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Cane Brakes, High Water, Drought: the Mississippi Delta

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Cane Brakes, High Water, Drought: the Mississippi Delta The Mississippi Delta · ·._. .. ~;~l< he term Delta is used in wade into the waters to baptize believers "the old way"; to different ways up and the privileged planters' sons, whose membership in the Cane Brakes, down the Mississippi exclusive hunting clubs along the river is bestowed by the River. But when most accident of birth. The rivers are imbued with personal, people, especially those not local, and regional symbolism and significance. High Water, from the region, say Acknowledged as the birthplace of the blues, the home Mississippi Delta, they refer of "King .Cotton," America's "last wilderness," and the to the area formed by the source of a variety of uniquely American art forms, the alluvial flood plain of the Delta is often discussed and portrayed as a powerful, Drought: The lower Mississippi River and evocative place. The Delta "shines like a national guitar" incorporating parts of four to singer/songwriter Paul Simon, and to Mississippi writer states, a region disting­ Eudora Welty the Delta is a place where "most of the Mississippi uished by both geographic world seemed sky .. seemed strummed, as though it were and cultural characteristics. an instrument and something had touched it." Indeed, a From the flat, rich land of great deal has touched the Mississippi Delta to form it and west Tennessee through to distinguish it from other regions. Much of its Delta parts of Arkansas, Missis­ distinctiveness has been attributed to its "Southern-ness." sippi, and Louisiana, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford called the Tom Rankin entire region owes many of Mississippi Delta "the South's South." "The Deepest its cultural traditions to the South ... the heart of Dixie .... Nowhere are ante-bellum "This land, this Mississippi River and the conditions so nearly preserved as in the Yazoo Delta," many smaller rivers that observed Rupert Vance in 1935, as he contrasted the South ... with permeate the area, some living conditions and lifestyles of the Mississippi Delta's with names reflective of the planter elite with those of its illiterate and impoverished woods for game Native Americans who first Black masses. Certainly one of the common legacies of settled there or other groups the entire Mississippi Delta region is the stark contrasts and streams for who came later: the Obion, evident there. Just as the Delta can be rich and fertile, it Hatchie, and Loosahatchie can also be poor and desolate; just as one can hear the fish and deep in Tennessee; the Yazoo, powerful chords of humanity's best music there, one can Tallahatchie, Sunflower, also witness Delta nights of terror and inequality; just as rich soil for and Coldwater in Missis­ natural resources are abundant, so can everyday life be sippi; the Arkansas, White, harsh. But in each of the extremes is a powerful culture. see d. " and St. Francis in Arkansas ; Truly few places exhibit a more striking example of the the Ouachita and Black in affinity and interaction between humans and nature than -from Go Down, Moses Louisiana. Entire commun- the Mississippi Delta. Today' s Delta is still largely rural by William Faulkner ities, operating with varying and agricultural, its economy very closely tied to the land. codes and customs based on With its vast expanses of sky, one can actually watch the indigenous traditions, have weather, as clouds gather and boil across one horizon and evolved around the region's the sun or moon blazes brilliantly on the other. In spite of rivers and bayous: from the a century of clearing, cultivating, draining, and land Support for this program comes commercial fisherfolk, trap­ leveling, the region retains its primitive swamps, bayous, from the Mississippi Band of pers, and towboat workers, and cypress brakes. Choctaw Indians, the Mississippi whose houses often cluster In Go Down, Moses William Faulkner described the Arts Commission, The Recording near major rivers, landings, Yazoo-Mississippi Delta: Industries Music Performance Trust and levees; to African­ In the beginning, it was virgin - to the west, Funds, and The Rhythm &Blues American ministers and along the Big Black River, the alluvial swamps Foundation. their congregations, who threaded by black, almost motionless bayous and 12 SMITHSONIAN FESTIVAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLIFE The Mississippi Delta . ::;_:~~~:.t Mapping the Mississippi Delta TENNESSEE ARKANSAS Region Represented in The Mississippi Delta at the Festival of American Folklife States' Counties Comprising the Delta Distribution of Blues Musicians Location of birthplaces of blues musicians, 1890-1920 (75 counties) Map by George 0. Carney National Park Service map; Source: John F. Rooney, Jr., Wilbur Zelinsky, Lower Mississippi Delta region . and Dean R. Louder, eds. 1982. This • Original Delta Remarkable Continent: An Altos of United rnJll Additional Study Area by (64 parishes) States and Canadian Society and Cultures. legislation impenetrable with cane and buckvine and cypress deep rich soil for seed and lush springs to sprout and ash and oak and gum .... This land, this South it and long summers to mature it and serene falls ... with woods for game and streams for fish and to harvest it and short mild winters for men and SMITHSONIAN FESTIVAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLIFE 13 The Mississippi Delta animals .... That's the trouble with this country. Everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our nvers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image. Greenville, Mississippi, native and newspaper editor Hodding Carter, Sr., characterized the region in his 1942 book on the Mississippi: "The Lower Missis­ the state." H. F. Gregory, a Louisiana folklorist, has sippi's valley is a precarious Eden, which the river has written that many older residents make a distinction fashioned and caused to be populated because of its between the "front lands" and "back lands" of the promise. It is a promise beset by ordeal and still only Louisiana Delta, the "back lands" being the wilder, partly fulfilled." natural, swampy landscapes. "The back lands remained as Carter also echoed Faulkner when he wrote about the swamplands," explained Gregory, "refuges for animals, historical legacies of the fertile, overgrown landscape: birds, and people displaced f~om the plantation areas." Go quietly at dawn into those brakes of cypress Agricultural interests began draining the back lands in the and cane and cottonwood and water oak. Paddle 1970s, changing the environment, Gregory argued, to the beside the banks of the Mississippi's bayous and point that "today only in game preserves can one see the false lakes which once were part of its channel. original landscapes." You will find something of what the Spaniard, the It was the environmental wonder and agricultural Frenchman, and the Englishman swore and mar­ richness of the region that led a diversity of cultural veled at: the disordered lavishness of a wilderness groups to settle there. For instance, in the 1890s several sprung from the earth droppings of a river's plantation owners fretted over the declining work force uncounted years. and looked to Italy for a solution. Arkansas's 11,000-acre Full of pestilence - malaria, typhoid, and yellow fever Sunnyside Plantation brought Italians to be sharecroppers. - and unyielding and unnavigable terrain, the Delta Arkansas planters similarly brought Chinese to the Delta. remained a frontier wilderness until well after the Civil Most contracted to work for five years, many relocating or War. This is a fact that the familiar Delta stereotype changing occupations after being liberated from their doesn't include. farming obligations. More recent accounts still highlight the Mississippi Though the largest percentages of residents are Black Delta's place as a veritable wilderness, in part. Thomas African Americans and White Anglo-Saxons, the region Foti, an ecologist with the Arkansas Natural Heritage also has substantial populations of people of Jewish, Commission, described the lower White River as a Chinese, Lebanese, Syrian, Italian, Greek, and Mexican "special place ... still the wildest region of the Delta." ancestry. One can observe small Chinese groceries in According to Foti, in addition to supporting a core of many Delta towns, the large presence of Italian families committed houseboat dwellers who work on it, the White and traditions throughout Mississippi and Arkansas, and River also hosts the "only indigenous black bear the wonderful assimilation of ethnic foodways such as population in Arkansas, the only productive eagle nest in Delta tamales. Probably brought to the Delta by Mexican 14 SMITHSONIAN FESTIVAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLIFE The Mississippi Delta immigrants instead. For a brief time during the Reconstruction period, convict labor was used to clear thousands of acres, though this scandal-ridden lease system was outlawed in 1890. Later, African­ American laborers accomplished most of the difficult task of clearing the forests. William Ferris in Blues from the Delta quoted blues singer Jasper Love talking about his work in the 1930s. "Times was so tough we couldn't cut it with a knife, man," recalled Love. "Plowing four mules .... Hitting them stumps and that plow kicking you all in the stomach. I had to get up around three in the morning by a bell. The bell rang two times. First time you get up. The second time, be at the barn. Not on I • .• .. .... your way, at the barn." ~:~:.-.. - The fertility of the Delta has led to some . .-_ ~ ~-· ·; pretty harsh working conditions. Wiley Cochral, who was born in 1925, grew up as the son of a sharecropper, working with his father, mother, and siblings, farming on halves. By the fall of 1947-thirty-three years after moving to the Delta - his father was able to buy 100 acres of land and an old house in Stephensville in Sunflower County. A White man, Cochral' s explanation about sharecropping and his feeling toward the arrangement speak for many who farm as sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta: Farming on halves, you give the One of the few remaining traditional Southern occupa­ Achurch official stakes out the boss man half of the crop to start tional crafts in the Delta is the making of gourd or tiered baptismal area in the Ouachita River with.
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