About thirty years ago I walked into a pawn shop in Starkville. We were trying to make rent. You can only make so much money slinging pizza. I had with me the one and only guitar pedal in the house, a Cry Baby. I walked past the rack of bicycles hocked by all the freshmen who had already failed out and needed gas money to get back to Tupelo or Biloxi or Natchez. The goth behind the guitar counter offered twenty bucks. It was a ripoff, but there weren’t a lot of other options.
I’m sitting here this morning trying to remember what we spent that twenty on, watching a chubby cardinal splash in the birdbath between the gardenias and the cast irons. Who knows. I dang sure know it wasn’t on rent.
The fmr. Trulove’s Pawn Shop & Trading Post, Starkville, Mississippi, Polaroid SX-70 (2024)
Give or take twenty feet and thirty years from where I got ripped off on that wah-wah pedal, a fellow from Arkansas named John R. Cash got arrested. Later on he wrote a song about it and pretended the bust was because he picked some flowers. But we all know that if you’ve been at the Pike house until 2 a.m., you weren’t just looking at that flower bed.
They put up a marker about the troubadour taking a break in that flower box, but the old pawn shop is to one side of it and a combination Dollar General and Dollar Tree on the other. It’s not real auspicious but the plaque is nice.
Last year I wore my feet out walking up and down the Mall in D.C., wiping the sweat out of my eyes, marveling at the structures we’ve built to honor our past. I had never seen much of it before. The sky was beautiful and blue and it seemed you could hear just about every language there was, woven together by the melody little kids running around laughing and playing. I looked up.
The District of Columbia, Polaroid SX-70 (2023)
It took them almost forty years to build that obelisk, and when it was done, it was the tallest structure in the world. Well, for about five years, when some folks in Paris built a tower of their own.
The day they laid the cornerstone, in 1848, there was a fellow there who was representing the State of Illinois. He had been a whole bunch of things in his life—worked the counter at a general store, slung ale at a tavern, run mail as postmaster, and finally, found his path as a lawyer, achieving a fair measure of renown. He had been born in a cabin in Kentucky, and was named for his grandfather, a captain of his county militia during the Revolution against Great Britain. His name was Abraham.
Maybe that was the same where that lanky fellow stood, staring up at the same blue sky, maybe he mopped his forehead down with a folded cloth. He didn’t live to see it, was gone twenty years before they laid the cap on top.
You can just walk right up on in the gin at Dockery Farms. When I made the journey a few weeks ago it was just me for most of the time, swatting away some little bugs, listening to the rise and fall of their chatter. Inside there’s one of those videos that plays on loop, fragments of staticky, stylus-carved 78s blaring for a second and then a lot more than you would expect about running a farm. But there’s nothing that says the world began here.
Sunflower County, Polaroid SX-70 (2024)
Outside in the heat you could pretend it was still 1930, could take the handkerchief out of your back pocket to wipe your brow, maybe Charley Patton was playing that night. Think that young fella might be with him on guitar, the big one, who hunches over like a wolf hunting its prey. Or could be it’s a few years later, say ‘36, and the great wanderer is back from recording in San Antonio. You can start with Charley wailing And now he's gone, Sally don't you worry, and then end up with Robert warning can’t you hear that wind howl? She won’t come back. Maybe they did a medley one night, sitting on the porch.
As I wander over to the gas station, a white F-150 rolls by, crunches on the dusty gravel. I wave and the couple grins back. The dust settles as they open the doors to the truck, pop the tops on some cans of Diet Coke, carefully extract sandwiches from torn squares of waxed paper.
Lemaître reasoned a primeval atom shattered and our cosmos was born. If there is such a place for American music, perhaps it is here. See if can feel the last of that eruption, nearing a century past, as the couple in the truck murmur and gently touch each other’s faces, as the high noon heat shimmers over the county highway, as a corrido spills out of the Ford.
Highway 8, Polaroid 600 (2024)
Ladies and gentlemen and other folk, it is summer in Mississippi. There is beauty and glory in the thick air, in every skeeter bite on your wrists and ankles, in the very dirt. You can hear it as the grass crunches beneath your feet and you pull your cap down over your eyes. Happy Sunday.
“SOME SUMMER DAY” is a song by Charley Patton, which he recorded round about 94 years ago, in Wisconsin, not far from Lake Michigan. It is a chapter of GORJUS, a dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, held fast with instant film.
If you liked what you saw and read, if you maybe felt a twang in your belly while you looked it over, then this is for you, and I reckon we would be friends. Consider sending this letter to a pal who is like us. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see an archive of Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.