Di Rushing

It’s a rare occasion for Rocky Mountain Reader to visit the Mississippi Delta, but Ouray author Di Rushing’s book, The Delta in the Rearview Mirror, has given us the perfect opportunity. A memoir undertaken from her Ouray, Colorado home during the Covid shutdown, Rushing’s book is the account of her family’s successful launch of a winery on farmland near Merigold, Mississippi in 1976,  and Diane’s popular  tearoom that followed, providing a place in the countryside to gather, eat lunch and drink wine for 14 years—until disaster struck in the form of sabotage by a disgruntled former employee. It’s not giving away too much of the story—Rushing places it up front—to say that in May, 1990, Ray Russell, a neighbor who’d been employed by the Rushings, opened up a vat containing 8,000 gallons of wine and drained it into the river bordering the property. Di Rushing called it “the night the Sunflower River ran red.”  That event, the vandalism of the tearoom and multiple attacks and threats on the family  ultimately drove the Rushings away from their home to a new life in Colorado.

Full disclosure:  I’m not dispassionate about the Delta, where I lived and worked as a newspaper reporter from 2016-18, leaving behind a big chunk of my heart when I left. Everyone in America should know something about the Delta, even sworn Colorado mountain dwellers, for the region’s racial history and poverty, yes, but also for its music, its food, its warmhearted people, its haunting cypress swamps, its rivers and vast open farmland, for its people’s love of a good time. It’s a place of long straight roads connecting a network of small towns, a place with few people and plenty of ghosts.

Di Rushing and husband Sam were Delta natives, both from Greenville, who married young and shared a dream of a family business. At 24, they reclaimed a portion of their family’s 350-acre farm for vineyards. In subsequent years they were instrumental in designating the Delta as a vital state viticulture area, made wine that won multiple national awards, cared for their young children in their home on the winery grounds and created a warm and hospitable place for visitors to lunch, tour the grounds and enjoy the bounty and quietude of Winery Rushing.

The Delta in the Rearview Mirror: The Life and Death of Mississippi’s First Winery succeeds as a chilling true crime tale, one of those the victims can’t escape. It’s also rich as a portrait of a distinctly American place. Rushing understands and articulates the social divide in the Delta and the attending resentments and violence over generations that may have led, in part, to Ray Russell’s act of vengeance against the Rushings. (In case you’re wondering, Russell is a white man; the Delta is about 70 percent Black.)  Rushing also understands what holds communities together in such an isolated place and writes about the Delta with the love and all too familiar knowledge of a native. A white woman concerned that she might sound too precious telling her story, she explains her hesitation in the foreword of the book: “I feared that some may perceive it as an indictment of the Delta, where many people I love still live.”

But she persists, and with the gentle (not genteel) voice of a born-and-bred Mississippi Delta storyteller, she tells all: how she and Sam learned to make wine; how her values were formed growing up in Greenville public schools during years of racial strife; how she and Sam struggled to succeed and how they enjoyed their success; how heart wrenching it was for them to make a decision to leave. The legal aspects of the story are eye-popping and Russell’s attacks on the family are terrifying—he has a particular penchant for torturing animals. Rushing tells them all with wit and style. That the book ends with the violent murders of Ray, his father and his wife 25 years after the events in question is a shock but not a surprise.

The book is organized in brief chapters, each dated and preceded by a clip from a newspaper or magazine, or a television broadcast, all about the winery throughout the years it operated. It’s easy to picture Di Rushing in her Ouray living room, flanked by boxes of memorabilia, dragged out to help her remember the details. The loneliness of telling this heart-filled story from over a thousand miles away seeps into the pages of the book but never becomes maudlin or self-serving. Rushing is a determined realist who went on to teach high school English and psychology in Ouray for 20 years, then, more than 30 years after leaving the Delta, sat down to write her memoir and got it published by the University of Mississippi Press.

Colorado’s lucky to have her and her hard-earned Delta sensibility.