Back in June 2016 when my husband and I were making plans for a long weekend trip to the Mississippi Delta, we were trying to figure out just what to see and do on such a short visit. While it’s easy to find Delta tourist advice, we wanted authentic intelligence from someone who knew the area intimately, so I sought help from Rheta Grimsley Johnson.
Rheta is an author and syndicated newspaper columnist who is a fellow Alabamian, but she’s lived in and written about Mississippi for so long now that she qualifies as a “local,” and she generously offered us sage advice on the best food, drink, cultural and musical stops of the Delta. But her finest and most important advice was this:
“The thing to do in the Delta is talk to people…there’s music in their voices.”
She was so right, and we heard that music over and over again from people like farmer Tim “Moose” Miller, who stopped to chat with us near his field in Friar’s Point, Mississippi, and just a crow’s fly from the Big Muddy. Sitting at the wheel of his pickup truck, Moose told us about his children—a daughter who was making herself a lawyer and a son who was not making much of himself at the moment—and about a snake that ate a radio-tagged bird, and how it could be dangerous in those parts of Mississippi what with the rampant rural crime, but how you’d also never find a friendlier place.
We also heard it in the voice of Barbara Pope, sister of the late Joe Pope who founded the famous White Front Café (AKA Joe’s Hot Tamale Shop) in Rosedale, Mississippi. Ms. Pope’s quiet, composed voice rose above—or maybe somehow below—the sounds of a television in one corner of the café and a window air conditioning unit struggling loudly against the indoor and outdoor heat in another corner. We hung on every word as she talked about how she came home to Mississippi from Chicago in 1990 to take care of her ailing mother and never left, and how tamales had brought the world to her door, but bringing prosperity to Rosedale was a work in progress.
We also heard it late one afternoon as we wandered around the grounds of Dockery Farms—the “birthplace of the blues”—near Cleveland, Mississippi, and met Julius Voss, a retired plumber who grew up working on a nearby farm. He began to tell us stories about his childhood there—about watering their farm horses at Dockery’s place—and I think he would have talked on for hours, but the sun was melting off the edge of a hot June sky and our hotel was miles away in Clarksdale, so we reluctantly said goodbye without fully tapping into the music of his voice.
That night we did what tourists do in Clarksdale—listened to the music of the Delta at Ground Zero then later at Red’s Lounge where Terry “Harmonica” Bean was evangelizing the blues to a largely white congregation of us tourists (some hailing from as far away as Australia). As Terry played, sang and told stories to the crowd, a woman sitting alone at a little bar table strewn with empty tall-boy beer cans and half-pint whiskey bottles—Miss Mae they called her, and we decided she must be a local—would occasionally rouse from a nap and make her own music by offering a barfly’s “amen.”
We also heard it from Willie “Po’ Monkey” Seaberry, the proprietor of Po’ Monkey’s Social Club, one of the last honest-to-God juke joints in the area, maybe in the world.
It was mid-afternoon on a Saturday, so Po’ Monkeys was deserted—the singing and dancing occurs mostly on Thursday nights—but we took photos of the establishment’s ramshackle building and its trademark, hand-painted signs disallowing droopy pants, cockeyed baseball caps and outside beer and drugs.
We happily slipped the obligatory $5 (each) requested for outside photos in a padlocked box then stood on the dirt-gravel road that ran beside this sharecropper’s-shack-turned-cultural-icon and toasted the Delta with a couple of fingers of Woodford Reserve whiskey poured into plastic travel cups. Just as we were about to leave, a white van pulled up and out stepped a tall black man wearing a rhinestone belt buckle shaped like a dollar sign. It was Po’ Monkey himself and he invited us in to see the place he had run without major incident for more than 50 years.
For about an hour, we wandered around in the shabby-garish gloom that settles over any jumping joint during the quiet daylight hours and Mr. Seaberry answered our questions and told us stories. He even gave us a peek into his sleeping quarters, a tiny room in a back corner of the shack that was “wallpapered” with Mr. Seaberry’s many famous flamboyant suits, hats and assorted party outfits.
I think Mr. Seaberry would have kept talking with us for hours more—he was polite that way—but we had places to go and we figured he had things to do, so we drove away waving at Mr. Seaberry and thanking him profusely for his hospitality.
There are so many more people and places we encountered on that too-short trip, all worth recognizing, but that would take pages, and the real point of this is that we got the best advice for the Delta—for anywhere, actually—from Rheta. Stop and listen when people want to talk.
The importance of doing that was brought poignantly home to we four travelers when, less than a month after we returned home from that trip, we heard that Willie Seaberry was gone…found dead in his tiny bedroom on July 14th.
I wish we had lingered longer with Mr. Seaberry—and with Moose, Barbara, Julius, Miss Mae and all the other people we encountered in the Delta—and listened harder to the music in their voices. We might not get another chance.
katielamarjackson 