Mississippi Stories

Figure 1.

Photograph by Alex Knighton

The past isn't dead. It's not even past.

—Faulkner

In the Mississippi Delta it goes like this: Memphis with its blue lights; Highway 49 a lonesome road of cypress swamps and Tuesday-night juke joints; the river, in all kinds of brown and foaming glory, stepping gracefully down to meet you somewhere south of Vicksburg.

The steel girders of the bridge whip past my open window. Below, a fat brown snake of water twists through shaggy oaks, kudzu vines and dirt-walled levees. The sky is warm and hazy. Liz smiles at me from across the bench seat of our Chevy pickup. We've seen a lot of country already—Dakota dust rising to the sky, a thousand acres of tall grass rocking in Nebraska wind and that back road in Kansas where fireflies licked the inky dark with their quick light—but now we've crossed the Helena bridge out of Arkansas and have our nose pointed due south, toward Clarksdale, Mississippi. Fields of cotton and soybean stretch to far horizons of cane swamp and river trees. An old man, shovel slung across his shoulders, stands on a ditch bank. He watches us watching him.

That night we stay at a place called the Shack-Up Inn out on Highway 49, where a plump guy in shorts and T-shirt, who calls himself "the Shackmeister," rents out refurnished and air-conditioned shotgun shacks for forty dollars a night. He hands us the key, tells us there are Moon Pies on the pillows, beer in the fridge, and to come see him in the commissary for dinner. So we haul our bags inside, have a cigarette on the porch, then head over for something to eat.

After a plate of what they call barbecue pork, but which tastes like a little bit of pit-smoked and shredded heaven, we sit and sip beer and talk with the Shackmeister and the few other locals in for an evening drink. They pry our story from us: just graduated from college, road-tripping to our placements in Sunflower as public school teachers with Teach For America, thinking about hitting the Louisiana coast before we have to start teaching. And we learn that the building we're sitting in really is an old plantation commissary, where just forty years ago black tenant farmers came for groceries bought with company scrip. They shake their heads at this, lament that the commissary was abandoned, that the shacks they've lined up for us in a neat row no longer house anyone but tourists. We study their faces, which, like ours, are flushed with heat and alcohol. And then the Shackmeister leans in toward us. He says it's a good thing we're here and all, but don't expect anything to change: "What we got here is the genetic dregs. All the good ones made it to Chicago or Detroit or somewhere up north. The ones left ain't worth a damn dime."

* * *

As the seventh-period bell rings, I rush to order the stack of class expectation sheets by the pencil sharpener, erase the board, straighten the desks. It's the first day of school, and I'm running ragged—my voice is nearly gone, I haven't sat down in hours, and I don't know anyone's name. It all feels so harried, so close to the edge of chaos, or worse.

I grab my clipboard and turn to go greet my seventh-period students at the door as they come in. But I see a student already in the room, his back to me, rifling through the stacks of papers by the pencil sharpener. The yellow polo shirt of his uniform is untucked, and for being in the ninth grade he has very broad shoulders. His shaved head gleams in the fluorescent lights. He's not supposed to be in here. There's a sign outside the door that says all students are to wait for me in the hallway. I say, "Excuse me, are you...