Mississippi Delta Blues

In W. Ralph Eubanks’ When It’s Darkness on the Delta, hope and hard times swap verses. But too often the latter carries the tune. It makes for a disconcerting journey into a blues-steeped region perfectly captured by the book’s subtitle: How America’s Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land.

It’s disconcerting by necessity. This isn’t a joyride down Highway 61 into the heart of a juke-joint Saturday night. This is a long, sober walk into a place where wealth was won on the backs of a subjugated race, in a state where the law was wielded like a weapon, in a country where all men were supposedly created equal.

Eubanks is a native Mississippian and veteran chronicler of his state through books, essays, and journalism. He loves this land and champions those — like his own father — who tried to make a difference in the Delta. But on every page he’s cleared-eyed about this land and its legacy of suffering.

He asks us to look deeply at the Delta and its poor.

To see that the iconic landscape, so flat and treeless and perfect for growing cotton, was “essentially a created environment … cleared by slaves and the descendants of slaves, who farmed under a system of sharecropping that mirrored the inequities of bondage.”

To see that the people who toil there aren’t poor by choice or lack of gumption, or even through societal neglect, but from the systemic treachery of the white power structure.

To see, and to ask questions, such as why we consider President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” a failure without acknowledging a longer lasting and more effective engagement: a war on the poor.

Eubanks names names — such as Jamie Whitten, John Stennis, and James Eastland, “powerful Mississippi legislators [who] manipulated policies and programs at the intersection of agriculture, food, health, and welfare to maintain white supremacy and to thwart any efforts toward Black advancement in the Delta.”

He’s particularly effective in his case against Whitten for thwarting initiatives that could have helped Black veterans returning to the South after World War II, Black sharecroppers and farmworkers displaced by automation, and those suffering from hunger and food insecurity throughout the Delta.

The Mississippi Delta is not the poorest place in Mississippi or perhaps the entire nation because of the failures of its residents. It is poor by the design of its political leaders at the state and national level.

It’s not all darkness, though, in this thoughtful, serious, and necessary book. Eubanks shines a light on those people and places where real change happened — if fleetingly — in the face of all-powerful opposition.

He takes us to Mileston, the only Black resettlement community in the state, where former sharecroppers could live as landowners. Eubanks feels connected with this place — his father, “young and idealistic … with a newly minted agronomy degree from Tuskegee Institute,” arrived there in 1949. He taught farming techniques to war veterans and vocational agriculture at the high school there. Eubanks’ mother also was a teacher in Mileston, and a basketball coach as well.

But as hope rose for Black farmers and their families, so did the ire of white Mississippians ever protective of the status quo. Eubanks’ father decided it was time to leave Mileston in the mid-1950s because “the Delta no longer felt like a safe place for his growing family.”

Ralph was born in 1957 in Mount Olive, Mississippi — south of the Delta. But he clearly treasures his many visits to Mileston, where he can “sense the youthful spirit of my parents.”

He also takes us to Mound Bayou, founded by former slaves in 1887 as “a self-reliant, autonomous, all-Black community amid a white-owned, plantation-based economy.” There was a bank, train station, Carnegie library, school, Black-owned businesses. The “Jewel of the Delta,” President Theodore Roosevelt called it. But today, in its “crumbling state” with a 38 percent poverty rate, it stands as another case of great hope dashed in the Delta.

Eubanks recalls visiting Mound Bayou with his father. He remembers his father’s pride in what was accomplished there. He remembers his own sense of hope. Visiting the town today, he sees the people there as living in exile, consumed by memories of what was and unable to move forward.

And so it goes in the Delta, a scarred land of rich soil, a land of deep poverty and vast wealth, a land through which runs the stark American divide that hardly anyone bothers to talk about today.

“Poverty is not a thing of the past,” Eubanks writes, “but talking about poverty is.”

This book talks loud and clear. Are we listening?