Look Away Dixieland: A Carpetbagger's Great-Grandson Travels Highway 84 in Search of the Shack-up-on-Cinder-Blocks, Confederate-Flag-Waving, Squirrel-Hunting, Boiled-Peanuts, Deep-Drawl, Don't-Stop-the-Car-Here South

4 Mississippi, the Most Southern Place on Earth

97 4 Mississippi, the Most Southern Place on Earth We can’t boast of our ancestors because, when we get started talking about our families, out jumps the ghost of a pirate or a cousin of color. —sam dabney, from james street’s Tap Roots, 1943 C rossing over into Mississippi we noticed two things: first, this state is getting the jump on its neighbors by starting to build Interstate 14 along the side of U.S. 84. In places the large blue background exit signs announcing lodging, gas, and fast food are already up. Someone needs to tell them the other states are not cooperating. And, second, we noticed that the best-looking buildings in Mississippi are the banks. They seem to be everywhere, clean and neat with big pillars . Maybe Willie Sutton was right; that’s where the money is. It doesn’t seem to be anywhere else. There’s a famous quote that there are more writers in Mississippi than people who can read, and I couldn’t help churlishly wondering if there are more banks in Mississippi than there are businesses with money. Or maybe these are the banks not doing the credit default swaps. The Free State of Jones The chunk of east-central Mississippi you enter on U.S. 84 has a unique history. It was settled by the same cantankerous Scotch-Irish who moved 0 look away, dixieland 98 west from the Carolinas, Virginia, and Georgia. They were Celts—think Braveheart. The land never was very productive, and timbering hadn’t yet begun. These settlers didn’t have slaves. They did have religion, however. Over to the west, in the Mississippi Delta, there was cotton aplenty. And slaves to produce it. But here in the rolling hills, it was really one-mulea -family farming. So when the wealthier parts of the South wanted war, this area wanted none of it. Why should they? And so the myth of the rebellious Jones County (named for John Paul Jones) began. Supposedly when the question of secession from the Union came up, the Jones County people voted it down. They said, no thanks, we have no interest in fighting so that you can keep your slaves. They instructed their delegate to the secession convention in Jackson to vote no. But when he arrived in the big city, he was caught up in the furor and voted with the Rebels. His angry neighbors back home hanged him in effigy. Reluctantly, Jones County prepared for war. They made their reluctance public, and the Confederate cavalry, whose initial job was to find food and supplies for the army, descended on them. The Rebels raided their farms, taking food and livestock that these people could ill afford to lose. One of those farmers was taciturn Newt Knight, and he was an early conscientious objector. He refused to fight for a cause he did not believe in, and when he was drafted, he served not as a combatant but as a hospital orderly. But he didn’t serve for long. Once he learned of the infamous “Twenty Negro Law” (if a man owned twenty or more slaves, he could avoid military service) and once he had been traumatized by battle (the bloody fight at Corinth), Newt became an active objector. This fight was becoming “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” He deserted and returned home to Jones County. He didn’t come home alone. There were plenty of other deserters from this part of Mississippi. About a hundred of them holed up right along U.S. 84 in a place called Leaf River Swamp, near the present town of Soso. As with so much of the South, this swampland would be drained after the war to get to timber. But in the 1850s it was sopping wet. The deserters would commute from the boggy bivouac, called Devil’s Den, 99 mississippi, the most southern place on earth to their farms, work the land, hunt and fish, and, when pursued, retreat into the muck. What became known as the Newt Knight Company and the Free State of Jones was an embarrassment, to say nothing of the drain on the war effort, and so the Confederate headquarters in Jackson decided to put an endtoNewt.TheysentaMajorAmosMcLemore,anativeofJonesCounty and a man who supposedly knew the swamps, to take him out. He came close, but Newt was too...