Thanksgiving

For the last several years – since I’ve been working on my father’s family history – I come home from Thanksgiving family reunion wishing I had taken more time to look around at courthouse and library records while there. So, this year I planned it better. I took off work earlier than usual for Thanksgiving in order to get to some courthouses in southeast Arkansas before the holiday. After a long drive through Mississippi, I hit Lake Village, Chicot County, Arkansas, about 3pm. I picked up a new state map at the beautiful visitor’s information center – it is like someone’s wooden vacation house with a huge deck built partially over the lake – and then drove on to the courthouse to look for evidence from the past of my ancestors in this county.

But my move into the past had already happened out on the highway, along about the dip in the geography that happens when you come into Greenwood, just before you get to the Yazoo River. I haven’t looked at a geological map of Mississippi, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that is one of the borders of the Mississippi River Delta region.

Every November, for as many years as I can remember, that bleak, gray-green landscape spreads as flat as water out before us on the drive to see my grandparents. On either side of the car, converging perspective lines of cotton or soybean or rice stubble rattle past. And above us, dominating our view on every side, was–-is--the umbrella of sky with whatever scape it was bathed in. In November, it is often dark rain clouds on the horizon. When you have that much unbroken sight, you can see the weather going on simultaneously at different ends of the land. Threatening clouds over a curtain of rain soaks a couple of miles over there, and, as if watching time travel before you, rays of light break through clouds on this side, clearing and drying fields. A very old memory comes up of riding in the car with my Granny, informing her with my characteristic dead certainty that those rays beaming through the clouds were “God’s light.”

Also breaking the miles of flat fields is the wreckage of ancient agricultural equipment. Once, in the 1980s, I was driving my grandfather around Desha County. He saw one of those wrecks ahead of us and asked me to stop, and then asked me to take a picture of him with it, which I thought was strange at the time. Later I came across a much older photo that he must have taken himself of the same kind of equipment on the side of the road. A friend of his told me that the machine was a diesel powered water pump for irrigating crops. Granddaddy, who could fix any motor, and earned his living that way for a good part of his life, appreciated machines. I think by taking the photo, he was making a portrait of the old machinery, like a family photo, and a reminder of the old life.

Driving down from the hills into the delta lands is like a hypnotist’s cue for me to move into the past, mine and others. The long low land uncurls itself before me in an unending scroll of old stories, old memories, the memories of others, the memories of the dead that I and my family now must remember for them.