THE OTHER
AMERICANS
at the University of Mississippi,
described the experience of escorting visitors to Yazoo City and
other parts of his native flatlands
that extend eastward from the
Mississippi River:
“Over the years I have taken
countless outlanders through the
Delta: peregrinating Yankee scholars, writers, journalists, civil
rights activists, and more than a
few of the merely idle and professionally despondent curious.
Their reaction has often been a
singular blend of bafflement, titillation, anger, and, not the least of
it, fear; yet to the person they are
struck nearly dumb by its brooding quintessential sadness.”
Morris’ words were written when
Lakeisha Davis, another Delta native, was just 2 years old. Today, the
22-year-old Davis sits on a concrete
slab skirting the Anguilla Family Houses, a low-rise, low-income
housing project in Mississippi’s
Sharkey County, one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest
regions of one of the poorest states
in the nation. Her daughter, 2-yearold Josmin, plays in a nearby patch
of dying grass, unaware that she is
likely the latest installment in what
seems a forever unfolding tale of
brooding, quintessential sadness.
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
Davis and I take a seat on a pair
of orange cafeteria chairs, which
have been reclaimed as porch furniture, and I ask her to tell me what
life is like in this rural outpost.
“There just ain’t nothing here,”
she says. “That’s it.”
Davis’ response is an abridged
version of a story told to me by
just about every resident, academic or politician I met in a week
of touring the area. These plainspoken observations are typically
delivered without affect or complaint: The Delta, one resident
told me, never changes.
I arrived in Jackson, the state
capital, just as the wet, leaden
weight of summer was settling
on the South. I headed westward
across the eternal flatness of the
Yazoo, aka the Delta basin, a wide
shelf of cotton, soybeans, rice and
catfish farming that stretches like
a black cherry leaf—wide in the
middle and pinched at both ends—
from Vicksburg in the south to
Southaven in the north, along the
border with Tennessee.
This roughly 15-county floodplain, bounded by the Bluff Hills to
the east, was essentially a swamp
in the antebellum years, prompting
many locals to remind visitors that
there never really was slavery in
the Delta. Rather, levees and other
post-war infrastructure created
an expanse of fertile cotton land