Ghosts Of Mississippi Quotes

There was a mystic wraith of fog over the brown water that night, together with dark driftwoods; and across the way New Orleans glowed orange-bright, with a few dark ships at her hem, ghostly fogbound Cereno ships with Spanish balconies and ornamental poops, till you got up close and saw they were just old freighters from Sweden or Panama. The ferry fires glowed in the night; the same Negroes plied the shovel and sang. Old Big Slim Hazard had once worked on the Algiers ferry as a deckhand, that made me think of Mississippi Gene too; and as the river poured down from mid-America by starlight I knew, I knew like mad that everything I had ever known and would ever know was One.

It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against the world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats, I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered 'round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

It's as if what was to come was already laid out before us, that our fate lay in the geography toward which we were blithely driving.

Grief felt like the heat of a Mississippi August. Sticky. Suffocating. People did not die right, and, where I am from, where the Spanish moss hangs from bald cypress trees and casts dark shadows on the river water, when people don’t die right, they refuse to stay in the ground. The ghosts haunt us with our memories and loneliness as their weapons.

Memphis can be thought of connected as much to Mississippi and Arkansas as it is to Tennessee, if not more so. William Faulkner once observed that Mississippi extends from a Memphis hotel room to the Gulf of Mexico.

A beauty beyond words,” whispered Rini, mesmerized by the view.

the river from the Mississippi, and downriver from local farmers as the state's corn growers figured out they could make a lot more money distilling their product into liquor than shipping it out for hog feed. A steady current of illegal alcohol flowed through the city, and fortunes rose and fell on the tide.