The Haunted Delta

I am spending a couple days in Clarksdale, Mississippi. This morning I woke up and thought, the Delta is three-times haunted.

The Delta is haunted, first of all, by the absence of those who have left. Their homes crumble alongside the sinking highways, rotting to splinters among the rusted remains of their tools and toys and old cars and things. Now and again, an anachronistic busybody will roll down US-61 and reclaim a few of the old shacks for a museum, but the pickings are slim. The rot remains to remind the survivors of what has been.

The Delta is haunted as well by the significance of its past and the seeming insignificance of its present. Here in this room, the rough-hewn, wood-paneled parlor of an old sharecropper’s shotgun house, Muddy Waters stares at the Haint Blue-painted door from a poster on the wall above the bed. By the front door and on the bathroom wall, two separate travelers have commemorated “Flyover Country Road Trip” with permanent marker. Mark Twain and Muddy Waters imbued this place with meaning in the last two centuries. What animates it now but the spirit of those who have left?

Nature haunts the Delta, too. Last night a storm raged for hours outside the shack here. The wind poked and prodded at the old wooden panels, slamming the screen doors and creaking up and down the porch like a malevolent visitor in the night. In the lull, I could hear the wind rolling through the magnolia trees and across the vast black and brown field beyond like an intelligent thing. The spirit of the Mississippi River stalks the landscape here, ambivalent to the people hanging onto the black earth for life.

I love it here.