There was no wealth here, or if there was, it was hidden. The profits of the cotton crops did not appear to enrich anyone in the Delta. Probably someone in Jackson or Memphis lived well on this harvest.
I thought of Almeida Garrett, the mid-nineteenth-century Portuguese traveler and philosopher. An inspiration to me, Garrett had taken a trip in his own country, chronicled in Travels in My Homeland (Viagens na Minha Terra), and seeing the poverty, he had formulated a question: “I ask the political economists and the moralists if they have ever calculated the number of individuals who must be condemned to misery, overwork, demoralization, degradation, rank ignorance, overwhelming misfortune and utter penury in order to produce one rich man.”
“Things Are Worse Than They Look”
“What you see in the Delta isn’t how things are,” a woman officer at a bank in Greenville told me.
“But they don’t look good,” I said.
“Things are worse than they look,” she said.
She’d been raised in Hollandale, one of the bleaker towns on Highway 61 south of Greenville. She shrugged and asked me what I wanted to know. Her colleague Sue Evans, who was sixty or so, sat with her but said little, merely nodded in acknowledgment. We sat in their office on an upper floor of the bank, on a back street of Greenville on a dark afternoon, under a sky thick with bulgy drooping clouds. Scattered droplets of cold rain marked the broken sidewalks and potholed street. I had thought of the Delta, for all its misery, as at least a sunny place, but this was chilly, even wintry, though it was only October. For me the weather, the atmosphere, was something new, something unexpected and oppressive, and thus remarkable.
“Things are worse than they look” was one of the more shocking statements I heard in the Mississippi Delta, because as in Allendale, South Carolina, and the hamlets on the back roads of Alabama, this part of the Delta seemed to be imploding. The Bible is often the happy hunting ground of disturbed minds, but it was easy (as I kept finding among the biblically inclined in the South) to be drawn to the book of Revelation, with its signs and portents, and discern that instead of the parted clouds of salvation and the blare of trumpets, we were living in the sulfurous fumes of the Last Days.
“Housing is the biggest challenge,” the bank officer said, “but we’re in a Catch-22—too big to be small, too small to be big. By that I mean, we’re rural but we don’t qualify for rural funding because the population is over twenty-five thousand.”
“Funding from whom?”
“Federal funding,” she said. “And there’s the mind-set. It’s challenging. It’s short-term thinking, a misplaced value system.”
I said, “Are you talking about the people living in poverty?”
“Yes, some of those people. For example, you see nice vehicles in front of really run-down houses. You see people at Walmart and in the nail shops getting their nails done.”
“Is that unusual?”
“They’re on government assistance,” she said, and shook her head. Sue Evans murmured her agreement. “I’m not saying they shouldn’t look nice, but it’s instant gratification instead of sacrifice.”
“What do you think they should do?”
“Tell you what I did,” she said. “Because my value system is different. I grew up in a poverty-stricken town”—and having passed through the town the day before, I knew it was not an exaggeration: Hollandale looked as if the plague had struck it. “My parents had fourteen children, and at any given time there were never less than ten people in the house, plus my parents. One bathroom. This was interesting—we were never on any kind of government assistance, the reason being that my father worked. His job was at Nicholson Files. And he fished and hunted and gardened. His vegetables were really good. He shot deer, rabbits, squirrels. My mother fried the squirrels or made squirrel stew.” She laughed and said, “I never ate that game. I ate chicken.”
“I’ve had squirrel,” Sue Evans said, her first contribution to the discussion.
“What happened to Nicholson Files?” It was a company that made metal files and quality tools, a well-respected brand among builders.
“Closed. Went to Mexico,” the bank officer said. This was a reply I often heard when I asked about manufacturing in the Delta. “I could see there wasn’t much for me here. I joined the Marines. I did three-and-three—three active, three reserve. I was based in Oceanside, California, and I can tell you that apart from salvation it was the best decision I’ve made in my life. The service provided me with a totally different perspective. It helped me to see things differently.”
“I’ve heard that,” I said. “The military as a way out and a way up.”
“Made all the difference to me. Up to then, all I knew was the Delta. I went to Hollandale School, a typical public school in the Delta. It was integrated in, I think, 1969. The white school was on the other side of town, but it—miraculously, ha!—burned down just after that. Of course, they burned it so that they wouldn’t have to deal with us. No one will be convinced otherwise. After it burned, Deer Creek Academy started in Arcola—a white school, still there, still white, or at least ninety-nine percent. There were some whites at my school, two or three. Though the ratio of blacks to whites in the Delta is sixty-forty, we still have an imbalance in Greenville. O’Bannon Elementary and High School is black. Riverside High School in Avon is mostly white. Those dynamics hurt us as a community.”
“But Greenville is a big town.” I’d been surprised at the extent of it, the sprawl, the downtown, the neighborhoods of good, even grand, houses. And a new bridge had been built—one yet to be named—across the Mississippi, just west of the city.
“This is a declining town. River traffic is way down. We’ve lost population, from about fifty thousand to less than forty thousand. This was a thriving place. We had so much manufacturing—trailers for big-rig trucks, Fruit of the Loom men’s underwear, Schwinn bikes, Axminster carpets. They’re all gone to Mexico, South America, China. There was an air force base here. It closed.”
“What businesses are still here?” I asked.
“Catfish, but that’s not as big as it was. We’ve got rice—Uncle Ben’s, that’s big. We’ve got a company making ceiling tiles, and Leading Edge—they put the paint on jet planes. But there’s not enough jobs. Unemployment is huge, more than sixteen percent, twice the national average.”
“People I’ve talked to say that better housing helps.”
“It’s fine to have a home, but if you don’t have the subsidies to go with the home, you’re just treading water. But that’s how a lot of people live.”
“Do you fix up houses?”
“Very few homes get rehabbed. Most are in such bad shape it’s cheaper to tear them down than fix them. A lot are abandoned. There’s more and more vacant lots.”
“If Greenville happened to be a city in a Third World country, there would probably be lots of aid money pouring in.”
“This was a federal Empowerment Zone—ten years, ten million dollars pumped into the economy.”
“Ten million isn’t much compared to the hundreds of millions I’ve seen in US aid to Africa,” I said. “A small single country like Tanzania or Ghana might get seven hundred million. For schools or clinics.”
“That’s news to us,” she said, and Sue Evans looked equally surprised. “We do what we can. Things have been improving slowly. There’s Greenville Education Center. They have both day and night classes for people to study.”
Later, I checked the curriculum of Mississippi Delta Community College, which was part of this program, and found that they offered courses in bricklaying and tilesetting, automotive mechanics, commercial truck driving, heavy equipment operation, electronics, machine tool expertise, welding, heating and air-conditioning, office systems, and much else. But there are few jobs.
“People get educated and they leave,” she said. “There’s a high rotation in doctors and teachers. We’ve got to come together. It doesn’t matter how. Some healing has to take place.?
??
Given the seriousness of the situation, and the blight that was general over the Delta, I wondered aloud why she persevered.
“Me? I was meant to be here,” she said.
All this time, Sue Evans had sat in silence. But when I changed the subject, talked about the musical history of Greenville, the blues, the clubs that had been numerous up and down the Delta, Sue became animated. The subject of music was dear to her heart, she said.
“My mother had a jazz club in Leland,” Sue said. I had passed through Leland, another farming town on Highway 61, known for its blues history. “She was a great gal, my mother—Ruby—everyone knew her.”
There were still some clubs, she said. There was a blues museum. People came from all over the world to visit these places associated with the blues, and to see the birthplaces and the reference points—the farms, the creeks, the railways, the cotton fields.
“I heard that in Indianola there’s a B. B. King museum,” I said.
This produced a profound silence. The two women exchanged a glance but said nothing. It was the sort of silence provoked by an unwelcome allusion, or sheer confusion, as though I had lapsed into an unfamiliar language.
“He was born there, I understand,” I said, flailing a bit, and wondering whether I had overstayed my visit.
Sue Evans had a mute and somewhat stubborn gaze fixed away from mine, while her colleague, smiling faintly, then spoke.
“Berclair,” she said. “But he was raised in Kilmichael. Other side of Greenwood.”
It seemed very precise and obscure information. I couldn’t think of anything more to say, and it was apparent that this topic had produced an atmosphere in the room, a vibration that was unreadable, and that made me feel like a clumsy alien.
“Shall we tell him?”
“I don’t know,” Sue said.
“You tell him.”
“Go ahead,” Sue said.
This exchange, a sort of banter, had the effect of lifting the mood, diffusing the vibe.
“Sue was married to him.”
“Married to B. B. King?”
Sue said, “Yes, I was. I was Sue Hall then. His second and last wife. It was a while back.”
Sue was white and looked like a school librarian; her colleague was black and still had the forceful manner of a master sergeant in the Marines, which she had been. But now that the subject had been raised, both women were smiling.
“One night my mother booked him,” Sue said. “He kind of looked at me. I was just a kid. I had an idea of what he was thinking, but my mother wouldn’t stand any nonsense or fooling around. He played at the club a lot—a great musician. He waited until I turned eighteen—he waited because he didn’t want to deal with my mother. He was afraid of her.”
She laughed at the memory of it. I said, “This would have been when?”
“Long ago,” Sue said. “We were married for ten years.”
“Did you call him BB?”
“His proper name is Riley. I called him B.”
I was writing down “Riley.”
“Which was confusing,” Sue was saying. “Because Ray Charles’s wife was named Beatrice. We called her B too. We often got mixed up with the two B’s.”
“You traveled with him?” I asked.
“All the time. B loved to travel. He loved to play—he could play all night. He loved the audiences, the people, he lived to talk. But I got so tired. He’d say, ‘You don’t like to hear me,’ but it wasn’t that. I just hated staying up all hours. I’d be in the hotel room, waiting for him.”
“Are you still in touch?”
“We talk all the time. He calls. We talk. He still tours—imagine. Last I talked to him, he said he had some dates in New York and New Jersey. He loves the life. He’s still going strong.”
And for that fifteen or twenty minutes there was no blight on the Delta. It was a cheery reminiscence of her decade with B. B. King, the man who’d brought glory to the Delta and proved that it was possible and could happen again.
“Jesus Is Lord—We Buy and Sell Guns”
My season of driving was ending. I continued up the Delta, then went east and crossed into Alabama. It was like traveling in the hinterland of a foreign country, the same solitude, the same poverty, the same birdsong, with unexpectedness and discoveries, as on the Alabama shop I passed with a yellow sign, enormous black letters, JESUS IS LORD—WE BUY AND SELL GUNS, which had become one of the mingled themes of my journey. Inarticulate in explanation but eloquent in its actions, the South never ceased to advertise its obsessions on big billboards. I had come to depend on its visibility.
After most trips you say, This is enough, I’ll go home and write about it. This trip was done but the journey wasn’t over, and my discoveries gave me an appetite for more. I had found that America had a peasant class, as hard-up and ignored and hopeless as any I had seen in the world. I thought of all the people I’d met—Reverend Virgin Johnson in Sycamore, Wilbur Cave in desperate Allendale, Cynthia Burton in Tuscaloosa, Mayor Washington and Reverend Lyles in Greensboro, the people in the Delta, Mother Scott, the former Mrs. B. B. King, and more. And all the folks who’d invited me back. The autumn landscapes were already turning cold and fading to gray. What would all this be like in the winter, and what would those folks be doing? My home was at one end of the road, my subject at the other end. Loving the long empty stretches, in the grip of white line fever, the satori of the open road, I drove home making plans to return soon.
INTERLUDE
* * *
The Taboo Word
At home the word I’d heard spoken by various people, and sung with joyful menace, was echoing in my head. It is perhaps the most explosive word in American English, which is noted for the vividness and originality of its robust vocabulary. Other racial or ethnic slurs do not come close to having its damning quality, its strength of insult, or its hint of infernality. Obscene words and vulgar references that were forbidden for their shock value when I was much younger are spoken these days on television shows for all the children to hear. But this racial epithet is in a category of its own, and as a writer who spends his days engrossed (as I am now) in contemplating the meaning, the effect, the sound, and the arrangement of English words in order to convey an experience, I can perhaps be forgiven for being fascinated that a word—a mere two syllables in this case—possesses such overwhelming power to enrage.
The handful of whites I met in the South who used this word in my presence did so in two different, almost opposing, moods, muttered it casually or enunciated it defiantly. And it was spoken by black and white alike—another paradox, it was used more frequently by blacks in my hearing, and with heartiness and zest and sometimes almost tunefully. It is impossible to say the word without showing your teeth.
It occurs in other languages, among them German, where the word is Neger. It was used by Nazi propagandists to induce fear or loathing (jazz was Negermusik), and in his speeches Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels raised the specter of a defeated Germany being overrun by betrunken Neger (“drunken niggers”). Germans have come to see Neger as an objectionable word (often replaced by Farbige, colored, or Schwarze, black), which is why Negerkuss (“nigger kiss”), the chocolate-covered marshmallow treat beloved by German children, was not long ago renamed Schokokuss (“chocolate kiss”). The French word nègre is not so insulting but has belittling implications—for example, nègre is also slang for ghostwriter. Defying the formality of the Belgian king Baudouin and other luminaries, in the celebration of the Congo’s independence in 1960 in Leopoldville, Patrice Lumumba, the newly elected prime minister, angrily used the word, saying, “We have known sarcasm and insult, endured blows morning, noon and night, because we were ‘niggers’ [nègres]. Who will forget that a Black was addressed in the familiar tu, not as a friend, but because the polite vous was reserved for Whites only.”
But none of these examples is as offensive as the English word. In America the word has the deepest roots,
as the notable curse word of slavery—slavery, the South’s enduring curse, which the use of this word seemingly perpetuates by calling it to mind and summoning up the image of a captive and despised individual. In his Autobiography, recalling his early days (the 1840s) in Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain writes, “The ‘nigger trader’ was loathed by everybody. He was regarded as a sort of human devil who bought and conveyed poor helpless creatures to hell—for to our whites and blacks alike the Southern plantation was simply hell.”
Growing up in the North, I never heard the word in my house, though in the Boston streets at that time (late 1940s and 1950s) “nigger heaven” was the colloquial name for the top tier of any theater or sports arena; a cigarette might be “nigger-lipped” (“I hated it when a buddy took a greedy, wet puff, ‘nigger-lipping’ a butt before he passed it on to me,” the black writer John Edgar Wideman wrote in a 1985 New York Times essay about growing up in Pittsburgh); “Eenie meenie miney moe” ended with “catch a nigger by the toe.” In the corner shop that sold penny candy, the small black nuggets of licorice in a big jar were formally called “nigger babies” (“And five cents’ worth of nigger babies, please”). These misguided uses of the word were common in a society that prided itself on racial fairness and where blacks and whites attended school together; using the word in the presence of a black person would have been regarded as gratuitously insulting.
My parents abhorred the word, even these conventional uses of it. They viewed it correctly as racist, betraying the bigotry and ignorance of anyone who spoke it. I can’t think of another word in English that has such singular force: to speak it is to breathe fire. The word itself is historically a degrading synonym for “slave,” and implies an inferior, even subhuman, being. In Faulkner’s Absolom, Absolom! Rosa Coldfield (speaking to Quentin round about 1909) appears to set out the South’s traditional categories when she rails, “What creature in the South since 1861, man woman nigger or mule . . .”