“Dispatches From Pluto” by Richard Grant
Ed (my Seattle native husband who lived in Mississippi for fifteen years), has long insisted that my native deep South is a foreign country. I’ve told him no it is not either, you better stop saying that, you don’t know anything, you’re a Yankee. Then I read Dispatches from Pluto, by British travel writer Richard Grant, who, with his girlfriend, Mariah, bought and moved into a house in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, near the very small town of Pluto. Well…
I was entranced by Grant’s ability to capture the tone, feeling, eccentricities, awfulness, and gorgeousness of an area touted to be the most “southern” part of Mississippi. I kept saying, “Oh, My Lord! Honey, you’ve got to hear this,” and then I’d read Ed the story about the cashiers at the distinctively Delta Walmart or the one about the trick the drinkers at a bar pulled on the cop whose mission it was to arrest them or the part about how Morgan Freeman sees the area, where he owns the Ground Zero Blues Club.
We went to the Delta a couple of years ago, where the devastated, post-cotton area struggles to come back via “cultural tourism”, mostly juke joints where beautiful, talented black people play the hell out of the blues, and moneyed white outsiders pay to watch them. We went to Po Monkey’s, the strangest bar I’ve ever seen, where William Seaberry, the owner (RIP), shocked and cracked us up with the same prank he pulled on Richard Grant when he spent an evening there.
We saw the poverty and the affluence. We talked with the still hopeful mayor of struggling Clarksdale, with whom Grant became friends. Like Grant and Mariah, we ate, with gusto, crawfish and grits, fried green tomatoes and okra, tangy-sweet barbecue.
Reading DISPATCHES FROM PLUTO was like revisiting the Delta with a keenly observant, passionate guide.
I have long answered the question “What’s the race situation in the South?” with one inadequate word: “Complex”. In a chapter titled “Grabbing Smoke”, Grant tackles race in the Delta as well as anyone I’ve read. He befriends Southerners of both races. He attends black and white churches. He sees how the races voluntarily frequent separate bars and stores and restaurants, and yet, at a white woman’s funeral, how blacks sit at places of honor with the deceased’s family. He doesn’t claim to know how things are, just observes and reports on them so well that, I believe, even non-southerners will get the picture.
Given the bad press the South receives, often for good reason, I find it gratifying that Grant and Mariah love so much about it and celebrate it as one of America’s best kept secrets.
DISPATCHES FROM PLUTO is a wonderful book, and I want to read everything else the author wrote. Now, when Ed refers to the South as a “foreign country”, I nod and say, “Yep. You’re right. Shoot, it’s another planet. It’s Pluto.”
I was entranced by Grant’s ability to capture the tone, feeling, eccentricities, awfulness, and gorgeousness of an area touted to be the most “southern” part of Mississippi. I kept saying, “Oh, My Lord! Honey, you’ve got to hear this,” and then I’d read Ed the story about the cashiers at the distinctively Delta Walmart or the one about the trick the drinkers at a bar pulled on the cop whose mission it was to arrest them or the part about how Morgan Freeman sees the area, where he owns the Ground Zero Blues Club.
We went to the Delta a couple of years ago, where the devastated, post-cotton area struggles to come back via “cultural tourism”, mostly juke joints where beautiful, talented black people play the hell out of the blues, and moneyed white outsiders pay to watch them. We went to Po Monkey’s, the strangest bar I’ve ever seen, where William Seaberry, the owner (RIP), shocked and cracked us up with the same prank he pulled on Richard Grant when he spent an evening there.
We saw the poverty and the affluence. We talked with the still hopeful mayor of struggling Clarksdale, with whom Grant became friends. Like Grant and Mariah, we ate, with gusto, crawfish and grits, fried green tomatoes and okra, tangy-sweet barbecue.
Reading DISPATCHES FROM PLUTO was like revisiting the Delta with a keenly observant, passionate guide.
I have long answered the question “What’s the race situation in the South?” with one inadequate word: “Complex”. In a chapter titled “Grabbing Smoke”, Grant tackles race in the Delta as well as anyone I’ve read. He befriends Southerners of both races. He attends black and white churches. He sees how the races voluntarily frequent separate bars and stores and restaurants, and yet, at a white woman’s funeral, how blacks sit at places of honor with the deceased’s family. He doesn’t claim to know how things are, just observes and reports on them so well that, I believe, even non-southerners will get the picture.
Given the bad press the South receives, often for good reason, I find it gratifying that Grant and Mariah love so much about it and celebrate it as one of America’s best kept secrets.
DISPATCHES FROM PLUTO is a wonderful book, and I want to read everything else the author wrote. Now, when Ed refers to the South as a “foreign country”, I nod and say, “Yep. You’re right. Shoot, it’s another planet. It’s Pluto.”
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