Greetings from the state which has a county named after Jefferson Davis.

(Jefferson Davis was the first president of the Confederacy.)

I won't lie: I doubt I ever would have gone to New Hebron, Mississippi had I not been forced to travel there for work today. But I'm glad I did, because now I can go ahead and check that off the ole bucket list.

"I do believe this is the best restaurant in Neweebrun," the little girl with an accent thicker than Jenny's said as I perused the buffet line.

"What are the other ones like?" I asked, glad I had finally discovered how the locals actually pronounce New Hebron.

"Well, the other one has better decorations, but this one has better food."

The little girl's mother works in the kitchen at Yesterday's Cafe, so naturally she is biased. Either that, or she could simply be telling the truth, since there are all of two restaurants in New Hebron. She knew the exact price of the all you can eat buffet ($7.44) at the better one. She also knew the exact time that it would fill up with the usual lunch crowd (11 a.m.). When they all flooded in -- blue collar, blue collar, blue collar -- I could practically feel the eyeballs burning a hole into the back of my head, as I ate my mashed potatoes with gravy, fried chicken and cornbread. I was wearing Carhartt's, but they were wearing Carhartt jackets. There is a big difference. The pants are for fake hippies; the jackets are for real men.

"Who's the Yankee?" I kept expecting to hear, even though I'm from Texas. That's how out of place I felt, what, with my laptop and fancy sunglasses, my shirt without a name tag sewn on and a rented Corolla parked outside, the only non-truck in sight. I was eating lunch in a small town in the heart of the Confederacy, and I don't have an accent. I may as well have been someone's cousin Vinny. Where is my black leather jacket when I need it?

"I'm looking for Highway 42. Do you know where that is?" I asked the little girl. She seemed to know everything else about Neweebrun.

"I don't know," she said, "I live on Main ayve."

"It's avenue," the waitress corrected her, really emphasizing the short 'a' in the Neweebrun way. "Not 'ayve'."

"Oh, whatever!" the little girl yelled. "It's the same difference!"

Maybe in Neweebrun, MS, it is.

I was in town to visit a pork rinds manufacturer that had suffered damage to some of his equipment from the recent snows that blanketed much of the southeastern United States two weeks ago. New Hebron got hammered by nine inches of the stuff, even more than what covered Baton Rouge (where I must have heard "Boy I tell yuh, this here is more snow than the winner of '88!" five times in the two hours I spent there that day), and way more than we got down in Houston.

A snowman in Houston doesn't leave much snow for the surrounding area.

Pork rinds: that was my assignment today. Just add it to the list of interesting industries I've been exposed to since taking this job over two months ago. Chrome plated rims, Persian rugs, tobacco stores, women's clothing boutiques, heavy equipment rentals, oil refineries, plastic bag manufacturers, and now, pork rinds companies.

That's right. I was a history major at Virginia. And I also speak Swahili.

On my drive back to Jackson, which is where I flew into, seeing as (no way!) New Hebron has a Dollar General and yet no airport, I passed by a crazy old man selling Confederate flags on the side of the road, in front of the entrance to an RV park. I promptly pulled a U-turn.

Welcome to Mississippi!

I hate Confederate flags; I view them as a symbol of slavery and racism, and I don't buy into the whole "Pride not Prejudice" bullshit. But I do love people's stories. And the guy in Mississippi who sits in a truck on the side of the road selling Confederate flags -- just like the Kosovo je Srbija nationalist, or the dreadlocked white guy in Ethiopia -- is a guy who has a story. That's why I pulled a U-turn.

Mississippi is a state overflowing with black people. They make up 37 percent of the population, easily the highest proportion of blacks in any state in the union, and yet, somehow, this is still the Mississippi state flag.

Yes, it is almost 2009.

"I don't think they know they're free yet," my black coworker remarked when I described to him what it felt like to see a huge, billowing Mississippi flag flying proudly in the wind every few minutes as I drove towards Jackson.

"Maybe they haven't gotten the memo yet."

"Also man," he said, "I don't think you realize how little in common I've got with the black people down in Mississippi."

My coworker is from Brooklyn. That's pretty close to New Jersey, which, as it turns out, is where Winstead is from.

Winstead.

That's right. The guy who makes a living selling Confederate flags on the side of the highway in M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I is not even from the South. He's from Atlantic City.

This, my friends, is why I love people's stories.

"Hell," he said, after I shook his hand and introduced myself, "these people down here think I'm some carpet bagger Yankee from Atlantic City."

I had noticed he didn't have the "Neweebrun" accent, but never in a million years would I have guessed that a man like this would hail from the armpit of America, New Jersey.

"I used to think the Confederate flag was just something that had to do with the Klan," he admitted, as we both shivered in the biting wind that is more characteristic of where he comes from than where he lives now. "Even two years into this business, I didn't realize it had anything to do with the Civil War."

Winstead. He sells Confederate flags for a living in Mississippi. He did not know the flags "had to do with the Civil War" for a full two years. It's Winstead.

"Do you do well?" I asked.

"I wouldn't say 'well,'" he said, in the understatement of the year, seeing as I've seen homeless men more dapper than Winstead, "but I will say this: anyone who stops -- and not that many people stop -- always buys something."

I was already trying to decide before he even said that which gift I was going to get for Tom, who is a pasty, white Yankee from Philadelphia.

I briefly considered the, "REBEL BLOOD IN MY VEINS, YANKEE BLOOD IN MY YARD!" option, but decided a) it was not worth $10 and b) he would never, ever display it, ever.

"So what are you doing in Jackson?" I asked. "Why the hell did you choose Mississippi?"

"Well," he said, "I used to work in the carnival business." Winstead is a former carnie. Please, God, make the story keep getting better. "And when that went out of business, we were in Jackson, and I just got stuck, I guess." A burning cigarette stuck to his bottom lip, as he spoke, the filter torn off. The paper was soaked through, and the ash was a good inch and a half out. "That was 15 years ago."

"So where do you live now?" I had my hands shoved in my pockets as we spoke. It was cold.

"Oh, I live in a tent out there." He pointed towards the RV park.

"Man," I said, shaking my head at the thought of poor Winstead wrapped up in his Confederate flags to keep warm, "do you freeze at night when it's this cold?"

"Yeah," he said, before pausing, as if he wasn't sure. "Well, yeah. But lately I've been real lucky because some people ask me to house sit their trailers, like when they're not gonna be around for a few days, I get to house sit their trailers."

He then began some rambling story about his truck, how it was dead, how some church group had offered him an interest free loan of $1,500. I wasn't really listening. I was taking pictures of the flags.

"How many kinds of Confederate flags can you possibly have?" I asked. I counted at least 30, all with different tacky designs printed atop the bars, like a motorcycle, or a wolf, or a skull and crossbones.

"Hell, tons of 'em," he said. "And it don't matter what kind; they all sell."

Clearly not well enough, though, to get him out of a tent and into a proper trailer. He used to have one of those, until Katrina wiped him out, he said. That was back when he worked selling flags on the side of the road in a neighboring county.

"Man I used to be in Hinds County," he said, "but they made me move."

"Why?"

"Because they said I was 'intimidating the Afro-American community.'"

"Well..."

Winstead was talking freely now, no longer guarded, as he had been initially. We were old pals at this point, in his mind.

"Those (N-bomb) aren't scared, man!" he tried to convince me, then covered himself, realizing I may be a (N-bomb) lover. You never know these days, with all those Obama supporters running amok. "I mean, uhh, those Afro-Americans ain't scared!"

"Uh huh."

I walked over to the table of Confederate goodies he had for sale. It was like going to a Claire's shop in 1861 Charleston. Cute bracelets and necklaces, hand made, with earrings and other female accessories, all adorned with the Stars and Bars. Not only that, but there were patriotic bumper stickers ("I Ain't Comin' Down!"), pocket knives with Confederate leaders' faces engraved on the handle (Winstead surmised that one of them was "probly Grant," showing how much he's shored up on his knowledge in the past 15 years), and even a deck of Confederate flag playing cards.

I was thinking two things: Tom, and cheap.

(Which is why I went with this magnet, with a flying eagle and a thermometer, and which was Made in China.)

I think I picked a winner.