You'll have to excuse my fascination with the Mississippi Delta region. Something about it just seems different, like they never made it past the Great Migration (circa 1940). There is one notable exception, Cleveland. Cleveland shows, more than any place else I've seen, how much a university (in this case, Delta State University) impacts the community. There may be other bright spots in the Delta (Greenwood, I'm told, is a bright spot too because of Viking Range being headquartered there; Robinsonville/Casino Center in Tunica County is also a bright spot, but ONLY if you consider that a community). The rest of the Delta (excluding DeSoto County which though it is technically a Delta county, doesn't really count as Delta; and Vicksburg which again doesn't really count as Delta, even though Warren County is a Delta County), is pretty blighted across the board. Having been now to a number of Delta cities/towns/villages, I can vouch for this (Clarksdale, Lyon, Ruleville, Marks, Mound Bayou, Yazoo City...the list goes on). One can see why so many folks had the blues there, and why it thus produced SO much good music.
Cleveland is a nice town, a bit of an anomaly in the Delta if you ask me.
However, the pictures I am posting now weren't taken in Cleveland, rather, they were taken somewhere between Cleveland and Marks. I believe they were mostly taken in Sunflower county, but it is likely that Tallahatchie or Quitman County are also where these pictures were taken.
I will try and describe these pictures the best I can remember them. You'll of course notice, they're all flat. The first one is of of sunflowers I belive (which leads me to believe it was in, you guessed it, Sunflower County). The middle two are of rice fields, I believe. The last one is of corn I believe.
Again, forgive the quality of the pictures, they were taken on my cell phone camera, and I was more focused on driving safely than framing
a picture well.
a picture well.
