Diatribune

Marks, Mississippi. Marianna Arkansas. Memphis Tennessee. These are the first stops for John Edwards on a special journey that begins July 16 in New Orleans, goes up the Mississippi, across to the Rust Belt of the upper Ohio Valley states and ends in Appalachia. John Edwards is highlighting poverty in this country: The Road to One America Tour.

Part I of that tour, the Mississippi Delta, is where I was born. It is the flattest place in the U.S., maybe on earth. And two colors: Green and black, stretched around the meandering twists of the Mississippi River. If you have Mapquest or Google maps, look at the aerial view, and you’ll see what I mean. That black land is fertile.

My granddad used to say that if you had enough rain – but not too much – you could stick a piece of wood in the ground and it would sprout and grow without further assistance. He was wrong, of course. Over some two centuries, growing things there took a lot of help, mostly in human flesh and bone. Before the Civil War, that work was mostly gotten from slaves. In some of our lifetimes, that work was done by sharecroppers and tenant farmers, a very tiny bit of which remains today.

My granddad did that in the beginning. You don’t own anything. The owner gives you a place to live (more on that below) in the Spring. Seed. Maybe a mule. You plant, tend, and harvest, hoping that enough rain comes without floods. Your other needs are bought on credit, to be paid when your harvest comes in. Take the harvest and sell it, give the owner the lion’s share of the money, most of the rest to pay the other bills. Maybe just a bit left over to get through the winter. Repeat.

The contrast between the few who were wealthy and the many who were poor was and is striking. Energies that might have been directed toward rebellion were kept in line as they are today, through fear, and deflection of frustration onto a scapegoat of one sort or another. After Secession and the Civil War, which few poor whites had voted for, the great number of poor whites were kept in check by deflecting them toward racial hatred and fear of former slaves. Black citizens had few reasons to trust anyone white, and even fewer ways to have a different sort of life.

Many of the poorest folks on the Delta lived in places like the lines of small mustard yellow houses that used to line the great cotton farms outside West Memphis, Arkansas. If you got too old or too sick to work, well, you might be turned out. Only the luckiest folks got ahead of this curve.

My grandfather got that slim chance at a better life. He was lucky enough to be sent to school, instead of having to work in the fields all the time. He didn’t marry until he was 26, and he managed somehow to get out of the cycle. He bought the tiniest piece of land – much more possible because he was white - and besides farming, he built things for people. I have a copper lamp he made with scraps from some job he took on, and he built my grandmother a fine, small farmhouse that still stands strong some 80 years later.

My granddad was lucky in other things: Times were changing and the people who had lived, however long, however well, working the land for others, were turned out by machinery. Many went north. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s book Colored People relates that story very well.

The Mississippi Delta is still the home of many poor people, and many people slipping into poverty. There are few opportunities, and little prospect for improvement. Poor people and people worried about their rising poverty are still being manipulated by fear and having their frustrations deflected onto other issues. Last year I had a short, sad conversation with a retired man in Tennessee who was worried about the “G D immigrants coming in and taking what’s ours.” Not three hours earlier I had read an antique poster dated many decades earlier that made similar arguments during a time of massive crop failures.

It strikes me today that sharecropping was the middle bead on a heavy necklace, with slavery on one end, and “freedom” in poverty without opportunity on the other. Our country still wears that necklace. Today’s poor are also locked into an uncertain future with little job security, a fear of bad health, and the burden of hard debt over head. That’s the lot of so many people in our country, slipping into worse shape, falling toward poverty, into deeper financial troubles and despair. It’s a part of America that I don’t think people in Washington DC understand.

John Edwards, alone among the candidates, seems to understand the roots of poverty, and how our citizens, however poor or well off, need to be bound together. I hope you’ll follow his journey, and see what he has to say.
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