fragments of Mississippi and Louisiana

This lovely outline of a horse's head was drawn on the inside of a barn housing the cotton gin at Frogmore - which is still a working cotton farm in eastern Louisiana, and which gives a terrific tour that emphasizes how cotton was and is grown, and the life of a slave and then a sharecropper on this land - none of your great house Gone With the Wind stuff (not to mention that it was stressed how hard laboring with cotton was - we were all given little bolls of the stuff and told to pick the seeds out - and it also helped that there was an African American tour guide modeling, if that's the right word, how the cotton gathering sacks were worn, as well as showing us round.

Here's a cotton boll decoration on the side of the gin.

Back in Natchez, in Mississippi, the decoration was stranger and more fragmentary - a once very-rich town, now struggling, but trying (and we'd recommend the African American Museum, with its energetic curator).

Here's a pigeon on top of an alarm system.

Alas, the Ritz Cinema is no longer functioning.

A great decoration on a water fountain;

but my impression when I drove through 9 months ago - admittedly in the dusk - that the town was full of flourishing galleries and antique shops was sadly misplaced.

You wanted a Swamp of the Day?  This is in the grounds of our hotel (where it's currently pouring, pouring, pouring with rain).