Standing at the
Crossroads
By William McKeen

© 2007, William McKeen
Adapted from Highway 61. Reprinted by permission of
W. W. Norton & Company. Not to be reprinted
without permission of the publisher.

It’s a suffocating Sunday afternoon in the Mississippi Delta and my 19-year-old son and I are looking for a dead black man.

We head south of Oxford on Highway 7, over hills we see through a Jackson Pollock-like spray of butterflies and insects on the windshield of our Explorer. The road cuts across central Mississippi, back toward Highway 61. The corn, eyebrow high, already has tassles. Graham stocks the CD changer with appropriate music: Muddy Waters, The Real Folk Blues; Sunnyland Slim, Sunnyland Train; B.B. King, King of the Blues, Disc 1; Son House, Delta Blues and Spirituals; Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers (gold disc) and Charley Patton, Founder of the Delta Blues.

Graham has also pulled out reams of computer printouts from his Internet research and his notes. While he drives, he asks me to mark key sites on our Mississippi road map. There are three graves – two marked, one unmarked – and Graham doesn’t want to take any chances. “We’re going to all three,” he announces. “One way or another, I want to be standing over him.”

We’re in the middle of a 6,000-mile road trip following Highway 61 from its beginning in Thunder Bay, Canada, to its end in New Orleans. Mississippi has so much music history that we’ve decided to take side trips from our main road. Marked on the map, they look like cross stitches.

“I think that unmarked grave is outside of Greenwood,” he says.
Greenwood’s got that post-nuclear look, largely void of people. We park downtown, but there are few signs of life. After a couple blocks we come to Spooney’s Bar-Be-Que, where two young black men sit on the stoop, the CLOSED sign prominent in the glass door behind them. They don’t work there; they’re just copping some shade.

“Doin’ some bowlin’, buddy?” One of the men, the one in the pork-pie hat, points to my shoes.

“Hey, they’re the most comfortable shoes I own,” I say. “Actually, we’re just looking for directions. Do you know where Little Zion Church is?”

His face clouds and he turns to his buddy. “Little Zion?”

“Down this street right here,” his friend points. “Not too far down, you’ll see it, if it’s the one I’m thinking about.”

“All right, we’ll go looking for it.” I motion toward the door. “This place open later?”

The first guy shakes his head. “No, Spooney’s not open on Sunday. Not much is. You looking for a place to eat?”

He gives us directions to a place he says we’ll love not far away, but we go looking for the church first. We find it, but it’s in the middle of town, and the place we want is in the country.

“Look at the sign,” Graham says. “’New’ Zion. The place we want is Little Zion. They got mixed up."

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