Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town

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3 One can only imagine what slavery was like in the delta land around Yazoo City-the black alluvial soil, once the very floor under the sea, which had to be fought through all the seasons and elements, reclaimed from the swamps in unbearable summer heat and against the overflowing snakeinfested rivers and creeks in the spring: "... this land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations...." It was a land that was not easy to defeat, and no one has chronicled this better than Faulkner, who lived eighty miles up the road from here but knew very well this dreadful curse on the land itself, the price it exacted in the sweat and suffering of men, especially in the wild black chattel whose descendants, here in Yazoo and other delta towns six generations later, would soon be going en masse into the schools built by white men for their white children, under the dictates of a supreme federal authority hundreds of miles away. "That's the 14 Yazoo one trouble with this country," Faulkner says in As I Lay Dying. "Everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image." The very name Yazoo had been an effective and peculiarly haunting subject for speculation among Northern journalists who had visited here frequently of late; Yazoo means "death" or "waters of the dead," and the occasional SNCC worker who came here and then left quickly in the early 1960s when the Movement was in full flower, who called Yazoo County one of the "toughest" in all of Mississippi, knew about the word too. The Northern visitor is invariably surprised when he comes to my home town to find it is not the raw little hill town that the name may deserve -not a Canton, say, or a Philadelphia in Neshoba County-but a substantial town with many broad old streets and beautiful homes peopled by an extremely large number of college-educated whites for this section of the country. The trees and the vegetation are lush and green most of the year; in springtime there is no more beautiful place in America. The smell of the spring is staggering, enveloping the senses, making them reel in pleasurable delight. One writer from New York, emerging from a car here one April night years ago, said, "What's that I smell-a chocolate factory ?" The population of the town in 1970 was about 11,000, slightly more than 50 per cent Negro, and in 15 Willie Morris a county of just over 27,000 there are fewer than 2,000 industrial jobs. Almost one-fourth of the population received food stamps, and 35 per cent of the families made less than $3,000 a year. In national elections it is a deeply conservative place. It voted for Goldwater in '64, and for Wallace in '68, and its conservatism is of a piece with the conservatism of the delta as a whole. There is a story that made the rounds during the days of the Movement about the Negro sharecropper , named Ben McGee, who died at the age of seventy -five, ascended to heaven, and was immediately escqrted into the presence of the Lord. "Ben McGee," the Lord said, embracing him in an L.B.J.-like hug, "I'm proud of you. We've kept our eyes on you. Richard Goodwin had been helping us keep tabs on you. You've done the cause of human brotherhood and Christianity so much good down in the Mississippi delta that we intend to send you back." "0 Lord," Ben McGee said. "I'm not going back. You've never been. You don't know what it's like down there." "If necessary, Ben," the Lord said, "I'm going to have to put that in the form of an order." "If you send me back down to the delta, Lord," Ben asked, "will you go with me?" "I'll go as far as Memphis," the Lord replied. As late as 1948, in Yazoo County, there were more than eighty schools for Negroes. This was the year 16 Yazoo that Mississippi began underwriting a few tentative efforts to make the schools for Negroes at least reasonably passable, since its leaders after the Dixiecrat split began to fear the possibility of some kind...