Anthony Walton

One night during this time my mother started asking me questions, out of the blue, about William Faulkner. She was taking a night-school course and wanted to write about the Nobel laureate from her hometown, New Albany. Why Faulkner, I asked, of all the writers in the world to care about? Why not Richard Wright, James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston? “We’re kin to some Faulkners,” she said. I laughed out loud and informed her that this Faulkner was white. My mother smiled and said, “So?”

As I write in 1993, the mayor of Vicksburg is a black man. Contemporary Vicksburg is a sleepy river city with a predominantly black population, and race relations are quiet: the residents, black and white, seem to go about their business with a certain peacefulness, even equanimity, that belies the city’s history. But though it sits so pretty on the bluffs, it has an atmosphere equally seedy, empty and tired on a quiet summer afternoon. I drove down fabled Catfish Row, a strip of black food shops and juke joints one afternoon, and found it deserted, few pedestrians and no cars. This was true of most of the other streets in Vicksburg, including U.S. 80, the east-west thoroughfare. Most of the city’s automobile traffic was on Interstate 20, which crosses the Mississippi on a cantilevered bridge, the twin of the structure at Natchez, and barrels on past the dingy brick buildings and frame houses of Vicksburg for Jackson.

Mississippi blues are simple, built on modal one-, two- and three-chord harmonies, rhythmically intense and searingly emotional. Many see the blues as boozy, folk-existential wails, but as musician Vernon Reid notes, the blues are inevitably sociological. The style arose in part as a reflection of social unrest: the blues are the cries of souls under lock and key, a way of speaking when doomed to silence, a parallel language of human expressiveness. They are a way of analyzing, understanding and notating past experience and then distancing oneself from it with irony and humor that contain but do not deny the trauma. Bluesmen bewail “evil women,” but such complaints are not a joke, as often relationships with women were the only wealth those men had; and muttering in a song about leaving for Chicago might have been their only means of criticizing the plantation boss.