Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

by Richard Grant

In most of the Deep South, the ordeal of slavery had run straight into the misery of sharecropping, but that wasn’t how it happened in the Delta. After the Civil War, hundreds of freed slaves voluntarily migrated to this swampy new frontier, because it was the only place in the South where they could rent land, clear it, sell the crops they could raise on it, and work toward owning their own land. By 1900, two-thirds of the Delta’s farm owners were black. That all changed during the next twenty years. White planters and corporations exerted their power and, crucially, their access to credit, to dispossess black farmers of their land and establish large-scale plantations. Many disenfranchised black farmers now found themselves sharecropping on the new plantations, in a new era of stricter white supremacy, and often moving from one plantation to another, searching for better treatment and a fairer deal. This was the era that gave birth to the blues. It was not an ancient ancestral moan but the cry of alienated, uprooted modern man, craving independence and strongly individualistic in a way that African music had never been.