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119 CHAPTER  “little old ladies at three o’clock in the afternoon” Mississippi Delta, 1953–54 After his graduation from seminary, Gray was given his first parish assignment: Calvary Church in Cleveland and the smaller but older Grace Church in Rosedale, both in Bolivar County, Mississippi. Bolivar County borders the Mississippi River on its western edge; it is there that Rosedale is located. Cleveland is about twenty miles east, near the county’s opposite edge. The Grays settled in the larger town of Cleveland, the same town in which Gray’s grandfather, W. F. Gray, had owned and edited the Bolivar Commercial for seven years between 1919 and 1926, and where his father had served as managing editor until 1922.1 It was in Rosedale during his seminary years that Duncan Gray Sr. met his wife, Isabelle McCrady, while he was working as a summer intern at Grace Church there. They would eventually become the parents of the new Bolivar County rector.2 So in many ways the new place felt like home to the young Gray family. The Gray children were left with relatives for a few days as the parents moved into their new home. And it was new, just finished for the new family , with hardwood floors, two baths, and a screened back porch. It sat on the lot adjacent to Grace Church and offered plenty of outdoor play space for Duncan, now four, and his sister, Anne, just over one year old. Ruthie Gray says, “It was just like a castle after that barracks covered with tar paper , that tar paper shack at Sewanee.”3 As Will Campbell writes, the Mississippi Delta in the mid-1950s “was reminiscent of the Gershwin and Heyward Porgy and Bess folk opera. Fish were jumping and the cotton was high.”4 As the rest of the Porgy and Bess song has it, there was little need for baby to cry as long as “daddy’s rich and mamma’s good-looking.” And for a portion of the white population, at least, such was the case. 120 “Little Old Ladies at Three O’clock in the Afternoon” Bolivar County is in the Mississippi Delta, that area between the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers that Mississippi writer David Cohn famously described as beginning “in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis” and ending “at Catfish Row in Vicksburg.” More than a century before Cohn, another observer of the region had predicted great things for the places that eventually became Memphis and Vicksburg, but he found it difficult to imagine much of a future for the area between the two rivers, still covered with primeval forests and “impervious and widespreading cane brakes.” In the early eighteenth century, one visitor had described the area as “a seething , lush hell,” and by the turn of the next century, a traveler making his way through the region still wrote “all the country, or nearly so between the Yazoo and the Mississippi to the mouth of the Yazoo, overflows annually [with floodwaters from the rivers] and renders it of no value.”5 As James C. Cobb points out, these discouraging prophecies about the Delta proved untrue for the simple reason that their authors “failed to appreciate the importance that the remarkable fertility of [the area’s] continually replenished alluvial soil would assume in a regional, national, and international economy grown ravenous for cotton. More than that, however, those who doubted the Delta could ever be cleared, tamed, and farmed efficiently failed to take into account the determination, rapacity, and cruelty that humans could exhibit if the proper incentives were in place. Scarcely three decades after Mississippi joined the Union [in 1817], though still a largely uncleared wilderness, the Yazoo Basin had already emerged as the most attractive new planting region in the Cotton South.”6 When Mississippi became the twentieth state, the land that came to be known as the Delta was still claimed and inhabited mostly by Choctaw tribes, but the growing demand for cotton and the fertility of the soil soon resulted in their removal, as whites along with their black slaves began to move in and clear the region for cotton planting. The 1820 Treaty of Doak’s Stand transferred much of the Choctaw’s southwestern Mississippi holdings into white hands, and counties began to be organized in the area. Sixteen years later, the lands were further divided; Bolivar County came into existence in 1836.7 More than a...

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