The week before Christmas had been haunted in Mississippi. I spent the first night in an RV ghost town. Grand Gulf was once, briefly — “when cotton was king” — with Natchez and Vicksburg, one of the major river ports. It was known for its culture and theatre scene.

The heyday came before Army Corp flood control engineering and the river flooded wiping out half the town just when things were looking good. A few years later a tornado erased half of what was left. 

Twenty years later, as Grant tried to deny use of the Mississippi to the Confederacy, Admiral David Farragut and the Union Navy burned what was left of Grand Gulf to the ground.

Now there’s an empty church, a few relics, a cannon, a water wheel mill, and an RV park without any people. It was like a sci-fi set where everyone mysteriously vanishes.

Vicksburg on the bluffs overlooking the river is the site of a sobering cemetery.  Row after row of gray and white grave markers. Dead soldiers willing and clearly able to die. Their duty.

The weather, even for Mississippi at that time of year, was remarkably warm. The only signs of life I saw were deer hunters, duck hunters, and crappie fishermen.  In Oxford, Ole' Miss was crushing Tulane in a bowl game. 

Oxford, Natchez, and Vicksburg have been restored, painted, and repaired to resemble the glory days, but most of the small towns are reduced to a Dollar Store, a gas station, and dusty untethered dogs wandering the streets. The Delta looks, well, bluesy. Empty storefronts, solitary modest houses next to winter empty cotton fields.

 Clarksdale, home of the Blues Museum, was closed up tight. As quiet as a cypress swamp.  No open clubs. No shops selling cheap guitars. Not a postcard available, but ample parking even for a van. I finally found one place open and tried to get a bite to eat. The woman behind the counter said all she could sell me was some chicken salad to make my own sandwich if I had my own bread. I asked about three sweet potato pies sitting on one of the tables, but they were spoken for. Some lucky soul was alive and going to get fed on Christmas.

At Drew, the home of the Staples Singers, I was drawn off the main road by a “Mississippi Blues Trail” sign. The town was so faded and tired the stop signs had paled to pure white. I couldn’t tell you whether any of the stores on Main Street were in business or not. I didn’t see a customer in the three hours I was parked drawing what I’m pretty sure was the remains of a grain elevator.

The police were still on duty. The town cop stopped and kindly told me I had left my headlights on and if I didn’t turn them off I might need a jump. There might not have been enough juice in the whole town to get me started again. He waved and smiled every time he passed for the next three hours. I’ve got to say he had a lively smile and I felt like if I needed one I might have a friend in Drew.  

In Ruleville, just south of Drew, there was another Blues Trail sign so I followed the trail and it led me to the parking lot of the Dockery Baptist Church. Behind it faded lettering on a farm building declared this to be Dockery Farms. But the cribbing holding it aloft was freshly whitewashed and substantial. The tin roof had some rust, but looked serviceable and every line was plumb.

 I read a marker saying this was, according to BB King, the home of The Blues. I settled in to try and make a drawing, but only got the rough lines blocked in before I ran out of light. The church lot started to fill, so I pulled behind one of the out buildings and decided to park, spend the night, and finish in the morning.

Maybe it was the spirit of the Delta, but I kept hearing ghosts of old blues tunes floating around in the Mississippi night air. I was haunted.  I knew it wasn’t choir music coming from the church or even elevated oratory from the pulpit. The sound was just on the periphery of my senses. 

 “Did you hear that, Dolly?”

She wasn’t saying, or maybe she didn’t care about or believe in the supernatural.  I finally got to sleep and the next day finished the drawing in the morning light.

Now that I wasn’t pressed for time or daylight, Dolly and I made a more leisurely examination of the site.  

I read about how Henry Sloan, a sharecropper, had taught Charlie Patton, one of the first recorded blues singers, to play, and how he later taught Pops Staples.

Charlie was eventually run off by the overseer after seducing more than one of the other sharecropper’s wives. I got to see a supposedly working model of a 100- year-old Murray cotton gin. And from the gin building I got to hear the ghostly voice of Charlie Patton singing the blues as a soundtrack behind a short documentary film endlessly looping the story of Dockery Farms. It was a familiar sound.  I had been hearing it all night long.