1 post tagged “cemetary”

Last Sunday, I set upon a quest to travel the breadth of the state in search of the quintessential South, and I found it, just where I thought it was. Mississippi Hwy 8 passes east-west through Cleveland. Far to the east, near where it intersects the Natchez Trace, this particular road reveals a particularly good slide show of the what makes the South, the South. This is the land where semi-trucks, old bulldozers, and worn-out school buses go to die, while others stand guard, brightly glinting, over the memory.

The lighting was terrible for the most part, being extremely bright and from a low angle, but for some shots it particularly accentuated the glint of metal, glass, and water contrasted with dull brown grass or rust. There were indeed people along the way worthy of my quest, but one -- a scruffy, mulleted white man of about 40 shopping for a tombstone for his recently departed mother -- declined to be photographed, and the other -- a grandmotherly black woman in purple dress and matching hat chatting after church in a parking lot, I was too shy to photograph and it only occurred to me afterwards how simple it would have been to ask her permission. A large man in a big white pick-up truck pulled off at the derelict cotton gin to see what I was doing. "Just taking pop shots?" he asked. "Yeah, is that alright?" I asked. "Sure," he said, remarking out loud how broken-down the old gin had become. "Y'all have a nice trip," he wished me, and drove off.