Mississippi Closing, Still Here, Still Moving

Mississippi is the most American of states, in the sense that everything America has been unable to resolve has lived here in full, undiluted form. The soil was the most fertile and the most contested. The wealth was the most extreme and the most unjustly built. The violence done to suppress democracy was the most organized and the most brazen. And the resistance, when it came, was the most courageous and the most consequential.

The state that gave the world the blues also gave it the civil-rights movement's most galvanizing martyrs and its most tenacious organizers. Fannie Lou Hamer grew up barefoot in a sharecropper's cabin and went to Atlantic City to challenge a political party's understanding of itself. Hiram Revels walked into the United States Senate. Thousands of ordinary Mississippi citizens, many of whose names history never recorded, walked into hostile courthouses to register to vote and kept walking back until the law changed.

The Mississippi River still runs wide past the bluffs where Natchez stood and where the French built their fort and where the cotton boats once loaded. The Delta flatlands still grow crops; soybeans and corn have largely replaced cotton, but the land is the same land, worked by different hands under different economics. The blues still plays in Clarksdale on a Saturday night. The Choctaw still hold the land their great-grandparents refused to leave.

To drive through Mississippi is to move through time in the American style, where the past does not recede so much as layer. The road ahead is also the road that was. This state has not finished telling its story, and what it has already told is more than enough to fill a long drive in silence.