30 Days a Black Man by Bill Steigerwald

Author:Bill Steigerwald
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493026197
Publisher: Lyons Press

CHAPTER 11 Sneaking Through the Delta

And we are nothing more

Than a herd of Negroes

Driven to the field

—FROM “SHARECROPPERS”BY LANGSTON HUGHES

Sprigle and Dobbs pushed north on Highway 61 in their big Mercury. If there hadn’t been telephone wires strung along the road and Pepsi-Cola signs nailed to the fronts of the few “colored cafes” and general stores they passed, it could have been 1880. The brown fields on both sides of the two-lane highway were scattered to the horizons with ragged little columns of men, women, and children in overalls, printed cotton dresses, and wide straw hats. Sharecroppers. All of them were black. Some were in their seventies, some as young as five. Heads bowed, eyes to the ground, they mechanically worked their long hoes in short chops as they moved among the rows of baby cotton plants they’d tend until picking time in the fall.

Half a million black Americans lived in the Delta. Most were sharecroppers, day laborers, and tenant farmers. They and their large families lived in unpainted shotgun shacks that were on plantations as large as twenty thousand acres or that were scattered randomly along the dirt and gravel roads. Tenant farmers who grew their own cotton on ten acres of rented land worked twelve-hour days—6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Sharecroppers, who paid their rent by giving their landlord about 30 percent of their crops, often worked longer—from dawn to dusk. Using tools, animals, fertilizer, seeds, and food they bought from the landlord’s store on credit, the sharecroppers and tenant farmers raised cotton from seed to bale.

Like their grandparents, sharecroppers lived in shacks, walked behind one-mule plows, weeded cotton rows with hoes, and handpicked a hundred pounds of cotton bolls a day under the baking Mississippi sun. Unlike their grandparents, they were not slaves. But they were close to it. In the most advanced country on Earth, three years into the Atomic Age, they were nineteenth-century poor. They had no electricity, no running water, no property, no assets, no savings, no access to credit, no vote, no future in Jim Crow Mississippi for themselves or their children.

Fifteen miles west of Sprigle and Dobbs were the sharp bends and coils of the sleeping Mississippi River, which, along with the levees that had tamed it, formed the state’s crinkled western edge. For thousands of years its floods and the floods of its equally erratic junior partner, the Yazoo, had laid down the Delta’s deep alluvial plain. An oval two hundred miles tall by seventy miles wide in northwest Mississippi, the Delta stands like a teardrop between Memphis and Vicksburg. Flat as a griddle and spectacularly fertile, it’s a perfect blend of climate and soil. “The richest land this side of the valley Nile!” is how plantation owner Big Daddy Pollitt described it without exaggerating in Tennessee Williams’s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Native Americans and early white settlers were first to create the Delta’s wealth. They cut down its bottomland hardwood forests, controlled the rivers with dikes, and drained the floodplain for agriculture.

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