My husband and I recently traveled with the Peoples Bank Platinum Club to the Mississippi Delta. Our itinerary had an art and music focus.
We revisited the Grammy Museum in Cleveland, drove to Mound Bayou to visit the Peter’s Pottery showroom and wound up at the McCarty’s Pottery studio in Merigold.
Having attended Delta State University, visited often in Greenville and lived in Marks for six years, I am familiar with the Delta and have always loved it. It’s Mississippi’s Big Sky Country. But I hadn’t been there in several years. So I was appalled at what I saw.
The news tells us that the Delta is dying, and what I saw confirmed that sad fact. Despite a few brighter spots, many once busy stores and industries are shuttered, even the Indianola Pecan Company that used to sell their treats all over the state. Many houses are abandoned, decaying and falling in, retaken by the relentless energy of nature. Whole neighborhoods look like junk yards, pocked with water holes. Their residents seem to have given up on garbage collection service and now just toss their trash to the yard.
It didn’t help that it was a cloudy, foggy day with intermittent light rain. I knew that February is probably the worst time to visit the Delta and that it presents itself more attractively when crops are growing and equipment is buzzing in the fields. But the winter views are depressing if you aren’t used to them.
We had a great time due to a well-planned trip with friends, but I have a feeling that some of the first-time travelers there won’t be going back.
Ironically, I had been reading a book about the Delta— The Barn by Wright Thomson— and had taken it to read on the way home. The book’s subtitle is The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. Its focal event is the murder of a black teen, 14-year-old Emmett Till, which happened near where we were touring, in Money, Miss.
But it also covers the history of the Delta as a commodity that has been appropriated, bought and sold by other nations and commercial interests through the years. It focuses on the greed that led men to sacrifice everything to get and keep this fertile acreage and maintain the social structure that developed to make life possible there.
Part of that social structure was slavery, and when that was outlawed, sharecropping by blacks and poor whites took its place. A social hierarchy developed to organize, manage and profit from the land with the large farmer, called a planter, at the top, the poor white in the middle, and the black worker at the bottom.
Cotton financed life for all levels. Its production required keeping the black workers in financial subjugation so that they could not leave and could not refuse to work. If that subjugation required threats and violence, so be it.
Emmett Till came from Chicago into this economic and social system in 1955, visiting his mother’s relatives in Sunflower County. Out with friends one night buying treats and hanging out at the local grocery, Emmett playfully whistled at the owner’s wife, a thing kid might do but ignoring the code that a black man was not even to look at a white woman. She told a group of men about it, embellishing the story. They caught and tied the boy up in a barn, tortured him and beat him to death, and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River.
The whole judicial system of Mississippi consorted to exonerate the murderers and cover up the atrocity by hiding the records. The Barn is Wright’s attempt to expose the heinous event to the light of day, though he is himself a member of the Delta’s ruling class.
It is Wright’s contention that no area can continue to exist with such a weight of evil on it, that the Delta is indeed poisoned by violence. Mechanization has reduced the need for laborers, the population has migrated to less fraught places and the economy is floundering.
Having begun my teaching career in the Delta, I was interested to read that the academies established there to keep black and white children separated are closing— not enough students.
Wright interviewed one black Delta teacher for her experiences. “Gloria works with high school students who do not believe a different life is possible.” he said. “Students who’ve never left Sunflower County. Students who have never heard of Emmett Till, much less know that he was killed a few miles from them. ‘They believe things will always be this way,’ she says. ‘I’ll just stay home and take care of my kids and get the little money I get in the mail. The kids are not interested in being creative. They’re not interested in being curious. Curiosity is not there.’”
Wright’s book has made me very curious about the plight of this part of our state. February is Black History Month. It’s a good time to put The Barn under your Reading Lamp so that you will understand why Black Americans want a month of emphasis on their history, as the Jews want the Holocaust remembered. Because if we don’t remember the horror, it will return.
