Each year as summer fades and fall encroaches I am overcome by wanderlust. When I lived in Atlanta that meant a cold six pack of beer, a bag of boiled peanuts, a tank of gas and a compass pointed northward. Now that I live in Oxford, Miss., I've had to change my ways.
I still fill the tank with gas, and the cooler with beer, but the boiled peanuts have been replaced by cracklins -- the kind with Bible verses on the side of the cellophane package. (My last bag of Hog Wild Cracklins quoted Romans 10:13. "For whoever will call upon the name of the Lord will be saved.")
And, I now point my compass, and my car, southward, toward the Mississippi Delta. (If you want to be a stickler about it, the direction is really eastward and what most people refer to as the Mississippi Delta is, in all geographic actuality, the Yazoo Delta.)
Usually I head out with no particular place to go. Serendipitous encounters are a Delta specialty. Recently though, stoked on strong coffee and the power of positive suggestion at The Bottletree Bakery, our local shrine to sugar, flour and caffeine, I set out in search of an elusive southern icon -- the bottletree.
Long a part of the Southern landscape, bottletrees can be traced to
west-African religious belief in the use of talismans and totems to ward off evil spirits.
Traditionally, bottletrees were believed to function as spirit-catchers of a sort. People believed that evil spirits would be attracted to the brightly-hued bottles like moths to a flame. The story goes that, once attracted, the spirits would be lured into and eventually trapped within the bottles, insuring peace and prosperity for the
bottletree owner.
Bottletrees are made by stripping the leaves from a living tree (or a well-preserved dead one), taking care to leave the branches intact. Bottles, usually retrieved from the rubbish heap and often filled with any available bright paint, are slipped over the upward pointing branches.
The result is a pyramid of creativity that, in many
ways, resmbles a Christmas tree.
Though these "poor man's stained glass windows" were once a common
sight, bottletrees are now going the way of homegrown tomatoes and hand-picked cotton.
Chalk it up to creeping commercialism and an increasingly urbane Southern populace. Or, choose a more likely culprit: unsavory folk art pickers with hard hearts and gas-powered chain saws. No matter the reason, the bottletrees that used to dot the backroads of my Southern youth are now as scarce as chicken teeth.
And so it was that I found myself headed for the Delta on a recent, sunny Saturday morning. Surely if bottletrees were still to be seen, then the Delta, "the most Southern place on earth," was the place to seek them out.
Through Panther Burn, past Alligator, near Hollywood, beyond Anguilla,
I drove in search of the telltale, bright, roadside refraction of light. Though I saw enough oddities to make a carnival sideshow freak blush, not a bottletree was to be found.
Off Highway 61 a 40-foot, hoop-skirted "mammy" beckoned me on.
Closer to home, I came across a roadside dinosaur constructed of auto parts. In Robinsonville I ate deep-fried dill pickles.
Throwing gender convention to the wind, I even stopped to ask directions. (Most folks looked at me like I was crazy when I asked: "Do y'all know where I can see a bottletree?" The few who didn't think I was crazy had studied at the "turn down near where Old Man Bundren's place used to be before it burned down" school of direction giving. In other words, they were of little help.)
And so I returned home to the hill country of Mississippi, home to Oxford.
Exhausted and a bit dispirited by the creeping realization that bottletrees may indeed have vanished from the Southern landscape, I sought solace at the place where this tale began -- Bottletree Bakery.
Over a bracing cup of coffee and a slice of blueberry humble pie, I moped and stared at the assembled artwork. Bottletrees were everywhere. Pictures, paintings, sculptures. Like caged animals on display, they mocked me. A particular picture caught my fancy.
"Where might I find it?" I asked.
"Oh somewhere out east of here," came the answer -- an obsequious and
thoroughly Southern reply. Some things never change. Some things endure.
What did I expect? Directions?
If you know where I can view a bottletree and and are willing and able to give more specific directions, drop me a line.
|