Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

by Richard Grant

One white woman accused me of being racist for wanting to live in Mississippi, even though it’s the blackest state in America and Holmes County is more than 80 percent African-American. “All Southerners are racists, and Mississippi is the worst of all,” she opined. She had never set foot in the state, and never intended to, because she already knew everything she needed to know about Mississippi.

Nowhere else in the world have I met so many fine, generous, honorable people, but if you look at the statistics, and read the news stories coming out of Mississippi, the state gives every appearance of being a redneck disaster zone.

Mississippi was found once again to be the poorest state in the Union, a position it has held consistently since the end of the Civil War.

Once again, it was the fattest state, with more than a third of its adult population classified as obese. It was number one in the nation for teenage pregnancy, illiteracy, failure to graduate high school, religious devotion, political conservatism, and sexually transmitted diseases.

“There’s America, there’s the South, then there’s Mississippi.” To which Martha Foose added, “And then there’s the Delta. You have no idea what you’re getting into down here, and that’s what makes it so perfect.

Outsiders often see it as a paradox, that such a poor, conservative, religious state should also have such a rich literary tradition, but it makes sense to Mississippians. Not only are they great tellers and admirers of colorful stories, with a rich supply of material.

That floored us. Mariah said, “I thought Republicans were supposed to be stingy and mean-spirited. No liberal has ever given me the keys to their car, or a whole bunch of furniture.”

In addition to insults, members hurled shoes at each other in a school board meeting. A man was beaten in the Greenwood Waffle House after accusing another man’s girlfriend of wearing “Christmas pants” in July. People seemed uniquely primed to believe in plots and conspiracies, miracles and demons. When the outgoing police chief in Greenwood stood up to deliver his farewell speech, he had this to say about the mayor: “Antichrist, Beelzebub, deceiver, destructor, liar, seven heads and ten horns, oh, Satan, the devil himself—that’s the Carolyn McAdams I know.”

Cruising around Belzoni, Martha pointed out a store advertising Sno-Cones, Fireworks and Gravestones. “I love a multipurpose business,” said Martha. “Juanita’s in Greenwood has a sign that says, ‘Beauty Salon, Bail Bonding, Bridal Boutique.’ We’re all about multitasking here in the Delta.”

In Oxford’s Square Books and Jackson’s Lemuria, Mississippi already had two of the best bookstores in the country. In Turnrow, it had a third.

“It’s a great day to be in Mississippi,” he said. “Our food, our music, our people, black and white, having a good time. Mississippi got its problems, but fuck all that shit, cause we know how to live, man. We have good times like a muh-fucker. I wouldn’t want to be nowhere else.”

They were conservative Bible Belt Republicans, and she was an urban liberal Democrat, except it wasn’t like that at all, because no one was defining or judging each other by their politics.

If whites had stuck with the public school system, things would be very different now in the Delta. When they removed their children, they also removed their money, influence, experience, and personal investment in the public school system. In rushed the influence of poverty. The Delta public schools started to experience similar problems as schools on Indian reservations, in crime-ridden inner cities, and the poorest, most isolated counties in Appalachia. All of the worst schools in America, without exception, are located in the highest areas of poverty, just as all the highest-performing schools are in the wealthiest zip codes. Statistically speaking, poverty produces bad parents and bad students, and the good ones are exceptions.

It was part of the Barksdale push for “emotional literacy” among the students. They’re taught how to recognize their emotions, understand where they come from, and regulate their moods as a way to break the cycle of acting out and getting punished.

As I drove home through torrential rains, I pondered the economic significance of the schools. In the Delta, where poverty is so extreme and job opportunities are so scarce, people look at schools as a source of employment, first and foremost. School board members and superintendents run for election, and once in power, they tend to distribute jobs as patronage within local kinship networks, shoring up their support for the next election. Educating children becomes a secondary concern.

The plantation mentality. It’s why the Delta doesn’t progress. It’s not having anything, and not really wanting anything, because that would mean change. That would mean taking on more responsibility. Too many of our people are not interested in progress and change.”

“Whites don’t even need to be racist anymore. They can just sit back on their plantations, and send their kids to the academy, and hang out at the country club, and watch us keep each other down. I mean, it’s wild, it’s insane.

“Because I can live anywhere I want, and this is where I want to live,”

“It seems like we’re determined to be at the bottom of every list, or the top of every list that you want to be bottom of,” he said. “Teenage pregnancy, education, poverty, you name it. We’ve got one last abortion clinic fighting to survive. People vote against their own best interests, because they’re culturally so conservative. Sometimes when I see how the electorate votes, I ask myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ And the next question is, ‘Well, where else would I go?’ And I don’t have a good answer for that.”

WE WERE FINDING the word racist to be increasingly unhelpful, because racism came in so many different forms and degrees.

A kind of affectionate racism prevailed among the Delta gentry. They had kind, paternalistic feelings toward black people and a genuine appreciation for black culture, but they didn’t want a black man dating their daughters or sitting down to eat dinner at their table, because that wasn’t the way things were done, or meant to be. These were just a few rough starter categories, and within them there were innumerable variations, nuances, spillovers, and contradictions.

“If a white person is lazy around here, it’s because they’ve got a poor work ethic. If a black person is lazy, it’s because they’re black.” There were many different types of white racist, as I’ve outlined, but this belief, as far as we could tell, was common to all of them.

So you see the difficulty in trying to generalize about racism even in one tiny pocket of the Mississippi Delta.

It’s a shifting target, a grouping of perceptions about other people’s perceptions. There’s a huge social chasm between the races, a deep history of prejudice, and bonds so close they feel like kinship.

We were never bored here, and our minds had broadened. We looked back at our former selves as narrow, picky, and judgmental.