Drove into a small Mississippi town after dark. Don’t know anyone except a friend of a friend, a kind photographer named Birney Imes, who has offered to let me crash at the apartment above his family’s newspaper business and loan me some photo equipment tomorrow.
Birney has released several excellent books of Mississippi photographs, including one on Mississippi juke joints simply called Juke Joint, another on the glacial pace of changing race relations at a now-long-gone roadside restaurant called Whispering Pines, and another book of Mississippi photographs called Partial to Home.
Birney gives me a friendly tour of the building, shows me where I will stay, hands me the keys, then heads home. I’m alone in a big old newspaper building, presumably surrounded by Southern ghosts, hopefully most of them content.
I decide to walk off the three-hour drive and make myself tired enough to sleep. You have to have brass balls to walk around a small Mississippi town by yourself late at night. Even I know that both the citizens and the law enforcement instantly spot you as an outsider, with the wrong clothes, the wrong shoes, and the wrong gait and body movements. You ain’t from around here, boy. If the police stop you and see your California driver’s license, it’s all over, you’re gonna get messed with. I stop at a gas station and buy some snacks. Get weird stares from the other people in line. Where did “he” (me) come from?
I stumble across famous playwright Tennessee Williams’s first home, the house he was born in. Which begs the question, why wasn’t he called Mississippi Williams?
The sidewalks are sloping, the gothic houses are extremely Southern gothic, and the large old churches are many. Somewhere nearby there must be an excellent graveyard or two, but even I can’t bring myself to go walking through them this late at night by myself.
I make it back to the newspaper building with a couple of Little Debbie snacks. Birney has an upstairs office decorated with excellent photos, old juke joint signs, folk art, and an antique bed where I will lay my head tonight. It pays to know the right people, and I amaze myself sometimes just how far this musical goodwill journey has taken me. Thanks again to Scott Barretta, who put me in touch with Birney. It all worked out.
Tomorrow, I’ll drive half an hour to another Mississippi town and photograph a whole bunch of Mosrite guitars for the Mosrite book I’m working on. Gonna be hot. Gonna sweat. For now, I’m going to try to not let the ghosts interrupt my sleep.
See several more photos and a video at Deke’s original Facebook post!
