Later, as we neared Jackson, we pulled off impulsively at a sign for “the world’s only cactus plantation.” Further signs brought us to increasingly narrow, canopied roads, the last of which was unpaved and pooled to a dead end in front of a shaded wooden home and a series of greenhouses, with a garden separating [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Mississippi’
Roadside history, Pt. II
Posted in The Southeast, tagged Cactus plantation, Mississippi on July 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Roadside history, Pt. I
Posted in The Southeast, tagged Bob Dylan, crop-dusting, double-cropping, Highway 61, Mississippi, Onward, Teddy Bear on July 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
After two days in Clarksdale, we headed down Highway 61 listening to Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, the opportunity to do which had been our reason for going to Clarksdale to begin with.
It was a sunny and hot, and the sky was blue except for columns of smoke that rose every so often from [...]
Blues town
Posted in The Southeast, tagged Clarksdale, Delta Blues Museum, Mississippi, poverty, tourism on June 30, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Downtown Clarksdale was a near-seamless integration of the chic pseudo-poverty and actual poverty. Down near the Delta Blues Museum, a dull redbrick building with green awnings that I would have taken for a retirement home were it not for the unassuming sign out front, there was nothing much around but a railroad spur, where ferns [...]
New junk
Posted in The Southeast, tagged Clarksdale, Hopson Plantation, junk, Mississippi on June 27, 2008 | 1 Comment »
The vintage-model mechanized cotton picker sitting on the front lawn of the Hopson Plantation at the edge of Clarksdale, Mississippi looked like a heap of scrap metal that might have been carted off to the dump if anybody cared enough to bother. Its rust-orange frame resembled that of a primitive tractor, amended with a cage [...]
