Nearing Vicksburg

I drove the narrow, wooded road until nearing Vicksburg where the green overhang opened up to cotton and soybean fields. The road into town, Clay Street, drops you right off at the Vicksburg National Park. The Civil War siege of Vicksburg, and the city’s July 4th, 1863, surrender gave Union forces control over the Mississippi River. The Park dominates the city. In another life, I attended a re-enactment in Vicksburg. We walked a dusty road to a field outside of town where white folks in costumes lived in tents and ate awful food. Today, I was meeting with the Mellon Fellow partnering with the Park on the African American experience from War through Reconstruction. We met in a coffeeshop decorated with dead ducks. After we visited, we drove to the courthouse.

Vicksburg: Near and Far

Vicksburg is confusing to me with real life mixed up with history. The city has an actual working courthouse and an Old Courthouse, which I believe is a museum. We went into the working courthouse. The Fellow showed me how to pull the oversized real property ledgers off the shelves and index land ownership. I saw an original 1800s Hebron deed, but it appeared to be land the family owned in town, not the LaGrange farmland. A helpful clerk with blond hair and china blue eyes couldn’t find a record of Ellen Hebron’s divorce, my true reason for being in the courthouse.

Our Wavery Choices

Standing on the old downtown streets, I pointed west to the river.

“I heard that isn’t the Mississippi River. That the channel changed.”

“Right,” the Fellow said.

The most basic fact about Vicksburg—it sits on the bluffs of the Mississippi River—isn’t true. In 1876, the river changed course, leaving Vicksburg high and dry. Two years later, the Army Corp of Engineers began work to cut a diversion channel to the Yazoo River. Vicksburg sits on the Yazoo River.

We have choices, you and me. I have found those choices to be as wavery as light bouncing off water. As I travel though life, I have to renew my decision to examine what I think I know. We can accept family stories and Lost Cause Myths, or we can listen. We can hear when historians tell us that is not what happened. Or we can continue to broadcast that which makes us feel comfortable.

Vicksburg Nearing

As we were leaving the duck place, a white man was seated outside at an iron table. Two white women were standing at the table, talking to him. They all seemed to be early forties. The man spoke to the Mellon Fellow using a bluff hearty “Hello!” It’s not actually a greeting. It’s a rebuke, checking you. Asserting control: this is my place, not yours. That was my first inkling people in Vicksburg might be aware of the work at the Park to highlight African American history. And did not like it. Too often people say, why are you digging up that past? But in a town like Vicksburg wrapped in the past, it’s clear what they really mean is, why are you digging up that particular past?

Nearing Vicksburg, Again

Several times in my conversation with the Mellon Fellow, I felt she knew something about my family past that she wasn’t ready to share. Once, she asked, “Have you made a thorough newspaper search?” I have tried. But I’ve seen references to articles that I can’t then recover. I’m sure I have surprises yet to come that, as I keep nearing Vicksburg, will force me, once again, to make choices.