One summer night in the Mississippi Delta

When my sister asked, “You gonna hike?” I was like, “Are you crazy?”

We were home visiting my parents in the Mississippi Delta, where I grew up. Just walking from the house to the car in the heat of summer in the Delta is enough to give you the vapors. Most days, with the heat index, it feels like at least 100.

But on our third night home, a rainstorm washed everything clean and wiped the temperature down to 76.

The Delta is flat. I did not hike in it growing up. No one did.

I was also too busy hating it to really look at it. I saw and heard so many racist things growing up. I defined myself in opposition to a place where so much ugliness had happened and was still happening.

So when I went up in a hot-air balloon at age 13, I was shocked to love what I saw: a tapestry of green in shades I’d never seen outside a Crayola box, ribbons of rivers snaking through black soil.

In summer, in full-on primordial swamp mode, the Delta is freaking gorgeous.

This night in July, the light was soft, the air almost totally saturated with moisture, the neighborhood a tangle of trees and vines, flowers and grass.

My husband, my sister and I walked up Grand Boulevard and crossed the Tallahatchie Bridge (yes, that one) onto Money Road.

Yes, that Money, Mississippi. The place where 14-year-old Emmitt Till was brutally murdered in 1955 in an act of racial hate.

The historical marker of Till’s death was vandalized just last month. Again.

Money Road is not a place to travel on foot, so we immediately turned onto a dirt road that parallels the Tallahatchie River. Cotton and soybean fields stretched away into the unseeable distance. Despite all the cotton fields I’d seen in my life, it was the first time I’d actually seen cotton plants flowering.

We passed a parked tractor, the glowing sun behind it. A deer bounded along the riverbank, leaping over tangles of brush.

We rounded a bend in the road, tried to remember where it led, and headed back so as not to be wandering around Money Road after dark.

That walk through fields in a Delta pulsing with life and light was one of the highlights of our visit home.

There are many myths about the Delta. Inevitably, they all ignore one of two things.

All of the hate and injustice and poverty and ugliness here was – and is – real.

So is the beauty.