To Understand Mississippi, I Went to Spain
September 24, 2024 at 12:44AM“As a son of Mississippi, particularly a son of old, land-owning Mississippi, I have an obligation to understand what it means to inherit this dirt, and to pass it on to my children.” In this short but powerful essay, Wright Thompson travels to Seville, Spain, to see in person the first map of the land he comes from, drawn by a Spanish cartographer named Alonso de Santa Cruz. It’s a 480-year-old map not only of the land on which his family’s farm has sat for more than a century, but a place full of US history—and violence.
Many, many volumes have been written about the Delta, and I think I’ve read them all. None really captured for me what it felt like to claim it as home, to have a firm grasp on the economics of the place, to understand the alluvial insidiousness that drove our history. Often the very act of setting a story in Mississippi creates a portrait of a puppet but accidentally erases the strings. Mississippi didn’t make itself; it was shaped by far-flung investors and speculators, by a river of global capital flowing through it. Malcolm X famously said that everything south of Canada is Mississippi. I liked to ask myself how close was too close to live to the barn? Fifty feet? A mile? A thousand miles? Seeing Mississippi requires seeing all of its history all at once, more of a collage than a chronology.
And that required mapping a buried world. Finding out who owned the land, then and now, understanding how capital moved in and out of my home, following the profit. As I collected dozens of maps of the Delta, I imagined uncovering the very first one, the one whose blank spaces were an animating call to commerce and arms—to all the people and forces unleashed on a place that would one day be called Mississippi.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/09/23/to-understand-mississippi-i-went-to-spain/
via IFTTT
Watch