'Right in the middle of the cotton fields,' she marvels. 'Can you believe this?' one woman asks another, as they shuffle forward, waiting at midnight for a table in a casino restaurant. Entering the casino lots feels like stepping out of real life. A few feet from these spangled façades dark acres of cotton and soybeans spread under the Delta night, silent except for the bullfrogs and the mosquitoes. Their marquees promise shows by Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, and Tanya Tucker. At the hamlet of Robinsonville a brand-new four-lane access road under a canopy of sodium lights draws drivers west toward the banks of the Mississippi River, where an Irish castle, a Wild West town, a Tudor mansion, a circus tent, a plantation house, a Hollywood studio, and an enormous western saloon-casinos all-float in a sea of parked cars. The highway along which Tunicans once migrated north in search of jobs now glows with billboards and searchlights luring 1.2 million visitors a month into the Delta.

Benjamin and Christina Schwarz provide an answer in 'Mississippi Monte Carlo,' a piece from The Atlantic's January 1996 issue: Which raises the question of why the casinos are there in the first place. These are Mississippi's flooded casinos.Ĭlustered in and around the town of Tunica, a short drive south of Memphis or north of Greenville, they're impossible to miss: glittering, often tacky buildings that materialized in cotton country, an area that is often referred to as the poorest place in the U.S. (To see some of these striking images, visit Alan Taylor's In Focus gallery.) But a few photos seem strange: the ones containing Hilton-like suburban palaces or King Arthur-style turrets.

The buildings and other human structures can seem like afterthoughts, in part because they mostly look like what many people expect: small Southern houses, historic brick buildings, and the like. In most photos of the recent Mississippi floods, what you notice first is the water, the dramatic thick brown sheet.

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