Sundays I sometimes drive to Rankin County. There’s this one old strip right off Commerce, what I think of as the back way, that takes you by the old places that shut down once Pearl and Madison became places people actually wanted to get to, and once the highways and the big boxes finally killed the last of the family shops.
Jack’s Tamale House has long since closed but its sign is beautiful and blue, even if the red in the Coca-Cola part has started to fade.
I don’t know why I love these places, but I do, and it’s been my blood longer than I can remember: I like old places, as much as I like how you can work on old cars and the heft of vinyl, the smell of old hardbacks.
I am always trying to get pictures of this great old rusted trestle right off of State, striding over bits of Pearl River. I am always too damn lazy or scared to get out and hike around to get a good angle on it. There are at least two major reasons for this: one, at thirty-one years old I am sick of sweating, and it’s busted Mercury out there lately. I would move up North for the chance to wear scarves more days per year and not ruining the collars and armpits of all my shirts from June to September if I did not think that it meant the actual whoring of my God-given soul and that I would cry everyday from the shame of it all.
Second, I am scared of the hobo camps that line Pearl River. I know this is at best an urban myth or maybe even a lie but I think that the Diplomat told me about seeing signs of a hobo camp by the Pearl once, even if it was up around by the Belhaven part of town, but the last thing I want is to have a rusted, stolen Swiss Army knife with a broken corkscrew jabbed repeatedly, somewhat ineffectively into my screaming throat. However, if truth be told I believe that that story may have been told in the wee hours of a weekday with the Diplomat holding a glass of Scotch with a name that had too many vowels all crammed together next to each other.
But if there’s one thing I know about hunting down good photos, it’s to take no extra film or any water or anything like that: you know, just park the car and climb an embankment and start walking down some train tracks with a Polaroid camera bouncing around your neck.
Still: the cellular phone has destroyed the art of contemplation. Just as I am beginning to really sweat—so that it’s dropping onto my sunglasses, which really pisses me off—my dad calls. He is at the hospital, tells me my great aunt is doing well, and I tell him I am mailing him a set of Moonlighting DVDs, a show that we used to watch a lot when I was growing up, and that we both like immensely. “It’s said a lot, but the reason those shows were so good is because of the dialogue, just like an old movie,” my dad says, and I agree, and invoke His Girl Friday, which is my favorite movie on a whole lot of days, and then my aunt stirs in her room, two hundred and fifty miles away, and my father tells me he needs to go.
Yet: it is hard to imagine that one is in a scene from “The Body,” or if you prefer, Stand by Me, when one is walking forty feet over dried-up river bed on a train track talking on a telephone.
At this point I am in the empty concrete skyscraper that is Interstate 55: four stories high, the thrum thrum thrum of the traffic above echoing in my your chest. For some reason I think of this old Star Wars comic where on this one planet a whole city was built in the bones of old wrecked sailboats, what looked like pirate ships to me, coated with moss and riddled with secrets. You could build a whole city just up under these highways, and the folks above would never know it, skimming by at seventy and eighty miles per hour.
I finally get up to where the river almost is, and you can see most of the City of Jackson. I’ve never seen it from here, and the photos don’t help much: there was so much sunshine it soaked the film, rendering most of the images burned free of details. I remember that I could see the green-gray metal room of the Old Capitol, but the Polaroids say I couldn’t; I think I’ll ignore them. I was happy to learn that when I turned to my left I could see the back-end of the busted Ross Neely trailers I took fotos of a few weeks ago.
I skittered down an embankment made up of fist-sized gravel and covered with six-foot high weeds, cussing that I wasn’t wearing knee-high tube socks for the first time in ages. I wanted a picture of that bridge pretty badly, but after stumbling through bright white sand and knocking down weeds for a few minutes I didn’t think I was going to get any closer without some serious effort, and I was soaking wet, and wanted a drink of water pretty badly.
I settled for the view I had and promising to come back on a cooler day, more properly dressed, with like a machete or maybe a shotgun or something similar to beat back the weeds.
I look at the water and wonder if this is still named Pearl River, or if maybe this is some tributary, and if so, what it is named. Then I remember that Eudora story where one fellow laughs says “everybody knows Pearl River is named Pearl River,” and I toss a little rock at the water, trying to skip it but only getting two. I think for a second about floating a Polaroid in the water, and who maybe could find it, years later, but then worry a fish or bird or something could eat it and get sick or that maybe it has some kind of a secret evil chemical in it and I decide against it.
There were no signs of hobos, nor of hobo-residency. I did see three little kids off in the distance, bouncing along the weedy dunes with a couple of fishing poles. I wondered if they had caught any fish, and then I looked at the pond-puddles of the high summer Pearl, wanting a drink of water real badly, and thought better of it before I’d ever even really thought about it.
On the walk back I picked up a rusted railroad spike out of a pile and held it with my shirt the whole way back, because it was so hot it burned my hand at first and I had to throw it down. I got rust stains on my shirt from where I held it, but it was just a Target shirt and I have two others that look just like it anyway.
I had parked next to this run-down and shut-down gas station that had one of those super-express module things where the person was stuck in it like a prisoner, or an experiment. I felt bad at whoever had to work in the thing and then I felt bad that it was out of business, and then, as I do, I thought about how pretty the red of the glass box was, and how the red of it was not faded, and still matched the signs in the window.
On the way home I stop at that Conoco on State that’s right next to Commerce. There is a beautiful woman in a sari behind the counter: she is swathed in what seems to be yards of ethereal and diaphanous fabric, a pale pink color decorated with scarlet rhinestones, or perhaps jewels, sewn into the shapes of flowers and butterflies around the neck and waist. I am embarrassed because I don’t smell particularly good—which I know because I have begun to smell myself—and because I am buying not only lemon-lime Gatorade but also Dairy Fresh Dutch chocolate milk (the best brand for sale in Mississippi, bar none) (for later), and a Sparks (also for later), and I am sunburned.
All of the Polaroids in this story, save for “Stuck In It Like a Prisoner” and “The Empty Concrete Sky” will be posted on the telephone pole at the corner of Saint Mary and Belmont Streets in Jackson, Mississippi, at midnight on Wednesday, July 19, plus a few others.
Great pics and even better story. Woo hoo!! Good stuffs. Sounds surely like a grand time.
beautiful story. it reminds me of being in college and just getting outside and walking around with a friend, doing nothing because you have nothing you have to do. i forget what that feels like, now that i have all these kids. please remember to take me tramping with you next time. i’ll pack the picnic.
Very nice photo spread. I also enjoyed the early Neil and Crazy Horse reference.
Great piece. I love the outskirts of anywhere, and to top it off with a few paragraphs of hobo-talk? Perfect.
I enjoyed this piece a lot. That has long been one of my favorite drives. I’ve taken that road many times from Belhaven all the way to Tinseltown, past the ballpark, and into the Pearl sprawl. It’s a strange trip: you almost feel like you never leave the neighborhood, then you’re in the country, and then you’re at the Cracker Barrel!
I never wandered around in the woods very much until I moved to Mississippi. It’s very satisfying, even if you end up passing out from dehydration and getting molested by a coupla hobos, like you almost did.
word on the street (or, actually, from the lady who did inventory management at bebop on county line) was that you could get moonshine at jack’s tamales up until a few years before it closed…
Wow! These are beeyootifull. I absolutely LOVE the “Yes We’re Open/Sorry We’re Closed”
Hey, mail your sister “this is nowhere”. I enjoyed this post immensely, the writing and imagry filled my head and for a little while, I was walking with you. Thanks, big brother.
i can vouch for the pearl river hobos. they have probably moved on as hobos are want to do. but about 10 years ago, i took a bike ride back into those woods. as i barelled down a muddy hill, i turned to dodge some pine trees and very nearly crashed into a hobo lean-to. a campfire was burning, and clothes and dishes were hung from fishing line between two trees. i heard some commotion in the brush and pedaled the hell out of there.
that was closer to the billboard – another spot well-suited for juvenile delinquency – than the trestle, though.
Since when are all hobos homicidally, or otherwise violently inclined?
since forever. they will also steal any and all pies left to cool in windows.
Aw, now, there’s a world of difference between stealing a pie and stabbing a guy (the difference, as the Simpsons put it, between a singin’ hobo and stabbin’ hobo).
It would be interesting to figure out when, in the collective American imagination, hobos went from being seen as drifters who were guilty mainly of having no place in society (a society that, especially in the 30s, had fewer and fewer places for anybody, period, so that pretty much anybody could become a hobo and a hobo could become anybody) and even perhaps lauded for carving out an alternative mode of life to figures of terror and violence. I’d suspect it correlates with changing American attitudes about class and labor.
Herman zie German, you should have stuck around. I’m sure they would have shared some of the stew they were making from the boots they caught in the river.
filet of sole?
“I would move up North for the chance to wear scarves more days per year and not ruining the collars and armpits of all my shirts from June to September if I did not think that it meant the actual whoring of my God-given soul and that I would cry everyday from the shame of it all.” One time someone in Knoxville told me she wouldn’t move up North because women in the North eat their babies placentas when they are born. This woman taught science. I assured her that this was not required, nor even common, in the north. Not that I want you to move to the North when it is obvious that you love your home, but be relieved to know that if you ever must, your soul is safe!
Yeah, but where did she teach science?
Are you trying to say that East Tennessee doesn’t count as true South? It could be the Appalachian influence. As for the science. . .perhaps it came out more as pseudo-science.
No no, I meant more like, at what institution of learning? Because I know of a few in that area who have some intriguing ideas about science.
My wife used to go to Jack’s Tamale House when she lived in Jackson and really enjoyed them. We realize the place is no longer there but hoped someone kept the recipe and is still making them. Do you know of anyone? Pictures and story are fantastic and sure brought back memories to her.
I used to live in Jackson, Ms many years ago. I drove accross the old Pearl river bridge in order to buy Jack’s tamales in Pearl. If you have an address of where I can still purchase Jack’s tamales today, please email me the address
Thanks
Arlene Condit