Memphis, Tennessee

Again I have come into the south. I suppose It was in Arkansas. I just don’t think of Missouri as the south. So it must be Arkansas. The signs here are things like Cotton Fields, Pine trees, brown grass, pale brown dirt, black folks.

In southern Illinois the southernmost city is called Cairo (which is pronounced Kay-ro) and is in the marshy confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi river which for some reason is called “Little Egypt.” Cairo, I have learned, thanks to Wikipedia, is further south than Richmond, Virginia and is equidistant from Chicago and Jackson, Mississippi. So this question of where the south begins is such a tricky one. Above is the Mississippi River at Cairo

Down around Memphis this area is really called the mid-south, a good melding of the Midwest and the south. It seems like both and the change from the plains of the Midwest to the plains of the south is really only one of climate and vegetation.

South of Memphis in Mississippi in the area erroneously called The Mississippi Delta I felt like I was really in a place. The Delta is technically an alluvial plain between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. It is mercilessly flat and full of fertile soil growing mostly cotton. This is the great spooky empty poor south of blues music. The place where Robert Johnson legend has it traded his immortal soul to the devil so that he might be the king of delta blues in this life. What a legend. I put the satellite radio onto the blues channel.
North of Drew I passed the large gate and dry grass of the Mississippi State Penitentiary. In the yard two men in black and white striped jump suits picked up trash. No kidding. I was in “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?”
I delivered the cans to a warehouse in Drew. Not the cannery. Just a storage warehouse. The air was perfectly silent all I could hear was my feet on the concrete. Inside was a single black man, a forklift and millions of tin cans stacked 20 feet to the ceiling filling the whole of the space. How many trucks worth?
My next load had two pickups and two drops. Pickup one in Memphis and #2 in Tupelo, Mississippi and drops at K-Mart DCs in Pennsylvania. I headed up to Memphis and spent the night at a pilot a mile up the road from Hamilton Beach where I would pick up in the morning.