Adventures in the South - Vicksburg to Lafayette

Now then, where were we?  Ah yes, Vicksburg.  For anyone new to the Adventures in the South travelogue down the Mississippi, you can go back to the beginning with the Prologue, or check where we left off with the Clarksdale to Vicksburg episode.

Vicksburg is generally recognised as the foot of the Mississippi Delta, the fertile plain spreading out from the Big Muddy.  It’s not a Delta in the classic sense, like the Nile Delta for example, occurring when a river branches out as it nears the sea.  What’s more, Vicksburg isn’t strictly on the Mississippi any more, having been left behind when the river changed its course decades ago.

Waking up in the Andrew Jackson Suite of the Anchuca B&B, we had Sunday breakfast in the airy dining room.  I decided to give grits another go, this time of the cheese variety, and it has to be said they were at least more palatable than the ones I’d sampled in Denny’s back in Memphis.

Just some of the local attractions in Lafayette that we didn't see

And then we were off, aiming for Lafayette, a couple of hundred miles away in Louisiana.  First stop though, was a Walmart on the outside of town.  I’d mislaid my shaver, so needed a replacement, and we took the opportunity to pick up a spare holdall as well.  And yes, the place sold guns, in all shapes and sizes.

Continuing down Highway 61, we stopped for lunch in a baking hot Baton Rouge, then took a sharp turn west to cover the last 50 plus miles along Highway 10 to Lafayette.  For a substantial chunk of this the road was on stilts over the bayou, with signs periodically advertising the presence of alligators in the area, which I think was designated a nature reserve or similar.  It was a dramatic example of the effort necessary to negotiate the swampy southern land.

Approaching Lafayette in the late afternoon, we were running low on petrol, and looking to the south there were dark clouds and flashes of lightning heading our way.  And sure enough, before we could reach a gas station, a tropical downpour arrived.  If you’ve ever visited Disneyworld, this was the same kind of rainstorm that seems to hit the Orlando area metronomically at 5pm each day in summer – short lived, but torrential.  And although it soon began to ease, it was still a bit disconcerting when you were struggling to find your way around town – which was a bit of a nuisance, as Lafayette was the one place on this trip where we hadn’t booked accommodation in advance.

After taking shelter and filling the tank at a gas station, we groped our way towards downtown, expecting that to be the obvious location for a hotel or two, and tripped over a Courtyard by Marriott.  Initially I went in just to see if they had a local map, but after a swift consultation we decided to take a room for the night.  We were feeling tired and grubby after the drive, and all too ready to avail ourselves of the very hospitable young staff, a decent room, and even laundry facilities.

The idea behind visiting Lafayette had been to seek out some Cajun music, this being the heartland of the style apparently.  This would turn out to be a bust though.  After having a rest, dealing with the laundry and getting freshened up, we emerged into the lobby looking decidedly more human.  “Hey, y’all clean up real good!” laughed the receptionist, which said it all about how bedraggled we must have looked on arrival.

We ordered a cab to take us downtown to a likely sounding restaurant, and had a drink while we waited.  And waited.  And waited.  A good 45 minutes later the cab finally turned up – and got us to the restaurant just in time to be told that the kitchen was closing.  In fact it seemed like the centre of Lafayette was closing all round, with the exception of a large sports bar, where we ordered a couple of beers and considered our options.

Cajun music was no longer on the agenda, we reckoned.  Options to eat out looked limited.  Our planning for Lafayette, we concluded, had been sadly lacking.  So we cut our losses, got a cab back to the hotel, and got fed and watered on a bottle of red wine and a couple of burgers and fries, while the hotel staff gave us tips for our next destination – New Orleans.

It may sound like a total cock-up, but it was one of those bizarre episodes you look back on and laugh.  Like WC Fields visiting Philadelphia, we’ve been to Lafayette.  It was closed.

Adventures in the South - Clarksdale to Vicksburg

If you haven’t read any of the ‘Adventures in the South’ series before, it’s a travelogue from a trip me and my better half took down the Mississippi Delta back in 2013.  So if you want to go back to the beginning, here’s the Prologue.

Or if you want to remind yourself where we’d got to, here’s where we left off, with Clarksdale Part 2.

Sculpture, hoodoo style

Up in the morning to head further south to Vicksburg, but first we wanted to check out the Shack Up Inn, a couple of miles outside town.  The Inn is a rather clever business venture, turning a plantation into a niche motel by offering actual shotgun shacks – somewhat modernised - as chalets for visitors to stay in.

The inn had been our original choice of accommodation for Clarksdale, but we’d given up on the idea when their website indicated that it wasn’t possible to make one night bookings at the weekends.  Too late, we were informed by local guru Roger Stolle that this was a measure designed to dissuade locals from renting shacks for parties, and that international visitors are generally welcome for one night.

But despite missing out, we decided to give it a look anyway.  On one level, it’s a bit of a dubious proposition, selling the experience of plantation life as a tourist attraction.  But it still offers some insights.

There’s a spookiness about the disused railway running past the place, once upon a time presumably a vital link for shipping supplies in and cotton out.  The shacks themselves underline the spartan nature of plantation experience for African American slaves. And then there’s the bottle tree – an interesting piece of hoodoo, voodoo, or what you will, in which coloured bottles are hung on the branches of a bush or tree in order to attract and catch evil spirits.

As we’re wandering around, a couple emerge from one of the shacks, and right away we recognise each other as fellow customers from Red’s Blues Club the night before.  It turns out they’re an Anglo-American couple on honeymoon, making their way down to New Orleans like ourselves.  But whereas we’d headed off from Red’s around midnight, they’d stuck around for Anthony “Big A” Sherrod’s next set.  According to the groom, Big A’s brother - a guy rather bigger than Big A himself - had turned up to sit in on guitar.  “And then it turned into a crunking party”, he said.  They were sitting by the door, and when Red decided to nick out and take the air for a minute he actually turned to the English lad and asked him to pick up the admission from any new arrivals.

Your modern day, all mod cons shotgun shack

Damn.  Party night in Clarksdale, and we’d only given it half measures.  Our new friends let us have a squint at their shack, which had evidently been modernised by someone with a sense of irony.  The place is what an English estate agent (a realtor, US readers) would call “compact and bijou”, with an especially snug shower cubicle resplendent with a rough concrete floor.  And while the shack has a colour TV, they tell us that it only shows a blues music channel.

And so off we go, down Highway 61.  Our next stop is a little place called Rolling Fork.  This is actually the birthplace of Muddy Waters, but to be honest I’m not one for going and looking at birthplace markers.  We do pop in to the little town museum though, a one room affair overseen by two little old lady volunteers so delighted to have visitors that we’re scared they might lock us in.

The museum celebrates Muddy, of course, but also recounts the story about President Teddy Roosevelt that gave rise to the ‘Teddy Bear’.  Back in the early years of the 20th century Roosevelt, who had cultivated a reputation for being an outdoorsman, went on a hunting trip in the vicinity of Rolling Fork.  Apparently he had a notion to shoot a bear, so his guide obliged by catching one – and how you do that is an interesting question – and tying it to a tree for Roosevelt to shoot.  Roosevelt, to his credit, found the idea of shooting a trapped bear appalling, and ordered its release.  A political cartoon drawing on the incident attracted the attention of an enterprising manufacturer of toy bears, who asked Roosevelt if he could name his bears “Teddy Bears” in recognition of the incident – thereby launching one of the most successful marketing wheezes of all time.

Tipped off by the museum biddies, we drive a few miles down the road and stop for lunch on a porch by the bayou at the Onward Store, where we get catfish and fries washed down with real lemonade.

Then it really is off down the road to Vicksburg, where our plan is to stop off at the National Military Park on the way into town, a significant memorial to the Civil War, with cemeteries for the dead of both the Union and the Confederacy.  Situated at the foot of the Mississippi Delta, with high bluffs overlooking the river, Vicksburg was a crucial area during the Civil War.  As Lincoln himself put it, “Vicksburg is the key.  The war can never be brought to a close until the key is in our pocket.”  But as we drive in on Highway 61, it appears we’re on the wrong side of the very large park to gain access.  The afternoon is wearing on, so we cruise around the pretty-looking town centre, and then head to our accommodation.

We’re staying at a B&B called Anchuca, just up the hill from the town centre.  For the benefit of British readers, for whom a Bed & Breakfast is at the lower end of the accommodation spectrum, I should explain that in the States B&B’s are more upmarket, boutique propositions.  So boutique that in this case we have a suite of rooms, the Jackson Suite, that is named after Andrew Jackson, the Confederate President who stayed in it following his release from prison after the end of the war, and gave a speech to friends from the balcony.

Heading out again on foot in the late afternoon heat, we go for a wander round town.  This must be a thoroughly alien notion to locals, as a fella walking along the other side of the street looks over at us, smiles, and calls out, “Hi folks.  Enjoying your vacation?”  Mad dogs and Scots people, it seems, go out in the midsummer sunshine.

And it has to be said they’ve got a point.  It’s not just the heat, it’s the humidity, which seems to have been ratcheted up a notch or few since we left Clarksdale.  So we potter around town picking up bits and pieces of history, and abandon plans to head back to Anchuca and freshen up before coming out again for the evening.  What would be the point when we’d be melting again within ten minutes?

Monsour's - Southern hospitality comes with the drinks

Instead we camp out in 'Monsour’s at the Biscuit Company', a bar-cum-eatery where we get ourselves well fed and watered for the remainder of the evening.  We make friends with the bar staff and the owner, and chat about the South, and I have enough to drink to get up and do a bad karaoke version of Sam Cooke’s ‘Bring It On Home To Me’.  At the end of the night the owner insists on one of the bar staff giving us a lift up the road, because apparently us Brits are being naïve to think it would be safe to walk home in the dark - but it's incredibly hospitable of them.

So we don’t encounter any live music in Vicksburg.  But since then it’s become apparent to me that the centre of town isn’t where you’ll find that action in a lot of towns like Vicksburg.  Instead the key venue for musicians like the local hero and internationally successful Mr Sipp is the Ameristar Casino a little way south of town.  That’s where the money is, but unfortunately it doesn’t really fit the romantic preconceptions of blues pilgrims from afar, does it?