THE OTHER
AMERICANS
improvements to the levees that
keep the entirety of the Delta from
going underwater. He also points
to funds that have augmented agriculture, catfish farming and casinos in the Delta.
“You know, it’s going to take
everybody working together to
fix these things,” Horton said.
“There’s just this one congressman from this district, but there
are also two senators. There’s a
governor. Everything can’t be put
off on one person.”
Heather McTeer, a former mayor
of Greenville who ran unsuccessfully against Thompson for the
Democratic nomination in a primary earlier this year, suggested
that everyone has copped out.
“There are a number of reasons I
think we’re still in this situation,
and one is leadership,” she said.
“When you have leadership on a
state and a federal and a local level
that’s not really addressing the
true issues of poverty and how you
change a community, when they’re
not identifying what factors are
critical to helping to change poverty, then you’re always going to stay
in that situation.”
Back in Anguilla, I asked Davis
what she aspired to as a child.
“I wanted to go all over the
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
world,” she declared. “I wanted
to go to Canada.”
Today, she talks of making it to
Jackson, the state capital 100 miles
to the south, or to Memphis, 200
miles north, where she reckons
she’d have higher odds of finding a job—any job. At the moment,
though, she’s got little in the way
of means to make this happen, and
those faraway cities, which are facing their own tough times, might as
well be in another country.
“Tell them to come help us. We
need some real help down here,”
Davis said when asked if she had a
message for people outside the Delta. “We sure need some help.”
DIFFERENT
STARTING LINES
In the book The Color of Wealth,
Lui and her co-authors take on
those who would suggest that
enough help has already been given,
or that people in Davis’ shoes just
haven’t tried hard enough.
“Individual effort does make a
difference in financial success, compared to how the same individual
would have fared without putting
forth an effort,” they wrote. “But
Americans begin the race from different starting lines. Not only do
well-off people, primarily whites,
have significant head starts, but
even many working-class whites