“ENTIRE GENERATIONS HAVE PASSED
THROUGH, FROM BIRTH TO ADULTHOOD,
LIVING WITHOUT WATER OR WITHOUT
ELECTRICITY, WITHOUT PLUMBING.”
generation after generation, Brock
said part of it is the mentality of
the people who live here. “They’ve
heard for so long that they can’t
have anything, that they cannot be
anything, that they cannot do anything, that they start to believe it,”
she said. “People are a product of
their environment.”
Paulette Meikle, the director of
the Center for Community and Economic Development at Delta State
University in Cleveland, Miss., 40
miles north of Greenville, expounds
on this notion. “When you drive
through parts of the Delta, you can
see, it’s like, ‘Wow, this is a wealthy
place,’” she said. “There is wealth,
because we have the power elite,
the ones who own the means of
production, who control the land.
That economy, which grew out of
the plantation economy, still survives. You have wealth here that
emerged out of that structure.”
But that wealth was not shared
by—and, as researchers have frequently shown, was actively with-
held from—black workers and
sharecroppers. As the 20th century wore on and mechanization
eliminated work opportunities
for low-skilled blacks, nothing
emerged to take its place.
“The intersection between race
and social class, it’s so locked-in,”
Meikle explains. “So when you
look at the data: if you’re born
in poverty and you’re a minority
group member, a large percentage of those who are born into
that kind of situation will remain
that way. An intergenerational exchange of poverty occurs.”
Such has been the fate of Lakeisha Davis and her daughter. There
once was a peanut factory in Anguilla, she tells me offhandedly, but
that’s long gone. Today, the town
has a mini-mart and little else.
Davis managed to complete high
school, though now she mostly
gets by on food stamps and other
government assistance, much as
her mother did before her, and her
grandmother before that. She enlisted in job training in Greenville,
about 40 miles northwest of Anguilla, but she has no car, and the