Since Tuscaloosa was hammered by the tornados we went to Leland MS by interstate to Jackson, north on 49W to Indianola and then US 82 west. Crossed a fantastic new bridge over the Yazoo, and boom, you drop into an unending flat green landscape. The Delta. You drive and drive through the vast fields (corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, almost no cotton anymore) and the horizon seems never to move, it’s like being at sea. Roads are great, almost no traffic, and things look a little more prosperous than last time.
It’s daunting to try to describe either the place or my feelings about it. There’s not enough time to do it justice. I worked there for 12 years at the USDA Southern Weed Science Laboratory at Stoneville, a wonderful place to be a young scientist, you’re in the heart of Big Ag--but a huge social adjustment after my post-doc in Corvallis, Oregon! I remember arriving there in my “McGovern & Shriver” T-shirt and discovering a place where you almost could not find another white person who would admit to ever having voted Democrat.
The place and the people who live there are unique. We’ve been gone 27 years but have gone back to visit several times—each time the feeling is we have never left and are just returning home. That’s because our experiences of the place were extreme. Tragedy and healing. A murder and a suicide, and a church and friends (some of the finest Christians I have ever known) that quite literally saved me, and the union with the woman who has made the rest of my rather happy and productive life possible. We stood at the altar in the little Leland Presbyterian church with 3 teenage girls next to her and 3 little boys next to me and there was not a dry eye in the place. Those Presbyterians had borne my first wife Lois’ bipolar religious and social experiments with love and grace and attempts at help. After her death they carried me and my boys for months. And my marriage to Mary, the end of the story, began when Lois and I met her in Leland Presbyterian Sunday School.
When we visit Leland now we always stay with Kikki and Jody Stovall, part of one of those big Delta clans. They live right on Deer Creek in a…I want to say “magnificent” but that makes it sound like some kind of MacMansion and while it is pretty big and full of beautiful things it seems absolutely unpretentious, how does she do that? Since they will read this I must be, ah circumspect but the fact is we always just sit around on their porch and enjoy each other, have wonderful conversations and catch up on Leland, The Delta the church, families. Dinner at Lillo’s with Ray Beckham and Bessie Bennett (now married and that’s another story) Nancy and Charles Bryson (a colleague in the Weed Science Lab), all Presbyterians. I have a great story about everyone, relationships here are so intertwined and dense and rich, memories both joyful and painful crowd in with every meeting, every corner turned as you drive around. We run into Mary Francis Shaifer-something (she has married) a wonderful sparkler of a girl and a vivid memory of her seizing me at Lois’ funeral—she had been widowed not too long before—and saying through tears “Praise God, Don!”
Oh my God what a place. The horrendous racial history here is just part of the overall starkness, the black-and-whiteness and yet green-ness of the place! Somewhere, here, is the possibiity of ultimate human reconciliation.
No comments:
Post a Comment