Dockery Plantation

Okay. Here it is. The birthplace of the blues. Charlie Patton, the first man to record the blues, worked here on this plantation. There were 2,000 sharecroppers, a doctor, a store, a church. The sharecroppers worked all year, charging their meat, meal and molasses at the company store. Once a year, there was a reckoning. And usually the plantation owner reckoned that he was owed more than the sharecropper had earned.

It was a hard, hard life. I haven't been able to express yet just how hard it was. But at least it was a way of life. A sharecropper could raise a family this way, and many people in the Delta now can't provide anything for their families.

Charlie played the blues, and he went to Memphis and recorded. He came back and played the blues at night and fooled around with other men's wives during the day. There was a romance to being a blues man that sharecropping couldn't match, and almost all the early bluesmen had lots of women troubles for that reason. That, and they fact that they played at night and were hanging around the shacks by day when the other men were in the field.

It is pretty well assumed that the blues began with field hollars: While working in the fields, a man sings out "I'm gonna get up in the morning and leave this place." A man a few rows over replies "Oh, yeah, I'm gonna get up in the morning and leave this place." Others join in, and they have a blues song, with the mournful sound it deserves and a hint of the African rhythms they've carried with them.

In the days before mechanical cotton pickers, the Dockery Plantation couldn't have survived without the sharecroppers. (It's said it takes a man and a mule for every acre of cotton.) And the blues wouldn't have been created without the Dockery Plantation.

Missionaries

We were on the bus bright and early the next morning, with Langston Hughes's "Weary Blues" and Robert Johnson's "Crossroad Blues" for the sounds of the day.

Our first stop was the Cleveland Baptist Church. We'd already heard that almost all the Delta is Baptist, of one variety of another. When you see the suffering, you understand how strong a support the religion must be to keep the people going.

The Cleveland Baptist Church was our particular destination because it was one of the many churches in the Delta that offered a Chinese "mission" school for Chinese children, who were not allowed in the white schools. The schools were often run by retired Baptist missionaries. There was a lawsuit by a Chinese father who wanted his child to attend the white schools that went all the way to the Supreme Court. In its wisdom, the Court ruled that the white schools were not required to accept Chinese children. It was good marketing on behalf of the Baptists, however, because most of the Chinese became Baptist.

It's interesting that these same churches didn't see a need to provide schools for black children.

Charlie Patton,

I think I told you already, is known as the father of the blues. Lots more about that later. But here is one of his songs about the great flood.

High Water Everywhere
Looky here, the water dug out,
Lordy, levee broke,
Rolled most everywhere.

The Water at Greenville and Leland,
Lord,it done rise everywhere.

(spoken: boy, you can't never stay here.)

I would go down to Rosedale,
but they tell me there's water there.

Randy Newman's "Sail Away"

was the song from the second day of the workshop. Here is a photo from the Chinese Cemetery. The Chinese came to the Delta from the 1890's, first to work on the railroads, then to open grocery stores, sometimes several in one little town. Considered neither black nor white, they could be buried in neither cemetery. Someone went against the law to sell them the land for this cemetery, which is still used. The Chinese are still buried here, although most of them are Baptists. The young woman from Bangladesh said that in her country, Muslims, of whatever color, are buried in the Muslim cemetery and the same with Christians.
Next, we visited the "African American" cemetery and then went on to Greenville, the "Queen of the Delta" to visit the synagogue I described earlier. Then on the flood museum, documenting the 1927 flood.
It wasn't even lunchtime yet, and we already had a feeling for the diversity of peoples here on this fertile delta when cotton was still king.

A Short Diversion

I'm writing this from the Deutsche Sommer Schule Atlantic, in Kingston RI. We've been visited and spent time with two German rappers from Berlin, Pyrana and Chefket. I'm grateful for the experience, and they love rap, but it felt familiar, in a not good way, when they talked about the beginnings of rap in the South Bronx and, it felt to me, glossed over the pain and crime and suffering there. And out of all that came the media making money off the music. There's a straight line from the Blues to Rap, I think, and the suffering that created them is forgotten in the rush of the powerful to make money.

The Mississippi River

This is about as close as we could get -- and it was taken from the top of an observation tower.

"The Fatal Flood of 1927"

is another great documentary we saw on the bus that first day. The 27 flood has parallels to the Katrina disaster and was also a big turning point in the history of the Delta.

There's also a recent book about it that it very good, Rising Tide. The short version of the story is that the blacks could have been evacuated, but the planters didn't want to risk that they would never come back to grow cotton, so they forced them to stay and shot them if they refused to work on the levee.