The Help.

JACKSON, MS

We pass a street in Jackson my host, Joshua, won't take me down at night. "That's where most of the maids lived in The Help," he informs me. Even by day, he says, the neighborhood is dodgy at best. Fifty years, a best-selling book and its Disney film adaption have done nothing to raise it out of dereliction.

We've just left Hal and Mal's, a timeworn brick eatery that seems lodged just as stubbornly in the past. Dim incandescent lights hang from those inverted pie pan fixtures. The live jazz band is comprised of men well into their 60s and perhaps 70s. Most of the other patrons skew towards middle and late-middle age, but you get the sense this was the haunt of their youth. The place has all the ingredients of a modern hipster venue: atmosphere, craft beer, obscurity from outsiders (it's difficult to spot if you don't know what you're looking for) -- but Jackson doesn't have any hipsters. (Probably.) I order the whole order of red beans and rice with smoked sausage washed down with a draught of Abita Restoration Pale Ale.

Joshua is a grad student from Minnesota who works part-time at the only Apple store in Mississippi. He's approaching the end of his clinical hours quota and plans to move back to the Twin Cities to find a job in marriage and family therapy soon. He takes me past the Mississippi state capitol and up to the affluent white suburb of Madison, notable for having the longest-serving mayor in the United States. "Mayor Mary" Hawkins Butler is in her eighth consecutive four-year term and has had enormous influence on the Madison's architectural design, requiring each building to conform to her Neoclassical vision for the city. Everything from the post office to the municipal building to what is possibly the most ornate Shell station I've ever seen is replete with stuccoed Corinthian pillars, modillioned cornices, parapets, cupolas (and other features I'm going to pretend I know all about). The cumulative effect is an imposing if somewhat affected stateliness.

The next morning, we sit down for a cup of coffee and bowl of oatmeal before I hit the road. Joshua's hosted dozens of travelers from all over the world and has the hospitality game down pat. He is also a coffee connoisseur (seriously, did I luck out or what?) who made this cool wall art from java jackets collected during his travels.

Truer facts never spoken.

Wish I could have contributed a Dutch Bros. sleeve to the cause!

It's drizzling lightly when I leave Jackson, and further east the rains begin in earnest. And it just does. Not. Stop. I get a National Weather Service alert - a feature I didn't even knew my phone had - warning me to avoid "flood areas," a term I'm soon to learn is roughly applicable to the entire Southeast this week.