I’ve thought a lot about home during the quarantine. The place and the idea. The way it calls to us, and the way the pulse of daily life can sometimes drown it out.
My home is near the courthouse square in Oxford, Mississippi, a vibrant modern college community. That’s where we wake up and make scrambled eggs for our toddler. But I’m from a nearby place called Clarksdale, birthplace of the Delta blues, the town that gave the world the likes of Muddy Waters, Sam Cooke, and Nate Dogg—a place where on a clear night I can hear plantation blues, the protest soul of Stax Records, and the heavy sound of G-Funk LA all mix in the open air.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, my wife, Sonia, and I took our two-year-old daughter, Wallace, on a drive into the Delta. The plan was to sit somewhere for a picnic. We’d stop in Clarksdale and pick up some takeout at an old-school Italian roadhouse called Ramon’s, drive out in the country, spread out a blanket, and just be there for a while.
Clarksdale is 64 miles by car from Oxford, but it feels farther than that. It feels like something out of a novel or a play. In fact, it is. Tennessee Williams grew up in my neighborhood. Two doors to the left of the house where we moved when I was five was a big white mansion. The woman who lived in it was named Blanche.
Heading into town, I turned off of the highway and we bumped along a busted country road. We looked out the right window of the car and saw a nearly burned down house, still smoldering. A soot-stained chimney reached into the blue sky. Out the left window, a tall white grave marker sat in the middle of a pecan orchard. The son of a prominent local farmer had recently died of an opioid overdose. I worked for the farmer a long time ago, and he’s a good man, funny and generous. I saw a bench situated next to the grave, and in my mind I could see the outline of the farmer and his wife, year after year, growing old on that bench, watching leaves come and go on the trees.
“It’s a town full of ghosts,” Sonia said as we arrived.
That’s Clarksdale.