Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“There’s America, there’s the South, then there’s Mississippi.” So said President Lyndon Johnson. He might have added, “And then there’s the Mississippi Delta.” The Delta is a strange, strange world indeed, where high-tech farming, guns, booze, racism, religion, music, and deep-fried food are the staples of life. The Mississippi Delta is the subject of this compulsively readable book by English journalist Richard Grant, who makes his home in the Delta—in Pluto, Mississippi, to be exact. I learned about “Dispatches from Pluto” from reading an article by Mr. Grant in the Wall Street Journal about the woeful state of elementary schools in the Delta, and a public school that has managed to reverse the area’s trend of black illiteracy and turn out students who can read and do math on the national level. The story is included in this book. The Mississippi Delta is not to be confused with the Mississippi River Delta, down in coastal Louisiana where the river drains into the Gulf. The place known as the Mississippi Delta is 300 miles upriver, located on an alluvial floodplain between the Mississippi River and the Yazoo River. Two hundred miles long and seventy miles across at its widest, it begins just south of Memphis and ends at Vicksburg. Famed Highway 61 (a.k.a. The Blues Highway) runs through the heart of it. When people speak of Mississippi Delta Blues, this is where it began, by the likes of such Blues legends as Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf. The Delta also has produced a number of famous writers, including Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner. “There’s an intangible, mysterious quality to life here that Mississippi writers have felt compelled to tackle,” says the author, “a kind of magical realism that comes out of the state’s long insularity, the urge to mythologize its history of defeat and oppression, the deep influence of the Old Testament and faith-based thinking, and perhaps the drama of the natural landscape.” And the food? “The first rule of Delta cuisine: if it can’t be battered and fried, cook it with fatty pig meat,” writes Grant. “Down at Clancy’s in Yazoo City, the house speciality was a battered deep-fried hamburger. That horrified us, but we’d grown to love the battered deep-fried pickle slices, and what they call ‘Mexican okra,’ which was pickled jalapeño slices given the same treatment, and excellent with cold beer.” The author fell in love with the Delta at first sight. It took some doing, but he talked his New York girlfriend into moving there. They purchased a grand plantation House on the cheap and underwent a harrowing acclimation that included roof leaks, spotty indoor heating in winter, inadequate air-conditioning in summer, spiders, mosquitos, fire ants, raccoons, possums, armadillos, snakes, stray dogs, wild hogs, foxes, and alligators. “You need a dog and a gun,” he was told. He had a dog but buying a gun was another matter. Both he and his girlfriend abhorred guns—at first. The instinct to survive amid the swamps—and the omnipresent gun culture—changed their minds in a big hurry. This was the Deep South after all, where hunting doves in Summer and deer in the Fall was a part of the culture, a social occasion, where men bonded, women prepared heaps of food, and pickup trucks overran the wilds. The author learned to appreciated guns and became an adequate sharpshooter. Along the way, he and his girlfriend learned to love eating whatever was in season. Much of the story revolves around people, generous to a fault, white and black, who enjoyed the same things (hunting and fishing, drinking and deep-fried food) who co-existed amicably despite a century of deep-rooted prejudice. How the author manages to navigate among the southern culture and the myriad of social dos and don’ts makes for a fascinating and humorous story. The book is full of insights and includes a tour of the Delta, nights drinking in blues clubs (including Po Monkey’s, depicted on the book sleeve) meeting the likes of blues legend T Model Ford, a visit to the South’s most infamous prison, a round of golf with actor Morgan Freeman (who owns a blues club called Ground Zero and still keeps a house in the Delta), hunting trips, a funeral, a wedding, and near the end of the book a big party blow-out. Grant supplies laughs by the score but spares us not the underlying Delta sadness, much like the morning fog that lurks in the boggy hollows. Five big stars.

The writer takes a NY couple(man is British) who wind up in the MS delta with no idea what lifestyle there is like or the coping necessary to make it. Although the story line closely follows this period, the writer is able to make the worst of times into the best of times through humor as the couple learned to love and respect all kinds of different people, places, and the history of the state of Mississippi as opposed to NY city. Thoroughly entertaining, even for myself who was reared during these times in the heart of the delta, Belzoni.

I am always a day late and a dollar short. Well, two years short on this one, to be exact. This may be old news for someyall. I just finished this book and I could not put it down. I have to say this Richard did an amazing job on this book and I think it should be required reading for everyone. Now see, being from Mississippi everyone already has their assumptions about me. They group me in with the stereotypes. I have had people get in my face telling me all sorts of things they know about Mississippi: racial relations, our education system, our religion. I always say, YOU GO LIVE THERE, then you come back and we can talk about Mississippi. No one can possibly understand that state unless you have lived there. It is a state full of contradictions and bemusement. The author of this book moved himself into the Delta, Lord bless him. The Delta is it's own world within Mississippi, but a lot of what he says can be said for the state in general. He tells it like it is - you can't tie it up in a pretty bow. I remember when I was in high school (I went to church school, an academy and finally public school where I'll have you know that I was a minority!) I had a friend that grew up in the Delta and she told me that the Delta was still segregated and for the most part it was by choice! That blew my mind. But now when I look back, when we sat down in our own class rooms in the 90's all the black folk sat on one side and the white kids sat in a little group on the other side. My P.E. class was like Orange is the New Black but I was smaller and mo scared! I also want to clarify that my family was poor. My great grandmother and grandfather worked the farm, picked their own cotton, sun up to sun down (back breaking work). Great Granny always had dinner ready when Great Popaw came in from the field, they were lucky if they had a bit of meat to eat, but mostly just ate the vegetables they grew. She sure did have 3 cakes or pies every night though. My granny and my momma also helped her when they came along. I went in the cotton patch once - those things have spikes on them - I got out of there as fast as I could. But they had a small, ramshackle, shotgun house in the hills outside of Tupelo. We used buckets as sinks, a steel tub in the back yard as a bath, an electric well for water, black pot belly stove for heat, big electric fans for cold and an outhouse that scared me to death at nighttime. I come from a family of hard workers. I think a lot of divide in Mississippi can come down to hard workers and wont workers. I also think you need to read this here book. Richard, though he comes in as an "outsider" writes with the heart of a true Mississippian. He understands the culture, he grasps the divide and the confusion that goes on between black and white. My mom's best friend when I was growing up was black, people didn't mind staring. My mentor growing up was one of the most amazing men I have ever met, he was black, didn't bother me, I would not be where I am in life without his love and guidance. None of this had anything to do with color, but love and respect. But then you have those few and they exist on both sides....you just have to read this book to understand...he got it.

After seven decades in the South I suppose I think of my self as a veteran here and an amateur expert of sorts on the life and culture of this place. I consider the region's language and social dynamic and folkways complex and likely forever recondite to the outsider. I'm automatically skeptical, therefore, when I encounter a book that purports to describe some aspect of it, especially a book on the Mississippi Delta. The Mississippi Delta's northwestern tip was once said by none other than William Faulkner to lie in the lobby of the Gayoso Hotel (others claim the Peabody lobby), a statement borne out by facts to be more than plausible. Memphis, situated right on the DeSoto County/Shelby County line, is, in spirit, I think, more of a Mississippi city than a Tennessee town. The good people of Mississippi certainly don't really have another conurbation that I know of worthy of the title. Here in Memphis, inescapably, the congenital insanity of the Delta is well-known, legendary even. So, it was only after weeks of persistent urging by my wife, a Yankee by birth but an absolute Southern lit fiend by predilection, that I picked up Richard Grant's "Dispatches from Pluto". Good God Almighty! What a book! This book is so funny, so well-written, so perceptive, so spot-on, so damn good. I was gobsmacked by it. And to think it was written by a Brit with a New York girlfriend in tow! I've already bought a half-dozen copies for my friends and will probably wind up buying more. This fellow's take on the whole Delta thing is priceless. "Livin' in the Delta is like being in love with a crazy person," says one of his (real-life) lady characters as they pursue a road-trip through moribund, though ethnically cosmopolitan, little Mississippi towns. When you read the book you'll see how perfectly this statement captures the spirit of the Delta. I don't know, perhaps it requires the objectivity of a well-traveled foreigner to triangulate properly on such an otherworldly, socially complex locale, a singular, contradictory place whose oddities have grown opaque through custom and tradition, even to its own inhabitants. Indeed, perhaps specifically a worldly-wise Brit was the quintessential man for the job of laying it all out, especially the nagging situation of race and class, and doing so with exquisite humor and insight. In any case I heartily recommend this book. Just lemme say this: When you get it, take it slow, like you would a 30-year-old single-malt scotch, and savor every drop. You will not be disappointed. Meanwhile I need to write this boy a congratulatory letter.

Brilliant! Great read! I'm an artist form the Mississippi hills and think that this is a pretty fair assessment of some of the interesting and quirky social and cultural nuances in the Mississippi delta. It's truly a well done book that is hard to put down. An artist friend from Colorado read it, loved it, and told me about i!. I will say this: since I have roots here but they are on the "other side of the tracks" so to speak, because my grandparents were white share-croppers in Lambert area- that this book- just like society- only notices the rich elite plantation owner country club type crowd and also the poorest of the poor of the black community. (smh-It's okay,at least he omitted ANYTHING negative about us and besides we are used to it, but it would be nice if someone would have the insight and talent of Richard Grand to update Faulkner and the bias Hollywood framework that is so so tiring as stereotypical bigoted, ignorant and mean-spirited folks! The depictions of the rest of us good-hearted, hard-working average folks just aren't interesting because we don't have Morgan Freeman as arm candy?) Finally, this book goes a long way to explain the physical landscape and culture of Mississippi and why the MS delta is the muse of so many fine artists and musicians. The only thing missing was the definition of "delta casual" which I've always found amusing. (Look it up!)

Grant's skill as a travel writer keeps this account of his first year in the Mississippi Delta moving at a steady clip. This helped me plow through it in a day, this in addition to the fact Grant got my hackles up early in the narrative. I was prepared for a book about the Mississippi Delta to be riddled with talk of racism, but it took some persuading for me to trust Grant as a storyteller. He refers to his girlfriend as being "politically correct in her speech" in the beginning of chapter one. I am always stymied when I hear that term. It makes me cautious about the speaker's humanity in any context. This coupled with some odd references to Tchula's residents , including the use of the charged term "welfare queen," made me wonder if Grant could grapple with such a weighty topic and keep a sense of everyone's dignity, including his own. By the close of the book, I appreciated Grant's honesty in dealing with the people of Mississippi and his readers. The way that Tchula lurks on the edge of the story, in some sense, serves the idea of the complexity of racism itself. The biggest impression I was left with is a result of the recurring moments of hospitality and generosity from a large cast of real-life characters throughout the book. Grant and his wife were met with welcome and help from many people in their rural community, regardless of social class or race. This book is about building community, understanding the duality of communities, taking on Mother Nature and a mortgage and trying to articulate further understanding of racism. I'm drawn to travel writing that also feels like a relaxed ethnography as well as writing and music about the Delta, so the time reading this book was well spent. If you want to read some of Grant's writing before buying this book, several of his articles are easily found using Google. And if you are curious to look inside Po Monkey's, Oxford American's SoLost has a short film on YouTube to get you there.

Had a lot of stereotypes on republicans and more importantly, Mississippians in the beginning. Hopefully, who ever reads this book realizes most stereotypes aren’t true or maybe are true but they are good stereotypes. Happy that Mississippi is being represented especially the Delta.

I really, really loved this book. The original plan was to read this while in Mississippi, but the best laid plans and all that jazz. Instead I devoured it in a few days when I returned to NY. Grant is a travel writer who was born in Malaysia and lived in Kuwait, London, Tuscon and New York before moving with his girlfriend turned wife to the Mississippi Delta. They moved partially out of curiosity and partially for a lower cost of living. Grant had friends in the region from his writing career and they met many friends when they moved to Pluto: friends of the family they bought the house from and others they quickly met in the small towns along the Delta. In between his & Mariah's experiences trying to adjust to small town life and hunt for meat they couldn't otherwise acquire, Grant explored the legacy of racism in Mississippi as a whole and in the Delta specifically. It was still alive for him in his experiences visiting a club with a friend and watching a friend run for mayor of Clarksdale and navigate the race issues therein. In exploring racism he also explored the issues of stereotypes, two liberal democrats forming a deep friendship with conservative christians, and their NYC/London friends meeting and loving their Mississippi friends. An excellent read about a slightly bizarre living situation.

Having read Richards previous books I know he takes a challenge head on. This book was written in the same vein with thoughtful, personal writing. I actually wish he wrote more books!

Very interesting and entertaining. Well written. A fair amount of history, as well.

This is a terrific book. Grant writes elegantly and engagingly and with deft wit. His previous books have been more obviously ' adventurous' but this account of his move to the Mississipi Delta allows him to write beautifully not only about nature and its terrors - vicious snakes, poison ivy, Mosquitos, crocodiles, even phenomenally irritating armadillos - but also about the paradoxes and ongoing complexities of race relations in what is a weird and sometimes horrible society. Skilfully tossed into the mix are a love story - the author's own - murder, madness, capital punishment, preachers, prison in the shape of Parchman Farm, juke joints, the Blues, spectacular eccentricity and rounds of golf in a very downbeat country club with Morgan Freeman. Altogether, a real treat.

Interesting story about a rather unique part of the world. I wonder how they're doing now? Well written.

I have read a couple of books by Richard Grant, always captivating and full of thoughtful passages. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the American south and Louisiana in particular and also anyone who wonders about the relationships between white and black people in that area. Good read.