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

Nitta Yuma

Nitta Yuma The Delta can be seen as a collection of small dying villages as America consolidates into metropolitan areas. If you look at maps from the 1930s, there were a lot of small towns in the Mississippi Delta. Most of them are gone now. In the Mississippi Delta, each new major northsouth road was built on higher ground farther from the river. Highway 1, the great river road, literally bumps up against the river’s levees at times. Some fifteen miles farther east, U.S. Highway 61 was built. Later still, Interstate 55 came and was built farther east still. As the major roads migrated eastward and agriculture became mechanized , the vitality of the river valley deteriorated, and no other economic opportunities developed. People left to find work. It’s evident that many more people once lived in these little Delta towns by the number of abandoned and deteriorating commercial buildings. But out in the country you see little evidence that a lot of people used to live here. Fifteen miles north of Greenville is Scott, Mississippi. Today Scott is an unincorporated community in Bolivar County. It’s barely a wide spot on Highway 1. Scott is the former headquarters of the Delta & Pine Land Company, one of the country’s first agribusinesses. During the 1930s, D&PL operated the largest, most successful cotton plantation in the United States. This plantation formed in the early twentieth century when the textile manufacturers of the Fine Cotton Spinners and Doublers Association, Ltd., in Manchester, England, wanted a dependable source of raw material. 230 These Englishmen created D&PL which bought approximately 36,000 acres in Bolivar County, Mississippi. It cleared the virgin land and grew the first crop in 1913. Even though the company lost $500,000 during the flood of 1927, the plantation ultimately proved to be a good investment. When Jonathan Daniels was here in 1936, the company’s president noted: In our operations at Scott, we have planted approximately 11,000 acres of cotton. The production of this crop gives employment to about 900 families consisting of around 4,000 human beings. With a successful cotton picker and by the use of tractors and other equipment designed for labor saving, we could operate this property with probably 75 or 100 laborers. He was right. By 1945, 6,300 acres of cotton production required only 612 sharecropper families, involving 1,547 workers. As farming steadily mechanized and farm equipment got larger and better, the number of workers required to plant and pick cotton steadily decreased. In 1978, the English sold D&PL to a group of Memphis investors. The American owners sold the land to an insurance company and retained the side business of developing new strains of cotton and soybeans. This side business grew. In 1993, D&PL became a public company selling cottonseed and soybean seed in thirteen countries. In 2007, Monsanto Company acquired D&PL for $1.5 billion. D&PL has been an operating division of Monsanto ever since. Little evidence remains of the thousands of people who worked the D&PL land for so long. There are a couple of brick residences built in the 1950s or 1960s, along with the agricultural buildings necessary to maintain a modern farming operation, but that’s about it. Where over 4,000 people used to live and trade, no tenant buildings remain, and no other commercial buildings remain. There’s just flat land. In her book During Wind and Rain, Margaret Jones Bolsterli writes about the disappearance of such communities: When considering change in the part of the world we are discussing here, it is good to remember that farm houses, villages, and even towns can disappear without a trace in a very few years because most buildings are built of wood. In Europe, the skeletons of villages unoccupied for years 231 are still there in roofless stone buildings and cobbled streets. By contrast, in the Delta within a few months after a house goes vacant, nature begins retaking its space: weeds eight feet tall fill the yard, vines grow over the house, saplings come up through the porch floor, the roof collapses, and then the whole thing falls down and rots or is eaten by termites. Saplings in the yard become trees and make woods again unless the place gets cleared and planted as part of the field that surrounded it to start with. In a few years, every single trace of human habitation can be erased. Traveling Highway 61...