Driving Friday down to Itta Benna, always chiming “little ol itta bin” with Taj Mahal in my mind to where I don’t know how to say nothing right no more. The side roads dirt and gravel, pebbles and soybean carcass, the gps directing “continue straight for 2 miles” and looking at the road cut up like a ditch after a hard raining hard drinking Saturday night, and knowing this old Toyota Camry ain’t got it in it, opting left or right because a phone call to AAA sounds like, “well…y’know…i’m out at Shaw-Skene Road in Cleveland, Mississippi, and I need you to pull me out the mud,” and two hours later we’d both be stuck and the driver looking at me and my dog with more questions than he could ask and the Toyota trunk deep in delta dirt and the road looking for all of it like the river’s many paths down the states and,
Headed to itta bin and passing fields of brown with black and white horses against a pale blue sky, through Shaw, to the town for lunch which was very cold out in the shade of a January day with my dog, under an oak, against the shadows of grain bins, taller than castles and rusting, the bb king museum adjacent and I guess they pipe his music out into the air so he can live forever, his voice carried into the sky like a paper lantern, blowing clear to Cote D’Ivore and Cannes, Cambridge and Clarksdale, gentle same as Mississippi John Hurt, roiling with feeling like the Mississippi.
There was a small pond, a little bayou, filled up with cypress and Christmas lights, a post electric taped over as a power cord drefted into the depths, those old knees bigger than a dog or myself, I guess, curious to see it when it’s dried up in the summer and crackling. The water bright green, trailing clearer water in movement and wind.
Lunched and gone and glad to be out traveling, just little jaunts out into the land, following Township road to that rutted end of Shaw-Skene
(i never been whisky mean but I have been drinking mean)
Turns out the road leads to Beulah, to Beulah, Mississippi, then eventually and windingly to the river, oxbows and log-loaders and all of that, this land seems stranger and stranger and truer and truer to me. Thinking of the land where I would have come from a century or two or three ago, it’s not clear, I have no good memory - the people where I came from if they had a better knowing of the land, knowing that disconnecting from one social media app lets me see better, imagine a world of no - phone no - music - on - demand no light - on - demand, no heat - on - demand, no food - on - demand, here we stand next to the land; connected, practically ear-to-earth at times, this incredible understanding of it all, mostly, at least the earth and sky, which is better than I have now, which maybe is why God came out down back then, better than now, the disconnect all connected; those monks and nuns fasting and praying and never seen social media practically, different still but all the same; the masses surging forward feverishly and acceptingly and not saying no one is better that no one else because we are all humans with hearts but - some folks got the privilege of rolling around in red clay and wet grass and under a blue sky in the winter and spring and summer and fall and no one knowing but they come out with their hearts full to burst and eyes brand new on the land and
“If the light has gone out in your soul,”
Same as mercy and forgiveness, light is never ending, and your soul setting out to get renewed, every season along with the collards and the cauliflowers and corn and every sort of bean and flower and tree and creature; we are so lucky. Amen.
