McComb, Mississippi

Last Saturday was beautiful: sunny, very low humidity, and actually honest-to-dog COLD. I drove over to McComb, MS (about a 3 hour drive); I was there last year but spent most of the time on the Bogue Chitto River and only went into town to have lunch at the Dinner Bell.

My biological father was born there, although he actually grew up in North Platte, NE and considered himself a midwesterner. I got a chance to look through the Pike County yellow pages while I was there last year; I didn’t find any Galbreaths but there were lots of Colemans, which was his mother’s maiden name. And in fact, when I was there on Saturday I saw a banner hanging outside of a banquet hall type place, advertising the “Coleman-Trantham” wedding. Could have been a distant relation! I was never close to my father’s family though; other than one of my cousins, I never felt like any of them gave a damn about me and my brothers once my parents got divorced. My grandfather might have, he seems to have been a sweet man, but he died when I was very young.

I was surprised at how run-down downtown McComb was. It reminded me of Detroit in miniature almost; like you could tell the neighborhoods had money once, and some of the houses were still nice, but there were a lot of decayed shells and overgrown lots. But McComb has a very low crime rate–it’s consistently rated as a great town to retire to–so it’s more like the money just moved to another area (up near the bypass maybe, or out into the exurbs), and the downtown was depopulated and is sort of genteelly falling apart in a polite southern way.

I shot a roll of 120 in my Diana and a roll of Fuji Superia in my Golden Half; these are just some shots I took with my digital Polaroid.

PICT0548, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

Old advertising murals can still be seen in many Mississippi towns, I saw some in Canton when I was there last year. Shame they ruined this by sticking a meter box over part of it, especially since I don’t think the building is even presently occupied.

PICT0550, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

This is the building the mural was on, most of the windows were broken or had plywood over them.

PICT0540, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

This was near the train station, there was a whole complex of buildings in various states of ruin. Some still had roofs and interior walls, and some were just the exterior walls and foundation.

PICT0543, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

Another mural. This was one of the main streets downtown, there are still businesses in some of the buildings.

PICT0546, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT0547, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

This building fascinated me for some odd reason. Like, I couldn’t tell if it was still occupied or not. Some of the doors are bricked up, but that could just be due to how the interior space was re-organized. I also found it weird that an exterior staircase went from the second to the third story, but not down to the ground floor.

PICT0551, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

This is where I ended my day. This cemetery is ENORMOUS, you drive in and it just goes on for acres and acres. There’s also a park with a playground right smack in the middle of it, which I found delightfully morbid. I expected to find Wednesday Addams on a swing.

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Last weekend was the first of what I hope will be an annual road trip for my meetup group, to Mississippi. (It won’t always be in MS, though. The plan is for north Louisiana, the Galveston/Beaumont area of Texas, and possibly Arkansas.) We spent Saturday in Canton and Sunday in McComb. I don’t have any photos developed yet; I’m going to use the rest of the rolls at Laos New Year in Lanexang Village this weekend.

Canton is really beautiful. The downtown is arranged around a square containing the Madison County Courthouse, a very Classical white-columned building with a distinctive dome. Quite a few movies have been filmed in Canton, mostly because of the courthouse. It’s like the go-to town in Mississippi for whenever producers want a really southern old-timey looking courthouse. It was the courthouse in A Time to Kill–or, as I think of it: You can Be a Racist or a Vigilante, Take Your Pick.

The buildings in the streets around the square are really old (at least to my California frame of reference), a lot of them painted bright colors and with original details like stamped ceilings or little petal-shaped windows. Canton has a ginormous antiques festival twice a year, so there are a lot of year-round antique stores. I bought a pair of opera glasses at one, which should look nifty next to my absinthe spoons. BELL EPOQUE YO.

We also went to the cemetery that was the original cemetery of the town, and it’s next to the old Madison County Jail, which was being fixed up by the local historical society.

On the way to McComb, we stopped at a charming store called Dirt Cheap in Brookhaven. Hope goes there whenever she goes to The Dinner Bell (of which more later). It’s like a Dollar General, but not QUITE as clean or charming. However, they did have Kodak film and disposable cameras for $3. Which for some reason rang up as “health & beauty items”. I haven’t done any disposable distortion in a while, so I stocked up. (In the same section we also found dirt cheap condoms, next to dirt cheap pregnancy tests. Probably if you use the former, you find yourself in need of the latter.)

McComb is near the Louisiana border, on the Bogue Chitto River. It’s actually where my father was born, but his family moved to North Platte, Nebraska when he was very young and he and his siblings thought of themselves as midwesterners, not southerners. I’d never been to the town. We didn’t get any photos of the town, but we drove through a fair bit of it. There’s a lot of suburban sprawl around the edges–the town isn’t big, but it’s the only town of ANY size in Pike County (weird to be dealing with counties again, rather than parishes), so they have a lot of the businesses that serve the whole county. But looking at the old center of the town, I could imagine how it must have looked when my father was a child. It was pretty hilly, which I wasn’t expecting. I guess whenever I think of MS, I think of the delta, which is as low and flat as south Louisiana. It was nice, I miss hills.

We spent the morning trying to find the damn river (Hope’s GPS is easily confused), also stopping to photograph another cemetery we came across. But we mostly stopped in the town in the first place to eat lunch at The Dinner Bell. It’s a round table restaurant in a converted private house: you sit at a table topped with a giant lazy susan with a dozen other people, the servers bring out dish after dish of southern home cooking, and everyone helps themselves. Fried chicken, ham, potato salad, turnip greens, butter beans, sweet potatoes, macaroni cheese, and the best fried eggplant I’ve had IN MY LIFE. Hope sometimes drives all the way from Baton Rouge just to eat lunch there.

This trip made me realize how truly awful Louisiana drivers are. I drove hundreds of miles in MS, and not once did I see someone hanging out in the passing lane mile after mile, going half the posted speed limit. I see that literally every day in LA.