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.

Half Commanche Indian and half Dane

That's the guy on the right. The woman on the left is his wife, who showed up every day in the blistering heat with a different pretty sundress, sweet as a morning glory.

Everything I've described from the geography, through LaLee's Kin and Reggie Barnes, happened on the first day. In the late afternoon, we took a bus to a state park on the levee. You can't really SEE the river most places, because of the levees. In fact, some of the kids here have lived five miles or less from the river and have never seen it. Even at the park, we could only see it from a distance. A fried catfish dinner was served at the park. The river began to become almost a mythic entity to me, then, something like the Oracle at Delphi. Although we were never far from the river, that was the closest we ever actually got to it.

It's the third biggest river in the world, and is incredibly dangerous. Sometimes currents flow in both directions at one time, with whirlpools besides. I began to understand Mark Twain and Huck Finn a lot better at about that point.

Oh yeah,

Reggie Barnes is the man on the left. The one on the right is the incredible Luther Brown. I met so many people on this trip, and heard about so many more, that used their lives to accomplish amazing things, that I feel rightfully humbled.

Reggie Barnes, past superintended of West Tallahatchie Schools

Mr. Barnes is featured in the documentary "LaLee's Kin." He had been hired to bring up the district schools from probationary status: they were in danger of being taken over by the state because of the low test scores.

He did bring up the scores. They've gone down again now that he's left. At the time the documentary was being made, while he knew his students lived in poverty, he didn't realize that some of them had no running water and had to bathe in 5 gallon buckets.

He's accomplished amazing things. He ended his talk by telling us, in different words, that teaching, that helping these kids, is a task put on us by God, and that one day we'll have to account for our actions if we don't care enough and act like we care enough.

When you see the documentary, you'll see how much he's aged. That was some job he had, and damn, he put everything into it.

Luther Brown's briefcase

I haven't said enough about Luther Brown yet. He is the head of the Delta Center for Culture and Education and was the leader of the workshop. Despite the fact that he is a geologist, (or something scientific like that), and he was born in Bermuda, he has become the saint of the Delta. He knows everyone and everything and works and works to bring people to the Delta, partly because he loves history and the blues, I think, but mostly because he want to help the people of the Delta. The blues are blue for a reason -- the Delta is a tragic place.

Laylee's Kin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4xVyYjD34o

Please look at this except from this great documentary about the connection between illiteracy and poverty. I haven't figured out yet how to actually embed the video in my post. Anyone who can help me with that, please let me know.

This documentary was filmed in West Tallahatchie County -- one of the poorest counties in the US. (And yes, it contains the bridge from the song "The Day That Billie Joe McAlaster jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge" and yes, I saw all the bridges that it could possibly refer to)

If you care about poverty or educating the poor, you really need to see this. It is just now available to buy from HBO.

I haven't found the right map to show

you yet. So just picture a diamond shaped area on the west side of Mississippi where it borders the Mississippi River. It's in between the Mississippi and the Yazoo River, "the Nile of the New World", one of the most altered landscapes in the world, where a swampy wilderness, an alluval plain that flooded yearly was turned into incredibly fertile farmland. I'm told that, most place topsoil is measured in inches, but here it goes down a foot and a half.

I haven't found the right map to show

Bibliography of the Delta

You don't believe me how important it is and has been? Just look at this partial bibliograpy:

A Bibliography for The Mississippi Delta updated 1/25/10

Asch, Chris Myers. 2008. The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer. New Press.

Aiken, Charles S. 1998. The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Ambrose, Stephen and Douglas Brinkley. 2002. The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation. Washington D. C. National Geographic Society.

Anderson, LLC. 2002. Separate, But Equal. New York: Public Affairs.

Black, Patti (ed.). 1980. Mules and Mississippi. Mississippi Dept. Archives and History.

Black, Patti and Barnwell, Marion. 2002. Touring Literary Mississippi. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi

Blackmon, Douglas A. 2008. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II. Doubleday. $29.95.

Barnwell, Marion. 1997. A Place Called Mississippi: Collected Narratives. University Press of Mississippi.

Barry, John M. 1998. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America. New York: Touchstone.

Beito, David and Linda. 2009. Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis. 1995. Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table. American Heritage Custom Publishing Group.

Boardman, Eunice (ed.). 2002. A Journey of the Blues. Mississippi Valley Blues Society. Accompanied by a CD.

Brent, Linda. 1973. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.

Brown, Luther. 2006. Inside Poor Monkey's. Southern Spaces. http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2006/brown/1a.htm

Brownderville, Greg Alan. 2005. Deep Down in the Delta: Folktales and Poems. The Doodlum Brothers Press.

Buchanan, Minor Ferris. 2002. Holt Collier: His Life, His Roosevelt Hunts, and the Origin of the Teddy Bear. Centennial Press of Mississippi.

Campbell, Will D. 1992. Providence. Georgia: Longstreet Press, Inc.

Canon, Sybil Reynolds (ed.). 2005. Rice in the Mississippi Delta: Yesterday, Today and Forever. Delta Rice Services, Inc.

Clay, Maude Schuyler and Lewis Nordan. 1999. Delta Land. University Press of Mississippi.

Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. 1959 and 1975, DeCapo Press.

Charters, Samuel. The Poetry of the Blues. 1963. Avon Books.

Charters, Samuel. The Roots of the Blues, and African Search. 1981. DeCapo Press.

Cheseborough, Steve. 2001. Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues. University Press of Mississippi.

Clark, Eric, for the Mississippi Legislature. 2001. Mississippi Official and Statistical Register. State of Mississippi.

Cobb, James . 1992. The Most Southern Place on Earth: the Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cobb, James C. 1995. The Mississippi Delta and the World: the Memoirs of David L. Cohn. Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press.

Cohn, David L. 1948. Where I was Born and Raised. London: University of Notre Dame Press.

Cohn, Lawrence. 1993. Nothing But the Blues. Abbeville Press.

Colletta, John Philip. 2000. Only a Few Bones: A True Account of the Rolling Fork Tragedy and its Aftermath. Direct Decent.

Cowdrey, Albert E. 1996. This Land, This South: An Environmental History. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky.

Cox, James L. 2001. The Mississippi Almanac. Computer Search and Research.

Crowe, Chris. 2003. Getting Away With Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case. Dial Books.

Curry, Constance [et al.]. 2000. Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement. Georgia: The University of Georgia Press.

Curry, Constance. 1995. Silver Rights. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.

Dattel, Gene. 2009. Cotton and Race in the Making of America: the Human Costs of Economic Power. Ivan R. Dee, Publisher.

Daniel, Pete. 1986. Breaking the Land: the transformation of cotton, tobacco, and rice cultures since 1880. University of Chicago Press.

Daniel, Pete. 1997. Deep’n As it Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood. Oxford University Press.

Daniel, Pete. 2000. Lost Revolutions: the South in the 1950s. USA: Smithsonian Institute.

Davis, Francis. 1995. The History of the Blues: the Roots, the Music, the People: From Charley Patton to Robert Cray. New York: Hyperion

Dollard, John. 1949. Caste and Class in a Southern Town. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.

Dunbar, Tony, Patty Still and Anthony Dunbar. 1990. Delta Time: A Journey Through Mississippi. Pantheon Books.

David Honeyboy Edwards, Janis Martinson, and Michael Robert Frank. The World Don't Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards. 1997. Chicago Review Press.

Egerton, John. 1994. Speak Now Against the Day: the Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press.

Faulkner, John. 1942. Dollar Cotton. A Hill Street Classics Book.

Faulkner, William. 1993. Absalom, Absalom!. New York: Random House, Inc.

Faulkner, William. 1995. If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms]. Vintage International.

Ferris, William. 1978. Blues From the Delta. New York: Da Capo Press.

Ferris, William. 2009. Give My Poor Heart Ease. the University of North Carolina Press.

Field, Claire T. 2002. Mississippi Delta Women in Prison. NewSouth Books.

Gage, Melissa and Justin Gage. 2009. Memphis and the Delta Blues Trail. The Countryman Press.

Gates, Henry Louise Jr. 1995. Colored People. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, Inc.

Griffin, Farah Jasmine. 1995. Who Set You Flowin'? Oxford University Press.

Hamilton, Mary. 1992. Trails of the Earth. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.

Hermann, Janet Sharpe. 1999. The Pursuit of a Dream. Banner Books.

Hightower, Sheree, Cathy Stanga, and Carol Cox. 1994. Mississippi Observed. University Press of Mississippi.

Holditch, Kenneth and Leavitt, Richard. 2002. Tennessee Williams and the South. University Press of Mississippi.

Holley, Donald. 2000. The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South. University of Arkansas Press.

Holland, Endesha Ida Mae. 1997. From the Mississippi Delta. Simon and Schuster.

Holloway, Joseph E. 1990. Africanisms in American Culture. Indiana University Press.

Howell, Elmo. 1998. Mississippi Back Roads: Notes on Literature and History. Langford and Associates.

Huffman, Alan, and Florence West Huffman. 1997. Ten Point: Deer Camp in the Mississippi Delta. University Press of Mississippi.

Hudson, Winson, and Constance Curry. 2002. Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter. Palgrave-MacMillan.

Hurt, R. Douglas (ed.). 2003. African American Life in the Rural South. University of Missouri Press.

Imes, Birney. 1994. Partial to Home. Washington D. C.: Smithsonian Institution.

Imes, Birney and Richard Ford. 2002. Juke Joint. University Press of Mississippi.

Jesse Jackson (Foreword), Mamie Till-Mobley, Christopher Benson. 2003. Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America . Random House.

Johnston, Michael. 2003. In the Deep Heart’s Core. Grove Press.

Jones, Fernando. 2009. I Was There When the Blues Was Red Hot. Amazon.

Kap, Stann, Diane Marchall and John T. Edge. 1998. Deep South. Lonely Planet Publications.

Kirkpatric, Marlo Carter. 1999. Mississippi Off the Beaten Path. Old Saybrook, CT.

Kubik, Gerhard. 1999. Africa and the Blues. University Press of Mississippi.

Lawrence, Jacob. 1992. The Great Migration. Museum of Modern Art.

Lee, Chana Kai. 1999. For Freedom’s Sake: the Life of Fanny Lou Hamer. University Press of Illinois.

Lemann, Nicholas. 1991. The Promised Land: An Account of Sharecropping Families in Their Journey from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago. Pan McMillan.

Lemann, Nicholas. 2006. Redemption: the Last Battle of the Civil War. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Levine, Lawrence W. 1977. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lomax, Alan. 1993. The Land Where the Blues Began. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

McDowell, Fred and Dan Bowden. 1996. Fred McDowell The Voice of Mississippi Delta Blues Guitar. Mel Bay Publications.

Mathur, Anuradha and da Cunha, Dilip. 2001. Mississippi Floods. Connecticut: Yale University Press.

Mastran, Shelley S. 2002. Your Town: Mississippi Delta. Princeton Architectural Press.

Mauskopf, Norman, and Randall Kenan. 1997. A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta. Twin Palms Publishing.

Metress, Christopher. 2002. The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. University Press of Virginia.

Morris, Willie. 2002. My Mississippi. University Press of Mississippi.

Moye, J. Todd, 2004. Let the People Decide: Black freedom and White resistance movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986. University of North Carolina Press.

Mills, Kay. 2007. This Little Light of Mine: the Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. The University of Kentucky Press.

Miles, Jim. 1994. A River Unvexed: A History and Tour Guide of the Campaign for the Mississippi River. Rutledge Hill Press Civil War Campaign Series.

McMillen, Neil R. 1990. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.

Nall, Hiram. 2001. From Down South to Up South: An Examination of Geography in the Blues. Midwest Quarterly 42(3): 306- 313.

Nelson, Lawrence J. 1999. King Cotton’s Advocate: Oscar Johnston and the New Deal. The University of Tennessee Press.

Newman, Mark. 2004. Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi. University of Georgia Press, not yet released.

Nicholson, Robert. 1998. Mississippi: The Blues Today. London: Blandford.

Norris, Randal. 2008. Highway 61: Heart of the Delta. University of Tennessee Press.

Oliver, Paul. 1968. Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition. New York: Da Capo Press, Inc.,

O’Neal, Jim and Amy van Single. 2002. The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine. Routledge.

Oshinsky, David M. 1996. Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow. New York: The Free Press.

Owens, Harry P. 1990. Steamboats and the Cotton Economy: River Trade in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. University Press of Mississippi.

Palmer, Robert. 1981. Deep Blues. New York: Penguin Books.

Payne, Charles M. 1995. I’ve Got the Light Freedom. California: University of California Press.

Percy, William Alexander. 1968. Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son. Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press.

Powdermaker, Hortense. 1967. After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Rankin, Tom. 1993. Sacred Space. University Press of Mississippi.

Robertson, David. 2009. W. C. Handy: the Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues. Alfred A. Knopf.

Saikku, Mikko. 2001. The Evolution of Place: Patterns of Environmental Change in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta from the Ice Age to the New Deal. Renvall Institute Publications, University of Helsinki.

Saikku, Mikko. 2005. This Delta, This Land: An Environmental History of the Yazoo-Mississippi Floodplain. University of Georgia Press.

Saikku, Mikko. 2010. Bioregional Approach to Southern History: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. Southern Spaces.

http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2010/saikku/1a.htm

Salvatore, Nick. 2005. Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America. Little, Brown, and Co.

Saucier, Roger. 1994. Geomorphology and Quaternary Geologic History of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Mississippi: U .S. Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station.

Sayre, Maggie. 1995. ed. By Tom Rankin. Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre: Photographs of a River Life. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.

Shearer, Cynthia. 2005. The Celestial Jukebox. Shoemaker & Hoard.

Schweid, Richard. 1992. Catfish and the Delta: Confederate Fish Farming in the Mississippi Delta. Ten Speed Press.

Segrest, James, and Mark Hoffman. 2004. Moanin' at Midnight : The Life and Times of Howlin' Wolf, Pantheon Books.

Sillers, Florence Warfield (compiler). 1948. The History of Bolivar County. Hederman Brothers, 1948.

Smith, Thomas Ruys. 2007. River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain. LSU Press.

Starr, Kathy. 1989. The Soul of Southern Cooking. University Press of Mississippi.

Taulbert, Clifton. 1995. When We Were Colored. New York: Penguin Group.

Taylor,William Banks and Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. 1999. Down on Parchman Farm: The Great Prison in the Mississippi Delta. The Ohio State University Press.

Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. 1981. Bantam Classics.

Vollers, Maryanne. 1995. Ghosts of Mississippi: the Murder of Medgar Evers, the Trials of Byron De La Beckwith and the Haunting of the New South. Canada: Little, Brown & Company Limited

Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. 2004. Amistad Press.

Wardlow, Gayle Dean. 1998. Chasin’ That Devil Music. California: Miller Freeman Books.

Welty, Eudora. 1979. Delta Wedding. Harvest Books.

Welty, Eudora. 2003. Some Notes on River Country. University Press of Mississippi.

Whitfield, Stephen J. 1991. A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Willis, John C. 2000. Forgotten Time: the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War. Virginia: The University Press of Virginia.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. 2004. Mississippi Delta. Southern Spaces http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2004/wilson/3a.htm

Woodruff, Nan Elizabeth. 2003. American Congo : The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta. Harvard University Press.

Woods, Clyde. 2000. Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. Verso Books.

Work, John W., Lewis Wade Jones and Samuel C. Adams, Jr. (Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov, Eds.). 2005. Lost Delta Found. Vanderbilt Univ. Press.

Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s Children. 1936. Harper Collins.

Luther Brown, Delta Center for Culture and Learning

Wow, I forgot to tell you

just how varied a group we were. We also had teachers from Bangledash and Brazil, and a music professor from Turkey.

Cleveland, Mississippi

So Cleveland is just a straight shot down Highway 61 from Memphis. It's a small town, the home of Delta University. Delta is completely integrated: one half white students and one half black. Because of the white Christian academy system so widespread in the south, many of the students have never been to school with a person of another color until they are college freshmen. While this has a lot in common with the system in Monsey, New York, that's a subject for another day.

The seminar started with a reception in the Railroad Museum in Cleveland, which is filled with an itsy tiny version of the delta in minature railroad fashion. The forty participant were mostly there, and we were a bit wary of each other. It took another day before we realized that teachers who actually want to spend a week in the Delta studying this stuff have a lot in common to talk about. And we did. Talk. A lot. We came from Utah, and the Midwest and Washington DC and New Orleans and New Jersey and mostly, we loved the same things. Kids and history and learning. Here's a photo of the Railroad Museum.

The Lorraine Motel and Soul Food

I think I'm gonna quit using the phrase "soul food." It's just what I grew up eating. From now on, it's gonna be just "food." We ate at the restaurant where Martin Luther King, Jr. had his last meal. Catfish, mashed potatoes, really well-seasoned green beans, corn bread, sweet tea, and peach cobbler. And then, stuffed with sugar and fat, rolled on the Civil Right Center at the Lorraine Motel, where King was shot.

He was there to support the sanitation workers strike. Some of those in the marches (not members of any of the organizations) broke store windows, which provoked a violent police response and severe beating of innocent marchers. He was discouraged about the future of the movement, which he saw as helping the poor, living isolated in poverty in a country of wealth. His last speech, the "I Have Been To The Top Of The Mountain" which was informal, last minute, without any notes or text, was magnificent. He looked bone tired, and he knew already he would die young: "I may not get there with you." But he ended with declaring "I fear no man."

The next afternoon, he was shot on the balcony of the motel, on his way to dinner with other leaders of the civil rights movement to discuss how to put together a peaceful demonstration in support of the sanitation workers.

Po'Monkeys

In the middle of a cotton field, in an unpainted board sharecropper's shack with a tin roof, festooned with Christmas light, unairconditioned, unlicensed, and hot as hell. That's Po'Monkeys. He works as a sharecropper during the day and on Thursday nights, he opens his home to visitors. You pay a five dollar cover charge to a woman just inside the door. Through the kitchen door, you buy beer, soda, or water for 2$. The bringing of your own hard liquor is tolerated and practiced openly and with passion. When there isn't live music, there's a DJ. It's as crowded as possible, and with all the stuffed monkeys and tinsel hanging from the ceiling, as surely a fire hazard as I've every seen. You sweat more than you ever have in a hot yoga class. Strangers appear to be warmly welcomed.

There's a blues trail marker outside, and Larry, Po'Monkey's friend, has surrounded it with a chain link fence and razor wire to protect it.

So that's a jook joint. I'd heard my father describe them, but I had no idea.

Pictures to follow.

Delta Food

I gave in and had a Delta cream doughnut and I could easily eat another dozen.

Battered, deep-fried pickle slices.

Food we've been offered by the workshop as symbolic of the Delta:
fortune cookies, hot tamales, fried pork rind, some other things I can't remember.

Shalom, ya'll

Unfortunately, the photos and video will have to come later. I'm having problems with them, and we're on such a tight schedule that I don't have time to mess with them.

The greeting above was given to us by the president of the congregation of the Jewish Reform Temple in Greenville, Mississippi. He actually refers to the building as a "church."

There have been Jews in the Delta since the 1820's, but most didn't come until after the civil war. One small town had both an Orthodox and a Conservative congregation. We watched a documentary and some local Jews claimed they had never experienced anti-Semitism and they consider themselves Southern first, and Jewish second-- although most of them appear to want, to the point of insisting, that their children marry other Jews.

The Dutch dinner. The congregation in Greenville has a big fundraising dinner every year. It's so big that member of local churches have to help them put in on. The special food is ordered from Chicago and, from all the newspapers accounts, it appears to be a well-loved ritual in this small town that was once known as "The Queen of the Delta." Of course, the menu is actually German, the meat ordered from a German butcher, because "Deutsch" was heard as Dutch, and besides, everybody hated the Germans, anyway. I don't know how many of the happy diners know the truth about the origins of their fool

Although all of the Jews I heard speak downplayed any antisemitism as much as possible (and I heard resentment expressed towards the Jewish young people who came down from up north to help with the civil rights movement), I have to wonder. Two temples were bombed in Mississippi during those violent times, one of them in Jackson. How could that not have frightened them. It sounds too much to me like the Jews who stayed too late in Germany, believing that their assimilation would save them. I don't have the right to judge, I know that. They were in a precarious situation. And, in the end, it turned out all right for them. This time, at least.

The Jews are finally leaving the Delta, as the children go off to colleges and become professionals and then move to urban areas. The congregations grow smaller each year.

Things I have to tell you about tomorrow

There was never prohibition in this part of Mississipppi,

There's a pink building downtown with sign that says "Delta Cream Doughnuts" that's calling my name.

The Senator's Place.

There's a recipe for moonshine on a sign at the park we went to today.

There were actually a bunch of people in the workshop who'd never eaten catfish before -- what's wrong with them?

"Where ya from" means "Where were you born?" and not "Where do you live", but "Where YOU from?" means you better correct your manners right away. And it may be too late, anyway.

Short post tonight, on account of doing

too much today. Which includes eating. I didn't know anyone could make banana pudding on nilla wafers as good as my mom's. I forgot that eating is the major life activity in the south. Food is so important here that the mascot of Delta University is the Fighting Okra. That's right. The Fighting Okra.

The Flood of 27, the Mississippi River, genetically engineered cotton, the schools in Tallahatchie County, generational illiteracy, really good biscuits and cornbread made like it should be, with no sugar, and fresh butterbeans.... too much to tell tonight.

Highway 61, from Memphis to Cleveland

starts off with the big riverboat casino billboards. A gigantic Paula Deen urges me to try the buffet at one casino -- they've added 25 of her dishes. Since the only recipe I ever saw of hers was a bread pudding made with Krispy Kreme doughnuts, I can't imagine folks eating a whole meal of her food.

There's a little swamp, with cypress trees and their knobby knees, and then the flat land on both sides of the highway is deeply green with cotton on both sides. I didn't know they still grew cotton in Mississippi.

And, of course, it reminds me of his father and his story about his own father hiring him out for 25 cents to an uncle to chop cotton when he should have been in school. My father was never one for letting the truth get in the way of a really good story, but that one has a feel of truth about it.

Other than the occasional field of corn, taller than I am and already dry and yellow, there's mostly cotton for the two hour drive.

My mother's father came from Mississippi, and my father said some of his did, too. I wonder what he'd think about his trip of mine.

The roads are better than I expected, and the few schools I've seen have been new and clean-looking. I wonder if it's the money from the casinos? When I was a girl, the roads got worse the minute you crossed the Mississippi/Alabama line. Still, Mississippi came with a hint of sophistication and romance: my mother's best clothes when she was in college came from Meridan and she was always proud of that. And going to college in a dry county, my father would cross the state line late at night to buy moonshine.

I, however, have been unable to find a store from which to buy wine to stock the little refrigerator in my room. To my suprise, I have been able to find soy milk and rice cheese. Who knew?

Just because I've spent my adult life

claiming I could never be a southerner, doesn't change this basic, fundamental truth. People are nicer here. They just are. I can't help it. I wish it weren't true. Everybody smiles and wants to know how I'm doing and they aren't just being polite because they ask follow-up questions that show they are listening. They ALL smile all the time and joke gently with their fellow workers. It's sad, but it's nice. It's really nice. I love New York best, but I can't imagine what it would be like if everyone smiled and were in a good mood and took extra care to be kind to strangers and to always joke with everyone around them in Times Square for example. What would that be like?

More photos from Memphis

This is the photograph of the original Peabody duckmaster. Everyday at 11, the ducks are marched from the roof, by way of the elevator, to the fountains in the lobby. At 5, the process is reversed.

The original owner of the hotel came back from a hunting trip with his live duck decoys, and probably as drunk as someone coming home from a hunting trip usually is, he decided to keep them in the fountain. I remember stories of hunting parties in my family that ended with a person of high repute shooting a buck decoy and not being able to figure out why it didn't fall. For either one of these stories, my first instinct is: drunk? And hunting? And only ducks in fountains and shot-ridden decoys as collateral damage? It could be much, much worse.

Drivin' South

I loved Memphis, but I can't see myself there. With my trusty GPS, I headed south this morning into Mississippi and down to Cleveland. Route 61 S is known as the Blues Highway. There are signs everywhere about Mississippi being the home of America's music. I wonder how the residents feel about their history being turned into a tourist attraction. If they're anything like Floridians, Mississippians are grateful for anything that brings in a way to make a living. And at least the blues history here is real, or more real than the pirates and Indian that make up Florida's instant history.

Or how do I know that? Maybe I'm just part of the whole elaborate hoax, like the Gasparilla Festival in Tampa or the Chasco Fiesta in New Port Richey with fake pirates for the one and fake Indians and Spaniards for the other.

I'll let you know if I can figure anything out. For the record, here are the last of my photos from Memphis. Above is another view of the gorgeous Peabody Lobby.

Okay,

so just be patient, my loyal followers, while I'm figuring out how to post the correct photos. The "Drinks to Go" joint is on Beale street, right around the corner from the Peabody. Some places have signs informing would-be patrons to leave their guns at home. From that, I have come to the assumption that, unless notified otherwise, you're welcome to bring your gun anywhere, including a joint where everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, has had waay too much to drink.

It's perfectly legal to walk down the street drinking alcohol, as long as it is in a cup and not a bottle.

And most joints on Beale Street have the "To Go" windows.

The ducks in the fountain -- that is the lobby of the Peabody. It was built on cotton money when the Delta cotton-growing was at its height and, at that time, it was said you could stand in the Peabody Lobby and see anyone who was anybody in the Delta. On my journey, it represents that extreme wealth generated by the cotton grown in fertile soil of the Delta.

Actually,

You may have guessed that the photo above was NOT, in fact, of the Peabody Lobby. That's a catfish joint across the street. It expresses the non-Peabody part of Memphis pretty well. I'm going to try again for some photos of the Peabody.

Memphis

Since "they" say that the Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, that's where I started.

I'm going to Cleveland....

Mississippi, that is.

"The Mississippi Delta is simultaneously a unique place and a place that has influenced the American story like no other. This paradox is summed up in two simple statements. Historian James Cobb has described the Delta as 'The most Southern place on earth.' At the same time, the National Park Service has said 'Much of what is profoundly American- what people love about America- has come from the delta, which is often called 'the cradle of American culture.'"

(from the website for the NEH summer workshop "The most Southern place on earth.")