Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

by Richard Grant

It was different being in Mississippi as a resident and a property owner, rather than a visitor passing through. The history of racial violence and injustice was no longer their problem, but mine too, I now realized.

“Those people in Money are sick and tired of being judged for something that happened more than fifty years ago. But they don’t want to be ignored and forgotten about either.”

“There’s a secret to living here,” she said. “Compartmentalize, compartmentalize, and then compartmentalize some more. If someone tells you that the Muslims are plotting to destroy America, or Obama is the Antichrist, you just seal that away in its own separate compartment,

People here talk about firearms and hunting in the same way that urban liberals go on about nutrition and exercise.

I took a photograph of its beautifully weathered sign: MIDNIGHT GIN. “Don’t be a culture vulture,” said Martha. “Don’t go back to New York and be putting that sign on the label of your small-batch artisanal gin.”

“The kids who live here have never seen one thing built,” said Martha. “They can’t imagine building something themselves, or someone else building it for them. When you grow up in the Delta, everything around you is falling in, and emptying out, and it really affects you. America isn’t supposed to be this way.”

“If you’re easy to find, and hard to fit, we’ve got you covered,” he said, snapping open a pair of jeans with an 86-inch waist.

Once blacks were able to vote in the Delta, they started to win public office, because they outnumbered whites three-to-one, and these days most teachers, principals, school administrators, judges, police officers, mayors, and city and county employees in the Delta were African-American. It was an unusual situation: whites still had the wealth, but blacks held the political power.

biggest issues in western Christian civilization are the white-black race issue and the rich-and-poor issue. Mississippi is at the apex of both. And if anybody in the world can solve the problem, it’s Mississippi.”

Even a simple trip to the grocery store was fraught with racial undertones. If, as a non-Southern white person, you forgot to say “Sir,” or, “Ma’am,” to an older white person working a cash register, it was a slight rudeness, the sort of thing you could expect from Yankees and foreigners. If you neglected to use the same honorifics with a black person in the same circumstance, it would probably be taken as a sign of racism and disrespect.

One of our biggest surprises was meeting African Americans who were against the civil rights movement and who blamed desegregation for the social and economic woes in the black community. It

“MLK was good at integrating lunchrooms and bathrooms, but not social classes. Civil rights taught us that we deserved what the white folks have, and we don’t have to build it for ourselves. It’s a sense of entitlement: you did my grandmother wrong, so you owe me. That man sitting on the corner right there is a product of the civil rights movement.”

Our people are so busy trying to get some of that money into their pockets, and get their nephews and cousins hired on, they can’t see no further. It’s just like James Meredith says. We’re trapped in a four-hundred-year dependency problem. The only thing holding us back is us.”

I love my people, man, don’t get me wrong, but we can’t keep yelling at the white man and acting like that’s going to solve our problems.”

“The whole problem in this Delta is that nobody can see past black and white. Very, very few. So all our energy goes into stopping the other ones, blaming the other ones, trying to get what they have. It’s so obvious that we need to work together, but

I had done the thing that modern life conspires against. I had fully inhabited the present without distraction.

Incarceration was now the second biggest industry in the Delta, after agriculture.

Statistically speaking, poverty produces bad parents and bad students, and the good ones are exceptions.

“You’ve got five to ten percent on either side who hate. Most folks get along now, treat each other with politeness, courtesy, and respect, and that’s really all you can ask for. We don’t all have to be best friends. In your life you’re only going to have five best friends, and they’re going to change over time, but still, most people will have five.”

After 250 years of slavery, 90 years of plantation sharecropping and Jim Crow, and 50 years more of unequal opportunity, deep poverty, and very slowly diminishing racism, black folks were expected to shake all that off like it was nothing and be grateful for their civil rights.