Mississippi hospitality

Driving into Greenwood after dark, we pull into a gas station and ask directions to a late-night grocery store. ‘Sir… I have a suggestion,’ says a young man in the queue. ‘I’ll be going that way in this big old box.’ He waves towards a magnificently clapped-out Chrysler at the fuel pumps. ‘Y’all just follow me.’ Our convoy proceeds to the store at 25mph with no turn signals. Then, with another wave, our Good Samaritan turns and rumbles back towards the gas station. He wasn’t really going our way at all.

A little later the Crystal Rooms restaurant reopens its just-closed kitchen for our small party. ‘We’ll feed y’all… come right in,’ says the owner Johnny Ballas. Next morning Howard Smith, part-time country singer and full-time proprietor of Smith and Co. department store (demure fashion downstairs, guns, knives and traps upstairs), gives us a personal performance of Willie Nelson and George Jones songs from a chair on the balcony.

Next, the receptionist at the Staplcotn farm co-operative invites us in for coffee when we pause to admire the old building. Finally, deep in the country, we pass a pick-up driver who somehow knows we’ve taken a wrong turn and waits to offer directions when we reappear. (‘Ah knew y’all would be back down here real soon.’)

The American South can be like that — flipping visitors from one gratuitous act of kindness to another like a benevolent pinball machine. But it’s as well to remember that five white Europeans would have been welcomed just as warmly 70 years ago, when racist southerners were committing atrocities so vile that their stain still lingers today.

The murder of 15-year-old Emmett Till near Greenwood in 1955 was so shocking it lit a fire under the nascent civil rights movement.