Eat Drink Delta: A Hungry Traveler's Journey through the Soul of the South

5. Tallahatchie County: Wild and Mysterious

109 6 5 Tallahatchie County Wild and Mysterious Tallahatchie County stretches from the fecund flatlands in the west to the undulating eastern hills. In the old days, it could take weeks to traverse the swamps and woods to get from one town to the next, thus two county seats: Charleston in the east, Sumner in the west. The cultural divide is also evident. “There’s a feeling that the west side is more the landed gentry and that the east side is more the loggers, the farmers, and the hillbillies,” said Glenna Callender, the executive director of the Charleston Arts and Revitalization Effort, Inc. (care), which promotes arts education and historic preservation programs in her community. “The people on each side tend to socialize mostly with each other. But it’s not unfriendly. We all dated boys from the west side.” Legend says W. C. Handy discovered the blues in 1903 upon hearing a farmhand singing mournfully at the depot in the little town of Tutwiler. Handy wrote a version of the song, “Yellow Dog Blues,” and went on to become Father of the Blues. Its water tower is inscribed with the slogan “Where the Blues Was Born,” though several other Delta towns also make this claim. 110 Tallahatchie County Most of the world, however, identifies Tallahatchie County with something else: one of the most infamous racial murders in American history. In August 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American from Chicago, was kidnapped from his uncle’s home in Money, Mississippi, after allegedly whistling at a white woman. Several days later, the teen’s battered body, tied with barbed wire to a cotton gin fan, was fished out of the Tallahatchie River on the Tallahatchie County side. The woman’s husband and his half-brother were charged but acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury that deliberated less than an hour. Within months, the two men had confessed to the crime in Look magazine, intensifying the outrage and bringing more negative publicity to the Delta. Tallahatchie County has in recent years been trying to come to terms with the searing episode. Residents formed a biracial commission for the purpose of restoring the Sumner County Courthouse to its 1955 state and turning it into a museum dedicated to Emmett Till. (A small museum honoring Till’s memory already exists in an old cotton gin at the end of a dirt road in nearby Glendora.) In 2007, the commission unveiled the first in a series of historical markers related to Till’s murder, and members read aloud a resolution expressing regret for a “terrible miscarriage of justice.” Disagreements persist in the county as to how best to honor, rather than exploit, Till’s legacy, but plans for the new museum are going forward, and the courthouse itself has been placed on the National Historic Register. Sumner, a community of less than 450 bordered by a bayou and some old railroad tracks, is in the flat, western part of the county. Other than the courthouse, there’s not much left of the tiny business strip but a couple of law offices, a bank, and a pharmacy. There is no restaurant, but many residents belong to the Bayou Bend Country Club, where the Sunday night buffet offers fresh seafood, frogs’ legs, and sometimes quail. Charleston is the older and larger of the two county seats, with a population of about two thousand. It was once renowned for timber, with one of the largest lumber mills in the world, a hotel, shops and restaurants, and a golf course, where William Faulkner supposedly practiced his swing. Charlestonians are proud of the stately old bank they’ve restored and turned into a community arts center. A banner with portraits of three of Tallahatchie County 111 the county’s famous native sons—jazzman Mose Allison, actor Morgan Freeman, and blues great Sonny Boy Williamson—festoons the entrance. Residents also like to direct visitors to another landmark, a tiny tin-roofed house with a large ceramic pig in front. The house is a monument to Scissors the pig. Raised on Pine Crest farm east of the city, Scissors was named overall Champion Hog at the Omaha Livestock Show in 1917 and 1918 and at one point was said to have weighed 1,800 pounds. Freeman, who owns a ranch outside Charleston, spotlighted his hometown in the documentary Prom Night in Mississippi, about preparations...