Day 38 -- Sunday, June 7

I retraced my steps eastward on the long ribbon of highway that stretches straight as an E string from Greenville to Greenwood and beyond. My first stop was the grave of Charley Patton, the earliest blues performer about whom there is significant career documentation. He was among the first to be recorded and his influence on those who followed was immense. It seems primarily his presence on and around the huge plantation known as Dockery Farms that leads some scholars to name that area as the birthplace of the blues. He lived there for much of his life and many other players, Willie Brown and Howlin' Wolf, to name a couple, learned at his knee, so to speak.


Charley is buried in a church cemetary in the tiny town of Holly Ridge. I located the spot, then headed east again. My next stop was in Quito, a few miles north of the Robert Johnson grave I visited the other day. It turns out Johnson has two final resting places. His death certificate places him at the Morgan City graveyard but some say that his sister had him moved to Quito some years later. Still others say he was never at the Morgan Creek site. We may never know the answer to this long-standing question, so I decided to cover all the bases and visit Quito, too.


Bad move. The Delta truly has me caught in its web, it seems. I found the graveyard, which sits just to the west of the Payne Chapel Mission Baptist Church. It's really in the middle of nowhere, a tiny little hamlet with just a few shacks and mobile homes. I wandered through the stone markers for about half an hour, unable to find Johnson's resting spot. I was wearing shorts, the grass was high and bugs of every stripe were enjoying a special Sunday dinner on my bare legs. At one point, I felt a little stinging and looked down to see literally hundreds of ants gnawing on my gams.

Despairing a bit, I decided to cross the road and see if anyone in the little home that was there knew where I'd find Johnson's grave. I locked the car door, on the outside chance that someone would walk by while I was away. Unfortunately, I neglected to remove the keys before I did so.

Luckily, someone was home across the street, a saint of a gentleman named Miller Carter. He allowed me free use of his phone, gave me a soda to cool me off and a chair in a shady spot while I waited for someone to come rescue me. This last was especially appreciated, as it was terribly hot and so humid you could do the backstroke. I called the police first, in nearby Itta Bena. "We don't come that far out," they lamely replied. "Call the sheriff's office." "Nothing we can do," the sheriff's office whimpered, "and there's only one locksmith who works weekends." Armed with that number, I dialed the locksmith. Two hours later, he actually answered the phone. "Forty bucks," he said. Hell, by that time, I'd have paid 40 bucks for a slightly chilly Fresca, so I said "No problem." Half an hour later, he pulled up. In no more than ten seconds, I'm not kidding, he had the car door opened. In another minute, he had 40 dollars, a smile on his face and me in his rear-view mirror.

Okay, so my carelessness had cost me nearly an entire day; there was a bright side to the whole mess. I met a couple of wonderful men, the aforementioned Miller Carter and his father, whose first name I didn't get. Miller, a black man and father of two, works at home as a mechanic. He also is a deacon at the church across the road, where my impenetrable vehicle spent the afternoon roasting in the sun, taunting me all the while. His father, on the other hand, a delightful gentleman, is a member of one of those denominations with really long names: the Church of the Family of God in Christ in Heaven or something. He offered me some lunch, and although I hadn't eaten, I was really too over-heated to have much of an appetite. I thanked him, though, and told him how much I appreciated the kindness he and his son were extending me. "I'm a saint," he said. "I belong to the Church of (fill in the blank) and we're taught that it doesn't matter what color a man's skin is, it's what's in his heart. We're happy to have you." We sat and talked politics, and life in general; it was a joy. I found the people of Mississippi, especially the black folks, to be wonderful; they were open, genuine, and helpful. More than once, when I'd asked someone for directions, they offered to get in their car and let me follow them to the place I was seeking, worried I might get lost .

The folks there were so great that it was sometimes hard to imagine that so many racially-motivated atrocities occurred here not so very long ago. Every now and then, though, some white jerk in a gas station or a diner would make a hateful remark he didn't want anyone but me to hear and it wasn't so hard to picture anymore. The gentleness, dignity, and courage of the majority of the black folks I met was genuinely moving, though; I'll always have warm memories of these wonderful people, especially the Carters and Mrs. Hill. So I hereby award the entire Mississippi Delta the BRETTnews Highlight Attraction Award.

I headed back towards Clarksdale, taking in a few sights along the way: the site of the train depot where W.C. Handy first heard the blues; Dockery Farms, a plantation where some claim the blues were born, and Parchman Penitentiary, where a number of famous bluesmen involuntarily spent some time.



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