If Mississippi came to Chicago during the first three-quarters of this century, now there’s begun to be movement back. “This return migration is telling you something about the success of the civil rights movement,” says James Grossman, Vice President of Research and Education at Chicago’s Newberry Library. “There was one high school [for Blacks] in the whole state of Mississippi in 1920.”

No one calls Mississippi perfect, but the state has more black elected officials than any other in the United States. And for many black Mississippians who might have migrated to Chicago, there’s reason to stay. Johnny Walls did.

A graduate of the University of Mississippi Law School, the 51-year-old Walls is one of ten blacks in the state senate. He chuckles recalling that as a six-year-old he was a water boy for field workers in the cotton fields surrounding Clarksdale. “I couldn’t have imagined it back then. When I was sworn in, my mother looked up and said, ‘This is a long way from the shotgun house we had in the Oil Mill Quarters of Clarksdale.’ ”

But it wasn’t political ambition that caused 44-year-old Betty Fowler to leave Chicago in 1980 and return to Mississippi, although she became mayor of the tiny town of Moorehead for a time. “In Chicago my first husband was very smart, but very stupid to get caught up in drugs, and I wasn’t going to have my child growing up in that environment.”

She too had known the blues growing up on a plantation in Sunflower County, Mississippi. “We were so poor,” she says with tears welling up in her eyes when I ask how a former sharecropper becomes mayor. “Right now if you go to my [elementary] school in Sunflower you won’t see my or my brother’s photograph. My mother said we had to decide which one of us could get a class picture taken, but both of us couldn’t. There wasn’t any money. We decided neither of us would. Welfare!” she snaps, wiping away the tears now. “I hated it.”

Betty went on to a job-training program after returning. She threw herself energetically into community affairs. “What I decided,” Betty says, summing up more than her life, “was to learn as much as I could as fast as I could, and be as good as I could at whatever I did.”

On this trail so full of remarkable people, the passage of 83-year-old Arnold “Gatemouth” Moore in Yazoo City, Mississippi, reminded me that much of the spirit along the blues highway fills a single temple.

“Yes, I was pretty wild. Gambling. Women. All the rest of it,” says Gatemouth, as Reverend Moore still prefers to be called. He ran away from his home in Topeka, Kansas, when he was 16 and made his way to Beale Street in Memphis with ambitions of being a “crooner.” But “being a crooner you got to work every now and then. Being a blues singer, you got to work every day. It was a matter of living, and I got right in there with those mouth harps.”

Growing up in a white household in Topeka, Kansas, where his mother was a maid, he didn’t know the South or the blues. He learned both traveling with the S.S. Walcott Rabbit Foot Tent Show in 1934. “The train was going through a Mississippi cotton field when I woke up. ‘Look, it’s snowing!’ I shouted.”

The blues are “just situations in life,” he explained, “and that’s what I wrote.” With hearty laughter he recalls how he composed one of his best-known songs: “Have You Ever Loved a Woman?” “Lots of people know it. Well, my wife wasn’t home when I came back to Memphis from a trip, so I went down on Beale Street to look for her. A fellow said, ‘Yeah, she’s upstairs.’ I’m mad now. The band leader saw me. ‘Sing something, Gate,’ he said. I was looking for my wife, and I told him to turn up all the lights. I shouted out singing: ‘My wife is here with another man/and I swear we’re going to fight.’ That song came from me looking for Willa Mae. She got outta there too.”

Gatemouth pauses now. I glance at the photograph he’s handed me, showing a tall, handsome young man with a broad smile. I got lost for a moment thinking about his blues highway, from the West to the Deep South. But then I remembered that all these highways traveled for most of this century are one road.