p 60--Bistro Graball
SY -- The first time I saw this picture, it reminded me--for some reason--of
church picnics. It seems to me that Fairview Baptist Church, where I
went as a child, must be just behind Maude as she shoots the tables.
Her title for the photo, however, convinces me that the association with
churches is one that I'm bringing to the photo myself. I suspect Maude
had something else in mind--namely, that Deltans, both black and white,
love to party. They will do it anywhere.
MSC -- The Bistro Graball was really just a couple of tables out in the open near a house at Graball Landing, my family's old cotton farm on the Tallahatchie River. This is truly deep country (off a country road that's off a country road). I never saw anyone there, since the house next to the tables was deserted, but I think it was a gathering place on weekends -- perhaps where some people came to drink and eat barbeque. My great grandfather's house was blown away in a great cyclone (the local vernacular, or, at least my grandmother's word for, tornado) in 1894. Before that cyclone, Graball consisted of the "big house," (though not a grand one), a commissary, a cemetery with a quaint iron fence, and the nearby houses (shacks, really) that the plantation workers lived in. The house next to the table and chairs of Bistro Graball was of a much later vintage -- maybe the 1940's. When I came upon it in the fall of l993, it was just a ramshackle tableau: an illusory, somehow fragile escape from the long dead Delta plantation system of forced labor and the stringent "laws" the workers lived by. Steve's sense of a Baptist church picnic is a hopeful observation, and if any shred of hope was to be found at the Bistro Graball, it would have been on weekends when the "party" was being held out under the open sky. Though the blues and God are supposed to be kept totally separate (the blues representing the Devil), this might be a place where the two things actually came together. When I went out there in the fall of 2000, everything was gone -- house, tables, chairs -- as if they never really existed at all.
SY -- Maude's comments remind me once again of old houses. I'll confess that when I was about seventeen, I asked a friend (who was old enough to buy liquor) to get me a bottle of gin. I couldn't leave it at home, where my folks would find it, so one Friday morning, on my way to school, I took it and hid it in an old tenant house I knew had been abandoned for years. When I went back to get it, along about sundown, I discovered it was no longer there. After a much more careful look around than I had taken that morning, I realized that somebody was using the house as a place to have a good time. There were numerous empty bottles in the back room, a few crumpled cigarette packs, several cans that had once contained potted meat or sardines. At the time I was angry, but later on, when I realized just how crowded some lives can be and how little privacy some people have, I found myself hoping that whoever had taken the gin had enjoyed it.
