Mississippi

Listening to: I Am Weary (Let Me Rest)

-The Cox Family

I will be honest, I had trouble figuring out how to incorporate Canton, Mississippi into my journey's theme. By now you'll have probably noticed that I know a whole lot more about a couple of places on the way (ahem...Arkansas...Memphis...the next stop after this one...) than I do about others, but at least I had places of interest to go off of, like KFC or Carson McCullers' house. The only thing I really know about Canton is that portions of O Brother, Where Art Thou? were filmed there.

However, this is what the internet is for. How do you get to know a town or city without having been to it? (Yet) I'd hate to spend so much time talking about the social and philosophical sides of the other stops without spending some typing time on Canton. So I start traversing the internet (it's difficult to find real opinions of a place past the tourism advertisements) and finally come across someone asking what it's like to live in Canton. The responses are mixed, but most agree that Canton is 1.) More or less a subdivision of Jackson 2.) Full of people employed by but not really modernized by the Nissan company and 3.) Racially divided, though I'm not positive as to what extent. One reviewer used the word segregated, others skirted around it and advised the asker to look to a different school district for her kids. They all alluded to the idea that the public schools are sub-par and attended mostly by black students and that there is one private academy that is overwhelmingly by white students, but a couple of people did try to emphasize that Canton is changing for the better, at least economically.

All that said, it will be up to my companion and myself to determine our own opinions of the city, so here our itinerary begins. We are staying in the Hampton Inn in Canton, more or less because it's cheap, of course, and my dad was the manager of a Hampton Inn in Mississippi when I lived there briefly as a child. (It's a stretch, I know, but you've got to have a way to choose one cheap hotel over another...)  For dinner we will splurge a bit, though, and eat at the Two Rivers Restaurant, said here to be the best in town.

I am hoping that we will be able to get to Canton in time for the famous Canton Flea Market. It's the one local event that every local of the town raves about, so I'm hoping to find some semblance of the community there, and perhaps some eccentric folks to talk to. It's also held in the same town square in which the Homer Stokes voting rally is held in O Brother, Where Art Thou? so that is a plus. If nothing else, I can find some of what Lewis Nordan describes as "elegant junk" in Wolf Whistle. See those stained glass windows? Who doesn't want some of that? Eh? Eh?