Blues, haints and bayous: snippets from the Deep South: Hustlers, antebellum homes and hulks

There are casinos along the Mississippi. We didn't realise that until we ended up staying in one. Ours was shaped like a paddle-steamer. That awoke faded memories from childhood, reading the many library books my dad used to check out, about gambling on paddle steamers chugging up and down the Mississippi to and from New Orleans, when smart sharply-dressed hustlers with their fancy ladies, would scam passengers onboard the steamer.

The casino attached to our hotel was not like that. More like an RSL club, truth be told. Crowded with people playing one armed bandits; all very smokey with slack service for dinner. So, we quickly took the shuttle back to our hotel across the road and, instead, spent time exploring old Vicksburg.

Here, we found decent coffee at last. Our coffee experiences have been fairly dire, truth be told. There are few, a very few, dedicated good coffee shops on our route. Elsewhere, coffee is forever on tap. It is mainly filter. It is over-brewed. It is served in thermoses. Tasteless. And typically cold. In Vicksburg, finally, we found an espresso machine in a wacky little coffee spot on the edge of downtown. Brilliant flavour. Beautifully extracted. We went back for seconds it was so good.

Vicksburg was once notorious for lynchings and vigilante violence at the height of the Ku Klux Klan era. Before that, it was a hub for the Confederate army until the Union took control of the city after the Siege of Vicksburg. Some beautiful antebellum homes survive. As do some ugly empty buildings.

We notice such rotting hulks everywhere in the Delta. While initially built well they appear to survive for a time, but are then left empty to become derelict and vandalised. Many of the structures are still sound. But put to no use. This always bothers me in Australia, too, when public monies are spent building new buildings while potentially useful hulks are often sitting right next door. They could be used. Or removed. Either would be an improvement on the status quo.

From Vicksburg we visited the stunning Windsor Ruins. Here a fellow called Smith Coffee Daniels, part-Indian by birth, became hugely wealthy, very young, growing cotton. He married his cousin, had six children, then had a romantic Greek-revival mansion built by his slaves. The slaves built highly elaborate Corinthian type columns onsite. They are built from bricks, laid circular, and finished in decorative stucco. The work is simply astonishing.

The ground floor had the kitchen, a school room for the children, a dairy, a doctor's office and a commissary. One floor up was the master suite with its master bedroom, a sitting room each, a library, a study and a dining room connected to the kitchen by a dumb waiter. Very practical. Above that was another bathroom, a bedroom each for the kids and a couple of guest bedrooms. And rising over it all, coming out of the roof of the mansion, was a domed cupola with glass walls that could be used as an observatory.

Sadly, Smith died just weeks after his home was completed.

The home served through the Civil War when it was used as a hospital after the Vicksburg siege, then later, one February day, in 1890, just thirty years after its construction, the family were on the way home from town with provisions to prepare dinner for guests when they saw smoke spiralling out from the cupola. A guest, it is said, dropped cigar ash onto timber debris left during repairs on an upper floor. Once the fire took hold it destroyed everything except the solid brick columns and the metal balconies.

All that is left of the mansion today are the beautiful ruins, nowadays often used as a film set.