NONFICTION
‘Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta’
by Richard Grant
Simon & Schuster
$16, 320 pages
In the Mississippi Delta — for better and for worse — the disappearing South hasn’t disappeared just yet. Its reclaimed swamps, now alluvial farmland, represent an enclave in the national imagination, a state of mind like “Out West,” or, for that matter, “Key West,” into which Americans can empty their desires.
But the legendary Delta, defying expectations with its prickly unpredictability, grows over such impudence and gobbles it whole, as Richard Grant learns during the course of his investigation, “Dispatches from Pluto.”
The Delta’s resistance to easy interpretation is one reason this affable British travel writer — given a dangerous curiosity that once led him to mingle with outlaws in the Sierra Madre — chooses finally to settle down and make his home in little Pluto, a community located in the poorest part of the poorest state in the Union.
It wasn’t anything Grant necessarily intended. He describes himself as “a wanderer, a drifter, forever passing through, taking notes, and moving on.” In a BBC documentary accompanying his 2003 book, “American Nomads,” he explains, “A nomad feels stable at velocity.”
Grant makes the geography simple enough: “The place known as the Mississippi Delta is the shared ancestral floodplain of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, a place that still wants to go underwater every spring. Two hundred miles long and 70 miles across at its widest point, it begins just south of Memphis and ends at Vicksburg.”
Much of the Delta is “flat as an ocean … a landscape of ruins,” overrun by a scampering population of “big rodents called nutria whose mating cries sound like babies in distress.” Its bantam towns are renowned for their exotic names: Panther Burns, Big Hungry, Africa, Egypt and Midnight (“named after a card game”).
To Grant’s friend, Martha Foose, an award-winning cookbook writer from Greenwood, Miss., the locale is best contemplated from a psychology of romantic tumult: “The Delta is such a mess, but it puts a spell on you … It’s like being in love with a crazy person.”
Like every committed journalist, Grant wants to “start making sense of human society in the Delta” right away. Native acquaintances assure him this is an “impossible task.” Foose helps him navigate a universe of cultivated eccentricity, racial conundrum and surreal criminal activity, the last of which she attributes to a brew of “isolation, humidity [and] toxic chemicals.”
Under Martha’s tutelage, Grant becomes a connoisseur of the area’s “strange feuds,” like the one-sided vendetta between a well-known oncologist and the wealthy Greenwood attorney he accuses of being a “Muslim crime boss” and stooge of the “Delta Illuminati.” The delusional physician eventually orchestrates a deadly gun battle in his adversary’s office.
Foose’s raunchy, razor-sharp wit stabilizes the often-troubling Mississippi that surfaces in Grant’s narrative. After a 52-year-old man is arrested for pursuing carnal relations with a show hog, Martha describes the practice as “‘dating down the food chain,’ and frankly, it’s a wonder it doesn’t happen more often.”
When Grant purchases from Foose’s father a 1910 plantation house in Pluto, he and his American girlfriend, Mariah, are subject to devastating swarms of mosquitoes, not to mention skirmishes with venomous snakes. In darkest winter, the land is “desolate and monochromatic”; at the peak of summer, “the sun was a tyrant who reigned cruel and unopposed in the vast blue sky.”
An “urban liberal Democrat,” Mariah comes to terms with Pluto right away. “You know you’re living in the country,” she remarks, “when there’s a vulture stuck in your shed.” She becomes fast friends with her “conservative Bible Belt Republican” neighbors, as Grant develops ties with the heirs of Mississippi’s “quasi-aristocracy,” who have now come to refer to their plantations as “farms.” He learns the “art” of wing shooting and makes an uneasy peace with firearms.
Grant brings an anthropological approach to “Dispatches from Pluto,” observing “kinship rituals” and interracial “eyegames” among the population; “shadow families” of blacks and whites are not uncommon. He acknowledges his novelty status because of his British accent. (A Delta teenager asks, “Will you say banana like you say it?”)
Since moving to the Delta, he writes, “The history of racial violence and injustice was no longer their problem, but mine too, I now realized.” Occasionally, he must endure racist cretins who use crude acronyms to describe African-Americans. He notes that Mississippi’s demented Jim Crow-era race codes in the 1930s thrilled a visiting South African delegation, which used them as a blueprint for apartheid.
But Grant soon learns that in the Delta, race is “a kaleidoscope you could keep on turning.” He stumbles into descendants of a late 19th century immigration wave from Asia and the Middle East: “To hear a Chinese or Syrian grocery owner defending the Confederacy in a broad Mississippi accent is one of the many strange delights to be found in the region.”
Among the book’s splendid vignettes, Grant meets Morgan Freeman at the wonderfully down-at-heel Bayou Bend Golf and Country Club. Freeman’s left arm may have been dinged in a near-fatal car crash, but he is still “very good around the greens.” He returned to the Delta more or less permanently in 2001. When asked why, the co-owner of the Clarksdale’s Ground Zero Blues Club replies, “Because I can live anywhere I want, and this is where I want to live.”
Grant believes that Mississippi is “the best kept secret in America.” He also thinks of it as the state with the most beautiful name. Here, food becomes the great equalizer: “The first rule of Delta cuisine: if it can’t be battered and fried, cook it with fatty pig meat.” What impresses him most is the Delta’s conviviality, its “characteristic friendliness and a kind of down-home splendor that you often see, as if people had polished up their spirits so they shone a little more brightly.”
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