READERS of Out of Africa never forget the haunting first line: ‘I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.’ It’s that small past-tense verb ‘had’. My grandparents lost their farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1931, the same year Isak Dinesen lost her farm in Kenya, but I never heard the words ‘We had a farm in the Delta’. No unforgettable words are tattooed on my heart.
Dinesen then describes the landscape of her farm: ‘The views were immensely wide. Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom and unequalled nobility.’ Views across the cotton fields in the Delta are also
