One night during this time my mother started asking me questions, out of the blue, about William Faulkner. She was taking a night-school course and wanted to write about the Nobel laureate from her hometown, New Albany. Why Faulkner, I asked, of all the writers in the world to care about? Why not Richard Wright, James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston? “We’re kin to some Faulkners,” she said. I laughed out loud and informed her that this Faulkner was white. My mother smiled and said, “So?”

As I write in 1993, the mayor of Vicksburg is a black man. Contemporary Vicksburg is a sleepy river city with a predominantly black population, and race relations are quiet: the residents, black and white, seem to go about their business with a certain peacefulness, even equanimity, that belies the city’s history. But though it sits so pretty on the bluffs, it has an atmosphere equally seedy, empty and tired on a quiet summer afternoon. I drove down fabled Catfish Row, a strip of black food shops and juke joints one afternoon, and found it deserted, few pedestrians and no cars. This was true of most of the other streets in Vicksburg, including U.S. 80, the east-west thoroughfare. Most of the city’s automobile traffic was on Interstate 20, which crosses the Mississippi on a cantilevered bridge, the twin of the structure at Natchez, and barrels on past the dingy brick buildings and frame houses of Vicksburg for Jackson.

Mississippi blues are simple, built on modal one-, two- and three-chord harmonies, rhythmically intense and searingly emotional. Many see the blues as boozy, folk-existential wails, but as musician Vernon Reid notes, the blues are inevitably sociological. The style arose in part as a reflection of social unrest: the blues are the cries of souls under lock and key, a way of speaking when doomed to silence, a parallel language of human expressiveness. They are a way of analyzing, understanding and notating past experience and then distancing oneself from it with irony and humor that contain but do not deny the trauma. Bluesmen bewail “evil women,” but such complaints are not a joke, as often relationships with women were the only wealth those men had; and muttering in a song about leaving for Chicago might have been their only means of criticizing the plantation boss.

The statue’s resting place looked pretty good. All she really had to do was get him deep enough so the dogs didn’t dig him up before the sale. After her exertions over his tomb, the hollow Saint Joseph seemed to weigh nothing in her hand. He seemed to float in space before her eyes. She set him down on his back in the hole, but found that she couldn’t shovel the dirt on top of him, not right on his face like that. She turned him face-down, but that seemed worse. When she picked him up again, half-frozen dirt had sifted into his open base. You could see it through the translucent, cream-colored skin: Saint Joseph turning brown as he filled up with soil.

Jennifer was a performance artist. The blood was a prop in her act. There were many props in Jennifer’s act, but blood was the unifying device. She concealed plastic sacs of the homemade blood in various articles she had with her onstage—a child’s fluffy teddy bear, her pearl-encrusted evening bag, the bodice of her white bridal gown. For an hour she paraded about to her own synthesizer music, acting out dysfunctional family relationships and decrying bankrupt, oppressive governments, while the Barbie-doll world hemorrhaged around her. 

More than anything, he would like to turn the nighttime sky into 3-D color TV. That would be the most incredible hack of all, he says, and he claims to know how to do it, but it would cost a lot of money, even for a few seconds, and so far the funding has been elusive. He pitched the idea to his old friend Vernon DeCloud—financing celestial television by selling some sky-time for advertising—and though Vern would be perfectly happy to go down in history as the man who turned the stratosphere into a Coke commercial, he said no. Vern didn’t believe Tempesto could do it.

Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.

The chief legal problem connected with hidden food is that of title. A scavenger cannot acquire title to chicken that he has discovered abruptly, and therefore he cannot transfer title even by barter to an innocent dining man who has requested a stew. Hence the rightful owner of the chicken may take it without compensation from anyone who has not properly tracked it according to the rules set forth in the Topographical Legend and Location of Food Nooks. The innocent dining man, however, may challenge the scavenger for breach of his implied warranty of good title as it applies to edible objects, in this case the promised delivery of a chicken bisque with definite ownership.

When air kills itself in remote regions, the debris settles here on the grass, sharpening the points. Men of the house may not walk on these areas, nor may they ever observe the grass without pain in the chest and belly. They exist as figures which are doubled over, in static repose against the house territory. When children sleep on these points of lawn, the funeral of air passes just above their heads in a crosswind with the body. Funerals generally are staged in pollinated wind frames, so that the air can shoot to the east off of the children’s breath, dying elsewhere along the way, allowing fresh, living air to swoop in on the blast-back to attack the house.

I decided the caterpillar was too stupid to live. I put it into the carabid beetle’s container. The caterpillar was much larger, but it had no means of defense. The carabid sliced into it and lapped at its leaking blood. Because the caterpillar was so big, the carabid had to repeat his attack eight or ten times. The caterpillar crawled away frantically for the first few wounds, but it was so slow that its movements hardly inconvenienced the beetle drinking from its bleeding flank. After ten minutes or so the caterpillar lay still. Its jade flesh turned black as the beetle chewed and drained it.

The copulation continues. It lacks the aerobics of a mammalian encounter. After the insertion it involves, besides the cannibalism, merely clinging and a slight pulsing in the male’s soft abdomen. It may go on for a long time; some couplings have outlasted my patience for watching. The genitals fit so tightly that, if you try to separate the pair, their bodies will tear apart before they disengage.

A prairie dog guard sees a rattlesnake coming and chirps the alarm. The adult prairie dogs defend their burrows, throwing their tails up to appear menacing and making bluff charges at the snake. They work in teams, one distracting while another rushes in for a bite. The rodents have formidable teeth and can kill a rattlesnake, though they rarely manage to. Some people say prairie dogs will seal a rattlesnake in their own burrow once he’s inside, entombing him alive, Poe-style.