Barreling down Highway 61, on our way from Oxford to Clarksdale, Miss., last spring, my friend and I couldn’t believe what we were seeing out of our car window. Chickens were scuttling into the street, overflowing from the yards of trailer homes. Houses that looked like nothing more than shanties were eclipsed by the rusting parts of cars and lawnmowers sitting in giant weed-stricken lawns.
We stopped off at what we thought would be a picturesque place for some artsy trip portraiture: an abandoned car lot with some beautifully rusted old cars. Posing on the hoods of some of these cars-my friend in a rabbit fur sleeveless vest and Diesel jeans, myself in blue velvet pants and a vintage cowboy sweater of my mother’s-I suddenly felt embarrassed when the barefoot kids from the trailer next door began to stare at us.
The Mississippi Delta, that part of America where the blues began and where the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin found inspiration, is also historically one of the most impoverished places in the nation. As we drove down Highway 61, “The Blues Highway,” my friend and I felt that we had taken a wrong turn into the third world.
My high school English teacher, a delta blues aficionado and the inspiration for our trip, had recommended we stay at the Riverside Motel in Clarksdale, the official home of the blues. For one, it is the site of famed blues singer Bessie Smith’s death. But as much as my teacher fancied Frank “Rat” Ratliff, the motel owner and manager, no one could ever have prepared us for the wonderful, heart-warming character that took us under his wing for the next two days.
Rat, like the rest of the South, does things differently. But his manner was much warmer than my slow-paced southern culture at home in Birmingham, Ala.
When we checked into the motel, Rat unlocked the door to his parlor and sat us down to talk about the motel, its guest history, and literally everything else he had on his mind. Flipping through the guest book, my friend and I noted that an unreal number of foreigners stay at Rat’s old, rickety, dorm-style motel every year, the greatest majority coming from Japan. In fact, one Japanese kid comes to Rat’s three times a year to play music and absorb the blues culture. (creditcadabra.com) He keeps his guitar in the corner of Rat’s parlor all year long.
Rat also told us about JFK, Jr., who came to stay at the Riverside sometime in the ‘90s to avoid some bad press around the time of his bar exam. Pictures of JFK, Jr., and Rat’s mom flank the hallway of Rat’s domain, and in his parlor hangs a large, framed portrait of JFK and Jackie O. themselves. He told us that during the music festival season, when his motel is full, he encourages all of his guests to gather in the parlor and talk. One of the ways he helped people feel at home, he said, was by fostering conversation between his guests. Our initial conversation with Rat lasted an hour and a half.
Rat’s pride in his motel goes so deep that he stays there morning and night, leaving his wife at home, to make sure his customers have everything that they need. He stays up late and puts fresh paint on the walls in dingy rooms, listening to the blues on an ancient, muffled radio. But most important to him were the sheets he’d cleaned and put on our bed. He said, “I always use colored sheets, makes people feel at home, you know? Had one customer say ‘Honey, damn! We got these sheets at home!’ “
If you know someone like Rat, the Delta seems, sometimes, more like home than home.
