Dispatches from Pluto by Richard Grant

Author:Richard Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

MARIAH WOULDN’T DRIVE after a single drink, so if we went for an evening out, I was usually the designated driver, although not always entirely sober. Driving fifty miles home on a long, straight, empty road with the moonlit fields streaming past, hoping not to run into a stray dog, or a deer, or a DUI checkpoint, became a familiar experience, as it was for many people here. It’s always a long way in the Delta, they said, but never too far to get there.

In the nineteenth century, Delta planters and their families were famous for making forty- and fifty-mile horseback journeys in order to attend parties and balls. They were gregarious people who lived in a place where human settlements were spread out and isolated. Once the Delta was cleared and tamed, its geography was determined by the requirements of large-scale plantation agriculture, rather than human sociability and convenience. Today, with disappearing towns, shrinking populations, and mechanized agriculture, that was even more true.

It was forty miles one way to Club Ebony in Indianola, a famous African-American nightclub founded in 1948, and well worth the journey if Super Chikan was playing. He was a virtuoso electric bluesman who built his own guitars out of cigar boxes, auto mufflers, rifle butts, and other found objects. It was forty-five miles to have cocktails at the Alluvian Hotel bar in Greenwood, followed by sensational fried chicken in a booth at Lusco’s, or James Beard Award–winning contemporary Southern fare at the Delta Bistro.

It was a 160-mile round trip to Po Monkey’s on a Thursday night. You drove north to the small town of Merigold on Highway 61, then turned on to a gravel road that ran parallel to a bayou in pitch blackness unless the moon was out. You kept going, wondering if it was the right gravel road, until you saw a small dim light in the darkness up ahead, and then a long row of old rectangular American cars and pickup trucks, and a few newer ones, parked on the edge of a field.

Then you walked up to an ancient-looking sharecropper’s shack, built from unpainted cypress boards, patched up with pieces of plywood and corrugated tin, and covered in hand-painted signs and drawings. One depicted a man in a backward baseball cap, with the words “not like this” written next to it. Another drawing showed a pair of male buttocks with the pants sagging below them, with the words, “and not like that.” That was the dress code and above the rickety-looking front door, another sign read, “NO beer brought inside. Please NO drugs or Lounld [sic] Music.”

There used to be juke joints like this all over rural Mississippi, but Po Monkey’s was almost the last one left. It was popular with blues tourists, and it had been officially designated as a cultural landmark in the National Register of Historic Places. It was in the process of being commodified and preserved as a museum version of itself, but it wasn’t there yet. Most of the clientele was black and local, and they were here to drink and dance.

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