Delta History

THE PLANTATION

Willie Morris wrote, "there are not many prospects in America so beautiful as a field of white cotton in the fall." And for the Mississippi Delta, there has never been a more benevolent, yet cruel dictator than King Cotton. Although cotton's dominance in the region has waned and given way to other crops like soybeans or catfish, the plantation remains one of the region's most iconic images, from its pre-Civil war days to the sharecropping era to the twenty-first century mechanized farms.

A look at the plantation in Delta culture exposes the tension-filled symbiotic relationship between hills and flat land, mankind and nature, white man and black man. From the late 1800s through the mid 1900s, sharecropping was a prevalent means of farming in the Mississippi Delta and throughout the South. What began as a way of employing former slaves to do familiar tasks during the Reconstruction era evolved into an interdependent relationship where wealthy land-owners employed poor "croppers" to work the fields in exchange for a portion of the crops. Landowners also often provided tenant sharecroppers with places to live and other amenities, creating communities within the plantation environment. Ironically, both white men and black men shared this community. White children and black children grew up together in this community in a delicate balance that stands in stark contrast to the unrest that played out in the South during the rise of the Civil Rights movement.

Of the difficult to describe bond between blacks and whites during this era that extended into the 1950s and 1960s, Willie Morris wrote:
"As a grown man I have thought often of those who labored so against the earth and who still live in the town, or in Memphis or Chicago or Detroit or Gary, but mostly in Chicago to which they had drifted in hordes from the Delta with their belongings in cardboard boxes and suitcases tied with cotton clothesline, or lay now in pine boxes in the very soil they had once tended. It was mysterious and cruel and profoundly interior, that merging here in the Delta of the great European and African sources, yet vital and even life-given – as if we belonged together, and yet did not; the barrier between us acute and invisible. It was very strange and hard."

Cotton Patch, Mississippi Delta. ca 1937.
Photo by Dorothea Lange, courtesy Library of Congress.

Cotton Picker, outside Clarksdale, Mississippi. ca 1939.
Photo by Marion Post Wolcott, courtesy Library of Congress.

International Cotton Picker, Hopson Plantation, Clarksdale, Mississippi. ca 1939.
Photo by Marion Post Wolcott, courtesy Library of Congress.