Hugh Sidey's America

By Hugh Sidey

Aaron Henry recalls the days when Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey were on the line, calling from Washington to his tiny Fourth Street Drugstore in Clarksdale to give heart to the movement. Foot soldiers in the bloody civil rights wars crowded the store's narrow aisles in those days, desperation and what sometimes seemed like misplaced hope overcoming their justified fears. Now, in the soft afternoon shadow, the phone is silent, and there is only one visitor, come to ask how things have changed.

Henry, a thickset man of 68, has been head of the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People since the civil rights movement was at its peak. Mississippi's Delta was one of its deadliest battlegrounds, a crescent of tormented land between Memphis and Vicksburg, hemmed by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, the poorest and blackest part of this country. A generation ago, some of the most oppressed blacks in the most harshly segregated state in the U.S. rose to claim their share of America's dream, and some whites did their violent worst to stop them. Television beamed the story to the world, and the nation's shame and anger forced the politicians in Washington to act. The result was new laws guaranteeing the civil rights of all citizens, regardless of their color.

Henry's eyes blaze with the memories of the human cost of that victory. Because 14-year-old Emmett Till, down from Chicago to visit relatives, allegedly whistled at a white woman, he was beaten, shot and then thrown into the Tallahatchie River in 1955. An all-white jury acquitted two white men of the killing. In 1963 Henry's N.A.A.C.P. associate, Medgar Evers, was gunned down in the driveway of his home in Jackson. His accused murderer, Byron de la Beckwith, was freed when all-white juries failed to reach a verdict. Now the state, seeking to atone for old wrongs, is trying to extradite him from Tennessee to try him again for the killing. Henry himself was arrested several times for his civil rights activities, and was once chained and shackled to a garbage truck to keep him from escaping. He glances up at the piece of tin that covers the hole in the ceiling where a bomb was thrown in 1964. All that is dim history now to most of the world.

But not to Henry.

He picks up the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, which used to trumpet the segregationist line but today champions racial harmony, and reads slowly out loud about George Bush's threatened veto of the new civil rights bill and about a school-board vote in Jackson along racial lines. "The battle of human rights and race relations is over," he says, "but while most people don't express overt racism, their actions manifest a prejudice. We've got to persevere."

Henry has just come out of a fierce redistricting battle in the state legislature, of which he has been a member since 1980. There are daily confrontations over housing, jobs and always the budget. But such battles now go unnoticed outside Mississippi and the Delta. "The spotlight is harder to focus here," he admits, and in that statement he may have defined the movement's great success. Now that the issue of legal equality has been laid to rest, blacks and whites in the Delta often stand together against outside forces, not each other. The war is economic and social and without shotgun blasts in the night. Still, it is wearying and hard. How long has Henry been battling? How long will he go on? He looks off into the distance and says quietly, "Forever." In the sanctuary of his little store, that sounds like a psalm.

Whether we are fully aware of it or not, the nation is still searching for its soul in Mississippi's Delta. Thirty years ago, blacks risked their lives if they tried to vote. Today there are 28 black mayors in the Delta, an area about 200 miles top to bottom and 85 miles at its greatest width, with 340,000 people, 55% black. There are black sheriffs, police chiefs, city-council and county-board majorities. Just across the tracks from Henry's store is the office of Henry Espy, black mayor of Clarksdale, at 20,000 the upper Delta's largest city. "I am convinced the South is the promised land," says the tall, energetic Espy, cutting patterns in the air with powerful hands. "Blacks turned to the North and West for promises that were largely unfulfilled. They are coming home." The mayor's brother, Mike Espy, is Congressman for 22 counties in the heart of the Delta. He was elected in 1986 -- over Webb Franklin, a white lawyer -- with the support of only 15% of the white voters. Last year he got 70% of the white vote.

The success of the Espys and other middle-class blacks is a fragile thing. Welfare payments are the largest source of income in rural areas, greater than King Cotton. The Third World poverty in towns like Tunica (23.5% unemployment) and Jonestown (pop. 1,400, of whom 1,300 are black) is a reminder that civil rights laws alone cannot guarantee opportunity.

In places like these the problems are so basic they seem anachronistic: plumbing, paving and food. Jonestown's energetic Mayor Bobbi Walker is scrounging for $3,000 in private money so the Habitat people will come in and help replace 30 dilapidated shacks. Cotton planting and ginning take only about six months of each year, and there is no other work for the Jonestown families. Yet Mayor Walker and her small cluster plod on. A sewer system will be completed in a few weeks. Running water is now in most homes. She's working to get hot water to every family. There will soon be a tiny health clinic * visited by a doctor and two nurses. "We've got to get jobs, we've got to get industry interested in coming, we've got to do it ourselves," she says.

Bobbi Walker is running on spirit, because the statistics are still arrayed against the Delta. John Emmerich, editor and publisher of the Greenwood Commonwealth, knows the depressing numbers and says, "I do not think this area has the capability of righting what is wrong on its own. We have the highest rate of everything bad, like teen pregnancy, and the lowest rate of everything good, like income. There is too much poverty, too few jobs, too little education." Poverty breeds more poverty, because it discourages new investments. "Industry does not want to come into a town 60% black, with crime, broken homes, low skills," says Emmerich. "In some of those areas, 60% of the children are born out of wedlock; 95% of them are black."

After the schools were desegregated, whites deserted the public school system and set up their private academies; so far, they have not returned in significant numbers. In Greenville (pop. 45,000), long judged a redoubt of tolerance led by such people as editor Hodding Carter and lawyer-planter- writer William Alexander Percy, the public schools are 95% black. Writer Bern Keating, once jailed as a civil rights activist, is worried that all the forces now altering the Delta -- the return of blacks from the decay and danger in Chicago and Detroit, the migration of families from small towns and farms to Greenville, the general economic stagnation -- will produce "a rural inner city of 50,000."

But there is a strange magic in this anguished American corner that may confound the statisticians. The rich history of the Delta has played out on a landscape almost devoid of natural grandeur, apart from the Mississippi River. Even Mark Twain's "chocolate tide" has been corseted with levees, and for the most part lies out of sight and out of many minds. The rich alluvial soil, deposited when the gorged rivers were allowed to burst their banks and leave behind their silt, stretches flat and monotonous, the streams muddy and sluggish. Those planters without mountains or oceans or majesty of any kind made monuments out of their families, friends, parties and hunting clubs.

Myth asserts, with more nostalgia than truth, that before the Civil War, the Delta was a social capital of the South. "The idea that the Delta was a place of antebellum white-columned mansions and women in crinoline skirts -- lies, all lies," snorts historian and author Shelby Foote, who grew up in Greenville and lives and writes in Memphis, at the region's northern tip. "The houses were not well furnished or very comfortable."

In fact, the Delta is not even the Old South. It was not until about 1840 that some flinty cotton planters from the Southeast, having sucked the life out of their land, discovered the wealth of the soil in the riverside wilderness of hardwood trees, panthers, snakes and fever. The planters brought their slaves to uproot the stumps and tend the cotton. Outnumbered dozens to one by their human chattel, the planters installed a brand of servitude so brutal that slaves considered being sent to a plantation "downriver" in the Delta a far worse fate than death.

William Faulkner wrote that the Delta was "deswamped and denuded, and derivered in two generations." Some planters made money, but not nearly as much as legend would have it. There was always another enemy. Land was the staple, usually mortgaged. Nature provided floods, droughts and plant diseases. Bourbon eased some of the pain but brought on its own. The Delta became a place of wild contrast: the lowest poverty and humility alongside the highest pretension and arrogance.

The Civil War ended slavery, but its aftermath produced sharecropping, a form of exploitation almost as severe. And the Delta was battered by all the economic swings of farms, its routines upset by advancing technology. When the sharecroppers were replaced by mechanical cotton pickers and tractors after 1940, the Delta blacks joined the 5 million Southern rural blacks who fled to the cities of the South, West and North, bringing to urban culture their broken hearts in a tragic search for a fragment of dignity and security. That migration, one of the largest such internal movements of people in history, transformed America. The blacks who stayed behind suffered from abject poverty and near starvation. When Bobby Kennedy visited the Delta in the spring of 1967, he was shocked by the conditions. "My God," he said, "I didn't know this kind of thing existed. How can a country like this allow it?"

Adversity had another side. A kind of genius was nurtured in the Delta at both ends of the human scale. Writers abounded, penning stories of depravity and abuse, but of beauty and decency too: Faulkner, Foote, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, William and Walker Percy, Willie Morris.

The Delta also yielded a great harvest of blues singers, spawned in the sorrow of the sharecroppers' shotgun shacks (so called because the rooms are one behind the other, allowing a shot fired through the front door to sail straight out the back door -- unless something gets in the way). Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, James ("Son") Thomas -- most of modern American music has its roots in the Delta. Big Jack ("the Oil Man") Johnson plays there now, one of many with more coming on, including his nephew, James ("Super Chicken") Johnson.

James Cobb of the University of Tennessee has studied the culture and economics of the Delta as much as anyone. He summarizes the melancholy story of the area as "a scary and fascinating pursuit of the American Dream" by a small group of bright, tough people who, unrestrained by conscience or government, ruthlessly exploited other people and resources even as they cloaked themselves in courtliness. Cobb has documented the manipulation of the modern political system by the likes of the late Senator James Eastland, who poured millions of tax dollars into the pockets of the planters and let the little fellows go begging. Cobb believes the way the Delta goes will give us a clue on whether the rest of the U.S. -- and, indeed, the world -- can successfully deal with minority and Third World problems.

The days of reckoning are upon the Delta. A lot of the old family landowners have sold out to corporate interests. The Prudential Insurance Co. is one of the huge Delta operators. Low prices for cotton, soybeans and rice and climbing production costs have squeezed farmers. "Nobody in the Delta is worth more than $10 million," says Billy Percy, one of an enlightened family of statesmen, writers and planters. "Maybe one," he corrects. "He made it in Holiday Inns. I used to be able to have four bad crop years before I would be in financial trouble. Now if I have two bad crops, I'm in trouble."

As those at the top have been burdened and forced down, those at the bottom have been raised a bit. Uless Carter, 75, one of the people in The Promised Land, Nicholas Lemann's chronicle of the black migration, is back in Clarksdale, living in a retirement community. He spent 38 years in Chicago, an additional six in Flint, Mich. The stories of change lured him home. "There are black people working in the banks and stores now," he says. "They treat you now like a human being. It is wonderful. My prayers have been answered." So little asked, so little yet received.

Last week the Delta was drying out after the wettest April and May on record. The giant Deere tractors with their 12-row cultivators left tails of dust as they stirred the baking fields. Ed Scott of Minter City was up at 5 a.m. to tend his eight catfish ponds. If all goes well, the black entrepreneur this year will sell nearly half a million pounds of catfish, the Delta's second biggest crop after cotton. In Arcola, Billy Percy was in a battered pickup as crop dusters in their yellow Air Tractors swooped around him, spraying rice and cotton against unrelenting weevils and thrips. As he watched he talked about two blacks being taken in as members of the Greenville Country Club in the past six months without a ripple. He told with enthusiasm about a new Foundation of the Mid South, which is going to use private funds to help the Delta schools look for a way up.

But if top and bottom are homogenized, will the Delta lose its special fervor? Maybe. Maybe not. On the edge of Clarksdale, bluesman Johnson told of his days learning music from his sharecropper father. "Folks ain't so bad off now," he said. "It ain't as low down as it used to be. Blues ain't as sad." Then the Oil Man lifted his head and sang a few lines -- about the Persian Gulf war.