Riding the great divide on the Hills Highway.
A competition? Hills versus Delta. Or a merger? Delta meets Hills. Signs of the times on Interstate-55…
You’ve got your map, and now you’re on the lookout for the road signs. Something that will tell you
Divided Loyalties Up Ahead. Or
Sympathies Merged ½ Mile. But the truth is, I-55, the unofficial demarcation between the Mississippi Delta and the Mississippi Hills, is long division that needs no solution. It’s a fault line that won’t crack—although once you fall into the rhythm of this easy-going road, with your gaze and your thoughts roaming across the verdant landscape, the timelessness may envelop you, with your everyday concerns swallowed against the vanishing point of the horizon.
I-55 is a straight shot between two cultures, two landscapes—the flat sheet of Delta, so flat there’s not even a wrinkle, meeting the gently rolling hills of northeastern Mississippi. Cotton meets cow. Ag meets industry. Which isn’t to say there aren’t detours, complications: for example, cotton farming and cotton fortunes were plentiful in the Mississippi Hills on the wedge of Black Prairie, just as there is industry today in the Mississippi Delta. And if you cast the situation in terms of Old South versus New South, it is the Hills that could be argued take the senior position. Large portions of the Delta remained wilderness long after fine plantation homes in Aberdeen and Columbus were holding court.
The twentieth century was ready to dawn when much of lands around the Divide were domesticated, a fact that Faulkner wrote about, often with dismay.