p 68--Four Trees and Water Tower

SY -- This photo was taken on a place that I do know, because I've driven through Sumner many times. But once again, I have other associations too: Deer Creek, in Leland, and Indian Bayou, in my hometown, Indianola. There always seems to be a bayou running through the heart of so many of the small towns in the Delta, and because the landscape is flat and the buildings low, the water tower is almost always the tallest thing in sight.

MSC -- Four Trees was taken in one of the rare snows we have in the Delta. Of course, there is something purifying and magical -- in a kind of Zen sense --.about a stark, white landscape punctuated by four black trees. The "Chinese Hat" water tower was a real small -Delta -town landmark; this particular one in Sumner was torn down in the last couple of years. It turned out , as it has with a lot of these photographs, that while I set out simply to record a visually ineresting thing, it later turned out to be an important record of a thing that is no longer around for everyone to view. Photographs preserve history, but in many cases they create a fictional history, a "sense of place." (Think of Eudora Welty's WPA photos of Mississippi: unless you were actually there in the 1930's, it's hard to imagine any other vision of Missisippi in the 1930's) My vision of the Delta is as much about what I actually went out looking for, as much as it is about what I simply happened upon. I feel that Steve, also a Delta native, tells such a powerful story in Visible Spirits: His book ( like a photograph ) is a kind of "made thing," one that is woven from bits and pieces of history, conversations, myths, perhaps Steve's early communion with the landscape. But fortunately for the reader, Visible Spirits contains convincing voices, all the voices that present themselves to us in all their poignant and horrifying facets -- voices like those of the people that actually formed the Delta . There is just no getting around the fact that the Delta economy was built upon the labor of people who were paid nothing, and were allowed to have nothing. Noone wanted to hear their voices, and in fact lived in fear that the voices would one day rise up and rebel against the inequities and inequalities. It took strong people on both sides to build up this awesome and tragic system, and it took strong people to tear it down.