Interment

Somewhere in the Delta, down Mississippi Highway 61, is a little town that is trying hard to keep itself clean and up, when it looks like it has become not so much a town anymore, but perhaps a residential neighborhood. . . nothing that looks like a business, or businesses anymore. The train depot, probably constantly busy 50 years ago, is a weather worn, boarded up wooden building. I caught a glimpse of it and yearned to find the owners and beg them to let me in, to let me walk through the small building and see if I could feel the rumble of the trains and hear the voices of passengers lost since forgotten.

We made our way following car after car to a gravel road, and in the year 2011, we passed shotgun shacks. . . weathered, looking very drafty and worn. . . crooked even on their foundations . . . with DirecTV dishes attached to the side. . . tiny porches. . . a truck and two men talking . . . and on one porch, 3 children playing. They stood as we drove by in the funeral procession, smiling and waving.

The lovely next to me said what I was thinking. "Its' 2011. Those children live in shacks."

Who would have thought? It was a surreal experience, driving past them in a rental car, down a dirt and gravel road, with them playing on a porch that was probably not six feet by two feet.

A church sat in the distance, looking for all the world as if it were abandoned. A cousin walking up told her that this was her Daddy's church, where he went as a child. I saw 3 tombstones, fairly new, sitting right by the gravel road. And then we walked across mud and stepped into a path cut through dead grass that stood 6 feet tall. The tractor was parked to the side in the grass, and all around us was dead, white grass six feet tall.

Approximately 20 feet in the view opened to a farm field, and an extra swath of grass cut down for the tent and chairs. Within 10 feet of the new gravesite was wrought iron, twisted and rusted, laying on the ground, almost unidentifiable, if not for the finial tops. A tiny tombstone laying down on the grass gave the date 1916.

I could not find signs of an organized grave yard. I wondered if there were other graves hid in the tall grass. It was the most . . . forlorn . . . lonely . . . plot I have seen. Things didn't seem to match - a baby's grave from 1916 next to a new plot from 2011. . . head high grass, next to a farm pasture, living people who would have been in sight of a church that seemed dead, if they could have seen the church for the too tall weeds.

She would later tell me that there is another portion of a cemetery on another side of the church, she, too, didn't understand this separated plot.

I wanted so hard to try and take pictures to capture the emotion of the grass, the church, the gray sky, and the children playing on the shanty of a porch. But even the thought of a picture seemed intrusive. And I feel my words fail at capturing the remoteness, the out of touchness of this place. Somehow lost in the time that the Delta should have moved past.