From the outside looking in - Greenwood, MS

On Saturday afternoon, the three interns guided by Ben and team teacher Ashley Johnson all piled into the University van for our first trip into the Mississippi Delta.  Our first destination was Greenwood - headquarters of the Viking Range Corporation - and then we were on to Money - the now vacant town once home to Bryant's Grocery.  The trip was one I will never forget.  The sights I saw opened my eyes to a part of our nation I could never have imagined, neighborhoods so poor and distressed you might as well think you were in a third world country.  

The small Delta 'city' of Greenwood, Mississippi was first introduced to me by Ashley Johnson, the bright and passionate young MTC Team Teacher who spoke to us about her experience as a teacher at the Greenwood Middle School a few weeks back.  Ashley supplemented her verbal description of the area with a simple diagram; a river (the Yazoo) running parallel to a set of train tracks divided the picture plane in two.  On one side, she indicated the affluent, upper class neighborhoods inhabited primarily by white families and wealthy Viking executives. Across the river and on the other side of the tracks that once rattled day and night with whistling trains piled high with mountains of cotton, she noted the now crime-ridden impoverished black neighborhoods.  Boy, did I not have any idea what the Delta was really going to be like.

The Mississippi Delta is a legendary part of America and its history.  The dark nights of lynchings and burning crosses; the gothic complexity of Faulkner’s tales; the horrific legacy of plantations and slavery; the sweet smell of the magnolia tree on a summer's night; the blazing morning sun rising over endless fields of cotton.  I saw it all too well; battered shacks that house the poverty-stricken descendants of slaves; the riverbanks where water moccasins and fire ants threaten; the calm muddy Yazoo and Tallahatchie rivers that have swallowed countless bodies of murdered black men.  And more still, situated within the decrepit slums, we found Baptist Town - the birthplace of the blues; the place where cicadas sing in cacophonous vocal experimentation all night long; and finally, the overlooked origin of some of the raw beginnings of the civil rights movement right there in Money, Mississippi.  Each of these descriptions is a mere glimpse of the delta that is a inextricably apart of our national mythology.

 

In the Delta I was perhaps most struck by the contrast between the vibrance of the fertile land and the unavoidable sense of decay in the black neighborhood.  "My kids from this neighborhood, they had a particular smell, you knew where they were coming from," said Ashley Johnson as we drove down Broad Street in Greenwood.  She taught many young children from this area just a few ago.  She could still remember their names, which houses their aunts and uncles lived in, and the corners they used to frequent.  Most of these children never make it out, we were told.    

Imagine a small ghetto a world away with ramshackle shot-gun shacks lining the streets, shower curtains for front doors and sheets covering the broken window panes.  There were blocks where virtually every storefront was empty and people were just aimlessly hanging out, as if waiting for something else to happen.  The liveliest pockets in many of these neighborhoods were around children.  A lonesome boy road a flat-tired bicycle in front of a barren Baptist church.  There is at least one liquor store for every church in the area, and there were a lot of churches let me assure you.

 

These are the poorest of the poor, their ancestors once slaves and sharecroppers.  Today they are deliberately cast aside, ignored, not discussed, given little attention or care.  They endure lives of poor education, poor health, limited opportunities, and rampant crime.  There are those who loudly proclaim that the poor of the nation should “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps,” but such proclaimers have most always lived lives of relative privilege.  The desperate poor often don’t even have the boots … and the delta can be an inescapable trap.

As Ben has told us again and again, the Delta, and in particular the small town of Money, was significant in igniting the modern civil rights movement.  In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till, a black boy visiting his family from Chicago, apparently wolf whistled at a white woman while visiting Bryant’s Grocery.  Mrs. Bryant told her husband and in the dead of night Emmett Till was kidnapped, beaten, murdered, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River.  The accused murderers were acquitted in under an hour by an all-white jury.  The story brought outrage across the country and was a tragic start to the march for racial equality over the decades.   

Finally, the last stop on our journey was Bryant's Grocery. As I gazed up at the now crumbling store front, I felt a wave of grief and disgust come over me.  Sadness for a naive Emmett Till, for his mother, his family, and for all those who lost their lives or suffered any kind of social injustice, prejudice, racism, or segregation.  There was no monument, no marker, nothing to indicate the profound importance of this location in our nation's history.  The historical footage we've seen in documentary films shows a bustling town with one store front after the next.  Of course, that was then.  Now, the rotting frame of this one lonely building and is all that's left.