I was perhaps unreasonably pleased to find this map of Panola County printed in the Wirt books mentioned in my last post, and though I will not deny a map fetish, neither am I wholly without reason. First, a map of a place like Panola County is a rare bird. Sure enough the county appears on maps of the state of Mississippi (more or less as an intersection of I-55 and Highway 6, with a dot for Batesville), but the towns of Sardis, Como, Crenshaw, Courtland, and Pope, though they may perhaps appear as dots, surely are not indicated by perimeters comprising finite areas. Additionally, I am pleased by any map that clearly demarcates the Delta, whose boundaries are so unambiguous when they are crossed but which are nevertheless so ambiguous on maps. I have seen only one other map that so clearly indicates the region (stolen from npr.org).
And of course the quaint hand-drawn character of the map is reminescent of the maps of Middle Earth included in all of Tolkien’s books, which maps were endlessly imitated by me and all other bookish but warm-blooded nine-year-old boys with good hardy souls in them; and the likeness surely activates some psychological trigger.
What’s more, the map heightened my appreciation of a song. I did not know, before seeing this map, that Choctaw Ridge names the boundary separating the Delta from the Hills. The coldness of the (mother’s?) lyric Nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge, in Bobbie Gentry’s lovely song, “Ode to Billie Joe,” now benefits from a suggestion of the historical antagonism between the Delta whites and the “Rednecks” of the Hills. Since it is in Panola County that the Tallahatchie River crosses Choctaw Ridge, I suppose the Tallahatchie Bridge central to the song is Panolian, and that the song’s speaker and her family are having breakfast at home somewhere in the western third of the county.
On an entirely different note, a few pages before the map Wirt’s Politics of Southern Equality begins with an inscription allegedly left by a Union soldier on the wall of a Mississippi home, where we are told it remains legible:
To the owner of this house — Your case is a hard one and I pity you.
A Google search does not return any instances of the phrase. I wonder if the inscription is real, and if so where in Mississippi it is.