Travels with Barley (30 page)

Eckhardt also gave me a tip about comportment when judging in a group dynamic. “It's bad form to put the beer down and say, ‘Oh, shit!'” he said.

We commenced our judging. Nobody commented on beers until after the scoring was revealed.

On the first beer, Sean Lamb asked Fred: “Didn't you find it a little cidery?”

Fred: “Cidery?”

Sean: “Yes, cidery?”

Fred: “No, I found it aggressive.”

Sean: “Aggressive?”

Fred: “Well, anyway, I gave it a 40.”

Sean: “I gave it a 35.1 liked it.”

Fred: “I can see you did. You drank it all—what a lush!”

Lamb laughed.

They looked at me. I'd (whew!) given it a 34.

Judging is a deliberate business and we plodded on. Fred interrupted once to ask a peculiar question: “Are you going to listen to the beer?”

I thought he wanted to know whether, in the amalgamation of sniffing, sipping, and gazing at a particular beer, the beer had perhaps revealed some cosmic sense of how it should be scored. But, no, he meant was I going to listen to what each beer sounded like.

“If you listen to enough beer, there are some differences,” Eckhardt explained. “Belgian beer is buzz—well, actually more like a lawnmower motor. Some beers that are spoiled sound like a buzz saw. If you listen to Bud, it's got a wonderful sound. In lagers, bubbles will be bigger than they are in ales. They usually produce a fast click. Bud has a slower, noisier click. I don't know what it means but I have fun with it.”

We got through four beers and I was feeling exceptionally proud because I had been blissfully in the middle of both Fred and Sean in the scoring, never more than a point or two from one or the other. I could
do
this.

Then beer No. 786 reared its ugly brown little head.

I winced as I heard Eckhardt give it a 39 and Lamb a 37—scores that put it very close to the exceptional category.

I'd given No. 786 a measly 25.

“I didn't like this beer at all,” I said.

“What was wrong with it?” Lamb inquired.

“Well, uh, I didn't like the way it looked,” I sputtered.

Lamb peered at me. “Well, you know looks only really count for a little.”

Silence.

“Hmm, well, flavor-wise, it seemed a little flat,” I offered.

More silence.

I tried again. “There's a taste in there I, uh, just can't put my finger on. I, uh—”

More and deeper silence.

I looked at Eckhardt and then at Lamb. “Okay,” I said. “I've clearly lost my mind.”

This seemed to my fellow judges the smartest thing I'd said all evening.

“Well, 25 still puts it in the ‘good' category,” Fred said, trying to let me off the hook a little.

We agreed to go on to the other beers and come back to this one, so as to meet the requirement to ratchet all the scores within seven points of each other. I got back on track for the last three beers. And we went back to the disputed No. 786, whereupon, having tasted it yet again, I realized it was really a 32, not a lowly 25. And my brethren judges, who saw no reason to change their scores, smiled upon me charitably.

But I knew this was a blow to my Beer Geek in Waiting aspirations.

The Foam Rangers went on to win the 2002 Dixie Cup, trouncing their nearest opponent by 26 points. Skirt-Boy (aka Bev Blackwood) won first place for the Rangers in the Old Ale category and placed second or third in three others, while the Grand Wazoo (aka Jimmy Paige) placed second in the Old Ale category and second in American Brown Ale. The Rangers took first place in ten separate styles, including the Monster Mash and the Specialty/Experimental/Historical beer category, and thirty-four places altogether. The name of that winning experimental beer was “Don't Fuck Me Up with Peace and Barleywine.”

The Mississippi Delta began to assert itself somewhere around Eudora, Mississippi.

Having somehow missed the Highway 61/Old River Road connection out of Memphis, I'd found my way to 1-55 and, at a town called Hernando, I'd jogged off the Interstate and found myself on State Highway 304. It cut through rolling hills that held comely farmland and woods cloaked in thick, forest-green kudzu still slicked in rain and burnished by a late afternoon sun poking through vanishing clouds. I knew I was pushing into the deep, deep South when I saw a hand-lettered sign offering pigs for sale, and another later on advertising competitive barrel racing. (For the uninitiated, this is a sport involving riding horses around tight turns in a course marked with barrels.)

A few miles on, an enormous billboard reared up off the highway. It said, “If God Should Ask Why Should I Let You Into Heaven, What Would You Say?” I turned on the radio, caught a gospel station and heard an African-American preacher, in urgent tones, asking pretty much the same question.

Just west of Eudora, the land gave up all pretense of elevation and lay down unflinchingly flat as far as the eye could see. Past a sign designating the Tunica County line, a fallow field of rich, black gumbo soil stretched out in the mellowing light, a lone tree the solitary feature of the horizon. Soon, soybean fields, cotton fields, and a hayfield, the latter forming a golden rectangle in a sea of green, pressed up to the highway; a tiny farmstead, a police car pulled up in the front yard, broke the unblemished fetch of fields. And then some miles hence, as if by signal, a scrum of gargantuan billboards lurched up out of the landscape announcing places like Harrah's, Sam's Town, Fitzgerald's, the Hollywood Casino, and products like Miller Lite, One-Pound-Steak-and-Egg Breakfasts at $2.99, and an Epic Buffet. If this seemed incongruous—Las Vegas—style billboard mania in the middle of endless cotton fields—it was nothing like the impression of the casinos themselves.

As I swung south on Highway 61 and approached Tunica, there they were, neon megaliths winking in the distance, most of them clustered together in an ark of shifting light, some brandishing lasers and spotlights and all set off in a darkening moat and surrounded by nothing that resembled them—high-rise aliens amidst the dimming land covered in cotton, and the sprawling sky holding on to the best light of the day, and the scattered farms that seemed like quaint anachronisms in the shadows. The impression was of a mirage, but no mirage this.

I headed for the lights and within fifteen minutes I'd arrived, via Casino Center Drive, in a parking lot that probably could hold the Rose Bowl crowd. This was the Horseshoe Casino, which I'd randomly chosen out of what seemed like eight or nine other possibilities because I was attracted, buglike, to its turquoise aura and unavoidable rosy pink neon glow. I parked the car and hiked on in.

Though this was a Sunday night in what certainly once passed for the Bible Belt, I needn't have worried about repeating my experience among the elderly teetotalers aboard the
Diamond Jo
casino boat back in Dubuque. The casino—65,000 square feet of it with 2,000 slot machines and a 500—room, fourteen-story hotel attached—was about half full, mostly with slot players, though a saunter through various rooms and anterooms revealed a goodly number of people playing craps and Caribbean stud or some such game. I circled around a bit and found a bar and quickly became acquainted with a couple I'll call Richard and Mary. They were dressed in ranch casual—pointy-toed cowboy boots, jeans, and checked shirts (though not matching). They looked to be in their late fifties. They told me they'd lived in the Delta proper until seven years ago when they moved upriver near West Memphis, Arkansas. Richard had spent most of his adult life as a mechanic; Mary had waited tables and worked briefly in a bank in between raising their kids, who were now grown.

They were drinking Miller Lite and commiserating about how they'd dropped about $100 between them. Richard played video poker; Mary the slots. They'd driven down after church and lunch, church being the reason they were reticent to give me their real names. They explained that they were Baptists of evangelical bent and didn't widely advertise to their Baptist Church friends that they occasionally gambled away their Sunday afternoons over a beer or two.

“There's no harm in it that we can see,” Richard told me. “But sometimes it's easier not to have to explain certain things to people.”

“Richard,” Mary said, “I doubt we're the only gamblin' or beer-drinkin' Christians out there.”

He smiled and said, “I know that. But, see, what she's not telling you is that we've got this pastor and, boy, would he let us have it if he knew we were here.”

I told them about my quest and said I doubted their pastor, from the sound of it, would ever pick up a book about beer anyway. Richard laughed and said he wanted to make one other religious clarification. “You know Jesus drank wine and beer's not even mentioned in the Bible one way or the other. That's why we don't see anything wrong with it.”

I knew Richard was right on the beer front. The Bible mentions wine many times and has several references to “strong drink” but without clarifying what that might be. Some scholars say there is good circumstantial evidence that strong drink, given the history of barley cultivation in the biblical Middle East, was beer, but nobody knows for sure. Still, any beer-drinking Christian could take comfort from Proverbs 31:6-7: “Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty and remember his misery no more.” (In fairness, Proverbs 20:1 offers this rejoinder: “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” On the other hand, this seems to be an appeal to moderate drinking, not prohibition.)

Richard told me that, though they drank Miller Lite most of the time (and Coors regular sometimes), they really weren't big beer drinkers and that since the opening of the first casinos here a decade ago, they pretty much confined their drinking to their trips here. “But as far as beer joints go you won't find a real beer joint in a casino” Richard said. “People are here gambling and they might drink. They don't come here to drink thinking they might gamble.”

I asked them how the arrival of the casinos had changed things.

“Oh, plenty,” Mary said. “This was—what, honey?—the poorest county in the United States before gambling opened up?”

“Something like that,” Richard said. “I remember about a dozen years or so ago when people were saying this place was poorer than places in Africa and they were probably right. You can't say that anymore. I think they've poured, I dunno, tons of money—hundreds of millions—in here, which is a lot for a county that had basically cotton and squat-else before.”

I asked if there were any naysayers.

Richard laughed. He said, “I think they [the casinos] are ugly myself but Mary here thinks they're sharp.” Beyond that, he had heard complaints that the casinos had brought crime, traffic, and unwelcome change, and that the good jobs had gone to Memphis people, leaving the locals to scrub floors and change sheets in the hotels. And, this being the Bible Belt, religious pamphleteers sometimes decorated the cars in the parking lot with anti-gambling literature. “But the vast majority of people who remember what Tunica County was like before will tell you they've been a godsend,” Richard told me.

“I don't see anything wrong with any of it,” Mary said, gesturing around the casino. “This passes for pretty fancy where I grew up.”

We talked briefly about what I might find downriver. Mississippi, I knew, wasn't exactly one of the premier beer states. It had no active full-fledged breweries, was one of the few states to still outlaw homebrewing, and was the last state in the union to legalize brewpubs. It had four of them, two in Jackson and two on the Gulf Coast where the state's other cluster of casinos can be found. It does rank fourteenth in the nation in terms of per capita consumption, at 36.3 gallons per person, but more than 95 percent of the beer it drinks is American Standard lager.

Clarksdale, known as the blues capital of the world and home of the Delta Blues Museum, was maybe forty miles away, Richard and Mary told me. They didn't know of any particular beer joints but suggested I hit Abe's for barbecue. Then they drained their beers and said they had to start driving back. I soon headed out into the neon night myself. As I drove away, billboards told me that unless I lingered a few more days, I would miss not only Joan Rivers but Leon Russell and Edgar Winter, too. I could imagine Leon and Edgar, in their salad days, playing the Delta dives and juke joints that were the pre-casino mainstays here. But Joan? I don't think so.

Before settling into a motel far from the neon glare, I did detour into Old Tunica ten miles south to satisfy myself that a charming Southern town still coexisted with the neo-glitter of the casinos. It had pretty much rolled up and gone to sleep. But it was there.

As I drove a beeline down Highway 61 the next morning on a misty, overcast Delta day, I realized Richard and Mary had been right about other things, too. I'd checked the
Wall Street Journal
's archives by laptop and learned that Tunica County had been, by every standard measurement, the poorest county in Mississippi and nearly the poorest in the nation, made poorer still by the restructuring of the cotton industry that by the early 1960s had become totally mechanized, throwing thousands of farm laborers out of work. Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson had visited back in 1985, coming to a wayside of wretched poverty and tumbledown shacks called Sugar Ditch and declaring it “America's Ethiopia.” Unemployment was about 20 percent and getting worse.

These days, Sugar Ditch sprouts a low-income housing development and Tunica County's unemployment rate is about 6.5 percent—a figure representing mostly the hard-core unemployed battling the lingering social and medical dysfunctions of poverty. By one estimate, casino and related construction had pumped $3 billion into the county—perhaps the largest slug of single-purpose private capital ever poured into one locale. The gambling emporiums were producing about $ 1 billion of taxable revenue a year and had created roughly 15,000 jobs. Even a cranky person who thought the casinos were a neon blight on the pastoral landscape would have a hard time arguing against their economic merits. Scenic poverty is hardly ever scenic to people who live in it. I wondered, as I crossed into Coahoma County, where Clarksdale is the county seat, whether the casinos were admired as much from a distance.

This stretch of the Great River Road seemed as straight and flat a stretch of road as I'd ever been on, the straightness being a blessing when I overtook a mile-long column of gargantuan double-wide trailers being towed to some destination down the road. My observation of flatness was confirmed by a marker noting the elevation of the highway between Tunica and Clarksdale deviated only a quarter-inch in the whole stretch. Of course, the road sat on one of the richest loads of compacted alluvial soil found anywhere in the world—topsoil in the area had been measured as deep as 350
feet
in some parts. Indeed, the topsoil bank found along the river as it winds some 360 snaky miles through Mississippi amounts to one of the biggest natural flowerpots anywhere.

The farther I got from the casinos, the more like Old Mississippi it became. I passed faded churches with faded cemeteries and watched crop dusters fly low overhead, spraying bug and weed killer on vast stands of cotton and soybeans. The other remarkable feature of the countryside was a notable absence. The once ubiquitous shotgun shack, a legacy of the Delta's sharecropping past and a staple of Mississippi's postcard poverty, was simply nowhere to be seen. I wondered whether this might be simply another localized outcome of casino prosperity. But I'd come to learn that the Delta's rural poor, since the 1960s, were being slowly but surely tucked into public housing, rendering the shotgun shack a fading relic of the past.

I'd never been to Clarksdale but as a minor student of the blues I certainly knew of its vaunted place in American roots music history. It had been the prime stop on the so-called Chitlin Circuit, when itinerant African-American bluesmen in the 1920s and 1930s wandered the Delta from Natchez to Tunica, battered guitars and harmonicas in hand, playing music at turns both wry and mournful; music that tumbled directly from the crucible of poverty, backbreaking work, and racism; and, yes, also a longing for life, love, and happiness despite all of the above. Every would-be blues player eventually pitched up on Issaquena Avenue in Clarksdale and the town, long a cotton-trading center, became a music center as well.

Clarksdale proper had produced a stunning number of legendary bluesmen, among them Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, and first-generation blues pioneers like W. C. Handy and Charlie Patton. As famous or infamous as all of them was Robert Johnson, the man who wrote “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Cross Roads Blues” (later commercialized by Eric Clapton and Cream) and who by legend sold his soul to Ole Scratch one night at a dark highway junction in exchange for an uncanny ability to play the blues. Enhancing the legend, perhaps, was Johnson's preoccupation in his lyrics with the devil, sex, and women. The Cross Roads is popularly considered to be the literal intersection of Highway 61 and Highway 49 at Clarksdale (a notion that has many debunkers, who say it is farther south near Cleveland, Mississippi). But folks in Clarksdale will have none of that and have marked the Highway 61/49 junction with a signpost holding three giant blue guitars and “Cross Roads” written on all three sides of a triangle. This bit of touristy kitsch is perhaps forgivable considering that Clarksdale and much of the Delta didn't seriously recognize or attempt to promote its indigenous music until about twenty years ago and people have been trying to make up for it ever since. (Cynics might say they also discovered there was good tourist money in the blues.) Johnson died penniless in 1938 at the age of twenty-seven after drinking whiskey apparently spiked with poison by a jealous husband and, by one account, crawling around on all fours in a mad rage like the hellhound in his song. The transformation of the blues into a popular art form since then has been as remarkable as the transformation of Tunica County since casinos. A couple of years ago Johnson's estate, inherited by a son he fathered out of wedlock, was valued at $1.2 million—based solely on royalties for his reissued records.