Old Souls

I'm ashamed to say I'd never gotten around to reading "Dead Souls" by Nikolai Gogol. So ... I'm listening to it on audio as I drive. Today, I'm travelling overland from Lonoke, AR to Pine Bluff, my home town, so I'll be listening. I'll travel mostly through flat, desolate land farmed by absentee owners. I’ll also pass near a maximum-security prison where we have always housed "death-row" inmates, or those for whom we deemed "social-death" was not sufficient. Farm-land, waste-land, or dead-land, take your pick. Its identity disappeared long ago.

I'll pass through land where long-dead souls toiled under the lash in brutal weather and inhumane conditions as what conservatives now want to call "guest workers." Later, they were called "sharecroppers," a term that bespoke a partnership that hardly existed in the harsh economy of the Arkansas Delta. The main things they shared were poverty and indignity. Today, those workers are gone, replaced by behemoth machines with multiple tires and implements as wide as a hobby-farm barn. The inhabitants are gone and the land won't even support the skeletal remains of what years ago were towns of value.

When I get to Gethsemane, once a community with two small groceries but now just an empty gash in the land—pronounced locally as "Gessymane,” I'll turn off the Bluetooth, slow, listen, and see if any souls will speak to me.

She left years ago. We can only
hope it was for a better place.