p 77--Kudzu House, Spring

SY -- I can't see kudzu without thinking of my old friend Willie Morris. This photo was taken at the north end of the Delta, in DeSoto County, but down around Yazoo City, where Willie was from, the kudzu just took the landscape over, as it has taken this house and hillside. As a child, I actually feared kudzu, believing that it might one day eat me.

MSC -- Little did anyone realize when they imported kudzu to the south from Japan in the 1930's (ostensibly to solve the Erosion Problem), that it would take over the south! I find the rolling banks of kudzu beautiful in every season, but the Kudzu House is clearly visible only in the dead of winter, since in the other seasons it's just a mass of green vines. This house at Walls, Miss, (which is now more or less a bedroom community for the burgeoning Miss. casino scene) -- where the Delta meets the bluffs outside of Memphis on fabled Highway 61 -- was originally on an old plantation called Glover. According to my friend whose father owned Glover, this was a shed used to store various farm equipment and chemicals. In the 60 or so years since Kudzu came here, it has (as Steve eloquently says) "taken" many a hillside. The Delta itself, which is an extremely flat alluvial plain whose only hills would be Indian burial mounds, is not conducive to having any kudzu to take a foothold, but all the hills surrounding the Delta are covered with it. It's almost like the entire Delta is ringed by a cathedral of kudzu: we're in the "bowl " and kudzu longs to encroach upon us, but the land fights receiving this interloper. Speaking of the flatness of the Delta, this is how Eudora Welty described it in her book, Delta Wedding, through the eyes of the child protagonist, who is coming from her home in the hills via train to visit her Delta relatives:

"And then, as if a hand reached along the green ridge and all of a sudden pulled down with a sweep, like a scoop in a bin, the hills and every tree in the world and left cotton fields, the Delta began...Thoughts went out of her head and the landscape filled it. In the Delta, most of the world seemed sky...The land was perfectly flat and level but it shimmered like the wing of a lighted dragonfly. It seemed strummed, as though it were an instrument and something had touched it."