TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/062491/0624100.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 14.6 KB | 304 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 14

HUGH SIDEY'S AMERICA

Sad Song Of the Delta


In a tormented corner of Mississippi, the soil is rich and the
people are poor, but the blues aren't as blue as they used to be

By Hugh Sidey


    Aaron Henry recalls the days when Bobby Kennedy and
Hubert Humphrey were on the line, calling from Washington to his
tiny Fourth Street Drugstore in Clarksdale to give heart to the
movement. Foot soldiers in the bloody civil rights wars crowded
the store's narrow aisles in those days, desperation and what
sometimes seemed like misplaced hope overcoming their justified
fears. Now, in the soft afternoon shadow, the phone is silent,
and there is only one visitor, come to ask how things have
changed.

    Henry, a thickset man of 68, has been head of the state
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People since the civil rights movement was at its peak.
Mississippi's Delta was one of its deadliest battlegrounds, a
crescent of tormented land between Memphis and Vicksburg, hemmed
by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, the poorest and blackest
part of this country. A generation ago, some of the most
oppressed blacks in the most harshly segregated state in the
U.S. rose to claim their share of America's dream, and some
whites did their violent worst to stop them. Television beamed
the story to the world, and the nation's shame and anger forced
the politicians in Washington to act. The result was new laws
guaranteeing the civil rights of all citizens, regardless of
their color.

    Henry's eyes blaze with the memories of the human cost of
that victory. Because 14-year-old Emmett Till, down from
Chicago to visit relatives, allegedly whistled at a white woman,
he was beaten, shot and then thrown into the Tallahatchie River
in 1955. An all-white jury acquitted two white men of the
killing. In 1963 Henry's N.A.A.C.P. associate, Medgar Evers, was
gunned down in the driveway of his home in Jackson. His accused
murderer, Byron de la Beckwith, was freed when all-white juries
failed to reach a verdict. Now the state, seeking to atone for
old wrongs, is trying to extradite him from Tennessee to try
him again for the killing. Henry himself was arrested several
times for his civil rights activities, and was once chained and
shackled to a garbage truck to keep him from escaping. He
glances up at the piece of tin that covers the hole in the
ceiling where a bomb was thrown in 1964. All that is dim history
now to most of the world.

    But not to Henry.

    He picks up the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, which used to
trumpet the segregaline but today champions racial harmony, and
reads slowly out loud about George Bush's threatened veto of the
new civil rights bill and about a school-board vote in Jackson
along racial lines. "The battle of human rights and race
relations is over," he says, "but while most people don't
express overt racism, their actions manifest a prejudice. We've
got to persevere."

    Henry has just come out of a fierce redistricting battle
in the state legislature, of which he has been a member since
1980. There are daily confrontations over housing, jobs and
always the budget. But such battles now go unnoticed outside
Mississippi and the Delta. "The spotlight is harder to focus
here," he admits, and in that statement he may have defined the
movement's great success. Now that the issue of legal equality
has been laid to rest, blacks and whites in the Delta often
stand together against outside forces, not each other. The war
is economic and social and without shotgun blasts in the night.
Still, it is wearying and hard. How long has Henry been
battling? How long will he go on? He looks off into the distance
and says quietly, "Forever." In the sanctuary of his little
store, that sounds like a psalm.

    Whether we are fully aware of it or not, the nation is
still searching for its soul in Mississippi's Delta. Thirty
years ago, blacks risked their lives if they tried to vote.
Today there are 28 black mayors in the Delta, an area about 200
miles top to bottom and 85 miles at its greatest width, with
340,000 people, 55% black. There are black sheriffs, police
chiefs, city-council and county-board majorities. Just across
the tracks from Henry's store is the office of Henry Espy, black
mayor of Clarksdale, at 20,000 the upper Delta's largest city.
"I am convinced the South is the promised land," says the tall,
energetic Espy, cutting patterns in the air with powerful
hands. "Blacks turned to the North and West for promises that
were largely unfulfilled. They are coming home." The mayor's
brother, Mike Espy, is Congressman for 22 counties in the heart
of the Delta. He was elected in 1986 -- over Webb Franklin, a
white lawyer -- with the support of only 15% of the white
voters. Last year he got 70% of the white vote.

    The success of the Espys and other middle-class blacks is
a fragile thing. Welfare payments are the largest source of
income in rural areas, greater than King Cotton. The Third World
poverty in towns like Tunica (23.5% unemployment) and Jonestown
(pop. 1,400, of whom 1,300 are black) is a reminder that civil
rights laws alone cannot guarantee opportunity.

    In places like these the problems are so basic they seem
anachronistic: plumbing, paving and food. Jonestown's energetic
Mayor Bobbi Walker is scrounging for $3,000 in private money so
the Habitat people will come in and help replace 30 dilapidated
shacks. Cotton planting and ginning take only about six months
of each year, and there is no other work for the Jonestown
families. Yet Mayor Walker and her small cluster plod on. A
sewer system will be completed in a few weeks. Running water is
now in most homes. She's working to get hot water to every
family. There will soon be a tiny health clinic visited by a
doctor and two nurses. "We've got to get jobs, we've got to get
industry interested in coming, we've got to do it ourselves,"
she says.

    Bobbi Walker is running on spirit, because the statistics
are still arrayed against the Delta. John Emmerich, editor and
publisher of the Greenwood Commonwealth, knows the depressing
numbers and says, "I do not think this area has the capability
of righting what is wrong on its own. We have the highest rate
of everything bad, like teen pregnancy, and the lowest rate of
everything good, like income. There is too much poverty, too few
jobs, too little education." Poverty breeds more poverty,
because it discourages new investments. "Industry does not want
to come into a town 60% black, with crime, broken homes, low
skills," says Emmerich. "In some of those areas, 60% of the
children are born out of wedlock; 95% of them are black."

    After the schools were desegregated, whites deserted the
public school system and set up their private academies; so far,
they have not returned in significant numbers. In Greenville
(pop. 45,000), long judged a redoubt of tolerance led by such
people as editor Hodding Carter and lawyer-planter-writer
William Alexander Percy, the public schools are 95% black.
Writer Bern Keating, once jailed as a civil rights activist, is
worried that all the forces now altering the Delta -- the return
of blacks from the decay and danger in Chicago and Detroit, the
migration of families from small towns and farms to Greenville,
the general economic stagnation -- will produce "a rural inner
city of 50,000."

    But there is a strange magic in this anguished American
corner that may confound the statisticians. The rich history of
the Delta has played out on a landscape almost devoid of
natural grandeur, apart from the Mississippi River. Even Mark
Twain's "chocolate tide" has been corseted with levees, and for
the most part lies out of sight and out of many minds. The rich
alluvial soil, deposited when the gorged rivers were allowed to
burst their banks and leave behind their silt, stretches flat
and monotonous, the streams muddy and sluggish. Those planters
without mountains or oceans or majesty of any kind made
monuments out of their families, friends, parties and hunting
clubs.

    Myth asserts, with more nostalgia than truth, that before
the Civil War, the Delta was a social capital of the South.
"The idea that the Delta was a place of antebellum
white-columned mansions and women in crinoline skirts -- lies,
all lies," snorts historian and author Shelby Foote, who grew
up in Greenville and lives and writes in Memphis, at the
region's northern tip. "The houses were not well furnished or
very comfortable."

    In fact, the Delta is not even the Old South. It was not
until about 1840 that some flinty cotton planters from the
Southeast, having sucked the life out of their land, discovered
the wealth of the soil in the riverside wilderness of hardwood
trees, panthers, snakes and fever. The planters brought their
slaves to uproot the stumps and tend the cotton. Outnumbered
dozens to one by their human chattel, the planters installed a
brand of servitude so brutal that slaves considered being sent
to a plantation "downriver" in the Delta a far worse fate than
death.

    William Faulkner wrote that the Delta was "deswamped and
denuded, and de rivered in two generations." Some planters made
money, but not nearly as much as legend would have it. There was
always another enemy. Land was the staple, usually mortgaged.
Nature provided floods, droughts and plant diseases. Bourbon
eased some of the pain but brought on its own. The Delta became
a place of wild contrast: the lowest poverty and humility
alongside the highest pretension and arrogance.

    The Civil War ended slavery, but its aftermath produced
sharecropping, a form of exploitation almost as severe. And the
Delta was battered by all the economic swings of farms, its
routines upset by advancing technology. When the sharecroppers
were replaced by mechanical cotton pickers and tractors after
1940, the Delta blacks joined the 5 million Southern rural
blacks who fled to the cities of the South, West and North,
bringing to urban culture their broken hearts in a tragic search
for a fragment of dignity and security. That migration, one of
the largest such internal movements of people in history,
transformed America. The blacks who stayed behind suffered from
abject poverty and near starvation. When Bobby Kennedy visited
the Delta in the spring of 1967, he was shocked by the
conditions. "My God," he said, "I didn't know this kind of thing
existed. How can a country like this allow it?"

    Adversity had another side. A kind of genius was nurtured
in the Delta at both ends of the human scale. Writers abounded,
penning stories of depravity and abuse, but of beauty and
decency too: FaulkFoote, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty,
William and Walker Percy, Willie Morris.

    The Delta also yielded a great harvest of blues singers,
spawned in the sorrow of the sharecroppers' shotgun shacks (so
called because the rooms are one behind the other, allowing a
shot fired through the front door to sail straight out the back
door -- unless something gets in the way). Robert Johnson, B.B.
King, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, James ("Son") Thomas -- most
of modern American music has its roots in the Delta. Big Jack
("the Oil Man") Johnson plays there now, one of many with more
coming on, including his nephew, James ("Super Chicken")
Johnson.

    James Cobb of the University of Tennessee has studied the
culture and economics of the Delta as much as anyone. He
summarizes the melancholy story of the area as "a scary and
fascinating pursuit of the American Dream" by a small group of
bright, tough people who, unrestrained by conscience or
government, ruthlessly exploited other people and resources even
as they cloaked themselves in courtliness. Cobb has documented
the manipulation of the modern political system by the likes of
the late Senator James Eastland, who poured millions of tax
dollars into the pockets of the planters and let the little
fellows go begging. Cobb believes the way the Delta goes will
give us a clue on whether the rest of the U.S. -- and, indeed,
the world -- can successfully deal with minority and Third World
problems.

    The days of reckoning are upon the Delta. A lot of the old
family landowners have sold out to corporate interests. The
Prudential Insurance Co. is one of the huge Delta operators. Low
prices for cotton, soybeans and rice and climbing production
costs have squeezed farmers. "Nobody in the Delta is worth more
than $10 million," says Billy Percy, one of an enlightened
family of statesmen, writers and planters. "Maybe one," he
corrects. "He made it in Holiday Inns. I used to be able to have
four bad crop years before I would be in financial trouble. Now
if I have two bad crops, I'm in trouble."

    As those at the top have been burdened and forced down,
those at the bottom have been raised a bit. Uless Carter, 75,
one of the people in The Promised Land, Nicholas Lemann's
chronicle of the black migration, is back in Clarksdale, living
in a retirement community. He spent 38 years in Chicago, an
additional six in Flint, Mich. The stories of change lured him
home. "There are black people working in the banks and stores
now," he says. "They treat you now like a human being. It is
wonderful. My prayers have been answered." So little asked, so
little yet received.

    Last week the Delta was drying out after the wettest April
and May on record. The giant Deere tractors with their 12-row
cultivators left tails of dust as they stirred the baking
fields. Ed Scott of Minter City was up at 5 a.m. to tend his
eight catfish ponds. If all goes well, the black entrepreneur
this year will sell nearly half a million pounds of catfish, the
Delta's second biggest crop after cotton. In Arcola, Billy Percy
was in a battered pickup as crop dusters in their yellow Air
Tractors swooped around him, spraying rice and cotton against
unrelenting weevils and thrips. As he watched he talked about
two blacks being taken in as members of the Greenville Country
Club in the past six months without a ripple. He told with
enthusiasm about a new Foundation of the Mid South, which is
going to use private funds to help the Delta schools look for
a way up.

    But if top and bottom are homogenized, will the Delta lose
its special fervor? Maybe. Maybe not. On the edge of
Clarksdale, bluesman Johnson told of his days learning music
from his sharecropper father. "Folks ain't so bad off now," he
said. "It ain't as low down as it used to be. Blues ain't as
sad." Then the Oil Man lifted his head and sang a few lines --
about the Persian Gulf war.