It Had to Happen Sometime Pt.1

Onward, Mississippi is not a rallying cry for this state in the southern USA, but rather the name of a location, a town at a crossroads. Not the crossroads of Robert Johnson and the Devil and the birth of the Blues fame, that's farther north in the Delta. Onward marks the spot where drivers of cars heading North anticipate entering the 'real' Delta, and where south-bound travellers leave the flat Delta fields behind. Either way, people stop for gas or food at the Onward market, becoming aware, if they didn't already know, of the site's true claim to fame: the mythology around the origin of the term 'Teddy Bear.'

At the heart of the legend is President Theodore Roosevelt's refusal to shoot a bear cub while on a hunting trip. A remarkable tale, as Teddy Roosevelt was so assertive at other moments: he championed the triumph over Natives in the American West as well as in other continents, where the ‘dominant races’ had pushed on bravely and avoided the shame of leaving these vast terrains as ‘nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages;’ he led key campaigns in the Spanish-American War, and he was the overseer of Panama’s ‘liberation’ from Colombia and the subsequent construction of the Panama Canal.

I remember staring in confusion (for quite a long time) at the signs in Onward. The only feeling I could identify was ambivalence: inspired by Teddy's legacy (other hunters have spared cubs, but few to none have been Presidents), the Delta's past and present and the unifying role of the sweet stuffed creature. At the time, nobody could have imagined that this, too, would change.