nutritious forage for livestock, which enriched the soil with nitrogen-fixing roots. Many useful things become toxic when transplanted out of their native environments.
All of these characteristics no doubt contributed to the way kudzu had grown into a cultural metaphor for Southern society, although no one agreed on the meaning. Maybe it had to do with manners and sugar-sweet hospitality gone wild or because it proved a relentless adversary much like poverty and racism. Probably these things and a whole lot more. Johnson's raspy voice scratched out 'Crossroad Blues,' supposedly his lament after selling his soul to the devil in exchange for his supernaturally superb guitar ability.
Mmm, the sun goin' down, boy Dark gon' catch me here
On the southern outskirts of Yazoo City, signs pointed to 49E veering off to the northeast. The bifurcated Highway 49s would almost parallel each other for another eighty miles, describing a long, thin diamond sliver that hounded much of my early life.
Staying on 49 would take me through Midnight, Silver City, and Belzoni to Indianola at the western point of the diamond, where Saints' Rest, one of the Judge's plantations, was located. A little farther on, 49 passed through Ruleville, where my mother's sister had lived and died, and up through Parchman Prison, the Devil's Island of the Delta. Finally, Highway 49 healed itself with 49E up in Tutwiler, north of Summer, where an all-white jury back in the mid-1950s had acquitted the killers of Emmett Till, who had been tortured to death for the crime of being a black teenager. I was about six years old at the time, but I don't remember much specific about all this other than visits from a lot of strangers and hushed conversations behind the closed doors to the breakfast room in the Judge's house in Itta Bena.
Back then, my mother and I lived in a small apartment attached to the main house the Judge had built for us during the first divorce. Mama and Papa divorced and married each other three times before ultimately each marrying someone else for the fourth time. What Papa and I did together was rare and episodic. I went on trips with him to New Orleans exactly four times, twice when he was working and twice to watch Ole Miss win the Sugar Bowl. We went dove hunting three times and once for ducks. I remember those eight events primarily because they were so very special but also because eight things are not hard to keep in mind.
Despite that, I loved Papa deeply whenever I was with him. I can remember to this day how he always smelled of Old Spice and Camels. The cigarettes railroaded him into a series of long, dark, painful, and humiliating final days living mutely with a tracheotomy where the cancer had eaten his lungs away.
I would like to have known my father better, but he died first.
While it never made up for not having Papa to hug, I enjoyed the run of the Judge's big house and yard with the giant sycamores along the street in front, the massive pecan tree out back, the tulips blazing along the driveway in the spring, a pen full of bluetick hounds, and of course Lena Grayson and Al Thompson, who served as cook/housekeeper and chauffeur/gardener. I owed my life to Al Thompson. As the story goes, after going to a cowboy-movie matinee, I decided to hang myself. I took apart the rope swing on the pecan tree, tied a damn good noose for a five-year-old, stood on my tricycle, and nearly choked to death.
Al Thompson observed the entire thing from the screened-in back porch next to the Judge's kitchen. He called Lena out to watch and she told him to stop me. Al waited until I started to choke, 'If I stop the boy before he gets a taste for things, he'll just try it again some other time when nobody's watching.'
To this day, I fight panic when cinching up a necktie.
Not long after I turned onto 49E in Yazoo City, the four lanes narrowed to two, then plunged from the textured land of kudzu-covered hills to the table-flat elevations of a hundred merging flood plains of the Delta.
Train tracks heavy with long snakes of hoppers, boxcars, flatbeds, and log carriers paralleled the curvy, tree- lined two-lane with no shoulders and barely wide enough for two pickups to pass without taking off the side mirrors. The highway and tracks flirted with the base of the hills until we got to Eden, where 49E ricocheted north- northeast, off toward the heart of the Delta. My new trajectory ran atop a steep berm, which would usually keep the road surface above the waters of creeks and rivers that escaped their banks every winter and spring. Beyond lay cotton in various stages of development.
Water stood in many of the fields, testament to a period of unusually high rainfall this year. The rice and catfish farmers had no trouble, but I saw this would be a horrible year otherwise if the fields didn't dry out. In the higher, drier fields, cotton grew thighhigh and colorful with flowers. As a child, I had marveled how cotton blossoms opened white one day closed up that night, and reopened the next day all deep reddish pink for the next day or so until they dropped off.
Everywhere I looked, the landscape was the same: fields of developing cotton punctuated by rows of trees marking streams, sloughs, and oxbow lakes that could not be cleared for crops. Ironically, in the distance, I saw the dust pointing to vehicles in the higher spots, places where the brutally hot sun baked the surface dry and left the standing water around it a warm, perfect incubator for mosquito larvae.
One of Mama's favorite stories she told so often was how, during her early childhood in the late teens and 1920s, Mr. Durham, who owned one of the two drugstores in town, would mix quinine with Coca-Cola and chocolate syrup as a 'spring tonic' for her and the other children in town as a prophylactic against mosquito-borne disease. The best attempts at mosquito abatement must not have been very successful, because by the time I was a kid, I remember getting vaccination shots for yellow fever, a better behaved but still nasty hemorrhagic cousin of Ebola.
The first time Highway 49E straightened out, a pickup filled my rearview mirror, then accelerated past me and quickly disappeared around the next curve, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the gathering thunderheads to the northeast reaching for the stratosphere even though it was not quite noon. More storms, more rain, more misery.
When the highway broke free of the trees, I was struck by how the thunderheads resembled great angry Confederate privateers with storm-bellied sails and armed with lightning, tornadoes, and hail. I remembered hikes in the woods when the storms would announce themselves first with the distant low rumble of thunder that said, 'Head home.' Then came a blast of cool air like opening God's own icebox, hurtling me into a dead run for home. I'd sprint to escape the march of heavy rain, which sounded like a giant pushing through the leaves and brush. I ran faster and faster, especially when the interval between the lightning and thunder came like my racing heartbeat.
Sometimes I beat the rain, sometimes not. One time when lightning took out a dead tree less than fifty yards away, I almost urinated in my pants. When I was about sixteen, I huddled in a gully as a tornado passed overhead and sounded like every B-52 in the world charging down the runway toward takeoff with a full load and every engine straining. I'm fine if I never hear that again.
With the past ringing in my head, I spotted a small settlement ahead scattered on both sides of the highway with a water tower, a gas station, and a store with a driveway of loose beige gravel. I slowed as my truck passed old black men in blue overalls sitting still on the sagging porches of gray, weather-bleached shacks with rusty tin roofs. Three graybrown pigs rooted along the road shoulder. In the distance, a dust contrail plumed across a field, pointing at the pickup that had passed me.
Once past the settlement, I drove like a drunk dodging dead possums, dogs, skunks, raccoons-passing more red meat in the highway than you'd find at the Piggly Wiggly's butcher case. Even with the air-conditioning on recirculate, I could tell some of the animals had been fermenting in the hot sun for days.
I was making good time up 49E, chasing heat mirages that looked like fleeing desert ponds in the road ahead and thinking about how Talmadge was most likely the key to this whole mess, when my cell phone rang. I hoped it was Jasmine, but when I looked at the caller ID, I recognized it as Rex's. I turned the CD's volume down.
'Hey, man,' I said.
'Hey y'own damn self, asshole. What's the big idea of coming to my town and not stopping by? What am I going to tell Anita?'
As tense as I felt, I couldn't help but smile. They had to be the oddest couple. Rex's wife, Anita, originally from India, was an accomplished physician from a royal family that still lived in the old country. Rex was a genius with ready hands, one of the smartest people I had ever met, who managed to hide his intelligence behind a rough physical style that, outwardly at least, favored fists over philosophy.
'Tell her I'm buying y'all a big fancy dinner when I get back to Jackson.'
'That'll be a start.' Rex laughed.
Static filled an awkward silence.
'So what can I do for you?' Rex said finally
