bookstore for local magazines, books, souvenirs, or a cool drink.
The university hosts a Faulkner conference every summer. It also owns and is renovating his house, Rowan Oak, which stands on a woodsy street not far from the school, with red cedar trees lining the path to the white columns of its front doorstep. The house and garden need work but look much the same as when Faulkner (1897-1962) purchased them for $6,000 in 1930, long before he won the Nobel prize for literature, or either of his Pulitzers. Inside, the chapter outlines for his novel "The Fable" are penned high on two walls and still readable in his first-floor writing room. His golf clubs lean in the corner. A makeshift horse trailer, built with wood from a grand piano, is parked outside the house.
With a bit of hunting, you can find Faulkner's grave, and those of his extended family, in Oxford's St. Peter's Cemetery.
That's just the beginning of the ghost hunt. Strike out on Route 6, a narrow highway heading west to the Mississippi Delta, and you'll soon find yourself hurtling back through time. There are horses grazing in green fields, rocking chairs on the porch of every tiny shack, and rusting farm antiques for sale. Grisham's sprawling yellow house sits high on a hill to the left, and leafy kudzu — a plant introduced to stave off erosion but that has now taken over — smothers the banks of every ditch and swamp.
A roadside sign for the Rosehill Baptist Church reads, "Pray for our nation." Here in the heart of the Bible Belt, even the electronic sign at the First Security Bank flashes "Worship in your church on Sunday," intermittently with the time and temperature.
Eventually, the landscape gives way to miles upon miles of brown cotton fields. The stalks have only just pushed through the ground in early summer; they'll be harvested in the fall. Catfish are bred in giant rectangular pools set in the ground, evidence of the changing use of land in this former agricultural mecca.
The Delta has been called the most fertile place on earth, located in a vast flood plain along the Mississippi River that stretches from Vicksburg up to Memphis. Millions of acres of trees were clear-cut here decades ago and the topsoil is rich. But the land that once employed and enslaved so many people is marked today by stark poverty. Abandoned gas stations, some of them turned into diners or modest beauty salons, are testimony to former boom times. There are pawnshops and barbecue joints, and an eatery touting a "Southern style catfish plate."
Take note, on the way into the heart of Clarksdale, of the intersection of Routes 61 and 49. The site has become known as the crossroads, where, legend has it, bluesman Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to gain his mastery of the guitar. The story has been fueled for years by the lore and myths of Southern culture, and also by Johnson's death at 27, apparently from poison.
Blues historians say if there was such a crossroads for Johnson, this wasn't it. "Johnson was almost certainly referring to a lonely country crossroads, not a busy intersection next to a big town," writes Steve Cheseborough in his "Blues Traveling" guide (University Press of Mississippi, 2000). But the site continues to be a pilgrimage point for music aficionados. It's also the home of Abe's Bar-B-Q, known for some of the best barbecue in the world, locals say.
Clarksdale is hardly the thriving town it was in its heyday. It's a depressed place with a wide, dusty main street on which most of the storefronts are empty. But a spirited effort is afoot to rebuild the town as a tourist destination for blues lovers.
The Delta Blues Museum anchors the development at 1 Blues Alley. It's based in the old Illinois Central Railroad freight depot, a brick warehouse that displays memorabilia of such native sons as Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Ike Turner. It holds a one-room log cabin, once a slave quarters, where Waters used to live, as well as guitars, records, stories, and photographs of life on Mississippi plantations.
Chicago may be where the blues first plugged in, and Memphis drew musicians who were looking to make a living. But Clarksdale was the birthplace of this quintessentially American music — the place where the misery of a people gave way to soulful tunes and a style that would influence rockers from Elvis to Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones.
"We are a Southern town, so everything's closed down on Sunday," said Blues Museum director Tony Czech, who recently broke that rule for a group of visitors. Don't try to visit the nearby Ground Zero Blues Club on the seventh day either. It's open Wednesday through Saturday nights, featuring local talent and famous blues musicians, under the stewardship of owners Bill Luckett, a local lawyer; actor Morgan Freeman, who was raised here; and Howard Stovall, head of the Blues Foundation.
The year-old club is housed in the former Delta Grocery & Cotton Co. A sign on the front porch warns mothers to watch their daughters inside. There's a pool table in back and the moist stench of old beer hangs in the air. A $4 shot buys a "little bit of this, lotta that."
On a recent visit, the Deep Cuts blues band was playing, and sax player and vocalist Josh "Razor-blade" Stewart was belting out a wistful "Don't Let the Green Grass Fool Ya." Anthony "Switchblade" Sherrod, a bass player, sang a lively rendition of "Purple Rain" that made Prince's version seem electronic and superficial.
The last stop in Clarksdale — at least for now — is an elegant dinner at Madidi, a restaurant also owned by Freeman and Luckett. Chef David Krog, who made his name at La Tourelle in Memphis, cooks a mean catfish. He's known for his creative use of spices, and for seafood and meat dishes with French and Southern flair.
It's a splurge to savor. You won't be able to get the blues out of your head on the drive out of the Delta. In fact, you may not be able to get them out of your soul when you head back North.