Mississippi

The Bridge over the Mississippi River at Natchez is a matter-of-fact crossing, two massive steel spans cantilevered between Adams County, Mississippi, and Concordia County, Louisiana. The bridge is not much different from river crossings I've encountered elsewhere, as far north as Minnesota; here in the South, of course, the water is very wide and has taken on a dull gray-brown cast. The silver is from the muggy, slightly overcast sky, the brown from mud washed in by recent rains. I don't see any of the canoes, rafts, warships or steamboats of river lore, only a barge pushed by a tug off in the distance to the south. Eastbound on U.S. 84 from Vidalia, Louisiana, just over the bridge, it's a quick left onto Business 84, two lanes that wind up a steep incline and through two weathered imitation Greek columns. The columns I take as an unofficial welcome to and boundary of the city of Natchez. From where I stand, on a splash of gravel alongside the road, the river reflects like quicksilver. The bridge presents an unremarkable Friday afternoon scene, an early summer coming and going of commuters, commercial vehicles and people arriving or leaving for the weekend -- a day like most others in a small town in North America. For me, though, the just-completed crossing is of tremendous consequence: I have gone over a river from familiar places, and into the state of Mississippi. If you look on a globe, or a good world map, between North and South America and between the Atlantic and the Pacific, you will see the Gulf of Mexico. Then, locating the city of New Orleans at the northern edge of this body of water, you can trace the ninetieth meridian north toward Memphis. The line you trace, between the thirtieth and thirty-fifth parallels, will roughly bisect the twentieth state in the Union, the poorest by most measures, a jurisdiction of eighty-two counties and 47,716 square miles, home to something over two million citizens. As your finger slides you'll pass place-names like McComb, Poplarville and Natchez, Philadelphia, Clarksdale and Vicksburg, each name searing a scream in the minds and memories of people like me, black Americans. Mississippi can be thought of as one of the most prominent scars on the map of this country. When you trace the ninetieth meridian from New Orleans to Memphis you're fingering a scar, and that's why I arrive in Natchez with some trepidation. I intend to explore that scar. There is something different about Mississippi, something almost unspeakably primal and vicious; something savage unleashed there that has yet to come to rest. Of the forty martyrs whose names are inscribed in the national Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, nineteen were killed in Mississippi. How was it that half who died did so in one state? I am a black person, a black male, a colored man, a Negro and, sometimes, certainly sometimes in Mississippi, a nigger. For the longest time, when I was young, the fact that I had been assigned those labels didn't much affect me. I grew up in working- and middle-class neighborhoods in midwestern suburbs, where people were, most of the time, polite and, most of the time, kept what prejudices they had to themselves. I was born in 1960, in Aurora, Illinois, and as I came to social awareness it seemed to me that large parts of America's tragic history were finally being overcome. Mississippi was, to me, something we blacks had gotten free of, washed into the past. I grew up on Rosewood, a street in Aurora that parallels the Fox River, which runs to the Illinois, which runs to the Mississippi. As a kid I often looked at maps of Illinois, of the Midwest, of the Mississippi Basin, or sat on the banks of the Fox watching the river run south. I'd think about Mississippi, the recent family trip down or the one soon to come, and wonder if I could canoe all the way there. I remember the first time I felt palpable fear, the night Martin Luther King was killed. IWalton, Anthony is the author of 'Mississippi' with ISBN 9780679446002 and ISBN 0679446001.