Dreaming in the Delta: A Memoir Essay

KRISTAL BRENT ZOOK Dreaming in the Delta A Memoir Essay In Indianola, Mississippi there is a catfish-processing plant oumed by 178 iuhite malejarmers. The workforce inside the plant, hoiueuer, is ninety percent black andfemale. A little ouer ten years ago, the women at Delta Pride led the largest strike ofblack laborers euer to take place in that state, and won. Going there and meeting Sarah White, a union organizer and key leader in the strudle, meant making an effort to understand the plight ofworking class women in the modern-day South. Sarah White and the momen ofLocal 1529 could haue rejected my efforts. Butthey did not. They shared their dreams with me. And it wasgood. "Does your mama know you're in Mississippi?" The person asking was Geri Taylor, an organizer with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. We were seated around a conference table at Local 1529 in Indianola, Mississippi. Four other women were there, bags offast-food chicken splayed out between us. Carolyn Bradford was a Tennessee-based organizer, while Margaret Hollins and Mary Sibley were local ufcw reps, as was Sarah White, the woman I had come to see. This was the work of1529: strategizing around conference tables, color coding charts. Setting up in dusty hotels for months at a time, their mission was to convince workers to stand together, one by one, and be counted. In this way, the women had organized poultry and catfish plants, nursing homes and grocery stores. They had brought modest health benefits, wage increases, paid holidays, and even a modicum of [Meridians:/eminism, race, transnationalism 2003, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 278-88]©2003 by Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved. 278 job security. More importandy, they brought something that had been missing for far too long from the lives ofworking women: dignity. At Delta Pride, restroom breaks were considered a privilege, not a right. Such everyday indignities had made the women tough—but not in an urban, fast way. Tough like the south. A place thatwas utterly foreign to me. We were in the heart ofSunflower County. I knew that Fannie Lou Hamer had been jailed and beaten less than thirtyyears ago in nearby Humphries Countyjust for registering poor black farmers to vote. And I knew that in 1955, Lamar Smith, a sixty-three-year-old farmer and World War II veteran, was shot dead before dozens ofwitnesses on the city courthouse lawn for the same offense. Nor had the brutality ended with the civil rights era. During the 1990s more than twenty black men were found hung "under suspicious circumstances" in local Mississippi prisons. Now here I was, a high-yella gal cruising along backwoods Southern roads in a zippy rental, as though my life could not be taken in the blink ofan eye for asking too many questions. Hence the query: "Does your mama know where you are?" Before traveling to Mississippi in the early 1990s, I had never heard of Sarah White, never read her name in any newspaper, or seen her face on any television. I had no idea that in 1990 she had led the largest strike of blackworkers in Mississippi history. I did not know that she and nearly 1,000 workers—most ofthem blackwomen—had taken on Delta Pride, the largest catfish plant in the country. Their strike was "one ofthe most significant labor and civil rights victories ofthe decade," according to the 1991 documentary, This Far by Faith, narrated by Alfre Woodard. So why hadn't any ofus heard the good news: that black women in the 1990s were leading movements as grand as anything the 1960s ever saw? Delta Pride first came to Indianola in 1981. Sarah White was twentytwo . She had been employed at the nearby Con Agra catfish plant, but was finding it difficult to work the night shift and take care ofher family. In ig83 she was hired at Delta Pride, working days and earning $3.40 an hour. "We felt itwas a new beginning," she recalls. "A chance to get off the welfare lines and make a better life for our kids." But Sarah soon discovered that conditions at Delta Pride were no different from...