Books |
Vicksburg
Mississippi
By
Published: Jan 01, 2007
Category:
Travel
Vicksburg, Mississippi
The Rejoice Gospel station out of Memphis rocks with blues and gospel, and the July sun dances mirages across the blacktop. Vicksburg, Mississippi awaits some 500 miles down Highway 61. Lincoln knew its importance: “Vicksburg is the key. The war can never be brought to a close until the key is in our pocket.”
The Steamboat Gothic “Welcome to Mississippi” sign is passed, and the old highway transforms into a newly paved four-lane that glides under the wheels. Cotton bolls ripen in green rows across the delta. Youthful memories recall bent pickers moving across similar fields dragging gunnysacks full of heavy cotton, a weighing truck standing mid-field. Giant picking machines will roll over these fields in late August and separate in one motion the cotton, seeds, and hulls.
This trip is simpler than the one marched by 40-year-old Matson Mowder and his 15-year-old bugle boy son, my grandmother’s father. On June 7, 1863, they left La Grange, Tennessee, as volunteer soldiers in Grant’s army. The older Mowder had witnessed slavery on a trip to New Orleans, and was quick to enlist in Iowa when Lincoln called for volunteers. In a coincidence of history, my mother’s family home is in La Grange, so it is possible that one relative camped in the backyard of another. Grierson’s Raid, which inspired John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers, began here. Architecture cradles La Grange in faded brooding stillness. Antebellum mansions and Victorian houses sit among ancient oaks and white fences. Memphis, once forty-seven miles away, approaches in the relentless march of urban sprawl.
Vicksburg fell on July 4th, and I have long wished to visit the battle site in full summer, the better to appreciate The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign, December 1862-July 1863, by Shelby Foote. This drive down Highway 61 is a special treat. The return trip will travel along a more familiar two-lane from Oxford’s town square.
Morgan Freeman, the Academy Award-winning actor, has chosen to live in the Delta’s purifying crucible heat. He and his Mississippi partners, Howard Stovall and Bill Luckett, have created two restaurants in Clarksdale. The local favorite is Ground Zero, a soul food blues club.
Clarksdale’s exit appears, and signs point the way to the Delta Blues Museum. A quick tour reveals how tourists and English rock musicians inspired the natives to take pride in the Delta music. Muddy Water’s former home, a one-room wooden shack, sits in eloquent silence midway through the museum. The sound system plays his Muddy “Mississippi” Waters Live album.
Across the way stands a four-story, unpainted building. A sagging couch and mismatched chairs rest on a long front porch. Just visible on the screen door is a painted small blue circle. The unprepossessing place is my lunchtime destination, Ground Zero.
Diners crowd the restaurant; lawyer Luckett hosts a group of visiting doctors. Tea is offered “sweet or unsweetened.” The first bite of greens and chicken fried steak done to a New South chef’s turn explains why the locals eat here. Friendly folk at my table tell how the Delta is coming back to life.
After lunch a Live at Ground Zero Blues Club (starring Bobby Rush) CD plays in the car as Highway 61 takes me through towns remembered in songs and history. Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues offers a handy tour guide to the area’s great juke joints, momentous happenings, and almost forgotten gravesites.
General Grant described the approach to Vicksburg: “The country in this part of Mississippi stands on edge, as it were, the roads running along the ridges.” And as afternoon brings me to Vicksburg, sunset shades those ridges with reflected gold. It is as it was; the United States Civil War Parks keep battlefields sacred and bulldozers at bay.
A park ranger wearing a Southern goatee explains that most visitors to the Vicksburg battlefield are Texans stopping by from Interstate 20 on their way to Florida. He is willing, though, to check the computer for my family’s Yankee regiment, and he gives directions to Sherman’s circle where the Sixth Iowa marker sits. A looping narrow parkway passes by statues of forgotten warriors.
Twilight adds to the mystical atmosphere. I stop to view the cemetery landscaped with aged cedars and magnolias. White rectangular gravestones by the thousands stand in quiet sentinel. Below, the deep watered Mississippi River rolls toward New Orleans.
— Guest Butler Judith Wilmot, a founding writer of Stop Magazine, is writing a biography of Rabbi Stephen Wise. Her family home is in La Grange, Tennessee, some eight miles from the Mississippi border.
To buy “The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign, December 1862-July 1863” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Live at Ground Zero Blues Club” from Amazon.com, click here.
For the web site of the Delta Blues Museum, click here.
For the web site of Ground Zero Blues Club, click here.
