His analysis was right. The fish-farming cooperative he began to run in Indianola in 1981 with fifty employees now provided employment for fourteen hundred people, and indirectly for many more, many of them black people who until then could only get seasonal jobs on cotton plantations, “chopping cotton” in the spring, getting rid of weeds that couldn’t be poisoned, and working in the cotton gin in the autumn. Many farmers had been saved from having to leave their farms. “A lot of farmers didn’t want to be involved in catfish, but they had few alternatives. It’s hard for a farmer once they’ve become a farmer to ever give up. It’s a way of life for them.”
Sam Hinote had done a lot of useful advertising. “We’re spending a lot of advertising dollars as a company and as an industry to upscale the image of catfish. We’ve hired professional chefs like this guy”—he held up a pamphlet with a photograph of a chef holding serious-looking dishes in both hands—“to help us change the image of catfish.” Catfish, catfish—like the dedicated man he was, Sam Hinote appeared never to tire of speaking the word. The Catfish Institute, founded in 1986, had been publishing booklets. Sam Hinote gave me one: Fishing for Compliments—Cooking with Catfish. It had been an American-style campaign, and it had produced American results. The catfish business as a whole now had sales of $200 million; almost half of that came from the plant at Indianola. And Sam Hinote thought that within ten years the industry was going to have sales of $1 billion.
And though men cannot absolutely control other living creatures—Cannery Row itself died because the sardine vanished from that coast—and no one can be absolutely certain what will happen to catfish—what mutations, what debilities—as a result of this intensive farming, it is nevertheless an astonishing thing to have happened in a place that Louise knew as wilderness, malarial, liable to floods, but beautiful with wildflowers, and where now, within hours of leaving their ponds, the red entrails of fish pour into red trucks, their life cycle over.
THERE IS no landscape like the landscape of our childhood. For Louise, though her father had been a planter, the “big cotton patch” that the planters had created in the Delta was a disfiguring of the forest she had known as a child. And for Mary, born in the Delta forty years later, there would be no landscape like the flat, stripped land she had grown up in.
She said, “I think there is nothing more beautiful than the flat, flat land and the big, big sky.”
She was showing me the small country town of Canton, fifteen miles or so north of Jackson, giving meaning to a shabbiness I had driven through once before without comprehension. I had taken in only the broken-down air of the main road through the town, and noticed the large number of black people in a town where there appeared to be little to do. All at once now, with Mary taking me through the streets around the main square, the layers of history became apparent, as they did in so many places in the South.
The town had been established in the mid-1830s. But most of the buildings on the square had been put up in the twenty years from 1890 to 1910. The Civil War had intervened; and in a street not far from the main square was the first reminder.
It was a street of pretty, old houses, but with black people. Some of them could be seen sitting on the porches. In the middle of this street was an open green space with a gray marble obelisk. It was inscribed on one side: Erected by W. H. Howcott in memory of the good and loyal servants who followed the fortunes of Harvey Scouts during the Civil War. On another side: A tribute to my faithful Servant and Friend Willis Howcott, a Colored Boy of rare loyalty and faithfulness whose memory I cherish with deep gratitude. W. H. Howcott. And on a third side: Loyal, Faithful, True Were Each and All of Them. The fourth side of the obelisk was bare.
The slave, Willis, had taken the name of the master. Had the “colored boy” who had gone to the war with his master really been a boy, or had he been a man who had remained a boy even in death? True feeling was there, but how much of defiance had there also been, in this obelisk put up after the war to celebrate the loyalty of slaves?
The obelisk was in a black street. The memorial to the Harvey Scouts was in the white cemetery, elsewhere. And the slave memorial was still tended. The grass around the gray obelisk was neatly cut; on the base there was a bouquet of artificial flowers. Black people sat on porches not far away. Black people walked past while we looked. Didn’t they mind?
They didn’t. But, Mary said, it was something that hadn’t been put to them. Perhaps they would mind if someone came one day and put certain things to them.
In the white cemetery, some streets away, and centrally placed in it, was the memorial to the Harvey Scouts. It was also an obelisk, but not as plain as the one for the servants. It was carved with crossed flags, a star and crescent; and there was a metal plaque on the plinth. Some verse had also been carved:
Long since has beat the last tattoo
And peace Reigns now where Troopers Drew
Their sabres Bright to Dare and Do
Led Forward by Ad Harvey.
It was unsettling, that flawed last line; it made one think that the first three lines had been borrowed. Yet there had been sacrifice: CAPT ADDISON HARVEY BORN JUNE 1837 KILLED APRIL 19 1865 Just as the Country’s Flag was Furled forever Death saved him the pain of defeat.
At the far end of the cemetery, not far from the corner with old Jewish graves, were small tombstones, in rows of five, running down the length of the cemetery, each stone marked UNKNOWN CONFEDERATE SOLDIER. It was shocking, in this small-town cemetery, the thought of all these unclaimed men. The bodies or the remains, Mary said, would have been gathered together some time after the war. The headstones might have been put up in the 1870s. The Harvey memorial, and the memorial to the black servants, would have been put up later.
The cemetery was still in use. Other people, with heavier needs, were driving about the lanes, as we had been doing. There were two new graves, below green awnings marked with the undertaker’s name, Breeland. And not far away was the undertaker’s own family plot, with a large stone marked Breeland. Mary said, “Some people think it’s advertising.”
Small as it was, Canton had its social and racial divisions. The railroad track divided the good side of the town from the bad. On the bad side, the black side, many of the houses were in disrepair; and many of them were shotgun houses, one room in front, one room at the back, the houses set close together. There were other, better black areas; but even new developments appeared to be going down. There didn’t seem to be much doing in Canton. In an older part of the town were the settlements associated with the timber industry, when there had been one. Milltown was for the white workers. Next to it was the black area, with a designation that recalled the cabins of the slave plantations: Sawmill Quarters.
There was still a furniture factory in Canton, and there were two or three other factories outside the town. But the industrial area was in a mess. It looked like tropical slum. It was hard to think, when we got to the area of the country club—with a membership of professional people from Canton and from Jackson—that both areas shared the same climate and vegetation. In one area the sun seemed part of the blight and torpor. In the other, among the tall trees and well-cut driveways, the sunlight was like part of the general privilege of the place.
“Sun,” “sunlight”—to me they had always been different words. “Sunlight” was a nice word. “Sun” was harsher; it was what the sunlight of early morning in Trinidad turned to at about eight, when it was time to go to school. The slogan on the label for Trinidad Grapefruit Juice, when I was a child, was “Fruit Ripened in Tropical Sunshine.” I had always thought that the words were too pretty. “Fruit Ripened in Hot Sun” would have been truer to the climate I lived in; but then they might have been less of a slogan. “Tropical Sunshine”—they were tourist words, I always thought; and, indeed, they could have little meaning for someone who had known nothing else.
Agricultural and industrial depression now; civil-rights movement twenty to thirty years before; the Great De
pression before that; and Reconstruction; and the Civil War—it seemed, considering the layers of history whose memorials or remains one could see in a place like Canton, that the South had moved from crisis to crisis. And at the back of it all was the institution that had seeded most of the crises, or aggravated them: slavery, which had led to this present superfluity of black people, people no longer needed in a machine age.
Mary said: “It’s been frustrating to me because the enormity of the problem is something I know I’m not going to see solved. It’s heartbreaking to see people living like that. And it will keep the area from progressing, economically and culturally. These people don’t read books, or even newspapers. TV is the only thing. And in fact some of them probably can’t read. Not in the way that you and I can read. They can read a sign, but not a thought or an idea.”
During our drive through the town she had shown me a red-brick high school that had been turned into a furniture store after the schools had been desegregated.
“The enrollment in the public system made the building unnecessary.” She meant that white people had withdrawn their children, and sent them instead to private and usually Christian academies. But now that was a financial strain on some people, and people were beginning to think again about the public system. “I’ve been encouraged recently because some of the people here who would not be considered liberal are realizing that so much of the future of the town is tied into the school system.”
“Is there still bitterness about desegregation?”
“A lot of bitterness from the sixties has gone into the second generation. But now it’s more of an economic resentment. People resent seeing the welfare programs like food stamps—and there is something that provides food and milk for babies. And of course people that have worked hard for their families are certainly going to resent seeing people being given for nothing the equivalent of what you’ve had to work hard to earn. Medicare is another thing. There are clinics for people who pay according to their income. Which means that they are supported by the federal government—that is, other people’s income tax.
“I’m not a bleeding heart racially, believing in universal brotherhood. People are too different. I believe in God, but I’m not religious. This is the Bible Belt. For some reason Southern people have a tremendous capacity for faith—black and white. When I go to a church service where people are extremely devout I feel I’m missing something. But it doesn’t last. Religion is very social here—fellowship, church suppers, things like that. And I suppose I’m not a particularly social person.”
“When did you start thinking of yourself as a Southerner, somebody different?”
“I’ve always felt it. We’re so proud of it. We are permeated by the feeling that the South is special. My family were always interested in the literary aspects. We were very proud of our writers here.”
What about the other side? The bigotry, the violence? Was there one view that could hold it all?
“I was aware of the other side. The violence, the deprivation. There was a very ugly incident when I was growing up. That was the Emmett Till murder. He was a young black boy from Chicago visiting the area. He was shot supposedly for whistling at a white woman who worked in a little store in a rural area. And this all happened close to Greenwood, where I was living. This was in 1955. I was eleven. I remember reading it in the newspaper first. I had a friend and she knew the people in the store. And I remember people at school saying it wasn’t true, that he was still living in Chicago, and that people were trying to make Mississippi look bad. But even at eleven I knew that was a sad way of thinking, and that people who thought like that were of the same social class as the woman at the store.”
Here it was again, the emphasis on social distinctions. How did they operate in the Delta, where lives were so isolated and confined?
Mary said, “My grandmother would say of some people that they were not folks. That was probably her favorite phrase. She was very conscious of who were and were not folks.”
“Who were folks?”
“Generally, folks were people who weren’t transient, who’d lived here for some time. You knew their families. And if they’d moved in, say, from Lafayette County, you would know their families.”
“But, apart from some people in Natchez, no one has been here for more than five generations.”
“No. It simply meant that you knew they were the same kind of people. They knew how to behave. They didn’t say ‘nigger.’ Nor did they say ‘ain’t.’ People who said ‘ain’t’ and ‘niggers’ were not folks—that would definitely put you beyond the pale then and there. She was a stickler for manners. If you put your elbows on the table, she would pick up those heavy silver knives and she would hit your elbows, if there wasn’t company—in those days people had the heavy silverware, not the stainless steel. I think we behaved like this because we genuinely thought that this—the South—was the best place in the world. To be technical about it, my grandmother came from Alabama. She had lived in Mississippi since she was married. I can remember my parents talking to me and trying to explain the racial problem. And since nobody really understood it—”
I was interested in that idea. I said, “No one has put it like that to me.”
“I don’t think they did. Understand the race problem. I still don’t think they do. I know that people of, like, my grandmother’s generation—her generation and black people of the same generation had a closeness that doesn’t exist any more. In those days no one had any money. You know, the Depression and things. A lot of the jobs the black people had depended on the white people—in the houses and yards and things. But the white people depended on the black people too. I think that at that time there was a better respect between the races.”
“People outside didn’t have that impression. There were the lynchings.”
“There were, exactly. But the people I was talking about—and I’m sure that people are much more capable of violence than I realize—the people who carried out the inhumanities were not typical of everyone.”
“What effect does the physical appearance of Canton have on you? The town you showed me.”
“That kind of question makes us defensive.”
“No, no. I don’t want that.”
“What did I show you? Buildings and fields.”
“You showed me a lot that was run-down. It isn’t worthy of the history.” And I meant—though I didn’t speak precisely—that if you took away the cemetery and the main square, there would be little in Canton that wasn’t contemporary slum. The land and setting were hard to associate with a great and difficult history. How, in such a setting, did she support her sense of history?
Mary said, “It may not be worthy. But I don’t think poverty and deprivation are limited to the South. I think we are addressing the economic problems more than we have ever done. People are addressing the problems of black and white as of one group.”
“What do you like about the South?”
“It’s a very nourishing place to live. I like the people, even though I’m not close to them. If there was some sort of tragedy people would rally round, even though they were not my family. And the sense of the past can be satisfying—even though my family is not from this area. What did Faulkner say? The past is more real than the present? I can’t remember the exact words. But it’s that the past is something we all live with. Possibly in larger places they don’t put the importance on the past. We’re preoccupied with the past. Some people think that’s because we lost the war.”
So we had circled back almost to where we had begun. I had asked, seeing some military-looking figure in a memorial in the cemetery, whether he was wearing a Confederate uniform. But the memorial wasn’t what I had thought. And Mary had said, “There was no uniform. Towards the end they were lucky to have shoes.”
WILLIAM SAID: “People up north think they know better than we about problems and people down here. They think they know how the black man thinks and the white man thinks.
They have missed miserably on the black man.” The North had disrupted the more economically active South in 1860; and they had done it again after World War II.
I wanted him to go beyond that.
He said, “Let’s talk through certain things first, before you make notes.”
I put away my notebook and we began to talk at random. He was a businessman, of a prominent Mississippi family. He was in his forties. He loved the outdoor life and was athletic and handsome. He appeared to be blessed in many ways. Yet what came out after a few minutes of conversation was that he was a man to whom religion was supremely important. His judgments, even the tough ones he had spoken at the beginning of our meeting, were contained within his idea of the religious life. And that was where we began again.
We sat on rocking chairs in front of his desk: the tradition of the porch, transferred here to an air-conditioned office.
William said, “The Bible says the Lord helps those who help themselves, and I really believe that. I feel there are not enough people trying to help themselves. And I don’t think that the help these people need is a free check.”
I asked about the development of his faith.
“Both sets of my grandparents were very strong workers in the Baptist church. My parents were and are strong members of the church. I don’t remember us not praying or reading a Bible. I made my profession of faith when I was seven years old. I guess I went to my parents first—after hearing the Sunday-school teachers talk about Jesus and the Lord, and I believe that he did come out of heaven and walked among us and died for us, to give us an opportunity to be with him in heaven. And finally I said publicly, ‘I want to accept Christ.’ And they said, ‘Fine, let’s go to the preacher.’ And he talked to me. And I guess they felt my feeling was strong enough, and I was baptized at seven. I grew up around it, I accepted it, and I made that profession of faith.