Delta Fragments: The Recollections of a Sharecropper's Son

The Delta

The Delta Every few years [the Mississippi River] rises like a monster from its bed and pushes over its banks to vex and sweeten the land it has made. For our soil, very dark brown, creamy and sweet-smelling, without substrata of rock or shale, was built up slowly, century after century. William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee The place I call home is a land of profound contradictions and paradoxes, beginning with the history of its founding and extending to the people who have settled there. Located on the eastern edge of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, Greenwood , the major town and county seat of Leflore County,1 is truly representative of the culture and way of life of the entire region. Considering several facts and questions may help explain why I consider this whole area to be so baffling, interesting , and contradictory. How is it that an area long ravaged by floods and a population plagued with swamp fever should nevertheless have produced such rich soil and such hearty people with the vision and cleverness to tease it into an endless blanket of snowy white cotton? Why would the citizens of this region name a town and county for an Indian of French and Choctaw descent who was loyal not to the Confederacy but to the opposing side? Indeed, most baffling to me was not that Greenwood LeFlore would lend his name to the city The Delta 2 and county—many other cities and counties in the state are named for Native Americans—but that he, to his dying day, remained faithful to the Union. There are other questions, even more personal, that have puzzled me. Why is it that those most responsible for the wealth of the region have ended up at the very bottom of the economic ladder? Moreover, how can we explain that, until fairly recently, a community constituting over 75 percent of the population had little or no political representation? And, finally, how can I proclaim that a region that has often made it difficult for me, as for so many other black boys and girls, to achieve my potential should also have given me the motivation and determination to make something of my life? The Delta, wrote David L. Cohn, “begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.”2 Specifically, it is a fertile strip of flatland in the northwestern part of the state, stretching along the Mississippi River from just below Memphis to just above Vicksburg and extending inward to beyond Greenwood. Somewhat deltoid in shape, the Delta measures about 160 miles north to south and 60 miles at the widest east-west point. Ten counties lie completely within the Delta and several others lie partially within its confines.3 Any observer will immediately note that the area appears to be flat—“as flat as a pancake,” more than one commentator has noted. But historian James Cobb points out that the surface is actually a bit uneven as a “result of centuries of flooding and sedimentation by the Mississippi and its tributaries.” He continues, “When confined to its normal channel, the Mississippi dumped its rich load of silt in its true delta at its mouth.”4 The result was a rich alluvial soil “endlessly, deep, dark, and sweet”—just the type of soil needed to grow an abundance of cotton. The Delta would become the capital of the cotton kingdom. This was aided in no small measure by the presence of black laborers, who were holdovers from slavery. William Alexander Percy, an aristocrat of the first order, described the “basic fiber” of the Delta (and, by extension, the whole South) as woven from three dissimilar strands: the slave holders and their descendants, poor whites, and Negroes. He regarded poor whites with particular antipathy. Whatever notable contributions they may have made to the culture of the South, Percy wrote, one could “admire them, trust them, love them—never.”5 They were, in Percy’s hierarchy, “intellectually and spiritually inferior to the Negro, whom they hate.” In Percy’s view of things, it was this group that was most responsible for mob violence against blacks; his main point was that “the Delta was not settled by these people; its pioneers were slave-owners and slaves.”6 3 The Delta Even if we set aside for now the fact that Percy was no friend...