We’re in a smaller space, but paradoxically with a lot more room, and only increasing rent from Jackson rates by about $300, which is about as good as I could have hoped. And we’ll have a guest bedroom, so, friends, you know what that means.

We’re leaving my car and flying back to Jackson Tuesday. Then we pack a truck and move on or around July 1st.

And, coming to New Mexico straight from Mississippi this time (not from California like before), I’ve noticed some additional benefits of the dry air: (1) Getting out of the shower, you dry quicklier, and (2) cold beverages don’t sweat (in MS, they are prone to over-power the most valiant coaster).

I visited the area in the early 70s with Bobbie Lee herself. At that time I worked with her in Las Vegas. We have remained friends ever since. Much of the area in and around the famed Tallahatche Bridge is not what it was 30 years ago, actually poorer. It is in Chickasaw County, not far from Greenwood Mississippi. The bridge was, back then, almost unuseable. The so-called Choctaw Ridge is just one of many areas identified by the locals as “up on the ridge”, all with various little names. It is unlikely any map would identify the exact location of a Choctaw Ridge, people of the area called the same place different things. I can only say it is a real place, and probably long forgotten by most in the area now.

This is interesting, though “Chickasaw County” is not especially near to Greenwood, and the Tallahatchie River does not enter it. History is strange.

I’ve not posted anything in quite a while. Stress and procrastination are partners. I’ll add a few posts soon.

Choctaw Ridge doesn’t turn up on many sites apart from those with Gentry lyrics. It seems to be an archaic description.

We saw Honeyboy Edwards, the 90-year-old bluesman who knew Robert Johnson and was present when he died. (I am told that it is his account of Johnson’s death that is widely considered most credible.) He sounded quite like I would have imagined, playing acoustic Blues as a man who played it when all Blues was acoustic.

Then last weekend we all reunited for the first time in Oxford. And what a relief, to decompress with my peers who are experiencing similar trials. Or even to chat over drinks with people my age, somewhat hip and somewhat liberal and somewhat well-educated. It sounds ugly and provincial, maybe (if it isn’t too backwards a use of provincial), and I do not mean it to be derogotary to anyone outside of that description, but what a relief it was, ugly relief or not.

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.

In August I will begin teaching at North Panola High School, where about 100% of the students are black and many are poor. Perhaps ten miles south of North Panola High is South Panola High, which is racially integrated (and a few times larger). The two buildings give rather different impressions, as you can see in the photographs. More are available here.

When I scanned the map of Mississippi counties with critical teacher shortages I noticed no county but Panola that was shaded on only one half. Though I could guess, I do not know why Panola County is divided into two school districts. I hope the two books Frederick Wirt wrote on the subject of race in Panola County (Politics of Southern Equality and We Ain’t What We Was) will be informative.