by Stephen Fry
* * *
LOUISIANA
KEY FACTS
Abbreviation:
LA
Nickname:
Bayou State, Pelican State, Sportsman’s Paradise
Capital:
Baton Rouge
Flower:
Magnolia
Tree:
Bald cypress
Bird:
Brown pelican
Dog:
Catahoula Leopard Dog
Motto:
Union, Justice, Confidence
Well-known residents and natives: General William T. Sherman, Huey Long, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jimmy Swaggart, David Duke, Paul Morphy, Lillian Hellman, Truman Capote, John Kennedy Toole, Elmore Leonard, Anne Rice, ‘King’ Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Louis Prima, Harry Connick Jr., Branford Marsalis, Wynton Marsalis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Lester Young, Mahalia Jackson, Clifton Chenier, Aaron Neville, Buckwheat Zydeco, Leadbelly, Professor Longhair, Buddy Guy, Randy Newman, Ben Turpin, Dorothy Lamour, Kitty Carlisle, Ellen DeGeneres, Reese Witherspoon, Britney Spears.
* * *
In 1965 Hurricane Betsy flooded the Lower Ninth. President Lyndon Johnson was there immediately, Isaiah tells me, promising aid which arrived and with which the Lower Ninth was rebuilt. This time around (after an admittedly more destructive storm) it is as if, in his opinion, the entire two and a half square miles has been written off. The Lower Ninth, he reflects, was always a poor district, but was notable for containing not one single Housing Project (the equivalent of our British council houses and flats). Ninety per cent was made up of owner-occupied housing. Being poor and living on the edge, these were the kind of people who could least afford insurance. As far as the most extreme white citizens are concerned, the denizens of the Lower Ninth were out with guns, looting, raping and pillaging the first night after Katrina. As far as the most extreme black citizens are concerned, their neighbours and their whole community were cold-bloodedly and deliberately murdered. Katrina left a legacy of physical destruction, but perhaps it is the destruction of faith, morale and trust which is the most terrible of all. The bright beads on the necklace of the American Dream are in the gutter.
Voodoo
That night I attend a voodoo ceremony in the Marigny district. We cross Desire Street to get there. The trolley buses that one finds all over New Orleans, known as streetcars, used to come as far out as Marigny and would bear the name of the last street at which they stopped, much as a tube train in London bears the name Cockfosters or High Barnet. Tennessee Williams, the great Southern playwright, was very taken by the common sight, back in the forties, of a streetcar which would carry the name Desire. The voodoo itself disappointingly lacks any effigy stabbing or zombie raising, but turns out to be yet another mixture of ‘positive energy’ and wild dancing. Not unlike Laurie Cabot and her witches in Salem, Massachusetts back at Halloween.
Angola
It is time to move away from New Orleans (never an easy thing to do: she is one of those cities one never wants to leave). We travel upstate towards Mississippi: on the way we stop off at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola, once one of the most notoriously terrible and feared prisons in America.
Originally a place for ‘breeding’ slaves whose ‘stock’ came from southwest Africa, hence the name, Angola is now a prison farm. A huge parcel of land, the size of Manhattan, it is given over to cattle, crops and cultivation. The prisoners, so long as they toe the line, eschew drugs and the gang culture, can learn to work the land. We are shown round by the ebullient Warden Burl Cain (is that a name straight from southern fiction, or what?) who is particularly pleased with his dawgs. Bite dogs (one or two of whom are crossed with wolves) go for a foolish escapee’s arm, Trail dogs are bloodhounds capable of tracking people across rivers and through any number of false scents, and Drug Sniffing dogs can detect a tenth of a gram of cocaine in a bag of cinnamon powder. Despite this fearsomely efficient bestiary, Warden Burl is pleased to have turned round his prison’s reputation not with draconian discipline, cruelty or threats, but with a combination of motivational techniques and old-time religion. He is careful to make it plain that it is not the nature of the religion that matters, merely the sense of a future and self-respect that any religion can engender. The atheistical anti-religionist in me bridles, but results are results…Angola is a place for lifers and death-row convicts: certain crimes in Louisiana are punished with no option whatever for parole. What motivation to ‘behave’ will a prisoner have if he knows he will never see freedom, however much he toes the line? Somehow, despite this inbuilt problem, Warden Burl seems to have turned the place round. Nonetheless, I am glad to leave…
A work detail at the State Farm, Angola.
This slice of northern Louisiana, not far from the Mississippi state line, reminds me forcibly that we are outside the orbit of New Orleans now. Hound dogs, a dose of religion, Death Row and men called Burl. It truly is another world. I head for the state line feeling like a visitor from outer space. And loving it.
MISSISSIPPI
‘…good Southern soul food, fried catfish, fried chicken, fried potatoes, fried coleslaw, fried salad and fried Coca-Cola…’
You only have to look at its list of well-known residents and natives to see that music is Mississippi’s dominant product. Cotton may once have been King, but Mississippian native Elvis Presley took that title for rock and roll back in the fifties. Elvis was born here, in the town of Tupelo, but he was raised in Tennessee, just as the blues were born here and raised into more popular, commercial forms outside the state. For lovers of the true Delta blues, however, Mississippi will always be home. Look at the names: B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and, above all, Robert Johnson.
Natchez
My first sight of what cotton gave Mississippi (or at least what it gave the white plantation owners) is given in the town of Natchez, where grand antebellum homes abound. They are fine and noble and the Mississippi river running through looks very Mark Twain, but I head for a local church to listen to some gospel singing. It has been a long drive from Louisiana and not many things could raise the spirits as high as the sound of a gospel choir. Two members of the choir, Yolanda and Celestin, very kindly invite me to dinner at their home, where I enjoy good Southern soul food, fried catfish, fried chicken, fried potatoes, fried coleslaw, fried salad and fried Coca-Cola, in the company of their children C.J. and Brandice. Yolanda and Cel are a proud and prosperous middle-class black family. Cel works as a McDonald’s manager, supervising three or four restaurants around Natchez. Feeling once more warmed and physically weighed down by such generous helpings of Southern hospitality, I set off next morning for the Delta.
The Delta
What is a delta exactly? Well, it derives from the Greek letter delta, whose majuscule is shaped like an equilateral triangle. A river’s delta is the area towards the mouth where sediment builds up into a triangular piece of land. It can also be called an alluvial fan. The Mississippi Delta, it is explained to me, is not a true delta at all, but a giant alluvial plain that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. It is an enormous region, said to begin in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel up in Memphis, Tennessee (where I became an Assistant Duck Master) and to end down in Catfish Row, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The word ‘plain’ should alert one to the fact that the Delta is astoundingly, remorselessly flat.
Plumb through the middle of the Delta runs Highway 61, the legendary road that, like the Mississippi River itself, flows all the way from Minnesota down to New Orleans. The section of it that passes through the state of Mississippi is also known as the Blues Highway, for where it intersects Highway 49 in the town of Clarksdale is a Holy Place for all lovers of blues music. That crossroads is where Robert Johnson, for many aficionados the greatest bluesman of them all, is said to have sold his soul to the devil in return for mastery of the guitar. The crossroads has been used in song, film and album titles ever since and th
e town of Clarksdale (which styles itself the Birthplace of the Blues) derives much, perhaps most, of its income from newly established Blues Trails and heritage Blues Tours that bring people here from all over the world. Bessie Smith died in Clarksdale, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Ike Turner and Sam Cooke all came from here and another local, the Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman, has opened a blues club called Ground Zero right by the railway tracks in the centre of the old town.
* * *
MISSISSIPPI
KEY FACTS
Abbreviation:
MS
Nickname:
The Magnolia State
Capital:
Jackson
Flower:
Magnolia
Tree:
Magnolia
Bird:
Mockingbird
Rock:
Petrified wood
Motto:
Virtute et armis (‘By virtue and by arms’)
Well-known residents and natives: Jefferson Davies, Trent Lott, Medgar Evers, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Richard Ford, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, John Grisham, Dana Andrews, James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman, Jim Henson, Diane Ladd, Oprah Winfrey, Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley, Conway Twitty, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin’ Wolf, Sam Cooke, Bo Diddley, Willie Dixon, Bobbie Gentry, John Lee Hooker, Bobby Rush, Otis Rush, Elmore James, Ike Turner, B.B. King, Junior Parker, Tammy Wynette, Lester Young, Jimmy Buffet, Leontyne Price, Charley Pride, LeAnn Rimes, Britney Spears.
* * *
Basketball
I travel late that afternoon in a classic yellow American school bus with the Clarksdale High School girls’ junior basketball team. They are, in the language of showbiz magazine Variety ‘skedded’ to meet on the court of battle the girls of South Panola High in Batesville, MS.
Batesville is around forty miles from Clarksdale and I get a chance to chat with those girls that aren’t plugged into their MP3 players. They will pulverise those girls of South Panola High. They have had a good season and it can only get better. Where did I get that freaky accent from?
Clarksdale High Girls’ Basketball Team on their way to Batesville.
‘England. Do you know where that is?’
Two of the girls look at me with eyes clouded with contempt at the thought that I should be weird enough to expect them to know where a place so unimportant might actually be. A voice pipes up from the back.
‘Sure. It’s on the way to New York.’
We pull into the rival school. I am astounded by its facilities. Both South Panola and Clarksdale are publicly funded schools from the poorest state in America, predominantly attended by African-American children and yet both have indoor sports facilities infinitely more impressive than can be found in any school I’ve ever visited in Britain. From Eton College to the most favoured and subsidised giant comprehensive you will not see better facilities in better condition. Despite the cheerleading team’s best efforts, Clarksdale High is soundly thrashed and we return in a slightly subdued mood.
Talking the blues with Morgan Freeman.
On the Sofa
By the time I’m back in Clarksdale, Morgan Freeman’s blues club is beginning to warm up. I give myself over to fried chicken and live blues music. Ground Zero has been described as a masterpiece of ‘manufactured authenticity’, with its artfully burst sofas on the porch and its stylishly graffiti-ed doors and walls. Everyone inside is white: the band, the waitresses, the crowd. There is only one black man to be seen, Morgan Freeman, and he sits on the sofa next to me and talks about why he founded this club. Clarksdale, he says, is popular music’s ground zero. This is where the explosion began and it is right that the community should benefit. It is a poor Southern town of some 20,000 souls. The collapse of the sub-prime property market, a series of failed harvests and a general downturn in the American economy have hit places like Clarksdale very hard indeed. ‘The richest soil and the poorest people’ is how Freeman puts it to me. ‘It’s a town that deserves to be known and deserves to prosper.’ I could not agree more.
ARKANSAS
‘Considering that the Mississippi is one of the largest and most unspoiled rivers in the world, it is astonishing how alone we are.’
Arkansas, rhyming with ‘Darken Saw’, calls its citizens Arkansans. Bill Clinton will probably remain the best known of these for many generations. His blend of crinkly charm and battered disreputability seems rather an accurate face to put on the state.
I drive through the town of Helena (weirdly known as Helena-West Helena), another proud Historical Blues Cultural Centre, feeling that I have stepped back fifty years. Disused rubber warehouses and flour mills dominate a town that looks as if it has just been prepped for a shoot by a Hollywood production designer. A shoot of what, though? A Depression-era drama, or the biopic of a country-music star? Some fantasy combination of both I should imagine.
Canoeing
On the banks of the Mississippi River I am met by John, a man who spends every hour he can boating up and down the river. He teaches young kids from disadvantaged families how to handle a canoe. There is a number of these here with him today and together they lash a comfortable wicker chair to the centre of a canoe to make me a throne. With a broken arm it would be difficult for me to sit in any other fashion, but as we set off on our Huckleberry adventure I feel a twinge of embarrassment. A large European is being paddled along a big river by black youths. It feels a little too imperial, a little too ‘Sanders of the River’ for comfort. The boys themselves don’t seem to feel it, however, and I excoriate myself for being so gripped by self-consciousness, race-guilt, doubt and insecurity. Nonetheless, as an image…I shudder as I consider what my bien pensant friends back home will say when they see it.
Considering that the Mississippi is one of the largest and most unspoiled rivers in the world, it is astonishing how alone we are: I had expected a great deal of tourism to be on show. Once or twice a huge commercial barge comes by, but we are the only leisure craft on the water. John confirms that Americans, keen as they are to enjoy their woods and their wildernesses, hugely under-use the Mississippi, on which it is their right to sail, paddle or steam as much as they like. We make camp on a small island, that in a week or so will be gone (the melt waters that come down from the frozen north will soon be swelling the river and raising its levels), making shift with wine, beer, coffee, barbecued meat, baked potatoes, beans and cheese.
John and I discuss the mythical status that the Mississippi has in United States lore, literature and art. The river has exercised a grip on the American imagination from the earliest days of European settlement, finding its apotheosis in Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick’s only serious contender for the title Great American Novel. Perhaps that is why Americans come to the river itself so rarely, we decide. It functions as such a potent symbol that to encounter the real mud and water might only lead to disillusionment. But a symbol of what? Well, the Mississippi divides east from west, so in the imagination it becomes the frontier that separates civilisation, law and authority from free-spirited, maverick pioneering. It is also a symbol of the American obsession with journeying, with moving on. America is a nation composed of people whose ancestors moved on, who had the restless desire to up sticks and leave their European homes. The itchy-footed need for the endless journey is in the American DNA and while it is now most often presented in its twentieth-century fictional form, the road movie, it found its first expression in Huck Finn and legends of Ole Man River. But the Mississippi also stands for a connection between north and south. With Chicago at one end and New Orleans at the other, so much of America’s traffic, cultural as well as commercial, has travelled down or up.
One of our young canoe party helps pull to shore.
John gets the kettle on.
As a matter of fact, the Mississippi is not the longest river in the United States of America. At 2,320 miles, it is some twenty or so miles shorter than its great tributary the Missouri. The
short journey from jetty to small island seemed long enough. I thank John and his young crew and continue on my way.
Dogging
The border of Arkansas with Tennessee is marked by the course of the Mississippi, and as I drive north I keep the river to my right. Over on the eastern bank the lights of Memphis, Tennessee are beginning to twinkle. On my side, the Arkansas side, the city is called West Memphis and it is noticeably more down at heel than its famous Tennessee brother. I am tempted by a large neon sign that reads ‘Southlands’. I have been told that there is a major dog track here.
‘A little too “Sanders of the River” for comfort…’
I should have passed right by. Greyhound racing was once one of the most popular sports in America but the track in West Memphis is deserted when I get there, despite a race being scheduled every half hour. So long as they are televised, who need actually attend the meetings? The bets can be laid in Sydney, Sidcup or Sidi Barrani, with betting by satellite TV and the internet it makes no difference. I talk to Paul Cohen, one of the trainers, who tells me that ‘back in the day’ there would be two miles of tailback traffic snaking round the interstate on race days. Today people are more drawn to the casino which has been added to the Southlands complex. Paul is keen for me to understand that the dogs are exceptionally well cared for. He loves them and it upsets him that the sport has a reputation for cruelty. I promise him that I will pass on this news (he seems to think Britain is full of people who would come to Arkansas for the racing if only they believed that the greyhounds were well treated) and bid him goodbye.