MONDAY: Vicksburg to Memphis

"The Mississippi Delta," a native son once wrote, "begins in the lobby of the Peabody and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg."

The Peabody Hotel in Memphis happens to be where I have a reservation for the night. So it seems only fitting that I spend the afternoon driving from one end of the Delta to the other. It is lunch time when I head down Vicksburg's steep bluff to see what remains of Catfish Row. Not much, it turns out; the ramshackle sprawl of beer joints and fish houses has been supplanted by the casinos.

Actually, I'm relieved. Catfish is one of those Southern dishes whose pleasures are more folkloric than gastronomic. As if whiskers aren't unappetizing enough, there's the overall shape of the bottom-feeder. No less an authority than a writer for Southern Living once declared that catfish "looks like its head has been slammed in a car door."

So I grab a convenience-store snack instead before slipping out of town and onto Route 61, one of the most myth-encrusted highways in America. The road cuts through the heart of the Delta and once formed the main thoroughfare connecting Mississippi to Memphis and the cities of the North. As such, 61 became the main artery of the blues, carrying north the music of John Lee Hooker of Clarksdale, B.B. King of Itta Bena, and Leadbelly (born McKinley Morganfield) of Rolling Fork, to mention only a few.

A short way north of Vicksburg, steep bluffs give way to gently rolling hills, and then to the pancake-flat fields of the Delta proper. The Delta is actually a misnomer, referring not to the Mississippi's true mouth but to the alluvial plain that stretches for some 160 miles on either side of the river. This fertile land once brought untold riches to cotton planters, and unspeakable poverty to the blacks who toiled for them. Today, with most of the cotton and its wealthy cultivators long gone, the Delta is the blackest and poorest pocket of the nation, with the population of some counties 75% black and 50% beneath the poverty line.

The Delta is also famed for what one writer calls its "million-volt-a- minute sunlight." So I slip on my shades, turn on the a.c. and let the landscape roll by to the strains of a B.B. King tape. There's not much to look at, except the roadside signs. A stand offering "crawfish boiled and live." A small wooden church with an extravagant claim: "Free trip to Heaven. Details inside!" And signs announcing flyspeck settlements with colorful names: Alligator, Bobo, Lula, Rich, Nitta Yuma, Panther Burn.

One sign finally lures me to the shoulder of the road. "Welcome to Mound Bayou, the oldest all-black municipality, founded by ex-slaves in 1887." The sign stirs a faint memory from college history class, so I pull in at a dilapidated luncheonette offering BBQ, slab or sandwich, and pig's gizzards, here or to-go.

The proprietor directs me to the town's unofficial historian, Milburn Crowe, a gray-haired man who lives in a modest home two blocks off the highway. Crowe's father belonged to one of the "pioneer families" who came here hoping to create a black Utopia where freed slaves could own their own land and elect their own officials. "This was a sanctuary," Crowe says. "It was the one place in the South where blacks ran for sheriff instead of running from the sheriff."

As a child in the 1930s, Crowe was insulated from the racial apartheid that consigned blacks to second-class citizenship in the South. The only segregation in Mound Bayou was at the train depot, which had a separate waiting room for whites who happened to disembark there. Blacks reserved the finer, first-class waiting room for themselves.

Crowe still recalls the shock of going to a sandwich shop in a neighboring town and being told he had to go around back to be served. Later, as he made his own way in the world, eventually landing in Chicago, he realized the magic--and unreality--of his childhood in Mound Bayou. "It didn't really prepare us for the real world," he says.

Today, Mound Bayou's 2200 residents are still almost all black. The six whites in town are nuns. But with the end of segregation, Mound Bayou has lost much of its distinctiveness, and succumbed to the same economic decline as so many Delta towns. Even so, Crowe chose to return home when he retired from his city job in Chicago. "There's a lot of promise in the South. It's not Utopia but it is changing for the better," he says, seeing me to the door. "I want to be a part of that."

Back on 61, it's hard to share his optimism. The crushing toil of cotton sharecropping may be gone. But little economic life has risen in its place, except for catfish ponds and catfish processing plants, which offer some of the most wretched jobs in America (i.e. sawing off catfish heads for close to the minimum wage).

Then, near Tunica at the north end of the Delta, a familiar sight appears. Garish billboards advertise "Bally's," and "Casino Strip Resorts." Casino hotels rise in the distance like desert mirages. Tunica, once among the poorest towns in America, now is gaining on Atlantic City in the size of its casino space. Speeding past it all, I'm reminded of the words of Willie Morris, one of so many writers to hail from the Delta. "The contemporary South from my perspective: It's the juxtapositions that drive you crazy."