Super 8 Motel, Vicksburg, MS: GREETINGS from Mississippi, where the state flag still features the stars and bars in the top lefthand corner, and where state employees got Monday off in honour of Confederate Memorial Day.

This month sees the start of commemorations for the 150^th anniversary of the US Civil War, and my guess would be that many of the locals will not be celebrating the outcome of that conflict.

Among the nostalgics for the Old South will be the woman who gave Stroppy and I a guided tour of the delightful antebellum houses of Natchez yesterday.

Now, if I were in charge of tourism in a small economically depressed town, where the money visitors bring in just about keeps the place going, I would think twice before allowing people like her to show educated liberal Europeans around.

We were told, for instance, that back in the days of the civil rights struggle, blacks sometimes burned down their own churches and pinned the blame elsewhere, because that way the federal government would stump up for a brand new building.

Here are a couple of verbatim quotes: ‘We have come so far, we truly have. We are learning in this area to coexist’. Note the present progressive tense there. And hey, it only took half a century.

But she topped even that with this gem of a Civil War factoid: ‘We surrendered here [in Natchez] three times. I know I’m ashamed of it.’

Our hostess even proclaimed herself a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy, an organisation of the women descendants of Confederate veterans, and offered us speculation as to how the South could have won the ‘war between the states’, as the euphemism puts it.

Nor was this rather nasty Southern belle a one-off. Governor Haley Barbour – touted as a possible Republican presidential contender until 24 hours ago, when he withdrew from the race – keeps an antique Confederate flag in his office, and did not distance himself from the suggestion that the founder of the Ku Klux Klan should feature on local licence plates.

One recent opinion poll found that 46% of Mississippi Republicans want interracial marriage banned by law.

But the good news is that not everybody round here is a redneck.  I spent the evening of Confederate Memorial Day in Hal and Mal’s bar in downturn Jackson, at a fabulous blues and southern soul jam session, where blacks and white drank together, danced together, and made wonderful music together. If anybody in the audience got lucky, miscegenation may well have taken place.

It was a cheerful end to a depressing day, and ultimately, the best possible rejoinder to Mississippi’s racist right.