An Englishman in New York who decamps to the rural South and writes reports of lurid local love for things bestial and martial can easily come across as the worst type of tourist. Except, that is, if he really, really is in love with the place and its people, which thankfully seems an apt description of Richard Grant, who was lured to the Mississippi Delta by a cheap house and found a rich home, if a perplexing one. He recently wrote an article of his experiences for the New York Times, one tied to the release of his new book, Dispatches From Pluto. 

An excerpt from the NYT piece:

Opening the local newspaper in hunting season, we stared at photographs of women who were killing deer with pink arrows for breast cancer awareness. Bizarre crimes came in a steady stream. An unlicensed mortuary was busted on a residential street. Motorists were warned not to stop for police officers because someone posing as a cop had killed two people.

In the dilapidated old cotton town of Greenwood, an oncologist was arrested for hiring two men to murder the lawyer who lived across the street. He was found unfit to stand trial and remanded to the state mental hospital. His devoted patients are still clamoring for his release.

In the same town, a man was caught in a police sting operation while having carnal relations with show hogs. We had never even heard of show hogs, so our friend Martha Foose, a Delta-born cookbook writer, had to explain. “We have beauty pageants for our swine,” she said. “And they get those hogs dolled up. They shave their underparts, curl their eyelashes, buff their little trotters, and I guess it’s more than some guys can stand. I call it ‘dating down the food chain.’”

After nearly three years here, it still feels like we’re scratching the surface. Even for a native like our friend Martha, it’s hard to say what accounts for the Delta’s eccentricities. Maybe it’s the strain of living in a dysfunctional third world society in the heart of America. A white pseudo-aristocracy maintains genteel airs and graces amid crumbling towns and black rural poverty reminiscent of Haiti. It’s all stirred up with whiskey, denial and fire-breathing religion.•