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Archive for Mississippi Delta

favorite flânerie . Painted Clarksdale

I’ve been wandering through my photo archives lately, and it’s like a stroll through back roads and small towns and memories made. We’ve made quite a hobby of road-tripping over the years, and my kids have been pretty good sports with all the random stops to capture the views. I’ve been trying to archive and organize and make connections between all the places and wanders we’ve experienced, with the hope of sharing them here on The Frog Kisser.

This week, I’ve been looking at some images from Clarksdale, Mississippi. We last visited this crossroads of Delta arteries on a hot (HOT) summer day, and I’m revisiting the sun-baked glimpses of a small town steeped in art and dust and most of all, the blues. I’ve already shared about our visit to Delta Blues Museum and the iconic Ground Zero Blues Club, but most of our adventures also include at least a little dawdling over downtown streets and the search for whatever street art we can find. So, today’s archive is a glimpse of painted Clarksdale.

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letters and numbers . Greenwood, MS No. 3

Delta Feed Company in Greenwood, MS

“There’s one!” When we have the chance for a family road trip, I’m likely to hear this from one of my children. I consider it a surprising byproduct of dragging them too often through back roads, two-lane highways, and sometimes questionable alleys in an attempt to capture photographs. Their exclamation usually refers to some specimen of graffiti, hand-painted letters or murals on the side of a building, or retro signage they may have spotted. I guess I’ve trained their vision through experience. These days, when I suggest we should take the long way to this place or that, one of them invariably adds “so you can get some photos!” I take an odd pride in the fact that they no longer question or wonder when I say “let’s just pull off here.” I think they’ve either accepted this strange penchant or decided it doesn’t matter — maybe even embraced the pursuit by discovering something of their own. As my astute 14-year-old reminds me, “weird is wonderful.” And, I suppose that explains this latest foray into Mississippi Delta letters and numbers.

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see . Indianola’s B. B. King Museum

Last summer, we decided to make a trek into the Mississippi Delta for one of the road trips that have begun to signify our summertime experiences. We made a couple of stops along the way to explore, but our true destination was Indianola, in Sunflower County, the town B.B. King considered home. There, he returned to perform for his namesake festival each year and is now memorialized at the B.B. King Museum & Delta Interpretive Center. We wanted to see and learn and experience this legendary Mississippi musician who was so loved by the world – there, where he had been raised. What we found was a world-class experience of music chronicling the part this iconic musician has played in it. Our visit to the B.B. King Museum did not disappoint, and looking back, I’m still enamored by its retelling of the man who’s tonic was the Blues.

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go . An Afternoon in Clarksdale, Mississippi

Summer is road trip season, and we’ve been enjoying a few of our annual adventures through Mississippi and the backroads South! These uncharted and somewhat unplanned treks have become a favorite part of our family’s summer activities. Last week, my sweet Elisha even told me that the car trips have been some of the best activities of summer so far. And, what’s not to love, with enjoying games and movies in the car, exploring 2-lane highways, experiencing new scenery, and exploring, shopping and eating in out-of-the-way places? My children hardly even blink an eye now when I pull off to photograph something or take a detour just to see what’s there. For our first road trip this summer, we decided to drive over to Clarksdale, Mississippi to see what we could find at the crossroads of Hwy 61 and 49. I thought I’d share three of our favorite Clarksdale experiences and some of the sights in watercolor sketches and photos…

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sojourn . Itta Bena, Mississippi

Back in May as our summer plans were just starting to materialize, I knew I wanted to take some opportunities to explore. We had already planned trips to the beach and Memphis, but I was determined that we would spend at least a few days on sojourns to Mississippi places we hadn’t seen before. I felt very blessed to have the children hanging out at home while school was out, and to have the flexibility in my freelance work to “schedule in” some unscheduled time.

So, on a Wednesday in the middle of June, we picked up breakfast donuts and headed west on Highway 82. It was the first day trip in our new car, which made for excitement with the kids in checking out all the bells and whistles, and I had heard that the B.B. King Museum in Indianola was pretty cool. Even though I was born and raised in Mississippi, I really haven’t spent a lot of time in the Delta, and the kids had never been to that part of the state. I was eager to take time without an itinerary, to soak up my little ones on the journey, and to explore some of that storied part of my home state.

There’s something mesmerizing about the sudden flatness of the land as you move out of the “hills” region of Mississippi. The sprawling farm fields, the succession of small towns popping up along the way, and so many broken down structures out of time. My children have tagged along on enough adventures to know my tendency to wander down side roads and stop on various Main Streets to capture photos of historic buildings, hand painted signs, and the curious sights of the small town South. This day trip had its share of those kinds of stops!

After pizza and visiting Indianola’s homage to Riley B. King, the kids indulged me in the short right turn onto Mississippi Highway 7 in Leflore County, down to Itta Bena. We wound past fields and water towers to a small square of a downtown with a city park surrounded by half cobblestone streets and nearly vacant storefonts – no evidence of the fast food spots and quaint downtown shops found in some of the other Delta towns we saw. It was late in the day and not many businesses were open. Not many businesses were there. We saw cars gathered around a few storefronts including a small convenience store, and a few folks were gathered on benches near the park. We drove around the square several times, across the railroad tracks and through the surrounding streets, stopping to capture the “place” of the place through my camera lens, and trying not to look too conspicuous.

Itta Bena seems to share part claim to Mississippi Valley State University with its neighboring county seat, Greenwood, just twelve miles East. The community also stakes claim to the birthplace of B.B. King, technically in Berclair, three miles to the West. I learned that Itta Bena comes from a Choctaw phrase, “iti bina,” meaning “forest camp,” and was named by a state senator who relocated his plantation there and built a home in the mid 1800s. He called it “Home in the Woods.”

We didn’t see much “woods.” We’ll seek that out for the next trip, but I enjoyed the glimpses into shops and businesses gone by and what I most often seek out on these adventures – the haunting and beautiful blight common in so many rural Mississippi towns. The gutted gas station. The vacant lunch counter featuring “Southern Cuisine”. The old structures you find give a hint to entrepreneurs and business folk who once made downtowns like these thrive. So that what you see is indelibly tied to what you imagine you would have seen twenty or fifty years ago. And sometimes the make and model of parked cars blur the difference.

The bricked pavement. The railroad tracks. There always seem to be railroad tracks. Military cannons and statues in the park memorializing one conflict or another. Buildings bear the remnants of their last use, sometimes overcome by weather and decay, but still vibrant with color. Sometimes the structures are just a shell with no roof remaining, and their own rural garden of weeds growing where countertops and store shelves used to be. Mom and pop restaurants, corner convenience stores and beauty salons are often the last hold-outs of downtown commerce, displaying store windows with the current price of a six-pack or posters of the latest beauty inspiration. Churches and public buildings are well-kept, but the interesting finds are those structures with a tell-tale hodgepodge of styles revealing their changes through the years. The boarded up remnants of stained glass windows and worn plaster ornament.

And, I love the signs. In addition to the faded out brands – logos that have since been updated to meet today’s visual appeal – small towns often show great examples of hand painted signs and repurposed banners showcasing a business owner’s pride. Somebody’s initials. Somebody’s name. Somebody’s stamp on the world. The local Big Star grocery became Big Star Tobacco, and even that has since gone defunct. Warehouses and old train cars usually provide an overlapping series of letters as the sun fades one generation of signage into the one before. The past, present and a citizen’s ingenuity.

Those glimpses of a small town – like the ones we captured in Itta Bena – are interesting and layered and sad and curious and indicative of how time passes. And sometimes passes by. Looking back through the images of our drive made me wonder what I keep trying to capture. When I seek out these broken and aged views of the small, worn South. I think maybe they are a glimpse of the greater challenges we have in our state. The wrestling of past and present, of sustaining opportunity, of growing and overcoming, of how we clean up our messes. Of capturing the moment in time. Or letting it go. All told, we spent less than an hour on our drive down to Itta Bena. That’s not enough time to know the place. Not enough to see what’s really gone and what remains. Not enough to see what might be emerging.

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