Mississippi Border

Stories of river and of humanity, from Mississippi to the Po river.

Jeremiah Saint John Pinkerton tells of his life with Jack Lungurdson in Quintillia, a place on the banks of the Mississippi where the county road goes to die in a bend in the river. In the old house inherited from Jack their lives you do company, on way for sunset. Jeremiah is a sponge compared to all the stories he has heard about his black lineage and the Quintillia of his youth; but it also absorbs Jack’s stories, after a first period of study between the two. Jack is the spitting copy of Robert Redford. This similarity, which in the old age is increasingly accentuated, in his youth brought him joys, pains and troubles, until he was gone away from the United States to work on the oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico and in the North Sea above Scotland. He grew up in Jackson with his adoptive parents and has long been obsessed with a somewhat bizarre story that would have him born in Italy at the end of the Second World War, but even descended from the Vikings, through a long Germanic family way. In the end, he learns that the story is all invented, except that he really was born in Italy to a young woman who died then in an asylum and arrived in Genoa from a remote village on the banks of the Po river. He leaves for Europe, while Jeremiah remains in Quintillia, waiting for his friend to return at any moment, because he is sure that his destiny is to end his days with Jack in the house on the river.