It is not, despite appearances, the end of nowhere. The empty fields are its destination. The weeds let you know where one crop ends and another begins. While other man-made places were covered in people and concrete, here it was the dirt that mattered, and there was just so much of it, between porch lights, and schools, and hospitals. There still  is. In the open land between the towns and the wide places in the road, dark drops like a lid on a box, and that very isolation has shaped life here, held it, and marked it deeply and sometimes horribly. -Rick Bragg, from the introduction to New Delta Rising.

Welcome to the Delta. A place where the divide between rich and poor, educated and uneducated is so prominent that it draws comparisons to a third world country. A place that has produced countless writers, musicians and artists in spite of this divide, possibly because of it. Welcome to a place that I am fortunate to call home. Having grown up in the quintessential Delta town of Sumner, a community of around five hundred, I consider myself firmly rooted to the “dirt” that Rick Bragg aptly describes in the introduction to New Delta Rising.  Sumner, like much of the Delta, is a small town strongly shaped by its agricultural and historical past (still home to many a farmer and the location of Emmett Till’s murder trial.)

The strong sense of place that was instilled in me as a child by the shapes of the land and the community is exactly the sentiment that beckons numerous visitors to the Delta-visitors such as award-winning photographer Magdalena Sole, whose photographs the University Press of Mississippi has published in a beautiful collection titled New Delta Rising. Sole spent a year photographing and interviewing residents of the Delta, and the connection she established with her subjects is evident in every frame she captured. The testimonials that accompany the photographs, which only deepened my pride for the resilient people of the Delta, also serve as a spirited introduction for those who are not familiar with “the most southern place on earth.”

Magdalena Sole will be at Lemuria for a signing on Thursday, March 29 at 5:00.

Click here for more details about the book.

 

by Anna

 

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