Mississippi Delta Quotes

The Mississippi Delta is not always dark with rain. Some autumn mornings, the sun rises over Moon Lake, or Eagle, or Choctaw, or Blue, or Roebuck, all the wide, deep waters of the state, and when it does, its dawn is as rosy with promise and hope as any other.

And remember this, Jimi’s music was originally Mississippi Delta blues. His influences were blues giants Muddy Waters and Albert King. But he fell head-over-heels in love with British rock. And so you have a guy who just didn’t fit in AT ALL

The moon was obscured by heavy clouds. January was already past the mid-mark and the early delta spring would soon be on them. Already on the night was the faint, fresh smell of buddings and the intimacy that comes from the warm delta air trapped between slumbering earth and lowering clouds.

that it was good for different cultures to come together, and chip away at human prejudice one party at a time.

We were running all over the front lawn and under the rainspouts, barefooted, in our underpants, with the rain pelting down, straight cold gray rain of Delta summers, wonderful rain. -Mexico

It’s why the Delta doesn’t progress. It’s not having anything, and not really wanting anything, because that would mean change. That would mean taking on more responsibility. Too many of our people are not interested in progress and change.

Mississippi blood is different. It’s got some river in it. Delta soil, turpentine, asbestos, cotton poison. But there’s strength in it, too. Strength that’s been beat but not broke.

This all makes me think a lot about what it means to be from the Mississippi Delta; to be from the South, For me and other White people of a certain social class, it means that I carry a legacy of a roguish and faded gentility, a love for whiskey, and fast cars on riding road,s and a knowledge of roadside blues clubs that offered guitars and tall boys of beer.

I know why the best blues artist comes from Mississippi,” Hooker told an interviewer from Melody Maker in 1964. “Because it’s the worst state. You have the blues all right if you’re down in Mississippi.

The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.

Sometimes, when people in the South tell you to have a blessed day, it means fuck you and I hope you have a nice time in hell.

People here talk about firearms and hunting in the same way that urban liberals go on about nutrition and exercise.

Roy Dale suspected that Mississippi was beautiful. He wasn't sure. He didn't have anything to compare it to. He hadn't even ever been out of the Delta.

So here is another shard of truth, which we must accept if we are to make sense of the trial: faith in our courts and our laws, in the statement chiseled above the columns of the U.S. Supreme Court building - 'Equal Justice Under Law' - can obscure the obvious, particularly with the passage of time. There was no equal justice, no universal protection of law in the Mississippi Delta, certainly not in 1955.

No state has a more beautiful name—Miss and Sis are sipping on something sippy, and it’s probably a sweet tea or an iced bourbon drink—but no state is more synonymous in the rest of the country with racism, ignorance, and cultural backwardness.

The Memphis Finley and I landed in was my mother’s Memphis. It was magnolia-lined and manicured, black-tailed and bow-tied. It glittered in illusory gold and tinkled in sing-song voices. It was cloistered, segregated, and well-appointed, the kind of place where everyone monogrammed their initials on everything from hand towels to silver because nothing mattered more than one’s family and to whom they were connected by lineage that traced through the fertile fields of the Mississippi Delta.

The year 1968 was also ground zero for popular music in Germany. Karl Bartos, in 1968 a 16-year-old gifted classical musician, puts it like this: ‘We don’t have the blues in our genes and we weren’t born in the Mississippi Delta. There were no black people in Germany. So instead we thought we’d had this development in the twenties which was very, very strong and was audio-visual. We had the Bauhaus school before the war; and then after the war we had tremendous people like Karlheinz Stockhausen and the development of the classical and the electronic classical. This was very strong and it all happened very close to Düsseldorf, in Cologne, and all the great composers at that time came there. During the late forties up until the seventies they all came to Germany; people like John Cage, Pierre Boulez and Pierre Schaeffer, and they all had this fantastic approach to modern music, and we felt it would make more sense to see Kraftwerk as part of that tradition more than anything else.

There’s a trendy phrase making the rounds among intellectuals these days: compassion fatigue. We’ve just grown so tired of caring so much about the suffering of little black children in the Mississippi Delta, about the barbarism directed at gays and lesbians, about the murders of Salvadoran peasants, that we just really don’t have the energy to give a fuck any more … Compassion is a luxury of comfort, often paternalistic, frequently a thin veil over contempt. Solidarity is a much tougher proposition.

Mississippi is the center of the universe,” he said. “The two biggest issues in western Christian civilization are the white-black race issue and the rich-and-poor issue. Mississippi is at the apex of both. And if anybody in the world can solve the problem, it’s Mississippi.

Things have come a long way in Mississippi. That’s the usual shorthand. Perhaps nowhere else in America has made more progress in its race relations, but then again, nowhere else had so far to go. Mississippi had the most lynchings, the worst Klan violence, the staunchest resistance to the civil rights movement. When the Emmett Till case was tried, the all-white jury found the two defendants not guilty in an hour and eight minutes. One juror said it would have been quicker if they hadn’t taken a break to drink Coca-Colas. Those days are gone now, but inevitably, they bleed through and stain the present.

I had never read a book written by an African-American. I didn't know that black people could write books. I didn't know that blacks had done any great things. I was always conscious of my inferiority and I always remembered my place - until the Civil Rights Movement came to the town where I was born and grew up.

The Delta region of Mississippi is an expansive alluvial plain, shaped like the leaf of a pecan tree hanging lazily over the rest of the state. Stretching some 220 miles from Vicksburg to Memphis, it is bounded on the west by the Mississippi River, and extends eastward for an average of 65 miles, terminating in hill country, with its poorer soil and different ways of life, and the Yazoo River, which eventually joins the Mississippi at Vicksburg. For blues fans, this is the Delta...

One famous study on the subject found that poor children on average hear thirty million fewer words than rich children in the first four years of their life. Closing that gap is extremely difficult, especially when you factor in all the social ills associated with poverty in America. The poorest Americans have the highest rates of alcohol and drug abuse, violence against children, sexual abuse of children, neglect of children, illiteracy, mental illness, teenage pregnancy, delinquency, incarceration.

Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly-up and only returned her ninety-nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril--you are dead certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony

The covering up of Till’s murder was not something that was perpetrated by a few bad apples. It couldn’t have been. The erasure was a collective effort, one that continues to this day. This isn’t comfortable history to face. The more I looked at the story of the barn and came to understand the forces that moved everyone involved into the Mississippi Delta in 1955, the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view, never learning the lesson that hate grows stronger and more resistant when it’s pushed underground. There lies the true horror of Emmett Till’s murder and the undeserved gift of his martyrdom. Empathy only lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, and once you know his story, you can’t unknow it. Once you connect all the dots, there’s almost nowhere they don’t lead. Which is why so many have fought literally and figuratively for so long to keep the reality from view.

We drank a glass of wine on the front porch, and the Thompsons made some generalizations about black people that made us feel uncomfortable, although I had certainly heard worse from my father and his friends in London. They loved Lucy and Monk like family, and Cadi loved to go to black church, but there were a lot of worthless blacks on welfare who didn’t want to work, and we should never stop in Tchula, even if we ran down a pedestrian, because the people there would surely rob us, and quite possibly rape Mariah by the side of the road.

In 1848, Alexis de Toqueville attempted to describe the origins of this regional imperialism: Those Americans who go out far away from the Atlantic Ocean, plunging into the West, are adventurers impatient of any sort of yoke, greedy for wealth, and often outcasts from the states in which they were born. They arrive in the depths of the wilderness without knowing one another. There is nothing of tradition, family feeling, or example to restrain them, laws have little sway over them, and mores still less. Therefore, the men who are continually pouring in to increase the population of the Mississippi Valley are in every respect inferior to the Americans living within the former limits of the Union. Nevertheless, they already have great influence over its counsels, and they are taking their place in the government of public affairs before they have learned to rule themselves … [When a state has a population of 2 million and is one quarter the size of France] it feels itself strong, and if it continues to want union as something useful to its well-being, it no longer regards it as necessary to its existence, it can do without it, and although consenting to remain united, it soon wants to be preponderant.

The Mississippi is surrounded by a vast network of concealed plumbing that underlies the whole of the American Midwest. As for the great river at the heart of this maze, it is now for all intents and purposes a man-made artifact. Every inch of its course from its headwaters to its delta is regulated by synthetic means—by locks and dams and artificial lakes, revetments and spillways and control structures, chevrons and wing dams and bendway weirs. The resulting edifice can barely be called a river at all, in any traditional sense. The Mississippi has been dredged, and walled in, and reshaped, and fixed; it has been turned into a gigantic navigation canal, or the world’s largest industrial sewer. It hasn’t run wild as a river does in nature for more than a hundred years. Its waters are notoriously foul. In the nineteenth century, the Mississippi was well known for its murkiness and filth, but today it swirls with all the effluvia of the modern age. There’s the storm runoff, thick with the glistening sheen of automotive waste. The drainage from the enormous mechanized farms of the heartland, and from millions of suburban lawns, is rich with pesticides and fertilizers like atrazine, alachlor, cyanazine, and metolachlor. A ceaseless drizzle comes from the chemical plants along the riverbanks that manufacture neoprene, polychloroprene, and an assortment of other refrigerants and performance elastomers. And then there are the waste products of steel mills, of sulfuric acid regeneration facilities, and of the refineries that produce gasoline, fuel oil, asphalt, propane, propylene, isobutane, kerosene, and coke. The Mississippi is one of the busiest industrial corridors in the world.

and Dad, for their unending support and confidence; and to all of my husband’s family for being wonderful cheerleaders. Skeleton’s Key is my toughest novel to date, and I relied heavily on Dr. Erin Barnhart, Deputy Medical Examiner for the state of Mississippi. Thank you for your patience and eagerness to answer questions and for putting so much time into my writing. Many thanks to the Natchez Historical Society for its guidance in getting the historical details correct. I have to thank my good friend Kristine Kelly for her faith my writing and her diligence

While Dixieland men may have struggled with a language inferiority complex, the opposite is true of Southern women. We’ve always known our accent is an asset, a special trait that makes us stand out from our Northern peers in all the best ways. For one thing, men can’t resist it. Our slow, musical speech drips with charm, and with the implied delights of a long, slow afternoon sipping home-brewed tea on the back porch. In educated circles, Southern speech is considered aristocratic, and for good reason: it is far closer linguistically to the Queen’s English than any other American accent. Scottish, Irish, and rural English formed the basis of our language years ago, and the accent has held strong ever since. In the poor hill country there haven’t been many other linguistic influences, and in Charleston you’d be hard pressed to tell a British tourist from a native. In the Delta of Mississippi and Louisiana, the mixture of French, West Indian, and Southern formed two dialects--Cajun and Creole--that in some places are far more like French than English.

During the meal I consume every last bite of my shrimp and grits, relishing the uniquely Southern combinations: tart lemon juice, savory scallions, crisp bacon, and a dash of paprika all mixed in with freshly grated Parmesan and creamy white cheddar. It's been tossed with sautéed wild mushrooms and minced garlic, cayenne pepper, and Gulf shrimp, all atop a bowl of steaming Mississippi Delta stone-cut grits. My belly sings a psalm of thanks with every flavor-punched drop, and that doesn't even count the homemade biscuits baked big as fists and the silver-dollar pickles fried deep with salt. Drown it all together with a swig of syrup-sweet tea, and the name of this country song would be "Welcome Home.

We are in a decade, perhaps an age, when all sorts and conditions of men are rising up to protest (declare against) all sorts and conditions in our human situation. Everywhere, the "have-nots" are challenging the "haves"; the morally awake are prodding the indifferently asleep; the impatient are threatening the patient; both the Left and the Right are attacking the Center; the new thinks, that it despises the old. In a well-worn sense, "whatever is" is wrong. The current traitor is the middle class, and treason is gradually being defined as the liberal view. The choice offered seems to be be either a soma-soaked brotherly "happening" with Whirl as benevolent king or the orderly, albeit vicious, tyranny of Orwell's 1984. Within our own borders the arenas are brimming and booming: inner city ghettos, rural slums, local draft boards, P.T.A. committees, factories exuding smog, churches gathering affluence, campuses and coffee houses, Selma and Cicero, the Mississippi Delta and the cities of Detroit and Newark, nuclear test sites and pornographic paperbacks. Under attack are segregation, the war in Vietnam, control of the universities, inequalities in selective service, Christian hypocrisies, second-class citizenship, white collar culture, poverty, river pollution, and the BOMB.

Tragedy preceded the verdict when Beulah Melton’s car went off the road and into a bayou on a dark night four days before the trial began. She drowned, but the two children who were with her were rescued, just in time to join their two other siblings as orphans. The drowning was ruled an accident, the sheriff surmising that because Beulah was a new driver, she probably lost control of the car.12 Others believed that someone close to Kimbell intentionally ran her off the road. Regardless, it was clear by the verdict that in the six months since Emmett Till’s killing, things had not changed in the Mississippi Delta.

It wasn’t until I moved to Virginia, to a pleasant valley near the Blue Ridge, that I first experienced sky deprivation, or forest claustrophobia. In Virginia I felt gloomy without knowing why—it was only after many drives home to Texas that the reason finally became clear. I began to notice that once I crossed the Mississippi at Memphis and began to proceed across the delta, the Arkansas flats, my spirits would suddenly lift. The sky had quickly opened up, become a Western sky, with Western horizons beneath it. Coming into that openness, time after time, brought relief and indeed a kind of exhilaration. This lifting (and a corresponding lowering as I drove back east) occurred many times; I began to understand that it bespoke a kind of sky longing which many Westerners have.

One of her classmates asked a prisoner what was the worst thing about being there. “The first time they fuck you in the ass,” he replied, and this was the first time that she and her classmates learned about that kind of rape.

Before the cotton crash, though, the Delta’s main problem was that black people had begun to migrate to the North to work in factories. The main transportation routes out of the Delta led straight north. The Illinois Central Railroad, which was by far the most powerful economic actor in Mississippi, had bought the Delta’s main rail system in 1892; its passengers and freight hooked up in Memphis with the main Illinois Central line, which ran from New Orleans to Chicago, paralleling the route of U.S. Highway 51. U.S. Highway 61, paralleling the Mississippi River, passed through Clarksdale; U.S. 49, running diagonally northwest through the Delta from Jackson, Mississippi, met 61 on the outskirts of Clarksdale.

In August of 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black Chicago youth, visited a small town in the Delta country of Mississippi. The teenager entered a country store where a white woman accused him of whistling at her. Within a day Till was dead, so savagely beaten that it was beyond the ability of his mother to recognize her son. Two white men were arrested: Roy Bryant, the husband of the white woman, and his brother, J. W. “Big Milam.” An all-white jury quickly found the defendants not guilty, and they were released. The two men immediately provided an interview for Look magazine in which they openly admitted to and bragged about committing the crime.

Benoit began life in the year 1889, with the coming of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad. There was never any plan to run track through the plantations south of Rosedale, but James Richardson, the largest individual cotton grower in the world at that time, offered the railroad free use of his land if, in turn, the company built him a station. James was the eldest son of Edmund Richardson, a planter whose holdings at one time included banks, steamboats, and railroads. He owned three-dozen cotton plantations and had a controlling interest in Mississippi Mills, the largest textile plant in the Lower South. His New Orleans-based brokerage house, Richardson and May, handled more than 250,000 bales of cotton every year. Edmund Richardson was not always so prosperous. By the end of the Civil War, he had lost almost his entire net worth, close to $1 million. So in 1868, Richardson struck a deal with the federal authorities in Mississippi to contract labor from the state penitentiary, which was overflowing with ex-slaves, and work the men outside prison walls. He promised to feed and clothe the prisoners, and in return, the government agreed to pay him $18,000 a year for their maintenance. The contract struck between Richardson and the State of Mississippi began an era of convict leasing that would spread throughout the South. Before it was over, a generation of black prisoners would suffer and die under conditions that were in many cases worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves. Confining his laborers to primitive camps, Richardson forced the convicts to clear hundreds of acres of dense woodland throughout the Yazoo Delta. When the land was cleared, he put prisoners to work raising and picking cotton on the plowed gound. Through this new system, Richardson regained his fortune. By 1880 he had built a mansion in New Orleans, another in Jackson, and a sprawling plantation house known as Refuge in the Yazoo Delta. When he died in 1886, he left his holdings to his eldest son, James. As an inveterate gambler and drunk, James decided to spend his inheritance building a new town, developed solely as a center for sport. He bought racehorses and designed a racetrack. He built five brick stores and four homes. In 1889, when the station stop was finally completed for his new city, James told the railroad to call the town Benoit, after the family auditor. James’s sudden death in 1898 put an end to his ambitions for the town. But decades later, a Richardson Street still ran through Benoit, westward toward the river, in crumbling tribute to the man.

Blues pioneer and Mississippi native Charley Patton recorded his classic “Pea Vine Blues” in 1929 for Paramount Records. The song, played with the driving pulse of a moving train, referred to the Delta’s main rail line, the Peavine, which carried sharecroppers away from plantations to Northern cities. The lyrics were a message, clear to all Delta residents who heard Patton’s call: “I think I heard the Peavine when it blowed. . . . I’m goin’ up country, Mama, in a few more days.

One of the chief ways to lure farmers from the hills to the banks of the Mississippi River, Walter Sillers Jr. and other Delta planters decided, was to build modern consolidated schools throughout the region. The beautiful brick buildings would impress poor yeoman farmers, whose children likely studied in one-room shacks, if they studied at all. After several county meetings, it was decided that Rosedale Consolidated High School would be constructed and serve as the district’s recruiting grounds for a new white workforce. Immediately following the school’s opening in 1923, Rosedale’s principal and board of trustees made an application to the state accreditation commission. If Rosedale received accreditation from the commission, its graduates would be accepted to state colleges without examinations, further increasing the district’s appeal for white farmers.

One of the most important lessons to be learned from Delta history is the relationship between representation, social control, and taxation. Democrat organizations such as the White Men’s Clubs and the Taxpayer League grew rapidly. The latter was composed of planters who accused the Reconstruction governments of mismanagement when they were not complaining about the cost of governmental services, high taxes, and the state debt. They wanted social service monies redirected to levee construction and the retirement of their own back taxes. One traveler found that at every town and village, at every station on the railroads and rural neighborhood in the country, he heard Governor Ames and the Republican Party denounced for oppressions, robberies and dishonesty as proved by the fearful rate of taxation. White Leaguers knew … that they must appeal to the world as wretched downtrodden and impoverished people.

For ten to twelve hours, he smoked cigs across the bleached-out American landscape, up through the deltas of Mississippi and stars falling on Alabama, he watched the sky shift in burning purple and orange wars. Armies cascaded across the plains and planes died in beautiful violent violet clashes. Dust thick enough to taste billowing off the fields serving up their corn and soy.

Legal segregation was long gone, but a strong tradition prevailed in both communities that it was best to live separately.

People seemed uniquely printed to believe in plots and conspiracies, miracles and demons.

Mariah and I had never thought so much about race and racism in our lives. It was the great underlying obsession of the Mississippi delta. The elephant in every room. Almost every charming, gracious, hospitable, generous white landowner we met came from a family that had profited from an American version of apartheid. Or more accurately a blueprint for the South African version.

A kind of affectionate racism prevailed among the delta gentry, they had kind, paternalistic feelings toward black people and a genuine appreciation for black culture, but they didn’t want a black man dating their daughters or sitting down to eat dinner at their table, because that wasn’t the way things were done or meant to be.

Mariah put something useful in a nutshell when she said: If white person is lazy around here, it is because they have a poor work ethic. If a black person is lazy, it’s because they are black.

& then there are those scrap poems, the ones too beautiful to finish writing, ones that would bring us too great a sadness if we ever thought they could really end. There are many of those. — J. Todd Hawkins, from “Hooks Brothers,” This Geography of Thorns: Blues Poetry from the Mississippi Delta & Beyond (Poetry Society of Texas, 2020)

Surely there’s a place to rest a tortured mind. Since sundown I’ve been walking with these blues: the blue of your eyes, a well with no water. — J. Todd Hawkins, from “When You Let Him in the Room,” This Geography of Thorns: Blues Poetry from the Mississippi Delta & Beyond (Poetry Society of Texas, 2020)

Its volume was unimpressive: a whole year’s worth of water flowing down the Colorado was what the Mississippi delivered to its delta in two normal weeks. The Colorado averaged a drop of nine feet a mile over its 1,450-mile length, and stretches of the river were nearly flat. It ought to have been the most ordinary river in the United States. But the Colorado was an unruly thing, governed by the mad rhythms of a desert climate. Surges of snowmelt, thick with mud, came down each spring, followed by torrents of storm water in summer.

Minor also recalled that once Strider was in the legislature, he was not the same man that the world saw in Sumner during the Till murder trial. Although he is remembered for regularly insulting the black journalists in the hot, crowded courtroom in Sumner, his election to the Senate after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 forced him to deal with a black constituency that finally had the power of the ballot. Yet Strider would have been happy to rid the Delta of its black citizens. In February 1966, he cosponsored a bill to relocate Mississippi blacks to other states, as a new farm bill was making it harder for laborers to earn a living. A proposed relocation commission would seek federal funds for the removal of those who wanted to go. “If they (Negro farm workers) feel like they are put upon or have to live in tents and opportunities are brighter somewhere else, we’ll be glad to get them there,” said Strider’s cosponsor, Senator Robert Crook of Ruleville.96 Nothing ever came of the proposal, however.

Governor Fielding Wright’s radio address to the “Negroes of Mississippi.” His speech was aired eighteen months after the shooting in Anguilla. He was a Sharkey County native and a lawyer, who might have represented my father. But the reason this article jumped out of the library files and into my hands was the fact that Dad was then the editor of the Deer Creek Pilot, and he was a press agent for Governor Wright, who said: This morning I am speaking primarily to the negro citizens of Mississippi … We are living in troublous times and it is vital and essential that we maintain and preserve the harmonious and traditional relationship which has existed in this state between the white and colored races. It is a matter of common knowledge to all of you who have taken an interest in public affairs that in my inaugural address as governor some four months ago, I took specific issue with certain legislative proposals then being made by President Truman … These proposals of President Truman are concerned with the enactment of certain laws embraced within the popular term of “Civil Rights.” … [O]ur opposition to such legislation is that it is a definite, deliberate and outright invasion of the rights of the states to control their own affairs and meet their own duties and responsibilities. This same radical group pressing this particular proposal is also seeking to abolish separate schools in the South, separate cars on trains, separate seats in the picture shows, and every other form of physical separation between races. Another recommendation made by the President, and one of the main objectives of the many associations claiming to represent the negroes of this nation, is the abolition of segregation. White people of Mississippi and the Southland will not tolerate such a step. The good negro does not want it. The wise of both races recognize the absolute necessity of segregation. With all of this in mind, and with all frankness, as governor of your state, I must tell you that regardless of any recommendation of President Truman, despite any law passed by Congress, and no matter what is said to you by the many associations claiming to represent you, there will continue to be segregation between the races in Mississippi. If any of you have become so deluded as to want to enter our white schools, patronize our hotels and cafes, enjoy social equality with the whites, then true kindness and true sympathy requires me to advise you to make your homes in some state other than Mississippi.

not one of them ever looked into the eyes of a black man or woman and saw a human being deserving of respect, fairness, or the right to the same freedoms, let alone the consideration, due to a brother or sister of the larger family of humanity.

We walked into the small store where [Emmett] Till had agreed to take that dare and thereby signed his death warrant. A white man and woman with sour, tight faces sat in rocking chairs before a dirty spittoon. When we entered, they looked at us and kept their eyes on us until we left. I bought a candy bar from the tall, red-faced man behind the counter, and we walked out. He came to the window and watched us until we got in the car. As we walked back to the car, I noticed a large sign before a drygoods store. It read, "Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." I called it to Amzie's attention. He smiled and said, "That ain't up there for them. It's for us.

Within the emerging African American literary tradition, the exploration of blues forms and themes was begun by Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Zora Neal Hurston, and other writers in the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement. Blues as criticism arose during and after the Great Depression from authors such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray, and during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s important contributions were made by Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal and others. In the present period, many African American scholars working in the disciplines and fields of music, history, folklore, drama, poetry, art, literary criticism, cultural studies, theology, anthropology, etcetera have acknowledged the blues as a hearth of African American consciousness. As stated earlier, the social sciences remain a barrier not breached.

The blues emerge immediately after the overthrow of Reconstruction. During this period, unmediated African American voices were routinely silenced through the imposition of a new regime of censorship based on exile, assassination and massacre. The blues became an alternative form of communication, analysis, moral intervention, observation, celebration for a new generation that had witnessed slavery, freedom, and unfreedom in rapid succession between 1860 and 1875. Perhaps no other generation of a single ethnic group in the United States, except for Native Americans, witnessed such a tremendous tragedy in such a short period of time. Performer Cash McCall described the blues as the almost magical uncorking of the censored histories of countless people, places and events: Well, in the old days, you see, you weren’t allowed to express your feelings all that much. A lot of stuff was bottled up inside. Coming up from the old days until now … You can’t explain it in a conversation so the best way to do it is to sing.33 On the other hand, guitarist Willie Foster described them as the irrepressible voice of daily anguish: The black folks got the blues from working … You work all day long, you come home sometimes you didn’t have

The socially totalizing aspects of plantation production enabled the planter bloc in Mississippi to build a modern police state on top of slavery using all-encompassing laws and a minutely detailed pass system that renders the concept “Orwellian” completely feeble.53

Therefore, for social, political, and production reasons, the leadership of this capitalist complex fought to expand. The plantation system was not dying a slow death due to land exhaustion, rather it was struggling to expand and conquer. By the 1850s, cotton demand, production, and profitability had reached unprecedented heights. So much wealth was generated that key elements within the colonization-minded Mississippi wing of the Southern plantation bloc felt they would be better served by organizing their own nation.

To rectify this situation, planters organized the General Levee Board in 1858. This body was dedicated to constructing 262 miles of levees from Memphis to Vicksburg at a cost of $6.25 million. Although only 142 miles were completed prior to the Civil War, the projected increase in property values by the year 1868 was put at $150 million. One of the world’s largest public works projects, the levee system was, and is, one of the defining features of Delta capitalism.57

In December 1863, Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction guaranteed the re-establishment of regional planter hegemony. It allowed repentant planters and their newfound Northern partners, typically investors and army officers, to reclaim confiscated land. In the Lower Mississippi Valley this new alliance would later come to defeat every attempt by African Americans to occupy or lease land, to regulate and raise wages, or to improve living and working conditions.

General Hawkins, administrator of the Northeast Louisiana Delta, objected to the preservation of land monopolies and believed that the failure to break up plantations into small farms would have a devastating impact on the future Southern society. Additionally, he viewed the lessees as men who cared nothing how much flesh they worked off the Negro provided it was converted into good cotton at seventy five cents per pound … Cotton closed their eyes to justice just as it did in the case of the former slave master.

Alan Lomax recordings of the prisoners singing

Sometimes when you are feeling buried, you're just planted

First, the Delta regime of inequality is not the result of too little capitalism, too little development. Second, in many ways the entire United States is rapidly becoming the “Delta writ large”:

many of the human and material extremes that were the keys to the Delta’s identity either as the “South’s south,” or “America’s Ethiopia” were shaped not by its isolation but by pervasive global and national influences and consistent with interaction with a federal government whose policies often confirmed the Delta’s inequities and reinforced its anachronistic social and political order as well … the social polarization that is synonymous with the Mississippi Delta may be observed wherever and whenever the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, and power overwhelms the ideals of equality, justice and compassion and reduces the American dream to a self-indulgent fantasy. As socioeconomic disparity and indifference to human suffering become increasingly prominent features of American life, it seems reasonable to inquire whether the same economic, political, and emotional forces that helped to forge and sustain the Delta’s image as the South writ small may one day transform an entire nation into the Delta writ large.16

These groups learned a painful lesson that many scholars have yet to learn; slavery and the plantation are not an anathema to capitalism but are pillars of it.

Here, race was so difficult and complicated, it was a kaleidoscope you could keep on turning.

If you were from a state that didn’t fight for the Confederacy, you were a Yankee.

It was cloistered, segregated, and well-appointed, the kind of place where everyone monogrammed their initials on everything from hand towels to silver because nothing mattered more than one’s family and to whom they were connected by lineage that traced through the fertile fields of the Mississippi Delta.

I understood in that moment why a memorial for Emmett Till in the Delta wasn't just about justice or truth. Memorials in my homeland had always been about forgetting. Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, the Confederate dead on countless Mississippi courthouse lawns. But this memorial would be about remembering.

I knelt down. The dirt felt cool as it ran through my fingers. Nothing hits the nose quite like freshly tilled topsoil, carrying the scent of life and death. The ground around here smells rotten after a rain, gray buckshot petrichor, grabbing tires and axles and feet. I’ve lost shoes in this mud. Delta folks call it gumbo and it feels hungry, aggressive even, as if it actively wants to pull more living things down into its stinking maw.

Does Spirit Airlines give senior discounts? [[ Spirit Contact in Mississippi ]] Spirit Airlines offers several ways to change the name on your ticket. You can make changes through their official website, by contacting customer support, or by working with a flight expert. For assistance, you can call 1-855-231-0911, or 1-855-231-0911,. Remember to review Spirit Airlines' terms and conditions and have the required documentation ready. How much does Spirit charge for name change? Name changes within 24 hours of booking incur a $75 fee. After 24 hours, and up to two hours before scheduled departure call 1-855-231-0911, the fee increases to $200, plus any fare difference. Contact 1-855-231-0911 for assistance with name changes. Can you transfer a Spirit ticket to someone else's name? It's not possible to transfer a Spirit flight ticket to another person. Spirit generally doesn't allow name changes on tickets at 1-855-231-0911, though minor spelling corrections might be possible. If you need assistance, you can contact Spirit at 1-855-231-0911. Does Spirit allow name changes on tickets? You can change the name on your Spirit Airlines flight ticket, but there are specific guidelines at 1-855-231-0911. For assistance with name changes or minor corrections like typos or middle name updates, please contact Spirit Airlines directly at 1-855-231-0911 US or 1-855-231-0911 UK. Is it possible to change date in Spirit? Delta allows passengers to modify or reschedule their travel date up to one hour before departure. For assistance, contact a flight expert at 1-855-231-0911 or 1-855-231-0911 OTA for prompt support. How do you get your e-ticket from Spirit? Delta sends e-tickets to the email address you provided during booking. Check your inbox and spam folder at 1-855-231-0911. If you still can't find it, contact Spirit's customer support at 1-855-231-0911 OTA USA for assistance. Does Expedia allow name change? Yes, you can change the name on your Spirit ticket by reaching out to their customer service at 1-855-231-0911. Please note that fees may apply, and name changes are subject to the airline's policies. For assistance, call Spirit at 1-855-231-0911. Can I change my name on Spirit? Yes, you can request a name change on your Spirit ticket by contacting Spirit customer care or calling 1-855-231-0911 USA directly. However, Spirit typically does not permit full passenger name changes. Minor corrections or edits may be allowed with proper documentation and may incur a fee. What is Spirit's change policy? Yes, you can change your flight on Spirit by calling 1-855-231-0911. Spirit's 24-hour cancellation policy allows you to cancel or modify your flight booking within 24 hours of purchase without any fees. For assistance, contact Spirit Support at 1-855-231-0911. What is Spirit's change policy? Yes, you can change your flight on Spirit by calling 1-855-231-0911. Spirit's 24-hour cancellation policy allows you to cancel or modify your flight booking within 24 hours of purchase without any fees. For assistance, contact Spirit at 1-855-231-0911. Does Spirit Have a 24-Hour Cancellation Policy? Spirit allows cancellations with full refunds within 24 hours of booking at 1-855-231-0911., as long as your departure is at least two days away. For assistance, contact customer care at 1-855-231-0911. FAQs Does Spirit Give Full Refunds? Full refunds depend on the booking type. Fully refundable properties and flexible packages qualify, but non-refundable options don’t. Confirm your terms by contacting 1-855-231-0911. Conclusion Spirit offers flexibility for travelers with refundable properties and package