Things you see in the South

Oct. 31 – Cleveland, MS

I saw my first real live cotton plants today. Most of the crop has already been harvested and collected into modules that look like huge white Styrofoam bricks, but some fields remain in bloom. You could knit hundreds of sweaters from the cotton litter along the side of Highway 49 through Marvell, Arkansas. Uncollected bolls have been mashed into the dark mud of the bottomland, giving the entire landscape an unwashed appearance. The very countryside seems built by the river, as well it might, since the land here is an ever-changing accumulation of sediment deposited in floods and at river bends, which have become open farmland as the Mississippi meanders like a sidewinder across the face of the South. The sidewinder's tracks are seen in scores of oxbows in various stages of regression to dry earth: lake, swamp, muddy scar, fertile cotton pasture.

The city of Cleveland, Mississippi is small, but then again all cities in Mississippi are small. I can't say what goes on there, as I haven't really seen the town, but there is Delta State University and a double-wide downtown main street. And Wal-Mart. There is always a Wal-Mart. The city is located in the Greater Delta region of Mississippi, a name that actually refers to the inland alluvial landscape and not the deposition of sediment into the ocean. Cleveland is home to almost 14,000 people and at least one small obstreperous bird, who flew in circles above our hotel tonight, looking for somebody to annoy.

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