I spent a lot of time in Mississippi growing up. I never found Southerners any less or more cultured, interesting and cosmopolitan than folks in the Midwest, Northeast or Northwest. To this day it bothers me how often people from outside the area buy into the "Deliverance" stereotype that everyone South of the Mason Dixon is a toothless, incestuous hillbilly who loves nothing better than giving Yankee carpetbaggers a good uninvited rogering.
This despite some of the most notable and powerful literature in all of America's 20th century coming from the region:
"In them words of Flannery O'Connor, 'Yew'd be a good person
if'n yuh had a gun pointed atcher every minute o' yer laif!'"
I will grant this, though - the Blue Collar Comedy Tour and NASCAR culture haven't helped my case at all.
I recently found Natasha Tretheway, a native of Gulfport, MS who's received a lot of acclaim (not to mention awards) for her poems. You can imagine that Hurricane Katrina has had an effect on the things she writes. This particular poem I always imagine from the vantage points of the Vicksburg bluffs where one of my best friends in college used to work, a national monument to the Battle of Vicksburg where Grant rose to fame before his rise to prominence and the presidency.
Pilgrimage
Natasha Trethewey
Vicksburg, Mississippi
its mud-dark path, a graveyard
for skeletons of sunken riverboats.
Here, the river changed its course,
turning away from the city
as one turns, forgetting, from the past—
the abandoned bluffs, land sloping up
above the river's bend—where now
the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed.
Here, the dead stand up in stone, white
marble, on Confederate Avenue. I stand
on ground once hollowed by a web of caves;
they must have seemed like catacombs,
in 1863, to the woman sitting in her parlor,
candlelit, underground. I can see her
listening to shells explode, writing herself
into history, asking what is to become
of all the living things in this place?
This whole city is a grave. Every spring—
Pilgrimage—the living come to mingle
with the dead, brush against their cold shoulders
in the long hallways, listen all night
to their silence and indifference, relive
their dying on the green battlefield.
At the museum, we marvel at their clothes—
preserved under glass—so much smaller
than our own, as if those who wore them
were only children. We sleep in their beds,
the old mansions hunkered on the bluffs, draped
in flowers—funereal—a blur
of petals against the river's gray.
The brochure in my room calls this
living history. The brass plate on the door reads
Prissy's Room. A window frames
the river's crawl toward the Gulf. In my dream,
the ghost of history lies down beside me,
rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.
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