Unconditional love in an unlikely setting
From the Vicksburg Post

There's a yearning to tell the world -- in words and music -- about the place where she grew up, even if it can't all be unraveled.

Aunt Fidelia brought the rolls
with her green bean casserole
The widow Smith down the street
dropped by a bowl of butter beans.
Plastic cups and silverware,
lime green Tupperware, everywhere.
Pass the chicken, pass the pie,
We sure eat good when someone dies.

Some try to unravel the South with words. Others with music. Fayette native Tricia Walker is proving adept at both. It's clear she knows the things that make the South southern. It's clear she sees the beauty. It¹s clear she sees the contradictions. Walker, who now lives near Nashville, didn¹t write the lyrics to
"Funeral Food," above, but did choose to include it on her solo CD being
released this week.

The song won¹t make the Top 40. The only thing remarkable is its honesty:

There sits mean old Uncle Bob,
gnawing on a corn on the cob.
Who's that walking through the door?
I don't think we've ever seen him before.
Let's hit the line a second time,
We sure eat good when someone dies.

The title song, "Heart of Dixie," which Walker did write, combines the same brand of honesty with a serious melody. It's about Walker's experience as the third generation in her family to receive unconditional love from a black woman at their home. "Dixie" had been her grandmother's companion, her mother's nurse and then her own "other mother."

As she sings it:

When Mamaw passed in '63, Dixie worked for Mama and took care of me.
And in my eyes she was family, 'cause you know kids are colorblind.

Countless white Mississippi families had the same experience. A daily
presence in their homes, arriving from a different culture and reality,
was a person who knew all the family secrets, knew (or created) most of
the family traditions and to whom color or wealth was no barrier to a
perfect brand of candor.

These people would leave at day's end, and, as children grew, they sensed there was some kind of gap or barrier -- but they were at a total loss to explain or understand it.

Walker wrote it this way:

Jesus said we were all alike, and Daddy said, "Yes child, but not quite."
And while I tried to figure out who was right, Dixie loved me like one of her own.

Walker's mother, Marie, was an unusual person in her day, too. She was the editor of the Fayette Chronicle, the weekly paper of Jefferson County. During the first half of the last century, Jefferson wasn't changed a lot from the first half of the century before. Black people, though not slaves, were almost all poor. Virtually all land and wealth was owned by white families whose sons and daughters were fast departing the rural life.

All along, black people were in the majority, but with the 1960s came both empowerment and instability. Today, word is, there are fewer than 15 white families in Jefferson County. It consistently tops the state rankings in poverty and joblessness and, most recently, the national ranking in obesity.

So, things were better back then?

Not hardly. Apartheid, Mississippi style, was fundamentally wrong because it was totally artificial. Tricia Walker sensed that as a child, and writes and sings about it as an adult. But she doesn¹t explain the mystery of such personal dedication as
Dixie's in the face of a social order doomed to collapse. Perhaps no one can. She just appreciates it.

She came to church when I was wed, 92 and almost dead.
All dressed up in her Sunday best, she didn't have long to go.
I remember the night she died, angels sang and Mama cried.
Dixie crossed to the other side, when Jesus called her home.

Walker has been part of Nashville's music establishment for some time now. Her work has been recorded by Faith Hill, Alison Kraus and Patty Loveless. She has played keyboard on tour with Shania Twain, Paul Overstreet and Connie Smith.
But there¹s a yearning to tell the world -- in words and music -- about the place where she grew up, even if it can¹t all be unraveled.

"Culture is a precious, living thing," Walker said. "It has to be nurtured if it's going to survive. Any artist or creative thinker has a responsibility to help chronicle his or her own time, place and people. That's the surest way to keep a culture from disappearing."

Well said.

And well sung, too.

Charlie Mitchell is managing editor of The Vicksburg Post. Write to him at
P.O. Box 821668, Vicksburg, MS, 39182, or email post@vicksburg.com.