Word: delta
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...