Dispatches from Pluto

In 2015, the UK-born adventure travel writer Richard Grant published his memoir about buying a house in the Mississippi Delta on a whim and then living there for a year. Titled Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta, the book is a funny, fish-out-of-water story about Grant and his girlfriend, Mariah, learning to cope with the unfamiliar environment and their ramshackle mess of a house. A coming of age narrative about Grant learning to settle down and to become domestic, it is also a serious and insightful commentary on the intersection of racism, community, and poverty that Grant discovers. As Kirkus Reviews sums up this everything but the kitchen sink approach, Dispatches from Pluto is “an appealing stew of fecklessness and curiosity, social psychology and social dysfunction, hope and despair.”

Richard Grant describes himself “a misfit Englishman…with a taste for remote places,” which for a long time meant living in a tiny apartment in New York City with his girlfriend, Mariah, in between traveling to places like the Sierra Madre to explore. But after a picnic where they discuss what it might be like to live in the “poorest county in America’s poorest state,” the pair makes a whimsical decision to buy an old plantation house in Holes County in the Mississippi Delta despite never having been there. The impulse leads them to spend the next year trying to figure out how to live in Pluto, a tiny settlement full of cypress trees near the Yazoo River.

The book’s early sections describe Richard and Mariah wrestling with nature. First, there is acclimating to the new climate with its heat and humidity and its surprisingly cold nights. Then, there are the constant battles to reclaim the house from nature, as the book details having to deal with cottonmouth snakes and alligators, unfriendly lawn-destroying armadillos, attacking fire ants, enormous mosquitoes – not to mention endless weeds and bamboo that grows a foot a day.



As Richard and Mariah settle into life in their giant house, they start getting to know their neighborhood and its pastimes. Grant tells readers about going on a deer hunting expedition early in the morning, playing golf with a glib politician during a local reelection campaign, visiting a black church, paying their respects to Emmett Till in the grocery store where his lynch mob started, being shocked at the condition of most of the area’s schools, touring Mississippi State Prison Parchman Farm, and having a great time at a party in the house of blues legend T-Model Ford.

Grant delves into the history, context, and complicated present-day circumstances of race and racism in the area. The historically majority black Delta has never really recovered from slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and forced integration. De facto segregation has never really stopped being the lay of the land. In order to be able to be able to interact with his white neighbors instead of being horrified by their regressive opinions, Richard and Mariah follow a piece of advice they received early in their adventure: to compartmentalize. In other words, the only way forward is to ignore the often untenable political views of those around him and instead concentrate on their good qualities. At the same time, as Richard makes friends with the patrons of a crossroad tavern frequented by poor African-Americans and learns about their day to day life, he can’t help but see that despite the ever-present racism that inflects Delta public life, there are many close, loving, and interdependent relationships between black and white families.

As Richard and Mariah gradually stop thinking of Pluto as a temporary exploit and instead come to see it as home, they connect with the many colorful locals. We meet famous people like T-Model Ford, cookbook author Martha Foose, and actor Morgan Freeman; as well as characters like catfish farmers, quirky millionaires, and storytellers whose tales give voice to the region.



In the last part of the book, Grant tackles the issue of the Delta’s future, which seems bleak considering just how appalling the state of public education is in Mississippi, and in the South as a whole. Without finger-pointing, Grant takes us on a tour of failing schools, whose students are ill-equipped to break away from the cycle of poverty they have grown up in. Still, even here Grant finds a small silver lining – a model school that has transformed its F rating into a C during two years of intense effort and some mounting problems.

The book ends with Richard and Mariah deeply in love with each other, and with the flawed, beautiful, and self-contradictory place that they now call home.