From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

Day Trip to Arkansas

Day Trip to Arkansas Leaving downtown Memphis, you immediately climb skyward toward the expanse of steel and cable crossing the Mississippi River into Arkansas. The bridge is high, the river wide. And every time I cross it, I think of the New Madrid fault, the seismic scar which runs from southern Illinois through southern Missouri and northeastern Arkansas. From December 1811 until February 1812, the region recorded four of the largest earthquakes in North American history. These earthquakes were so severe they rang church bells in Boston—and caused the mighty Mississippi to change its course. Whenever I’m on the bridge, I wonder what poor souls will be caught there when those tectonic plates shift again. It’s a concern today because my trip is to the “sunken lands” of eastern Arkansas. These sunken lands are swamp lands and standing water lakes created during the New Madrid earthquakes. The sunken lands area is one of the country’s last frontiers. Because the land was wet most of the year, it was wild and untamed until the first two decades of the twentieth century. Levies were built to control flooding, and drainage districts built ditches which allowed the swamps to dry. Once the swamps dried, timber was cut and the soil below was some of the most fertile land in North America. Now it’s mostly used to grow cotton and rice. What remains undrained is prime hunting land. On his Journey, Jonathan Daniels visited Tyronza, Marked Tree, and Lepanto, the three major towns in eastern Poinsett County, Arkansas. 186 He came to see firsthand the tenant farmer problem. During the Great Depression, an overproduction of cotton caused the price to fall precipitously . One government program paid cotton farmers not to farm cotton. Conventional thinking assumed that reducing cotton production would cause cotton prices to increase and thereby help return them to a level where remaining producers could make a living. The first problem with this plan was that much of the cotton crop was raised by sharecroppers, but the government required no assurance that any part of the relief payments be paid to sharecroppers. Not surprisingly , few landowners shared the government checks with their sharecroppers . Moreover, since they weren’t planting as much cotton acreage, landlords let a number of sharecroppers go, causing an increase in the number of homeless. Due in large part to the unintended consequences of this federal aid program, the country’s first fully integrated union, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU), formed in eastern Poinsett County in 1934 to help the tenant farmers. Jonathan Daniels came to see this unique union movement. Agriculture has changed dramatically, and the STFU died out in the 1960s. Cotton is no longer picked by hand. Today the process is mechanized . Fields that once took hundreds of human beings weeks to pick by hand are now done in days by three or four men using huge farm machines. Multi-row machines pick cotton bolls which are then packed in large truck-sized modules in the fields. These modules contain approximately 16,000 pounds of cotton which yields thirteen bales of ginned cotton. At harvest time in the Delta, these green-topped modules dot the countryside. Tyronza, Marked Tree, and Lepanto, along with Trumann, still remain eastern Poinsett County’s major towns. Tyronza is a town of fewer than 1,000 and lies about thirty miles from downtown Memphis, close enough to be a suburb of the big city. But it’s not. Memphis developed eastward away from the river. Few Memphis commuters venture west across the bridge each afternoon; it’s almost like the river is a barrier. Tyronza is about the same distance from downtown Memphis as Collierville, Tennessee. Collierville is a suburban paradise, with a small old downtown surrounded by housing developments, fancy eating estab187 lishments, a couple of private schools, lots of big box merchandisers, and the limited-access Nonconnah Parkway which allows commuters quick access to downtown. Tyronza has none of this. A branch bank, a public grade school, and a restaurant that serves breakfast and lunch—that about sums up Tyronza’s amenities. Tyronza is home to the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum. Now affiliated with Arkansas State University, the museum is located in a restored dry-cleaning establishment and gas station which once shared a common wall with the Bank of Tyronza. In the 1930s, the owners of the dry-cleaner and...