(Mississippi, USA)...I went for a week-long drive in Mississippi, sticking to the back roads and seeing what I could uncover. It was similar, although much shorter, to William Least Heat Moon's wonderful travel journal Blue Highways: a Journey into America, which was written in 1982, 25 years ago. I did not discover a Nameless, Tennessee, as Least Heat Moon did, but the open road of the United States always leads to wonderfully eccentric or eccentric and wonderful finds. I started in New Orleans and headed across the Pontchartrain River and up along the Pearl River past Hickory and Bogalusa, before entering the Magnolia State. I took Route 35, which pretty much heads due north, but took a diversion when I saw a sign reading Hot Coffee, five miles.
Who could resist visiting a village of that name, although all that is there is a general store that at least has marketing savvy enough to always have java on the boil. Actor and sometimes nude centrefold Stella Stevens (née Estelle Caro Eggleston) supposedly was born there, but this was a line fed to her by her publicity agent, something along the lines of "I come from Hot Coffee, but I was the drop that spilled over the cup."
It is near the larger town of Taylorsville. I headed northeast along the beautiful Natchez Trace Parkway (no billboard advertisement permitted) to Tupelo, to see the re-creation of Elvis Presley's boyhood home, where the women at the ticket desk grew quite angry when I asked about Elvis' father's time in jail for forgery (supposedly, he and some friends changed the 3 of a $3 cheque to an 8). Sometime after he was released, the house Elvis was born in was physically put onto the back of a lorry and moved to their new home―Elvis' home from thereon―in Memphis, Tennessee.
Driving across the state I visited the home of another Mississippi icon, William Faulkner, in Oxford. Rowan Oak, his home's name, is two or three miles south of the town and near the wonderful hamlet of Taylor. But perhaps the most memorable episode of this wonderful drive was heading south from Clarksdale all the way down the Mississippi Delta to the small hamlet of Pond, via larger spots such as Vicksburg and Natchez. 
At Clarksdale it is possible to have breakfast at the crossroads where Blues legend Robert Johnson was said to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his guitar skills, although the choices are severely limited, from a Popeye's Chicken restaurant to a doughnut shop with no seating. But this was sufficient to have me decide to follow Johnson's trail. Drive south to Itta Bena, just west of Greenwood, and take Route 7 south. Johnson is the only person I know who has at least two graves (some say he has three). The first, if heading in the same direction I did, is at Quito, a place so small it usually does not end up on state maps.
The road is narrow, the village poor and dusty. Next to a small bridge is―or was, as I think they have shamefully since knocked it down―the Three Forks General Store, where Johnson was poisoned by a husband jealous of his wife's dalliance with the Blues man. The store had, I was told, been moved three miles away from an even more obscure spot. When I was there, it was frequented, seemingly, by a gaggle of small boys all running around half-naked. A small plaque marks where Johnson was buried (perhaps?). It is behind a small church that in turn stands behind a disused factory and next to a small park of caravans.
Another five miles down the road is Morgan City, where Grave No. 2 stands, marked by a more expensive memorial paid for by contributions from fans and erected some 50 years or so after his murder. The area is very atmospheric: flat fields, long lines of poplar trees gently blowing in the faint breeze, a heat haze and burning tarmacadam. It is not hard to imagine lines of stopping cotton-pickers.
I had lunch in Belzoni, so-called Catfish Capital of the World, in a small, dark spot called Little Wimps Bar-B-Q House, where a toothless old woman continually smiled at me while watching a soap opera. I did drive on maybe two miles of Interstate but took the first available exit.
This was fortunate, for it was where I met the most memorable person of the journey, the so-named Double Headed Reverend H.D. Dennis. He lives in a memorable building on Route 4. It stretches for about 100 metres and is painted in white, red and yellow. Biblical scripture is written on large boards and a tower at one end supposedly―the reverend was telling me all this in a raspy voice that I had to listen to very carefully in order to understand--was the Tower of Babel crowned by David's armoured hat. No a re-creation, mind you, but the real one. This he insisted upon.
Inside a very cramped, very colourful, working general store is the "actual" Ark of the Covenant, while inside it are the "actual" 10 commandments etched in English (perhaps surprisingly) on two slabs. He also has a story to tell about how God ordered him to build his shrine, and I decided very early on that I certainly was not going to be the one to dispute anything he had to tell me. He said he learnt carpentry while working with German prisoners of war, in Mississippi, during World War II. (Approximately 20,000 German and Italian prisoners of war lived in the state between 1943 and 1946.) His wife smiled and shrugged her shoulders a lot during my hour there. I was even escorted to a yellow school bus that he had wanted to fix up as a travelling church but which remained broken down. He waved to me as I disappeared. I remember him with fondness.