Word: delta
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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...
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...