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.

The Black Code

After the defeat of Reconstruction in the mid-to-late 1800's, the State of Mississippi was the first to enact a set of laws that became to be known as The Black Code. These were laws which specifically spelled out offences which, when committed by a person of color, could be punished by an equally specific sentence. No distinctions were made as to age or gender. These laws were applied universally across the entire non-white population. Offences ranged from Insolence (as seen in the eye of the beholder) to Theft to Rape and Murder. The latter two, if committed against a member of the white population, were summarily dealt with via a common and accepted practice - lynch law. Cause of death always read the same, "death at the hands of unknown parties." Every non-white was at constant risk. For more on this subject, read David Oshinsky's excellent book: Worse Than Slavery--Parchment Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (Free Press Paperbacks/Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-684-83095-7)

"They worked us like rented mules…"

What the Black Code accomplished was a reinstitution of slavery via an ingenious phenomenon called Prisoner Leasing. Lacking facilities to house and manage a large and growing convict population, the State allowed the "leasing" of these prisoners to various business enterprises in need of labor. It was the responsibility of the enterprise to guard, maintain and direct those prisoners it had under lease. In the antebellum South, the most valuable property a landowner had, aside from the land itself, was the slave. As chattel, they had a high value. Owners had incentive to house, feed and maintain them in as healthy a condition as economically possible so that they could deliver the labor they were intended to supply. With the advent of prisoner leasing, all this changed. Not being "owned," but merely leased, and with a ready supply of replacements, prisoners could literally be worked to death. Records show annual mortality rates exceeding forty-five per cent.

The levees that rose to my right, huge earthen berms dug out of the heavy black bottomland, were the product of this system of labor. And as I headed for Clarksdale and the Delta Blues Museum, my plan was to visit later the source of much of that labor, the infamous Parchman Farm Prison.

The Museum

I arrived in Clarksdale (a guy named Muddy-something used to live and work around there), and followed the signs to the Delta Blues Museum. The Museum was housed (since moved to it’s own building) on the second floor of what was once the Clarksdale Library. As you enter, on the left is the cash register and counter stacked with CDs. Along the walls are posters advertising long- past appearances of various blues performers (some legendary, some not) and in the center of the room are library stacks containing reference books on blues and blues history. I prowled around, looking at various old guitars - BB King's Lucille, old Stellas, a National Steel, looked at pictures, thumbed through some books. I spent an hour. Signed the guest book. It was wonderful. Then I headed for Parchman Farm (a/k/a the Mississippi State Penitentiary).

"…where the Southern cross the Dog"

On the way to Parchman I drove through Tutwiler, MS. When I saw the sign, I wheeled off the road and headed into town, looking for the railroad crossing. It was in the train station in Tutwiler that W.C. Handy first heard the real-deal blues, played by some guy with a guitar using a jack knife for a slide. It was 1903. Handy was blown away. "…I'm goin' where the Southern cross the Dog…" the only verse Handy remembered from the tune he heard, was a reference to the intersection of the Southern Railway and the YMV (Yazoo Mississippi Valley Railroad), which was known variously as the Yellow Dog or just The Dog.

Maybe I wasn't alone in the car, but for some reason I thought of a verse Furry Lewis used in his version of John Henry, "…That Big Bend Tunnel on the YMV, gonna be the death of me" as I headed down Front Street, past The White Front Café & Joe's Hot Tomalleys, and the Tutwiler Funeral Home (a former garage), straight to the crossing. No station any more. No trains either. Not for thirty years. I took a picture of the overgrown, crooked tracks, northbound, headed for Memphis, the tracks that carried Mr. Handy, his head spinning with a new sound, on up to play a date somewhere, 96 years ago.

The Shooters

Then I drove on to Parchman Farm, where Bukka White served time for manslaughter ("...sef defense," he told me) and literally sang his way to freedom (the Governor dug it and pardoned him). There are no fences around Parchman, just twenty thousand acres of cotton fields covering some forty-six square miles. Cotton farming there is now pretty much all mechanized. But up until about fifteen years ago, inmates worked the fields, divided into gangs of one hundred each (The Long Line). They were guarded by six groups-of-two of their fellows, Trustee Guards, who were picked from the population because of their bad attitude, toughness and brutality. They were armed. One carried a shotgun and the other carried a 30-30 Winchester. They were called the Shooters.

If someone tried to cut and run, the first shot was fired by the shotgun Shooter, aimed low, at the legs. If he missed, or the escapee kept going, the next shot came from the 30-30 and was a shoot-to-kill round. If the runner died, the Shooters were given a pardon for "meritorious service" (God's truth...). The men in the work gang were called Gunmen (because they worked "under the gun"). Each gang had a lead man known as the Caller. He set the rhythm and pace of the work with call-and-response verses. A newspaperman who once heard this reported that the response was "…a sound that could literally knock you off your feet."

Parchman Farm

About a mile from the Parchman front gate a sign on the highway warns, "No Stopping Next Two Miles - State Prison." Of course, I stopped at the gate, got out of the car and took pictures. Two guards who told me it wasn’t such a good idea to be taking pictures immediately ran me off. As I approached the gate, on that mile or so of highway, I could see buildings in the distance, across a vast cotton field, low-slung and sinister, ringed by ribbon wire. These were the "camps." There were fifteen of them and they consisted of dormitories (called The Cage) and various outbuildings, the laundry, a mechanical shop, a canning facility, etc. Through the main gate, and well into the compound, stood the Superintendent's House (known as Front Camp), shielded from view by a copse of trees. The job of Superintendent was a patronage appointment and, very early on, it was decided that the State needed "a farmer" not a "penologist" to run the place. Parchman was to be run at a profit. And it was. In 1908, four years after it opened, it showed a profit of $800 per man, woman and child in residence (children were indeed in residence at Parchman - records show that the Black Code was blind to age, with a six- year old girl serving five years for "stealing a hat" and a ten-year old boy serving life for murder). By 1917, Parchman Farm was the single largest revenue source for the State of Mississippi. It was big business.

But no longer. Parchman's acreage is now leased to farmers and cultivation is completely mechanized. Prisoner's no longer "work the long line" and are largely confined to barracks in the "camps" spread through the institution. The sight of the Shooters and the call-and-response rhythm of the Caller are no more. I drove quickly on and swung west on Highway 8.