The Folks Along the Road

On Mississippi's Route 61, collecting highway saints and homemade worlds

by

Further Afield

Starting out near home in Alligator, Mississippi, we head up Route 61, alive in planting season as the Delta hits its stride and the alluvial soil abides. The heart-soul-toil of this land is what made many blues musicians, and in the same way the hard farm work made heartbreakingly beautiful music, so too did it create its artists. 

Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art, Inc. sits on Delta Avenue in Clarksdale, and the sign out front is handpainted: OPEN SEVEN DAYS A WEEK, a black cat head with red eyes. The symbol is an ode to sculptor and bluesman James “Son Ford” Thomas, who worked many jobs, including gravedigger, and his son, Pat Thomas, who followed his father into the blues and the world of folk art. Outside of his music, Son Ford became famous for making skulls out of clay he found around his home place near Leland, Mississippi. He’d use anything he could find for teeth, but when the corn kernels sprouted, local dentists would donate to the cause. His skulls are unsettling, though whimsical, like a cartoon ghost and a Southern haint met at the crossroads and shook hands. His son, Pat, likewise, became famous for his line art cat head drawings; he created thousands of them over his lifetime. One of them now graces a Mississippi vodka brand, but another inspired store owner Roger Stolle’s cavern of Blues & Folk art. Paintings fill the walls; blues books and records cover every other surface. If you’re lucky and Stolle is there to greet you, he’s a veritable fountain of knowledge on everything local, blues, art, music, and food. 

[Read this: "Standing at the Crossroads—In Clarksdale, the Delta blues meet Southern hospitality."] 

From the sunny hot streets of Clarksdale, lined with dusty farm trucks, blue ghosts crowding the streets, we head south towards Mama’s Dream World, also known as the Ethel Wright Mohamed Stitchery, in Belzoni, the Catfish Capital of the World. Mohamed was born Ethel Wright in Fame, Mississippi, a town as big as a bird’s nest—as she was known to say. She moved to Belzoni in 1927 after she married her husband, Hassan Mohamed, an immigrant from Sarhine, Syria (now Lebanon), in 1924. They had a store they ran together for decades, where they sold overalls and shoes, fabric and food. 

[Ethel Wright Mohamed’s Stitchery] is testament to the mothers and grandmothers of the world, even for those of us who aren’t so lucky to have artwork that can also keep us warm while we sleep. 

In a book about folk artists in Mississippi, Dr. William R. Ferris, Jr. records the oral history of Ethel. Her love for her life, and especially her family, is underlined with sweet nostalgia and a matter-of-factness about the world. When her husband fell sick in the sixties, she began stitching at his bedside, creating scenes from his favorite story collection, The Arabian Nights, on pillowcases and sheets. When he died in 1965, she continued to run the store but would go home every night and stitch. Her early work was made on fabric scraps; she would sign each piece with “E.M.” She stitched stories about her grandparents getting married in the nineteenth century, because she didn’t have a photograph of the wedding and wished that she did. She made work about the birth of her eighth child, her daughter, Carol, with all of her family standing around her and the doctor by her bedside. 

In the seventies, she was encouraged by friends to join the state’s craft guild. They drove to Jackson, where the Folk Life Festival in Washington, D.C. was seeking out Mississippi artists. Two scouts from the Smithsonian fell in love with her work, and the rest was history. As she shot to fame through the festival and resulting traveling exhibition, plus an article in National Geographic, her purpose never changed. She would sometimes be working on five or six pieces at a time, so excited about every idea she could hardly sit still. Mohamed’s granddaughter Amy Hawkins relayed to us the way the artist told the stories of her own work: 

“You see that pair there? They’re kissing cousins. And those men are talking about horse trading . . . ‘If it wasn’t a Sunday, I sure would like to buy that horse.’ ‘Well if it wasn’t a Sunday I would sell him to you for $120.’  And a man teaching his son to tip his hat to ladies—look, over here, this man’s a flirt, because he is sitting next to this lady on the pew and his shoe is touching her shoe!” 

The museum is Mohamed’s former home, full of stories and light. Hawkins gives us the tour. Her telling of the history of her grandmother’s work is beautiful to witness; it’s a testament to keeping your people’s work alive, through all the generations. 

The house is beautiful and grand in a way that makes me remember my grandmother, the care she showed for us as children. There are treasures in every corner, photos of the family, scrapbooks, scraps of work Mohamed never finished. In one room, giant planning drawings for future stitchwork hang, awaiting her hand. Hawkins brought forth a comforter that her grandmother had made for her, upon it a persimmon tree full of birds of every  color. The place is testament to the mothers and grandmothers of the world, even for those of us who aren’t so lucky to have artwork that can also keep us warm while we sleep. Ethel Wright Mohamed’s Stitchery is open by appointment only.

If you streak across to Kosciusko, you’ll find the home of the “Unusual Artist” L.V. Hull, part of the L.V. Hull Legacy Center, which is set to partially open to the public on June 13. The home and property, renovated to be part of a larger “arts campus,” were, when the late artist lived here, covered, inch by inch, with bright colors and art objects—assemblages that speak to Hull’s enormous spirit. Her story is one entrenched in placemaking and homeownership,  in possibility and the dire need for individuality. 

Hull was born L.V. Bentley in McAdams, Mississippi, in 1942. Her father was a cotton farmer and her mother a midwife. She grew up making things out of mud, because out in the country there wasn’t any paint to be found. She married Frank Hull in 1961, and they moved to town, had one son, “Little Joe” Hull, in 1964, and divorced in the next year. Little Joe died at the age of four, and things began shifting. 

[Read more about L.V. Hull in this article from our September 2023 issue.] 

In 1974, with money earned from domestic labor, Hull bought her own nine hundred square foot house for $7,000. To decorate, she started painting every surface she could see: perfume bottles, sticks, planks, hatpins. “I don’t decorate no two things alike,” she said. Her work is made up of painted-out advice, of dots and dabs of color, of things gathered and glued together into a Southern fried mosaic, glass and beads and lighters all in a frame. She started with the yard, decorating tires with paint. She decided they looked like vases, so she added shoes on sticks and painted those, and they went with flowers that were already in her yard, the nature and art blooming together. The art started to move onto the porch, into her house, until she was positively immersed.

Hull’s health began to decline in the early 2000s, and neighbors started visiting more often, bringing her meals, paints, and friendship. When she passed away in 2008, an emptiness was felt in that yard, still so alive with color. 

The L.V. Hull Legacy Center will soon present exhibitions of Hull’s work and host creative residencies and workshops, as well as other public programming.  Her home is also a part of the National Register of Historic Places at the National Significance level—the first home of a Black art environment creator and the first home/studio of a Black woman visual artist to be listed as such. Phase I of the Grand Opening of the L.V. Hull Legacy Center will take place from noon–4 pm on June 13. 

From Kosciusko, it’s on to the city of Vicksburg. If you weren’t looking for Margaret’s Grocery & Market, you might miss it. Once a dazzling pink, white, yellow, and red painted building of concrete, brick, and wood towers in the front, this vernacular art environment is in its wintering season, soon to return in the spring and summer of its life as a bright building on the bluffs. Margaret’s Grocery was once the only grocery store owned and operated by a Black woman across the entire stretch of Highway 61. Margaret Rogers’ first husband was killed during a robbery of the store, and then she met Reverend H.D. “Preacher” Dennis. The two were married after Preacher promised to build her a castle, if only she would dedicate the space to God. 

So, she stopped selling beer and ripped out the jukebox and slot machines. Preacher’s castle of love arose like a bouquet of flowers, varied and colorful and beautiful. He delivered sermons in a glittering bus, welcoming guests into the yard adorned with shrines and sculptures, prayers and painted signs, because “All Is Welcome.” The grocery became a lighthouse to the religious and the curious alike, and Preacher welcomed them all. Margaret passed in 2009, and when Preacher followed her at the age of ninety-six in 2012, the battle to preserve their castle of love was already underway. Photographer Suzi Altman was a close friend to the couple and helped care for Preacher in his last years. She made a promise to protect Margaret’s Grocery and founded the nonprofit, the Mississippi Folk Art Foundation, in an effort to raise funds to save the site—envisioning a future interpretive center with a re-creation of the store inside. Anything from the Grocery that has been dismantled is being saved to be re-used in the future. In the meantime, tours inside of the grocery are available with advanced notice via margaretsgrocery.org. 

This road trip was a reminder to visit people while you can; their castles to love will fade, the frogs will be moved around, the scripture lesson will vanish if there is no one to profess it.

Just up the road in downtown Vicksburg sits The Attic Gallery, where Lesley Silver holds court, or church, on the second floor of her building, which looks across to the Mississippi rolling by. When she is in the gallery, she is at the table in the center of it, telling stories. She has known these artists, from Preacher to Hull. She is the walking encyclopedia of Vicksburg art, and Mississippi at large. Her gallery has been open for fifty-five years, and the life and vigor of the space is undeniable. Paintings of every genre cover the walls, metal cut-outs of fish and ladybugs, mermaids and alligators; encaustic paintings with keys and crows with extra wings, watercolors dripping with memory of place. Chickens run, humans jump for joy, zinnias bloom; it might take three or four rounds to scratch the surface. We leave knowing we can always come back if we have questions about the wide world of Mississippi and its artists. The Attic Gallery is open Tuesday–Saturday, from 10 am–5 pm.

[Read this: "Treasures in the Attic—For fifty years, the Attic Gallery has reigned as a beloved arts haven in Vicksburg"] 

The road out of Vicksburg is winding, and the bluffs give way to rivers as we near the southern part of the state. Palestine Gardens is three hours southeast from Vicksburg, in a place called Lucedale. The Gardens opened to the public on Easter Sunday in 1960. The Reverend Walter Harvell Jackson founded the site with his wife after they travelled to the Holy Land, wanting to bring their experience back home to Mississippi for those who couldn’t travel overseas. Right before you turn from the main road into the private forest, an archway assures you that you’ve made it. 

To visit the Gardens is perhaps to surrender yourself to a new world, or to entrench yourself ever-deeper into the one you thought you already knew. Caretaker Don Bradley, who looks a little bit like Jesus, or more like the Old Testament God, is busy working when you arrive—a weaver of stories, here by himself in the fragrant pines of the soft woods that hold Lucedale’s miniature Holy Land. This is an art environment set to scale, one foot equaling one mile, as you journey from one site to another—Bethlehem and Babylon, Jerusalem and Gethsemane. We found ourselves looking down at the entire ancient city of Jerusalem, with bridges and great walls, little ancient homes with a real-life lizard basking on a warm roof. There is a stone rolled away from Jesus’s tomb. Some of the towers Bradley restored with the help of his son’s bicycle wheels, “Don’t worry, he wasn’t using the bike anymore,” assures Bradley. The nativity scene is complete with a small cow, donkey, and sheep. What once might have been freshly painted buildings have turned the color of things left in the weather, making them a little more part of the landscape. 

Bradley begins to deliver his Gospel, including mathematic predictions from the Book of Revelation. All of this flies over my head with the migrating ducks. The woods have a spirit of quiet only slightly marred by the impending doom and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The quarter mile pathway is clean, and the property obviously lovingly cared for, Bradley throwing pinecones and errant limbs off the path back into the woods. There are three or four ponds black with tannins and brimming with life, and our dogs (which were welcome on the walk) were alive to the world. 

It is fascinating to witness someone living and talking completely as himself, with a pure and complete drive to tell us what he has discovered. “I would not have said it if it was not true.” As we walk back, I keep trying to ask him about the beautiful land around us; instead, he tells us a story about the fish he feeds in one of the ponds that symbolizes a Holy Sea. One day, he was walking by the pond as a big bass followed him on the perimeter. He began to apologize to the fish that he didn’t have any food for him that day, when a grasshopper flew on to his chest. He grabbed it and threw it to the fish, who ate it instantaneously. 

On our way out, Bradley prays with us, and for us, reminding us again to prepare for what might come. Palestine Gardens is open Thursday–Saturdays, 9 am–6 pm, and Sundays, 1 pm–5 pm. 

From Lucedale we head towards the coast, to the friendly city of Ocean Springs. Shearwater Pottery was established by Peter Anderson in 1928. Later, his brothers, James “Mac” and Walter (who achieved significant artistic acclaim of his own) Anderson, joined Peter at the wheel. It’s easy to miss, between the marina and the bayou, around curves under a generous canopy of trees. The road into Shearwater is narrow, and a sign reminds you to slow down. The pottery studio is right at the beginning, among several small buildings that look warm with light and activity. The potters themselves are older, and since COVID, the studios are closed to tours. But the showroom is still open, telling the history of Shearwater and displaying its kiln-made curiosities. The Anderson family remains active in creating the work. The founding brothers all worked to make figurines, designs, and glazes, with many of the molds and designs still in use today. The shelves are lined with such pieces, especially in the small museum room—colors bright as turquoise and dark as plums. A little hummingbird and several cicadas sit on the shelves near the pottery, suggesting the roots of Shearwater’s inspiration. These pieces, from a standard plate to a coffee cup with a woodpecker as the handle, are meant to be used. Peruse the watercolors, prints, photographs. Plate designs line the tops of the walls, which in themselves are jaw dropping works of art. Several different kinds of rooster designs challenge the innate understanding of how a rooster looks, but also reveal the spirit of a rooster, and the prowess of the artist and their craft. Shearwater Pottery is open Monday–Saturday from 9 am–5:30 pm, and on Sundays from 1 pm–5:30 pm. 

[Read this: "Meet the Andersons—At Shearwater, the artistic legacy lives on"] 

Next, we head west towards Bay St. Louis, taking the beach road that passes by carved live oaks and bird nest sanctuaries. Arriving in Old Town, we discover the streets bubbling with life, and the Alice Moseley Folk Art Museum appears freshly painted. This small museum is stacked to the brim with original paintings by the nationally acclaimed storyteller and “Professional Primitive Artist” Alice Latimer Moseley. She began painting at the age of sixty-five while she was helping to care for her mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s. 

She painted to tell stories, always naming her works before she began, often with great wit: “You don’t have a good day, you make a good day!” Every painting is based on a news article, neighborhood story, or life experience. A wedding painting draws you to the chapel door, but soon you see children playing with the cans tied to the car, a woman standing with the wedding cake. There is a video you can watch about the artist, and her character shines through. Upon moving to the Bay at age eighty, she dispensed with shyness, holding court in her blue house with the slogan, “The house may be blue but the old lady ain’t!” One painting has Moseley standing in her garden, looking flabbergasted by all of the plants blooming. It is titled, “How could I know they would all grow?” The Alice Moseley Folk Art Museum is open Monday–Saturdays 11 am–5 pm, and Sundays from noon–4 pm. 

It begins to rain as we depart from the coast and head toward Fayette, to The Frog Farm. We take a winding road through the pines; the sky is drizzling when we arrive at the gates. A dog greets us in love, and Louise Cadney Coleman opens the screen door to shout, “Diva! Go home!” We step into the bluegrey building, pay our admission fee, and enter the Farm. The first stop is the aquarium, with tropical plants and fish and birds, all made out of wood, shining under blue light. 

The birds that line the back wall pull me to them; whooping cranes and egrets, ducks and geese, pelicans and flamingos, a peacock with a tail made out of solid cypress. They look like living drawings, unrestrained by reality, ready to play. It’s easy to forget these are all made out of sticks. I’m tempted to fill the trunk with them, but pick out just a few especially unique birds. 

Coleman began making stick dolls as a child. It was a man everyone called “Bud”—she recalled his name being Sylvester Potts—who inspired her. He would whittle and bring the children the little gifts he made. At the time, she couldn’t quite figure out whittling, but began making her dolls. The nominal frog, with his bowtie, is featured prominently across the farm, and his name is, of course, Bud. To this day, Coleman is always collecting sticks “so when I get inspired, I have something to work with.” 

We enter the showroom and I am positively grinning; little hand-sized frogs with long arms and legs, sitting on porches, standing, fishing. The birds that line the back wall pull me to them; whooping cranes and egrets, ducks and geese, pelicans and flamingos, a peacock with a tail made out of solid cypress. They look like living drawings, unrestrained by reality, ready to play. It’s easy to forget these are all made out of sticks. I’m tempted to fill the trunk with them, but pick out just a few especially unique birds. 

Coleman has been working on the Frog Farm since 1999. She began helping build things at her husband’s hunting camp, before moving into her own studio. Before long, the frogs and the birds had filled that studio up, spilling into the yard, and back into the camp. Children in the neighborhood would come around to play in her woods. They told her “This isn’t a camp! This is a frog farm!” The land was christened. Her men helped build a new showroom, complete with displays. She keeps a working studio next to the window, warm light and a radio among her tools. 

We head outdoors. Coleman is in the middle of moving displays out of the woods so they can clean the property up and add more to it. The first Frog Guardian we encounter is larger than life and has a sign that reads, “While you’re here as our guest; may you find peace and rest.” (Real) frogs begin singing in the woods all around us. We meet the Unity Rockers—frogs and alligators in a band together, the country cafe for frogs serving fried cricket and muddy water. We pass turtles, penguins, and alligators. Through puddles and over stepping stones, we peek at the older version of the farm where the frogs are singing; a long wooden walkway is raised above the gathering water. Coleman shouts from under her umbrella, “That’s the hospital!” And we see two or three grinning frogs and a bird waiting for repair care. We thank her and head towards the car, with new art for our home, which is the next destination. We find the 61 highway and head north. The Frog Farm is open seven days a week, but call ahead to be sure Coleman will be onsite. 

This road trip was a reminder to visit people while you can; their castles to love will fade, the frogs will be moved around, the scripture lesson will vanish if there is no one to profess it. We found the folks among the folk art. It was a call for us to step outside ourselves and witness something new, to meet the remarkable souls that have saved the stories along the way, and couldn’t wait to share them with us.