NESHOBA COUNTY FAIR, THURSDAY — Phil Bryant is on stage talking about Tuesday at the fair with his new friend, “Don Trump,” the candidate’s son.
He punctuates his speech with jabs at the media, who, says the Governor, are ignoring all the good things happening in Mississippi.
Bryant launches into a defense of House Bill 1523, expressing incredulity about the furor the bill has aroused.
The bill, passed in this year’s legislative session, provides legal cover for public officials and businesses that chose to deny services to LGBT people. A federal district judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law, and a host of states, counties and cities have issued travel bans against non-essential government travel to Mississippi.
Bryant speaks in the plaintive cadences of a country preacher:
“I think there’s been more articles and editorials written about that than anything I’ve ever seen in the state of Mississippi.”
“The man landing on the moon didn’t have as many things written about him as 1523 — every day there’s a new article. My goodness you’d think the curtains of the temple had been torn.”
Does the Governor think talking about it will somehow make it right? I drift away feeling discouraged.
A young woman wearing a red T-shirt with “Gilbert?” on the front with white letters and carrying a fan with Delbert Hosemann’s photograph on it hands me her cell phone and asks if I’ll take a picture. She herds a dozen smiling young people wearing the same red T-shirts into a grouping with the Secretary of State. This is better.
In the exhibit hall next to the racetrack, Jessica Eaves, a conservation biologist from the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks, is greeting skittish fairgoers with a three-foot-long gray rat snake (also called a chicken snake) draped around her neck. Eaves, who lives in Moselle in south Mississippi, said she rescued the snake after it was hit by a car.
I ask if I can hold her. “She has to feel secure,” Eaves says as she wraps the snake around my arm. I feel the cool skin of the snake as it constricts around my bare forearm.
“She’s precious,” Eaves says.
Not the first adjective that comes to mind.
When a group of kids arrive, Eaves takes the snake, puts it in a large plastic container and produces a small alligator. The gator is 2 years old and will grow a foot a year until it is 6. It has a pink tongue.
The kids are mesmerized.
“My mother used to spank me when I took the screens off my window (to see what I could catch) when I was little,” said Eaves, who grew up on the Amite River in Louisiana.
“I’m exactly the same now as I was as a kid.”
Eaves tells of finding a prehistoric bone in the DeSoto National Forest. She sent a picture to George Phillips, paleontologist with the Museum of Natural Science in Jackson. George is a Columbus native.
It was the funny bone of a three-toed horse that lived 25 million years ago.
George knew immediately what it was, Eaves said.
Up the hill from the Exhibit Hall at the cattle barns, rosy-cheeked Nancy Hartfield of Purvis leans on a fence as a brown cow drinks from a large plastic bucket.
Hartfield has tended cattle for eight of her 18 years. Her favorite is the beautifully groomed two-year-old at the end of the lead she is holding.
Meet Scarlet, a milking short-horned, who is about to be awarded her second of two ribbons at the fair.
Nancy says she milks Scarlet twice a day before and after her workday at a fast food restaurant in Purvis.
When asked if she plans to make a career with cattle, Nancy replies without pause: “definitely.”
We drift over to the horse stables. The morning rains have delayed the harness races until 3. The grooms and riders are huddled in their stalls sitting on hay bales drinking beer, eating barbecue sandwiches and commenting on the flow of humanity slogging by.
We take momentary cover in one of the stalls. Small talk ensues. I asked a man next to me if he knew the late Tom Wilburn. “I raced against him,” the man said.
For a moment, it feels as though I’ve slipped through a wrinkle in time: these men and their horses, the angelic teenager and her cow, the wildlife biologist with her snake, the kids and the alligator.
Like the Governor’s law, we clutter our lives with the unnecessary, to the point we lose sight of the essential. Every so often, we are granted a respite, a vision of how it once was, how it could be.
Birney Imes is the publisher of The Dispatch. Email him at [email protected].
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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