“During the depth of the Depression—we have not had anything ever in the class of that Great Depression—we lived not far from a penal farm.” Thinking of the story she was about to tell, she said: “But it was something terrible. One of the trusties up there worked in the homes of employees of the penal farm. Ah, it was something that electrified the Delta! This daughter of one of the warders there—they said she was having an affair with one of these black prisoners. Unheard of. But, anyway, the prisoner killed her father. And then they set out to capture him, and there was a reward of two thousand dollars. A big sum then. And this young planter’s son just walked into a barn loft to bring him down. And of course the prisoner shot him and killed him. Twenty-three or twenty-four, the handsomest man you ever saw, and a fine young man; but he just walked to his death. And then of course they took the black man and killed him. This happened about ten miles away from where we lived. And it just really upset everybody. But now we have rapes here all the time. It was a very, very rare thing then. Now they don’t seem to make much of it. I was a young woman, about twenty. It affected me very deeply. It was very tragic. But there were occasional instances of violence like that.”
We talked about the Emmett Till murder in 1955. Emmett Till (how extraordinary the names of people become when they are associated with big and tragic events) was a black youth who had been accused of whistling at or molesting a white woman, and had been killed. It was something that had added to Mississippi’s bad reputation.
Louise said: “Parts of my family were still living there in the Delta. And he did more than whistle at her. My brother had a drugstore in Sumner, where they had that trial. We are not that kind of people.” Louise was talking of the social distinctions of the Delta. Earlier, speaking of her family’s position as planters, she had said, “There are class divisions everywhere.” And she meant now that the woman who worked as a store clerk—like the woman Emmett Till had allegedly whistled at or molested—was of a different class. “My mother and sisters never worked in that commissary. We always had hired help.” “Commissary,” a plantation word, meaning the plantation store, where workers bought goods on trust, against their wages. “My father didn’t think it was a suitable place for the women of his family to be. All kinds of people came in there—sometimes drinking.”
I had already been struck, in Ellen’s account of her childhood, by the modest jobs that people of good family did. One of Ellen’s aunts had been a postmistress; and now Louise was reporting that her brother ran a drugstore. It was as though, in the poverty of the South, class was something in the mind and consciousness of a family, related to an idea of good behavior and seemliness.
Louise said, “The civil-rights movement altered everything. It’s good and it’s bad.” She added, the thought seeming to come to her by association, “I wouldn’t like to live anywhere where there are not any blacks. I’ve lived among them all my life and I like them. And right now”—and she meant in spite of the crime in Jackson, and although the city was moving towards a black majority and might soon even have a black mayor—“they are warmhearted and humorous. I would miss them. But—we have such a mass of them here in Jackson. And wherever they are they are in a mass, because they like their own kind of people, and they are not going to settle where there are not other black people—they’re lonely. This woman was in Iowa, and she was earning much more, but she came back here because it was lonely for her there. But they are forming gangs now in Jackson. If they could be scattered about the country, it would be better. But we are not Russia. We can’t do that.”
It was almost time for me to go. She half wanted to be free of the need to talk; but there was also a side of her that, having begun to talk, wished to go on. And once more she turned to her childhood in the Delta, when the land had been forest.
“We fed ourselves, but we lived below what would now be called the poverty line. It was a privilege to live in the Delta. At night we would hear animals in the forest. A panther. It sounded like a woman crying.”
Close again to her now in old age, when she lived alone, was the loneliness of her childhood, the solitude of the Delta.
“My stepmother used to tell the story of a lady called Miss Sunshine Easterling—Sunshine Easterling!—who wanted to go to a party. But there was no transportation except down the railroad track. So—away they went, down the track, with a handcar. Pumping it up and down, you know.”
I didn’t know, really. I had seen the handcars she mentioned only in American serial-thriller films when I was a child in Trinidad.
“And,” Louise said, “they were wrecked by a freight train, and Miss Sunshine Easterling was crippled for life. That story was to prevent us from yearning too much for a social life. We certainly were isolated in the Delta in those days.
“I remember one Christmas I got a most beautiful real beaver hat. It must have come from a store like Marshall Field, because there were no stores that had anything like that anywhere nearby. And there was nowhere for me to go with my beaver hat. So I put it on on Christmas afternoon and walked down the railroad track, hoping that someone would see me. But nobody did. I was twelve at the time.”
Sixty-seven years later, alone again, in a Jackson developed beyond her imagining, widowed, nearly all the adventures of her life in the past, she recalled that earlier memory of solitude. Outside, her overgrown garden, full of trees, the ground dry, yellow, waiting for rain.
SOME DAYS later (when the rain had come) I went to call on Eudora Welty and mentioned this story of Louise’s about the beaver hat. Miss Welty was only a year younger than Louise, and she knew the kind of hat Louise might have got for Christmas in 1920.
“Those hats were called Madge Evans hats. They were named after a child actress. They were sold only in one store in Jackson. Many-years later I met the child actress. Of course she wasn’t a child when I met her, but she had kept up with her acting career. I met her in New York. She was a little bit older than me. She said, ‘I know your work, because in one story you had a Madge Evans hat. I’m Madge Evans.’ She was a little girl like us when she wore the hat. The hat was wide-brimmed all around, with streamers that hung down your back as far as your waist. They were wonderful hats. And there were straw hats as well, for summer. In those days you wore hats all the time. You wore hats even to Sunday school.”
THERE WAS no longer the forest Louise had known in the Delta; and an embankment along the Mississippi now kept the flat land from flooding every year.
The land was so flat that the trees looked low. And—from the car—the fields of young cotton plants created long, hypnotic perspective lines zipping by: the green of the cotton plants alternating with the yellow or dark brown of the earth. But agriculture had fallen on hard times; and though there were still splendid plantations like the one called Egypt, the Delta was no longer the “one big cotton patch” of Louise’s description.
Egypt, though, gave a glimpse of the past, and of the social graces and divisions of the plantation culture. At the back of the estate house and the plantation commissary was the Yazoo River, very muddy, down which the barges still go; the last river steamer called there in 1932. In the cool estate house, at lunch, there was a sense of space, of great distances separating one from one’s neighbor. Books, the concern with history (Egypt had been in the possession of the same family for most of the century), and paintings (originals, mainly portraits, and reproductions), and even the small sculptured Negro head on the mantelpiece of the drawing room—all this suggested a culture far removed from the special Delta world of work.
Even during the lunch the pest-control people had been busy outside. And just beyond the gardens of the house were the level fields on which it all depended. A million dollars’ worth of equipment tilled and harvested and fertilized those fields. There would have been much less equipment in the old days; there would have been many more workers.
In the flat land the single line of the widely spaced houses of the few black workers who were now nee
ded stood out against the sky. In front of the houses, on the road—and seen very clearly, as though on a stage: the effect of the flatness of the land and the great height of the sky—the black children played, running about or cycling. In the estate house, at lunch, one might have been in Argentina, on an estancia. Outside, considering those workers’ houses, one might have been in some country in Africa—Kenya perhaps, if there had been hills in the background.
But cotton, though the prices had improved recently, was no longer absolutely king of the Delta. What the flatness of the land concealed from the highways was that many thousands of acres of Delta land were now given over to catfish-farming, as complicated and big and American-ingenious, and mechanized and risky, as any of the ventures of the Delta.
I drove early one morning from Jackson to witness a “harvesting” of some catfish ponds. The “ponds”—each about fifteen to twenty acres—had been seined the previous evening. The seines were like the seines one knew. But the dragging had been done by two tractors, one on each embankment; and the embankments were strewn with dusty dead fish, now less like fish than like a kind of leathery material. There were snakes in the ponds sometimes; and goldfish, flashing red in the seine and in the wire-netted hopper that lifted the fish into the trucks from the pond. Goldfish, things of beauty when seen one or two at a time, had become “trash fish” here, to be separated from the catfish at the processing plant, and either thrown away with the other trash fish that a pond attracts (sometimes dropped by birds), or ground into fertilizer.
Nature, manipulated, had gone slightly haywire. The goldfish had been introduced to eat the algae that had been giving a bad flavor to the catfish. But when the goldfish had flourished far too well—rather like the kudzu vine, the other great plague of Mississippi, which, introduced from Japan or China to prevent erosion in the hillier parts of the state, had so liked what it had found that it had overrun many square miles, racing up electric poles and pulling them down, killing trees, creating great festoons and swags everywhere, blanketing woodland with a thick, even growth of—almost literally—ineradicable vines (the kudzu had been introduced for that very reason, because its marvelous roots held so fast to the soil). Like the water hyacinth in the Congo River, the kudzu had become a strangler.
Flavor—that was the great problem with catfish. And that had so far not been solved by all the research of the processing plant and the Catfish Institute. Catfish, especially in the summer, could develop strange flavors: mud, or burned wood, or something with a petroleum tang.
So the processing plant carried out five or six flavor tests on fish that were ready to be harvested. The tail of a live fish was cut off, cooked, and tasted. The purchasing manager of the processing plant said, “We cut the fish with the skin still on. We don’t want to adulterate it in any way. It’s right off the truck, the tail is cut, and it’s into the microwave. It isn’t skinned or anything.”
The cooking and tasting was one man’s job. “Our taster can easily do two hundred samples a day. It varies. I’ve known him do as many as 350 samples a day. He has his own kind of method of cleansing his palate. If a fish is very much off flavor he will turn on the fan in his kitchen—because the one that’s off flavor will really smell up the test kitchen. Nowadays, in the summer, only two or three samples out of fifteen sent can be accepted. The rate of acceptance is higher in the winter.” And the catfish farmer could only hope that the ponds with the rejected samples would become all right, and that the fish there would on a later occasion pass the flavor test.
So the fish being loaded that morning into the processing-plant trucks had passed all but one of their tests. There was to be a very last one at the processing plant. For two days before their trip to the processing plant, the fish had not been fed, so that nothing might interfere with their flavor. Now, on flavor, and weighing from one to one and a half pounds, the fish were almost at the end of their eighteen-month farm cycle.
In a hatchery, a small covered shed, they could be seen at the beginning: eggs in troughs, in water kept at a constant eighty degrees, an electrically driven paddle taking the place of the waving tail of the male catfish; without that disturbance of the water the eggs would die. In five days life—beginning as a black speck—comes to the eggs; and then the fingerlings are released into the ponds, to start their eighteen-month life.
The ponds are aerated constantly, because without oxygen the fish will die. The oxygen content of the ponds is tested every two hours, day and night; a catfish farmer cannot stay away for too long from his fish. The food or grain fed to the catfish is regulated by computer. It is dropped at fixed times at the deep end of the pond. The fish swim to the deep end at feeding time. They are creatures of habit. They do not eat if they are fed irregularly or fed too much. If there are too few catfish in a pond the fish do not eat enough to put on marketable weight, because (as it appears) the lessening of competition makes the creatures as “laid back” as the wild fish that feed at the bottom of rivers. How much, then—how much experimentation and accident and loss—had gone into the rearing of those fish being loaded that early morning into the trucks of the processing plant!
The plant was in the small town of Indianola. The workers from the processing rooms were sitting out in their lunch hour, in the broken shade of pine trees, across the paved road from the plant. They wore blood-stained white gowns and what looked like plastic shower caps. Most of these workers were black, and many of them were women. They sat on wooden stools at wooden tables and ate their lunch snacks. A number of them were eating hamburgers—workers in one food processing industry eating the products of another food-processing industry: the give-and-take of industrial society.
When lunch was over the process resumed. The trucks of the processing plant released the fish they had brought—in well water, to keep the fish as clean as possible—into a metal cage. The fish were lifted in this cage and delivered into an electrical stunner, a box painted green. And they were passed down from there to the processing lines, inside the building, in a room noisy with machinery, to be de-headed, eviscerated, and skinned.
De-headed, eviscerated, and skinned—the purchasing manager, who was showing us around, spoke the difficult words as easily as, in another age, people would have spoken of criminals being hanged, drawn, and quartered. Something of that process was involved here. But the emphasis in the fish plant was on speed, speed to preserve the freshness of the fish, which were to be kept alive to the very last moment, then de-headed, eviscerated, and skinned in a flat three and a half minutes, and immediately afterwards put (at least, the fillets or steaks or strips or nuggets) into very cold water mixed with ice. The ice was important at that stage: every detail in this process had been worked out. The ice, the purchasing manager said, rubbed up against the cut or filleted fish and acted as yet another cleansing agent. The fish were completely processed, ready for market, in thirty minutes.
“And so,” the purchasing manager said, “the customer can eat for dinner that evening a fish that was alive in the morning. This is a degree of freshness that cannot be equaled by any other aquaculture product. As far as seafood goes, forget it. Some of the seafood’s been lying on a boat for four, five days before the boat gets back to dock.”
“De-heading”—the word was new to me. But it was absolutely right. A man can be beheaded; a man is not de-headed any more than a fish is beheaded; and “de-headed” suggested the industrial process involved. Part of the speed of the operation depended on the skill of the de-header or, as the purchasing manager said, the head-sawyer. A good head-sawyer could cut fifty-five heads a minute. But the fish had to be well stunned, and not wriggling about; the stunner in the green box had to work. Men and women both did the head-sawing job. The woman I studied for a while wore yellow gloves and slid the stunned fish at a great rate against a vertical bandsaw. The evisceration was done by suction, by a machine such as I had seen, nearly twenty years before, in what had remained of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row in Monterey, C
alifornia. Outside, the entrails and other bloody matter of the processed fish poured down from two hoppers into red trucks, to be taken away somewhere, perhaps (but I didn’t ask) to be turned into fertilizer.
In the office building there was order and silence; and the girls were white. In the waiting room there was a photograph in color of two pretty white girls who were Miss Catfish 1985 and Miss Catfish 1986.
In Cannery Row in 1969 I had been shown around silent, disused machinery by the man who had bought it and was hoping to sell it. He told me that machinery—even as involved and long-winded as the canning machinery appeared to be—wasn’t difficult, once you “lived” it. And I felt that the president (and the purchasing manager) of this processing plant “lived” catfish in that way. But Cannery Row was a dead place, and Sam Hinote was building up a new industry.
He was forty-five. He had been born in Alabama and had gone to Auburn University. The name brought back my evening drives to that town and to the nearby town of Opelika, for dinner, when I was staying at Tuskegee. And, remembering something I had been told at Tuskegee about the comparative merits of the veterinary departments of the two universities, I said, “Auburn. But that’s the rival of Tuskegee, the black university.”
Sam Hinote smiled. I was a visitor; he was tolerant. He said, “Tuskegee is a black school. But Auburn is not its rival. Auburn’s rival is Alabama State University.”
He had started his professional life as an economist, a market analyst dealing with grain prices and other commodity prices. Then, as director of economic research for a big company in Omaha, Nebraska, it became his job to find new ventures for that company. That was how he got into catfish.
“We ended up in 1969 buying a small company that was involved in the catfish business. The company we bought had a hatchery and a processing plant. Their business was selling the baby fish to farmers, and buying back the market-size fish from farmers, and processing and selling the dressed fish. I thought it was very much like the early days of the chicken business.”