00:00:05 Speaker 1: After the West had been one, the gold had been gotten. This was the last frontier in America, this god forsaken twump. 00:00:15 Speaker 2: Telling the story as big as the one The Mississippi River has is a challenge. Like its drainage basin, which stretches from New York to Idaho all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, its reaches wide and diverse, like its stories. The end of episode one was like coming to an intersection that split into seven different roads that all looked equally as promising. Each road a story I have simply chosen in a direction that suits me and seems logical. I want to talk about the settlement of the Mississippi Delta and the people who were here and the challenges that gave them their identity. Will be veering out of the river into its floodplain, because, as William Faulkner said, to understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi. Once again, we'll be leaning on author Hank Berdine and New York Times bestselling author John Barry, and a new voice to bear grease, mistery and I's dear friend raised in the Delta, mister Earl Jasper. 00:01:20 Speaker 3: This is as. 00:01:21 Speaker 2: Unique a bear Grease as we've ever made. I really doubt you're gonna want to miss this. 00:01:27 Speaker 4: One faith family community help keep you grounded, help keep your mind straight, and kept you to the point where you said, Okay, this is where it is right now, and you won't have to deal with this always just stay focused. 00:01:50 Speaker 2: My name is Clay Nukem, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. It's not like most rivers, beautiful to the site, not one that the eye loves to dwell upon as it sweeps along, nor can wander along its bank or trust yourself without danger to its stream. It is a furious, rapid, desolating torrent, loaded with alluvial soil, pouring its impetuous water through wild tracks. It sweeps down whole forest with its course, which disappear in tumultuous confusion, whirled away by the stream now loaded with a mass of soil which nourish their roots, often blocking up and changing the channel of the river, which, in its anger at being opposed inundates and devastates the whole country around. It is a river of desolation, and instead of reminding you, like other rivers, of an angel which has descended for the benefit of man, you imagine it a devil. A European traveler wrote this about the Mississippi River in eighteen thirty seven. I saw this in John Berry's book Rising Tide. She's a real beast. The Mississippi River drains parts of thirty one states and two Canadian provinces, and forty one percent of the continental United States if you count the Missouri River its tributary. The Mississippi is the longest river in the world. Only the Amazon and the Congo have larger drainage basins. We misstated in the last episode and said that the Nile had a bigger drainage basin, but the Big Muddy has a bigger drainage basin than the Nile. The river slopes in an average of three inches per mile, runs through some of the flattest ground in the world, with average speeds around nine miles per hour and eighteen In a flood, the riverbed can scour sixty feet deep and fill itself back in in a month. At flood stage, the river can pump out over four million acre feet of water per day. In the last episode, we learned about the energy of rivers, their hydraulic complexity, and their drive to carry sediment. We learned about levees and dikes and jetties and cutoffs, and got a sense of the river's sheer size. We've learned about some of the early human history of the river and its importance to America. And if you'll give me the liberty, we're going to focus on the people in one particular part of the Lower Mississippi, a place called the delta. But we first have got to define the big concept of the delta. 00:04:58 Speaker 3: There's two deltas. Stay with me. 00:05:00 Speaker 2: A river delta is a triangular shape made by the deposition of sediment as moving water intersects a non moving body of water, and the slowing speed makes the sediment settle out and from above this would look like a triangle like the Greek letter delta. The true geologic head of the Mississippi delta starts at Cape Girardo, Missouri and runs all the way to New Orleans. At one time, the Gulf of Mexico extended far north into America and the river filled in the ocean with sediment, building this big delta. However, the term Mississippi Delta can mean a more specific region in Mississippi and Arkansas, and when people say the delta in the South, they're often referring to the alluvial floodplain of the Mississippi from Memphis to Vicksburg, which also includes the floodplain of the Yazoo River, which flows through the interior of Mississippi and empties into. 00:05:56 Speaker 3: The river at Vicksburg. 00:05:58 Speaker 2: This delta also includes the west side of the Mississippi in this stretch in Arkansas. It's the delta inside of the Delta. Here's our Captain Hank Berdine from Chatham, Mississippi, introducing us to the delta. 00:06:15 Speaker 1: What we call the Mississippi Delta was on alluvial bottom land on a Lousville hardwood bottomland of the Azoo and the Mississippi deltas it was an impenetrable jungle flooded every year. It was solid hardwoods and then the swamp areas, cypress trees, your oxbow lakes, willow trees, cypresses. You could hardly walk through a lot of the areas along the riparian banks of the rivers, creeks and streams in here because of the dense, dense cambrige, and you couldn't walk from unless you hacked them with a cane knife or follow the game trail. In the woods itself, the trees were comparable to a lot of the Redwoods and all right in California, because you had these massive oaks, some of them sixteen eighteen feet in diameter, with a canopy over the top that shaded below. So you didn't have a lot of trees underneath that brush because the something couldn't. 00:07:22 Speaker 2: Get to them. 00:07:24 Speaker 1: But then you'd get up next to a creek and there was a cane break that you couldn't walk through, and it was an impenetrable jungle. It was loaded with bear, wildcats, panthers, alligators, alligator snapping turtles, alligator gau You had monstrous cotton mouthed water markings and diamondback rattlesnakes. It was a wildlife paradise, but you couldn't hardly get in here. 00:07:49 Speaker 2: It's hard to imagine these ancient virgin forests and cane breaks. And he didn't mention the waterfowl super highway the river was and still is today. The incredible the natural resources of the Delta were protected by the flooding of the river far longer than most places in America. Mississippi became a state in eighteen seventeen, but much of the western side of the state, the river side, was undeveloped until after the Civil War. The government levees of the late eighteen hundreds made this region habitable, but before levees it was a wild place. Here's an excerpt from John Berry's book Rising Tide. 00:08:28 Speaker 3: About the pre civilized Delta. 00:08:33 Speaker 2: The land, wrote another traveler, was a jungle equal to any in Africa, with dense forests of cane and giant trees from which hung great, clinging vines of wild grape and muskydine. The density of growth suffocated, choked off air, held in moisture, and a pulsating heat was so thick a horse and rider couldn't penetrate. Even on foot. One needed to cut one's way through. Only the trees, some hundred feet high, burst above the choking vines and cane into the sunshine. Stinging flies, gnats, and mosquitoes swarmed around any visitors. One pioneer reported killing fourteen bears in eight days. One warned of wolves and the fatted alligator, while the panther basket at the river's edge, and the cane breaks almost impervious to man, nearly as large as a young calf. They're the most savage looking animal I ever saw. Their strong, sinewy legs with large hooked claws like a cat, could tear a man to pieces in a trice if they chose to the wild animals, the rattlesnakes, and water moccasins. The yellow fever and malaria made it worried. One settler quote, almost worth a man's life to cast his lot in the swamp. Yet the river made it worth the risk. The river left gold in the delta. It was gold, the color of chocolate. Gold that was not in the earth, but was the earth elsewhere. One measures the thickness of good top soil and inches here good lush soil measures tens of feet thick. A nineteen oh one report published by the American Economic Association said, quote, nature knows not how to compound a richer soil. A nineteen oh six scientific assessment concluded that the nutrients and the soil were unexcelled by those of any other soil in the world. The Delta, however, overwhelmed individual farmers. To take the land from the river, to clear it, to drain it, and protect it required an enormous outlay of capital and labor. From the first the Delta demanded organization, capital, entrepreneurship, and gambling instincts. It was a place for empire. That's a wild place. Here's hank with how this jungle the river side of the Mississippi was settled, and it. 00:10:49 Speaker 1: Will not until before the Civil War that the Delta even began being cleared. Folks would come down the river from Kentucky, get on the river bank, which every river has a riparian bank, which builds a natural levee on it itself. As the floods come and the water overflows the banks, what it does. The heavier particles come out first. That is your sandier particles, your heavy loamy type things will drift down and away from that bank. You get into bottom, lower areas, and that's where your real silty, fine, fine sands, fine dirt and loam settle down. That's what we call buckshott gumbo. It's a real heavy clay type dirt. Your sandier upper ground we call sandy loan call it ice cream, ice cream dirt. I mean, you can go out there and throw curnel of corn out there and next thing you know, you got corn crop. You know, it's some of the most fertile dirt that we've said in the world. So the only area is beginning to be cleared and for cotton well on the Missippi Ruver. 00:12:04 Speaker 2: The only agriculture on the western side of the Mississippi before the Civil War was right along the banks of the Mississippi River. They didn't penetrate into the interior of the Delta. That's important to understand. In eighteen seventy nine, less than ten percent of the Delta was developed. That means ninety percent of it was virgin forest. It truly was a wilderness. And here's how they eventually got inland. 00:12:32 Speaker 1: During that time, there were no roads. There weren't no railroads. There was no way to get in here. Here's a swamp. So the state of Mississippi gave rights of way, huge tracks of rights of way to railroad companies to begin opening up the Delta for cotton production and logging. So once the railroad companies realized the high rout that they needed to take to get into the Delta, then they began nudging into the North Delta out of Memphis and off of those railroad lines. They'd run what we called little dummy lines. 00:13:11 Speaker 4: Didn't they have what. 00:13:12 Speaker 1: We call a groundhog. Sawmell easily moved Sawmell. And because of the timber, the oak, the ash, the cypress, the pecan that came out of the Mississippi Delta, Memphis became known as the hardwood capital of the world. They were producing more hardwood than anywhere else because of the Mississippi Delta. Now, as those lands were cleared by the timber companies, if it was good ground, they would sell off those excess rights of ways to folks coming in from Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, different areas to continue the clearing and open up for cotton production. 00:13:51 Speaker 2: The railroads opened up new country paid for by logging. At this time, wood was the primary construction material for almost everything that man made. Once the land was cleared, it went into private ownership for farms. Here's some perspective on the timing of the settlement of the Delta. 00:14:13 Speaker 1: During that time in early eighteen hundreds on up through the middle eighteen hundreds, as the West was being opened up, Transcontinental Railroad was completed, the gold rush had gone on in California. They had already cut the majority of the timber in the northeast, and then they hit the northwest, the Redwoods, the big Sequaliya areas, Washington State. This was the very last area in the country. The timber here was massive. I would ask my mama men conversations, what is so unique about the Delta. It say it's the people, and I would say, yes, that's absolutely a never disputed my mama on anything, but I would say, yes, it is the people. And I want to love step further the people that win the Delta. Then, after the West had been one, the gold had been gotten, this was the last frontier in America, this god forsaken swamp. And those people that came in here were true pioneers. They were in an uninhabitable place trying to eke out a living in some of the best dirt in the world. So when I think of that it's that pioneering spirit that helped create the Delta, to make the Delta what it is today. And a lot of the people that are in the Delta right now today. I said, grandparents. It's not a great great grandparents, I said, grandparents that were true pioneers that came in here opening this place up. 00:15:57 Speaker 2: Hank's grandparents cleared land for and started farming and helped found the town of Ruleville, Mississippi. It's not intuitive to think that the Mississippi Delta region of this country was one of the last to be settled. We typically think of the West being the last region settled. However, nowhere else had such a giant flooding river. It wasn't until after the big government levees of the late eighteen hundreds that this region was truly safe to live in, well, sort of safe. 00:16:29 Speaker 1: As all of that was happening, the Delta was being cleared from the top downtrod to bottom. William Faulkner would come in here and hunt. He called it to big Woods, and he saw what was happening and wrote in one of his books that the Mississippi Delta was deaniy rivered, deswamped, and denuded in two generations. Once those railroads started coming in, and that's what happened. 00:16:58 Speaker 2: Once they learned how to live in the delta, it opened up fast and furious. If you remember Bear Grease Hall of Famer, Hulk Callier, a former enslaved man, was a market hunter who sold bear meat to logging camps in the late eighteen hundreds. He was legitimately believed to have killed three thousand bears in his lifetime. 00:17:18 Speaker 3: He was a hound hunter. 00:17:20 Speaker 2: You can hear that whole series on Bear Grease episode sixty eight, seventy and seventy two. It's all about Hulk Callier, and I hope you remember that. Our boat Captain Hank Berdine is one of the guardians of Hult Collier's legacy in Mississippi. He and Minor Ferris Buchanan worked hard to get Holt's grave turned into a monument in downtown Greenville, Mississippi. Hank can hardly talk about Holt without crying. I think that's something. William Faulkner, who Hank talked about, was from Mississippi and is considered one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, who rebirthed the Southern narrative to the country. He was known for his elaborate prose and for using multiple narrators called stream of consciousness writing. But his big theme was exposing the sense of tragedy carried by the people in the South after the Civil War. This place was war torn and beat up. Falkner was known for writing about the complex racial issues in the South. Here's the quote that Hank was talking about. It's from Falkner's book, Go Down Moses, written in nineteen forty. I've slightly revised this quote, omitting a touch of the original language. 00:18:35 Speaker 4: Here. 00:18:35 Speaker 3: It is. 00:18:38 Speaker 2: This delta, he thought, this delta, this land which man has de swamped and denuded and derivered in two generations, so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis, and black men own plantations and writeing Jim Crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaire's mansions on Lake Shore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like black people, and blacks crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planet and grows man tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese, African, Aran and jew all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which is witch, nor cares no wonder. The ruined woods I used to know don't cry for retribution. The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge. It's clear that, like the natural system of the river, the history of this place is complex. I don't fully claim to understand what Faultner meant, except for one part. He was saying that the people who destroyed the physical delta, drained her swamps and cut her ancient trees, will self inflict the land's revenge. He connected the social challenges of the South to its treatment of the land, which is an interesting thought. 00:20:04 Speaker 3: It's almost like the richness. 00:20:06 Speaker 2: Of the soil bred a unique kind of human greed. But the South doesn't stand out in this country as the only place that has abused the land. The impact of civilization and all that that includes has been widespread, and interestingly, it seems like we're having social issues everywhere. I have a question for John Berry about the delta. So there was a quote in the book from a geologist in eighteen fifty seven, and he said, whatever the delta of the Nile may have once been will only be a shadow of what this alluvial plain of the Mississippi will be. It will be the central point, the garden spot of the North American continent where wealth and prosperity culminate. This was in eighteen fifty seven, about the time that man really started to put his hand on the river. Much of the Delta was still virgin wilderness at that time, a lot of it. So this is like the beginning, a look into the future of what this land could be. And as I read that, that doesn't sound like what the Delta became. 00:21:16 Speaker 5: Well, you know the Delta, and again we're talking not just when you say delta. People may think the Mississippi Delta, technically the Yazu Mississippi Delta, but it really means a much larger area. But that had that area has been, you know, a tremendous agricultural producer, you know, whether or not, obviously best known for cotton, but there's a lot more than cotton. So I think in that sense, the prediction you know, pretty much came true. In terms of poverty, that's a different story. You know, you have some of the greatest discrepancies anywhere in the country, and you know some of those some of those counties, you know, are among the poorest in the United States. The poverty, obviously is a relic of slavery and the sharecrops system which persisted after slavery, when a tremendous amount of exploitation of African Americans, you know, the school systems didn't get the same support that you know, white schools did, and so forth and so on. 00:22:27 Speaker 2: I just read the same quote to longtime Mississippi resident Wilbert Primos, the one from eighteen fifty seven, and I asked him if he thought the geologists prediction of the Delta's success came true. 00:22:40 Speaker 3: Here's what he said. 00:22:41 Speaker 6: I think that it did. I mean, if you look right before the Civil War, Natchez had more millionaires than any city in the United States, all made from the Delta on the Louisiana side of Missippi side, agriculture, agriculture the hardy South side. And of course slavery was a huge part of that. And to understand that and how that came about, you know, it was to have cheap labor, and then they were brought to the Delta to be a part of that process. They even got Italians. That's why there's so many Italian farmers from the Mississippi Delta now, because they were brought over here. 00:23:21 Speaker 2: From Italy to be the labor right to be sharecroppers. In John Barry's book, it talks about how there were in Italy. There were signs on however they were traveling to get here by boat that said if you're going to Mississippi or if you're going to Arkansas, basically you. 00:23:39 Speaker 3: Should reconsider it's a trap. 00:23:41 Speaker 2: It's a scam because they brought over all these Italians that to be sharecroppers, and it was like a failure. I mean, they were really mistreated and weren't the deal wasn't as good as it should have been. But there's still lots of Italian immigrants in the South. 00:23:56 Speaker 6: That's right. And then living conditions were deplorable. 00:24:01 Speaker 2: For a long period of time before the Civil War, Natchez, Mississippi claimed to have more millionaires per capita than anywhere in the United States. That's a wild stat Here's Hank describing a very unusual happening in Delta culture, one that you might not expect. 00:24:20 Speaker 1: But during this time, as these places were opened up and these families were coming down here in Virginia, Kentucky, South Carolina somewhat, if you may say, aristocratic families, that's where they came from. That's what they'd been used to. They'd build big houses, I don't like to call them mansions into Delta, we call them big house. Every big place had a big house. And in those big houses you had libraries that were filled with Shakespeare, pros Keats, all of these literary volume from all over the world to teach people we used to having around, used to reading. Most of those houses had music rooms filled with grand pianos, cellos, harpsichords. The music that would be played in those during party time, during social seasons was unbelievable. And because of that influence, so to speak, there was a literary and artistic cultural whether it was a revolution or just a happening that was here. And the Percy family in Greenville, William Alexander Percy was a poet, a world traveler, and his house was filled with people from all over the world as they traveled and knew him and would come in here and visit with him, and sometimes they'd stay for a year at a time. Some folks would come in and stay and write whole books while they stayed at the Percy matching which we called it in Greenville, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandberg, Malvina Hoffman, who studied under all ghost re dain. You had Walker Percy, Shelby foot hiding carters. You had people from everywhere that gravitated in here that William Faulkner would come stay. And from that influence, so to speak, came an aura of literature, culture and all of this artistic stuff that was being held right there. And at one point in time, because of that, Greenville, Mississippi was known to have more writers per capita than anywhere else in America. Right out of the middle of Mississippi Delta. These folks wouldn't be the owners of the planations and all they wouldn't say all the time. 00:26:51 Speaker 4: They couldn't. 00:26:52 Speaker 1: It's too hot form, it was too full of mosquitoes, the humidity. So they'd go back up Monteagle, Tennessee. They go back up, can tell they go back home. No, it were cool, and then they'd come back down. In one time. They hunt a lot of them hunted. 00:27:07 Speaker 2: Greenville, Mississippi, has been called the most southern place on Earth. It was called the queen city of the Delta, and in the first half of the twentieth century it had more writers per capita than anywhere in the United States. Honestly, there are a lot of writers in Mississippi today. Every Turkey Hunter I know down there has published a book that's a bit hyperbolic, but you get the point, and I think it's really interesting. Hank mentioned a man by the name of William Alexander Percy from Greenville. John Barry actually devoted multiple chapters in this book. Rising tied to the Percy family because of their influence in the Delta. Charles Percy was known as the Gray Eagle. He was a Civil War hero, and for just a minute, I want to talk about the Civil War as we're building up beside the of who these Percies were. They were important. John Barry wrote chapters in this book about them. This is important stuff. Grant and the Union Army blew up the levees to defeat Vicksburg, flooding the town, and which in big river country is a really low, almost unforgivable blow. Many people in Vicksburg still talk about this today like it happened yesterday. In Mark Twain's book Life on the Mississippi, written in eighteen eighty three. 00:28:27 Speaker 3: He talks about this very thing. 00:28:29 Speaker 2: And I think all these little pieces of information give us data points on understanding the South and this river. 00:28:37 Speaker 3: Here's Mark Twain in the north one. 00:28:41 Speaker 2: Here's the war mentioned in social conversation once a month, sometimes as often as once a week. But the case is very different in the South. There, every man you meet was in the war, and every lady you met saw the war. The war is a great chief topic of conversation. The interest in it is vivid and constant. The interest in other topics is fleeting. Mention of the war will wake up a dull company and set their tongues going when nearly any other topic would fail. In the South, the war is what ad is. Elsewhere, they date from it. All day long. You hear things placed as having happened since the Wall and the Wall, or before the war, or right after the war, or about two years before the wall. It shows how intimately every individual was visited in his own person by that tremendous episode. It gives the inexperienced stranger a better idea of what a vast and comprehensive calamity invasion is than he can ever get by reading books. At the fireside at a club one evening, a gentleman turned to me and said, in an aside, you notice, of course, that we are nearly always talking about the war. It isn't because we haven't anything else to talk about, but because nothing else has so strong an interest for us. 00:30:02 Speaker 3: And there is another reason. In the war. 00:30:04 Speaker 2: Each of us, in his own person seems to have sampled all the different varieties of the human experience. And as a consequence, you can't mention an outside matter of any sort, but it will certainly remind some listener of something that happened during the war, and out he comes with it. This gives some insight into the South's interest in the war. And I think what Mark Twain said is still accurate to some degree. 00:30:35 Speaker 3: Today. 00:30:36 Speaker 2: At a high level, wars are fought for economics, policy, and ideology on the ground and in the trenches, though war is very personal, and most who are fighting are disconnected from the high level reasons of the bloodshed. Remember what William Faulkner said, To understand the world, you must understand a place like Mississippi. We're in pursuit on this here, bear grease poda cast to understand the world. Anyway, I want to get back to the Percy family, you know, that powerful family. And I want to say too that I'm going to pronounce Leroy Percy's name the same way that Hank Burdine does. You might read it and call him Leroy Percy. Anyway, Leroy Percy reorganized the levee system after the Civil War, which was a noble job, and with it came power. But also what gave him power was cotton. Here is an excerpt from John Berry's book Rising Tide. You should really check this book out. Two thirds of the world's cotton supply came from the American South. The river had made the Delta soil so lush that without fertilizer, it produced far more than any other land did. 00:31:51 Speaker 3: With fertilizer. 00:31:52 Speaker 2: Even the black loam of Alabama often Delta yields doubled and tripled that of other soils. Delta cotton for seas of climate and soil even had some resistance to the bowl weavil, which had entered Texas from Mexico in eighteen ninety two and spread east at forty to seventy miles a year, and was devastating the rest of the southern crop. In the early nineteen hundreds, world textile manufacturers began to fear a cotton famine. British and Northern investors poured evermore cash into the Delta. Development required three things. Protection from the river, transportation into the interior, and labor. Increasingly, labor shortages were limiting the Delta's growth. No area of the South was more short of labor than it in the South. Of course, the issue of labor is inextricably bound up with race. It was also inextricably linked to the society the Percys intended to create. On the issue of labor, the Percy family would play more of a role than any other. Percy reorganized both the economic problems and the need to accept a new order, and advocated a solution. Planners had land but no cash. Blacks had labor but no land. They resisted working in gangs under a foreman, which smacked of slavery and overseers. So Percy, who understood both the capital shortage and the importance of making labor content in order to maximize efficiency, advocated sharecropping. One man even credited Percy with inventing the system. In contemporaneous reports in other states did attribute the system's beginnings to Mississippi. Planners supplied the land, Blacks supplied the labor and gained some independence. Profits were theoretically split fifty to fifty. 00:33:43 Speaker 3: The cropper got more. 00:33:45 Speaker 2: If he had his own mules, making blacks and white's partners and, by implication, comparable, if not equal. However, abusive sharecropping later became because of the systems implied partnership of white and black. Acially, whites resisted it while blacks welcomed it. The advocacy of sharecropping was not the only reflection of Percy's sensitivity to the inefficiencies of racial animosity. As reconstruction dragged on, as the federal government became less and less willing to support black rights with Army bayonets, Percy, like most Southern white leaders, became increasingly aggressive in his efforts to seize back power from the Republicans and Negroes, but he did not want to frighten away either labor nor northern investors. Elsewhere, across the South, Democrats took power by murdering hundreds of blacks, including dozens in the Delta intimidating thousands away from the poles and perpetrating massive vote fraud. But Percy prevented the klu Klux Klan from operating in his own Washington County, and no murders were reported there. On one occasion, Percy waded into a crowd to stop the lynching of a black man accused of murdering white Charles Percy, the Gray Eagle was attributed by some to creating this idea of sharecropping, which became a big part of the post Civil War South. 00:35:15 Speaker 3: Here's Hank Berdin. 00:35:19 Speaker 1: As the Delta was being cleared and begun to be farmed. This was after the Civil War, after emancipation. There was no slavery, and there was labor. But who's gonna pay the labor? How they gonna pay the label? You don't have money in the cotton crop till you pick your cotton. So there was a system that came up called sharecropping, where and this black and white people would come in and the owner of the place would give him a house to live in, give him bout twenty seven acres of land to farm of that which had a little garden on it. In the house area, they farmed normally about twenty four twenty five acres. He and his family was apply with the mule supply, with all the influence supplied, with all the seed, fertilizers, whatever he needed, and he had credit at the company's store at the commissary, so all during the year he could get what he wanted, what he needed to subside on. But he grew that crop and he was in charge of that. And then at the end of the year when it came down picked cotton, and the cotton was picked and sold. Then was didvy of day when you came in and the bottle man gonna get his shef first, his cut, whatever percentage that was. Then you took the indebtedness at the store out and the rest of the debt on everything else, and whatever was left over went to the sharecropping family. Now, some years it wasn't bad. You had a good crop, price of cotton was high. Mankind family could get by, you know, and he had a place to live and uh food to eat the whole time, wood to cut for his one time heat. Then there was an instance where that system could be abused by the guy sitting behind the disc, you know, with his pencil I don't think that happened as much as a lot of people assume it may have, because you wanted good people on your place, and you wanted them happy. You didn't want them to get upset and leave, and then you hadn't got anybody to play farm your cotton. 00:37:24 Speaker 2: No matter which way you shake it, sharecropping was tough. It certainly was abused, and other times it worked as it was supposed to. In eighteen eighty eight, Charles the Great Eagle died at the age of fifty three, but his son le Roy Percy orn in eighteen sixty took up the family's empire building Mantle. The Roy Percy owned the twenty thousand acre Trail Lake Plantation near Greenville. This is complicated, but he grew up with and would be a lifelong friend of the bear hunter Hulk Collier, who was the former slave of his foll Leroy became a friend of President Theodore Roosevelt after becoming the Mississippi Senator and invited Roosevelt to bear hunt and Mississippi with Holt. You guys, remember that that's when the Teddy Bear was created. 00:38:12 Speaker 3: That's a wild story. 00:38:15 Speaker 2: Le Roy once gave his eleven year old son a rifle as a gift. Tragically, in nineteen oh two, another child accidentally shot and killed the boy. The Percys weren't immune to the tragedy that strikes all men. Here's an excerpt about le Roy Percy from Rising Tide. Le Roy Percy had a clear conception of the society he intended to build. 00:38:41 Speaker 3: It would be a. 00:38:42 Speaker 2: Great agricultural factory that chested its way into the forefront of the New South, more humane than in every bit as efficient as the textile mills in North Carolina or the coal mines in Alabama. It would have rich and poor and little middle but it would provide opportunity. It would be a place in which a superior civilization might flourish. And although Percy was not burdened by sentimentality, he expected the society to adhere to a code of honor. If ruled by an elite, that elite would take care of its less fortunate members. This is kind of hard to believe based upon the general frequency coming out of the South in this era, but for a period of time, the Mississippi side of the Delta was a kind of oasis for blacks, and much of it had to do with Leroy Percy, who would advocate for blacks in the height of the Jim Crow era. This isn't historical revision written by those wanting to smooth over the past. This is from John Berry's book, and I've read it in many other places. Leroy made sure blacks in Greenville were policemen, mailmen, and justices of the peace. He advocated for them getting loans and owning land. On March first, nineteen twenty two, Leroy Percy had a public debate with organizers of the KKK who wished to legally enter Washington County, Mississippi. He was quoted in newspapers across the country saying, friends, let this clan go somewhere else where. It will not do the harm that it will in this community. Let them sow dissension in some community less united than ours. I want to read another section from Rising Tide. 00:40:31 Speaker 3: You gotta get this book. 00:40:35 Speaker 2: The Delta did offer blacks at least relative promise. 00:40:38 Speaker 3: Judge Robert R. 00:40:39 Speaker 2: Taylor of Indiana, a member of the Mississippi River Commission, pointed out that levies, by allowing the mining of the river's wealth, also allowed quote the Negro to better his condition in considerable and increasing numbers. He is buying land and becoming an independent cultivator. Nowhere else in the South are as favorable opportunities offered to the black man as in the reclaimed Mississippi Lowlands, and nowhere else is he doing as much for his own uplifting. Percy and the men with him whom he dominated the region in particularly Washington County, did create something special, at least given the times. Largely because of Percy, who was on the board of one bank and influence others. Lenders did not hesitate to offer black's mortgages, and nineteen hundred blacks owned two thirds of all Delta farms, probably the highest proportion of black land ownership in the country. Also largely because of Percy, Greenville had black policeman, a black Justice of the Peace, and every mailman in the city was black. In nineteen thirteen, the Census Bureau concluded that the plantation organization was quote more firmly fixed in the Yazoo Mississippi Delta than any other area of the South, but even sharecropping could offer opportunity. Alfred Stone founded an agricultural experiment station to develop a better cot and as a social scientist, kept meticulous records of his settlements with his sharecroppers. In nineteen oh one, the average family on his plantation cleared one thousand dollars after all expenses were deducted, and in nineteen oh three they cleared roughly seven hundred dollars. The Mississippi outside the Delta was contrasted sharply with this picture. There whites were driving blacks off the land, burning their barns, whipping them, forcing them to sell at a loss, murdering them, and one Mississippi county, three hundred and nine men, including the sheriff, were indicted. Some towns bragged that they were inward free. More important was an outbreak of lynchings of almost incomprehensible viciousness. What Percy created in his Washington County and much of the wider Delta was kind of wild. But then in other parts of the South, all the stuff that a lot of us have heard about was absolutely going on. But Percy and his motivations, however, were more pragmatic than one might hope. In a speech, he also stated that if all the blacks left, the economy would plummet. Charles Percy LeRoy's father had distributed tens of thousands of a pamphlet titled The Call of an Alluvial Empire, which spoke of the potential prosperity of the Delta. The Percys were ruthless pragmatists, and they were set on building this alluvial empire, and it required labor. One governor, who was advised to put the Percys in their place, said quote, you cannot conciliate them and retain your self respect. They demand nothing short of the earth. These guys knew how to wild power, and this labor thing had been a problem since. 00:43:48 Speaker 3: The Civil War. 00:43:49 Speaker 2: Leroy Percy was dead set on not recruiting the poor whites from the hill country of Georgia and Alabama, who were problematic and prone to make racial issues worse. It's interesting that the KKK was primarily lower income, marginalized whites. The Klan did well with this group because they rallied around two common enemies, one below them the blacks, and an enemy above them, the Establishment, which they perceived to be run by wealthy Jews. In nineteen twenty, the KKK had three million members and they called themselves the Invisible Empire and they weren't even primarily based in the South. Between nineteen fifteen and nineteen forty four, here are the top ten states with the highest KKK membership Indiana, Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Oklahoma, New York, Michigan, Georgia, New Jersey, and Florida. 00:44:48 Speaker 3: That's wild. 00:44:49 Speaker 2: Prior to Leroy Percy, delta planters had recruited even Chinese laborers from Hong Kong, and at one time there were over fifty Chinese grocery store in Greenville, Mississippi alone. Do you remember when Holt Collier used to make the kids go buy them an orange pop and a plug a tobacco from the Chinese store before he would tell them a story that was in Greenville. The Chinese didn't work out, so around nineteen hundred, Percy himself went to Italy to recruit workers and hire labor agents. They would bring over thousands of Italians and have them work as sharecroppers on delta plantations. The experiment failed miserably. The people felt cheated and misled, and the Italian government even got involved, warning their citizens not to go to Mississippi or Arkansas. I think I'm beginning to understand Faulkner's quote about the complex social issues of this place. Here's another excerpt from John Berry's book Rising Tide about Lebroy Percy. In the meantime, his views on race were as progressive as those of any mainstream figure in the nation. Percy began his speech with the observation quote the statement is daily heard that education ruins the negro. I denied that any man is rendered worse by having his intelligence quickened. 00:46:16 Speaker 3: End of quote. It was a long speech. 00:46:19 Speaker 2: It affirmed the moral reasons for educating blacks and treating them fairly and honestly, including the fact that abusing blacks corrupted whites. Percy was an interesting character. When we apply the values of today to his life, you could find much error in his doctrine. But he was doing more than anybody else in the region at the time. In summarizing the story in the most simplistic way, the Roy Percy would never see his alluvial empire come to fruition, john Berry said. In nineteen oh three, Mississippi elected James K. Vardemann, the great White Chief Governor. He was the first man in Mississippi to realize, in the sense of making real the politics of race hatred. 00:47:06 Speaker 3: End of quote. 00:47:07 Speaker 2: Percy viewed Vardaman as pure evil who was going to drive blacks out of the South. Vardaman would help set the tone for the next seventy years of politics in the state and in the South. Huge amounts of Blacks would leave the South for good. The Roy Percy would be engaged in this fight his entire life, and his son William Alexander Percy or will Percy, would inherit it. Will's name will come up later when we talk about the flood of nineteen twenty seven. This series is going to wind like an alluvial river, but in the end we'll have a greater understanding of the river its influence in the people of the Delta. I want to introduce you to a dear friend of the Newcombe family, mister Earl Jasper, who was born in Pine Bluff on the Arkansas side of the Delta in nineteen fifty two. I want to hear his story of groy up as a black man in the Delta. It's one thing to read about it in a book. It's another thing to hear the voice of a man, the ultimate primary source, a man who lived there. Meet mister Earl. 00:48:16 Speaker 4: My grandfather, Avery Jasper. He should have been born right after slavery ended. His father Sanders. Yeah, I'm naming the name because I keep up with the family history stuff. Sanders Sanders Jasper was into slavery. In other words, the Jaspers that come to Southeast Arkansas came from South Carolina in Virginia and came right after slavery. That's when our family patriarch migrated to Arkansas, Southeast Arkansas, and it was not a good experience. 00:49:00 Speaker 2: Why didn't they come here? 00:49:02 Speaker 4: They wanted to get out of the South Carolina in Virginia, moving west, hoping for something better. 00:49:09 Speaker 2: The universal reason for human migration is hoping for something better. It's in our DNA. It's what made people cross the Bury in land Bridge. It's what made the Pilgrims cross the Atlantic. It's what made Boone go into Kentucky. It's what made Crockett go to Texas. I want to learn about mister Earle's early life. 00:49:30 Speaker 4: Okay. I was born August twelfth, nineteen fifty two, in Lincoln County. It's between Pine Bluff and Dumas, are between Dumas and Star City in that particular area. And I was born on the plantation because it wasn't an incorporated area. It was out in the country and my parents were sharecroppers and then became just plantation workers after the farming went south and everything, and my childhood in Southeast Arkansas. In the South during the fifties, it was a lot of outdoor time. 00:50:13 Speaker 1: You know. 00:50:14 Speaker 4: Now people pay guides and whatnot to go find game and look for sports. It was existence. The grown ups went tons for food. 00:50:28 Speaker 1: You know. 00:50:29 Speaker 2: So you remember your dad going hunting. 00:50:31 Speaker 4: Oh yeah, well, my uncle and a big brother and whatnot that they went hunting, and you know, it was unusual for them to bring home a rabbit. I know this may sound so dreadful to the twenty twenty three crowd. You know, I get it. I get it, but you have to be there to understand it. And yeah, they went hunting and all type of games, ducks, raccoon, squirrels, all us stuff that people hunt now. And it was for a meal. I mean, I know, it's unbelievable that someone really had to get their next meal from going out and hunting. I know that some of the older ones that looked at the Beaverly Hillbillies and saw Granny and Jed and them and all that funny stuff. That was a sort of like it wasn't as funny, but it was. That's the way it was. That's the way it was in the delta. You worked all the time until it got where the crop was in and whatnot, and then you had to survive so many months until work time come again. 00:51:43 Speaker 2: These people were truly connected to the land through farming and hunting. 00:51:48 Speaker 3: This was a way of life. 00:51:50 Speaker 4: When I was a child, my parents they were farmers themselves. They had for the acres they had the land or amount of land. They would have to borrow money from certain larger farmers and whatnot, and to make a crop. And then after a certain length of time, so many crops you failed, you would lose it and you would have to start working for someone else. And that's how the sharecropper went down to just general or labor on a farm. You have so many bad crops and you can't repay your loan, and they call in alone and and so they'll take the land and and you you'll stay there, but you won't own it anymore. You'll be working for the people that loan you the money for so many years to do that and when I was small, I was born in the country out from a hospital, and that's all I knew growing up was farming. They wasn't sharecropping necessarily. Once I got to be in high school. They were just general farm hand. 00:53:02 Speaker 2: To understand the economic progression of mister Earle's family when he was young, they were sharecropping, which offered some independence and in a favorable year, some income. 00:53:12 Speaker 3: This was good. 00:53:13 Speaker 2: However, they lost their farm and had to work on a plantation as laborers, which had little economic future other than subsistence. 00:53:25 Speaker 4: Growing up, like I said, during the spring, when you know, it was cotten keen cotton. You know in the South when we got out of school, they called it horn cotten, but we called it chopping cotten, you know, grassing it and whatnot. That was a regular routine, just like kids now going get a job at McDonald's whatnot. We was going to the fields when school was out in May that Friday. We would go to the field that Monday and we would work it on tea when the kitten got to a certain height. They wouldn't have to do certain things. They didn't have all the chemicals and big equipment to spread and stuff like they do now. So once about around July the fourth, the kind be too big to chop and then that's when we'll take a break. 00:54:16 Speaker 2: Did your family sing in the fields like you hear people talk about a. 00:54:20 Speaker 4: Lot of that stuff is Hollywood dramatic, But they wasn't moaning and groaning and complaining because that's just the way it was. And it was some singing, but all the time, not in the field I was in, and I went to a lot of fields during the time, But you didn't have people full of anger about what was going on because of their faith, faith, family and community. That's what kept stuff moving forward. 00:54:53 Speaker 2: So you were raised on a farm, went to school at a public school. 00:55:00 Speaker 4: Gated school until about my sophomore year. 00:55:04 Speaker 2: What happened then. 00:55:05 Speaker 4: They integrated graded school system. 00:55:08 Speaker 2: Had did your school move? Where did did new students come into your school? 00:55:14 Speaker 4: The way that worked? They had freedom of choice as they called it, and uh, in Lincoln County you had well, I think you had four different schools. When you had the freedom of choice, the parents had the choice to let their black student go to the white school. And yeah, the white kids could have went to the black but we know that wasn't going to happen, and that's what did it was. It was freedom of choice, I think for a couple of years. And then when it went force integration as they called it, when they just combine the two schools together. I think when I was a senior in high school, that was the first year it went all the way just graded the black and the white school went together as one. I think I was a senior in high school. 00:56:00 Speaker 3: What was that like for you? 00:56:05 Speaker 2: Oh? Boy? 00:56:06 Speaker 4: What was that like? It was fights every day. It wasn't a good atmosphere. It wasn't good. But for the most part, a lot of kids taking it in it strive because that's just the way it was. It wasn't It wasn't good at all, not for a lot of kids. And you had white flight, which was not unusual. And the ones who stayed had to endure attitudes of certain teachers that did not want to teach you. And so it was an experience that I would not want my child to go through. 00:56:47 Speaker 2: How did you How did you handle that, Cheryl? Did it cause you to become more insulated? Did it cause you to become more vocal and outspoken? Did it cause you to kind of retreat advance, or like, how did you serve? How did you survive that? 00:57:03 Speaker 4: All the above? You had to You couldn't be one dimensional. You had to adjust to what was going on and being respectful. You had to be respectful or else. That was sort of difficult being respectful for people who really didn't have your best interest at heart. But your parents said, I don't want to have to come to the school for any reason because of your attitude, and we knew they meant business. Deal with it. It's going to work out, okay. Once again, faith, family and community help keep you grounded, help keep your mind straight, and kept you to the point where you said, Okay, this is where there is right now, and you won't have to deal with this always just stay focused. 00:57:53 Speaker 2: Just stay focused. I knew mister Earle was involved in the civil rights movement, and I asked him when he first knew that he had to take action. This is what he said. 00:58:04 Speaker 4: As soon as MLK was assassinated and and whatnot. That had a traumatic effect on us. That we were seniors at the time in high school and. 00:58:15 Speaker 3: You remember the remember where were you at? 00:58:20 Speaker 4: If I'm not mistaken, I was at home with my mother because it was a news flash. They don't call a new flash back then, with the breaking news that Martin Luther King Jr. Was just shot in Memphis, Tennessee, and you talking about shockwave in the black community. It was pouring down of emotions, all kind of emotions at the time. And the adults, you know, back then, you didn't go into present of adults listening what the conversation were because you were a child. 00:58:57 Speaker 1: You know. 00:58:57 Speaker 4: So they was talking and talking. But I was a teenager at the time, so I was pretty much knew what were going on. And so fast forwarded when they wanna make MLK a legal holiday, and of course the administration that our school wasn't g gonna be supportive of us wanna stay out of school to honor that day. And so the seniors, all of us, we said, Okay, this is the day they they are doing it, and this is the day we're not gonna come to school. They can just do what they have to do forever for that day, cause we were gonna graduate anyway. So, uh, they would let you out of deer hunting, but they wouldn't honor what we was tryna do. So we said we'd take a deer day but that wasn't too good because they knew what we were trying to do. Anyway, that's what we gonna do, cause that's how important it is to us to honor his legacy by trying to show that we support that it need to be a national holiday, and at that particular time, it's sort of spring boarder from there. I was the president of the PTA, and I was the president of the local NAACP for Lincoln County for years, and we had a lot of different issues and whatnot in the Southeast as well as the state of Arkansas. That's just some of the things in the NOMI National Alliance, Mental Illness that I little rock, and disability to rights. I was the president of the board of both of those because those issues was important to my community. Important to me also everything that affected my family and my community in my church, I wanted to be a part of it. 01:00:45 Speaker 3: Mister Earl is a man of action. 01:00:47 Speaker 2: To give a short summary of his personal history, he graduated from high school in nineteen seventy, went to college for a year, and then went to work for the railroad in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in nineteen seventy two, and he worked there until he retired in nineteen ninety seven. I asked mister Earle how he could best help someone understand what it was like growing up in the Delta. 01:01:11 Speaker 4: He had an answer, it's hard for if you haven't to answer your question, mister Nukelem. It's like males trying to understand what it is to have a baby. You really have to be all in it to understand it. So to really understand, what I'm trying to say is you have to be black to really understand it. And that's not in a backhand way of trying to do anything except just it's hard to understand because when you try to understand, you going to run across somebody who might say, man, you can't believe that. But if I've never been white, so I can't understand how it is to be white when it comes to certain things in society. But when it comes to being a human being, we right on time. If you need oxygen, so do I. If your hard beat so many times a minute, so do minds. So human beings we together. Now when this different treatment come, that's when we start losing one another. But in general, your listeners, the Arkansas Delta is a great place to live. What I would like for your listeners, the ones that are trying to wrap their mind around growing up in the Delta back in the fifties, is that the black kids wanted the same thing that the white kids wanted. They wanted opportunity. They wanted to be free, They wanted to not be looked and watch everywhere they went with a different perspective of mindset about who's doing the watching. All the black kids wanted was to have fun, like or everyone else. We had white friends down there, We did until integration came and they got with their friends, and then we saw whom Something changed when integration came and you got around your white friends, and we understood it. We wasn't being out of shape about it because we knew that's the way it worked. You okay to play with us when we away from school, but when you come to school, I'm not gonna even speak to you the same kids we've been playing with all the time, because every plantation had just about white kids, white fans and whatnot. But growing up, that's one of the things that I would like for your viewers, your listeners to understand is that there wasn't the only difference in the white kids in the black kids. Was their skin color both you cut them. They believe red blood. They may have different ethnic values when they come to religious belief and whatnot. And they wanted to have something in life. Those kids did not want to have to leave the state of Arkansas to be able to get a job or to be able to get a loan to buy a house or buy a car. And we wanted to be treated just like everybody else, no special, but no less. 01:04:54 Speaker 2: What do you think the answer is to the problems that are in the depth of the day. 01:04:59 Speaker 4: Collaboration, commitment by the power to be the help and really trying to help everyone. Equal treatment to all citizens from the one that's supposed to be doing it would change the delta physical dynamics and loving as we say we are as Christians, would change the spiritual. That would change it because you dealing every day with the physical delta person and the spiritual delta person. And believe me, that spiritual has to be strong to survive with the physical dynamics. That's what's going on. And that's the reason why I keep going back to the church, the family in the community, because those three they make one complete family. Dynamics. 01:06:07 Speaker 2: I think those are wise words, maybe wiser than the academics and politicians and high dollar think tanks who set out to solve the problems of the Delta. 01:06:17 Speaker 3: And there are many of those, many many. 01:06:20 Speaker 2: I counted a great privilege to sit with mister Earle and hear the story of his life. 01:06:26 Speaker 3: I had a. 01:06:26 Speaker 2: Feeling that the story of this great river would be surprising, enlightening, and humbling, all in the same current, and I think that's what's happening. We've got a lot of topics yet to cover, like the river's fishery, the history of taming this river, and even the blues. We've got a long ways to go. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Greas. We're putting our heart and soul into these episodes, and I. 01:06:55 Speaker 3: Really appreciate you listening. 01:06:57 Speaker 2: Please share our podcast with a friend this week, and I look forward to talking with everyone on the Bear Grease Ring