Whatever Happened to Main Street?

Greenville survived fires, floods, Yellow Fever and the Union army. Now it faces perhaps its biggest challenge.

what ever happened to main street?

SaLLy mcdonneLL BarkSdaLe honorS coLLeGe aT The

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THE DELTA POVERTY PROJECT 2011 EDITORS

Bill Rose Garreth Blackwell

ART DIREC TOR

Callie Blackwell

E D I TO R I A L S TA F F

Macey Baird Marianna Breland Chelsea Caveny Maggie Day Cain Madden John Mosby Norman Seawright Miriam Taylor

PRODUCTION S TA F F

Michael Baker Elizabeth Beaver Adam Brown Shernina Carter Alex Edwards Amber Helsel Jujuan McNeil Ignacio Murillo Miriam Taylor

MEEK SCHOOL JOURNALISM AND NEW MEDIA THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI FA R L E Y H A L L , U N I V E R S I T Y, M S 3 8 6 7 7

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO

MAIN STREET?

4 H A N G I N G TO U G H | Macey Baird 15 C O N C LU S I O N S 16 I N S E A R C H O F H O P E | Maggie Day 27 C L I M B I N G T H E L A D D E R | Norman Seawright III 32 M R . R E P U B L I C A N | Macey Baird 40 M U D D Y WAT E R | Maggie Day 42 C O V E R I N G G R E E N V I L L E | Cain Madden 48 T H E C H I N A C O N N E C T I O N | Marianna Breland 52 T H E R E M N A N T | Cain Madden 58 T H E H I S TO R I A N | Macey Baird 63 A D E LTA L E G E N D | Miriam Taylor 68 T H E M I L L I O N D O L L A R M I L E | Marianna Breland 73 T H E G R E AT F L O O D | The Nelken Archives 78 TA K E A D E E P B R E AT H | Miriam Taylor 83 O P E N I N G U P | Marianna Breland 86 A C L E R K ’S W O R K I S N E V E R D O N E | Norman Seawright III 87 T H E S U P E RV I S O R | Norman Seawright III 90 T H E C O U N C I L M A N | Norman Seawright III 91 T H E C H I L D R E N ’S A D V O C AT E | Norman Seawright III 94 T H E P O L I T I C S O F S O U L F O O D | Maggie Day 95 A S E N S E O F P L AC E | Miriam Taylor 100 H E L P YO U R S E L F | Jon Haywood 101 B L AC K A N D W H I T E TO G ET H E R | Chelsea Caveny 104 S TA RT I N G YO U N G | Chelsea Caveny 108 C U LT U R E O F S U C C E S S | Chelsea Caveny 109 M E ET I N G C R I T I C A L N E E D S | Chelsea Caveny 110 T H E L I T T L E L A D Y W I T H T H E B I G V O I C E | Miriam Taylor 114 A B A D O L E M A N | Jon Haywood FALL 2011 • 3

CAI N MAD D EN

Decidedly working class casinos now anchor the Greenville waterfront.

Hanging Tough

f

People of both races are leaving Greenville in droves. But there are many in the Delta’s biggest city who think they can turn things around.

BY MACEY BAIRD

or one brief shining moment, Greenville thought it might just be Mississippi’s Camelot. It was the “Queen City of the Delta,” a regional business powerhouse, a busy Mississippi River port, a place with the Delta’s only shopping malls, home to a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper and the longtime chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party. 
 Through the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, it looked like Greenville couldn’t lose. It was the “Towboat Capital of the World,” base to a home-grown shipbuilding and barge industry that employed thousands. When the rest of the Delta was trying to seduce small sewing plants that employed dozens, Greenville had manufacturing plants that hired hundreds. It landed plants from the likes of Boeing and Vlasic. It had a Schwinn bicycle plant, Chicago Mills, and a branch of one of the largest carpet companies in the nation. They were generally minimum wage jobs, but jobs nonetheless. Greenville was home to a thriving cultural scene and a stable of nationally known authors. The city integrated its schools peacefully, hired black policemen and employed black store clerks before much of the rest of the state, building a reputation as one of the most progressive places in Mississippi. Stokely Carmichael famously called it “the rest stop for the civil rights movement.” And then it all went away. Camelot turned out to be a myth. Greenville had been living on borrowed time. Its large population of poor people, its de facto segregated schools and its fragile, vulnerable economic base caught up with

6 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

it — a trend all across the Delta. In that respect, the city turned out not to be so different after all. Today, Greenvillians shake their heads at the town’s fall and longingly recall when stores were packed on Washington Avenue, when Greenville “was a place so proud of itself it strutted sitting down,” as Hodding Carter III, former editor and owner of the Delta Democrat-Times, says. That spirit remains in pockets. Small bands of stubborn optimists inside and outside city hall refuse to surrender hope, feverishly plotting ways to revive the town and boost the economy, but they are bucking powerful economic trends.

PH O T O S / E L I Z A B E T H B E AV E R

The GREENVILLE in the sign welcoming people to the city was once part of the huge Greenville Mills sign before the plant closed.

A parade downtown in Greenville’s heyday. Once, the city’s parades drew large crowds.

FALL 2011 • 7

Greenville has lost its swagger. And no wonder. It can seem a grim place, littered with strips of empty parking lots that have replaced businesses. Many people are discouraged. Those who have spent generations in the city are leaving. Today, downtown looks like it is dying. Cars hobble through potholes on Washington Avenue. They pass strings of pastel-colored, once-luxurious homes, many now boarded and broken, peeling and unkempt, their prestige faded, just like the city. The popular clothing stores that once anchored the western end of downtown are gone. Instead, the street that was a few decades ago the busiest in the Delta is full of boarded-up buildings and littered with “For Sale” signs. Just over the levee, two mostly working-class casinos — nothing like the glittering casino-hotel complexes in Tunica — have replaced the old marina in a stretch once known as the MillionDollar Mile. They perch on prime lakefront, drawing a low-income crowd that pulls slot levers and prays for a big payoff. In May, the city was praying for relief from yet another Job-like tragedy of Biblical proportions. A record Mississippi River flood shut down the casinos and the port and put 800 people out of work. Dozens of residents of homes and cabins between the levee and Lake Ferguson had to evacuate when the river spilled over its banks and advanced on the levee. People downtown could look up and see a casino boat riding the high water. The late Greenville author David L. Cohn once described Delta people as “fearing the wrath of God and the Mississippi River,” and here they were doing it all over again. That industrial park off Highway 1, the one that used to cart out machinery and equipment by the loads, has fallen into fields of weeds and rusting hulks of what used to be, a victim of the move toward cheaper labor in Mexico, China, India and other places. Long stretches of discarded buildings and disconnected semi-trailers

reveal the skeletons of what once helped power the local economy. The old Greenville Air Base, once home to 3,000 airmen and employees, is now home to an airport with only two daily commercial flights in and out. Once, it dared to think of itself as different from the rest, the cream of the Delta. No more. More than a third of the city’s residents fall below the federal poverty line, and unemployment is soaring. Most of the scarce available jobs are minimum-wage. Call it cotton’s curse. The Delta was built on cotton, and Greenville was no exception. But the old cotton economy was built on a fragile base of credit, a vast amount of cheap labor and American dominance of cotton exports. In time, it all came crashing down. Greenville and the rest of the Delta have never been able to make lasting adjustments. Grain now rules the Delta and cotton depends on government subsidies. The mechanical cotton picker in the 1940s and new herbicides in the early 1950s caused planters to jettison the huge workforce that picked and chopped their cotton. Thousands of unskilled black laborers were displaced. In time, many went north in search of jobs, but many others stayed, moving to southern towns and cities such as Greenville, where they became part of a seemingly permanent, welfare-dependent underclass. Cotton is no longer king, but as author Gene Dattel (Cotton and Race in the Making of America) puts it, “its ugly human legacy remains among a great many black citizens who are unprepared to function effectively in the modern world.” Some found work in the Greenville factories, but now those are gone, too, just as they are gone throughout the Delta, with rare exceptions. The relative prosperity that allowed Greenville to thrive has evaporated. Of course, as Carter points out, the bulk of Greenville’s black population never really shared in that prosperity in the first place.

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Thwarted for decades in its quest for political access, the city’s black majority finally took over the courthouse and city hall in 2003, inheriting a city on a downward slide. Since then, the white exodus has accelerated and the community has slid further down the long, ruinous road it has been on since the 1990s. Dattel, who grew up in the Delta town of Ruleville, sees little hope that things will change. “With no jobs, AfricanAmericans and white people will

E L I Z A B E T H B E AV E R

Greenville used to be a major player on the Mississippi River. Its waterfront was always busy, with towboats being built, boats coming and going and the U.S. Corps of Engineers busy assembling the armaments needed to keep the big river in its channel.

continue to move outside the Delta. I do not see anything on the horizon to alter that trend,” he says. Benjy Nelken’s family has been in business in Greenville since before 1900. He’s seen the rise and fall of the city once dubbed the heart and soul of the Delta. Now he’s the owner of Nelken Realty and has overseen the creation of five minimuseums in Greenville. “In 1960, a consultant came in and studied the community,” Nelken says. “It was projected in 1980 Greenville would

have 80,000 people according to what it had done from the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Greenville’s 2010 population estimate was 34,400, a 17.4 percent decline from the 2000 Census. At that rate, the city would lose 15,000 people from 2000 to 2025. Frank Hester has been cutting hair at Palace Barber Shop in the same building downtown for more than 45 years. He remembers a time when you couldn’t find a parking spot on Washington Avenue.

The customer he’s lathering up ate his first batch of grits in 1954 at Jim’s Café next door and never left to go back north. If there’s one thing both these whitehaired men have noticed is missing, it’s a whole generation. “Young families and educated people aren’t coming back,” Hester says. His customer grunts in agreement. What’s more, white flight continues to grow as people, primarily the young, leave for better opportunities elsewhere. In 2000, only 25 percent of the city’s

FALL 2011 • 9

EL I ZABET H BEAVER

MARI AN N A BREL AN D

E L I Z A B E T H B E AV E R

A hopeful port director Tommy Hart says the port is experiencing a resurgence, with work underway on boats and an expanded terminal starting to draw more business.

population was white, a number that was sure to slide lower when the 2010 Census released detailed breakdowns by race. Significantly, white people control an estimated 60 percent of local businesses. “We’ve got to start bringing jobs. That’s got to stop the bleeding,” Washington County Supervisor Al Rankins says. Otherwise, “we’re going to keep losing people.” Could it be that Greenville’s success for the better part of the 20th century was all a house of cards? How did it go from regional shopping hub to a povertydominated city with a nearly dead downtown and working-class casinos milking the poor of their welfare checks?

A lot of things happened, most of them out of the Queen City’s control. In 1965, Greenville Air Base shut down, a blow to the local housing market and retail sales. But even that couldn’t slow Greenville down. Some say it really began with President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 grain embargo, a ban that hurt farmers and Greenville’s thriving towboat industry. It was part of a deadly, rapid-fire combination of embargo, truck deregulation and escalating fuel costs. In the early ’70s, when business was flourishing, there were 25 towboat companies headquartered in Greenville. Just over the levee, there were always

10 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

boats or barges in various stages of construction, with hundreds of welders working on them. The industry supported machine shops, steel providers — all sorts of spinoffs from the towboat industry. There were dozens of airplanes in the Greenville airport that the towing business used for ferrying parts and crews. At one point, Greenville firms owned 10 percent of all equipment on U.S. inland waterways, according to port Director Tommy Hart. An estimated 3,000 workers owed their jobs to the industry and those that served it. Then it went from boom to bust. Today, the local industry is down to a couple of

“The community is ready to unite behind something but doesn’t know what it is.” — Bob Boyd

towboat companies and several service industries. Hart estimates the marine industry here employs about 650 people. The mighty Mississippi that used to be Greenville’s highway has become a wall. Some blame the 1994 enforcement of the North American Free Trade Agreement for the city’s economic decay. The agreement eliminated barriers to trade among the U.S., Canada and Mexico and sent Greenville’s industry giants running for the southern border for even cheaper labor. Others went to India and China. Greenville, which had significantly more of these largely minimum-wage manufacturing jobs than other Delta towns, was left hurting. There have been missed opportunities, too. Nelson Street was once a magnet for the best black entertainers, a bustling main street and entertainment district for the black community. Those who remember it at its peak say it could have become the Beale Street of the Delta. But it has become a neglected, dilapidated strip that draws drunks and crime. There was talk of a downtown convention center or a museum a few years ago that never materialized. The waterfront, which could be a fishing mecca, a natural place for restaurants or a rest stop for towboats, is instead only a reminder of the city’s retreat. When the black community finally consolidated political power and Heather McTeer was elected the first black mayor in 2003, some people thought things would change. But soon, some white businessmen were privately saying they felt isolated by the new administration, and some black leaders were suggesting that whites had disengaged. The gulf between the white and black communities widened.

That friction is exemplified in the “he said, she said” rumors that circulate. The mayor’s naysayers love to talk about her expensive bodyguards. McTeer says it’s just an unfounded rumor, that her protection comes from the police. Just as bad, say the critics. There’s an underlying apprehension on both sides that blocks progress and opens rifts in the community. Clarke Reed, the former GOP chairman and once one of the nation’s most powerful Republicans, thinks McTeer has ignored connections and has missed opportunities to heal the city. “People like the mayor, they don’t want you,” Reed says. “I think she sees people like me as a threat more than a help.” “She tried to promote racial harmony,” says Rankins, the, county supervisor, waving off the idea that racial discord within the political community is one of Greenville’s problems. Catherine Gardner, director of community development at the Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau, says she doesn’t see the community embracing McTeer’s vision for the city. She sees a lot of division within community leadership and thinks there must be unity on every level for Greenville to make a comeback. “I think it’s past time we’ve bridged that,” says Gardner, who is running for circuit clerk. “I know we have people willing to step forward. I would like to see the mayor and council in harmony for the vision of this city.” “What’s missing among blacks and whites is any really visionary leadership,” says Bob Boyd, a former newspaper reporter and a candidate for supervisor. “The community is ready to unite behind something but doesn’t know what it is.”

Andy Lack, CEO of Bloomberg’s multimedia affairs, has taken a special interest in Greenville. His greatgrandfather was the city’s third mayor, back when it was still a town on the cotton frontier. Now he makes frequent visits, drawn by the charm and courtesy of its citizens. “Race is a lot of emotional baggage that isn’t helping,” Lack says. “No one’s talking. No one’s fixing that communication problem. Leadership is the first step. “It’s a battle for the soul of Greenville.” In conversations from city hall to beauty shops, Greenvillians talk about their weak tax base, the young people who won’t stay and the educated fleeing the city. But first they talk about their schools. If there’s one thing that everyone can agree on, it’s the dire need to revitalize the public education system. Though Greenville peacefully integrated the public schools, it could not stop white flight to private schools after the end of legal segregation. Two-thirds of the public schools are at risk of failing. One is on academic watch. More than 97 percent of Greenville’s public school students are black. There have been episodes of unruly behavior that led to lockdowns and parental concerns about security. It’s hard to imagine much industry or new blood willing to come to a city whose schools are both de facto segregated and performing poorly. “I thought that by the year 2010, after several generations of integration, it would have panned out and it would’ve been a little better at this point in time,” Nelken says. “But it’s gotten worse. “The fact that we’ve got the two school systems has something to do with it. If we had one unified school system united

FALL 2011 • 11

E L I Z A B E T H B E AV E R

The Greenville Renaissance Scholars program offers middle schoolers a head start in the college game, broadening their horizons and preparing them for the application stage to come in high school.

1 2 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

together it would be better, but it’s just not the way it is. And I don’t see any sign of that changing.” Some people blame a lack of consistent leadership for the town’s education woes. A hyperactive quality has taken over the city’s quest to try to improve the district. Teacher after teacher makes sure to point out the constant hiring of new administrations, year after year. And every new principal and every new superintendent brings a different mission, a different attitude, a different structure. Since the latest superintendent, Harvey Franklin, took over, one school has climbed off the failing list, and local leaders hope that maybe now the whole district can settle down and improve. Others point to another issue as the root of the problem. When Aid to Families With Dependent Children — a critical part of the nation’s welfare system — started, it was not allowed to go to homes with a man in the house. The result was an unintended blow to the black family — poor, unwed mothers supporting children off checks from the government, indirectly producing an epidemic of teenage pregnancies as too many daughters followed suit. Four decades later, the system has yielded a vicious cycle of single-mother households and generations of high school dropouts. Nearly one-fourth of Greenville students don’t finish high school. Children are behind when they first arrive at school, bearing the scars of problems at home that too often carry over into the classroom. These are entrenched social problems and very hard to change. But Greenville is a place where people dream. And there are bright spots in the system, people and organizations that have started chipping away at problems as best they can. The private Catholic school St. Joseph provides an example of integrated education that seems to be working. It

contains the only heterogeneous mixture in Greenville’s dual education system — 40 percent of its students are black. But St. Joseph charges tuition and most of its students come from middle- and uppermiddle-class families. Teach for America has placed 29 instructors in Greenville public schools, planting a community of 20-somethings determined to change things. That old liberal element is still there, coursing through social events, community organizations and educational programs. There are people like Hodding Carter’s daughter Margaret Carter Joseph and Mary Hardy, a white woman and black woman working to improve the education of children through the Greenville Renaissance Scholars program. It is an after-school and summer program for middle school students — more than 40 this summer — who focus on academic enrichment and college readiness. The program is too young to measure its effectiveness at getting kids into college, but if their enthusiasm is any indication, progress is being made. Larry Jones, executive director of the Delta Economic Development Center in Greenville, says the organization is implementing eight initiatives designed to pump life back into Greenville. In November, voters will decide whether to enact a tax on hotel beds to help finance a multimillion-dollar sportsplex, a huge recreation complex that would provide activities for the youth and probably draw from surrounding communities as well. With its fields and courts, it would be an ideal place to hold regional tournaments, which would mean parents and kids eating at restaurants and perhaps staying in hotel rooms. Until the Mississippi River flood shut it down for two months, the local port was experiencing a comeback of sorts fed by the market for scrap metal, shipments

FALL 2011 • 13

of grain and rising fuel prices that make river transportation more competitive. In February, the port moved 300 railcars of material, more than it shipped in all of the previous year. It is nothing like what the port once moved, but it is something. “There is a light under a bushel in the Greenville port,” says Boyd, the former DD-T reporter. He thinks steel can move down the river from the likes of Pittsburgh and be loaded aboard trucks at Greenville. He said plastic is another product that could bring the port business. Betty Lynn Cameron is the director of Main Street Greenville, an organization devoted to the revitalization of downtown. She’s determined that it once again become the heart of the city and not an eyesore. Ken Dowes, a 1959 graduate of Greenville High School, offered $50,000 of his own money to help clean up Greenville. He asked only that people raise enough to match his cash. Cameron and her crew raised the money in 60 days. Now, two years later, Main Street Greenville is allocating money in the name of the Greenville Challenge. Businesses can apply for money to improve the looks of their storefronts. Main Street is also planting yellow daffodils downtown, trying to use cosmetic touches to brighten the place. The hope is that as the appearance improves, business will pick up. Already, Cameron says, there is talk of a new restaurant and printing shop opening downtown. “It’s attitude. Once we get the attitude …” Cameron trails off, looking at the massive antebellum style Elks Club building across the street. Once reminiscent of Greenville’s glory, it’s now a cracked veneer of vines and a crumbling colonnade, a reminder of how far Cameron has to go. “Our saving grace is us,” she says, nodding to herself. Chuck Jordan, a retired banker running for mayor in the December election, also

says the city’s solution lies in the hands and minds of its people. “I’m convinced if we could change the attitudes, defeat the malaise that’s enveloped our community, we could reach the heights we want,” Jordan says. Other leaders of the community — a hopeful councilwoman, a former reporter, a prominent businessman — talk about changing the attitude, too. The problem, they say, is that people can’t let go of the past to move into the future. People remember Greenville how it was — “It looked like a Norman Rockwell painting,” one shop owner laments — and become bitter about how it is. They grumble and gripe, reliving the glory days without offering solutions to fix their fate. This is exactly the kind of attitude people like Jordan and the visitors bureau’s Gardner want to shake. “Greenville was guided by this mythical notion that we were different,” says Hodding Carter, now a professor at the University of North Carolina. “And because of this horizon, we were different.” The place, he insists, is not beyond hope. The visitors bureau and Main Street Greenville have begun distributing “I Believe in Greenville” bumper stickers in hopes they will act as a small beacon of hope for those driving behind vehicles on U.S. 82 and Highway 1. Greenville is caught in a cyclical structural conundrum. It needs jobs badly. It needs money from industry to keep young people from fleeing the city. But to attract industry, it needs an educated workforce. To develop an educated workforce, it needs training and a productive education system. It needs the kind of leadership that can get black and white working together to build a progressive city without two cultures colliding. These are tough obstacles. But Greenville has a knack for bouncing back from disasters. It’s been doing it ever since Charles Percy began reclaiming

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land from the wild river in the mid-19th century. There’s virtually no history in the Delta preceding the Civil War. It was still in the early stages of being settled. Then when the Northern Army came through on the way to Vicksburg, gunboats shelled Greenville and soldiers burned its homes and its stores. It built back. In 1874, much of the town burned again. It bounced back. By 1878, the city had grown to around 2,000 residents. Then a deadly yellow fever epidemic wiped out one-third of the population. It recovered. A few decades later, the 1927 flood left the city inundated for months. It dried out and slowly regained its footing. The airbase closed in 1965, but the city recovered again, eventually building an agricultural-industrial-business base that was the envy of the Delta. Then the grain embargo, fuel tax and NAFTA contributed to the current downslide, one that has been much more difficult to reverse. Today, the hospital is the biggest employer in town and federal transfer payments — welfare — are the biggest single source of personal income. No wonder that people were on edge when the river rose ominously to a record crest in the spring. Fortunately, the Mississippi stopped rising and the levee held. The river crisis is gone, but Greenville’s larger crisis remains. There appears to be no quick cure. Cities across America have crumbled in the face of lesser problems. One thing’s certain: If Greenville can’t fix its schools, it’ll be hard to rebuild any semblance of what once was. Yet, as many here point out, Greenville has always thought of itself as different. What’s almost as stunning as the town’s decline and uncertain future is that apostles of hope remain. Mindful of the city’s phoenix-like tendencies, they search for a way out, a way back. They, at least, have not lost hope. Considering the city’s past, would you bet against them?

g

Conclusions

reenville may have fallen on hard times, but there are things that could be done to stop the bleeding and nudge the city forward. Some of them are:

Greenville needs an anchor to help stabilize its economy, just

as Clarksdale has used the blues and Greenwood has used Viking. A Delta museum or another similar attraction downtown or nearby might draw tourists. Tourists could then be guided or bused to other attractions such as blues clubs, Winterville Mounds and riverboat rides. The city needs a stronger identity. It needs to find the one thing that instantly makes people think “Greenville” and milk and promote it Downtown Greenville needs to make better use of the Mississippi River and Lake Ferguson. Restaurants, meeting

facilities, riverboats that offer rides to the public would all be better than casinos packed with slot machines. Some type of attraction downtown that included a tower or walkway over the levee to the water could draw more people to Greenville and the river. It will be difficult to lure new industry as long as there is are nearly all-black public schools and nearly all-white private schools and public schools are perceived as troubled. The community needs to come together to attack the problem. An intriguing alternative might be a KIPP school such as

the one in Helena, Ark. KIPP schools have an excellent record for taking poor, black kids and sending them off to college with impressive academic records. A KIPP school would give black parents and students another option. But state law would likely have to be changed to accomplish this. Greenville and Washington County need more jobs at a time

when finding new jobs is very tough. But Greenwood’s Viking has proven that the Delta workforce can be productive and that locally-owned plants can prosper with the right formula. Workforce training programs should be pursued. And the state

needs to try harder to come to the rescue and recruit large employers to the area. Washington County has ample hunting and fishing opportunities and could market itself as a sportsman’s paradise,

drawing more duck hunters and fishermen to generate money for the local economy. The appearance of downtown needs to be improved.

Challenge Greenville grants and tax rebates are already being used to encourage revamping downtown store exteriors. The city needs to pass the sportsplex tax. The facility would not only provide valuable recreation for young people, but has the potential to draw families here for tournaments and events that would put money into hotels and restaurants here. The city could offer guided tours of Nelson Street. It could be policed, cleaned up, promoted. At the very least, tours could be offered in conjunction with blues festivals. The big blues festival needs to be aggressively promoted and supported and used as a marketing tool for the city. The city could also look at other festivals as well, creating synergy that could boost its image and draw people from surrounding counties for a day. It’s a natural place for a literary festival. The city needs an attitude adjustment, more positive thinking. But it must come in conjunction with concrete steps to move the city forward. Despite Greenville’s former reputation as a progressive city, there is still lingering distrust between the races in parts of the community. The two groups need to learn to work with

each other better. It is difficult for divided cities and regions to prosper. In key cities in the Delta, black and white officials and community leaders are working together better than ever before. Greenville and the rest of the Delta need to adopt that philosophy of unity if the area is to successfully recruit new residents and new businesses.

In Search of Hope

C HE L S E A C AV E NY

Greenville has room for recreation at and near Warfield Point on the Big Muddy, and it still would love to resurrect its once booming towboat and boating-building industry.

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“t

he word which God has written on the brow of every man is Hope.” — Victor Hugo, author of Les Miserables

B Y M A G G I E D AY

It would be easy to give up on Greenville. People have been doing it for almost 20 years. In 1990, ‘The Queen City of the Delta’ boasted a population just over 45,000. But since then, nearly 25 percent of its citizens have packed up and left. Greenville now stands at a shriveled 34,400, its lowest population since the 1950s. You can’t blame them for leaving. Thousands of jobs disappeared. Since 1990, numerous factories have left Greenville. Unemployment has soared. A third of the population remains mired in poverty. Much of Washington Avenue is boarded up. Schools remain hopelessly de facto segregated atop a racial and political fault line. These are daunting obstacles for any city. But make no mistake. Greenville is not bereft of hope. Just ask former Greenville newspaper editor Hodding Carter III, who left here in the 1970s, when times were good. “We rose above the [1927] Mississippi River flood. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again,” he said. Carter is not alone. A steady drumbeat of hope still pulses through Greenville. People are desperate to stop the bleeding, to find some semblance of economic growth, to carve out at least a piece of what the city used to be.

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“A cultural center or museum located in Greenville would not only reap economic benefits, but would expand the brand of the Mississippi Delta to reach beyond its musical legacy and bring to light the many other cultural and historic aspects of the this rich and evocative region.” — Cissy Foote Anklam

Some have already given up. But others are talking of ways to get up off the mat and do something – special after school programs for promising kids, an attempt to revitalize a huge swath of deteriorating neighborhoods near the hospital, ways to increase tourism by capitalizing on the blues or the lakefront, beautifying downtown, providing a regional recreational facility and more. Most agree on one thing – “you’ve got to capitalize on what you have,” as City Engineer Lorenzo Anderson put it. And Greenville still has some things to work with. After all, it remains the largest city in the Delta, home to the region’s only real shopping mall and a gleaming new bridge that provides easy access to Arkansas. And Greenville sits smack on America’s biggest highway – the Mississippi River. The city hasn’t capitalized on the river much since the local towboat industry collapsed back in the 1980s, but the potential is there. Rising fuel prices, the growth of grain crops, and a burgeoning scrap steel market are already breathing new life into the business. “When gas prices go up, it’s good for us,” said Tommy Hart, the port director and former president of the Economic Development Council. “This is the most efficient method of transportation, and other communities don’t have this. As far as the towboat industry coming back, it’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of when.” It’s a far cry from the “Million Dollar Mile,” the port’s nickname when

Greenville was known as “Towboat Capital of the World,” but the port’s size has doubled in the past three years and so has the amount of cargo it handles. Mississippi Marine is building a towboat, something that used to happen all the time but now is cause for celebration. Greenville is home to Delta Regional Medical Center and its 1,200 jobs, the largest employer in the county. The most comprehensive health care site in the Delta, it treats people from seven counties in a 100-mile radius. The city has the only movie theater for miles around, and the parking lot is often dotted with license tags from other counties and Arkansas. While not the shopping magnet it used to be, the same license tag effect can be seen out on Highway 1 at Lowe’s, Home Depot, Belk and J.C. Penny. But with the Delta shriveling with each passing year, Greenville needs more than this to survive. It needs an edge. For ideas, Greenville need look no further than thirty miles down the road in Indianola. A town with less than one-third the population of Greenville, Indianola could easily have slipped off the map. But black and white leaders got together, raised millions in seed money to demonstrate commitment, then obtained grants that enabled them to build a B.B. King Museum. It is honest: displays on the civil rights era capture the struggles of black people. It is colorful: a slick movie that traces the story of King’s rise from a plantation shack to the pinnacle of the blues industry. It is sophisticated:

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Smithsonian-style displays that draw tourists from as far away as England and Japan. If little Indianola can capitalize on its past and community solidarity, why not Greenville? TOURISM “The key to success in the Delta is that we have our cultural history,” said McKenzie Stroh, executive director of the Greenville Arts Council. Seeds of hope can be found in the colorful mini-museums scattered throughout the town, ranging from museums on the 1927 Mississippi River flood to the Jewish population. The artifacts and memorabilia are just as eclectic as their curator, the city’s selfappointed historian, Benjy Nelken. But none are big enough to secure large numbers of visitors or anchor Greenville as a tourist destination. As it stands, the more scattered the museums, the more scattered the visitors. But if Clarksdale and Indianola can draw tourists with their Blues and B.B. King museums, why couldn’t Greenville do the same with a single, comprehensive Delta Museum or Mississippi River Museum? If such a project were built downtown, on or near the scenic waterfront, glimpses into the city’s past could be the honey to lure tourists downtown and keep them hooked, spending precious dollars on surrounding retailers. “A cultural center or museum located in

M I R I A M TAY L OR

A reincarnation of the legendary Flowing Fountain is supposed to open this fall. Maybe Greenville can latch onto the burgeoning blues tourism in the Delta and revive some of Nelson Street’s old luster.

FALL 2011 • 19

C A I N M A DDE N

If the casinos make room on the waterfront, it would make a great home for a convention center, museum or other tourist attraction, offering fabulous views of Lake Ferguson and, potentially, rides on the river.

Greenville would not only reap economic benefits, but would expand the brand of the Mississippi Delta to reach beyond its musical legacy and bring to light the many other cultural and historic aspects of the this rich and evocative region,” said Cissy Foote Anklam, president of the Arlington, Va.-based Museum Concepts, who helped with the B.B. King Museum project. “Putting aside the economic argument, I hope that the folks and civic leaders of Greenville will seize the opportunity to build a cultural attraction that will once again make the city a must visit destination for travelers near and far - as she holds some of the south’s richest and most compelling narrative,” Anklam said. As Mississippi has found in its push for cultural tourism, nonprofit arts and cultural attractions, when marketed and run correctly, can be economic drivers in a community. They are a growth industry that supports jobs and generates government revenue and tourism dollars. The July 2010 Delta Business Journal reported that “while overall tourism spending in Mississippi was down seven percent in fiscal 2009, visitor spending in Sunflower County — home to the one of the state’s biggest blues attractions, the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center — was up 12.5 percent to $12.43 million.”

On the national level, the arts and cultural industry generates $166.2 billion in economic activity every year — $63.1 billion in spending by organizations and an additional $103.1 billion in eventrelated spending by audiences, according to the most recent report of Arts & Economic Prosperity III: The Economic Impact of Nonprofit Arts and Culture Organizations and Their Audience. THE WATERFRONT AND CASINOS “We’re going to have something over here on the Mississippi River to bring people over here from the B.B. King Museum and … spend some money in a restaurant and at the hotel,” said Larry Jones, executive director of the Delta Economic Development Center. Lake Ferguson sits just over the levee at the foot of Main Street, so close to downtown that you could easily throw a baseball into the water from the intersection of Main and Walnut. Yet, the scenic view goes wasted except for the glimpse folks get of it as they head into two casinos that take up most of the viewing area. These are not the massive, glittering Harrah’s of northern neighbor Tunica or the hulking monoliths anchored off the Gulf Coast. These are decidedly working class facades of economic hope

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for impoverished locals, storm drains for their earnings that already aren’t enough. Inside, you’ll find row upon row of mindless seduction in the form of slot machines. It’s all about haphazardly trying to win your paycheck back. There is talk of the casinos consolidating into just one, leaving more space on the lakefront – and another opportunity for economic development. “People everywhere,” said Larry Jones, “love the water.” Here is prime lakefront that could be used for a convention center, or an attraction offering rides on the lake or the mighty Mississippi itself, or something else. The point is, Greenville’s legacy as a river town offers opportunity, just as B.B. King’s legacy did for Indianola. HUNTING AND FISHING With some strong marketing, the river and the abundant lakes of Washington County might be used to lure more hunters and fishermen, who would in turn bring business to local restaurants and motels. Parts of southeast Arkansas have already capitalized on the area’s superb duck hunting, but Greenville could give them a run for their money. Hundreds already flock to Greenville for boating and fishing tournaments on Lake Ferguson and Lake Washington.

Lake Ferguson, an oxbow, is known for being one of the best places to bass fish in the whole state. The county’s woods are a prime spot for hunting white tailed deer. A push to promote and market Greenville as a major hunting and fishing destination, “a sportsman’s paradise,” could draw from other parts of the South. RECREATION Greenville could also potentially lead the Delta in sports facilities with a $20 million sportsplex. The sportsplex, expected to cover an expansive 95 acres, would be a state-of-the-art multipurpose sports complex near the Washington County Convention Center off U.S. 82 east. Complete with three baseball complexes of five diamonds each, the sportsplex would become reality if Washington County voters agree on Nov. 2 to a two per cent sales tax on hotel rooms. CLEAR WATER Greenville could also soon erase the stigma of brown water. Mayor Heather McTeer crusaded for federal help to clear the water of its dingy brown tint. If an $18 million grant from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is matched by $4.5 million from the city, six of eight wells within the city limits would be treated and, the city says, the water will be clear for the first time in decades. Though critics doubt it, McTeer devoutly believes that once the water is clear, industry and business will be more likely to consider Greenville. THE BLUES Tourists flock to Clarksdale and Indianola to sample the blues in the land from whence it sprang. In Clarksdale, they even throw down $150 a night to stay in refurbished, air-conditioned sharecropper cabins at the Shackup Inn. Greenville’s Nelson Street was once a hotbed of blues music but has fallen on hard times. There is an effort to cultivate an entertainment district of clubs along one block of Walnut Street next to the

levee. A coordinated effort linking and marketing Walnut and Nelson might pay off with more blues tourists. But much work needs to be done to assure crimeplagued Nelson is safe. And a city blues effort would need an edge of some sort, an angle that the city could market to signal to tourists why Greenville is worth a blues stopover along with Clarksdale and Indianola. INDIAN MOUNDS The Winterville Mounds attraction on U.S. 1 south of the city is a fascinating exploration of the mysterious mound builders who once populated this part of the Delta. If Greenville can get other attractions off the ground, it could throw in tours of the mounds and ferry tourists out there for lectures and a stroll atop one of the highest points in the Delta. This is the stuff of dreams. But cities that dream sometimes hit the jackpot. In the Delta, a region still staggering from the collapse of the old plantation economy, hope must always be grounded in reality. Here, there is a sense that even if Greenville finds tourist attractions, repairs downtown and reclaims some of its past glory, it will be difficult to truly blossom unless it finds a way to deal with the ageold dilemma of race and de facto school segregation. All these years after Brown v. Board of Education, the troubled public schools are more than 97 percent black and the private schools, with the exception of St. Joseph (40 percent black), are heavily white. That one dilemma makes it all the more difficult to attract new industry, businesses, residents. But even in the tricky arena of race, there is hope. Greenville remains arguably the most integrated city in the Delta with civic and country clubs, cultural and social events that help bridge the gap between races. State and national educational organizations are rapidly multiplying their presence in the Delta. Mississippi Teachers Corps and Teach for America have established and strengthened

enormous efforts within the past five years to help public schools get off “failing” lists. Many Greenvillians think it comes down to ‘an attitude problem’. Slowly attacking this mindset is a dwindling, but nevertheless stubbornly persistent band of optimists who keep dreaming, keep planning, and keep working with small, but ambitious strides to improve things. They often see hope where others see hopelessness. There is no lack of effort in other quarters as well. There is hope in Margaret Carter Joseph, who brought her Harvard degree back home to better the community through an after-school program called Greenville Renaissance Scholars, providing students with supplemental education and a creative after-school and summertime outlet. There is hope in Cliff Whitley’s MACE programs, some of which take troubled teens and high-school dropouts and train them for jobs and leadership positions. There is hope in the likes of 24-year-old Mackenzie Stroh, executive director at the Greenville Arts Council, who is promoting a comeback of the arts, as well as the return of her generation to the city for leadership positions. There is hope in George Miles’ LISC initiative that hopes to remake beaten down neighborhoods by mobilizing the residents. He envisions residents organizing into groups passionate about ridding their streets of crime, improving houses and yards and building community centers. The idea is to help the residents use LISC’s access to loans and grants and expertise and let them remake their neighborhoods. After all, who better to create hope in Greenville than its citizens? It is Greenvillians’ spirit of reinvention that keeps the city moving. “We have survived flood, fire and famine,” says Mayor Heather McTeer. “To even question whether there is hope shows no faith in our city and all that has already been done. It is our destiny.”

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Climbing the Ladder B Y N O R M A N S E AW R I G H T

n

N OR M A N S E AW R I GHT

Heather McTeer became Greenville’s first black mayor at the age of 27.

o one could ever accuse Mayor Heather McTeer of lacking ambition. In 2003, at the age of 27, she left a lucrative law career and got

elected the first black mayor and first female mayor of Greenville. Now, after two terms leading the state’s eighth largest city, she is running for Congress against Bennie Thompson, 63, a powerful, entrenched incumbent in a district that sprawls all the way from the Delta to Jackson.

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Mayor Heather McTeer has spent eight years as Greenville’s first black mayor. Now she wants to tackle Congress.

Thompson, who was sitting on a $1.7 million campaign treasury in early summer, has been in Congress for 18 years, the longest of Mississippi’s U.S. House delegation. Why tackle Thompson? “I think we could do a little bit better than we are doing right now. When I look at places that are in the most need, the place that needs help the most is the Second District,” said McTeer, who said she wants to “see some progress in our area.” McTeer is used to challenges. The first thing she learned in office: Politics is harsh.

After getting elected, she endured threats and slurs. She was criticized for championing an expensive project to get the brown stain out of the city’s drinking water. She was attacked for questioning why some public school teachers had their children in private schools. And she discovered that she had inherited a sizeable deficit. Along the way, she solved the deficit, secured millions from the federal government for a system to clear up the water and used bond money to start fixing neighborhood streets. But it was never easy. “There was a lot of doubt among citizens and employees as to what I could do,” McTeer said. “I had two employees who couldn’t work for me. Couldn’t work for a woman. One couldn’t work for a ‘little girl.’ That’s how I was viewed. I was called all types of derogatory names that you could imagine.” In fact, she said, the biggest disappointment she faced was learning that people she thought highly of turned out to be completely different than she expected. But, calling herself “the ultimate optimist,” McTeer set out to tackle the city’s long list of problems. She had the city hire a CFO, who is present at every city council meeting, to try to ensure that money is used as efficiently as possible. “I’m proud today that we don’t have to do what we had to do seven years ago, which was the accounts payable clerk would come in, and sit in the chair with a box of checks and how much money was in the account, and she and I would sit there and figure out who to pay,” McTeer said. For this, McTeer, a graduate of Tulane Law School, left a promising six-figure law practice. That 2003 Mercedes didn’t come from her mayoral salary of roughly $50,000 a year. McTeer’s election helped give blacks control of city hall in addition to the

courthouse for the first time, making her a symbol of change. Just how much things have changed can be seen in the photos of Greenville’s past mayors on the wall outside her office. They are all white. Sitting in her office, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of plaques and pictures. Here she is chairing a national advisory committee for the Environmental Protection Agency. There, she is president of the National Conference of Black Mayors. There is a picture of her with President Obama and his family. Numerous civic and church awards and the prominent letters of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority leave no doubt that she takes pride in everything she is involved in. As the daughter of civil rights attorney and photographer Victor McTeer, and retired teacher Mercidees McTeer, she was schooled on civil rights and equality as a child. Her parents sent her to public school, and mandated that she be in the Girl Scouts. So important to her is family that, after she took office, she took her grandmother to meet President Barack Obama, a fellow Democrat, at the White House for a Christmas event. “My parents didn’t want us to feel like we were ‘running away,’ but that we were actually a part and could be leaders in our schools. The things I remember most are, when we came home from school, my mom and dad put a basketball goal in the front yard. So we had kids from Clay Street and everywhere else in the front yard, on Main, playing ball. It would be twenty boys out in the front yard. We never felt like we were above or below anyone.” She gained an interest in politics at an early age. Her father was active in political causes adn took her to a rally in Indianola when she was around 9 or 10. While in law school, she interned for Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Fred Banks. After graduating from Spelman

FALL 2011 • 23

College, McTeer interned as a legislative aide in Georgia’s State Assembly, where she did everything from getting coffee to going to meetings on behalf of the senator. “I was a legislative aide for Sen. Donzella James. I think we were paid something like $50 a week. I thought my senator, initially, just hated me. I really did,” said McTeer. “She was a kind woman, but she was very serious about what she did, and there was a reason for that. She was an adamant member of Mothers Against Drunk Driving because, the year before, she lost her son to a drunk driver. Finally, one day, she was on the floor. There was a particular piece of legislation that she had been working on. She called me down…to the floor of the Senate … When I got there, she said, ‘I’m getting ready to speak on this particular topic. Write the speech.’” McTeer wrote the speech from the back of the Senate chamber on a legal pad. She figured it would be her last day, since the senator was so hard on her. “She read what I wrote, line for line. When we got back, she said to me, ‘The reason that I did that is because I knew you could do it.’” When McTeer was first elected mayor, defeating a veteran white incumbent, she jumped into several longstanding community issues. One of the first items on her agenda was Washington Avenue, which at that was a one-way serpentine road. Despite criticism from some downtown advocates, she straightened out the road and made it a two-way street, as it was originally constructed. Now, she said, people leaving the casinos over the levee don’t have to drive way up Main Street and circle back to shop on a one-way Washington Avenue. They just drive straight up Washington itself. “When I was running for office, the thing I heard over and over from people was that neighborhood streets had been neglected. Some hadn’t been fixed in 50 years,” she said. McTeer used $5 million

in bonds to tackle neighborhood streets first, smoothing out washboard roads. Now the city is embarking on a separate project to tackle Washington Avenue, including the bumpy, pothole-laden section at the entrance to downtown. It always galled her that visitors to Greenville would check into a hotel, go to their rooms and discover brown water flowing from the faucet. It’s impossible to ignore. The brown discoloration is an effect produced by water seeping through cypress roots. It isn’t harmful, and it has the added benefits of being soft and mineral-rich. But McTeer is certain that visitors may ignore the benefits and be stuck on the color. “You think about your tourists. When you go into a restaurant, and you ask for a glass of water, what would you do if they brought you a glass of brown water?” She believes that cleaning up the water will help improve the city’s image and might even make it easier to recruit business and industry. Her crusade to clear up the water eventually was featured in a story in The Washington Post. With the help of U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., she pried money out of the U.S. Corps of Engineers for a project to clear up the water. Greenville has to match it with about $4.5 million and the mayor insists that it will get done. Ask her about her greatest challenge as mayor and McTeer will tell you that she can always improve communication with people. She wants to learn to listen more and to listen better. Sometimes, she said, it can be tough to deliver bad news. For example, some water meters have been misreporting the amount of water used, sometimes reporting too much, sometimes too little. The city is taking steps to fix them, but even that creates problems. “You have to be careful about how you communicate that,” she said. “How do you tell the little old lady on fixed income who has been paying $25 a week for water that the meter was wrong and now she has to pay $45?”

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McTeer sees the lakefront casinos she inherited, for better or worse, as part of the community. They have brought some social problems, but they have also brought money into the city budget. “Since they are in the community, I think it is important that we have an effective partnership to the extent that we can,” she said. “In some ways, have they hurt? Yes. I remember there being a lot of issues, especially from the faith-

N OR M A N S E AW R I GHT

McTeer’s ascendance to the mayor’s office helped give blacks political control of city hall in addition to the courthouse for the first time, making her a clear symbol of change.

based community, and a lot of speakers talking about what this would do to our community, and it being a negative impact on the community. Either way, the decision was made to allow casinos. If I had to do it, I would not have formed the contracts in those fashions. I don’t think the city got the benefit out of the initial agreements with the casinos that they could have. With that said, hindsight is always 20/20.”

When she entered office, she stopped the use of casino-generated revenue in the general fund. McTeer wanted the city to be in a position where, if all the casinos left, the city would survive. McTeer’s office is a busy world. Conversations with the mayor are frequently interrupted by citizens coming in to express their discontent about something in the town, or by important phone calls that require her to shoo you

out of the office. She is often so busy that she forgets to eat. Her staff all but forces her to slow down long enough to gobble a quick lunch. Aside from her work in city hall, McTeer makes sure to participate in events around town. The morning of St. Patrick’s Day, she came to work wearing a green sweater. She spilled something on it, so she handed her credit card to her secretary and sent her out to go buy

FALL 2011 • 25

another one. “Being the mayor, you’re on the ground level, and so there is a very intimate communication that we have with our constituents. It has been a definite journey and experience in learning the community. I’m from Greenville, so I always thought I really knew Greenville,” she said. Knowing Greenville also entails knowing its history. Because white politicians and business leaders had dominated Greenville until McTeer’s election, some blacks still harbor negative feelings toward white people. At the same time, some white people feel marginalized or left out of critical decisions. “You have some African Americans who think you should do to white folks everything white folks did to you. I don’t agree with that,” said McTeer. She said no one group should be cut out of community decisions. “We need to set priorities and do the projects that are needed the most, first, regardless of whether they are in the white or black community,” she said. Critics complain that the city pays for expensive bodyguards to protect her. She says it’s a misunderstanding, and a bigger issue than it should be. On one occasion, men who were mistaken for bodyguards were simply her brother and cousin, in town to see a movie. At other times, men from the Nation of Islam showed up at public events and stayed near her, offering protection. She said police officers trained in “executive protection” not only ensure her safety, but are also assigned to protect any high-profile official that may visit Greenville. McTeer endured more criticism when, at a school convocation, she challenged public school teachers who were sending their children to private schools. “I caught a lot of flak for this because I said two things,” she said. “I said, if you’re a teacher for Greenville public schools, it was something to the effect of, you should be able to teach your own children. Why

N O RMAN SEAWRI G H T

Threats trickled in to city hall when McTeer was first elected.

are you a teacher for Greenville public schools and your kids go to private school? There was a whole newspaper editorial write-up, letters to the editor about how dare I trash teachers about where their kids go to school. McTeer feels strongly about trying to build future leaders among today’s youth. That’s why she expanded from 12 to 60 the Mayor’s Youth Council created by her predecessor, in which children from both public and private schools meet with her to discuss life in their respective schools. If children of different backgrounds get to know each other, she said, they are less likely to harbor prejudice later in life. Through Youth Council, she said, children of different races and backgrounds have the opportunity to build meaningful relationships that bring them into each other’s worlds. She has sponsored a school switch, where a child from a public school is paired with a child from a private school, and throughout

26 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

the week, they each spend two days at the other’s school, attending classes and events together. McTeer gave them each a journal, and they returned with new insights about worlds that were once foreign to them. What she got back in those journals made all the struggles of office worthwhile. “They are my babies,” she said. “They wrote some of the most wonderful pieces about how, ultimately, they discovered that all of them were just alike. And it caused them to begin to question, ‘Why aren’t we just all together?’ and that’s where I say I think we have to really invest in our kids. They’re going to be the next generation of policymakers, of organizers, of people who implement these programs to take us into the future. “My public school kids were saying, ‘Mayor McTeer, I went over to the private school and they had a Spanish test and I took it, and guess what? I made an A!’ It broke the stereotype of thinking that the private schools were so much more advanced than the public schools.” Adults, who carry a lot of baggage stemming from their life experiences, are harder to change, she said. She described how some white people have come to her office “and shut the door and closed the blinds” and said they would like to send their children to public school, but fear that their child “would be the only white child, a minority. “We’ve got to get over that and have these hard conversations,” she said. “I am very perceptive. I know there are portions of the population that I am not popular with,” she said. “I know there is hurt and pain and anger from years of conflict and stress. Maybe if we had known each other as kids, we would have been great friends.” “You know,” she said, “being in office can sometimes be a lonely place. It’s a position where you can take a lot of criticism.” When that happens, she said, “it probably means you are doing something right.”

i

Nelson Street Blues The fabled former main street of Greenville’s black community has fallen on hard times. But some envision a road to recovery. t’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon and a drunk staggers, stumbles and scuffles across Nelson Street, not at all sure where he wants to go. Just ahead, there’s a liquor store. Next door is an abandoned building that’s turned into a neighborhood hangout of sorts. He chooses the hangout, and a yellow Ford Mustang with black stripes slows to allow him to lurch awkwardly across the street. A group of men – all of them drinking – chases him away.

B Y J O N H AY W O O D

That’s Nelson Street today, a place of ruins and remnants. There are a few stores, some churches, a club here and there. But mostly it’s a place of broken dreams and drunks and shuttered storefronts.

MI RI AM TAYL O R

Nelson Street has fallen on hard times, but once it was a hot spot of black entertainment, a sort of unofficial Main Street for Greenville’s African-American community.

THE HEYDAY In its heyday, Nelson Street was alive and brimming with revelers. It was main street for Greenville’s African-American community, a business and entertainment hub known throughout the South as a magnet for top bands and bluesmen. The street once boasted more than 100 businesses, according to former Greenville High School bandleader Roy Huddleston, a sort of unofficial Nelson Street historian who keeps a list of them on yellowed notebook paper. People swarmed to New Town Café, the Delta Store and the famous Flowing Fountain nightclub, where the music never seemed to stop. “You could walk along Nelson Street all night long,” says Johnnie Wright, former

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CAI N MAD D EN

“You could walk along Nelson Street all night long” and it was always busy, remembers Johnnie Wright, former owner of Johnnie’s Lounge.

owner of Johnnie’s Lounge. It was the ultimate social gathering place for blacks. People dressed up in their best finery to stroll its sidewalks. Seeing and being seen was part of the fun. “You went along Nelson Street just to see what everyone else was doing,” she says. It wasn’t just black-owned and blackrun for black customers. There were also Chinese grocery stores and white-owned establishments. Many places served all of Greenville, such as Brown’s Bakery. But Nelson got much of its fame from its role as an entertainment mecca, catering to the raw styling of Delta blues, “the devil’s music,” as some preachers called it. People came from near and far to hear the rhythmic, roaring, rumbling sound of down-home blues. The sidewalks were packed most of the day and well into the night, and folks driving by would slow their cars to enjoy the music wafting out of the clubs. Nelson Street emerged as an entertainment powerhouse in the 1950s, a time when black expression — musical, artistic or political — was not widely accepted in many parts of the South. But here, it thrived. While other Delta towns were clamping down curfews, Greenville let the good times roll on Nelson Street. It became a place for young musicians to make a name for themselves at the rollicking clubs. It was frequented by the likes of Little Milton, Bobbie Rush and Sonny Boy Williamson II. Other musicians, such as Willie Love and Charlie Booker, were made famous by Nelson Street. In 1951, Love recorded his renowned “Nelson Street Blues” for Jackson record label Trumpet, wailing about how “you can have all the fun you want” on Nelson Street and citing local landmarks, including the Snow White Laundry and the Deluxe Barber Shop. Booker recorded his music live for rival Modern Records at the Casablanca restaurant and lounge. In “No Ridin’ Blues,” Booker paid his respects to the local party scene when he sang that “Greenville’s smokin’, Leland’s burnin’

N O RMAN SEAWRI G H T

Former Greenville High School band leader Roy Huddleston says Nelson Street began its decline in the 1970s, when musicians went to bigger venues in Clarksdale and Memphis.

down.” Several bluesmen had their own radio shows on WGVM and WJPR. Disc jockey Rocking Eddie Williams had a record store on the street. Other blues hot spots were Henry T’s Pool Room, the Silver Dollar Café and the Blue Note. In later years, another blues club would add to Nelson Street’s fame. THE FLOWING FOUNTAIN The Flowing Fountain was opened in the 1970s by Perry Payton and halfbrother Roy Huddleston. It became so beloved, such a dominant force on the Greenville blues scene, that Little Milton is said to have based his 1987 hit song, “Annie Mae’s Café,” on the club. Big-name performers Bobbie Rush, Tyrone Davis, Chick Willis and Little Milton himself performed there. Bernice “Peaches” Jones is a Nelson Street legend. She worked at the Flowing

3 0 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

Fountain as a bartender for 25 years, from its inception until it closed. To be fair, bartender doesn’t do her justice. As Peaches puts it, she pretty much ran the place. On a warm spring day, she sits in her kitchen tending to dinner on a hot stove, her eyes lighting up as she recalls how almost every Delta bluesman performed at the club. The only two who didn’t, she says, were Bobby “Blue” Bland and B.B. King, because the club couldn’t hold the crowd that would have shown up. Music impresario Quincy Jones once stopped by. “The Flowing Fountain was a place everyone liked to go,” Peaches says. “We sold whiskey all night long.” “That was the good-time place,” echoes Huddleston, who had his own band at the time and for years was the bandleader at Greenville High School. Business at the Flowing Fountain slowed in 2000 after the death of Payton, a strong man with a reputation as a good businessman. The street had already fallen upon hard times and the club eventually shut down, Peaches says, because Payton’s elderly widow couldn’t keep up with running the business. To many of its followers, the closing of the Flowing Fountain seemed to be the death knell for Nelson Street. The decline Huddleston says Nelson actually began its long decline in the late 1970s, when big-name musicians started playing at bigger venues in Clarksdale and Memphis. Wright blames the street’s decline on a generational shift. As older people died, so did their businesses. Most young people in the area weren’t interested in the blues, she says. For Huddleston, another part of the decline was a change in leadership on Nelson Street. Some of Greenville’s giants of black civic leadership were also businessmen on Nelson. James Carter, Benjamin Cook and others helped create a sense of pride there. The decline also can be traced to

LEFT | Little Milton (pictured), Bobby Rush and countless other name performers loved to play Nelson Street. BELOW | The state has placed Nelson Street on its Mississippi Blues Trail and there is hope that where a marker rises, tourists will follow.

N OR M A N S E AW R I GHT

economic changes sweeping the Delta. Black flight to the industrial North accelerated when mechanization made it unnecessary for farmers to depend on cheap labor to tend and harvest their crops. With the farm jobs lost to mechanical cotton pickers and better herbicides, blacks left in droves to search for work and a better life. In the Cold War era of the 1950s and early 1960s, Greenville was home to an Air Force base. Many of the airmen and employees of the base spent time and money on Nelson Street. When the base closed in 1965, so did a major source of the street’s revenue. Some blame the crack epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s. As crack came, so did crime. A Chinese grocer’s murder prompted other grocers to pull out, and several other businesses followed. Some business owners didn’t feel safe anymore and didn’t want to

invest their time and money in an area known for sporadic crime. HOPE FOR NELSON For a while, the city talked of trying to revive the night scene on Nelson Street. The Mississippi Blues Commission placed a historical marker there, anointing it as part of the state’s Blues Trail. But it continued its slide, and the club scene in Greenville began to shift to the Walnut Street entertainment district at the foot of the Mississippi River levee downtown, where the city has tried to foster growth by etching the names of legendary bluesmen into the sidewalks. Today, with all the closed, decaying buildings, it’s hard to believe Nelson ever amounted to anything. But the lure of history is still strong. There are those who would like to see it return to glory. “They should open it back up. There’s nowhere else for older folks to go,” says

Peaches. “If it comes back, it won’t be the same, because the young folk certainly aren’t going to the blues,” warns Wright. There are plans to reopen the Flowing Fountain. David Williams and Nikeka Nelson are hard at work on repairs. They planned to have the club, which was to be known simply as the Fountain, open sometime in the fall. Williams believes reopening the Flowing Fountain will bring back jobs to Nelson Street. He has gotten Peaches to agree to come back to the Fountain as its bartender. The club’s new co-owners bought the building from Payton’s widow, Hazel. Nelson adds that she and Williams are developing a scholarship program for young people interested in pursuing music as a career, to help revive the area and the Greenville community. “It would be a shame to let Nelson Street go to waste,” Williams says.

FALL 2011 • 31

Mr. Republican

s

BY MACEY BAIRD

People used to laugh when Clarke Reed talked about building a Republican Party here. Who’s laughing now? ummer, 1975. A tall, thin man in his

prime strides into Doe’s Steak House and ambles through the kitchen holding two paper sacks. The cooks fuss over him and a trail of greetings follows: “There’s Clarke, how’s it going Clarke, who you eating with tonight 
Clarke?” He shakes some hands and walks over to his table, setting bottles of

whiskey and wine on the plastic tablecloth and greeting his party. Tonight, it was a Delta Council executive. Last week, it was a New York Times reporter.

Spring, 2011

Long after his political prominence has begun to wane, Clarke Reed is still hosting at the rambling house in the bad part of town, entertaining his crowd with spirits and wry, self-deprecating humor.
 On this warm March evening, the old raconteur once again makes his way through the sea of women. There’s still the trademark patrician posture but now he shuffles with a walker, a reminder of last summer’s nightmarish car crash that crushed his hip and pelvis. He squeezes through the clutter of misshapen tables until he reaches his party and deposits

two brown bags on the table: a bottle of red wine and a bottle of white.
 It’s time to woo again. He’s in Classic Clarke mode.
 Reed, 82, is the father of the modern Mississippi Republican Party, the man credited with helping eliminate the “Mississippi Democrat” and create a two-party system in the state. For the past 60 years, Reed has been a guiding hand for Republicans, helping steer Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” and subsequent victory, then helping maneuver the party through the

32 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

Watergate scandal and the Ford-Reagan battle.
 Sitting here, Reed looks like just another native you’d see down at Buck’s or maybe a Rotary Club luncheon at the country club — khakis and a patterned sweater, long and lanky, white hair pieced across his crown, sharp eyes and a sharp wit to match. 
 But Reed has been to a state dinner at the White House. He’s had direct access to governors and presidents. When Nixon was in office, the phrase “Clear it with Clarke” became routine among staff

CO U RT ES Y OF C L A R K E R E E D

Clarke Reed built the GOP into a powerful force in Mississippi and became an advisor to presidents. Here, he meets with Gerald Ford in the White House.

regarding Southern matters.
 Before Reed and his gang stepped in during the mid-‘60s, the Republican Party was virtually invisible in Mississippi and much of the rest of the South. Reed played a major role in changing that.
 “There were two cataclysmic changes in American history,” Reed said. “One was the Civil War. The other was the South coming back into the system.”
 Reed believes both changed unnatural alliances and that the latter is the closest thing since the War Between the States to alter the country’s political structure.

It was the first time the South had fully been part of the system.
 Now he leans into the conversation, weathered hands grasping a simple wooden chair in his sparse Reed-Joseph International office, and gears up to tell a story he’s told a hundred times — the story of a young band of brothers who catapulted the South back into 
national political prominence.
 He began with an inexperienced generation, gathering kids like Lanny Griffith and Roger Wicker from the Young Republicans chapter at Ole Miss

and developing a group strong enough to contend with the Democrats, long the dominant political organization in the South.
 “They could see clearly what to do. So we’re young. We may just have to outgrow everybody,” Reed said.
 As he sees it, Mississippi used to be essentially a no-party state. It was made up of “Mississippi Democrats,” people who wouldn’t fully align themselves with the national Democrats, Reed said of his rival party.
 Reed believed that the conservative

FALL 2011 • 33

CO U RT ES Y OF C L A R K E R E E D

Reed talks strategy with the first President George Bush.

3 4 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

values and culture of these same Mississippians correlated with the Republican Party. He became a prophet in that regard.
 “They would say, we’re not Democrats. We’re Mississippi Democrats, we’re above both parties,” Reed said. “And I made my argument, let’s change parties, let’s get a two-party system going, see? I started teaching high school civics to people.”
 Mike Retzer, formerly chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party and ambassador to Tanzania, said tenacity comes to mind whenever he thinks of his one-time mentor.
 “He’s messing with the Republican Party in 1960 and everyone was just wacko to be in the Republican Party,” Retzer said. “People thought, what’s the point? You’re not going to elect anyone.”
 Reed retains the same old tenacity today, though he’s stiff from his injuries and barely budges but to uncross his rangy legs and fresh New Balance shoes.
 He speaks in his trademark Clarke mumble, often having to repeat himself to someone whose ears aren’t accustomed to it. He talks of this time in an automatic onslaught of recount. He’s been repeating his story for four decades.
 He labels the 1972 election of Thad Cochran and Trent Lott to Congress as a “quantum leap” for the GOP in Mississippi.
 “We started with young people who didn’t have a stake in the system as much,” Reed said.
 He answers a question about the youth of the early party before trailing off midsentence and coming back to explain the state’s warped political pairings. It’s a habit of his, these half-finished sentences. You can see him reconstructing the time in his head, bouncing from one story to another because he’s thought of a different point he wants to make.
 Reed found his own unnatural alliance in Hodding Carter III, editor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Delta DemocratTimes in Greenville and later State Department spokesman for the Jimmy

FALL 2011 • 35

Carter administration, whose political views stretched miles from Reed’s own. With Carter constantly on television during the Iranian hostage crisis and Reed frequently called upon to explain the Republican resurgence in the South, the two became the best known Greenvillians of their era. “It is hard to overstate his importance. He came relatively early, stayed late and was a consistent exponent of consistent party-building, human as well as financial,” Carter says. “He tied the state effort to the national party and eliminated the prefixes.”
 “Hodding and I worked together, more or less,” Reed said. “He wanted a real Democratic party and it wasn’t really there. We wanted the same thing, just different parties.”
 Reed doesn’t find it odd that a liberal newspaperman and a conservative political leader could work together for the good of their constituents. He’s matter-of-fact about it, stirring nostalgia for a more idealistic time when good and evil weren’t so clearly divided down political lines.
 Reed gives credit to Carter and his crew at the paper for helping spread the importance of bipartisanship in the state.
 “If he hadn’t been here I might not have been all that you see. He said there’s a two party system, here’s what happens you see,” Reed said. “They played up everything we did so we looked good, saying we’re really doing something.” “[Reed’s] the best conjure man I’ve ever known,” Carter says. “He gives the impression of a man mumbling his way through success by accident.”
 “He is, of course, a highly focused political animal who never lost sight of his objective. He is living proof of that old saw about the natural superiority of Southern politicians, save that he saw his role as building rather than running.”
 A friendship evolved that transcended civic duties and political idealogies.
 “It was a historic time. A lot of fun too,” Reed said, titling forward in a

conspiratorial laugh. “I’d have him to my events and he’d run with my conservative crowd.”
 You get a glimpse of the good old boy Reed is in moments like this. He’s the image of the classic Delta rascal: a whiskey-drinking business man who can charm both company and caucus.
 His wife Judy is out of town this week, so he’s spent every lunch at Jim’s Café on Washington Avenue with the other good old boys around the county.
 The company of men sit at the center table in crisp button-downs and thinning hair, chairs pushed back and legs crossed. They’re all long on opinion and short on subtlety, chatting about everything but the weather while they pick at the remnants of the owner’s burgers drenched in Gus Johnson’s famous hot sauce.
 Reed’s known for his social skills and loved for his charisma, something he passed down to his daughter Julia. She’s the author of two books, and contributing writer at both Vogue and Newsweek. Her irreverent humor has won the readership of many, and Julia often places her father as a central character in her stories, from his being so particular about her dress to his and his friends’ social status.
 In Julia’s first book, Queen of the Turtle Derby, she devotes a chapter to the “shonuff ” man.” Clarke Reed’s longtime friend and former business partner, the late Barthell Joseph, coined this term about the ideal Southern man.
 As Julia describes it, Joseph said this is a “man who’ll step up to the plate,” a man strongly committed to a certain set of values. To see if this is a Southern gentleman who can live up to the Southern woman, Joseph asks a series of questions, ranging from game-time decisions to relationships to tithing in the church.
 As Julia describes it, it’s her dad.
 He helped pull a party from state obscurity and pushed it to a place of political influence. He held parties at his office at the foot of the levee on Saturday

3 6 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

and then sat in a pew on Sunday.
 You’d expect to see remnants of these memories plastered across the walls in Reed’s office. There should be pictures of Reed with more hair, grinning with those prestigious powerhouses who helped run the party. There should be photos of drinks with the boys and framed clippings of Reed’s successes. Instead, it resembles a bachelor pad. There is instead a simple conference room and a spartan cubicle that Reed holds at ReedJoseph International, a Greenville-based company that specializes in bird and wildlife control. 
 There’s nothing to hint at the power and influence he has willingly wielded for so many years. It’s in keeping with his self-enforced humility.
 Reed cast his first stone in the Republican pool by voting for Eisenhower in 1952 and play a part in the Goldwater run in 1964.
 But it all really began for Reed in 1966 when Wirt Yerger resigned as chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party and Reed was thrown into the position, the second one in the party’s history.
 Shortly after. he became chairman of the Southern Republican Chairmen’s Association—“We were young guys with no ax to grind,” Reed said— an organization instrumental in constructing Nixon’s “southern strategy” that put both him and the other 
 chairmen into power.
 “We gave it extra attention, we said we want you,” said Reed, who called himself “the unknown chairman” at the time. “We’d been out of things so much.”
 “I remember seeing a license tag that said: ‘Put your heart in the heart of Dixie or put your back on the back of a jackass and get out,’” Reed said. “That kind of attitude. And that would change it. And he (Nixon) helped change it, see?”
 Nixon was generous to those that elevated him to the Oval Office, extending an open hand to the southern chairmen.
 “He let us put people in the administration. We had access so to

speak,” Reed said. “We could always make contact and talk to him about whatever we wanted to do.”
 Retzer recalls the last White House wedding, when Tricia Nixon was married. He recalls breaking into laughter when he saw pictures of the party.
 “Clarke’s in the pictures,” Retzer said. “It’s like Clarke’s in the wedding party.”
 Reed never ran for office. He was content to pull strings behind the curtain and train his disciples to preach the fundamentals of the party he helped shape below the Mason-Dixon line.
 Retzer says he has witnessed the considerable impact Reed can have in Congress.
 “Post card voter registration got to be

a hot issue. He wasn’t in favor of that,” Retzer said. “But the leadership had signed off on it. Clarke got on the phone in a weekend and turned that back in a hurry.” Retzer finds humor in Reed’s persistence and notes this is what makes him effective.
 “He will call and call and call,” Retzer said. “He will bother the issue until the issue gets solved. That’s really a great strength.” Reed’s daughter agrees. Julia says he raised “every dime of (Gov.) Kirk Fordice’s winning war chest” through what she calls castigation, which happens to be one of Clarke’s favorite words.
 “My mother always freaks out when she hears him on the phone raising money,”

Julia says. “He basically insults people into giving him money, as in, ‘This is too important, this is bigger than you, how can you live with yourself if you don’t write that 
check.’”
 Julia’s mother Judy has been with Clarke in every election, hosting parties and contributing Southern charm to move her husband’s agenda. She and her social skills – and her devotion to charity and the arts – are legend in Greenville. Earlier this year, the Greenville Arts Council gave her an award for her “lifetime contribution to the arts.”
 “My mother was a really big part of the prestige you mention,” Julia says. “She tirelessly entertained, usually at the drop of a hat.”

M AC E Y B A I R D

After a terrible automobile accident, Reed spent months on a walker. But it didn’t keep his still sharp mind from focusing on politics and it didn’t keep him from making it to his usual haunts around town.

FALL 2011 • 37

CO U RT ES Y OF C L A R K E R E E D

Reed meets with Reagan. The Reagan Revolution may have changed American, but the Reed Revolution changed Mississippi politics.

She remembers how, in the early 1970s, Clarke mentioned that famed conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr., and his wife Pat were coming to dinner in two days. Because the house was in the midst of remodeling, Judy had to repaint and put the door frames back on all the doors and re-hang the curtains. She bought a bunch of wicker for outdoor tables with staple-gun makeshift cushions. To Julia, it seems this is the

kind of story that epitomizes her parents, whom she often affectionately refers to as “Daddy” and “Mama.”
 “Buckley played the piano well into the night and Pat wrote my mother for her scalloped oyster recipe. My mother’s best friend named that menu, ‘The V.D. Dinner’ for Visiting Dignitary,” Julia says. “She went on to make it for Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Elliott Richardson (Nixon’s attorney general) and countless

3 8 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

others.”
 Retzer says he got his foot in the GOP door by translating for Reed.
 “I traveled around with him,” Retzer said. “I always said I was his translator because he’d give his speech and then I’d get up and repeat what he said.”
 Retzer laughs. He remembers another time when he was 28, sitting in Reed’s 
office when Nixon’s chief of staff called him and offered a seat on the

World Bank.
 “He said, ‘Uh no, no, I don’t want that,’” Retzer said, imitating Reed’s rapid fire Southern mumble. “Then he said, ‘Well I’m sitting here with Retzer. Mike, you want to be on the World Bank?’” 
 “They never could do anything for Clarke in terms of giving him anything because he just wanted people to do right.”
 Sometimes, this resoluteness seeped into his politics, like the storied split of the Republican party in the 1976 battle over presidential nominees Reagan and Ford.
 Reed, who sided with Ford during the convention, said he was originally for Reagan before he picked liberal running mate U.S. Sen. Richard Schweiker from Pennsylvania.
 “This guy’s (Schweiker) swagger was terrible,” Reed said. “The vice president should be the nearest thing to a cloned twin. When I heard he (Reagan) did this, I said I did not trust him.”
 Reed’s switch led to drama at the convention in Madison Square Garden. At a critical moment, when the Reed-led Mississippi delegation and its 30 votes went solidly against a rules change that Reagan wanted, it was a clear signal that Reagan was bound to lose.
 Ford won the nomination, but lost the election to Jimmy Carter. When Reagan became President four years later, some say Reed was boxed out.
 Reed says it’s not so. He waves off the idea that he was isolated because of his past alignment and only says, “No, he was good to me. We had some meals together.”
 Reed likes to tell stories. His comments are candid, his topics bounce from date to date, person to person, in one breath. In 150 minutes of talking, he hasn’t glanced at his 
watch. He likes to talk; that’s how he’s gotten things done.
 Retzer remembers the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Houston before the 1972 National

Republican Convention when Reed sat down with Ford campaign chairman Bo Callaway and told him Nelson Rockefeller, Ford’s vice president, couldn’t be his running mate in the 1976 election.
 “He said listen, Rockefeller just isn’t going to sell in the South,” Retzer said. “You guys can forget that.”
 Callaway immediately pulled Rockefeller aside before he spoke at the conference and told him the news.
 “After he addressed the crowd, he had the band play “Mississippi Mud,” some reference to Clarke,” Retzer said and laughed. “See, it wasn’t public knowledge yet.”
 Retzer said Reed thought it was funny; it didn’t bother him.
 In the wake of Hurricane Camille in 1969, Reed coerced Nixon and company to stop in Mississippi on a trip back to Washington. Though Nixon initially refused, Reed finally contacted the right person who sold the detour.
 It was the first presidential visit to Mississippi since Theodore Roosevelt’s bear hunt in 1902.
 “He landed, and we’ve been so out of the thing, about 40,000 people showed up at the airport,” Reed said. “We looked like a bunch of homeless people because of the storm.”
 “A guy named Steve Bull (who) handled the advances, he said that was probably the best talk they ever made in Nixon’s career.”
 Reed is still active in the GOP, but says he wouldn’t want to run things today. “It was a challenge then, you see. You make a little history or whatever you want to do,” Reed said. “Back then, there weren’t that many people standing in line to do it.”
 Now Reed’s back in his hometown, a town he loves but also one where he cannot exercise much control. The town is run by Democrats and he feels the mayor has isolated him and other

businessmen who might be able to help with the city’s many challenges. A while back, the city abolished the airport commission which he chaired.
 Now the man who has had a direct line to the White House says Mayor Heather McTeer won’t grant him an appointment.
 “I think she sees me as a threat more than a help,” Reed said. “I try to get an appointment, she won’t get me an appointment…I’m a Republican. I’m the enemy in her mind. I’d like to speak to her. This is the first mayor in a hundred years that didn’t have an open door where anyone can walk in and see her anytime.”
 McTeer, however, says she sets aside Wednesday afternoons for anyone to come speak with her without an appointment. For now, or at least until local leadership changes hands, Reed spends his days raising money for the GOP and helping run Reed-Joseph International. True to Southern degrees of separation, Reed’s partner is the son of his former partner. And the son-in-law of Hodding Carter.
 He’s still in the office everyday, lugging his tennis-ball rigged walker through the obscure building on Main Street.
 Reed was disappointed when Gov. Haley Barbour dropped out of the race for president in April, to the surprise of many.
 Barbour is a Reed protégé, a man with similar wit and an appetite for political warfare. Reed found Barbour when he was a 19-year-old Ole Miss student and later plucked him from the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house in his senior year to help with the 1968 Nixon campaign. Now he has picked up the baton and, after running the national party, is running the state.
 “He gets more done than I do,” Reed said in typical self-deprecating fashion. “His involvement shows how far we’ve come in the system in Mississippi.”

FALL 2011 • 39

Muddy Water

t

Greenville has a plan to clear up its brown drinking water. But is the price too much to swallow?

o most folks in Greenville, brown water is old news, certainly nothing to fuss over. After all, they have been born and raised, bathed and baptized in what could be mistaken for sweet tea. They wash dishes in it, soak linens in it and fill ice trays with it. After a while, many say they don’t even notice the color. They gulp it down without a thought.

B Y M A G G I E D AY

In fact, many say they prefer Greenville water, which tastes just a little different from your average glass of tap water. When Barack Obama visited the town in 2008 as a presidential candidate, he felt quite differently after seeing a murky stream come out of his morning shower at the Holiday Inn Express. Mayor Heather McTeer had been pushing for federal help to remove the brown tint from the water, and Obama was quick to pledge his support. He made a campaign promise that he would be back, and that he certainly wouldn’t forget the Delta. It took time, but with some help from U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., the mayor’s lobbying finally paid off. Now, Greenville waits to act on a grant from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that adds up to $18.5 million to clear up the water.

But the money comes with strings. The city is required to match 25 percent, or more than $4.5 million, no small sum in a place with a rapidly deteriorating tax base. The total amount — $23 million — would allow the city to treat six of eight wells within the city limits. It is testing the system now. For decades, these wells have pumped out brown water. But it has nothing to do with the muddy Mississippi River that flows by the town. The cause rests deep underground, where centuries-old cypress roots thrive in the aquifer from which the wells draw. The roots’ tint seeps into the water, giving it a nearly tobacco-colored hue. That’s what residents see when they turn on the water to brush their teeth. City officials insist that the water is completely harmless. It is treated

4 0 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

regularly for bacteria and any excessive minerals. According to then-Public Works Director Brad Jones, all chemicals in the water are within EPA standards, and no one has to worry when drinking or bathing in it. “We put a little fluoride in the water, and some chlorine is in there as well,” Jones said. “I like the water in our city; it’s soft. If you go elsewhere, you get hard water. I like to shampoo my hair here; it makes it feel soft,” he said with a chuckle, as he rubbed his balding scalp. Three companies have approached the city with different methods to clear the water, the most prominent being an ion-exchange system in the wells, where charged ionic chemicals attract the tint and grab it right out of the water. Other options include reverse osmosis and nano-filtration, both of which use semi-

permeable membranes that let water molecules pass but filter out color and contaminants. According to Jones, these processes will most likely be ruled out because 10 percent of the water pumped from the wells would go to waste, compared with only 1 percent when the ion-exchange method is used. Reverse osmosis also requires a lot of energy, he said. Greenville also has to consider turbidity, or haziness of the water, measured in nephelometric turbidity units, or NTUs. The higher the NTU, the cloudier the water. “We are looking to see which method will offer the most effectiveness,” Jones said. “Can they get us down from 70 NTUs to zero? What are the costs and projected offerings?” Pascagoula has used the reverse osmosis method since 1999. As a result, Jones said, little or no color is noticeable in Pascagoula’s water. “By the end of the year, we hope to nail down which (method) is right,” Jones said. To city officials, the need for clear water stems from a natural stigma – brown water is dirty water. When visitors come to Greenville, disgust is usually the first emotion experienced when they lift the toilet seat to find water that looks like someone failed to flush. Hotels frequently display small signs on their front desks with a clever rhyme to explain why the water is brown, but nothing deflects the initial shock of seeing brown water flow into the bathtub. Jones said hotels and casinos in Greenville have been forced to put in their own filtration systems, because the brown water leaves stains. For example, the Harlow’s casino on U.S. Highway 82 draws from the same well the city does, but its filtration system gets rid of the tint. “Everyone in Greenville has to bleach,” Jones said. “Hotels and casinos want their linens white. So this saves them the cost of bleaching – it gets expensive and can damage fabrics as well.”

MI RI AM TAYL O R

Greenville’s muddy tap water gets sold for laughs at the McCormick Book Inn.

“My socks are white, but not that white,” City Engineer Lorenzo Anderson said with a smile. It is just that kind of reaction that city officials worry about, along with a fear that finding brown water in the sink could scare away prospective businesses and industries, not to mention new residents. “It definitely makes an impression when attracting industries,” McTeer said. “I’m used to it. The doctor that is visiting is not.” McTeer believes that if Greenville chooses to accept and match the grant to treat the water, it could have a “tremendous impact on the economy.” “The water would still be soft,” she said. “The process just takes the color out.” “Economically speaking, we need this to happen,” Anderson said. “If you can, spend that $4.5 million, especially considering the fact that someone is offering a grant.” McTeer did not stop her lobbying with the president or the Army Corps of Engineers. She also attended the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, where former President Bill Clinton came up to her and told her that he wanted to help. She said Clinton and others have been keeping up with the project since she announced it.

The project is “absolutely going to be done,” McTeer said. “We wouldn’t be this far along if other groups weren’t willing to invest and help. I’m a staunch believer that if the money is out there, we’re gonna go get it.” The problem: Not everyone thinks it’s worth it. Some residents see the project as a waste of valuable resources that could go toward improving public education, revitalizing downtown or repaving one of Greenville’s main roads – Washington Avenue, which is so bumpy and potholed in places that gravel might actually be easier to drive on. “We do not need to be spending all of that money when our water is perfectly fine,” said retired Planters Bank President Chuck Jordan, a mayoral candidate. “I drink the water every day.” “With everything else we need, it’s ridiculous to spend that kind of money,” said former state Republican Party Chairman Clarke Reed. Though McTeer is adamant about seeing the project through, this is her last year as mayor. A new mayor will be elected in December and McTeer is running for Congress. Ultimately, the city council will decide whether to accept the grant. Implementing the ion-exchange system would take place over about three years, according to McTeer and Jones. If Jordan wins the election, the project could very easily be forgotten. “You never know if it will pass,” Jones said. “It’s a big project, but it’s justified.” In the meantime, guests arriving in Greenville will continue to see a card with this rhyme at the front desk of their hotel, or perhaps perched next to the bathroom sink: “You may be wondering why our water is brown — it’s cypress tree roots, in the springs underground. Y’all can drink our water and bathe without fear. For no one lives longer than the folks around here.”

FALL 2011 • 41

o

Covering Greenville scar Wilde once said that in America the President reigns for four years, but journalism governs forever and ever. An example of journalism influencing public policy played out

in Greenville under a newspaper dynasty, the Carter father-andson team, Hodding Carter Jr., known as “Big,” and his son, Hodding Carter III, a duo who published the Delta Democrat-Times backto-back from its founding in 1939 until “Little Hodding” became involved in the Jimmy Carter (no relation) administration in 1976.

BY CAIN MADDEN

“That is a benchmark,” said Dominick Cross, who was editor of the Delta Democrat-Times until August of this year. “It is something to behold and to try to emulate. I was not living in Mississippi at the time, but I know it won the Pulitzer Prize and was a great place to work.” In its time, former Washington County Attorney Josh Bogen said, the Carter newspaper was a conscience for Greenville, which liked to call itself “Queen City of the Delta,” a city that peacefully integrated its schools, kept the Ku Klux Klan in check and avoided racial violence. The paper also aggressively covered the community, probing everything from civic clubs to backroom political deals to racial injustice to water meter scandals. “The Carters played a key role in what Greenville was,” Bogen said. “The newspaper is extremely important to the lifeblood of a community, particularly the columns and editorials written by the editor and publisher. It is often the first thing people read.” Hodding Carter III believes that the DD-T helped the community prosper. “We helped a lot,” Carter said. “We put out a paper that wanted to cover the town heavily. Also, because we were tireless

42 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

community boosters.” Buster Wolfe, a 36-year journalist who has served multiple terms at the DD-T, remembers Carter’s influence on the paper. “He demanded perfection, Carter did,” said Wolfe, a Greenville native. “That put a lot of pressure on you — not stress, but pressure. I always tried for perfection.” Wolfe recalled how, fresh out of college, he was alone at the sports desk at lunchtime. “Carter was in. He was pacing around the newsroom reading over copy, cursing, and was obviously upset. I sat over in sports, hoping that he didn’t look at me. But, he did.” Wolfe said he will always remember how important getting every “little” thing

right was for Carter. Greenville has been without the Carters’ editorial presence for 35 years, and to view the Pulitzer Prize won in 1946, a Delta Democrat-Times reporter would have to go to the public library. But the newspaper is still being published, two ownership changes later. In 1981, a few years after the death of “Big Hodding,” the paper was sold for a reputed $15 million-plus, at the time an outstanding price. When Wolfe heard of the sale, he was surprised. “I was not necessarily confounded because he sold it, but because he sold it to Freedom (Communications), a highly conservative group,” Wolfe said. “The Carters had been so liberal.

“But then again, maybe it was what the community wanted. The community was mostly conservative.” When the paper was sold, the circulation of 17,900 subscribers extended into what Hodding III called the MidDelta – Washington, Bolivar, Sunflower, Humphreys, Sharkey and Issaquena counties. Thirty years later, press foreman Dennis Hemme said the newspaper’s circulation is 6,500 on weekdays, and 8,200 for the Sunday edition. Greenville has shrunk as well. Today, its population stands at 34,927 people. Thirty years ago it was approaching 45,000 people. Mayor Heather McTeer said that a newspaper is critical to the wellbeing of a town. “A newspaper, and all media, are responsible for getting information out to the citizens,” McTeer said. “But a strong newspaper can certainly be an asset to a community.” Now owned by Emmerich Newspapers, the Delta Democrat-Times still seeks to be a publication of record, Cross said. “There is the merging of information and entertainment going on in the media industry, like Fox News,” Cross said. “This ‘infotainment’ is not something we will do here.” Cross found his way to the Delta Democrat-Times in the same way that some of his reporters did, on journalismjobs.com. His most recent post was in Louisiana, but through his career he has worked across the country, including Virginia, Colorado and Texas. “Working in newspapers is a great way to see the country, and to really get to know it,” Cross said. “You are not just visiting these places, you get a chance to stay and get to know a place.” While Cross said he does not think

N O RMAN SEAWRI G H T

Pressman Jonathon Hemme sees to it that the Delta Democrat-Times looks good when it comes off the press.

FALL 2011 • 43

PH O T O S BY N OR M A N S E AW R I GHT

Despite a staff that is a mere fraction of the staff the Democrat-Times had years ago, the newspaper tackles major issues in Greenville and takes local officials to task.

it is necessarily the responsibility of the newspaper to help a town improve, he does see how it could have an impact. “You just report the news, good and bad,” Cross said. “What you can do is use your columns and editorials to make the community see what it can do to make itself better.” When the Carters ran the paper, readers often groused that the editorial pages were too liberal, the reporters too troublesome. But after years of shrinking newspapers, says former state Republican chairman Clarke Reed, “a lot of people would be glad to have them back. They covered the news.” The quality of the Delta DemocratTimes has improved under Emmerich ownership, since its purchase in 2001 for an undisclosed amount of money, Bogen said, especially when compared to the

newspaper’s previous owners, Freedom Communications, a libertarian-owned company based in Santa Ana, Calif. “The newspaper under Freedom had a pathetic voice,” Bogen said. “It really provided no voice for the community specifically, which the Carters had provided.” Bogen said today’s DD-T, unlike the Freedom-owned version, takes stances on issues that affect the community. As an example, he cited a scandal involving the ousted police chief. “In one story, he allegedly went down a street in Greenville in a police car, while intoxicated, and harassed three women,” Bogen said. “He pointed a pistol at them, confused them, and brought them into the station, where they were released.” The city council voted to fire the chief, but Bogen said Greenville’s

4 4 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

mayor, Heather McTeer, continued to support him. Cross and his editorial staff criticized the mayor. McTeer said the chief ’s case was under investigation, and that she was careful about what she said in print. “Sometimes you have to make a statement at a later date, and I’m not sure that they understood that,” McTeer said. “I am sure there are things that they would like me to say that I could not, or would not, but you have to be careful. You can’t say something that will impact an investigation. “Other papers I spoke with on the issue, such as the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, they understood the legal ramifications.” Later, a circuit judge upheld the city’s right to fire the chief. McTeer said in her eight years she has worked with three different publishers,

and Cross is her fifth editor. “And I have been through a lot of different reporters,” she said. “Some of them have been awesome to work with, and some have left a little to be desired.” The DD-T, in its current leadership incarnation, has room for improvement, she said. “I understand that we are not always going to agree,” McTeer said. “I know we will not always be on the same side, but it is about reporting accurate information in a fair way. That has not always been done.” While she is still trying to feel out the current leadership, in the past, McTeer said leadership teams at the paper have gone to the same places to get information, information that is not always accurate. “It is important to get all aspects, all

sides and really have a good thought process involved,” McTeer said. “I know there has been change in the way the communications business works. I know they can’t hire reporters and can’t always do the background that is needed. But at the same time, you have to be willing to have a partnership in the community, play a role that is fair and unbiased.” Still, she said, there are former DD-T editors that she keeps in touch with. “Despite our battles, we always remained very civil, and I appreciated that,” she said. “That is what is important, that there is a level of respect. There are folks who did not respect me.” Adversarial relationships between newspapers and government officials are fairly common, and Greenville certainly has its share. “The mayor has a pet TV station, that

she always gives tips to herself,” Cross said. “She has told people in city hall to not give story tips to us. But we get them. Someone will always give us something. “It is not a working relationship, but it is not our problem, it is their problem.” McTeer said she does not feel like it is her versus them. “It should not be Heather versus the Delta Democrat-Times,” she said. “This is about the city of Greenville, and how to move to meet in the middle.” The Delta Democrat-Times does not try to write to any particular racial audience, Cross said. “A story is a story is a story,” Cross said. Greenville’s population is about 70 percent black. While Cross said he would like for race to not be an issue, sometimes it is — just as it frequently was in the Carter years, an era that saw segregation

FALL 2011 • 45

N OR M A N S E AW R I GHT

Former editor Dominick Cross says the paper’s Web following is small but growing. “Nowadays,” said Cross, “reporters don’t just report and write. They proof layouts, design sections. “It is not like it used to be. We get here early, and we leave late.”

and its aftermath. “I can’t wait until the day that race is not an issue. I can’t wait until people get past this stuff,” Cross said. “News is color blind, and so are we.” Cross said people in the community will play the race card. “We live in an area that is 70 percent black, so when writing about someone doing wrong in office, it is likely to be about someone black because black people hold most of the major offices,” Cross said. “The same goes for crime.” He has heard of black officials, including the mayor and black preachers, urging people to avoid the newspaper, said Cross, who is white. “Preachers have told their congregations to not read the Delta Democrat-Times,” Cross said. “They have urged members to cancel their

subscriptions over some columns.” The age-old Mississippi problem of racial differences is not the only obstacle the newspaper faces. There are also the difficult economic trends that have forced newspapers across the country to slash their reporting staffs. While Cross would like to see his newspaper staff live up to the Carter benchmark, he said it is nearly impossible to do what they did, given the manpower he has today. In the 1970s, the Delta Democrat-Times had 15 reporters spread throughout the Delta and even in Jackson. Today, the newspaper has three reporters for his news section, and they all cover broad beats. Daryl Bell, the city news editor, has been with the paper for two years. He said he does a little bit of everything. His city beat includes Greenville, Leland,

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Hollandale, Indianola — government and police. He reports, he writes, he edits the copy of other reporters and then he lays out his section, also grabbing stories from the wire services to bring in broader news from Mississippi. When the sports editor is on vacation, Bell is also tasked with laying out the daily sports section. “The job is a draining experience, it really is,” said Bell, originally from Philadelphia, Penn. “But it can be rewarding at times.” He cited a story about a woman in Leland, whose son was killed by police. “There were many questions surrounding his death,” Bell said. “I talked to the mom and really got her rage into the story. It was really moving.” Another story involved a mother’s quest for answers. “Her son was pushed out of a moving

bus and killed,” Bell said. “She is very frustrated and wonders why no one has been apprehended for his murder.” Cross said the newspaper industry has changed a lot over the years. “At one time, you had people who only wrote headlines, you had people who just read copy,” Cross said. “The reporters here are proofing layout, some are designing their sections. It is not like it used to be. We get here early, and we leave late.” Deadline at the DD-T, an afternoon paper, is 10 a.m., so Cross said often the staff arrives as early as 6 a.m., and stays late the night before working on completing stories. “When I come in at 7 a.m.,” Wolfe said, “I feel late.” Wolfe said the current state of the newspaper industry induces a different kind of pressure, unlike the 1970s, when Carter demanded perfection. Now, it feels like getting the story in comes ahead of perfection at times. “There is pressure in knowing that if you don’t write something, someone else will have to,” Wolfe said. In the old days,” he said, there were more people to share the load. “It is tough to do this,” said Wolfe, who reports and designs the business and outdoors sections. “And I always feel like I could do more.” McTeer said the deadline mode of thinking has often opened rifts between her office and reporters. “Some think that they should always be able to pick up the phone and get the mayor to give an immediate statement,” she said. “But it does not always work like that. “I know you have a deadline, and I will work with you to give you what you need. But at the same time, I can’t be expected to give something on the spot when I have a responsibility to make sure everything I say is accurate at all times. I find that sometimes that understanding is not always there.” Cross said the staff is spread thin, and that if he could get the paper to hire

two additional reporters, the product he produces would improve, as would circulation and revenue. “If we had more reporters, we could do more thorough and consistent coverage, and everything that spins off of that, such as editorials and columns,” Cross said. “It would help us create a better informed community, and it would boost circulation…If we could get away from the bottom line mode of thinking.” Cross said two positions would really help – a reporter who exclusively covers schools and one who solely covers religion. Cross said the newspaper has to cover four school districts, and making that a beat in its own right would free up reporters to do more thorough coverage. The ever-increasing importance of the Internet has also added a layer of complexity to the newsroom. In many cases, the Internet has created a 24/7 deadline period, where reporters constantly scramble to update online information, though in Greenville, Cross admits that they don’t yet do much with the website beyond publishing what goes

into the print edition online. Once, the online edition was free of charge, but the website recently became a subscription-based service. Cross said the move was tough, and that many don’t want to pay it. Most of the customer base is Greenville expats, Cross said. “Mostly, it is people wanting access to the obituaries and gossip,” Cross said. “I don’t have a problem charging them. The way I see it, if you were living in town, I’d expect you to buy a physical copy of the paper.” Cross said online subscriptions are less than 1 percent of revenue. Another obstacle the paper faces, Wolfe said, is a change in community attitude. Before, he said, the newspaper would report the news and raise hell and sometimes get action. Now, many people aren’t listening, and he thinks apathy is partly to blame. “How do you make people want to care? Everyone has their own lives,” Wolfe said. “And they are self absorbed. “If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t be here.”

N OR M A N S E AW R I GHT

Cross

FA L L 2011 • 47

The China Connection

M A R I A NNA B R E L A ND

Years ago, almost every little town in the Delta had at least once Chinese grocery. In Greenville, they seemed to pop up all over the place.

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i

n a dandelion-laden plot of ground just off South Main Street rest the remnants of a dying culture. The headstones in this tiny cemetery share the usual story of the beginning and ending of life. Scan the granite blocks and you see the usual James, Patsy, and Jack, but the eye also catches the resting place of Yue and Shong. This is the Chinese cemetery. Here lies a part of Greenville that is disappearing quickly.

BY MARIANNA BRELAND

With its ornate entrance arch and Chinese lettering, the cemetery is lovingly maintained, a sign that in this place for the dead, there is life. Nonetheless, Greenville’s once vibrant Chinese community has seen better days. The young no longer stay. The old are dying off. Chinese grocery stores that once dotted every part of town – the late author Shelby Foote once counted more than 40 — are now reduced to no more than half a dozen, an endangered species. But still the little plot of ground is taken care of. This is a culture that respects the past, yet heeds the future. And for the majority of young Chinese graduating from Ivy League and Mississippi universities, Greenville is not the future. It is little wonder that the Chinese blossomed here, in a town known for welcoming different cultures. And the Chinese reciprocated. An hour into an interview with Raymond Wong, a journalist is politely recruited to dinner. And what a dinner. An Argentine, an Arabian, an Asian, and more meet every Tuesday night at a local Mexican restaurant, yet the only accent present is a Southern drawl. It may be unusual in other cities in Mississippi, but not here.

The Chinese who remain blame the slow erosion of their once-thriving community on troubled school systems, crime, lack of jobs, and the neverending list of depression-like ills that all dwindling Delta towns endure. Yet none are apologetic. They see this as the second migration. Their ancestors left China in search of success. And now their young leave the Delta for that as well. It’s not a problem for them. It’s a tradition. A tradition of wanting what’s best for your flesh and blood. As Luck Wing of Oxford, once the mayor of Sledge, explained, “Americans want their children to be a chip off the old block. Chinese, we want the children to be better than the block, better than their parents.” HOW THEY GOT HERE “Even Asia has contributed to and drawn from the Delta. Small Chinese storekeepers are almost as ubiquitous as in the South Seas.” – William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee Today, Greenville’s small Asian community could be the best-kept secret for Washington County besides Doe’s hot tamale recipe.

Many native Mississippians are unaware of this tiny pocket of culture in what was once cotton country. But it is business as usual in this melting pot of a town. Rev. Tommy Shepherd, a local Baptist preacher who long ministered to the Chinese community, wrote that in the frontier atmosphere after the Civil War the addition of Chinese to the complex racial mix of the population went “almost unnoticed.” According to Shepherd’s The Chinese of Greenville, Mississippi, they trickled up the Mississippi River by steamboat from New Orleans. Opportunity was in the air, the soil, the water, and the Chinese heeded the call. Gone were their families and the comfort of home. They came to America to do better, be better, and live better. They were recruited during Reconstruction when planters were looking for alternatives to black labor. But the Chinese quickly decided that chopping and picking cotton was not their cup of tea. Joe Gow Nue opened the first grocery store in 1910. One hundred years later, Chinese are still serving and feeding the Queen City.

FALL 2011 • 49

MARI AN N A BREL AN D

Being Southerners, the Chinese of Greenville are full of stories about their people and their ways.

It is much the same elsewhere in the Delta. Almost every little town had at least one Chinese grocery. Usually, the first storekeeper would establish a beachhead, build up clientele, then send for relatives, who would often live in cramped quarters upstairs at the store before eventually striking out on their own. It was not long before they were being assimilated. But they still stood out in school for their hard work and strong study habits. Many a Delta high school has seen any number of Chinese valedictorians and salutatorians. Sometimes, they shared their culture with non-Chinese. In Marks, people would come from all over the Delta to an annual lavish fireworks display sponsored by a Chinese family to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Most Greenville Chinese can trace their roots back to the province of Canton in southern China. The older Chinese can still speak their native Cantonese tongue, but most mainly speak English with a side of Southern. Sometimes, their Chinese comes out in a drawl as well. But the Chinese of Greenville, as elsewhere in the Delta, have not always been seen as equals. Chinese children were not allowed into the public school system until 1945. Just as African-Americans fought

a weary fight for equality, so did the Chinese. But in the traditional ways. They did it quietly, unassumingly. Until then, they had to attend the Chinese school, which resembled something straight out of a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. One room, a schoolmarm, and couple of desks. Today, most Chinese children attend nearly all-white private schools — Washington School and Greenville Christian School – or the integrated Catholic school, St. Joseph. They are going to MIT, Ivy League colleges, Ole Miss, Mississippi State. They are receiving diplomas, masters, and doctorates. They are surgeons, pharmacists, and dentists. But they live in Houston, California, or Washington. Gone are the days when the children stayed behind, taking on new grocery stores and family businesses. Bobby Ju is a grocer. Born in Vicksburg, he moved to Greenville and then Hollandale for the grocery business. These days, he says, things are different. “Our kids don’t want to work 85 hours a week,” he says. Can you blame them? The typical small Chinese grocery will stay open ‘til 3 in the morning on Saturdays and then open bright and early for the Sunday church rush. Add long hours with the constant

5 0 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

late night risk of being robbed at gunpoint and possibly murdered, and you have the daily life of a Chinese grocer. Yet, don’t be fooled. The Chinese can have a good time. Before being interviewed, Bobby Ju had just left a Mah Jong game. Most Southern ladies and gents play a game of rummy or bridge. These Southern ladies and gents do, too. Just a different kind. In the days of dresses and gloves, the Chinese would host dances and balls that could compare with the likes of any Junior Auxiliary or debutante function. Many a husband and wife met at these soirees up and down the Delta. Luck Wing met his wife at one in Marianna, Ark. Fannie Wong of Greenville met her husband at a dance as well. She claims she “wasn’t pretty enough to be on the dance floor.” So she stayed in the kitchen to help. But that didn’t stop Fannie from catching the eye of Jack Wong. Being Southerners, the Chinese are full of stories about their people and their ways. And these are their stories. BOBBY JU Bobby Ju doesn’t want to brag on himself. He has a laidback, reserved manner. He would rather talk about his people, his brother, his children. But Bobby Ju had the top grocery store in nearby Hollandale, Bob’s Food Land. The family-owned store survived competition from the Sunflower chain. He had 15 employees. A self-service meat-market. Shopping carts. A big deal, considering most Chinese grocery stores are more like a convenience store. For Ju, prosperity came after he and his wife bought a second store. Prosperity and good times were not always in the air for the Asian man who grew up during the civil rights era. “Well, let me tell you. It was tense. Even in the small town of Hollandale. “There are Democrats and Republicans and independents in America. The Chinese in America are the independents. We could not offend either side. You would create problems for your kids. They had to go to school,” he said. So Bobby Ju served both races. A minority among minorities, Ju and the other grocers could not comprehend not

The Chinese, like morning news show host Raymond Wong, above, who stayed are not at all surprised that so many have left. They see this as the second migration. Their ancestors left China in search of success. And now their young leave the Delta for that as well.

PHOTOS BY M ARIANN A BREL AN D

The Chinese Cemetery. Here lies a part of Greenville that is disappearing quickly.

serving other minorities and not serving the majority. They were simply the bridge. “We are not white. We are not black. Ware in between. We are neutral.” Ju has experienced slurs just like any other minority. He has been taunted. Called names. Even now, he hesitates to speak them. “Chinamen. Chink. They called us stuff like Hong-Kong. Tojo.” His brother was the first Chinese student to attend Hollandale High. In college, he noticed that he was always seated with other Chinese in the

classroom. “It bothered you, but you just absorb it. You don’t hold a grudge. It’s just a sign of the times,” he said. Having survived 37 years in the grocery business, Bobby Ju now tries to survive the ongoing demise of the Chinese presence in the Delta. There used to be 50 Chinese in Hollandale, and six or seven Chinese grocers. Now there are two — Bobby and his wife. Bobby has four children, none of whom live in Greenville — a place where welfare

is the single biggest source of personal income. “Unless we get education better, we cannot bring in factories and have a dependable workforce and when only seventy-something percent graduates...” His voice trails off and he shakes his head. There is no quick solution. But the man with graying hair, a quiet voice and even quieter smile doesn’t think his home is completely gone. “There’s always hope. Where there is a will, there is a way.” If nothing else, he said, “I think we left a legacy.”

FALL 2011 • 51

The Remnant

t

Once, Greenville had the largest Jewish congregation in Mississippi. BY CAIN MADDEN

en people filed through a side door of the domed Hebrew Union Temple on a Friday night, a holy night. One was pushed in a wheelchair, another hobbled with a cane. Others slowly made their way into the cavernous sanctuary despite their advanced ages. When the Torah was presented, they all promised to guard its wisdom. Twenty years

ago, hundreds would have made such a vow, but now only a handful of Jews remain in Greenville, once home to the largest congregation of Jewish people in Mississippi.

Among the many casualties of Greenville’s decline, the vanishing Jewish community stands out because it was so large, so successful, so influential for so long. It drew from little towns scattered around the Delta for 60 miles or more. Jewish families were here in 1870, already 10 percent of the population when the city was born, and in that fluid cotton frontier they were quickly assimilated, their drawls growing just as slow and thick as gentile drawls. As in other Delta towns in the frenzied

early years of the cotton empire, they moved smoothly into leadership roles in politics, business, civic clubs, garden clubs and the country club. Today, annual civic leadership awards are named after Jake Stein in Greenville, Ed Kossman in Cleveland and Morris Lewis in Indianola – all Jews. In Greenville, Jewish merchants ran the best stores downtown. Some owned cotton plantations. They also ran the city. The city’s first mayor, Leopold Wilzinski, was elected in 1875 and was Jewish. So

52 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

was the third mayor, Jacob Alexander, great grandfather of Andy Lack, CEO of Bloomberg’s multimedia group. Greenville’s Jewish community contributed one of the Delta’s most famous and prolific authors, cosmopolitan David Cohn, whose perceptive and farsighted works on cotton and the Delta are still quoted by those trying to make sense of the region. It was Cohn who coined that oft-quoted phrase to describe the geographic limits of the Delta: “The Mississippi Delta runs

N OR M A N S E AW R I GHT

Once, hundreds would pack this sanctuary, home to what used to be the largest Jewish congregation in Mississippi.

from the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis to Catfish Row in Vicksburg.” But now the few Jews who remain are swallowed up in the high ceilings and spacious meeting rooms of the nearly empty, palace-like temple on Main Street. For a city that long prided itself on being the Delta’s premier business center, the flight of young Jews to places of better potential is an ominous sign. “A lot of people have left, like me, so I know it is a smaller congregation,” said Hank Nelken, a screenwriter born in

Greenville but now living in Los Angeles. “That being said, one of the nice things is that the people who are left take it very seriously and are very committed to keeping it going.” People like Corrine Goodman, 84, who has been in Greenville since 1946, when she married into the family that has had the downtown clothing store by that name since 1902. Goodman’s story is unusual because two of her children, Sam and Rebecca Goodman, came back. “They had something to come back to,”

Goodman said. “The store.” When she returned in 1986, Rebecca Goodman said, it was supposed to be for a short break. “I was planning to go to New York or Chicago.” Twenty-five years later, she is still here. “The grass is not really greener depending on where you live,” she said. “It is what you choose to make of it and what your attitude toward life is that is really important. Greenville is a wonderful place with a lot of great people.” Since returning, she has helped

FALL 2011 • 53

“I cry real tears when I drive through downtown sometimes. I just remember how it used to be. This is my hometown.” — Earl Solomon

revitalize the business. “She decided to sell more formal wear, wedding and prom dresses,” Corrine Goodman said. “Used to, people had to go to Jackson or Memphis. Now, people from Arkansas, Louisiana and all over Mississippi come here to work with her.” Rebecca started with nine different dresses in three different styles, and now her formal wear takes up half the store. She picked wedding dresses because they are recession-proof. “When people cut back on everything else due to the economy, they are going to pay their taxes, and they are going to get married,” she said. Although hers came back, Corrine Goodman admits that children, the future, are in short supply at the temple. “The temple once had around 65 kids,” she said. “Now it has one or two, and they are not from Greenville.” Gaines Lamensdorf and his mother make the trip up U.S. 61 to Greenville from Rolling Fork, which had a Jewish mayor for 40 years, every couple of weeks for temple and Sunday school. Lamensdorf said his sisters, who have had their bat mitzvahs, no longer make the trip. At 13, he has not yet figured out what to do with the rest of his life. But he’s already thinking about it. “There is so much to choose from,” Lamensdorf said. “I want to become a famous researcher or astronomer.” The Delta is not likely to be a big part of his future. “I’m probably going to move to a bigger place,” Lamensdorf said. “I probably want to live in New York — there is a big Jewish community there.” The Delta Jewish population has always been one big extended family, with Jews

in one town very aware of what Jews were doing in other towns. Parents took care to arrange events and parties and dances all over the Delta so their children could socialize with other Jews. Even so, those in Greenville sometimes say they felt at least a little “different” in a region dominated by gentiles. Hank Nelken said that when his parents divorced and his mother took him to Dallas, he felt there were pros and cons to being part of a bigger community of Jews. “There were a lot more Jewish kids my age, and that was kind of nice,” Nelken said. “But on the other hand, there was sort of a uniqueness about being Jewish in Greenville. I was the only one in my grade, so when there was a Jewish holiday, my classmates would always come ask me what it was about. “It was kind of cool to be unique. You know, I felt like I fit in better at my school in Dallas, but I also did not feel as special.” Former Municipal Court Judge Earl Solomon, 74, said the Sunday school used to have six grades with six teachers. Now it has one student and one teacher. The temple used to have a full-time rabbi who lived in the house next door, which Solomon now rents as a law office. “It was an unbelievable place to grow up,” Solomon said. “But the young people did not come back.” Josh Bogen, an attorney who practices in nearby Leland, said the unrelenting exodus of upwardly mobile youth in search of opportunity is not just a Jewish problem. “It is happening with a lot of Greenville’s children, but I would say a higher percentage of Jewish children went to colleges and universities outside of Mississippi and did not come back,” said Bogen, who now lives in Oxford.

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His great-great-grandfather was once the Greenville rabbi and wrote a letter to the governor strongly urging major improvements in the state’s schools. Bogen grew up next door to Jay Stein, who went to the University of Cincinnati to study marketing and returned to Greenville to run Stein Mart. The venerable family discount clothing store was located for decades on Washington Avenue at the foot of the levee, until abandoning a decaying downtown for a new spot on Highway 1 South. “Jay came back to work with his father, Jake Stein, who was a brilliant man, but Jay had a much larger vision,” Bogen said. Benjy Nelken, Hank Nelken’s father and curator of several Greenville museums, said Stein once came to him to discuss that vision, back when Nelken was running his family’s store, The Fair, which closed in 1986. “He came to me and asked me if I’d ever thought about opening up some stores out of Greenville,” Nelken said. “He was convinced that the future of retail was in chains, and out of Greenville. I thought about it but never did it. “Now, he is a multimillionaire, and I am running some museums.” Nelken came back to Greenville from college to run The Fair, and when he closed that down he got into real estate. Many of Greenville’s businesses did not last that long. The discounter era arrived and shut down the mom-and-pop stores, he said. “Many Jewish people came to Greenville to trade, and ultimately ended up running those mom-and-pop stores,” Nelken said. “But they started to close down in the 1960s and 1970s.” Across America, the same trend continues to drive the heart of the

PH O T O S BY N OR M A N S E AW R I GHT

The shrunken congregation is much older now, but there are still some young people to worship here and gaze at the star of David. And all who come here are determined to keep the temple going and keep the memories alive.

C A I N M A DDE N

The domed temple on Main Street, a downtown landmark, used to draw worshippers from little towns 60 and 70 miles away.

community, its downtown, elsewhere, Hank Nelken said. “The big stores like Walmart come in and run the small businesses away,” Hank Nelken said. “A lot of those stores tended to be Jewish-owned — they ended up having to move on.” The children of these store owners did not have much of a reason to come back to Greenville, Benjy Nelken said. “These children went off to college, and they got degrees in professional career paths such as law, medicine, whatever,” Nelken said. “There was not much in the way of opportunities here, so they went where better opportunities existed.” Nowadays, said Solomon, whose children now live in Atlanta, most people in the temple are over 60. “I am 74, and I’m not really the oldest, but the youngest people are not far below me,” Solomon said. “They are in their 60s. There are only a few people below that. The youngest member won’t be here long.

She is in her 20s or 30s, and is only here with the Coast Guard.” When Solomon got out of the Army in 1964, he became a director of the temple. He remembers the congregation having 188 families. “We were much, much bigger than the temple in Jackson,” Solomon said. “Now, Jackson dwarfs us.” Back then, life was better not only at the temple but in Greenville, a place where the merchandise could be as good — if not as plentiful — as anything in Jackson or Memphis. It was a proud, progressive city where culture was treasured, best-selling authors were born and reared and the newspaper editor, Hodding Carter Jr., won a Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his editorials on tolerance. David Cohn was instrumental in luring Carter to Greenville. “I cry real tears when I drive through downtown sometimes,” Solomon said. “I just remember how it used to be. This is my hometown.”

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Rebecca Goodman fondly remembers growing up here. “Greenville really was a wonderful place to have a childhood,” she said. “All of the kids came together and we would have fun playing sports. I don’t remember anything anti-Semitic.” Corrine Goodman said she remembers a story from when the schools integrated. “One day, Rebecca had a black friend over, and they were studying in the front yard,” Goodman said. “I asked her if they wanted to come inside to read, but she wanted to sit in the yard. “You know what? I think it was because she wanted people to see them together.” Well before legal segregation ended, Jewish merchants started employing black workers in their stores. In 1950, Corrine Goodman remembers hiring a black woman who worked up front until she could no longer work. “My dad and Goldie both used to joke that they were never going to quit,” Rebecca Goodman said. “When they did

stop working, they would be coming out in a casket. “She worked for 50-something years. She was in her 80s, and she walked to work every day.” Benjy Nelken’s grandfather Herman Benjamin Nelken and father, Lester Nelken, found that it made good business sense to hire black people to work in the front of the store. “My grandfather saw that the black women in the store helping in the back had a good rapport with the black customers,” Nelken said. “Soon they started helping the white customers up front, too, and the white customers were happy to have the help and thanked them.” When Nelken took over The Fair in 1975, he hired a black woman to manage the store in The Greenville Mall, he said. “One time I was interviewing a person for the store who asked if Maxine (Amos) was the manager,” Nelken said. “I told her that she was, and she asked, ‘Is she not black?’ “She told me that she couldn’t work under a black manager, so I said, ‘Well, then, you are not hired.’ ” The first Jews who came to Greenville were of Polish and German descent. Later, they came from Russia and France. “It was mostly by word of mouth that they heard about American opportunities and decided to come here,” Nelken said. “America was the land of milk and honey, where opportunities abounded, and as Jews had a long history of being discriminated against in Europe, many decided to come here in hopes of success.” Not long after the first Jews arrived, as early as 1870, a congregation formed and began using Alex Hall as a place of worship. By 1906, the temple on Main Street had been built. Nelken said many Jews who came through Ellis Island met success, including his grandfather, who traveled down the Mississippi River to Greenville, where he had family. There, he opened The Fair in 1896. “Most Jews who came here to Greenville

did find success, at least enough to make a comfortable living,” Nelken said. “They became patriotic, and they loved this city.” In the 1960s, the Ku Klux Klan bombed temples in Jackson and Meridian and tried to assassinate a Jewish merchant in Meridian active in civil rights. But there were no problems with the Klan in Greenville, in part because of opposition from popular local leaders and in part because of farmers’ fears that the Klan would drive away black labor. In Greenville, the Jewish population built good relations with Christian churches in the downtown area. “I don’t know how we built such a good relationship, but we did it here,” Nelken said. “We help them, and they help us.” An example is the annual Dutch Lunch, a charity fundraiser started in the 1880s. It continues today, the first Thursday in March, as the Deli Lunch. Nelken said the congregation typically serves more than 1,500 plate lunches including sauerkraut. Sixty-five percent of the workers are Christian, including Florence Signa, better known as Aunt Florence of Doe’s, Greenville’s iconic restaurant. “One night, Richard Dattel came in to eat,” Signa said. “I asked him how he was, and he said, ‘Aunt Florence, I’m OK, but the Jewish population is getting thin and we need help with the lunch.’ ” Signa gave it some thought, and that night she called Dattel and volunteered her services. “I’ve been working there the last three years,” Signa said. “I love it. I always get the sweetest thank-you note from the ladies at the temple, that and they always treat the volunteers to one of the nicest lunches at the country club. “But I always tease Benjy about my paycheck when I see him,” Signa said with a smile. Corrine Goodman said the temple used to have services every Friday night and Saturday morning. Now, it meets only once every two weeks. “We used to meet every week, trying to do a service even when the rabbi couldn’t

come,” Goodman said. “We would have one member lead the congregation every other week, but it got to the point to where no one came, except the person leading the congregation and a couple of others. My husband and I came, because he grew up in the temple and was used to coming every week.” Solomon said when he was growing up, his parents gave him the option of going Friday night or Saturday morning. In high school, Friday night meant football, so Saturday morning was the easy choice most times, excepting Jewish holidays. During his senior year, Solomon was the Greenville High School football manager. The school was to play Jackson Central in the Big 8 Conference playoffs. “I told my mother how big a game it was, and that I needed to be there, but she said that it was a Jewish holiday and that I was going to temple,” Solomon said. “So I had to tell the coach that I could not go.” After he finished loading equipment onto the bus Friday morning, Solomon started walking away. “I could hear someone asking where was Earl going,” he said. “Then the coach, Clark Maddux, stood up and said that it was a Jewish holiday.” The coach said: “Earl Solomon is doing the right thing, putting religion ahead of football. I am proud of him. I am just as proud of him as I am of anyone on this bus. You are respected if you respect your religion.” Solomon’s parents also kept him out of school on Jewish holidays, and he said he never encountered any problems from teachers over such absences. “On one holiday I missed a test,” Solomon said. “I came back to class after the holiday and the teacher had me take the test.” Solomon said one student asked the teacher why he was taking the test that day. “It is because he is Jewish,” she told the ninth-grade class. “His parents would not let him come to school during the holiday. That is why the Jewish religion survives: They take it seriously.”

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The Historian

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Benjy Nelken is saving Greenville’s storied past one artifact at a time.

enjy Nelken lounges behind a desk strewn with loose papers and 19th-century Shakespeare volumes. He leans back, grips a pipe between his teeth and lights a match. “I’m sure I’ll get it back in

spades,” he drawls about his work, humor lurking behind a voice as

BY MACEY BAIRD

Nelken is Greenville’s unofficial historian. He’s a big, barrel-chested man with a penchant for tobacco, a man of irreverent humor who has preserved the city’s tumultuous past by creating five small museums. In a city that needs an economic engine in the worst way, proposals pop up every now and then to build a big museum in hopes of attracting tourists. There is talk of an African-American museum. There’s been talk of a Delta cultural museum near the levee. But none has gone anywhere. Meanwhile, people from the darnedest places drop by Nelken’s mini-museums to ogle his curious collections. “Have you talked to Benjy?” people say when asked about local history. “You

thick as molasses.

need to talk to Benjy.” Benjy Nelken has his own museum, a tribute to Greenville’s rich history that he has put together with his own hands. What started as decorations for his real estate office at 409 Washington Ave. has turned into an intriguing portal to the past. After foraging finds from his family’s attic and bidding on eBay, he has assembled a two-room contribution to Greenville’s storied yesteryear. And he hasn’t stopped. He has been the driving force behind the development of the Flood of 1927 Museum, the Goldstein Nelken Solomon Century of History Museum, the Greenville Air Force Base Museum and an exhibit located in the River Road Queen Welcome Center.

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Most are city projects in partnership with the Greenville and Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau, which Nelken chairs. But the Greenville History Museum is his personal project. He’s invested thousands in it with no outside funding. On a gloomy Delta day, Nelken rises from his chair and lumbers to the front of the roomy storefront he converted into the history museum more than 20 years ago. “It’s been a work in progress since its beginning. I just observed the fact that there was no real history being saved here except the public library,” Nelken says. “I thought we had an interesting history that needed to be studied and celebrated.”

C A I N M A DDE N

Benjy Nelken started collecting Greenville artifacts because, as he puts it, “I thought we had an interesting history that need to be studied and celebrated.”

Every inch of the tobacco-scented room is jammed with artifacts, ranging from old-fashioned country-club slot machines to a 1940s “Memphis Belle” B-17 replica. “You ever seen a 78 rpm before? Hey, this girl doesn’t know what a 78 is,” he snorts, standing beside a 1946 jukebox. “Too young.” “Nelken strolls the exhibits, jingling change in his pocket and directing a pipe back and forth from his chalky beard. He motions to a Delta Democrat-Times printing plate, the aluminum tablet used to announce the death of editor Hodding Carter Jr., a Pulitzer Prize winner. He points to his favorite, a 1930s motion picture projector from an old downtown theater. Beside a patriotic Mickey Mouse

motif, he stops. Four sketchbooks, each nearly 3 feet long and 150 years old, rest exposed on two podiums. He carefully peels back a flaky, faded maroon cover. “These are worth tens of thousands,” Nelken says as tiny shards of paper shed from each fragile page. “Roberts’ Sketches in the Holy Land, Vol. I” by David Roberts and “Les Loges e Raphael” by A. Lacrosse are manuscripts donated from Greenville High School. Now he’s at a small display of the 1927 flood that inundated the city. He reverently touches an enlarged blackand-white aerial shot of Greenville’s streets encased underwater. “That’s where the store was,” he says, pointing

to a large clothing shop in the heart of downtown that had been in his family for generations. Nelken was born in Greenville in 1945 and left only to play football at Ole Miss and live briefly in New York City. He came back to run The Fair, a few storefronts from where he now stands. Before he shut it down in 1986, it belonged to four generations of Nelkens. His grandfather bought out The Fair and Greenville Dry Goods, retail and wholesale stores respectively, from another family member in the 1930s. “I’m not in love with the history per se. This is where I was born and raised,” he says. “I have an interest in the area, emotionally and economically. I’ve been

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E L I Z A B E T H B E AV E R

A M B E R HE L S E L

In Nelken’s Greenville museum, no artifact is too small. In fact, it is the collection of so many items, both big and little, that make it so interesting.

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in business here since I got out of college, basically.” He may claim not to be enamored with Greenville’s story, but he can’t fool his friends. Nelken sits on the board of Main Street Greenville, whose main focus is revitalizing downtown, and is involved with the Delta Economic Development Center. When the city tried to tear down a water tower built in 1940, he said no. He won. “I just screamed and hollered,” he laughs. “Squeaky wheels get the grease.” This dry repartee screams from every corner of his office. It’s there in the “Shalom Y’all” coffee cup resting behind his head. It’s in the framed “Wanted: dead or alive” poster hanging on the wall with his 30-year-old face and buried among a sea of newspaper clippings about his son, a screenwriter in Hollywood. Sitting on top of his grandfather’s old bookcase are cutout caricatures of mini-Benjy. His oft-used phrases such as “Christian him down!” and “I told you so!” bubble from a silver beard. A friend made them for his 50th birthday party. Some people appreciate Nelken’s jesting. Some people don’t. He smiles as he says he’s alienated everyone in the town at one time or another. Susan Weisiger Painter, a spunky waitress at Jim’s Café across the street, says her distant cousin has done a lot for the city. She throws a plate of buttermilk pancakes on the table, slides down the booth and runs a hand through her cropped hair. “Take away the personality that has rubbed some people the wrong way,” says Painter, shaking her head. “And he gives, gives, gives to this community.” On a sunny Friday, the buzzer rings and Nelken glances at a monitor in his office. He goes to greet three middle-aged ladies from North Carolina in town for a funeral. “We don’t have any change,” one says, gesturing to the wooden admission box. “That’s all right,” Nelken says. “You give

what you can.” He tells some jokes, makes them laugh, then leaves them to themselves. Nelken doesn’t usually give tours. But if you indulge his sense of humor, he’ll take you up to the second floor and show you the old WJPR radio station and the closet brimming with boxes of old records. Or he’ll pull out binders from the conference room, crammed with laminated clippings and photos more than 100 years old. “Did you know Stein Mart started here?” he asks. He launches into a history of how his pal Jay Stein turned it into a chain of clothing stores scattered across the South. “Now he’s worth millions and I’m still here doing these silly museums,” Nelken snorts. But behind this witty cynicism is a discernible pleasure he gets from his treasures. Visitors from around the world have stopped by to peer into the past of a city once deemed “the Queen City of the Delta.” Visitor logs from the nearby Convention and Visitors Bureau contain names and notes scrawled by citizens from England, Germany, France, Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands and Greece. The guest book of Nelken’s history museum is an equally impressive register, but this isn’t a one-stop shop for those interested in the past. The four other museums under his guidance house memories of the city’s trials, tribulations and victories, from its 1927 devastation to its rising-star status to its economic fizzle. Greenville once was a bustling probusiness community, home to several manufacturing plants, an airbase and a thriving towboat industry, assets that separated it from its strictly agriculturedependent neighbors. But by the 1990s, many downtown storefronts were vacant and only the ghosts of the city’s industrial giants remained. Nelken blames Jimmy Carter’s grain embargo and the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement for the city’s decline.

“Tourism is what we have to latch onto the best we can,” Nelken says. “It’s a coming thing and Greenville is behind on the curve.” If blues and Mississippi River museums can become tourist attractions in the likes of Indianola, Clarksdale and Tunica, why not in Greenville? Maybe Nelken’s museums could be a catalyst, a step toward the kind of cultural tourism that could give Greenville a leg up. Betty Lynn Cameron, director of Main Street Greenville, believes Nelken’s museums are an opportunity. “There are over 10 museums in Washington County,” Cameron says. “I think it’s a major draw. Tourism is also an industry.” But Nelken’s five museums are scattered. Three are downtown, one is near the Mississippi-Arkansas border and one is out at the airport. The museums overlap each another. The Greenville History Museum and the Goldstein Nelken Solomon Century of History Museum — a tribute to Greenville’s Jewish past — both feature artifacts from the 1927 flood and items from the Air Force Base Museum. Nelken says the possibility of combining the museums has never been raised. “There’s no money,” he says. “We’d have to buy a building. We’d have to redesign, we’d have to lay it out …” He goes down the daunting list of dollars required. Cameron says the museums shouldn’t be integrated because each is unique. She points to the Flood of 1927 Museum, 100 yards behind Main Street Greenville’s building. The Weatherbee property, the oldest site downtown, dating to 1873, houses the flood exhibit in an old carriage house. The building was restored with $100,000 from a Mississippi Landmark Properties Grant. It’s been open only since 2009, but the visitor archives reveal an impressive pedigree. A couple from Grapevine, Texas, walk around the one-room plantation carriage

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PH O T OS B Y A M B E R HE L S E L

Left, an old football schedule. Right, a seemingly limitless supply of slides bring old Greenville to life.

house on a balmy March morning. They linger at a decayed wooden canoe used during the flood. A PBS documentary based loosely on John M. Barry’s book “Rising Tide” plays in the background. One slides on residue from a display of sandbags used to combat the river. They say they didn’t come to the Delta for the blues, just for the history. When the Flood of 1927 Museum was stuck in a yearly queue by the city a few years ago, Nelken decided to step in. “Just give me the damn key, I’ll get it open,” he says he told those in charge. With the help of the city, the Mississippi Levee Board and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Nelken got it done in five months. It seems to be a pattern in his relationship with these museums: a takecharge attitude because no one else does the job. The Jewish museum came to fruition in similar fashion, a labor of love for Nelken, whose family has been active in the temple for more than a century. The Delta once had the largest Jewish community in Mississippi, with more than 2,300 Jews in 1937. There were about 200 Jewish families in Greenville around 1950, Nelken says. Now the entire Delta has fewer than 300 Jews, but they are determined to hold onto memories of what was. Nelken was at a board meeting at the Hebrew Union Temple when the idea of a museum honoring Greenville’s Jewish cultural heritage arose. “I just said let me do it,” he says.

He started going through the temple attic, pulling files and framing handiworks dating back 75 years. It started out small. People started contributing pictures and articles, and the one-room Jewish museum grew to five. A collage of photographs, framing the lives of Jewish people in Greenville since the 19th century, leads down a hallway to the museum. It displays items such as the 1880 advertisement seeking a new rabbi. There is a section honoring members of the Hebrew Union congregation who fought in wars, from Col. Edward Storm in the Civil War to Albert Kossman in Vietnam. At the height of Greenville’s affluence, it had more than 45,000 residents. At one time, 2,000 of its residents were military personnel from the Air Force base. John “Puddin” Moore, a Greenville native who has been transforming iron into artifacts and architectural ornaments for 50 years, said the city used to be crawling with military men. “I used to sell papers right there when I was little,” he says, pointing in his downtown shop to a door with peeling paint. “But I got more money selling my sisters’ phone numbers to those men.” “Got me in lots of trouble,” he chuckles. “But then they ended up marrying two airmen.” The base left an indelible imprint on Greenville’s citizens. The airmen married their women, shopped at their stores and raised kids in their schools. But when the base left, it took more than 3,000 jobs with it — a terribly swift blow to the local

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economy. Located 10 minutes from downtown on the mezzanine level of the airport, the Air Force museum is full of photographs that preserve memories of the base that trained airmen and women to protect their country. The museum is a direct result of Nelken’s resolve and a $110,000 grant from the Mississippi Delta Empowerment Zone. He says this museum was the toughest for him because of a series of setbacks and a bum display jet that was a headache to replace. A jet from Arizona arrived in Greenville too banged-up to be reassembled. When Nelken finally found a suitable replacement that had been rotting 50 years in Shreveport, he hauled it back and combined its parts with the original purchase. Now a T-33 jet trainer model sits at the base of a water tower outside the museum. What started as a pet project has culminated in a string of museums that have protected the proud past of a city once known as the most enlightened in Mississippi, a cultural and literary mecca that churned out world-class writers. But Nelken plays down any praise for his work. “As Greenville goes, so go I,” he says. “Things haven’t been going so well here lately.” So what does he think Greenville needs to do to restore its prosperity? “I thought these museums would help,” he shrugs, blowing a ring of Pall Mall smoke at the ceiling.

A Delta Legend

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B Y M I R I A M TAY L O R

oe’s Eat Place still sits at the end of Nelson Street, its dilapidated exterior a fit for the neighborhood, all the glory of Greenville’s past melted into fading clapboard houses and potholed asphalt.
 It’s a little past seven on a Friday night and the parking lot is packed. In a neighborhood where yards are cluttered with rusty cars and bordered by broken-down fences, new Lexus, BMWs, and Mercedes fill the vacant lot used for parking.
 Men and women from as far away as Jackson and Memphis come for a taste of the tamales, the salads, the meatballs and the steaks — steaks whose seasoning rival any restaurant in the country, steaks that at their thickest measure three inches. Tamales, that strange little treat from south of the border that has become a staple of the Mississippi Delta, also lure guests from every corner.
 Outside, the night is cool and quiet, the only sound the occasional screen door slamming or a car backfiring. But inside the kitchen it is hot and loud. Orders are tossed back to the cook, and every now and then a guest lingers by the stove to comment 
about the steak or the Ole Miss game. It’s been 70 years since Doe’s opened, but while conversations and crowds may have changed, the same familial atmosphere present in 1941 prevails today.
 G ARRET H BL ACKWEL L

Charles Signa loves top recount how the humble ramshackle house became a legendary restaurant.

* * * “Well it started out because Daddy was a civilian worker out at the air base in the thirties,” recalls Charles Signa, 63, son of

FALL 2011 • 63

the late Doe Signa, who put the Doe in Doe’s. “He was a cafeteria worker there, and somebody gave him a tamale recipe, and he and Mom kind of doctored ‘em up and made them by hand.”
 Charles Signa wears a yellow cap, glasses and a red apron, his blue shirt sleeves rolled up as he tells how a little ramshackle house in a bad part of town became a legendary restaurant. It’s early afternoon, before the dinner rush, and Signa sits with a cup of coffee recounting tales from his childhood. The stories are jumbled and mixed, each one running into the next as he scatters them through his mind and off his tongue.
 “One of his doctor friends said, ‘Doe, why don’t you cook steak,’ and Daddy said, ‘Well, I’ve never really thought about it, but I guess I could.’ So one of his doctor friends brought a steak there, and he just cooked it on that little residential stove, and they agreed, well, you’ve got to have some kind of salad to go with steak. So they made up this salad dressing that you squeezed fresh lemons into. So they had fresh lemon juice and olive oil and they’d roll the bowl with garlic, and so it’s a lemon flavored salad. And they said, well, with the tamales, chili would go good. So they started making chili and gumbo, and then well, we’re Italians, so they made meatballs.”
 Signa ticks off the menu items from the top of his head — items that haven’t changed in 70 years. Doe’s isn’t about to mess with what works.
 “We’ve had people who haven’t come in 10 or 12 or 14 years, and they’ll come by and say this is just like I remember, it tastes just like I remember,” laughs Signa, his eyes shrinking into slits as his smile deepens, stretching out his whole face. “But how you gonna screw up the taste of a steak if you’re cooking on the same grill?”
 The grill and the menu aren’t the only thing at Doe’s that hasn’t changed. The building, originally a grocery store, has housed the restaurant since the beginning. It survived the 1927 flood,

when, legend has it, Doe had to swim out of one of the windows.
 “Actually in this room right here,” Signa gestures to the wood paneled dining area, “back in the late forties and early fifties this was where I lived. It’s still the same. And as for the people, we’ve had waitresses been working as long as I have—we got 
one girl that’s been here since 1965, her daughter works here, she’s been here for 30 years almost, her sister works here and she’s been here for 30 years, and then we have another girl who’s been working here about 20 years.”
 Having lived his whole life in Greenville, Signa has seen many changes over the years. He has watched a thriving downtown fade, noted the disappearance of three theaters, several jewelry and clothing boutiques, department stores, furniture shops and a downtown hotel.
 “Back then, walking along Washington Avenue, it was like, hell, it was like walking down somewhere in New York.”
 Hyperbole notwithstanding, Signa shakes his head from left to right as he mutters to himself, “Gone, gone. All that’s gone.” Throwing his hands up in frustration, he glances heavenward. “Everyone started moving south of town and that’s when this part of town started going down. That was the ‘80s.”
 Things were different at the restaurant back then too.
 “We used to go to the Swift and Co., a meatpacking company. Daddy used to call there, they knew what he was talking about because they knew dad, and he would call there and get special meat to make his chili, real lean meat. And he’d do it all special, and get special meat to make his meatballs, get fresh parsley, call City Grocery in New Orleans and get shipped real good cheese. We’d grind it up ourselves. We even made our own croutons.” The conversation is interrupted by the entrance of Doe and Little Charles, Charles’s brother and son. Polite “Hi, how ya doin’s” are tossed across the room, before both of the men retreat to the

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kitchen.
 “He likes to cook, that’s his deal,” Signa explains of his brother. “I like to go around talking to people. You know, we have four generations of family members coming in. We have this man that comes in all the time, shoots the bull with us, his parents came in, and his kids come in and that’s three generations of that family. But his kids are old enough to be having kids soon, so it’ll be four coming up.”
 A small girl with long dark hair and a bright turquoise bow pokes her head in the door to see what’s going on.
 “That’s my granddaughter Lela,” says Signa, smiling as the little girl approaches to give him a quick hug.
 There’s not only four generations of customers, but four generations of Signas still hanging around Doe’s.
 “You kind of feel like home when you get here. My aunt Florence was 85 last Wednesday. I was one when she started working and she still works here. She makes salads.”
 ‘She makes salads’ is a bit of an understatement for the undertakings of Florence Signa. Married to Big Doe’s brother, Frank, in 1948, Florence, or Aunt Florence as she’s known, has at one time or another played waitress, host, potatofryer, phone-answerer, mother, wife,

PH O T O S BY GA R R E T H B L AC K W E L L

LEFT | The walls of Doe’s are covered with photos of the rich and famous who have dined here, from politicians to football heros. RIGHT | Signa cuts those famously thick steaks.

sister-in-law, aunt and salad maker.
 “Well, Frank called up one night when we were first dating, and I thought oh, where we going tonight. And he said our girl that fries potatoes can’t make it. Can you fry potatoes? And I thought, fry potatoes? You want me to come and fry potatoes? But I did it, and that was my first job at the restaurant,” she says.
 Florence Signa is small with a shock of white hair, an apron tied snugly over her pale blue skirt. She is constantly at the heart of the restaurant. 
 Her station is in the middle kitchen, making her salads, so well-known for their special taste that people have started to bring her bowls to ‘fix’ in hopes that their salads at home can be as delectable as those at Doe’s.
 “It’s been a while back, but someone came in and said, ‘Do you season salad bowls.’ And I go, ‘Well I guess I do.’ And they said, ‘Would you season mine for me.’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ ”
 Aunt Florence laughs and begins pointing out details about the restaurant from her place by the bowls. A letter from the British prime minister, hanging in one of the three dining rooms, catches her eye.
 “I get to see so many people from all over the world. We have them come from

Germany, from Paris, from all over. We had the ambassador from Britain come in one night, and they were real nice, real down to earth. Wrote me a letter,” she states proudly.
 “Valentines this year we had Morgan Freeman come in, ordered himself a steak. Well, Kathy Wong, our cashier, was taking pictures when I was talking to him and she posted them on Facebook. 
 “And the next day all the ladies at the beauty parlor wanted to know, how was Morgan Freeman, what did he say. And I said well Morgan’s real sweet. In fact, we’re going to make a picture together. Instead of Driving Miss Daisy it’s gonna be ‘Driving Aunt Florence.’”
 Photographs litter the walls in every dining room, signed and addressed to Doe and Charles and Aunt Florence from athletes like Archie, Peyton, and Eli Manning to former Boston Red Sox pitcher David “Boo” Ferriss. In the front kitchen there is another wall of photographs of entertainers who have eaten here. From Willie Nelson to Liza Minelli, their signatures and faces decorate the sun-faded white wall. But the photos that Charles and Aunt Florence and all the Signas love to point out, are the ones stuck lovingly to the refrigerator in the middle kitchen. These

are photos of family and friends — each one portraying a story, a memory.
 “I enjoy this. I always have. I love people, and I like to be around people. I’m a people person,” she says.
 “My nephews are always in the kitchen when the guests walk in.” Florence is referring to that little oddity of Doe’s: a front door that leads straight into the kitchen. “Well, they’re always saying go in and say hey to my Aunt Florence, and people will come back here saying, hey, Aunt Florence. And I have to think— is this some relative I haven’t met yet? But I love it, I really do. I’m everybody’s aunt.” * * * As the evening wears on, more and more diners trickle in, each greeted by Charles, Doe, and Aunt Florence as they walk out of the night air and into the warm kitchen. Aunt Florence is at her station, makin salads and greeting people. Doe is cooking steaks and Charles is running around, making sure everybody’s feeling good, and has what they need.
 Florence turns away from her salads for a moment, gesturing towards a small table against the wall in the middle kitchen. “We call that the family table. It’s great. We get to talk to people while they’re sitting. And in that room,” she

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G A R R E T H B L AC K W E L L

The humble exterior of this decorated restaurant hasn’t changed and isn’t likely to. As Signa sees it, why mess with success?

points to where Charles had been sitting earlier, “that table right over there in the back is what we call the engagement table. We’ve had so many engagements here, I just love it.”
 In the room where the engagement table sits, a few regulars are brown bagging along with their meal. One of them, Hank Burdine, is as much a staple of Doe’s as an extended member of the family. He leans back into his chair and leaps straight into one of 
the many stories that exist about the restaurant and the family behind it.

“My mother,” Burdine says, “used to tell us that this room used to be the children’s bedroom. And the only bathroom in the house was adjoining it. In the early days, you had to go to the bathroom elsewhere because Miss Mamie would not let you go at Doe’s because you might wake the kids up as you walked through the bedroom. 
Mama said they would always stop at Mr. Joe Bordelon’s Gulf Oil service station because he had a heated toilet seat there!”
 Burdine, along with the rest of the table,

CAI N MAD D EN

Florence Signa, known as “Aunt Flo” to generations from the same families, shows off her special salad.

erupts into laughter at the memory. Aunt Florence and Charles, who have come in to listen, greet each person at the table – a firm pat on the back from Charles and a hug from Aunt Florence.
 “And after the bedroom was made into a dining room and the bathroom was opened up with the hallway, Jughead [Frank Signa] used to shuck fresh Gulf oysters for the customers,” Burdine continues. Everyone else listens, eyes glazed as their minds retreat to images of those early days.
 “I used to come by here just about every night when I was a bachelor and they were just like my family,” he says. “I always sat in the kitchen at the table with the aunts and when everybody had left or were supposed to be leaving, Aunt Rosalie would get up and pull the cord on the bare light bulb over the refrigerators and by golly when she pulled that cord and that light came on, well, you better be heading for the door!”
 Again the room is filled with the sound of laughter, large guffaws from the men, slight chuckles from the women, and a sweet giggle from Aunt Florence.
 “We try to make everyone feel like family, that’s why people like it here,” explains Florence.
 In a town that seems to be starved for business, Doe’s continues to feed people and feed itself. And the world has noticed.
 “We’ve been on the Food Network Channel a couple of times. You know, Bon Apetit had us rated as the third best steakhouse in the nation, and we got exposure on TV for that,” says Charles, “and in ’07 we got the James Beard American Classic award.”
 Aunt Florence recalls one of her favorite stories, so telling of the reach the restaurant has had, and the loyalty of guests who have visited time and time again.
 “We had a man come in who was on a plane coming from England, and the man beside him asked, ‘Where ya going?’ and he said, ‘To Greenville,’ and the man said, ‘Well you got to go to Doe’s.’ ”

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o

The Million Dollar Mile Former river baron Howard Brent would like to see a return to the days when Greenville towboats ruled the Mississippi River. nce, it was The Million Dollar Mile, a stretch of Greenville waterfront bristling with towboats, barges and shipbuilders. It provided work for thousands of big, rawboned Delta boys. It shipped enough grain and chemicals and steel to make Greenville the Towboat Capital of the World. Then it disappeared, chased away by the likes of NAFTA and

a grain embargo and fuel taxes and economic trends far beyond anyone’s control.

BY MARIANNA BRELAND

MARI AN N A BREL AN D

The port once produced dozens of towboats and now, boats are once again under construction.

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It became one more tragedy in a series of events that led to the deterioration of Greenville. But now, something may be stirring at the new Port of Greenville, relocated south of town a few years ago. Not so very long ago, a visit to the shipyards of Greenville yielded a ghostlike civilization of abandoned propellers, rudders, and men, jobless, from the decline of the towing industry. But now, business has picked up. “We’re picking up steam,” says Port Director Tommie Hart, surveying his domain. Barges are being loaded. Towboats are pulling in and out. And now a new ship is being built. To Hart, the ship being put together in the Mississippi Marine shipyard is not just a new tow, but a sign of new life. Like the metamorphosis of a butterfly, the towing industry may be about to break through the rough, ugly cocoon of the last 30 years. Last year, the Port of Greenville filled up 300 railway cars for shipment on the big river. This year, the port filled up 300 railway cars in February

MARI AN N A BREL AN D

Howard Brent was once a prince of the river. He would love to see the towboat industry rise again in Greenville.

alone. It would have been an even better year for the port if a record Mississippi River flood hadn’t shut it down in May, temporarily putting people out of work. And business is only getting stronger. It is not the booming, dominant force of the past, but it is growing. And in a city reeling from hard times, growth is synonymous with hope. That is music to the ears of Howard Brent, once one of the biggest of the river barons. His father, Jesse Brent, pioneered the industry and reigned as king of all things towing. The man credited with leading Greenville to river dominance died just as the business started going down. But the Brent legend is still revered here. After all, Greenville has always been a river town. There was something of the pioneer spirit about the business the Brents built. It put Greenville on the map. And Greenville has never forgotten. It worshipped the brash, brave men whose exploits brought the city rich torrents of publicity, which was good for business. Men with little more than their life savings and a vision risked everything on the belief that they could make big money shipping goods up and down a river famous for dangerous bends, tricky currents and shifting sandbars. Greenville, a town traditionally all about business, appreciated that local cash registers rang more often as others swarmed to cash in on the stream of money the Brents had discovered. Jesse Brent’s sons stayed with it as long as they could before selling out. But Howard Brent has never given up on the dream that did so much for his family. Considering the reaction he gets on his wanderings around town, you might say Greenville doesn’t want to give up, either. On a bright spring day, Brent walks into Sherman’s restaurant. Met with brisk hellos. He doesn’t have to order. The bartender knows what he wants. Walks into Does. Declared “one of the finest men in Greenville.” Brent is no ordinary fellow. He has

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the air of a maverick, the voice of John Wayne, the heart of an angel. He’s a father of four but a daddy to three daughters, all of whom have their songs on records. One, Eden, has won several blues awards. Brent is the type of man who orders for the ladies in his company. When confronted about how everything he touches turns to gold he guffaws and then replies, “Naw, baby. I’m just showing you all the good things.” But Howard Brent could not save the towing industry on the Mississippi River from collapsing. And that hurt, because towing is in his blood. Brent’s great-grandfather, Wilson Hemingway, had a little boat that delivered farm goods on the Sunflower and Yazoo River before roads were paved. The patriarch of the family had a heart dedicated to helping others. Brent recalled how in the 1927 flood, Hemingway paddled to a church where people were stranded on the roof. As the rising, rushing waters lifted the old church off its foundation, the people leaped for their lives into his little farm boat and watched their church float away down the Mississippi. Years later, the launching of another seemingly insignificant wooden hull gave birth to an industry. Jesse Brent and two other men owned the boat and went into business traveling up and down the river after quitting their jobs with the U.S. Corps of Engineers. By 1949, there were five of them in business together. Then in 1956, Jesse Brent sold out and struck out on his own, starting Brent Towing Company. That one business venture would lead to 100 towboats, 1,000 barges, 2,000 workers, and the title of “towboat capital of the world” for Greenville. Jesse Brent, who controlled 24 towboats and 60 chemical tank barges, was named “RiverMan of the Century” by the St. Louis Waterway Journal. Time magazine called him one of a “Breed of Bright Brash Entrepreneurs.” When the Time reporter asked about

M A R I A NNA B R E L A ND

A boat tied up at the port. It’s not as busy there as it used to be, but port director Tommy Hart sees hope for a recovery.

his financial holdings, Captain Jesse replied, “Son, I’ve got enough to buy all the whiskey and steaks I want for the rest of my life.” Jesse Brent would also form the American Waterways Operators. Like his dad, Howard Brent went through practically every position in the business, working as a deckhand, getting a tankerman license to load gasoline barges, piloting tows, and then finally, moving behind a desk in the main office. But in 1981, Greenville’s marine industry busted as fast as it boomed. Once it had around 3,000 jobs. Now, it

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has perhaps 650. Thirty years later, like a sun creeping out of darkness, the barge industry is making a comeback just in time to give Greenville a ray of hope. Now, people watch the river and wonder. Can the comeback continue? And, why Greenville? A BARGAIN FOR YOUR BUCK A former port director, Colonel Milton Barschdorf, declared Greenville “the million-dollar mile.” With shipbuilders, repair facilities, barges and towboats

MARI AN N A BREL AN D

Work had picked up at the port until a record Mississippi River flood shut it down for several weeks in the spring.

strung up and down the busy riverside, the nickname stuck. In 1927, the great flood washed Washington County with frightening force, leaving the town flooded for months. However, the rainbow after the storm came when the Corps of Engineers made three cutoffs, essentially straightening the wildly curving river channel. While that is nothing but a detail in a report to many, it means big bucks to the waterway industry. Howard Brent explained, “It makes the river shorter and swifter so you have to have more horsepower to get up the river. For every horsepower running an hour, you burn a gallon of fuel roughly.” He explained that if a barge is coming from New Orleans to St. Louis, it makes sense to stop in Greenville for money reasons. Greenville is a still water port, so boats do not have to fight the current going upstream. They can glide across the still water and exhale, as they are not facing a swift current and most importantly, not using hundreds of gallons of gas just to stay in port. Brent explained that some barges can use up to 10,000 horsepower an hour, using up 10,000 gallons of fuel. However, put that barge in an area where it does not need half the horsepower, and you have half the cost. Why, he wonders, can’t the rest of America can’t see the logic of shipping on the river? The Beauty of the Barge Trucks often have an advantage over the river because they can load up at a plant and take cargo right to its destination. But Brent will tell you that the river is often the safest, cheapest, and fastest mode of inland transportation. To make his point, he asks two questions, then answers them. Q. How many towns does a train go through when it’s traveling from New Orleans to Saint Louis? A. There are scores, perhaps over 200. Q. Now, how many towns are on the

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river, truly on the river? A. Well, there’s Natchez, Vicksburg, Rosedale, Memphis, St. Louis, New Orleans, and of course, Greenville just to name a few. “The railroads,” he says, “go through every little old town. If they have a train wreck, it’s close to every little town. Greenville is on the river, but a mile away.” Then there’s the statistics that towboat advocates love to cite: A normal 15- barge tow can hold up to 1,050 large semitrailers worth of stuff or 216 rail cars and 6 locomotives worth of exports. That’s 1,050 18-wheelers off the highways and interstate systems where most people travel. That’s 1,050 less chances of an accident on the interstate. According to a report by the National Waterways Institute, there is one injury in the inland marine sector for every 125.2 in the rail sector and 2,171.5 in the highway sector, and one fatality in the inland marine sector for every 22.7 in the rail sector and 155 in the highway sector. Furthermore, there is a less chance of having spills in waterways than on roads or rails. Trucks lose only 6.06 gallons per one million ton-miles, rail cars only 3.86 gallons, and barges 3.6 gallons per one million ton-miles. As far as cheapest, the tow industry’s only competition is pipelines. “Pipelines is the way they move oil or gasoline,” says Brent. “The Alaskan pipeline comes down and gets the oil out of the Alaska. You have got pipelines running all over the place. There’s a pipeline crossing the river. They drop ‘em way down yonder and dig a trench. You got pipelines running all over the country. Used to be the safest mode, but now with the older pipelines, the river is the safest mode. Pipeline is the cheapest, but river transportation is the cheapest mode of transportation for bulk commodities. “ Also, if you think in terms of gasoline and roadwork instead of money, you cannot help but think how much cheaper it is to send 1,050 18-wheelers worth of cargo at one time on a tow in a river, compared to 1,050 18-wheelers on the road.

Howard Brent runs through all this with a cry of exasperation. How, he wonders, can anyone not see the logic? “The people that don’t live next to the river don’t understand what all is going on. But, like, 60 percent of farm products that go for export are moved by barges. Man, if we didn’t have barge transportation, look how crowded the highway would be. And the railroad system couldn’t handle it.” A National Waterways Foundation study found that if all waterborne cargo were diverted to rail or highways, heavy traffic would double and two inches of asphalt would be needed to increase the pavement thickness of 126,000 lane-miles of intercity Interstate. In the Ohio River System, the CSX railroad would need 156 new locomotives and 5,616 new coal cars. The system’s average train velocity would drop by one-third. A barge can move one ton of cargo 576 miles per gallon of fuel, whereas a rail car can only move the same ton of cargo 413 miles and a truck only 155 miles. Last but not least, river towboats are responsible for very little air pollution. But one simple act and one simple tax completely devastated the towing industry three decades ago. THE CRASH In 1980, President Jimmy Carter banned grain exports to the Soviet Union, America’s biggest grain buyer. The embargo was meant to punish the Soviets, but it also drew howls of pain from farmers and towboat operators. To make matters worse, the embargo was enacted alongside a fuel tax on every gallon of gasoline. By 1981, the once-busy Greenville riverfront was desolate. A random traveler here and there. “Everybody had grain barges and moved the grain for export and it just failed to nothing. So the barges were tied up here. One guy built 10 barges, cost about $3 million, and he wound up never using them and had them for two years, paying for them to be tied up,” said Brent. “We had 30 family-owned towing companies here before everything was growing broke. And now, we don’t have

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any that are.” The number of local shipyards fell from seven to two. Howard Brent and his family’s business held on for dear life. But in 1989, after 33 years, he sold out. The Brent legacy was over in one fell swoop. “We had 610 employees with the Howard Brent Company. We had three drydocks,” he said. Brent still maintains his office downtown but just he, his daughter, and a secretary or two work there. Over time, Brent said, “the big companies swallowed the little companies and now everything has moved to Paducah, Kentucky.” After so many years of a reduced towboat presence here, the recent expansion gives Brent a sense of hope that better times are ahead on the Big Muddy. After 30 years, the towing industry has seeped back into Greenville’s economy. Port director Hart says there are three reasons. First, grains have replaced cotton as the dominant Delta crop. “Grain is the best bulk product to ship,” Hart says. “Regardless of what export, barges can move the most with the most efficiency. “Two, the fuel price is changing the flow of goods across the nation. Four dollar gasoline is going to cover us up in business. “Last but not least, the state support and development of the steel supply has made Greenville become the main port. Half of our business is scrap steel.” Hart well remembers how Greenville lost more than a thousand jobs with the collapse of the river business. “I didn’t like our [Greenville’s] existence tied to that level of jeopardy.” “At one time,” he said, “Greenville owned ten percent of equipment on inland waterway barges.” But Hart doesn’t think Greenville’s time of river prosperity has passed for good. He believes the industry has an opportunity “with focus on the right kind of development.” “If the community works hard enough, the darkest hour can turn into your brightest day,” he said.

The Great Flood

CO U RT ESY O F T H E N EL KEN ARCH I VES, GR E E NV I L L E , M I S S .

The great flood of 1927 left Greenville waterlogged for months. This photo was shot looking west on Washington Avenue.

Perhaps nothing in Greenville’s history stokes the imagination and fears of its citizens than the 1927 flood. Eighty-three years later, whenever the river creeps up the earthen levees along its banks, the people of Greenville grow nervous. And no wonder. On April 21, the river broke through the levee at Stops Landing north of the city. With a force greater than Niagara Falls, water gushed through a crevasse three-quarters of a mile long. The next day, accompanied by mournful sirens, it reached Greenville.

With 10 feet of water rushing through its streets in a steady, fearful hiss, people clung to tree limbs and rooftops for safety. Hundreds took to the levee for safety and many African-Americans would spend weeks in tents atop the wall of dirt that had failed the hold the river. For 60 miles to the south and 90 miles to the east, the Delta became a turbulent, churning inland sea the size of Rhode Island. As William Alexander Percy would put it in Lanterns on the Levee, it was “deep enough to drown a man. swift enough to upset a boat, and lasting enough to

cancel a crop year... The South Delta became 7500 square miles of mill-race in which 120,000 human beings and 100,000 animals squirmed and bobbed.” In Greenville, the situation quickly became dire. Thirteen thousand AfricanAmericans were stranded on the levee with little more than blankets and makeshift tents. In time, Herbert Hoover would head a relief effort and help would flow to the city. But it would take four months for the water to recede. It took Greenville much longer than that to recover.

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CO U RT ESY O F T H E N EL KEN ARCH I VES, GR E E NV I L L E , M I S S .

Citizens got around on hastily constructed board walks such as this one, shot on Main Street.

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CO U RT ESY O F T H E N EL KEN ARCH I VES, GR E E NV I L L E , M I S S .

It was possible to navigate some streets with cars, but boats were the best transportation as long as the water was high.

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Take a Deep Breath

M I R I A M TAY L OR

Asthma is more intense in the Delta than other places in Mississippi and Dr. Gailen Marshal is hot on the trail of a solution to this mystery.

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d

Rural blacks in the Delta are coming down with asthma in disturbing numbers. Dr. Gailen Marshall wants to know why. r. Gailen Marshall, suspendered and graying, sits wearing his Texas A&M ring proudly, opposite his wedding band. He is a blur of movement as he reads patient descriptions, barks orders and conducts the day’s business. He’s already seen a blur of patients and is running through his last few before lunch. Marshall is a man in a hurry. He is, after all, fighting an epidemic. Asthma is running rampant through the rural Mississippi Delta, particularly among poor blacks. Worse, no one is sure exactly why. And for Marshall that’s not good enough. So he and a group of medical fellows from the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson make the four-hour drive to Greenville twice a month.

B Y M I R I A M TAY L O R

According to the Mississippi State Department of Health, 10.2 percent of Mississippi children 17 and younger and 6.9 percent of Mississippi adults have asthma. About 7 percent of white children and nearly 14 percent of children of other races, primarily blacks, have the ailment. It’s much worse in the Delta, where asthma is the primary reason children miss school. A study using data from the Mississippi Asthma Surveillance System compared asthma hospitalizations in the rural Delta area with Jackson metropolitan hospitals. Results showed that Delta residents had significantly higher odds of being hospitalized multiple times. There are problems with illiterate patients forgetting to take their medicine or not taking it properly. “The intensity of asthma is higher in the rural area of Mississippi. ... People

are fascinated to find out why,” says Marshall, leaning farther back into his chair, his face betraying fascination and curiosity. “Is it because of the low access to care up here; is it because of something exposure-related; is it because of the fact of the agriculture up here; or is it stress? What’s the social component; what’s the environmental component?” Marshall is one of the last great pioneers, living out his life on the final frontier, medicine. Part preacher, part teacher, part savior, the man from Texas has a personality that could rival any ancient tent revival reverend and a heart as big as his home state. His demeanor is quick and his accent is long. He answers each query immediately with his slow Texan drawl. “Ninety percent of what we see here is African-American in terms of race,” Marshall explains. “We’ve seen a couple

of Caucasians and a few Hispanics but not many. And in terms of age, we see everything from little bitty kids only 18 months old to older people in their 50s and 60s.” Marshall’s asthma clinic is inside the Good Samaritan Health Clinic at the old King’s Daughters Hospital. The white brick building, with its terracotta roof and wrought iron details, is reminiscent of an era that existed before the modern hospital, with all its crisp floors and straight lines and numbered charts. The nurses constantly admit patients, run tests and deliver medication. The fellows, four in all — two each trip — continuously interview walk-ins, compile patient history and relay information to Marshall. Marshall, in turn, talks to each patient, explaining their condition, the causes, the concerns, and the care needed and offered for their asthma.

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PH O T O S B Y M I R I A M TAY L OR

Shelia Howard (left) and Debra Howard (right) praised the clinic. Shelia said her attacks had her “thinking you was going to die.”

“Most of our patients are from Washington County, there are few from Sunflower and some from ...” He pauses and sticks his head behind a divider, asking a nurse for the name of a particular county. “Humphreys, that’s right.” He smiles. “I’m completely geographically challenged in Mississippi.” Marshall’s clinic, which is staffed in Greenville on the second and fourth Friday of each month, was created to fill a need. “Someone said you need to come up to the Delta with me, so they put me in a car and drove me up Highway 61 and as I started to drive up into the Delta I began to realize just what incredible poverty there was here,” Marshall says. “I go on medical mission trips to Moldova, which is described as the last true member of the dissolved Soviet states, and the poverty here reminded me of the poverty

there. The landscapes were so similar.” Even after a year, Marshall is a little astonished to be here. “I had a Ph.D. and was headed for the bench and went to medical school to make my grant support opportunity better,” Marshall says. Then, “I fell in love with clinical medicine and have been schizophrenic ever since. I juggle clinic and I juggle lab and I juggle teaching and I love doing it.” As if on cue, one of the fellows, Sarah Bozeman, walks in and hands him a patient printout. He turns and discusses the numbers and details with her, ranging from medical history to home situation to day care attendance, agreeing on the best plan of action for the 22-month-old. He grabs the chart and his stethoscope and hurries into the hallway, leaning forward toward the patient’s room as he goes to talk to the boy’s mother, steadily

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absorbing information before the corner of his white medical coat disappears behind a thick yellow door. The two fellows on this trip sit at a makeshift desk, their faces glued to minuscule computers with detachable screens. Bilal Q. Khan and Bozeman fall back into their chairs, reveling in the small pause in their rushed schedule. “We’ll work over there (in Jackson), and we have a clinic in the medical mall; those are the two places we like to hang out,” Khan says casually, as if referencing which pubs or restaurants he likes to frequent on the weekends. “Oh, and we’ll go to the VA once a week.” He turns and smiles, his round Pakistani accent growing thicker in his energetic response. “As a physician it’s a great time to be an allergist.” Marshall finishes with his young patient

and returns to the room. It is small and rectangular with two tables and a few rolling chairs pushed together to simulate an office. Khan rattles off the facts about the next patient. They both recognize him as a return. “We’re seeing quite a lot of follow-ups, so people aren’t just falling off. They do come back,” Khan says. “For about every three new patients we’ll have seven returns,” agrees Marshall. “In most indigent care clinics the average no-show rate is about 50 to 70 percent and three-fourths don’t come back, and if they come back it’s because they’re really sick.” Marshall considers those statistics and adds: “To be fair, the system we’ve been able to work in has made it affordable to them. They can see the doctor for five or 10 dollars, depending on their ability to pay. “The Good Samaritan Health Care Center,” Marshall gestures at the building housing the clinic, “was started by the King’s Daughters, wives of prominent people from this part of the state, and is now run by a consortium of faithbased organizations. They’re very fiscally responsible.” “This was a partnership made in heaven for us,” he laughs. “The mayor hasn’t given us the key to the city, but the sheriff hasn’t been here either, so I figure we’re doing pretty good if we’re somewhere in between the two.” A pink-suited nurse walks into the office, and the doctor is momentarily distracted by the files she hands over. He scribbles a quick signature and sets the paper aside. Marshall brags about UMMC’s “Telemedicine” initiative that will allow hospitals to examine patients at other hospitals and clinics over a video hookup. “We are working with the Delta Health Alliance, actively looking at developing a Teleasthma initiative here that I hope we can roll out at the end of the summer,” Marshall says as his voice raises a halfoctave, the excitement evident.

“At its total fruition, clinics all over the Delta — in Tunica, Clarksdale, Cleveland — would be connected. ... One, they would have an electronic stethoscope and we could train the assistant in Tunica to put it on your chest and I could put the things in my ears in Jackson and I could hear you breathe. And two, there would be a video monitor and I could actually see you.” The doctor tumbles this information out, rapid and steady, patiently explaining the benefits this could provide and the greater numbers of patients the asthma clinic could reach. “If we can get ‘em in the door, I’m confident I can keep them here.” Aside from treating patients, Marshall’s time in Greenville grants him an opportunity for research. According to the Mississippi State Department of Health, asthma is more prevalent among people who did not graduate from high school than among people who did (9.5 percent vs. 6.4 percent). It’s also more prevalent among people with household income of less than $25,000 (10.4 percent) than among people with household income between $25,000 and $50,000 (5.7 percent) or greater than $50,000 (4.5 percent). Another thing that intrigues Marshall is the role poverty and the mind play in all of this. “There’s still disparity in our country; there’s still racism in our country; and to be somehow viewed not as good as someone else because of the color of your skin, it’s something you can do nothing about. You’re caught in an endless cycle of poverty; your mama was poor; her mama was poor; you’re poor; and your children are gonna be poor. The discouragement and the depression and the anxiety that that can produce, those have biological effects and we know that now.” He finishes the sentence with a crescendo. “Underserved minorities and their diseases is a trifecta for me. Not only is it morally satisfying, it’s scientifically fascinating. And it’s politically the right

time.” He is running it all through his mind for the thousandth time: Farm pesticides? Diet? Environment? Stress? Some combination? The doctor adjusts his jacket and gathers his gear. “Word of mouth,” he continues as he marches down the hall into the warm March afternoon. “It takes time to build a word-of-mouth reputation, and that’s what we’re harvesting in this second year compared to the first year. We went through a lot of effort with these folks. We’ve gone out into the community just like we’re going to do today. You know, I have no idea how many people are going to be there; there may be 50. There may be three. But it doesn’t matter. As long as there’s one, I’ll talk to him.” His brown Jeep is parked near the hospital. It is compact and casual. Behind the wheel, Marshall moves just like he walks. A blur of brown steel heads down U.S. 1 toward a new building, the site for today’s community luncheon. The building is like so many other government buildings — carpeted and bland. It smells of pizza and sodas, and growling stomachs can be heard as group of 13 forms a lunch line at the end of the room. The group consists of Marshall; the fellows; a few nurses; Jane Calhoun, director of clinical and field services at Delta Health Alliance; and patients and their friends. The largely black audience silently chews pizza as Marshall details the debilitating symptoms of asthma: how you know you have it, how to treat it, how to use an inhaler and nebulizer. There is urgency in his voice as he compares the disease to a house fire. He illustrates — clearly and concisely — how to know if you’re in serious danger or if it’s just a rough cough. He hands out his card, listing his cell phone number, email address and clinic hours, and then, straight-faced and serious, he reminds his patients that they should feel free to contact him in case of an emergency.

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M I R I A M TAY L OR

Sarah Bozeman, left and Bilal Q. Kahn of the University of Mississippi Medical Center make the trip from Jackson to Greenville twice a month to see patients at the special allergy clinic.

The speech takes an hour, but not a pair of eyes strays from his face, the people as enraptured by his conversation as they would be of a fireand-brimstone preacher of old. A few amens are fervently tossed out during his description of the panic caused by a sudden inability to draw air into the lungs. “Not being able to breathe, thinking you was going to die, like that fish swimming without oxygen,” says Shelia Howard, 35, agreeing with Marshall’s description. “I had an asthma attack one time and it was so bad I had to go to the hospital at 2 o’clock in the morning, and I had a panic and they had to give me a shot because I had an anxiety attack,” shudders

Debra Howard, 36. She and her sister are patients of the clinic and attended the meeting at the suggestion of the Good Samaritan Health Center. “I’m more educated and aware of how to control my asthma due to the fact of fliers and paperwork they’ve given me,” Shelia explains. “I think the fact that he was more realistic about it (helped) and he didn’t use big terms that you couldn’t understand. He broke it down and explained it to me … in a way I could understand.” In the bare room, Shelia stands out. Her dark, smooth skin contrasts brightly against her turquoise blouse, and her voice is vibrant and sure. “I’d be in trouble (without the clinic), because I work in this nursing home

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and they don’t have the coverage I need.” Shelia’s eyes follow the doctor as he cleans up the stray pizza boxes and napkins. “I think this clinic is awesome.” Marshall watches the sisters file out into the bright parking lot. The heat from the asphalt creates waves above the hood of their white Tahoe. They smile at the doctor as they pull out onto the highway. “My favorite story is when I get paid with a hug and a kiss. There ain’t nothing like it. There’s no money in the world that can buy the feeling that that can buy,” says Marshall, jerking his sunglasses over his eyes and pulling his keys from his pocket. “When someone is pumping your hand and there’s tears coming down their faces, thanking you for helping their child, that’s what you go into medicine to do.”

Opening Up

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BY MARIANNA BRELAND

Floyd Brown the postman knocks on Delia Mae Dennis’ door with a box in his hands, it is going to be a good day. Every other week he brings a package for Delia Mae from Sue Vondrashek, 1,812 miles away in Los Angeles. Every other week homebound Delia Mae gets to take a break from her game shows, her Bible reading and her sewing, and revel in the never-failing adrenaline rush of cutting the tape to see what is inside the box.

Sue Vondrashek, left, and Delia Mae Dennis became great friends through the Box Project, which brings people together through the mail.

It is always an average white cardboard box with Delia Mae’s address written carefully out of love with the casualness of a ballpoint pen. Peek inside, and you can find contents ranging from sewing fabric to quizzes to a gold-leafed book of poetry – small, thoughtful things that warm the heart of a friend. Though Sue and Delia Mae have met only once, they have communicated through letters, packages and phone calls for the past four years. This unusual relationship began through The Box Project. In 1962, The Box Project was founded to help comfortable families in the North reach out to struggling families in the rural South. On a plane ride to a peace conference in Geneva, Switzerland, activist Virginia Naeve of New Hampshire met Coretta Scott King, who told her about the poverty-stricken families of the Mississippi Delta, and one family in particular. The more Naeve thought about the Delta, the more she wrestled with finding peace in her heart. She had to do

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“We’re not black or white. We’re friends.” — Sue Vondrashek

something for those families, something more than just money. She started sending boxes of helpful items to the family King mentioned. Her neighbors heard about it and they started sending boxes, too. Over time, it grew into a national nonprofit that has helped 15,000 families, and not just in Mississippi. It has expanded into Maine, Appalachia and American Indian reservations out West. It is now run by the Community Development Foundation of Northwest Mississippi. But one thing has not changed: the idea that long-distance friendships can help people better understand the challenges of rural poverty. It must be working. Years later, families continue to be matched up with other families. People regularly send life’s little necessities such as soap, maternity clothes and school supplies to adopted families in the Delta. Within these little treats lies something powerful. It’s something that keeps box after box coming. Something that keeps donor after donor holding on to Happy Meal toys, cutting out crossword puzzles and buying an extra set of gloves. It’s love. It’s the feeling that hundreds of miles away, a life is made better from a 44-cent postage stamp and a priceless amount of thoughtfulness. It’s the feeling that somebody out there cares. It’s the feeling of opening the mailbox to see that today, the mail is not just bills. It’s friendship. So it has been with Sue and Delia Mae. Sue Vondrashek, a retired schoolteacher, heard about The Box Project from an article in suburban Chicago’s Daily Herald. She remembered it mentioning Sunflower County, Miss. Looking at her own two little girls and their abundance of toys and clothes, Sue wasted no time in contacting the main office to be matched with a family.

The suburban Chicago mom (she later moved to L.A.) was first matched with a family from Morgan City that also had two daughters. The two mothers instantly bonded as only mothers can do over dresses, lace socks, and the trials and tribulations of second grade. In the Vondrasheks’ kitchen, pictures and elementary school masterpieces hung on the doors, reminders not only of Sue’s children but also of her Box Project family. As the children grew older, the relationship faded. Next, Sue adopted an elderly woman until the woman’s death. Sue went off to teach in Kuwait for two years. That ended when she got the news that she was going to be a grandmother. Back home again, she contacted The Box Project to match her with another recipient in Mississippi. In 2006, introduced through the U.S. Postal Service, Delia Mae and Sue entered each other’s lives. The friendship started off one-sided. Delia Mae would never tell Sue what she wanted or needed. The 4-foot-10 Delia Mae is not one for words or elaboration. If she does want something, she never flat-out asks, but rather subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) hints around. “One time,” Sue recalled, “she talked about how the fabrics department was shut down in the Greenville Walmart and how there was nowhere in Greenville to buy fabric. So, finally, I thought I could figure out what to send her, so I asked, ‘Delia Mae, would you like some fabric?’ ” Without missing a beat, Delia Mae responded, “Sure.” In that instant the tide turned. The silence was broken when Delia Mae piped up, “Well, I ... don’t want any orange fabric.” Sue sputtered, “What about red?” “Well, I don’t want any bright red.”

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Delia Mae had finally allowed the last wall to fall. It’s not that Delia Mae wanted to shut out Sue, but after a lifetime of hospital stays, surgeries and life as an invalid, Delia Mae is accustomed to not asking for help. While the big brown eyes are often the first thing one sees when looking at Delia Mae, it is hard to overlook the crutches that have been her constant companion since she was 3. She suffers from osteogenesis, a congenital disease that leaves her bones far too weak, far too fragile. Delia Mae once broke her leg in two places simply from stepping on a spider in an effort to kill it. Because of her delicate bones and 25 surgeries, Delia Mae was home-schooled until sixth grade, when she was finally allowed to join other kids at public school. Since then, the omnipresent crutches have not stopped this mother of two and grandmother and greatgrandmother of several. But don’t let the crutches and meek manner fool you. Delia Mae survived a tornado blowing her out of the house and her baby boy out of her arms. Ask her about the broken bones she sustained when the twister hit her and she talks about it as casually as a bad haircut. She has no choice but to treat her trials as normal occurrences. So that’s exactly what she does. Every Sunday, Delia Mae sings in the soprano section in the church choir. And every other week, Delia Mae sits and waits for the package from Sue. The two finally got to meet last year when the Vondrasheks flew from Chicago for a Box Project homecoming reception in Clarksdale. The Vondrasheks drove down to Greenville and visited with Delia Mae for two days. It was there that Sue felt the bond deepen. Delia Mae looked away from the television, which remained on during the

Vondrashek in Clarksdale with Lillian Morris, right, director of the Box Project.

duration of the Vondrasheks’ stay, and said to Sue, “It’s like I have known you forever.” Those seven simple words from Delia Mae were as powerful as 700 for Sue. Little by little during the stay, Delia Mae would open up and tell her more and more. To Delia Mae, Sue is not just a friend, but a lady who sent her a box of books when she simply mentioned she liked to read. A lady who sent her a book of poetry that she keeps on her coffee

table along with Bibles and sewing knickknacks. She was the woman who finally took her to Super Buffet in Greenville so that she could be like her friends. For Sue, Delia Mae is “a smart woman. She is amazing and motivated.” “No matter her health issues, she just keeps going. She is teaching me not to be such a wimp. She goes full speed ahead.” In a town where race is too often a fence between neighbors, Sue sees only

friendship. “We’re not black or white. We’re friends.” The two may not ever see each other again, but they will remain friends forever. Delia Mae will continue to watch “Wheel of Fortune” and read her Bible. Sue will continue to send fabric, letters and quizzes. And Floyd Brown the postman will continue to deliver a friendship in Greenville, one box at a time.

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A Clerk’s Work is Never Done

The woman who helped others get elected now fills the demanding role of chancery clerk.

hen she returned to Greenville after college, Marilyn Hansell threw herself into the effort to re-elect the city’s first black councilwoman, Sarah Johnson. “It was an opportunity to do something for the community and to practice the political science I had been studying,” said Hansell, who coordinated the successful campaign.

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After that, when elections rolled around, she always seemed to be involved — local races, county races, gubernatorial races — but always behind the scenes. She worked on Robert Clark’s losing congressional campaign and was the regional church coordinator on Mike Espy’s winning one. And she worked as field director for Bennie Thompson when he was elected to Congress. Then she went to work for Thompson, and Hansell found that helpful organizations were disappearing from the Delta as funding eroded. “There was still a need in the Delta to do some things,” Hansell said. “We had found ourselves in the congressional office really taking on the aspect of a lot of development groups that were supposed to have been working in the Delta, so when constituents contacted us about sewer projects or water projects, we got involved.” She ran for chancery clerk in 1999. She has found the job rewarding but realized she had much to learn once she got the job. “A lot of what I learned, I learned by participating in training,” she said. The state requires yearly training offered by the Mississippi Judicial College.

She has a busy job. In Mississippi, chancery court is also family court. It deals with child custody, child support, adoption, divorce, probate matters, equity and land, as well as collecting delinquent taxes. On top of that, she is clerk to the board of supervisors and responsible for safekeeping countless county records. “When you start looking at the role of the chancery clerk, you begin to wonder, ‘How in the world can one person have all of those responsibilities?’ ” Hansell has 10 employees, and during the summer she employs high school and college interns. “They always like to come back,” she said. “I had a student last year, and he’s over at the junior college now, and he called me this morning.” “It’s a very unique position, but it’s a wonderful opportunity to be able to touch so many people. That’s what I like,” she said. Outside the office, Hansell is active with the Girl Scouts and the Progressive Art and Civics Club, affiliated with the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. She serves on the Mississippi State Democratic Executive Committee. She is proud of how her work

influenced her 27-year-old son, who has earned a master’s degree in public health from the University of Southern Mississippi. Hansell, 56, loves Greenville but believes it could stand improvement. She said a common goal of local officials is to fix and clean up battered and messy areas of the city. Another age-old problem, racial tension, needs to be addressed if Greenville is to move forward, she said. “It’s for the key shareholders in the community to make it happen.” Hansell believes the fate of Mississippi is intertwined with the fate of the Delta: “So goes the Delta, so goes the state of Mississippi.” Standing on the steps of the courthouse and discussing her political career after so many campaigns helping others get elected, Hansell recalled one early race that wasn’t going so well. Voter apathy was a problem and she was tired and frustrated. She recalled the words of the late Greenville activist Charles Moore, who saw her frustration, smiled at her and told her to be patient. He told me, “Just remember, Marilyn, to the victor goes the spoils.”

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The Supervisor

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N OR M A N S E AW R I GHT

Al Rankins, a veteran member of the board of supervisors, is retiring this year. He says the county needs more jobs and needs to find ways to train people for them.

fter more than 40 years in public life, Al Rankins thinks he knows something about fairness. Rankins, a member of the Washington County Board of

Supervisors, became an African-American police officer in Greenville in the late 1960s, when that was still a very rare thing. He vividly remembers how the first African-American officers before

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him were treated.

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Once, Al Rankins was one of a few black police officers in town. Now he’s one of five people who run the county.

They could arrest people only of the same color and couldn’t follow their investigations to fruition in court, he said. They had to hand over the cases to white officers to follow through. “There were only seven AfricanAmerican officers on the force,” Rankins recalled. “But two of them were the first African-American sworn officers in the state of Mississippi. They got hired in 1950, when it was unheard of.” The first was Willie Carson and the second was George Davis. AfricanAmerican officers were assigned to work only on weekends in neighborhoods where mostly African-Americans lived, Rankins said. “I was the first juvenile officer they ever had,” he said. Rankins was lucky in his timing. He was able to work as an independent investigator. While other black officers had to turn over information to white investigators who then took over the cases, Rankins carried out his own investigations and presented them in court. He liked his work. “When I was in law enforcement, it was all about protecting life and property. That was my main concern. Me being an African-American and growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, people’s rights were always dear to me, because I grew up under segregation,” he said. Over time, he moved up the ranks. But he also ran into a barrier of his own when he was denied the department’s top job. Instead, he had to settle for deputy chief. The memory still stings. “It’s one of those things that really stands out,” he said. “I think that was because of the politics. I was just as qualified. I’m a graduate of the FBI Academy, Mississippi Law Enforcement Academy, Louisiana

State Academy, Southern Police Institute, so I had all of the qualifications. I didn’t make chief because of politics. It was strictly politics.” After he retired from the police department, Rankins thought his life would be quieter and simpler. Then friends pushed him to run for the board of supervisors. In his first foray into politics, he won. “I like people, I’m a people person,” he said. “This is a team thing, not an individual thing.” Rankins has been on the board for more than two decades. Over time, he rose to the presidency, and he attributes his success to his ability to work well with others. “The board has changed ever since I’ve been here,” he said. “There are people who have been defeated, and new people have come in. I’ve been able to fit right in with them. Really, this has been an enjoyable experience for me.” As a board member, Rankins has a priority of not overspending tax money: “Government operates off of taxes. If people pay no taxes, you are out of business. My thing is always to try to give services, the necessities that people need. People are entitled to those services without being overtaxed. I think I’ve done that.” He said the board has consistently held taxes down over his tenure. Rankins noted that school taxes do increase. For that reason, he believes that school board members should be elected rather than appointed. He is retiring in December, but Rankins still has ideas about Greenville’s future. “We’ve been unable to retain some of the jobs that we have and bring in new industry. I think that has come from the labor force. I think that we have people

who are willing to work, who want to work, but ... through the years when we should have been educating our people through technology, we still were — guess what? — thinking in terms of agriculture.” To bring in jobs, Greenville must look to the future and train its workforce in technology, Rankins said. “We’re trying to get there. We’re behind some of the rest of the state.” Rankins likes to spend time at the soul food restaurant of his good friend S.B. Buck, across the street from the courthouse. Recently, he showed up there after a supervisors meeting, a stately man wearing a mauve dress shirt under a gray cardigan, with thin-framed round glasses resting on his nose. A smile came to his face when he discussed his family. He’s been married for 41 years to Mary, a retired schoolteacher. They have four children — a girl and three boys. His sons all went to public school and are college graduates, and his eldest son holds a Ph.D. and works for the state College Board. His second son lives in Baton Rouge, La., and works in agriculture after attending Alcorn University and earning his master’s degree. His youngest son lives in Birmingham, Ala., and attended Mississippi State University, where he earned his degree in golf and turf. He builds golf courses. Rankins’ daughter is a hospital administrator in Atlanta. When he leaves office at the end of the year, Rankins knows he’ll have a lot more time to soak up the atmosphere, the companionship and the soul food at Buck’s, and maybe see more of his family more often. “It’s time for me to do other things that I wanted to do with my family, my grandkids,” he said.

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The Councilman

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N OR M A N S E AW R I GHT

Councilman Kenny Gines wants to emphasize the positive aspects of Greenville, rather than the negative.

n his navy, three-button suit over a light blue shirt, Councilman Kenny Gines can keep up his end of a conversation with anyone. Seconds into the conversation, he’s smiling, exuding

warmth, confidence and personality — traits that have helped him on the council and in his job as a labor organizer

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for state employees.

9 0 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

Kenny Gines thinks Greenville can improve, but the community must unite to make it happen. It is that job, in fact, that drew him into public life. Over time, as he worked with state employees and state government, he became more and more interested in how government works. Finally, when Councilman Bill Burnley died, Gines sat down with his wife to discuss whether to scratch his growing political itch. “She said, ‘What are you going to do?’” Gines recalled. “And I decided to try to be part of the solution. I just jumped in. Been loving it ever since.” But it’s not always easy. Controversial votes are inevitable. Not everyone likes every council decision. Gines said the hardest part of his job is knowing that his votes affect someone’s livelihood. He has served for eight years on the council, working hard, he said, to build bridges to both black and white communities. Now he is running for mayor. He believes he understands the “collective personality” of Greenville and can unite the community to help move it forward. Greenville’s racial problems, he said, are no worse than, say, Tupelo’s. Gines believes he has proved he can build friendships and respect across racial lines. He was a pallbearer for white businessman Barthell Joseph and white Realtor Robert Cunningham. Mayor Heather McTeer, who is leaving the mayor’s office to run for Congress,

has done a good job, he said. “Knowing the process, she has done very well with the situation she had to tackle in the first place.” Gines said Greenville needs jobs, but it’s a difficult task in a slumping economy. He blames the city’s loss of jobs in part on the North American Free Trade Agreement. Another problem, he said, is that schools stress college preparation, but the majority of jobs here require only vocational or technical degrees, not four-year degrees. The city needs to look at how it educates and trains people, he said. Greenville has access to highways, railways and waterways and has proved that companies will come here, Gines said. He cited Leading Edge, which employs workers to spray-paint Boeing aircraft. “I wish we could get a Nissan or Toyota plant,” Gines said. “That would be just a big shot in the arm for us. But by the same token, we do have companies here that are hiring right now. Leading Edge has openings right now.” He said better media cooperation also could help the city lure employers. “News is news. Media can be good or bad,” he said. Gines wants to highlight the positive aspects of Greenville — not an easy task considering that Greenville’s population has plummeted since 2000. But “there

are truly positive things going on in Greenville,” he said, and they need to be publicized. Gines sees good and bad effects from the lakefront casinos. They create some jobs and provide tax revenue for the city. But in a town where almost a third of the population is poor, many people who go to the casinos are the very ones who cannot afford to go, he said. Gines’ mother picked and chopped cotton when he was young. She encouraged Gines and his siblings to attend college. His brother went to Alabama, while he and his sister went to Alcorn State. Gines quit Alcorn but later finished at Mississippi Valley State University with a political science degree. His daughter attended public school, and his grandmother, 95, voted for the first time when Gines was running for city council. Gines said he has not been touched by racism personally. But he said some local leaders lived in the era of segregation and immediately thereafter and remember it well. He suggested that the mind-set of both races needs to change, and dialogue is the best way to deal with remaining prejudice in the community. “Greenville is a great community,” Gines said. “I was born here, and I plan on dying here and being buried here.”

“I decided to try to be part of the solution. I just jumped in. Been loving it ever since.” — Kenny Gines

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The Children’s Advocate

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Cliff Whitley wants to save the children. He’s got his work cut out for him. liff Whitley hustles through the old building on Theobald Street with the lively air of a man with a lot to do and little time to do it. There are kids to be saved, grants to apply for, programs to push. The CEO of the nonprofit Mississippi Action for Community Education (MACE) is determined to help the children of Greenville, but it is no easy task.

B Y N O R M A N S E AW R I G H T I I I

Before arriving here, Whitley was the director of Head Start in Jackson.. As he dashed back and forth across the city, assessing how best to help pre-schoolers, he reached an inescapable conclusion — parental support is critical to the success of young children whether their parents are rich or poor. Head Start – a place where the staff reads to children, plays with them and tries to impart the basics of how to care for themselves and behave – is a good model for parents to follow, he said. If they will merely copy what Head Start does for their children, they will likely become more involved in their kids’ lives as a result. More community involvement and better teaching will also help, he said. Whitley brought the lessons of his years at Head Start with him to MACE, whose programs try to develop leadership in some young people and simply save others from the streets. He also worries about his community. Greenville, he said, is divided by race.

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In recent years, he said, the divisions have become deeper and the lines more clearly defined. It doesn’t help that the gap between the middle class and the poor keeps widening. And it doesn’t help that the schools are segregated all over again, with white children predominantly going to private schools and black children predominantly going to public schools. He believes public schools in Greenville were better in his younger days, when white and black children went to school together. There are far fewer whites now. Whitley would like to see public schools improved, especially with diversity. He believes that increased interaction among the adults is a good way to bring change. And that is more likely to happen if they get to know each other in grade school. “It’s painful to see what happens to kids,” he said. His own daughter attended Mattie Aiken Elementary School. MACE started a Youthbuild program for kids 16 to 24 who are not in school. It aims to get them at least a GED diploma and

N OR M A N S E AW R I GHT

Cliff Whitley has applied the lessons of Head Start to his work at MACE.

teaches construction skills and leadership. The participants work on homes for those in need and are taught the perils of bad habits and paths to success. Whitley would like to see parents involved more in the education of their children, assisting their children outside of Head Start. “What I hope to be my legacy here is our leadership development initiative.

That’s something that was a foundation of MACE,” he said, referring to MACE’s attempts to develop new community leaders. Whitley was born in Okolona and grew up in West Point, Mississippi. He comes by his interests in children and race naturally. His mother was a civil rights worker and his father, a United Methodist

minister. They gave him a strong interest in young people and a sense of social justice. He attended Northwestern and Cornell, worked as a clerk for a Chicago judge, could have stayed up north and probably made more money. But he says he always intended to return home and fulfill his life goal of helping someone else in Mississippi.

FALL 2011 • 93

The Politics of Soul Food

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Looking for the courthouse crowd? Buck’s Restaurant is a good place to start.

or 15 years, S.B. Buck has brought the community together for more than just a plate lunch. Tucked away in an outdated strip mall across the street from the Washington County Courthouse is Buck’s Restaurant, and if you blink twice, you just might miss it. But don’t let its humble exterior fool you. Buck and his wife, Demetris, own and run the establishment, complete with decor of historic newspaper clippings, posters and snapshots on the walls, cafeteria-style trays, and Tabasco sauce at every table.

B Y M A G G I E D AY

The enterprise is well-known, serving everyone from the regulars to Barack Obama in 2008 during a campaign stop. Soul food and sweet tea combine to create a place where the courthouse crowd takes a break, politicians strategize and the community congregates. But the Buck doesn’t stop here. In November, Buck’s name will appear on the ballot for county supervisor for District 4. This is his first political campaign, but don’t underestimate him — with his infectious personality and signature cackle, Buck is no stranger to the community. S.B. Buck was born on April 17, 1947, a mere 25 miles away in Indianola. Buck was named for his uncle, Samuel Bernard, but the whole name didn’t exactly make it to his birth certificate. So he is simply known as S.B. Buck has 13 brothers and sisters, and he is fourth-oldest. Their mother raised them on Billups Plantation near Greenwood, and they worked as sharecroppers while enrolled in school. Buck went on to study for two years at Mississippi Valley State University but did

not obtain a degree. “I had enough brothers to have a football team!” Buck howled. “I guess having that many siblings taught me how to share and appreciate when you don’t have much.” Buck then took the chance to get out of Mississippi. He traveled to Detroit in 1967 to stay with his uncle, who was a minister. “I was just a kid that wanted to get into things, but he had a different idea of what I was going to be doing,” Buck said, raising his eyebrows to make the point. Buck got his first taste of a big city there, witnessing the 1967 Detroit riot. A short time later, he decided to make the long journey home. He got a job with Modern Line Production in Indianola and worked his way up to become the company’s first black supervisor. It was in Indianola that Buck got a taste of civil rights activism, marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others from the Delta to Jackson. When he retired, he opened the restaurant in Greenville and has been there ever since.

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It’s a biracial crowd – “60 percent of my customers are white,” Buck said – that includes folks who work in the courthouse and nearby stores as well as a crowd from the hospital. Buck also does a healthy takeout business and can be seen running around town delivering tall stacks of Styrofoam containers of pipinghot lunches. But his place also has become a sort of community meeting place. Clubs and organizations frequently meet and eat in the second dining room off to the right of the main room, a large space with more photos and clippings on the walls from the Obama visit and a big color television mounted on one wall. Buck likes to talk, smile and laugh, and that hasn’t hurt his business, either. It’s also helped him get a strong sense of community trends and what people think. He’s plugged in. As Chancery Clerk Marilyn Hansell put it: “Buck’s is where all the politicians and the people downtown go to eat. It’s the place to be and it’s a big gathering place for the community. It’s where everyone goes.”

S.B. Buck’s soul food restaurant is popular with the courthouse crowd. He hopes to parlay that into election to the board of supervisors. PH O T O S BY EL I ZA B E T H B E AV E R

FALL 2011 • 95

A Sense of Place

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At the McCormick Book Inn, you can get books, local history and something called “Deltaology.” And always, always great conversation.

he McCormick Book Inn appears suddenly, wedged between a bright purple barbecue shack and an old cemetery. Inside, photographs and framed book covers decorate every spare inch of wall. Shelves lined with books bisect the store, creating alcoves and corners where customers hunker down, trying to decide between an old favorite or the latest best-seller.

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EL I ZABET H BEAVER

The Book Inn is packed with books on Mississippi, the Delta, the South.

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The store is charming, with its gray wood exterior and beams gridding the ceiling. The smell of coffee rises from the Keurig placed beside a small fireplace. Next to it four chairs border a circular table, their legs creating round grooves in a warm, worn rug. The area is weighted down with literature about Mississippi and the South. Each book and name is a source of pride for the little store and its owners. Faulkner, Welty, Percy and Williams are nestled next to Morris, Foote and Carter. The true character of the store is hidden within their pages: a profound sense of place. In a state long known for its turbulent past and in a time when independent bookstores across the country are pulling their blinds and closing their doors, the McCormick Book Inn contradicts the naysayers. “I have a problem with this,” snorts Hugh McCormick, who now runs the Book Inn. He picks up the Delta magazine that the University of Mississippi published in 2010. “The cover said ‘how will we ever recover from the rot of the old South,’ and I have a problem

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E L I Z A B E T H B E AV E R

The McCormick Book Inn run by Hugh (left) and Mary Dayle McCormick (right) has long been a literary oasis in Greenville, a place where the books and the conversation compete for supremacy.

with that.” He pulls at his gray beard and crosses his legs. Wearing khakis, glasses and a navy sweater vest, McCormick is the image of a bookstore owner. “The rot doesn’t exist,” he says firmly. “At least not in that sense. I mean we all suffer from the sins of the fathers, but that’s not unique to Mississippi or the Delta or anything else. It’s just extenuated here. For some reason the Delta is fascinating for some people.” He shakes his head slightly and continues, “This gal, a writer, came in from California and said she just loves the Delta and I asked why. She thought a moment and said, ‘Its authenticity.’ ” Authenticity. The word rings out clearly at the end of his sentence, a simple statement that applies to not only the Delta but everything contained in it. From its famed love affair with food to its romance with the blues, from its rich literary history to the characters and ghosts haunting small-town courthouses

and decaying front porches, the Delta is nothing if not authentic. And contained within the books wallpapering the store are the tales of this place and these people. Ask Hugh for his favorite author and he’ll cite two: William Alexander Percy, who wrote “Lanterns on the Levee,” and the prolific David L. Cohn, who wrote “Where I Was Born and Raised” and other books on subjects ranging from the Delta to cotton to tariffs to the Democratic Party to cultural trends discernible in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. For the past 46 years, the McCormick Book Inn has been the storehouse of the tales. “I was a visual merchandiser, and his excuse for getting me over here was the store needed remerchandising,” says Mary Dayle McCormick, smaller than her husband, thin and wiry with a drawl so soft and high it sounds like cicadas in midsummer. “That was the only reason!” says Hugh. His voice, normally smooth, gets gruffer

with his sarcasm, so dry that a stranger could mistake him for being as gruff as his tone. Mary Dayle ignores him. “So then I came over and said, ‘Well, why don’t you do this and why don’t you do that?’ ” Her voice gets low and rough, a perfect mimic of her husband’s. “And he said, ‘Well, we’ve always done it this way!’ ” Hugh protests, “Now I don’t think that’s very funny, OK?” “As the world of psychology calls it, he was highly entrenched,” Mary Dayle laughs lightly and takes another sip of coffee. “And so somehow I just ended up staying. That was in ... hmm, what year did we get married?” She turns to Hugh, adding with a laugh, “We forgot our anniversary this year.” Hugh thinks a minute and responds with a date. Mary Dayle twists back around. “Yes, 1990, so that was around ’85 or ’86.” At that time, Mrs. Mac, Hugh’s mother,

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still held court around the fireplace, nodding her approval of her customers’ book purchases. “She was the Oprah of the Delta,” remembers Hugh, “everybody would come in and ask her what they should be reading.” “But when she was about 85, she stopped coming over and so I became the new lady of the house,” says Mary Dayle, reclining in the same rocker that Mrs. Mac occupied through so many years and pages. “I was really into Southern writers, especially women, and I was doing some writing myself and I just lapped up everything visiting writers would tell me about writing and publishing. And I remember Kenneth Haxton sat in that chair when we were —” Hugh interrupts, “She wouldn’t know who Kenneth Haxton is.” “He was married to Ellen Douglas,” explains Mary Dayle, referring to the prolific Greenville author who wrote “Can’t Quit You, Baby,” about a white Southern woman and her black maid long before “The Help.” “She wouldn’t know who Ellen Douglas is.” “Ellen Douglas was, is a writer; she’s kind of forgotten about now.” “She is forgotten about now, still alive, lives in Jackson.” “Well, writers know about her.” “And her husband ran the classiest department store in the Delta.” “He was the second or third generation.” “He was the second generation, and you could go there and get the top New York fashions and people would just flock to the Delta to go to the store.” “They had a book department, so he thought himself an expert on books,” Mary Dayle finishes the thread of conversation and bats Hugh away. “He was an awful writer, but he tried. He was a great critic, but he’d lost all pleasure in reading; he couldn’t turn off the critic. He told me: If you can balance the two that’s

great, but if you have to choose, always read for pleasure. He said he envied me. And ever since that day when he would walk into the store — oh, he was a gruff, standoffish sort — I would always give him a hug, and he enjoyed it.” The memory falls off her lips, and she laughs again as the story of the people who run the Book Inn begins to fall into place. A jovially combatant couple who bounce and balance off of one another, just two more characters within the novel of the Delta. The pair have seen their fair share of writers come through the store, from the famous to those rare self-published authors Hugh will let through the door. “If they aren’t represented by a respected publishing house …” he trails off, but the understanding remains. “It is astounding to me the ego that’s wrapped around this now, in being printed. What’s with all these print-on-demand places now?” Mary Dayle has her own opinion. “I’ve enjoyed listening to and conversing with big-time writers who maybe I don’t like their subject matter, or I don’t like the way they write. But there are people who are completely underrated, and nobody shows up for their signing, and I just think what they’re doing is incredible, and it kills me. They’re a writer’s writer, and we just don’t have the kind of readership here who would pick up on any of that.” “The support from the community has dwindled for a number of reasons,” Hugh agrees with a shake of his head and a frustrated sigh. “Education’s different. And then there’s television, video games and computers. There was a reader here who came in and bought a book once a week, and now he comes in and buys one once a year because he spends most of his time with electronics.” “Not only that but Amazon has changed the formula,” Hugh continues. “And as Greenville declines so does the book business. In the ’50s and ’60s it helped to be a bookstore with a community of writers, and now that’s not

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true.” Hugh ticks off Greenville’s repertoire of authors. William Alexander Percy, David Cohn, Hodding Carter Jr., Walker Percy, Bern Keating, Charles Bell, Shelby Foote and Ellen Douglas — lives all overlapped with one another’s in time. The number of writers produced within this small area of space may have provided rare ammunition for literary jokes. A miniature water bottle, serving as a simple souvenir, is filled with Greenville’s famed brown water and carries the tagline: guaranteed to make you want to write, from our tap to your typewriter. But it also has brought attention to a town that is in danger of slowly becoming just a drive-through, a gas stop on Highway 1. “There was a time when if you wanted to get a job in a New York publishing house all you had to do was say you were from Greenville, Mississippi,” jokes Hugh. To hear him talk about Greenville’s past and promise is to hear Mary Dayle talk about Southern writers. They’re the historian and the writer, one sarcastic and brass and the other a soft-spoken woman with gentle gestures, an unlikely couple in an even unlikelier business. But it has its perks. “I always wanted to meet Ellen Gilchrist,” Mary Dayle says. “In high school I had already read Welty, and I realized you didn’t have to write like Willa Cather. But as a young adult reading Ellen Gilchrist, it was a revelation that you could write about home and family and what you know and your personal experiences and turn it into fiction that people would want to read. And finally a couple of years ago I go to meet with her. And she was just like her character (Rhoda). Just like her.” The names Lee Smith and Beverly Lowry and Julia Reed slip in and out of her stories as she continues, spinning the tale of a bookseller’s wife. She picks up books from the table and flips through them, pointing out passages, highlighting quotes and sentences, passionate in her

M I R I A M TAY L OR

Hugh, in a pensive moment among his beloved books. He and Mary Dayle have made the Book Inn a local icon despite the national trend against independent book stores.

zeal to inspire excitement about the power of writing. “We’re a strange shop; our mixture is, well, not much of a mixture. But it’s a lot of what we call Deltaology,” Hugh remarks, noticing the books that Mary Dayle is rifling through. “You’ve got to see the back.” In the back of the store, a step-down add-on past the children’s section, is a makeshift museum detailing Greenville’s

history. Photographs, memorabilia and maps cover the walls and glass casings that encompass the room. Pieces from Greenville’s past are huddled together so that present-day visitors won’t forget what Greenville has been, both in its accomplishments and its sins. Old pictures and pamphlets highlight Greenville in its heyday in the ’60s, when it was dubbed the Queen City, the jewel of the Delta. But others reveal its greatest

devastations during the flood of ’27. The shop remains an odd mix, part bookstore, part museum, but always with its own distinct sense of place. “I think what we have done in the store, or at least I like to think we have done this, is maintain the literary heritage over these years for Greenville,” Hugh muses. Then he shrugs. “Is that of any importance? I don’t know anymore.”

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Help Yourself

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With its self-help strategy, LISC is trying to help neighborhoods to reinvent themselves, one street at a time.

B Y J O N H AY W O O D

In poor neighborhood after poor Greenville neighborhood, it’s the same: Decent homes, then homes with broken windows, sheets of plastic over a leaky roof, junk cluttering a grassless yard, too many young men drinking in the streets, people making furtive purchases of something sure to be illegal. But across one wide swath of the city, a surprising thing is happening. Neighbors are coming together to organize. People are talking of how to rid themselves of crime, fix up houses, clean up yards, recruit small businesses, build community centers. At this point, it’s still a dream, but grant applications are being filled out, leaders elected and plans being laid, courtesy of a group called LISC. Unlike a lot of organizations formed to help the poor, LISC has decided that a good way to help people in battered

he streets are freshly paved. Look ahead and you’ll find an abandoned house - broken windows, no paint, no door. A few doors down there’s a home with all the trappings of middle-class American life — a well-manicured lawn, children’s toys, a pet dog. In this neighborhood you’ll even find a quaint little Catholic church and a street named Sicily. Well-kept homes abut homes and yards that could use a lot of work. This neighborhood, known as Little Italy and once a thriving Italian-American community, has seen better days. But even today, it has promise.

neighborhoods is to help them help themselves. Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) came to the Delta in 1995 with that one goal in mind. The non-profit has identified an area near Delta Regional Hospital as its target. All spring, it recruited neighborhood leaders, then helped arrange meetings with residents to get them to identify their most critical needs. Then LISC will offer various resources to help them meet them. “We want to change Greenville,” said George Miles, the executive director. THE STRATEGY LISC knows the neighborhoods are full of the unemployed or people who have low-paying jobs. It plans to create a LISC financial opportunity center to help them get the financial aid they need to purchase homes and build pride in their property,

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lifting the neighborhood at the same time. It is working with corporations, government, universities and other nonprofit organizations to find the funds. LISC also wants to turn around unattractive business areas by working with business leaders to increase visibility and sales, hopefully creating a new culture of entrepreneurship. Miles knows that it won’t do a lot of good if the children don’t get a good education. So LISC wants to organize an advocacy network of parents and create after-school programs that include tutoring and other services to compliment the public schools. Several other education plans are in the works, particularly programs for very young children. Health and safety is another target, including a partnership with the Greenville Police Department to make

PH O T O S BY N OR M A N S E AW R I GHT

Too many neighborhoods have abandoned houses where trash accumulates, adding to the rot.

neighborhoods like Little Italy safer. Problems plaguing other communities in Greenville include a lack of cohesiveness among residents, open drug dealing, robberies, car thefts and youth involved in gangs. To combat the problems, LISC would like to create and enforce neighborhood watch groups, work on partnerships between businesses and police and create recreational programs. LISC wants to create secure neighborhoods by improving reporting by the citizens themselves. The organization plans to recruit churches, business owners, residents, and health care providers to get involved. Changes are already starting to occur around Sacred Heart Catholic Church, a

block from Nelson Street and near Little Italy. “We are trying to keep our little area clean and neat,” said Father Thomas Mullally of Sacred Heart. “We have worked on a community garden and on keeping the grounds neat, keeping yards mowed and clean.” The hope, he said, is that others will see that, take more pride in the area, and fix up their own property. He is not unrealistic. He knows education and jobs are serious needs in Greenville. “The whole city needs to be mobilized,” he said. It’s tough to do, but if people can be energized, they can do a lot, he said. “I can’t go to schools and force people to learn, but at least I can help people have a clean, pleasant

environment.” THE CHANGE AGENT Behind many of the changes taking place is George Miles, executive director of Mid South Delta LISC since 2007. Miles left a job in the private sector to work for what he calls his passion, non-profits. He calls LISC’s work “comprehensive community development.” “It’s good to see that you can have a positive change,” Miles said of his nonprofit work. “We’d like to see one day when the Delta becomes a place people want to move to instead of move from. Everything about the Delta makes it special — the food, the people, it’s close to home for me.”

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Black and White Together

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St. Joseph is a rare sight in the Delta – an integrated school that seems to work. But it’s not for everyone. he intercom screeches in Michelle Sabotier’s senior English class. A high-pitched voice invites students to the gymnasium for a special presentation from a traveling planetarium. The last group called: Sabotier’s senior honors English class. Doors open outside in the hallway, and the chatter of excited students getting out of class leaks in through the door. Inside Sabotier’s class, not a single senior moves. The entire class of 13 decides to stay.

B Y C H E L S E A C AV E N Y

Sabotier’s students are focused, determined. They are about to graduate from St. Joseph Catholic School, and nothing is going to stand in their way. St. Joe, as it’s called, has been a part of Greenville since 1888. Its history links with the early families that helped build a proud city that, according to former Delta Democrat-Times Editor Hodding Carter III, “strutted sitting down.” The city saw itself as a more welcoming, progressive place than anywhere else in Mississippi. The Percy family was responsible for much of the early leadership of the city, and William Alexander Percy’s personal tutor, the Rev. P.J. Korstenbroek, led the creation of the Catholic Church and parochial education here. That history still seems present when students walk the halls of St. Joseph today. At this Catholic school, only half of the

students are Catholic. Beyond religion, St. Joe’s student body is integrated, a rare thing for a Delta school. Sabotier’s senior honors English class has five white students and eight African-Americans. The school is 40 percent AfricanAmerican. “In this building, people of all races, cultures, creeds work together every day for a common goal,” says Paul Artman, who served 16 years as mayor before becoming St. Joe’s principal. “They like each other. They succeed together.” It would be easy to see St. Joe, a popular school with discipline and a good academic record, as a model for how to make integrated education work in the Delta. But St. Joe has distinct advantages over public schools. For one thing, all of St. Joe’s students and their families have something in

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common: They have agreed to the guidelines of a parochial education, what Artman calls “a faith-based, moralsbased, value-added education.” And parochial education, unlike public school, comes with a significant cost. The average cost of educating a student at St. Joe is $6,500 a year. The students are paying closer to an average of $4,500 in tuition a year plus $800 to $900 in fees. The Catholic Church pumps additional money into the school to cover the costs not met by tuition. In very few cases, students who can’t afford tuition get financial aid from the church. The school makes its expectations clear from the beginning. “This is the school,” Artman tells prospective students and their parents. “If this is what you want in a school, we are glad to have you.”

PH O T O S BY E L I Z A B E T H B E AV E R

St. Joseph High School has been part of Greenville since 1888. It is that rare Delta school that is thoroughly integrated and boasts of good academics.

To qualify, students must undergo a vigorous application and interview process. They must complete a standardized math and communicative arts test, along with an essay and interview. Artman says that during the interview, “we try to explain that this is a different kind of school. Especially if one is coming trying to escape public school. Then we try to make it very clear that we are not going to accept any of the problems, any of the distractions that they’ve been experiencing at public school or that a student may have been a part of that.” Michelle Sabotier knows what he’s talking about. In the public schools, she saw fights every day and witnessed a fellow teacher’s nervous breakdown during the middle of the year. The students in the neighboring teacher’s class would then be ushered into the room every day for what turned out to be an unsupervised free period. Sabotier describes the experience as “soul sucking.” Sabotier, who used to run a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., came to St. Joe after

teaching in public schools in Rolling Fork and Greenville through the Ole Missbased Mississippi Teacher Corps. In fact, she took a pay cut to teach there. She liked the discipline. She liked the students. She liked the academic environment. And she especially liked the fact that it was the only “truly integrated” school she had seen in the Delta. She was impressed with genuine friendships forged between black and white students. When girls had sleepovers, for example, they would sometimes invite friends of both races. The stress and exhaustion that went with her previous jobs seems a distant thing on this Tuesday morning in early

spring. Today, Sabotier is invigorated. Her students are active and engaged. They eagerly tackle an exercise called “13 Minutes of Rock.” All 13 seniors quietly sit and listen to a song by a band named RAM. As the song ends, the class dives into a discussion about how the song mirrors a romantic ballad. At one point, the discussion becomes lively and for the first time the entire period, it looks like Sabotier might have to raise her voice and harshly demand silence. But the moment quickly passes. As soon as the chatter rises, the class disciplines itself with a few “shushes” from different parts of the room. “I’ve been involved in a lot of the studies of Greenville, Washington County, the Delta. How do you save it? How do you revamp it? Things like that. And I proudly tell everybody that I think we have the formula here,” Artman says. “Now whether you can replicate this formula of a Catholic school in the middle of Greenville or in the middle of the Delta for everyone else that lives around here, I don’t know.”

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Starting Young Greenville’s Renaissance Scholars programs treats middle school students like potential college students and they are loving it.

E L I Z A B E T H B E AV E R

The program challenges students and they are responding.

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s

B Y C H E L S E A C AV E N Y

pencer Davis just finished a grueling mock trial competition. Some days, he practiced for five hours. But you never saw him sweat. He is cool, calm, with a steady voice like a baseball announcer on

television. He says he is going to be a lawyer. Not that he wants to be a lawyer, but he will be a lawyer. He is only a high school sophomore but focused and mature beyond his years. He is confident, driven, a proud product of the Greenville Renaissance Scholars.

Mary Hardy, a retired public school teacher and now executive director of GRS, brags about Spencer as she calls him to see if he is interested in talking with a journalist. She says Spencer is always in the local news for his school projects and competitions. Spencer likes GRS because more than anything else, he wants to succeed. “It seemed like GRS was a level or two above the level we were on in school,” he says. Then, dead serious, he asks, “Is it too early to apply for college during my junior year?” Hardy is explaining how GRS operates. She is calm and professional as she discusses programs, curriculum, student recruitment. But as soon as she begins to talk about the students, this veteran educator grows giddy, almost childlike in her excitement over their work. The eager, driven students of Greenville Renaissance Scholars will do that to you. The program offers intensive after-school and summer instruction to promising middle school students. It’s designed to broaden their education, expose them to new things and new ideas, and give them an early advantage on the road to college. It is the brainchild of Margaret Carter Joseph, who wanted desperately to do something for the youth of her embattled hometown, where the poverty rate is roughly 30 percent and public schools have a history of struggling. She is part of a small community working within Greenville to fight an uphill battle for the future of Greenville’s young people. Joseph’s father, Hodding Carter III, ran the city’s newspaper for years but eventually moved away, and so did Joseph. After a stint in the Peace Corps, a degree in urban education from Harvard, and time spent teaching in the ghettos of Boston, Margaret Joseph eventually returned to Greenville and married a native son of the city, Barthell Joseph. After she had lived in Greenville for a few years, Margaret Joseph says, “I knew I wanted to be involved in education, and

E L I Z A B E T H B E AV E R

Margaret Carter Joseph wanted desperately to do something for the youth of her embattled hometown, where the poverty rate is roughly 30 percent.

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in kids’ lives and ensuring more kids went to college, but I just wasn’t sure how I wanted to do it.” Fortunately, the lessons she learned in her time away from Mississippi stayed with her. While teaching in Boston she became friends with a student who had benefited from an after-school and summer program known as Urban Scholars. Joseph liked what she saw. Over the years she also had become good friends with Jay Aultman, who ran an after-school and summer program in New Orleans that eventually developed into a series of popular charter schools. The models from Boston and New Orleans, along with an after-school and summer program much closer to home in the Mississippi Delta, the Sunflower County Freedom Project, fascinated Joseph. By the summer of 2006 she was asking founders of those programs how to make something similar happen in Greenville. While they helped form her vision, her own hometown helped make it a reality. She began meeting with school administrators, teachers, students and parents to see what kind of program they wanted. Joseph says she “really turned to a lot of great people in the community and said ‘what do you think about this?’ and they were excited.” Those first people she turned to formed the first board of advisers in January 2007. That summer, the first Camp Renaissance was under way. Held in donated space at Greenville Higher Education Center, it was open to middle school students and functioned much like a regular school day. For five weeks, rising seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders spent their mornings in advanced writing, reading, research skills and leadership classes. After a lunch break, the creative arts took over with dance, choral and drama classes. The first summer followed a theme that drew from the program’s namesake, renaissance. At the end of every Camp

E L I Z A B E T H B E AV E R

The program emphasizes the arts, and in a community that has traditionally supported the arts and cultural events, the kids were quick to embrace it.

Renaissance, the students put on a large drama production and invited the community. Greenville has a long history of strong support for arts and culture. Joseph saw the arts as a unique selling point and a way to encourage people to see the youth as “a rebirth for the community.” After the summer program, Greenville Renaissance Scholars continued during the school year. Writing workshops, offered during the afternoons and on Saturday mornings, sharpened skills the students would need to complete college admission essays. The school year also was filled with field trips to such places as the art museum in Jackson and even to Washington, D.C., for a drama production. It was the first time many of the students had traveled outside the Delta. The kids took to it eagerly. Spencer loved the challenge, loved the T-shirts they were given, loved how other kids would come up to them and ask about the program, as if it was an honor. The original plan was to begin with middle school students and add grades all the way through high school. To house its year-round programming, GRS found a home on the second floor of the E.E. Bass Cultural Center, once a public school on the edge of downtown. In the midst of empty former classrooms, GRS marked a class door with a gold plaque, filled bookshelves with copies of Hamlet and covered the

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walls with college banners from across the country. After a year of after-school programming, GRS returned to its mainstay, Camp Renaissance. The second year of Camp Renaissance saw a special focus on the arts. The scholars painted a mural about black migration to the North on the side of an empty building in downtown Greenville. Camp Renaissance has continued for the past three years, but like many of the upstart nonprofits dotting the Delta, it has seen some tough times. The past three years have seen shifts in its mission, and at GRS, hard times are often connected to funding. The initial start-up money came from local donations. Within four months, Joseph had raised $25,000. After that, GRS began to look for grants to help keep running. But even then it kept its focus very local, pulling from local organizations to help pay for things. Joseph smiles when she thinks about the financial support from Greenville. “Really, our base support has always been the community, which is pretty amazing, because we’re a pretty strapped community.” As Americans across the country tightened spending during the recession, GRS was forced to re-examine its mission. After about two years, Joseph says, “we kind of decided at that point that we had bitten off too much, for us, in terms of resources and what we could really do. So we refocused primarily on

LEFT | The kids get advanced instruction in the skills they will need to succeed in high school and go on to college. Some, in fact, are already planning their college years. BELOW | Students may be sitting on the floor with a teacher one moment and working away at a laptop the next.

PH O T O S BY E L I Z A B E T H B E AV E R

just middle school, making sure that after three summers of Camp Renaissance and some college readiness programming during the school year, they would be on the right track in high school.” The shift in mission is still something very much on her mind. She’d like to do more, to figure ways to help the kids long after they leave the Bass classrooms. “We’re not doing well by our former scholars, I don’t think. I think we get them through middle school really well, but …” Joseph pauses to think about what to say next, and as she does you can see her processing the last three years in her head. “I don’t think we’re doing enough for them once they get out of middle school.” Money is still tight. Maybe it is the honesty in Joseph’s voice, or something more, a kind of uneasiness about the future, as she says, “I think that’s our biggest headache year to year is how to raise money. We’re still sort of at the point

of year-to-year survival. And it may always just be that way.” The students don’t seem to notice all the fretting over mission statements, programming and funding. They are used to inconsistency and constant change in the schools. For the most part, GRS seems stable to them, a place apart, a sort of intoxicating oasis where they can go to challenge themselves and dare to think about college and a career much earlier than the average middle schooler. Like Kennedy Wellington. She loves GRS. On a free morning during her spring break, the spunky eighth-grader skips up the stairs at E.E. Bass. As Kennedy walks around the shelves filled with copies of “Romeo and Juliet,” she drags her hand along different books, or any sheet of paper that might get caught in her path. She rattles on, nonstop, about the recent earthquake in Japan, mystery books,

the virtues of Shipley’s Donuts and how if she were in charge she would improve the Greenville school system. She loves learning about new stuff. She loves a challenge. She wants to do more. She keeps a long list of colleges she might attend, and the list seems to change by the hour. What happens to Kennedy if money runs out? Faces like Kennedy’s and Spencer’s are on the mind of Margaret Joseph when she talks about how to measure the impact of the program. Joseph has built bonds with the students, and GRS is as much a part of her as it is Kennedy or Spencer. When she talks about them, her eyes light up the same way Mary Hardy’s lit up. At these moments, Joseph and Hardy aren’t thinking about mission statements and programming. They’re thinking about the kids. The future.

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Culture of Success

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An army of eager young teachers has invaded Greenville to try to reach the children. And some are falling in love with the Delta.

B Y C H E L S E A C AV E N Y

he inside of the blues bar is illuminated with lights that look like they came off a Christmas tree. The air sags heavily with smoke as the woman onstage belts out a song that makes the small crowd sway hips and tap toes. A table in front is filled with older couples who take turns dancing sloooowly to the music.

In a side room, where pool tables glow under low-slung lamps, a small group relaxes on the green surfaces. It takes only a quick glance to see these people are different. They are young, in a town that’s aging. They are interracial, in a town sometimes divided by race. They have unfamiliar accents, in a town accustomed to deep Delta drawls. But they have become regulars as much as the older couples whose bodies meld on the dance floor. As the night progresses, the young patrons wander to the threshold dividing the side room from the main bar. They perk up when the lead singer says it’s a special night because “my daughter’s music teacher is in the crowd.” One of them quietly leans over to admit that he doesn’t know which of his students has a blues-singing mother. He looks down and shakes his head, disappointed in himself. To the casual observer, this posse of 20-somethings who have taken over the pool tables could be just another bunch of college kids. But they are much more.

They are part of Teach for America, part of a small army dispatched to the Delta to try to save the children. In the process, they have brought hope and created a strong little sub-community all their own. Teach for America was founded in 1990 as the brainchild of Wendy Kopp’s Princeton undergraduate thesis. Kopp’s idea was to take recent college graduates who hadn’t majored in education, give them a crash course in teaching and send them into some of the worst school districts in the country. At the time, it was revolutionary thinking. There is debate across the land over how to educate children, but there is an even more critical debate over how best to educate kids from poor communities who go to poor schools, then go home to poor families. The stakes seem higher when a teacher is responsible for passing along the alphabet and algebra while also having to break through a cycle of poverty in a classroom. Kopp’s hope was that the energy and idealism of highly motivated

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college grads, unfettered by traditional teacher education, could help to break the cycle. Thousands of grads have become prophets of Wendy Kopp’s gospel, the culture of success, a religious devotion to the idea that no class is too difficult, no lesson too hard. It is a conviction that no kid is too dumb to be taught, that new ideas and new energy can make a difference in troubled and failing schools, especially in the Delta. Kopp’s army is growing rapidly. It has developed into a program with more than 7,000 teachers around the country and an incoming class set to be more than 4,000, the biggest yet. The Delta is one place TFA has grown the most in recent years. It has more than tripled its Delta teacher placement since 2009, and now has 520 teachers reaching 43,000 students in the region. “Since 1995,” says Sally Lineback, a regional development manager for TFA, “there have been 158 TFAs placed in Greenville. Currently, there are 29.”

Kopp’s believers have learned that to make the impact they desire, their days cannot end when the school bell rings. TFA teachers are forming after-school clubs, leading educational spring break trips and tutoring students for extra hours. At Solomon Middle School in the past two years, TFA teachers have helped establish an art club and book club and set up a trip to Chicago. At T.L. Weston High, one TFA teacher worked with a student after school for more than 90 hours in one semester. Her student went from failing math to Advanced Placement math. You would think that with this kind of hard work, with these long hours, even these driven young men and women would grow tired, isolated, lonely. But they have developed a survival strategy of sorts. In Greenville, they hang together, party together, study together, eat together with almost cult-like camaraderie, reinforcing beliefs and dedication, tossing around ideas, urging each other on. As they gather in the blues bar, the “TFA culture” begins to emerge. They spend a lot of Thursday nights listening to music in Leland. They grab early morning coffee at the Delta Grind. They are guests at Kiwanis and Rotary lunches at the Greenville Country Club. They are easily identifiable, the very bright young people with accents that stand out. As they sit around the pool tables, they talk about educational inequality and the need for stability in schools. They talk about students with special learning needs and how they, as a team, can help. It is easy to believe that they never really stop thinking about their work, because they are always talking about it. In Walmart or the Mexican restaurant next door — wherever they are — they carry their idealism about the future and about what can be done in Greenville. They consider it their town, and they care deeply about its future for a simple reason: They care about their students’ futures.

C HE L S E A C AV E NY

TFA teacher Greg Claus came from Ohio for “some direct frontline experience” and, like so many of his predecessors, fell in love with Greenville.

This emerging TFA culture seems to be developing some staying power. As the number of TFA teachers grows in the Delta, more of them are falling in love with the place. And more are staying for longer than the two-year teaching commitment. In Greenville, some are staying to take on other jobs. Across the Delta, 144 TFA alumni have remained beyond their teaching commitment. The executive director of the Greenville Arts Council is a former TFA teacher. The latest hire at a nonprofit in neighboring Sunflower County was a TFA teacher in Greenville. The list goes on and on. Greg Claus from Ohio is sitting on a pool table, chatting and laughing with friends. Claus is in his third year of teaching art at Solomon Middle. He came to Greenville looking for some “direct frontline experience.” And when he talks about “every teacher fighting a battle” in

the classroom, it seems he got just what he was expecting. But it also seems that this battlefront has made a less-expected impact on Claus. He has come to like Greenville. He is taking graduate classes at Delta State University in Cleveland, 45 minutes away. He was selected as Solomon’s Teacher of the Year last year. Most recently, mayoral candidate Chuck Jordan asked him to take a key role in his campaign. And Claus is seriously considering staying for a fourth year. Call it Mississippi Fever. Stephanie Pompelia of Wisconsin, a former Teacher of the Year at Weston High School, has it, too. She recently took a job working for TFA in Jackson, but during some off time she returned to Greenville to help chaperone a spring break trip. “I don’t think I’ll ever leave Mississippi,” she says. “This is where my heart is.”

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Meeting Critical Needs The Ole Miss-based Mississippi Teacher Corps sends squads of young men and women into some of the state’s toughest schools.

in

Mr. Curran’s class, when a student needs a pencil sharpened he takes it to the sharpener for the student so the class is not distracted. In Mr. Curran’s class, students are called upon and when they answer correctly they get a small gold star. In Mr. Curran’s class, he writes on a small electronic pad that projects his notes onto the board, so he never has to take his eyes off his class or turn his back to his students. Outside of Mr. Curran’s science class, the hallways sound like

chaos. The bell to start class rang over 20 minutes ago but loud yells and laughs can still be heard through Curran’s door.

B Y C H E L S E A C AV E N Y

Outside of Mr. Curran’s science class, the hallways sound like chaos. The bell to start class rang over 20 minutes ago but loud yells and laughs can still be heard through Curran’s door. Chris Curran is calm. His voice never cracks or reaches a high pitch. He is in control. His classroom feels like the lifeboat left from a sinking ship. Chris Curran is a part of the Mississippi Teacher Corps, an Ole Missbased program that along with Teach For America is working to put bright, eager, determined non-education majors in public schools across Mississippi. The teacher corps was founded in 1989 by Amy Gutman and Dr. Andy Mullins, now chief of staff for Ole Miss Chancellor Dan Jones. Gutman was a Harvard journalism student interning at the Greenwood Commonwealth and Mullins was working for the State Department of Education. Mississippi was facing a serious teacher shortage, and in a brainstorming session the two came up with the idea of creating a sort

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of domestic peace corps — a program that would bring young college graduates from across the country to complete their service by teaching in “critical needs” schools. By 1994, it had developed into a twoyear scholarship program housed at the University of Mississippi that offered participants a Masters degree while they were fulfilling their teaching commitment. The program has remained relatively small, averaging 25-30 participants a year. Currently, there are five Mississippi Teacher Corps participants teaching in the Greenville public schools. But small doesn’t mean they aren’t making an impact in the classroom or becoming a part of the local community. Many develop a strong love for the places they teach, something they carry with them long after they have moved on. Ben Guest, the program director for MTC and a former participant in the program, will tell you that, “of everywhere I’ve lived I have the most love for Hollandale,” where he himself taught.

The Little Lady with the Big Voice When Eden Brent sings about the Delta, you quickly understand what they mean by the blues. B Y M I R I A M TAY L O R

a

nd here she is, the little white girl with the sound,” says Jim Dees, introducing Eden Brent with a nickname she got on the road. It’s a Thursday night and Off Square Books in Oxford is packed, people spilling out onto the sidewalk. It’s Thacker Mountain Radio’s last show of the spring season and the weekly show has drawn a crowd. Old and young alike sit on thin wooden chairs that cover the floor of the store. Eden Brent walks up to the stage and settles in behind the piano. Her hair is long and dark, reaching far past her shoulders. It shadows her small frame, but her eyes are bright. She wears a white linen suit— perfect for the sweltering heat that has already set upon Mississippi in late April. It covers everyone’s shoulders like a blanket, causing hair to curl and necks to drip. In the back of the store a large window is open, letting a faint breeze in and the music out. “How y’all doing tonight?” she asks, and then begins to play. Immediately the murmuring ceases as her deep-throated voice fills the room. The first song is slow and longing and her face reflects the music. Her small smiles framed with red lipstick disappear as her mouth falls into a frown. The song ends and she takes a sip from a Diet Coke. Pushing hair from her face, she smiles, a small grin that warns of something fun to come, and immediately she dives into the next song. Her hands bounce across the keys, the old piano shaking under the weight of her fingers. The song is upbeat and warm.

FALL 2011 • 111

“got no home to keep him in, ain’t got no one to call if they get in a bind, no, I ain’t got no troubles on my mind.” Brent’s hands and hair fly as she dances along with the song. Her smile stretches, taking over the whole bottom half of her face. She’s the little lady with the big voice, no more than 5’1” but her voice carries, energizing the whole room until even the most silent of the older, checkershirted men are clapping their hands. “I ain’t got no troubles on my mind!” She stands and ends the song with a fury of fingers on keys, then turns and gives a little half-wave to the audience before introducing her third and final tune. “This next one was written by Tommy Polk, and if he’s listening tonight in Natchez, here’s a little shout out to him.” A small change takes over the audience as the words float above the piano. Titled “Beyond my Broken Dreams,” the song is a story of hope and renewal and Brent inhabits the lyrics. Her raspy voice smoothes out the sound and her eyes close. The tune plays close to Brent’s heart. She is, after all, from Greenville, a town that can always use a little hope. “I’m coming out of this hard luck haze, to better nights and brighter days.” The sun is almost down outside and it’s that eerie shade of gold before twilight comes in. “ ’Cause I see a new day dawning on the far horizon, I see white doves flying over fields of green, like a Phoenix from the oceans rising, I can see beyond my broken dreams.” She finishes, takes another sip of Diet Coke. Flipping her hair behind her shoulders, she stands and does another half-wave and a thank you before hugging Dees and heading to the door. Applause blocks her speedy exit. Dees gives a short whistle and a “how-aboutthat” before introducing the next guest, and Brent finally makes it out the door. She lights a cigarette and leans against a column while an older man with white hair compliments her performance and then walks away.

“Well, it started with my family,” says Brent, recalling the beginnings of her musical career. “My mom was a big band singer in the ‘50s, and my dad (former towboat magnate Howard Brent) plays the guitar. They encouraged all their children to play music. All of us took piano lessons and daddy taught us all a few chords on the guitar. It really started around the kitchen table, singing songs together after supper and on holidays. “We harmonized together a good bit. I can remember radiothons and telethons that daddy would take us to as little kids. At one point he took us to a telethon and this would’ve just been a local-yokel telethon. I was real small, not even school age, and we were singing Down on the Levee, something that my folks had taught us really early on,” says Brent, her voice raspy and rough, the voice of a true blues siren. But right now, speaking of her childhood, it softens into laughter. “I was a little shy at that point. I’d never been on TV before and I had my hand over my mouth the whole time,” she says with a laugh. “And after we’d gotten off the program and in the car headed home, my father said, ‘Eden why’d you have your hand over your mouth like that? I couldn’t see your pretty smile.’ And I said, ‘Oh daddy, my lips were chapped.’ “ Brent’s story has changed since that first appearance on TV. No longer shy and unknown, she has won the Blues Foundation’s 2006 International Blues Challenge. In 2004 she was featured on the Greenville Blues Walk, and she played at the 2005 presidential inauguration with B.B. King. She has performed at the British Embassy, the My South celebrations in Mississippi and New York, the Kennedy Center and the WaldorfAstoria Hotel. She has played at the Waterfront Blues Festival, Edmonton Labatt Blues Festival, the annual B.B. King Homecoming, and toured in Norway and South Africa. She was featured with her mentor, legendary Blues artist Boogaloo Ames, in the 1999 PBS documentary Boogaloo & Eden: Sustaining the Sound

11 2 • W H AT E V ER H A P PE N ED TO M A I N ST R EE T ?

and the South African production Forty Days in the Delta. Last year she took home the 2010 Pinetop Perkins Piano Player of the year award and is currently nominated for the Koko Taylor Award as part of the Blues Music Awards. Even with all the traveling and all the awards, Brent’s sound is decidedly homegrown. “I think growing up in Greenville encouraged my musical ear,” she says, “because I grew up around it and I was exposed to a lot of people. You know there are a lot of great storytellers in the Delta, and all of good music tells a good story.” Brent lists other factors that made growing up in Greenville a good place to learn music — the flavor and stories that came from people traveling on the river, the rich blues history born from the backs of poor blacks, the agricultural society that had to find a way to entertain itself come wintertime. “And naturally the teacher and student relationship that I shared with Boogaloo, a relationship that progressed into a performing duo, that led me down my musical path.” Brent’s bright eyes glow when she speaks of her 16-year apprenticeship with Boogaloo, an apprenticeship that helped shape her as a musician and a person. “The one thing you have to know about Boogaloo is that he lived quite the blues lifestyle. He drank a lot. He loved women a lot. He was very, very charismatic. I found out much later that Boogaloo had been living in Detroit, and was a married man and that his wife was his business manager. And he managed to fall in love with another woman who brought him back down to Mississippi and he never bothered to divorce his wife. And so I asked him what it was about his girlfriend that would make him leave his wife and the big city and move to Mississippi and stay here. And he looked at me with such sweetness in his eyes and said, ‘Affection, baby.’ ” Brent breaks out into another of her trademark laughs as she imitates

Boogaloo’s voice, deep and full of character. “We traveled together and the best was we would go somewhere, and somewhere remote I’m telling you, and he would still know someone, would have worked with them or met them on the road. You know there’s that new phenomenon called six degrees of separation. Well, with Boogaloo it was one degree of separation. He knew everybody!”

It was what most people might call an odd Mississippi friendship, a young white girl and an old bluesman, but the sound they created was the stuff of legends. “The best was, we’d go out dancing together or go out to dinner and he’d be staying at my house — you know, we had an upright piano in my house — and it’d be about one o’clock and I’d say, ‘Goodnight, Boogaloo.’ And within three minutes he’d be banging away at that

piano.” Brent shakes her head and finishes her cigarette. “All of this contributed to my sound. Blues music is a Mississippi art form that has influence over music all over the world,” she says, turning to walk back to the radio show, the house band’s deep country sound floating out the door and into the night. “There’s just a sheer joy in playing.”

FALL 2011 • 113

CAI N MAD D EN

T-Model Ford gleefully conducts an impromptu concert on his front porch.

h

A Bad Ole Man At the age of 91, T-Model Ford claims he doesn’t like the blues. But he sure can play them. B Y J O N H AY W O O D

is hands, ancient and weathered, tell a story of their own. It is hard to believe that just a year ago bluesman T-Model Ford

suffered a stroke that nearly stripped his ability to strum his guitar with those storied, wrinkled old hands.

The stroke made it difficult for Ford to use the right side of his body. But on a visit to the aging bluesman’s Greenville home, you wouldn’t know that Ford suffered any ailment at all. He sways and rocks with the guitar known as Black Nanny just as he always has. The sound of his down-home blues is just as good. It is smooth, pleasing and irreverent. Nothing about his music, like much of the Delta blues, seems manufactured. And when his fingers slide slyly along the strings and the sound wafts out onto the street, passing drivers slow and crane their necks and kids roaming the neighborhood stop in their tracks and grin. The music still has magic. You can easily imagine Ford playing his guitar in a smoky blues club with standing room only on Greenville’s Nelson Street, a formerly thriving black business and entertainment district, now reduced to a few clubs, a lot of vacant storefronts, liquor stores and a few churches. * * * T-Model Ford, like the Mississippi Delta, is raw, unwavering and mystical. Ford didn’t pick up a guitar until his late 50s, at the urging of a friend. He didn’t record a song until his 70s. No one really knows Ford’s age. He says he’s 91. Born James Lewis Carter Ford, sometime during or after 1920, in Forrest,

Ford lived a life not too different from his contemporaries, working odd jobs here and there to support himself. At 11, he began working on his family farm, plowing the fields with mules. As a teenager, he got a job at a sawmill near Greenville. After working another sawmill job, he got work at a logging camp. It was at some time around the logging camp job that trouble began. On the website of his former record label, Fat Possum, Ford says, “I could really stomp some ass back then, stomp it good. I was a sure enough dangerous man.” Dangerous enough that Ford seemed to run into the law more times than he could keep track of. He says he got arrested for something “every Saturday night there for a while.” Now that Ford has aged a bit, he’s not stomping as much ass as he used to, but he’s still got his fair share of troubles. He split with the Water Valley-based Fat Possum over a disagreement in 2010. He’s found a new label, Alive Naturalsound Records. * * * Ford may play the blues. But he doesn’t care for the soul-binding troubles that inspire much of blues music. Ford says, “I play the blues. I don’t like ’em. I play the blues for the peoples.” He can still be found playing that gritty style of Delta blues he’s become famous

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for at Mississippi blues hot spots in Clarksdale, at music festivals around the U.S. and overseas, and, if you’re lucky, an impromptu gig on Nelson Street. Ford now occasionally travels with the white, Seattle-based blues band GravelRoad. Ford has no formal management. So Martin Reinsel, the drummer for GravelRoad, looks after him, acting as a de facto manager. In January, Ford released an album, “Taledragger,” to much critical acclaim. “Make no mistake, ‘Taledragger’ is a BLUES record with a capital B,” said Tim Peacock of the U.K.-based music newsletter “Whisperin & Hollerin.” “Based around grooves, grunts and guttural yelps, it’s relentlessly real, landing somewhere between Howlin’ Wolf ’s London Sessions and it’s happy to sell its soul at any crossroads pact you care to mention.” * * * Nicknamed “Taledragger” by friend Paul Jones after a night of playing that guitar at a Belzoni blues club, Ford laughingly says the late Jones called him that because “I was hurtin’ ’em so bad. He was trying to play like me, so he said ‘Taledragger!’ ” The way Ford remembers an old friend adds to his charm and authenticity as a Delta bluesman. It’s that extra something that softens Ford in his old age, leaving

him to seem genteel and good-natured. He’s at ease, vibrant and preternaturally exuberant for a man of 91 years. “I don’t worry about nothing,” he says. Ford lives in a scraggly old house in a run-down Greenville neighborhood that’s seen better days. He now needs the help of his grandchildren to place the guitar around his shoulders and connect the amp. Those same cute little grandchildren sell T-Model CDs at $20 and $25 a pop out of a tattered cardboard box. Ford is helping to raise some of his grandchildren. He’s even taught 12-yearolds Stud and Little Mama, as they’re called, to play the guitar. They help create a warmth in the Ford home, a warmth that comes from a legendary bluesman grandfather, a doting little grandmother and the giggles of children. T-Model Ford has, in the end, created a life for himself that he truly enjoys. A life filled with family, friends, music and the occasional bottle of whiskey. Even after a stroke, he brings the guitar to life. It is easy to believe that nothing will slow down this venerable Delta bluesman.

PH O T O S BY CAI N MAD D EN

TOP | A busted tail light on the vehicle in his carport is in keeping with the scraggly house in a rundown neighborhood where the bluesman lives. ABOVE | Ford shows off a photo of himself in younger days, decades before a stroke slowed him down.

* * * T-Model Ford is an old man with a dirty tongue, a taste for Jack Daniels and fine women. He’s outlived most of his Delta blues contemporaries. Ford is, as he puts it, “a bad ole man.” He’s been married six times and just married the sixth wife, Stella Smith, a woman he’d dated for more than 20 years, in April 2010. At 91 years old, Ford says he’ll never die. And for whatever reason, that’s almost believable.

F A L L 2 0 1 1 • 1 17

“I play the blues. I don’t like ’em. I play the blues for the peoples.” — T-Model Ford

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