A Memoir of Wine and Violence
“It’s ankle deep in the cellar, and it’s all going down the drain!”
The Delta in the Rearview Mirror
The Life and Death of Mississippi’s First Winery
by Di Rushing
Mississippi, 194 pp., $25
THE DELTA IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR is Hillbilly Elegy meets In Cold Blood—part memoir, part ethnography, part true crime. It follows the life of author Di Rushing, focusing on the fourteen years she and her husband, Sam, ran the first winery in Mississippi until its ultimate destruction at the hands of a disgruntled former employee who terrorized the Rushing family and their business.
Rushing follows the tradition of other Southern writers: The setting is one of the characters, complete with its molasses rhythms, social stratifications, and, of course, its cuisine. “An English professor from Ole Miss told me that my place had earned the reputation of ‘where the elite meet to eat,’” writes Rushing of the restaurant at the winery,
but I didn’t think that was true, nor did I want it to be. To most folks, it was just a quiet, lovely place in the Delta where one could drink some local wine, have a leisurely lunch, and enjoy the beautiful countryside—sort of an Italian Agriturismo, without the overnight stay, of course.
Di and Sam opened the Winery Rushing in 1976 and made Merigold, Mississippi a destination spot for the surrounding area. For fourteen years, they worked hard building their business, and their “young family of four [was] still living in what’s known in the Mississippi Delta as ‘high cotton.’” It’s not just business that was booming—“Overnight it seemed I had made hundreds of new friends” thanks to the restaurant. The Rushings had found a place in their community.
The good times were punctuated by episodes of terrifying violence or ominous criminality. An employee used their parking lot for drug deals. Someone murdered their dog and shot up their living room while they were at the vet. Other dogs died mysteriously or disappeared over the course of years.
Then, one morning, the Rushings awoke to find their restaurant completely trashed and every tank of their wine drained on the ground—“the night the Sunflower River ran red.”
“It’s ankle deep in the cellar, and it’s all going down the drain!” Rushing recalled her husband shouting, helpless to stop their livelihood from flowing through his fingers. Moments later she saw him come out of the cellar, “his shoes and pant legs . . . soaked in red wine.”
The thin line between civilization and anarchy is a persistent theme. In a Western, the line between society and violence is fuzzy and at times impossible to see; in Rushing’s Mississippi Delta, the line is clear, but runs through the town and sometimes through individuals. Sam’s grandfather, a long-retired deputy sheriff nicknamed Big Tom, got a shoutout in a blues classic, “Tom Rushen Blues,” after he arrested the singer Charley Patton. The blues and grits and antagonistic neighbors harboring deep class resentments are all part of the setting and subject of the book. The story, if it weren’t true, could have come from Flannery O’Connor.
The storytelling is another matter. The book opens in medias res on the day Di and Sam discovered the vandalism, and it then shifts back and forth between that narrative and tangents about Di’s childhood, Sam’s family, and the history of the region. These tangents provide context for understanding the Mississippi Delta and the crime at the center of the book, as do the excerpts of news stories, magazine articles, and police reports at the beginning of every chapter. But what they add to color and context—as well as their useful reminders that the story is real, not just a memoir or a novel—tend to detract from the flow of the story, interrupting the development of the “plot.”
Rushing drops the flashbacks and asides about halfway through, allowing the narrative to progress of its own momentum. Without the added task of explaining a place, a culture, a world while also telling a story, Rushing is better able to convey how stressful and horrifying her life was after the perpetrator of the crime, Ray Russell, is released from jail and eventually evades justice. “On days when we least expected it, we would see Ray or his father on the road, or in the store, or at the gas station, and once again we would be thrown into emotional turmoil,” writes Rushing. “Tension was a constant in our lives. Days were difficult and nights were nightmarish.”
THE BOOK’S TITLE REFERS to Rushing looking back at Mississippi as her family drove away, but it’s clear her time in the Delta isn’t dead; it isn’t even past. Despite the central crime of the book, she describes her time there as “beautiful wallpaper.” The Mississippi Delta is as important to the plot as the characters. Rushing’s book also challenges preconceived notions about rural Mississippi and its inhabitants. In the foreword, she admits to apprehensions about writing the book at all because she “feared that some may perceive it as an indictment of the Delta, where many people I love still live.”
One aspect of the central tragedy of Rushing’s story isn’t just the vandalism of her business; it’s that the barbarians drove her out of the civilization she loves. The region may be marred by poverty and poor education—that’s what everyone expects—but Rushing captures the other face of the Delta: her friendship with internationally renowned artist Lee McCarty, who lived nearby; the help Larry Speakes, a former Reagan administration official who lived in the area, provided in getting official recognition of the Delta as an American Viticultural Area; and the time young Peyton and Eli Manning dined at her restaurant. Even as she describes the horrors her family experienced, Rushing’s love for the area is clear.
Rushing tries to portray other aspects of the tragedy as well, but these attempts fall short. She tries to explain how Russell’s crime was the result of intergenerational trauma brought on by the circumstances of life in the area. This could have been an interesting commentary on how high civilization—tea rooms and wineries and English professorships and Bayou Agriturismo—can’t exist where the average standard of living is so low. It could have been a tale of irreparable tragedy compounding over time. It could have been, at least, a compelling explanation of Russell’s motives, adding color and depth to the closest thing the book has to a villain. But Rushing offers little insight into how that intergenerational trauma might have occurred and been transmitted, so the ultimate origins of the tragedy remain murky.
The strength of Rushing’s story is the clear love she has for her life in Mississippi. The Winery Rushing brought attention and appreciation to a part of the country that is often overlooked. The Delta in the Rearview Mirror may do much the same thing.
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