Mississippi River Road

There are some things elemental toward grace and fellowship. credit: Andy Anderson

A traveler twisting along the blacktop road that follows the Mississippi River between New Orleans and somewhere in northern Arkansas will see just about anything from clusters of modern housing to cloud-making factories. But away from the cities one will be startled by long colonnades of 250-year-old oak trees, brick slave cabins abandoned in hummocks of poison oak, rambling houses that have been falling down for a hundred years, cypress board by cypress board, the wood eternal refusing to give up to thunderstorms that in the summer wash them down nearly every afternoon.

One sees brick foundations of forgotten sugar mills and groves of muscle-bound live oaks that signal a home site but no home — a sight that causes one to stop the car and look for a house and find only a walkway or a front step to oblivion. Farther up the road a cluster of tombs rests out in a field, their estate, blood kin, entire context for being, lost to time. A stray palm tree or line of pecans on the flat horizon will signal a place where there used to be something, but what?

Every few miles a broad-galleried nineteenth century commissary or plantation headquarters or saloon is tightly closed up with shutters and locks as though waiting for a need to open. Some of them look to have been sealed for sixty or seventy years. They tease the observer to wonder what went on in these buildings — what is still inside. The region is marked with fading hints of its history lying toppled in the grass or padlocked behind iron shutters. If there are people about, they are working. Nobody would come out in the sun if there wasn’t something of importance to attend to. They often don’t look up as a driver passes. They don’t need to wave at people not from here.

Long sections of the river road offer up an avenue of middle-class people doing well in their out-of-the-way homeland, and other long sections show poor people living where everything is vine-wracked, sagging, weed-haunted, painted by mildew. Buildings seem homemade; little lopsided stores bear hand-lettered signs; primitive clapboard churches seem made with a jackknife; leaning houses a hundred fifty years old, unrenovated but occupied, stay up by habit. It occurs that if anyone has a job, he’s got a long drive to get to it.

Contrasting with the poverty is the antique splendor of the occasional Big House, vast porches, massive columns, billiard table lawns. Some are blindingly white restorations and are still the homes of plantation owners. Some are boarded-up, dim hulks. Even the ruins are reminders of the great wealth made off this river-fed land. Away in the back fields one sees storm-raveled, blood-rust roofs of the idle mule barns and tractor sheds. Some tracts are fallow, and the relic buildings and machinery point back in time to the rhythms of manual agriculture, to the seasonal labors demanded by the cane or cotton crop, to a time when thousands of people were in the fields working for the man who lived in the white three-story house stippled with many chimneys.

Riding some stretches of river road is like being in two centuries at once. The windowless houses emanate a spirituality suggesting that the world is constantly dissolving in wind and rain, the poor places demonstrating how it all happens — this Heraclitean fire we are caught up in, this gradual diminishing toward the next world.

 The river road gives rise to many emotions, chief among them that one is in a great but incomplete museum bearing countless ambiguous fragments of past life. The whole region is like a tombstone partially erased by two centuries of bad weather.