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Driving in the Delta in the
early morning fog, pale yellow light, skies of clear blue
above a thousand shades of green. Or, driving in the late
afternoon, the sun spreading red beams across the land,
or in November, when the picked cotton fields are rows of
black crosses. As I drive I pray for good weather for the farmers, picturing them driving into town to borrow money from the bank, in winter, with their ties knotted at the neck and their hats in their hands. So much depends on weather in the Delta but the rains usually come. Good weather is more usual than floods or drought in this blessed land. My Delta is a flat alluvial plain that stretches from Greenville, Mississippi, to Yazoo City. I drive through this country nine or ten times a year going from my home in Arkansas to the Mississippi coast where my grandchildren hold my heart hostage. I have a three hundred mile drive before I reach the Delta, from the North Arkansas hills to the Arkansas Delta and across the Mississippi River on a bridge that is twenty miles from my mother’s home. Then the heart of my journey begins. As soon as I cross the bridge, I turn onto Mississippi 454 and take a winding two lane road past a house built on top of an Indian mound. The mound is fifty feet high and still fat and strong after many years of carrying the house and withstanding rains. I continue on to Highway 1, the famous road that runs beside the levee. Beside the road are fields, then thick stands of trees, then the levee. Behind the levee is the Mississippi River, bringing rain and melted snow all the way from Minnesota. I love to drive beside the river. I was taught to think I was the richest girl in Christendom because I lived so near to the river. The river belonged to us because we could go and look at its power and its beauty. My uncle lost an eye when he fell into it from a barge. My father and great uncle helped build the levee, my grandfather’s farm had been flooded in the 1927 flood. Even a little fat, red-headed girl like me was part of the majesty of the river, simply from proximity. The British feel about their royal family the way people in the Delta feel about the river. There are smaller rivers and lakes and bayous where they fish and swim, but the Father of Waters is another thing. By the time I have gone fourteen miles on Highway 1 and come to the turnoff into the Delta, I am a different person than the one who crossed the Greenville bridge. I become a child again in the delta, filled with the wonder of earth and sky and solitude. There will be very few cars or houses from now until Yazoo City. I turn on Mississippi Highway 12 and the best part of the trip begins. For the next 34 miles I can drive a hundred miles an hour without endangering a soul, myself included. Many bugs will pay with their lives, and I will use up a tank full of window washing fluid but, aside from that, the worst thing that can happen is I’ll have to slow down for a combine or go off into a cotton field. This land is as flat as a table top. The road is a straight line to Hollandale and then Belzoni. There used to be only cotton fields here, bordered by stands of hickory and oak, cypress and gum and holly and ash and elm, reminders that this land was all woods until white and black men followed the Indians and began to clear the trees. Now there are also rice and soybean fields and catfish ponds, rectangles of brown water surrounded by wildlife, cranes and flocks of egrets like white tulips. They are fat, happy birds, living on easy pickings, ponds brimming with captive fish. A man I know who works for the Fish and Game Commission has been trapping beavers for the farmers in the Delta. He caught a beaver last year that weighed ninety pounds from feeding on rice and soybeans. I wonder how big the egrets will become now that they don’t have to do a thing but catch fish in catfish ponds. The most beautiful sight is the rice fields. In spring they are a green that equals the sky for beauty. They are sheets of green silk unfolding in the wind. Think how gorgeous this must be to people who depend on rice for food. We depended on cotton, which is why I love to watch it grow. But mostly I just love the drive. Just because I can drive a hundred miles an hour through this country doesn’t mean I always do it. Sometimes I slow down to eighty and enjoy the view. Sometimes I stop at Leroy Percy State Park and walk in the woods and search for four leaf clovers. I used to tell my editor I thought the reason people in New York City were depressed was because they never got to drive, or, if they did, it was always in heavy traffic with cursing and bad air. “We could make a million dollars,” I used to tell him, “by flying people to the Delta to drive on the flat, straight roads. We could send crop dusters to race them along the fields.” This is not a journey for listening to the radio or thinking about your troubles. This is a drive for pretending you are Master of the World. One warning. Don’t stop the car and get out unless you are covered with insect repellent. The mosquitoes will bite you anywhere. My trapper friend was bitten in the ear. I have been bitten on the legs through thick tights. Delta mosquitoes will remind you it is a joke to think man is the top of the food chain. I have never seen a highway patrolman on these roads. Keep your fingers crossed that one doesn’t read this article and decide to spoil the fun. PREVIOUS ARTICLE | PAGE 1 OF 1 | NEXT ARTICLE |
