Among the Cabin Fanatics of Mississippi’s Giant Houseparty
Among the Cabin Fanatics of Mississippi’s Giant Houseparty
Listen to this article.
The Neshoba County Fair calls itself Mississippi’s Giant Houseparty, because every year the same families return, antlike, to five hundred and ninety-seven individually owned, festively painted cabins there. For a week at the end of July, even many who live nearby move to the fairgrounds, creating an instant community of twenty thousand people, three times larger than the population of the county seat, Philadelphia. The fair, founded in the late eighteen-hundreds in the remote east-central part of the state, has survived two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the coronavirus pandemic because the cabin owners could not bear to give it up. After spraying for bugs, touching up the paint, hanging porch swings, washing linens, changing light bulbs, making beds, and stocking refrigerators (some cabins have four), the families hold the equivalent of Thanksgiving—seven times. There are food hangovers, and hangover hangovers, and children everywhere, only nobody goes home.A lightly occupied fair cabin sleeps twenty-six; some sleep sixty. Upper floors resemble bunkhouses: bed after bed after bed. The fair is not the place for introverts, neat freaks, sensitives, or anyone who cannot tolerate unrelenting, bone-deep heat. Central air-conditioning is heresy, as is television. Did the fair’s founders watch “American Ninja Warrior”? They did not. Indoor plumbing and electricity are acceptable—fans and window units blow wide open. This year, during the hottest month in human history, I stepped into a frigid, empty-looking bedroom and was startled when a teen-ager rose from an upper bunk in a ghillie suit of blankets.Cabin dwellers, like Burning Man fanatics, plan their lives around the fair. Cabin 185 is called Mump’s Place because its late matriarch reportedly “thought about the fair for fifty weeks out of the year,” then kept detailed notes on what everybody ate and where they slept. Casseroles are cooked and frozen weeks in advance. The Minshews, of Cabin 1, are so eager for caramel cake, a family fair specialty, that they start eating it before they’ve finished unloading their cars. Diehards have not missed a fair since Franklin D. Roosevelt was President. Carrie Stokes Atkinson, of Cabin 351, was six weeks old when she attended her first fair, in 1988; she was seventeen when she was crowned Miss Neshoba County at the fair; she was thirty-four when, last year, her water broke at the fair, on the kitchen floor. She pointed out the exact spot to me while a meal was in progress, as one always seems to be. Someone said, “People have gotten married at the fair,” and someone else said, “Marriages have ended out here, too.”The fair started as a one-day picnic in 1889, when some families met to compare and share their livestock, field crops, garden vegetables, and crafts. As the event grew, fairgoers debated advances in farming and delivered discourses: “How I Beat the Boll Weevil.” They competed in home-economics contests—best axe handle, best sponge cake, best “homespun dress made during the Great Civil War”—for prize overalls or ten dollars in gold. Exhibits showcased fertilizer and a mechanical cotton chopper. “All these things that promote agriculture and horticulture help build up the country,” the Neshoba Democrat noted.The first cabins were raw-plank shanties, often made with repurposed materials. Sixty-five of them ultimately faced and surrounded a pavilion, which became known as Founders Square. The governor spoke there in 1896, and every governor is said to have spoken there since. In 1898, the square was seeded with oaks, whose roots spread and surfaced, like keloid scars.Most cabins are narrow and deep, set, at most, several feet apart. The founders added second floors as their families grew, then built more and taller cabins around the square. The cabins radiated out, forming “streets” and “neighborhoods”: Happy Hollow, Sunset Strip. Seventy-four cabins front the red clay horse-racing track; when the starting bugle sounds, quarter and dollar bettors crowd the balconies and porches.In keeping with the founders, many cabin owners pride themselves on building and decorating with salvaged or scavenged materials. A tire store became a cabin; the tin roof of a teardown became a kitchen ceiling. Newer cabins are frequently built with concrete blocks and aluminum siding, substances less susceptible to fire and rot. Owners distinguish themselves through color—there are cabins painted orange, turquoise, fuchsia, canary yellow with pink polka dots—and no two are alike. Robert Craycroft, a former architecture professor at Mississippi State University, has called the mishmash “Fairhouse vernacular.” The cabins are festooned with string lights and paper lanterns; in the blue hour, when the moon rises and the crickets start up, they twinkle like an extension of the midway. At Cabin 203, white bulbs spell out “BIG DADDY,” Broadway style. Across the track, there’s “POPS.”The fair starts on a Friday and ends the next Friday at midnight. Ten days later, the electricity and water are cut. For the fifty-one-week off-season, the fairgrounds “resemble nothing so much as an abandoned Colorado mining town,” Craycroft wrote. “A civilized place absent its civilization.”Every cabin is required to have a porch. Families loll there, play music there, eat there, entertain there, gossip there, lose at cards there, sleep there. For some, the porch is the fair. In 1986, Ellen Johnson Spendrup, who attended her first fair in 1900, at age two, said that she liked “sitting on my porch with my feet up, in my rocking chair, watching the idiots pass.”On Fair Saturday, Don DeWeese was on his porch at Cabin 32, a powder-blue two-story with white trim and patriotic bunting. He comes from a prosperous old Neshoba County family and now lives in Memphis. Relatives had travelled from as far away as Texas and North Carolina—they spilled off the porch and into Founders Square. Decades ago, Stanley Dearman, a former editor of the Democrat, wrote that fair people “take seriously” the art of “eating and talking.” DeWeese, who is seventy-eight, got started on the latter, volunteering that he has “the largest one-owner, one-location doughnut shop in the United States,” and that his forebears “invented plywood out of pine”; he’s had homes in Colorado and the Caymans; he stays at the Baccarat when in New York; one of his “closest friends” is Wynonna Judd, and his “closest friend,” the professional wrestler Jerry Lawler, was, that very day, receiving a lifetime-achievement award from the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame. DeWeese was missing the ceremony to be at the fair.“We’re not laughing at you, sweetie. We’re laughing at something you don’t understand.”Cartoon by Maddie DaiAs he spoke, DeWeese was hailing people, and people were hailing him. The fair is “a reunion—of your life,” he explained. “I see all my old high-school classmates. I see my old girlfriends. I already hugged one today. I see people I went to kindergarten through college with.” When he found out that I was born and raised two hours north—Oxford; Tupelo—he said, “Girl, I married Miss Tupelo! And her sister was Miss Mississippi!” He hollered over a shoulder, “Rita! Where’s Rita?”DeWeese wanted to show me his cabin. On the way inside, he pointed out an original watercolor by the Mississippi artist Wyatt Waters. It hangs above all the people sitting on his porch at the fair—and depicts a bunch of people sitting on a porch at the fair. Downstairs consisted largely of an open kitchen and an eating area, with a picnic table and a concrete floor. After introducing me to a granddaughter from Asheville who performs “Hamilton” numbers “amazin’ ” and to a man who had competed in that morning’s Heart o’ Dixie triathlon, he climbed steep, narrow stairs and pushed open a battered plywood door, revealing a room of wall-to-wall beds.Daylight knifed through gaps in the plank walls. Suitcases and a monogrammed tote lay open on the floor. Someone said, “Sh-h-h!” Several adults and children were in there, trying to nap before the evening’s events. The fair’s daytime population swells at night, when a live band plays the grandstand, at the racetrack. The fair hosts entertainers who are said to be on their way up, or down. Loretta Lynn, George Strait, Lester Flatt, Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette, Ronnie Milsap, Lee Ann Womack, Molly Hatchet, the Charlie Daniels Band, and Trace Adkins all performed at the fair. Jerry Lee Lewis appeared there in 1957, just before releasing “Great Balls of Fire.” June Carter performed before she married Johnny Cash. Dolly Parton never played the fair, but her sister Stella did. The fair can’t afford Morgan Wallen, though it was able to book one of his collaborators, the singer-songwriter Niko Moon.DeWeese declared Fair Saturday “the No. 1 night of the year, to a teen-ager in central Mississippi.” Girls planned their outfits for months: “I expect ’em to come in here in short shorts and cowboy boots, and titties showin’.” The previous night, a visitor from Los Angeles had stumbled, drunk, into a cabin at the north end of the racetrack and commented on all the “pretty bitches” he had seen. One of the men in residence informed him, “Down here, we refer to them as ‘ladies.’ ”Cabin 220, the color of a ripe banana, sits just beyond Founders Square, at the entrance to Happy Hollow, the fair’s first “suburb,” a short stretch of cabins separated by a sawdust-covered footpath. When I came across it, the owners, William and Barbie Bassett, and their daughter, Gracie, were sitting, where else, on the porch. Barbie, a former television meteorologist, had written “92°” on a whiteboard—the daily Faircast.Not long ago, cabins were known to sell for as little as a few thousand dollars. “This is a camp house, not a condo,” William said. Lately, some families have been spending more than it would cost to buy an actual Neshoba County home. Fairgoers love gossiping about it. The Bassetts had heard that a two-story cabin recently sold for a hundred and eighty-nine thousand dollars; they told me that the new owners gutted it and painted it Pepto Bismol pink with green racing stripes. Another went for three hundred and ninety thousand dollars; the buyers planned to raze it and rebuild, higher. “She’s an interior designer, and her husband’s in real estate,” Barbie said. “It’s gonna be the Taj Mahal of the fair.”Fair Saturday is “the No. 1 night of the year, to a teen-ager in central Mississippi,” a longtime fairgoer said.On Founders Square, everyone was talking about a cabin that had recently sold for around the same amount, to a family with no apparent connection to the fair or to Neshoba County. Neighbors disdained the newcomers’ “massive” television; worse, they kept their door closed. “Not to have your cabin open is kind of tacky,” one neighbor told me.Cabin people, traditionally, are hospitality extremists. At the fair, I was offered water, lemonade, iced tea, beer, Gatorade, a souvenir apron, boiled shrimp, homemade ice cream, a pork chop, a taco, a bed, a toilet, the remains of a funnel cake, a book about doughnuts, an introduction to “some really obnoxious cousins,” two ibuprofens, two more ibuprofens, help “fixing” a traffic ticket (offer declined), and numerous iterations of chicken. Gail Long, who is eighty and has been a fair person since girlhood, told me about the time her mother invited a visitor to help herself to supper at Cabin 271, and then to dessert. After the woman left, Gail and her sisters asked, “Who was that lady?” Their mother said, “I thought y’all knew her.” A late-night reveller once happened into Cabin 19 and obliviously ate raw meat loaf out of the refrigerator; the fridge is now divided into sections marked “PREP” and “DRUNK.”This year, Cabin 19’s twice-daily buffet stretched from its single stove all the way to the front porch. Roxanna McCarty, who runs the culinary operation with a rotating staff of eight, prepared “fried green tomatoes, fried okra, fried squash, fresh tomatoes, cream corn, fruit—we come in here and deseed everything—and pasta salad. We do black-eyed peas, green beans, lady peas, and butter beans every day. Devilled eggs at every shift. We did five pork loins, six turkey breasts. We had brisket. We had racks of ribs. We had Boston butts and ham. We had chicken and dumplings, chicken and dressing, lasagna.” McCarty cuts her okra lengthwise, instead of in rounds; it tastes “more okra-y” that way. The weather was so hot her green tomatoes turned red.Cabin 19 served more than six hundred plates this year. McCarty told me, “Just here today, we’ve seen kids whose mother is in jail, they’re on welfare, they’re living in foster care. We have a president of a big company, we have single mothers, we have people that run their own house-cleaning business, we have people that flew in here on a private plane. Every walk of life is here.”The fair has a board that functions almost like a municipal government, overseeing the budget and making policy: parking, garbage. Gate and cabin fees generate the operating revenue; the Neshoba County Fair Association, the nonprofit that runs the fair, took in eight million dollars between 2017 and 2022. Cabin owners pay the association up to five hundred dollars annually per cabin, and fifty dollars per air-conditioner. During the fair, the utility bill alone totals half a million dollars.“Squirrel!”Cartoon by Liam Francis WalshIndividuals build and own the cabins, and pay the property taxes, but the association owns the land. The cabins tend to pass down through families, making the fair largely a self-perpetuating, closed system. “The old saw here is that, in a divorce, people fight harder over the cabin than the children,” Sid Salter, a well-known columnist and Neshoba native, who co-owns Cabin 16, told me. Most sales happen privately, by word of mouth. An owner may not sell, rent, raze, rebuild, or renovate a cabin without the association’s permission. C. Scott Bounds, a state legislator and the fair’s president, recalled a former colleague who discouraged change by saying, “We ain’t never done it like ’at before.” Kevin Cheatham, the fair’s manager, said, “We try to keep things as simple as possible.”In 1980, the National Register of Historic Places added the fairgrounds to its list, describing the institution’s contributions to “this very rural region of Mississippi” as “immeasurable.” By then, the fair was approaching sewer capacity, and there were concerns about inauthenticity: the newer sections contained too many modern amenities for some people’s taste. “They’re putting Sheetrock in there,” DeWeese told me. The fair stopped adding cabins in 1982.The fair has a daily newspaper, the Fair Times, which is published by the Democrat. An annual profusion of advertising makes it thicker than some actual newspapers. The Fair Times overwhelmingly consists of photographs of fairgoers in situ. How else is everyone supposed to know that Cabin 612 hosts a “Golden Girls”-themed bunco night; Cabin 755 won a giant stuffed banana; Cabin 163 (“The Plaza on the Fairgrounds”) puts on an “Eloise”-themed tea party with antique dishes; Caleb Mayfield lost a tooth; and Kenny (Slick) Hillman fixed a weed-eater? Kids beg to have their picture taken. It is on record that this year’s fair was attended by Azlee, Bensley, Payzlee, Rhettley, Easton, Creeth, Halen, Tuff, Collyns, Kollyns, Jacks, Jax, Kelby, Karsten, Karter, Jagger, Bayleigh, Everleigh, Hadleigh, Jayleigh, Mosleigh, Ryleigh, Maverick, Banks, Anistyn, Gracyn, Hudsyn, Hollyn, Lakelyn, Rylen, Aspen, Aspin, and multiple Baylors.The fair has been called “the Carnegie Hall of stump speaking.”Outsiders have never been quite sure what to make of the fair. “It’s a deal where, if you’re not born to it, it doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Salter told me. “Sometimes when you are born into it, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.” Joyce Ellis, of Cabin 351, sees her busy teen-age granddaughters here and there throughout the year, but “the week of the fair? I’m with my grandkids for eight days.” People who might otherwise reject the density of a city are piled on top of one another, each neighbor reliant on the next. Children are often unaware that they are being watched by other people’s parents. Atkinson, also of Cabin 351, still doesn’t know who ratted her out, as a teen-ager, for kissing a boy and drinking Zima. Cabin owners accept that if their place catches fire the fair will bulldoze it without hesitation, at their expense, to prevent flames from reaching their neighbors. “The idea of subordinating individual liberties for the common good is a theme that many would view as suspiciously unpatriotic,” Craycroft, one of the few scholars who have studied the fair, observed. “But, these fierce defenders of individual property rights have, in effect, established a commune.”In 1980, National Geographic published “Mississippi’s Grand Reunion,” a thirteen-page feature on the fair. At the time, the U.S. was emerging from a gasoline shortage, and around twenty-four per cent of Mississippians lived in poverty, the highest rate in the nation, but the article depicted unmitigated bliss. The fair displayed an enlarged copy at Exhibit Hall, alongside award-winning fruits. The state legislature passed a resolution congratulating the author, a native of Kosciusko, Mississippi, for her exceedingly positive portrayal of the fair’s “good will and gracious fellowship.”Several weeks after the National Geographic piece appeared, Ronald Reagan, in the midst of his Presidential campaign, showed up at the fair. Mississippi’s politicians had long recognized that the fair provided an opportunity to address thousands of voters in one place—and just before the August primaries—but Reagan was the first national candidate to visit. More than thirty thousand spectators piled into the fairgrounds to watch. Reagan, who wore an open-collared dress shirt, charmed the audience by talking about Ole Miss football and John Wayne. He then moved on to inflation and a critique of public welfare, invoking his support of “states’ rights,” a euphemism for white supremacy which had been adopted to justify slavery and Jim Crow laws, and which political operatives had used to exploit racial tension in the South. After Reagan won, John Bell Williams, a segregationist former governor of Mississippi and a five-term U.S. congressman, declared, “I’m happy to say we have a President now who talks our language.”The fair has been called “the Carnegie Hall of stump speaking” and “Republican Woodstock.” Candidates address fairgoers in short bursts, three mornings in a row. In November, Mississippi will hold a gubernatorial election; Brandon Presley, a Democrat and Elvis’s second cousin, who is a state public-service commissioner, has mounted a surprisingly strong campaign against the Republican incumbent, Tate Reeves. At the fair, the more urgent race was the Republican primary for lieutenant governor. The leading challenger to the popular incumbent, Delbert Hosemann, was a MAGA state senator, Chris McDaniel.On the morning of Hosemann’s and McDaniel’s speeches, I found a seat on a long wooden pew toward the front of the pavilion. McDaniel’s small, noisy scrum of backers sat nearby. McDaniel characterized Hosemann as a liberal, and falsely accused him of having been the vice-president of an abortion clinic. (Hosemann is a devout Catholic.) McDaniel said that Democrats “seek the end of this country as we know it,” adding, “Why would you ever reach across the aisle to those people?” He urged voters to “establish sovereignty again in this state” and described himself as a “proud disciple of Ronald Reagan—and, yes, Donald Trump!”Hosemann, he went on, had “never endorsed Donald Trump for a single thing.” In 2017, when Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity sought information on Mississippi’s registered voters, Hosemann famously told the commission that it could “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.” Onstage, Hosemann called McDaniel “despicable.”After the speeches, I strolled over to Salter’s cabin, which faces the pavilion. Salter, a respected conservative who has watched the stumping since he was a boy, said, “When I was about fifteen, it occurred to me that all the things that were challenging about the state of Mississippi sort of stemmed from the fact that we were a monolithic, one-party state. At that time, the monolith was the Democratic Party—it controlled everything from the capitol to city hall to the courthouse. Every board, every commission, every facet of the legislature.” (Historically, Mississippi Democrats were Democrats in the sense that Lincoln was a Republican.) “If there was going to be reform, or change,” Salter said, “we needed a viable two-party system.”A harness racer, near the stables, one of the few places at the fair with a sizable Black presence.After Reagan’s appearance, the designations began to shift; in 1992, Mississippi elected its first Republican governor in more than a hundred years, and the G.O.P. became the monolith. The Party has since fractured into virulent strains. In 2014, McDaniel tried to unseat the U.S. senator Thad Cochran; several of McDaniel’s supporters were criminally charged in a plot to sneak into Cochran’s wife’s room at a nursing home, where she was bedridden with dementia. The plan was to film her and then accuse Cochran of having an extramarital affair while his wife was dying. A blogger, Clayton Kelly, was later sentenced to more than two years in prison for recording her in bed and posting the footage online.Cochran prevailed, but McDaniel got uncomfortably close. Hosemann later noted that toward the end of the primary for lieutenant governor the McDaniel campaign pulled in nearly a million dollars in dark money. Salter told me, “The division in the country makes a guy like McDaniel dangerous, if he’s got cash.”Later on the day of his speech, McDaniel somehow wound up in Cabin 22, on Founders Square, perhaps unaware that one of the families that own it, the Molpuses, are prominent Democrats. (Dick Molpus served as secretary of state from 1984 to 1996.) A Molpus relative delivered this news politely; McDaniel left. In 2016, when Donald Trump, Jr., appeared at the fair as a surrogate for his father, a woman goose-stepped in Founders Square. Democrats, vastly outnumbered, are relegated to such small acts of resistance. Standing on a supporter’s porch, Trump assured voters that his father was a “blue-collar billionaire,” then gushed about fairgoers being able to “hang out with the Mannings.” Olivia Williams Manning, who, with Archie Manning, spawned an N.F.L. dynasty, is from an old Neshoba County family—Cabins 14, 56, 82, 202, and 631.The fair’s inaugural picnic took place twenty-four years after the end of the Civil War. One of the founders was a Confederate veteran. In 1928, the second-place winner in one of the races was a horse named Ku Klux Klan. The pavilion has hosted a succession of segregationist governors and congressmen, and open support for the “Lost Cause” more or less continues to this day. On backstreets at this year’s fair, at least six cabins flew the Confederate flag. The fair allows it.Whenever I asked fairgoers about race, even some of the liberals appeared stumped, as if it should be obvious that an institution that started as a family affair among white people would remain just that. All eleven of this year’s Miss Neshoba County contestants were white. All but a few of the thousand-plus faces in the Fair Times snapshots were white. At the late-night sing-along, “Dixie” is still in the lineup.One afternoon, I came across a Black woman standing behind a cabin, staring at the midway. She was the only person of color I had seen that day. Her name was Larhonda Boswell, and she worked as a home health aide for one of the cabin owners. She in no way feared her employers, but her mother had warned her about wandering around the fair alone at night, even dressed in scrubs. Boswell had thought little of it until that morning, when, as she walked in from the parking lot, a couple of men had given her such a hard look that she prayed to Jesus for protection. She told me, “Baby, times ain’t changed.”After the U.S. Supreme Court ordered school integration, in 1954, Mississippi, where almost half the population was Black, refused to comply. The following year, white supremacists in the Delta, a couple of hours northwest of Neshoba County, abducted Emmett Till, a Black fourteen-year-old from Chicago who was visiting family; he had supposedly whistled at a white woman after walking into her store to buy candy. The kidnappers tortured and murdered Till, then threw his body, weighted with an industrial fan, into the Tallahatchie River. In an act that galvanized the civil-rights movement, Till’s mother held an open-casket funeral and allowed the magazine Jet to photograph her child’s crushed skull, broken wrists, and gouged-out eye.The Klan recruited in Neshoba County to such a degree that its opponents quietly warned newcomers not to accept any fish-fry invitations without first asking around. One cabin owner told me, “That was the recruitment tactic of the K.K.K.—you feed ’em and then you scare ’em.” In early 1964, as civil-rights groups prepared for Freedom Summer, the drive to register Mississippi’s Black voters, the Klan burned twelve crosses in Neshoba County in a single night, one at the courthouse. On June 21st, James Chaney, a Black Mississippian, and his fellow civil-rights workers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, white Jews from New York, went to Neshoba County anyway, to investigate the torching of a church. When they failed to return to their home base, in Meridian, F.B.I. agents descended on Neshoba and found their burned-out station wagon in a swamp.Seventy-four cabins front the red clay horse track. During the races, quarter and dollar bettors crowd the balconies and porches.For the next forty-two days, federal agents and four hundred sailors from Meridian’s naval base searched for the three men. Some white people in Neshoba County decided that the missing-persons case was a hoax, even after the F.B.I. found the men’s bodies buried in a red-dirt dam. The sheriff and his chief deputy, a Klan member, were ultimately arrested, along with a K.K.K. grand wizard and sixteen others.The fair opened five days after the bodies were discovered, on August 9th. A small plane, its tail number obscured, dropped Klan leaflets that “attempted to portray the civil rights workers as Communist Revolutionaries, un-godly atheists and traitors,” Steven H. Stubbs wrote in “Mississippi’s Giant Houseparty,” an eight-hundred-and-eighteen-page chronology of the fair. The next day, at the pavilion, a local leader of the John Birch Society received a standing ovation after delivering a “ranting attack on the Federal government.” Another speaker referred viciously to the N.A.A.C.P. Molpus, fourteen at the time, was there. “I looked around and thought, I’m on another planet,” he told me. The reaction was part of the reason he got into politics. It wasn’t until 1989 that any of Mississippi’s elected officials apologized publicly to the families of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. The acknowledgment came from Molpus.Trent Brown, a professor of American studies at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, has noted, “The fair represents a paradox that most white Mississippians have yet to grasp: their cherished celebrations of family and community cannot be separated from the state’s racialist past.” Molpus told me, “Those paradoxes are everywhere, not just at the fair. There are both noble calls to the angels of our better nature and far-right racist demagogues who speak to the dark and evil side. Such is life in the real world.”One afternoon, I stopped by the fair’s stables to see Walter Miller, a racing champion who had just come off the track and was cooling down two of his horses, American Sportsman and Fusion Five. Miller, who is in his sixties, had owned a trail-riding business in coastal Mississippi until a friend advised him to upgrade to harness racing, a sport that makes use of what are essentially chariots. Miller learned that a winning horse can potentially earn a hundred thousand dollars or more in its lifetime. About twenty years ago, he began racing at the Neshoba County Fair.In Mississippi, unlike in Northern states, almost all harness-racing owners and drivers, including Miller, are Black. Their relatives and fans unfold lawn chairs near the stables just before two in the afternoon, when the first race starts, and stay until the last team crosses the finish line, hours later. This is the only time when there is a sizable number of Black people at the fair. They rarely visit the cabins or walk through Founders Square, or stroll around looking at porches. After the races, they pack up and leave, and come back again the next day.In Miller’s view, racism at the fair had improved. He told me, “There’s progress. All the Black guys used to be up at the top of the hill, in the corner.” He meant the racing teams. His crew is assigned to the stables closest to the racetrack. Of the organizers, he said, “The way they look at it is, this is their building, their land. They control it the way they want.” Miller’s business partner, Trenlon Harris, was standing at Fusion Five’s sweaty right flank, listening. “It’s a slow process,” he said. “This is still Mississippi. Count your victories, however small they are.”Later that day, I sat on the porch of Cabin 8, on Founders Square, with Brittany and Derrick Reed, newlyweds in their thirties who live in Birmingham. Brittany, who is white, teaches special education; Derrick, who is Black, is a personal banker at Wells Fargo. The cabin first belonged to Brittany’s paternal grandfather. She said, “This is, I would say, the most important place to me. It holds more memories than anyplace else. There’s just a peace and a slowness about it.” A young relative was showing the grownups a moth in her palm; another was running around with a cluster of yellow balloons.This was Derrick’s second fair, and his first as Brittany’s husband. Before the first visit, he was “a little nervous,” he told me. “And his family was nervous,” Brittany said. “Yes, super nervous,” Derrick said. His mother, an Alabamian, was primarily worried about her son’s acceptance within Brittany’s family, which had included some older members who, as Brittany carefully put it, never “stepped out of their bubble.”In Alabama, Derrick attended predominantly white schools, and most of his friends are white; Brittany briefly worked as a missionary in Niger before teaching in Birmingham’s city schools. Individually, and as a couple, they were accustomed to spending time in various bubbles. At their first fair together, they told me, the only awkwardness had involved premarital sleeping arrangements.Because cabins pass down within large, branching families, they inevitably accumulate numerous owners. The descendants of founders (Foxes, Johnsons) still occupy Founders Square. At Cabin 90, the names of some of the hundred and twenty or so stakeholders are etched into the front steps. Cabin 8 passed down to Brittany’s father. When she inherits her share, Derrick will own it with her, becoming the first owner of color in the cabin’s history. ♦