The Delta

Passing the outskirts of Tunica, the landscape flattened. Cotton fields spread out to the right and left. I was entering the great Mississippi Delta.

 The Delta is bordered on the west by the Mississippi River and some 70 miles to the east by the Choctaw Ridge, the beginning of the Mississippi hill country. The Yazoo Delta, as this section is known, sits atop some fifty feet of rich, black soil, deposited by eons of flooding by the Mississippi, before it was contained by the levees. These levees were built at about the same time that the flour, milled fourteen hundred miles north, shipped off the docks at the Pillsbury A Mill. Both the flour and the levees were the product of strenuous physical labor - labor that was voluntary and remunerative at the Northern end of the river and completely the opposite at the Southern end.

The vast farms of both western Minnesota and the flat plains of the Dakotas were peopled largely by Scandinavian and German immigrants. Having sold virtually all they had in order to start a new life, these folks were just beginning to enjoy the rewards and benefits that flowed from hard work and equal opportunity. No one gave them anything - but no one took anything from them either. They spoke English, just barely, and when they did, it was through a heavy accent. They were largely illiterate and could not read or write the language of their new country. But they were among their fellows, their countrymen, some a generation removed from the homeland. The freedom assured by the laws and Constitution their new country allowed them to help and encourage one another and to prosper. And they were all, every one of them, white.

In the levee camps, the workers too, spoke with a heavy accent. They too, were illiterate. But they were not aided or encouraged in their efforts to build better lives, as were their neighbors to the north. And they were all, virtually every one of them, black.