Dispatches from Pluto

Working from home for a sixth consecutive week without my usual travel around Arkansas, I’ve found the time to pull books off the shelf and read them more slowly than I did the first time. Such was the case earlier this month with Dispatches from Pluto by British travel writer Richard Grant, who left his New York apartment to move into an old house on the Pluto plantation in the Mississippi Delta. Pluto is between Greenwood and Yazoo City in Holmes County, one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest states in the country.

Grant lived in this remote Delta outpost in 2012-13 and published the book in 2015. Writers have long been fascinated by the Mississippi Delta. Few have ever taken the time to discover the Arkansas Delta on the other side of the Mississippi River, even though it’s far larger geographically and has history, music traditions and a food culture that are just as rich. Having spent four years of my life working on Delta issues in both states for the Delta Regional Authority, I can tell you there’s not much difference. The racial divides, the problems with public education and the pride of the hospitable people on either side of the muddy river are much the same.

My friend Rick Bragg, the Alabama writer who understands the American South about as well as anyone alive, once said: “Some people who come here even say they have tumbled back in time, but I do not think that is true. They have merely slipped sideways into a place they do not recognize and may never understand.”

I consider my beat to be all 75 counties of Arkansas and am often asked why I write so much about the Delta, a part of our state that’s rapidly losing population. It’s because Arkansas would not be Arkansas without it. Those who live elsewhere, especially those far away in prosperous Northwest Arkansas need to know about a region that’s both enchanted and haunted.

As Grant considered his move to the Delta, Greenwood food writer

Martha Foose said of Pluto: “GPS doesn’t work there. It just spins round and around, and that’s the way we like it. They took away our ZIP code because we ran out of people and the postmistress drank too much.”

Another friend warned him: “The Delta is our Haiti. It’s the Third World right in the middle of America. Crime is bad, corruption is bad. It’s 70 percent black and the poverty is hardcore. … And you’ve got a bunch of rich white farmers living the good life right in the middle of it and trying to pretend like everything’s normal. It’s the South. We’re great at denying reality, but the strain of it makes us weird sometimes, and you see a lot of that in the Delta. Lots of eccentrics, boozers, nutballs.”

Grant found all of that and more. He wrote: “There were swaybacked trailers and listing shacks with sheets of plastic on the roof to keep the rain out, among neat little houses with well-kept lawns. Hardeyed young men cruised up and down in flashy new cars and trucks. In a mile we passed seven or eight churches. Drugs, religion and welfare appeared to be the cornerstones of the local economy.”

But he also found families with deep ties to the land along with a fascinating natural environment. Foose told him: “Land is family here. You can’t just move to the Delta like you’d move to a new neighborhood or a new city. You can’t separate the land from the families that have lived on it for generations.”

As he attempted to clear the rats out of the house and the weeds out of the garden, Grant discovered what a verdant land this is. He wrote of frogs that “hopped all over the roads and sang all night. Dragonflies refracted the sunlight through their art-deco wings, and the insects were so thick at night that they pitter-pattered on the truck windshield like raindrops. Raccoons and possums wandered up on the porch. …

“Everywhere life was teeming, fighting, killing, dying, rotting, breeding, gorging itself on the riches of the Delta’s biomass. The coyotes looked huge compared to their scrawny Western cousins. So did the bobcats, raccoons and hawks.”

Grant noted that at least 90 percent of what we now consider the Delta was still covered by virgin hardwood forests at the end of the Civil War. He described it as “the last real frontier in the lower 48 states, a forbidding swamp forest full of immense trees and impenetrable canebrakes, teeming with wolves, bears, panthers, alligators, snakes and disease-carrying insects. Then, by a staggering quantity of effort, most of it exerted by mules and newly freed slaves, the ancient forests were cleared to get at the rich alluvial soil. The swamps were drained and levees built up to keep the rivers from flooding. Great fortunes were made and lost and made again on the new Delta cotton plantations.”

Cotton once dominated the economies of Arkansas and Mississippi. Grant described it as a “fickle, demanding crop that promised to make you rich — if the weather cooperated, and the levee held back the high water, and the dreaded boll weevil didn’t infest the fields, and overproduction didn’t sink the price.”

Almost all of the hardwoods have been cleared and the swamps have been drained now. While cotton is still grown, many fields are filled these days with soybeans, rice and corn. Farmers still watch the weather forecast, hope the levees hold and lose sleep over whether they can pay off their crop production loans. In an era of huge farms and equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, much has changed in the Delta. In other ways, however, life remains the same as it has always been — a gamble in a wild but fertile land.