2.14.2011

Jackson

We started our day in Jackson at the Mississippi Museum of Art. They were still setting up for "Orient Expressed" exhibition, that we had been hoping to see, but we were able to tour the permanent collection of Pre-Columbian ceramics. The ceramics, most of them ritual vessels, were incredibly well preserved, and we were amazed with the characters and the animals and the details of the pieces created between 500 B.C. - 1500 A.D. We also toured the museum's permanent collection of "The Mississippi Story", that included some outstanding pieces like photographs by Eudora Welty, a self portrait of Artist Randy Hayes with Eudora Welty, and a George Innes landscape. But, nothing out-shined Sulton Roger's wooden, elongated, huge toothed, fire etched moustached 'Two Blues Singers'.

We stopped downtown to see the old capital building, modeled after the Capital building in Washington D.C., and a few highlights of the Mississippi Blues Heritage Trail. The massive stone Capital, and the surrounding City Offices and pillared Court House, were impressive in their authority. But traveling down Historic Farish Street told a very different story.

Once the hub of educational, political, religious, economic, cultural and entertainment activities, the area takes its name from Walter Farish, a former slave who settled the street and whose children and great grandchildren continued to live there for decades. Now, empty brick shells line the entire street, wires and pipes hanging from the ceilings. Windows replaced with plywood, and most of those broken. A Birdland shop sign lying against a brick wall. Gutted and charred small houses were now filled with stray cats. The entire neighborhood looked like it had been ravaged by tornados, bombed, burnt and then flooded. Even in it's disrepair and decay, however, there was something very beautiful about it. A kind of excited, hopeful energy that still hangs about.

Soundtrack:
MISSISSIPPI MUD - James Cavanaugh / Harry Barris
"When the sun goes down, the tide goes out,
The people gather 'round and they all begin to shout,
"Hey! Hey! Uncle Dud,
It's a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi Mud.
It's a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi Mud".

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