The sun was shining, and the crickets were chirping insanely, as I parked my car and headed into a wood alongside the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi. Somewhere in “there” was a Choctaw Native American burial mound, so a small brown square on my map told me, and I had decided I wanted to see it. I blazed my way through low bushes, becoming even happier than I had been for the last 20 minutes after joining this gorgeous road at a small town called Ofahoma, I think mainly due to there being a complete lack of roadside advertisements. They are banned from the Natchez Trace, and all I could see were trees, birds and the rolling road.

The mound was just that, a mound of about 10 feet in height, but to reach it, I clambered down and up a sunken trail that reminded me of the coppiced trails of my English birthplace of Kent, the path that Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims walked along on their way to the shrine of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury.

So intent was I to see the—as it turned out, disappointing—mound that it did not occur to me what the path was that I had just crossed. It was the original Natchez Trace road, which in that section was only a little wider than one of today’s SUVs. I went back for a second look. It was along here that traders, after floating down the Mississippi from states such as Minnesota and Ohio, returned to their homes after visiting New Orleans, as I also had done. Known as Kaintucks, these early 19th-century traders also would have stopped off at Natchez, Miss., which today is a quaint town of teashops, paddle steamers and antebellum mansions paid for by cotton, but for them would have been more recognizable in the still-existing area known as Natchez-under-the-hill, which was the nation’s frontier at the time and the bawdiest, toughest, most ruthless spot of sin in the universe. Mark Twain visited it in the 1880s, and he found that the place’s reputation had not improved. He writes in his travel journal Life on the Mississippi of…

“hordes of rough and hardy men; rude, uneducated, brave, suffering  terrific hardships with sailor-like stoicism; heavy drinkers, coarse  frolickers in moral sties…heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one,  elephantinely jolly, foul-witted, profane; prodigal of their money,  bankrupt at the end of the trip, fond of barbaric finery, prodigious  braggarts; yet, in the main, honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises  and duty, and often picturesquely magnanimous.”

All I saw on the streets of the town were red double-decker sightseeing buses, another thing that reminded me of home.

Before I had my meeting with the Choctaws, who were forced out of Mississippi to live in Oklahoma following a treaty called Dancing Rabbit Creek (they have since returned, and there now is a Choctaw nation near the town of Philadelphia, 25 miles east of Ofahoma), I entered Mississippi on Route 35 just north of the wonderfully named Louisianan town of Bogalusa. I had just ended a long weekend of fun and food in New Orleans (see Peter Crescenti’s article “Miracle on the Mississippi” from the October issue of Car & Travel for more on today’s New Orleans) and wanted to see some genuine rural South, and, indeed, Route 35 seems as far away from party-oriented New Orleans one could ask for; also, it was my intention never to drive on a Mississippi freeway.

I continued delighting in seeing signs to place names such as Pickwick, Goss and Clem, when I saw the town name to beat all town names, Hot Coffee. I did not even blink before turning right and heading away from Mt. Olive, driving past a pond and coming to a halt in front of the J&H Harper Grocery, where a coffee maker salutes this hamlet’s past and name, which started appearing on maps at the turn of the 19th century.

A man with a beard told me that the name came from the fact that travelers could stop there for hot coffee. Thanks for clearing that up for me! Actress Stella Stevens (a better screen name than Estelle Eggleston, which is what her Mom would have called her) supposedly was born here, before going off to Hollywood and starring in such films as Girls! Girls! Girls! with Elvis Presley and The Nutty Professor with Jerry Lewis, but that was an invention of her press agent, who even gave her headline-grabbing copy—“I come from Hot Coffee, but I was the drop that spilled over the cup.” Surely he could have come up with something equally marketable from the place where she was actually born, Yazoo City, also in Mississippi.

I reluctantly turned off the Natchez Trace when the sun started to dip and headed to Starkville, in the county of Oktibbeha and home of Mississippi State University. A woman in a convenience store was fascinated that I had come there from New York City and asked if I had walked. Breakfast was taken north of Starkville in a diner where the only other two customers breaking fast had tied their horses up to a length of wood set up for that very purpose. The casinos of the state’s Mississippi Gulf Coast seemed a very long way away.

Heading farther north, I stopped by the small city of Tupelo, where on Jan. 8, 1935, was born Stella Stevens’ co-star, perhaps better known as the King of Rock n’ Roll, Elvis Presley. The two-room house that now is a museum is original (Elvis’ father loaded the whole thing onto the back of a truck and drove it away to Memphis, Tenn., but much later, after the singer’s death, the city bought and returned it), but nothing inside is. That said, it provides a glimpse into Elvis’ life, as does Graceland in Memphis, although in a far more garish way. His Tupelo house is as dirt poor as his Memphis house is “gold rich.”

“Officially,” Elvis’ father left Tupelo for Memphis to seek better opportunities; “unofficially,” it was because he has served a prison sentence for forging checks and was not in everyone’s best graces. Mentioning this at the museum—as I did—will earn for you raised eyebrows and stony stares.

Living in more opulent Mississippi digs was novelist William Faulkner. After first stopping by Oxford’s well-known Square Books bookstore and inspecting the tidy city hall that sits in the town’s main square, I drove south to his home of Rowan Oak, which has a majestic approach path of oak trees and a tattered look that has not changed much since July 6, 1962, the day on which he died at the age of 64. This area is his mythical Yoknapatawpha County, although tongue-twisted locals might prefer to call it by its real name, Lafayette. A few miles south is the hamlet of Taylor, perhaps the quintessential Mississippi spot for those who want Mississippi to not grow beyond soda fountains; large, rusting, unusable Chevrolets; a menu featuring barbecue, barbecue and more barbecue; bullet-peppered road signs, and a slightly battered but extremely atmospheric general store. Once you reach it, the short road to it, which starts at a small swamp bordered with Spanish moss-filled trees, goes no farther. The Taylor Grocery—a sign says it serves the best catfish in the world—was closed. It remains one of the most popular gathering spots for students at Oxford’s University of Mississippi, aka Ole Miss.

(On the way to visit both these famous Americans—Elvis and Faulkner—take a diversion to Holly Springs, which is where you will find Graceland Too, a labor-of-love homage to the better-known Graceland across the border in Tennessee. Inside is more Elvis paraphernalia than you would think would exist. The love and life’s work of Paul McLeod, who saw Elvis more than 100 times, the first occasion being in 1954, it is so celebrated that the local convention and visitors bureau even boasts of the city being the “Home of Graceland Too.” McLeod—obviously not knowing or caring when to step back—named his son Elvis Aaron Presley McLeod, and an online search reveals that he has not left the building. Graceland Too used to be a monstrous shade of pink but now is white.)

Oxford is on Route 6, and so is Clarksdale. The scenery changes dramatically when nearing this small city. My route had entered the flood plains of the Mississippi and the state’s agricultural region. From here all the way south to Vicksburg constitutes some of the poorest places in the United States. Long, thin lines of poplar trees border flat fields, and it is easy to imagine stooping slaves and sharecroppers. It also is possible to hear in the wind the haunting notes of Mississippi Delta blues.

Clarksdale is best known as being the home of the Delta Blues Museum (662/627-6820; www.deltabluesmuseum.org), which on my first visit several years ago was above the Clarksdale Public Library. To reach it, one followed a long line of stenciled blue guitars on the pavement and stairs. Today, it is in a much larger building that formerly housed freight belonging to the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad. Its permanent collection contains such gems as one of B.B. King’s “Lucille” guitars and parts of the boyhood shack, originally in Rolling Fork, Miss., that Muddy Waters called home.

The museum also can provide the Mississippi adventurer with a “blues” map of important sites. I followed the story of Robert Johnson, who many consider to be the best blues guitarist—perhaps just the best guitarist, period—of all time. In Clarksdale it is possible to stop at the crossroads where at midnight on a misty night in the early 1930s Johnson allegedly handed his guitar over his shoulder to a man he dared not look at, heard it being tuned, received it back and then returned to the bars where he played with a prodigious talent that people whispered was the Devil’s work. A sculpture featuring three guitars in a middle of a turning circle alludes to the event.

Approximately 40 miles south is Greenwood, and southwest of that are his two gravesites. The most atmospheric is the one at Quito, along Route 7, a very narrow road that goes through some very dilapidated communities. In an unfenced cemetery by the Payne Chapel Missionary Baptist Church is a flat burial marker that says “Robert Johnson—May 8, 1911-Aug. 16, 1938—resting in the blues.” Back on the “main road” is a plot that used to contain the Three Forks General Store, where Johnson played his last song. I saw a family on its porch, all the children naked from the waist down, and was told that originally the store was a farther three miles off the road “in the middle of nowhere” where it sold provisions to the laborers and drinks to those who came to listen to musicians such as Johnson. It has now gone, which strikes me as very shortsighted, considering its history, or infamy.

Johnson knew the place well, and rumor has it that he in particular knew very well the wife of someone who lived thereabouts. It is widely thought that the spurned husband poisoned Johnson’s drink. No charges were pressed—not for the death of a black man in the South in the 1930s; no one thought it worthwhile to investigate the death. His body was thrown in a hole, but no one knows where that hole is. In Quito? Or perhaps four miles down the road at another cemetery by another church, the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in the village of Morgan City, Miss. Here is a larger gravestone, paid for by fans of his music. Being larger, it has more words on it, and they say “Robert Johnson: King of the Delta blues singers. His music struck a chord that continues to resonate. His blues addressed generations he would never know and made poetry of his visions and fears.”

Hungry by then, I delighted when I found “not the best catfish in the world” but the Catfish Capital of the World—Belzoni, Miss. This small town is home of Pinetop Perkins, who played piano for Muddy Waters’ band. He still is alive, aged 95, and is the oldest person ever to have received a Grammy (in 2007, when he was 94) for the recording Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live in Dallas! that he made with the then (almost youthful) 92-year-old David “Honeyboy” Edwards. At the Grammy Awards, Edwards was interviewed by the Reuters press agency. Talking about Robert Johnson, he said, “He was buried the day he died, on a Wednesday, but his sister come on the Thursday and had him dug up, and put him in a casket, and put him back in the ground—and I was there the same time when that happened.” (A calendar for 1938 shows that, in fact, August 16 was a Tuesday, so something is a little off here. If Johnson was poisoned on the Tuesday night, the 16th, maybe that was the day he died, but the first most people would have been aware of it would have been on the day afterwards, the Wednesday.)

Edwards was born in Shaw, Miss., which I had passed through on the way to Indianola, which is a necessary diversion if you want to reach Quito and Morgan City without touching Interstate 82. Just down the road from Belzoni is Yazoo City, where Hot Coffee’s Stella Stevens was born.

As I was driving around the Magnolia State, starting and ending in New Orleans, definitely it did seem as though everything in Mississippi was connected and turning in a grand, historical circle.

The circle continued as I headed south through the small towns of Midnight, Louise, Crupp, Valley, Satartia and Ballground. Farther south—Vicksburg, Port Gibson (near to here is Hazlehurst, where Robert Johnson was born), Alcorn and Natchez—the country contains fewer fields but more mansions, the kind of South depicted in tourism brochures. Port Gibson has the First Presbyterian Church of Port Gibson, which has a steeple crowned by a large golden hand with a finger pointing heavenward, while Alcorn is home to the Windsor Ruins, the impressively columned remnants of an 1859 mansion built by the wonderfully named Smith Coffee Daniell II on the profits from his cotton business. It burned down in 1890 and was never restored. Near to Alcorn State University, the ruins—there are 23 columns left—were used as a setting in the movie Raintree County starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Eva Marie Saint and Lee Marvin; a lesser role was enjoyed by DeForest Kelly, who later found fame as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy in the original Star Trek TV series.

(I also came across the Reverend H.D. Dennis and his Home of the Double Headed Eagle, aka Margaret’s Grocery, which I wrote about previously for this Website (see http://www.aaany.com/CarandTravel/Web_Only_Stories/Three_Chance_Finds.asp).)
I was nearing the end of my long loop through Mississippi, but I did not want to leave. The last diversion possible was a circuit on Route 24 off Route 61 that leads to Lesley, Fort Adams and Pinckneyville (when I was 16 to 18 years of age, one of my schoolmasters, who taught Economics, was named Pinckney, enough of a reason for me to visit). Fort Adams practically touches the Mississippi River. The jewel hereabouts is the Pond General Store, which is either in Pond, Miss.; Fort Adams, Miss., or Woodville, Miss., depending on who you ask. This store has not changed in 100 years, and it is a treasure trove of antique tools, bottles, tins and posters set on a small hill above—inevitably—a pond.

After Pinckneyville, Route 24 becomes Route 66 and enters Louisiana.