Yazoo City: The Town That Wouldn't Stay Burned

Yazoo City is remembered for one enormous fire. It came on May twenty-fifth, nineteen oh four, when a blaze that started in a house a block from the business district swept through town and destroyed most of it, by most accounts several hundred buildings, in a single day. The fire burned so hot and moved so fast that residents carried their furniture to the courthouse square and watched their town disappear around them.

What survived both fires, and what defines Yazoo City to this day, is its position at the edge of two worlds: the Mississippi Delta to the northwest and the loess hill country to the east. It sits on the eastern escarpment of the Delta, where the flat black cotton land meets the more broken terrain of central Mississippi. The Yazoo River runs just west of town. The town has always been a market center, the commercial capital of a region that produced enormous quantities of cotton and enormous quantities of suffering in equal measure.

The writer Willie Morris grew up here and wrote about it in his memoir North Toward Home, published in nineteen sixty-seven. Morris described a boyhood in a small Mississippi town in the years before and during the civil rights movement, a place where the social order was absolute and where the landscape itself seemed to press down on everyone inside it. He became one of the most important Southern writers of his generation, and Yazoo City is still closely identified with him.

In Glenwood Cemetery you can find the grave of the Witch of Yazoo, a local legend about a woman accused of witchcraft whose chains supposedly broke free on the day the town burned in nineteen oh four. Local tradition holds that she promised to return. It is the kind of story a town tells when it is trying to make sense of fire.