Spent Saturday night in Clarksdale, Mississippi at Clark House, a recently opened, beautifully renovated historic home near downtown, after lunch at City Grocery in Oxford and a little tool around Square Books. We were in Clarksdale for the launch of Delta Blues, a collection of mystery stories edited by Carolyn Haines, at the Ground Zero blues club, with proceeds going to the Rock River Foundation. I’m not a blues aficionado, and I’m pretty sure I got no right to sing the blues, but it was fun hearing a bunch of writers take the stage and sing and play their writerly hearts out for a good cause.
Whenever I arrive somewhere new, I like to get my bearings by taking a stroll, whether it’s just through the hotel lobby or around a neighborhood. It helps me feel located in that particular place, my temporary home. After we got settled into our room (I picked the one named Bottletree, of course), I headed out into the neighborhood, which borders Clarksdale’s downtown. As I walked down the sidewalk, big squares of concrete cracked and buckled by the roots of old oak trees, the wind came up, tossing the yellow jonquil blooms lining people’s yards. It occurred to me that I did in fact feel at home, and I realized that these streets I’ve walked out on from inns and hotels and bed and breakfasts in Clarksdale, in Montgomery and Monroeville and Montevallo and Hartselle, Alabama, in Inman Park in Atlanta, are like the streets where my grandmothers lived in Arkadelphia and Hot Springs, Arkansas, or the ones I rode my homemade skateboard down in Little Rock, Arkansas, where we lived on 2020 N. Arthur, an address my childhood mind free-associated with both clear vision and the knights of the round table. Forsythia was blooming, the flowering quince beginning to show its pink blossoms. I overheard the murmurings of a conversation taking place on a back porch. Someone drove up with a kid coming home from basketball practice. All around me, the houses, from grand nineteenth century to more recent twenties bungalows, seemed settled into their yards. A rainbow wind sock waved from the porch of a Victorian two-story, reminding me of an old lady with a bright scarf.
- Jennifer Horne
- Jennifer Horne grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, and has lived in Alabama since 1986. The author of a book of poems, Bottle Tree (WordTech Publications, 2010), and a poetry chapbook, Miss Betty’s School of Dance (bluestocking press, 1997), she is also the editor of Working the Dirt: An Anthology of Southern Poets (NewSouth Books, 2003) and co-editor, with Wendy Reed, of All Out of Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality (University of Alabama Press, 2006). She has worked as a teacher in elementary, high school, college, international, and prison classrooms, and as a journal, magazine, and book editor, and has received fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Seaside Institute. She holds a BA in the Humanities from Hendrix College, and an MA in English, an MFA in Creative Writing, and an MA in Community Counseling, all from the University of Alabama. She is married to Don Noble, a writer, editor, and literary interviewer.
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Glad to get caught up with my Jennifer Horne reading this afternoon. Your images here stir up more in my mind: I'm so glad to see the old lady waving at us on the front porch, a little loco, but happier for it.
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