My family once lived in the Delta, and I’ve been visiting it since I was a child. I know those photos intimately from the pages of books, but when I’m here, I’m also wandering through the early pages of my life.
Sometimes when I’m driving through a stretch of this crescent-shaped part of northwest Mississippi-not to be confused with the region hundreds of miles south of here where the Mississippi River flows into the Gulf of Mexico-I look at the landscape and feel like I’m in one of those classic shots taken by a Depression-era photographer like Dorothea Lange. The flat fields of the Mississippi Delta seem endless, and they can magically transport a traveler into the past.
