Crooked Letter, Water Dipper, Tall Men, Bass Note, You + Me
A Mississippi Road Syllabus by Jennie Lightweis-Goff
The Poetry of Voice-To-Text
Indianola, 2023
I texted him when I got home, a promise I try to keep. Home tonight was the loft of a barn somewhere between Memphis and New Orleans, a $60 rustic rental that meant I wouldn’t have to whip around and double-back after work: the one taboo of a traveler’s life. The penalty usually costs more than $60: I’ve likely bought two cars’ worth of plane tickets by refusing a connecting flight that backtracks. I want it halfway or nowhere. I want Chicago in the center of the Atlantic, LAX in the Pacific.
But it’s voice-to-text: I’m sleeping a little off the beaten half. I leave a footprint in the sponge of water-damaged parquet over the old barn floor. I don’t notice the soft landing of half instead of path before I press send. But he admires the beaten half. When we’re in the same room, we’re a country duet, but I’m another genre on my own. The beaten half shares a border with my fighting side, and I cross that border on exhausted nights. The beaten path is a fair place to visit: I follow the tourists to historical markers and half-dead house museums on bright mornings. The waystations and coffees and bathrooms are there for them, and I haven’t found a way to survive without the comforts they offer my body. The beaten half, despite its weary, slow, dirt road horror tread, overtakes me on dark nights: counts my injuries and the way my life fails to measure against some ancestor’s at 44. Or my grandmother, who never made it to 44. The beaten half is couch-lock and oversleep, a rattling Keurig and a wobbly table.
Little Milton’s “Grits Ain’t Grocery” (1969) / Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land” (1964) / Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee” (1957) / Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago” (1936) / Memphis Minnie’s “Killer Diller Blues” (1940s)
Beijing, 2018
The truth is that I’m not from anywhere, so I love Bob Hicok’s “Primer” (2008), his poem for Michigan. He lists the state’s locked factory gates and year-long February as deficits but ends with a praise-song for its particularity. “Let us all be from somewhere,” he says. “Let us tell each other everything we can.” I’m a New Yorker who moved to Appalachia in childhood, then aimed for New Orleans to mature from teen to adult and then demimondaine. If my trajectory continues, my final form is cranky Mississippi ascetic.
On a hot August day, I drove between my classroom in Oxford and my home in New Orleans. I passed Little Milton Avenue in Inverness, Mississippi and ended up on Lloyd Price Drive in Kenner, Louisiana. You could have decanted the sweat on my driver’s seat, but I did not curse my black leather interior. I made a playlist called 260 Miles, flush with Mississippi songs I passed through to get to Lloyd. His “Stagger Lee” was enough to get to heaven; “Personality” is a hell of a bonus. To be honest, I need the playlist to cover the miles I drive in the service of Mississippi’s flagship university: I’ve taught in Grenada, Tupelo, Oxford, and Southaven. I’ve sat in classrooms in Booneville and at Parchman. Universities are global, of course, interested in attracting international students who are ineligible for financial aid. (That price point is better, to the money men’s nostrils, than any drug I’ve taken). On one memorable occasion, I taught Southern Literature in Beijing. Americans assume the world knows us, but when I said I was from New Orleans, Shanghai waiters switched to French. That’s a polyglot, port city: up north in Beijing, the only south they knew was a bullet train away. They lacked associations and stigmas: they hadn’t seen Mississippi’s fires or its ghosts in American cinema. Few had heard about our crossroads.
No one would call Mississippi placeless. It’s one of a handful of states where Americans—transplants, natives, haters, observers—are happy to fix region. Contrast its fate to that of poor, orphaned Oklahoma: the South and the Midwest alike draw lines around the Ozarks. Texas drew a national border to divorce Oklahoma. “If your state has a Panhandle,” I tell my Southern Literature students, “that skinny bit is the South. Like, affix a Panhandle to Maine. Doesn’t matter.” When I’m teaching on domestic soil, I joke with students about the efflorescence of place names—names of other places—in Mississippi songs. Some Thursdays I nap in the glass observation car on the City of New Orleans between Greenwood and Yazoo City. A dream of Chuck Berry rattles with me. He sings of the “through train ticket” out of Mississippi in “Promised Land,” but neither North Carolina nor New Mexico can stick him to its verses. “Sweet Home Chicago” is the state’s anthem: not because of the Mississippi musicians fled, but the origami map Robert Johnson folded in his pocket.
Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)
Oxford, 2017
A few days after Trump’s inauguration, I reached the door of the theater in Oxford and found a sign promising age checks and scattered seating for big groups at Get Out (2017). No comparable sign appeared for Star Wars: Rogue One or Suicide Squad the previous year, but this was serious business: a movie about Northern racism. That subject delights a great many Southerners.
The state is 36% black; the campus is 13.4% black. The audience looked more like Mississippi than “Ole Miss” or the bucolic college town around it. I squawked with real delight at the theater’s collective response to the escalation, degeneration, and violence of the third act of Get Out. The Armitages’ repellent son Caleb has a slurring southern voice, unlike his sister Rose or his unctuous suburban parents. He counts “one Mississippi, two Mississippi” as he puts Chris in a chokehold. “Not Mississippi!” someone yelled in my row to colossal laughs and a hissing shhhhh from the ushers. When they’re upstairs, away from their at-home surgical theater, the Armitages are proud that this isn’t Mississippi; they would have voted for Obama a third time if they could have. They are flush with what Robert Penn Warren thought of as White Northerners’ “Treasury of Virtue,” a match to the White Southerners’ “Great Alibi” that turns “defects into virtues.”
Film theorists call the noise that characters and spectators alike can hear diegetic sound. What happens outside, what only the audience can hear, is extradiegetic. That night, the theater made its own soundtrack, but we collided into the characters on the extradiegetic line between North and South. Critics praised the film for its trenchant view of ‘liberal’ racism—that is, not Mississippi. But there’s a Treasury of Virtue in the South, too: it stocks its shelves in stiflingly white college towns, where the culture and language are designed for the comfort of Ph.Ds. All of this to say, Get Out is about Westchester and Fairfield Counties. Heroic Rod is a TSA agent at a LaGuardia checkpoint; one of the villains is a Chelsea art dealer. But it’s also about Oxford, Mississippi. I’m not sure who coined the name the Velvet Ditch or the Little Easy, but I’m sure they’ve been priced out by now in the hustle to build a progressive blue dot, a mecca that protects its residents from the Mississippi that surrounds them.
When Chris tells Rose that he must leave this white place, these white people, this white party, a cypress knuckle and an old dock are just out of frame. This trenchant satire of Northern racism? Jordan Peele filmed it in Fairhope, Alabama. The region rears up on its hindlegs.
Tom T. Hall, “That’s How I Got to Memphis” (1968)
Washington, DC, 2022
“But where do you sleep?” The legendary editor, a literary luminary, could not make sense of the map of my life. The answer isn’t easy, I tell him. I have generous friends in towns around the state, and I never take a firm mattress for granted. Despite their entreaties, my psychic fuel is often down to fumes after a week of driving a big loop through the state, so I opt for the loneliest possible place: a comped casino hotel room. “When I got a Ph.D., I didn’t realize that a player’s card would be so useful for my lifestyle,” I tell him. “Pearl River Resort sits between New Orleans and Tupelo, and I like the Fitz when I’m in the Delta. I can bear the noise in small doses, but my ride-or-die partner lives on the other side of the border. Most nights I sleep in Memphis.” We’re in Georgetown, telling stories about Budapest and the Bronx, but the editor gets Tom T. Hall’s cadence instantly. Most nights I sleep in Memphis, he sings. Most nights I sleep in Memphis.
Richard Wright’s Haiku (1959 – 1960)
Rochester, New York, 2010
I liked to talk about Richard Wright while standing in snow up to my shins, gesturing with a Genesee Cream Ale gripped in one ungloved hand. Back then, booze was my momentum, and my medium was half-baked theory. I can fake outrage or conspiracy for comedy, and I abused the privilege with my most credulous friends. These were grad school parties, so I wrench Wright from the provinces, from the quarantines that identity and geography imposed on him. He wanted to slip those yokes. When Wright died, Langston Hughes easily punctured American elegies in “Horn of Plenty” (1961):
Why did Richard Wright Live all that while in Paris Instead of coming home to decent die in Harlem or the south side of Chicago Or the womb of Mississippi? And one should love one’s country For one’s country is your mama.
The kid from Franklin County gazed at bullfights and sat at the table where leading black and brown intellectuals coined the term Third World—not a pejorative, incidentally, but an expression of a third way between the capitalist First and communist Second Worlds. Identity was a trap. I am gesturing to my own chest with the beer bottle now. Telling this white idiot that she shouldn’t write about Wright is like telling Wright he couldn’t write Savage Holiday or Pagan Fucking Spain or a thousand haiku, I tell them. Now I see it’s much worse; authenticity tests were far more costly to Wright’s reputation as a writer than my (middling) status as a scholar.
One of the men insists that only Wright’s Mississippi books are worth a damn. But now I’m drunk and thinking about Wright’s death. The people closest to him attributed it to sabotage and inferior medical care and sometimes murder. Paris is far away from this town near the Erie Canal, with the blighted houses my partner forages for the material of installation art. The lake blows tornadoes of snow down on our little, wedge-shaped neighborhoods.
A bright window pane With one slowly crawling fly Against a still cloud.
I drum my fingers on the beer bottle, the 5/7/5 rhythm that enamored Wright in the final months of his life. Maybe they’re better than the Wright books you know about, I tell him. But I just don’t think it’s a coincidence that he dies under mysterious circumstances in 1960, and then Thomas Pynchon appears like a goddamn literary comet 3 years later. A famous recluse, I say. Show me the anagrams, the pictures, of this Pynchon. Prove to me that’s not one more shapeshifting Richard Wright.
The tossed bottle disappears into the bank of snow.
Natasha Trethewey, “Elegy” (2012)
I can tell you now That I tried to take it all in, record it For an elegy I’d write – one day – When the time came.
Como, 2021
Jason tells me that someone should take all my pictures—laptops full of out-the-car-window Mississippi images—and turn them into a road atlas. It would document a scholar’s curious life lived off the tenure track, indifferent to bourgeois morality, in elegant disarray. But you know you make the whole world look like a David Lynch setting, he says. An ex-boyfriend of mine used to work in downtown Detroit; he’d watch the tourists aim their shining DSLR cameras. He could see their massive viewfinders as he harrowed the dough of the city’s signature pizza; it's built from onions and car parts and more grease than Chicago wrings out onto a plate. Tourists want the perfect crop: they snap a picture of the crumbling opera house or the dead train station and pretend they wandered in an empty city. I knew that look—on the camera, on the screen, on their faces—from post-Katrina New Orleans. Those snapshots of storm damage were often evidence of longer vacancy: the slow-motion hurricane of deindustrialization and mechanization. The outer bands of it expand over the river and the Delta; its emptiness is the size of New Jersey, but it’s got the density of Siberia. This love-pledge I offer to Mississippi: I want you on your own terms, not as evidence. I take in your expressions so I can write an elegy when the road closes. When I leave here. When the night circles back to my morning bed.
William Faulkner’s Byron Bunch (1932)
He would be where the chance to do hurt or harm could not have found him.
Yoknapatawpha County, 2019
I spent more than one New Year at Red’s in Clarksdale, then carried halfway home or near the John Lee Hooker special: one bourbon, one Scotch, and one beer. I looped back to the old Telegraph Building or the Chateau Debris with an unsteady gait. Once you’ve been to a few Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, you’re habituated to the old joke—I’m allergic to alcohol. I break out in handcuffs—but I’ve never not laughed. I am, in fact, allergic to beer and red wine. No doctor was certain of etiology, not even the one who broke the news at Tulane Hospital a decade ago. I drank through the hives and joint pain, I told him. When I heard myself, I located the etiology; call my disease what you like. One early morning January 1 in Clarksdale, I passed an ancient bluesman—now deceased, but you know his name—leaving a tourist’s hotel. She spoke with an accent even I found stirring at the bar the night before. The euphemism “walk of shame” died at the moment I saw his gravedigger’s hat in his proud right hand. I’ve had no need of them since. Drunk, garbagehead….call me what you like.
A drunk tallies regrets, resentments, and amends. I owe a great many amends. I am wrathful. My love is vain; it requires loyalty tests and training for big, imagined battles. Late nights, when I’m on the beaten half, I make amends to the books I read in school, then re-read when I grew. The re-reading ritual started the summer I moved to Oxford, when I vibrated with pain over slights and betrayals, agonies and annoyances, and the unfinished business of a life of shifting and moving with the whims of the academic job market. While my ride-or-die man cleared and cleaned our New Orleans house for a tenant’s arrival, I settled into a cramped Oxford apartment with The Scarlet Letter. I found it in a free pile and finished in a day. What we did had a consecration of its own, Hester Prynne tells Dimmesdale. She calls him friend in the privacy of the forest. I’ve never again heard the word without the chime of the erotic in the distance. Frankly, I don’t think I was capable of such nuance as a high school sophomore, frog-marched into reading all this off-stage sex.
Later it was Faulkner’s Light in August, which I read about nine times for its commentary on or complicity with racism, depending upon the demands of the seminar room. (The best rooms preserved the ambiguity. As a child, Joe Christmas stares at his vomit on the floor and wonders if it’s him. A reader can be content without an answer, if a murderer cannot.) These days, I don’t care so much if you met the book in the classroom or in Oprah’s Summer of Faulkner; I’ll talk to you about it over text, on the road, in the grocery aisle, or in the comments section. After my last drink—a White Claw, in contradistinction to my fixed notion of my own good taste—I vibed instead with Byron Bunch, who picks up a Saturday shift at work to be alone where hurt or harm would never find him. The fragile neutrality—the Jainist ahimsa—dies at the sight of Lena searching for her child’s father. Byron is ready for the trouble that connection brings to us. He loves instantly, and rages instantly, too, at the man who gave away a love he never had. Certain sobrieties lead you to live like a locust, alone for a time in the company of abundant regret. Others drive you to serve and to love, to wander and to walk, to live unprepared and unafraid of the beaten half. To let your body get around.
Thank you to Phillip Lightweis-Goff, Sarah Baechle, Jason Solinger, and Dan Veksler. I recommend Dan’s Dear Northern Atlantic as the soundtrack for your next Delta roadtrip, and Phillip’s art for the flag hanging from the cab of your pickup.