The Prodigy: A child of essence

Jackson, Mississippi woke slow in 1930. The

sun came up over the courthouse square

«first, catching the white columns and the

bronze soldier on his pedestal, then it rolled

west across the railroad tracks and the

shuttered cotton gin, and «finally it spilled out

past the last paved street onto land that

belonged, in nearly every direction a man

could walk, to Phillip Jackson. That was not a

«figure of speech or a boast made at a supper

table. It was a fact written in deed books

down at the county clerk's offi­ce, bound in

leather and ink, page after page of the same

name.

The Jackson's had come into that land the

way a great many Southern fortunes came

into being, through settlers rights and the

quiet machinery of paperwork. A family with

cash and patience could claim acreage the

government wanted settled, «file the right

documents, pay the right fees, and wait.

While other men squandered their claims or

lost them to debt, the Jackson's held on.

They bought out the ones who failed. They

married carefully. They outlived their

neighbors. By the time Phillip Jackson

inherited what his father and grandfather had

stacked up like cord wood, one family's name

sat on nearly every parcel that mattered in

the town, the good bottom land along the

river, the storefronts on Main, the livery, the

mill, and the wide green acres on the north

edge where the big house stood behind two

rows of oaks.