Let me see if I can get this right without having to consult a history book: The Great Yazoo Land Giveaway was one of the first great scams involving land and politics in the history of the United States. As I understand it, Georgia politicians freely sold off enormous plots of the stuff and made enormous profits from these sales. But they were eventually run to earth – a very appropriate place to end up, considering – relieved of their swag, and jailed. But not before the buyers turned around and created independent entities out of the land-masses they’d bought for a song. Independent entities that would become Alabama and Mississippi.

It was here, or near here, that all of this rascality took place. And because it is a Historical Event, there’s a plaque to commemorate it.

Not an auspicious start, but there you are. At least the air has been cleared.

The Jefferson County Courthouse is the second building to occupy a site that is now as close-shaved as any two-putt green. It is a handsome and imposing structure, whose general design and structure is mirrored in county seats all over the country. (North Dakota’s Traill County courthouse might be substituted for Louisville’s and nobody would – aside from well-loved particulars – be the wiser.) It was designed by a local architect and decorated, with scenes of cotton-picking, by a New Yorker who would never see a cotton-field firsthand.

It is not well-policed. In bigger places, you are obliged to go through a screening process that involves placing bags, keys, and other belongings onto a conveyor belt, on which these things are shuttled down into the bowels of a surveillance gadget which is designed to expose concealed weapons and such. If no concealed weapons are found, you get your stuff back. Before you are allowed to do that, you have to stop and wait underneath what looks like a freestanding doorway and are irradiated with something that will show whether you have decided to carry a box-cutter with you rather than consign it to the conveyor belt. If you pass muster here, you are done – at least until the next time you have to get into a municipal building, airport, or high-security area.

Because I was in Louisville, Georgia, I just went into the Jefferson County Courthouse and wandered around. The clock-tower was being renovated, so I went up there to see the great work-in-progress. I walked up a short flight of steps and saw the ladder I had seen in miniature from afar. And a fine, bird-flecked sky such as you dream about when you’re old and can only see right in front of you. I also browsed the courtroom, a sneezy-looking place nearly drowned in old varnish.

I’d wanted to do a picture of it, but didn’t want to attempt the conventional image that might have been expected of me, so I stayed up late one night and did something that is vaguely reminiscent – at least in structure – to the paintings of Charles Demuth. I was chiefly interested in the play of garish light that was interlarded with the somewhat macabre shadows you always get when the light-source is close to the ground. I couldn’t see very well, so I muffed a lot of the painting. I have shamelessly included all the offending areas fatigue and poor eyesight committed to the picture-plane. It’s something a painter shouldn’t do when he wants to save a picture. Yet tampering with one constitutes a kind of aesthetic surgery the success of which nobody can quite accurately judge.

I remember, when I was traveling the country in my late teens and early twenties, seeing a similar-looking place through the drowsy lens of a half-opened window. The Greyhound bus was on a new concrete bridge, which had swung over a wide river and had not made its descent to the highway. The courthouse down below was the centerpiece of a small square such as you used to see in pictures of Southern villages. Cars were parked diagonally along its axis, people milled underneath wide-spread awnings, and the great clock-tower still told the time well after a hundred years. The image of this town, and this courthouse, still rates as one of the most emblematic of a region I was trying to absorb by traveling. Growing up in the ‘burbs gave me a rather skewed vision of a nation that still had deep roots in the country. I felt, as I traveled, that we were fast becoming too divided: between the quasi-villages post-WWII developers had put up and the communities where so many of the soldiers had originally come from before they’d gone to college and become suburbanized. It’s still disorienting for a person who has spent so much time away from town and village life to realize that people still do live in such places and search for meaning just as “we” do here in DC. The quiet searches that go on every day in a thousand unheard-of places are possibly drowned out by the more ostentatious energies of the larger ones, but they are real just the same.

When the workers climb down from their ladders, you’ll be able to look up at the courthouse clock and get the time of day - if you don’t have your cell-phone with you, or are just good at guessing.