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Looking Around Mississippi With Walt Grayson An excerpt from his book ?s forward Walt Grayson is a Greenville, Mississippi native who has been exploring our state for about twenty years ?his is quite possibly THE perfect job. Walt shares with his readers many of the things about our state that makes it such a special place. Between the covers of his book is what boils down to Walt ?s love letter to the State of Mississippi. There is one particular photograph I remember seeing back in my teenage years that struck me as being particularly good. . . . I was working my first job in broadcasting while I was a junior in high school in Greenville, Mississippi. It was an excellent photograph to start with. Brooding darks offset by highlights caught in such a way as not to lose detail. The subject matter was obviously old, and it seemed to have a mixture of worlds in it. There was a dirt road reminiscent of American backwoods. And standing beside it were several huge columns suggesting that the house they once belonged to was perhaps of European influence. And there were trees growing from the tops of the columns that showed neglect, not the kind of neglect that had led to disaster but had molded the whole thing into a work of art. The photograph was in the office of radio station WJPR, where I worked the sign-on shift, then went to school and returned for a couple of hours in the afternoon. The picture was my escape from reality. Stretching my legs during network newscasts, I ?d walk up front and look out the glass door at the traffic passing on Broadway, imagining all those car radios were tuned to me.  And then I ?d pause in front of the photograph on my way back to the control room. I saw it as a whole. And then I ?d study details of it. I ?d follow the dirt road beside the columns until it was obscured by the tangled mass of vines spilling from the floor of the adjacent woods, flowing as if liquid toward the ruin itself. And because it was a photograph, meaning this was a picture of something actually real somewhere in the world, I wondered where it was. I ?d decided it must be the remains of some old castle in Europe. Then one day the station manager walked up while I was woolgathering in front of the photograph, and I asked him where this was. I was flabbergasted when he told me it was in Mississippi ? the ruins of the Windsor plantation house, no more than 120 miles away from where we were standing right then, down in Claiborne County at Port Gibson. I had never heard of it and had never heard of Port Gibson at that time that I can recall. All of this was a new Mississippi to me. It was somewhere apart from my familiar levees and Indian mounds and eternal cotton fields and sloughs and bayous of my Delta childhood. But the sudden awareness that Mississippi had something like the ruins of that beautiful house at Windsor turned on a light in me that allowed me to think of Mississippi in other terms than how the state had been portrayed on the nightly newscasts of the major TV networks of the ?60s. Unconsciously, it started me on a journey of discovery and amazement that has lasted until this very moment. And will, no doubt, go on as long as I do.