Gods of the Mississippi

6 The Mississippi River and the Transformation of Black Religion in the Delta, 1877–1915

6 The Mississippi River and the Transformation of Black Religion in the Delta 1877–1915 John M. Giggie Recently I jumped into my rusty Honda Accord and drove due west from Oxford, Mississippi, toward the River. In this part of the South, you don’t have to explain which river you mean; everyone knows it’s the Mississippi. My goal was to return to the Delta and revisit sleepy towns whose fortunes historically rose and fell with the River. I wanted to see if the region’s dismal economy had improved since my last trip several years ago. It hadn’t. My short, two-hour drive bridged two very different worlds. Leaving behind a favorite haunt whose boutiques, upscale restaurants, and colorful coffee houses symbolized the recent economic successes of the central part of the state, I soon entered its opposite. Riding the ashen heat-baked asphalt of Highway 6 and watching the landscape change along my route, I couldn’t help but think that nature itself was signaling a transition from a place of abundance to one of rural decline. Tall pine and spruce trees slowly gave way to a wide flat landscape blanketed by acres of cotton and soybean plants and, every now and then, a massive catfish farm. I saw only a few workers. The sun shone straight and hard, unfiltered by any cloud. The air hung heavy and moist. Communities along the highway were small and scattered, often no more than a stoplight, gas station, and convenience store. Arriving in Clarksdale , a birthplace of the blues, I immediately noted a new eatery and a blues bar but just as quickly spotted shuttered storefronts, pawn shops, and checkcashing businesses with winking neon signs. The scene was much the same 114 | John M. Giggie in nearby Shelby, Mound Bayou, Cleveland, and Greenville: a few bright emblems of economic rebirth struggling to shine among older and darker symbols of economic decay. One of the hidden casualties wrought by the long-running depression gripping the Delta is history itself, especially African American religious history . It is hard to look beyond the Delta’s current plight and see it as anything other than a forlorn and forgotten place. Yet no region in the country was more important in remaking black spiritual life during the first generations of freedom. Indeed, it birthed a series of revolutions in black Christian worship and liturgy whose effects rippled deep into the twentieth century. A reconsideration of the Delta’s role in the African American sacred past begins with a simple reminder of the region’s blackness. Blacks, first as slaves and then freed people, provided the agricultural muscle that transformed the thick, loamy soil of the Delta into a national center for cotton production during the nineteenth century. The black population peaked shortly after the Civil War. From 1870 to 1910, when 90 percent of all black Americans lived in the South, the Delta had an overall population that was about 75 percent black.1 It ranked first nationally in the total number of black-majority counties, some of which possessed a ratio of blacks to whites that ran as high as 15:1.2 Although many Delta blacks moved north during the Great Migration in the 1910s and 1920s, the region has always remained densely settled by blacks. This essay will take up the question of the Delta’s black religious history and focus on the post-Reconstruction era, from 1875 to 1915. Although scholars have traditionally derided this period as the lowest point of African American cultural advancement after bondage, believing that blacks widely acceded to the rising power of white supremacy, the achievements of Delta blacks suggest otherwise.3 This essay will argue that African Americans from the Delta reformed their sacred lives as they came into contact with modern racial strictures and new technologies and markets. As they integrated fresh experiences with train travel, fraternal orders, and commercial markets into their religion, they minimized the pressures of segregation and at times even overcame them, if only temporarily. Religion and TRain TRavel At the base of the major changes to black religion in the Delta after slavery lay the development of the railroad. Prior to the late nineteenth century, it was not a major part of the South’s economy or politics, and consequently 5] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 09:18 GMT) The Mississippi River and the Transformation of Black Religion | 115 it played little role in black spiritual life. That...