From time to time, I encounter an idea so prescient, so on target that it takes my breath away. Tonight is one of those encounters.
I'm 70; native Mississippian, living now as a retired Army officer in rural Virginia. A few years ago I set about analyzing my roots. I dug deep into my family history and reconnected with extended family with whom I had not had contact for years.
Most of all I set to reading both fiction and non-fiction related to Mississippi, the South, and the society in which I had grown up before leaving for almost 30 years of military service. I've read and re-read Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and a dozen or so other Southern writers whose works I had read years ago but only as requirements in long-forgotten college classes.
About three years ago I expanded my reading to non-fiction studies of elements of the South that surrounded me as I was growing up but that I never really analytically understood -- sharecropping; religion; slavery; Civil War and Reconstruction; the New Deal; regional differences in the South.
Follow below the squiggle for tonight's epiphany.
Years ago I read The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity, by James C. Cobb.
Published in 1992, this work sets the standard for a work of history, sociology, economics, and detailed research, all woven together into an amazingly readable work.
The Delta is an area of incredibly rich soil between Memphis and Vicksburg, bounded by the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers. The rich soil is coupled with a climate that enables a long growing season. These characteristics made the Delta what it was in the 1800's and to a large extent what it is today -- an area of
rich soil, wealthy planters, and desperate poverty -- the blackest and poorest counties of the South.
Cobb describes how the white planters survived the Civil War, thwarted the efforts of Reconstruction, and re-established slavery by another name that would last into the 1960's and that, to some extent, is still enforced today.
I had read this book years ago and pulled it out last week to re-read it. Tonight I finished it and the final paragraph stunned me -- remember -- this was written in 1992.
Recent statistical trends pointing to rapidly widening gaps in income and opportunity throughout the United States suggests that the economic and social polarization that is synonymous with the Mississippi Delta may be observed wherever and whenever the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, and power overwhelms the ideals of equality, justice, and compassion and reduces the American Dream to a self-indulgent fantasy. As socioeconomic disparity and indifference to human suffering become increasingly prominent features of American life, it seems reasonable to inquire whether the same economic, political, and emotional forces that helped to forge and sustain the Delta's image as the South write small may one day transform an entire nation into the Delta write large.
And there you have it. The South has won the Civil War. We are well on the way to seeing the entire nation become the Mississippi Delta.