Your connection to the Delta seems to be deeply intertwined with remembrances of your father. "This place was one of his lasting memories and I want it to be that way for others," you write. "But at the same time, I want it to live up to the promise my father saw in it when he arrived in the middle of the twentieth century."  What is about this region that Americans need to understand and what was the better future that your father envisioned?

Most Americans look at the Mississippi Delta and only see the South’s relationship with a system of patriarchy, racism, and social stratification. But the Delta’s story is not just about the sins of the South; it is also a story of America and this country’s thirst and ambition for transformation and reinvention. In the Delta you see the roots of income inequality in this country. But now in other parts of the country these inequities have crept in, giving these regions more in common with the Delta than they would like to recognize.

What I think many people fail to understand is that Black poverty in the Mississippi Delta mirrors the poverty in white rural America. Race has rarely been central to the ways we as Americans think about rural poverty and its lasting impact on the health and well-being of people from places like the Mississippi Delta. Although the patterns of poverty in the Delta today mirror national trends with respect to race and poverty in rural America, even back when public policy was paying attention to issues of poverty and social mobility, race has rarely been central to those policies. The institutional structures of poor, white America—in dying Rust Belt towns or Appalachia—have always been easier for people to see than the equally destructive and dehumanizing structures of slavery, sharecropping, and Jim Crow segregation.

The better future my father envisioned was represented in the Farm Security Administration’s resettlement community at Mileston, a place that helped sharecroppers become landowning farmers. He saw Black landowning and self-sufficiency as key to a better future for the Mississippi Delta. What I don’t think he counted on was how Black independent farmers would be seen as a mortal threat to the Delta’s White plantation owners and their need to hold on to economic domination in the region. The reason he believed so deeply in the promise of Mileston was rooted in his education at Tuskegee. Tuskegee’s philosophy, as stated by its president Robert Moten, was that there was no reason for Black people to leave the South and that their future lay in the region. Tuskegee gave my father that idealistic vision and it is one he could never let go.

You wrote this about your first trip to the Delta you took with your father in 1964 at age seven: “On our first trip in 1964, as dusk approached, a glow covered the two-lane blacktop and seemingly everything around us. I was mesmerized, as if under a spell. The light was a reddish yellow. … In the Delta, the light covered everything like a canopy and the wide vista of the landscape made its luminance feel endless.” Was that memory one of the things that compelled you to write this book?

The idea for this book began with that memory. Ten years ago, I spent a great deal of time in the Delta reporting a story for WIRED magazine on the lack of broadband access in Mississippi, particularly in the Delta. Working on that story stirred some old memories. Soon after the article was published, I returned to Mississippi to teach at Millsaps College, a small liberal arts school in Jackson. It was then that I started driving Delta roads on weekends without a map. What those drives revealed to me was that I was leading a very different life in Mississippi than the people of the Delta. Just a few miles from the perfectly manicured campus where I taught, I was thrust into a different world. 

The Delta wasn’t that different from what I remembered from my childhood, which was comforting but I began to see it differently. As a child I realized that I just saw the poverty of the Delta as part of the landscape. That is what most of us are conditioned to do: not to see poverty. And I felt a profound need to understand this place I remembered fondly and why the social realities of the past and the present were at odds with those memories of beauty and light. 

The Mississippi Delta is known as the home of the blues. What is it about the music that sprang from the Delta that you wish more people knew?

In the push to commodify the blues as something to draw tourist dollars to the Delta, I believe certain aspects of the blues have been lost in the translation to something commercial. What is being lost is that the blues began as a form of protest. And when we fail to see the protest roots of the blues, the meaning of the music is lost.

In his 1998 book Development Arrested, geographer Clyde Woods formulated the idea of “blues epistemology” to explain how the music named and critiqued the conditions of black people in the Mississippi Delta.  Describing the creators of the blues as “sociologists, reporters, counsellors, advocates, preservers of language and customs, and summoners of life,” Woods argued that the poetry and force of the blues had the power to compel social change—which, despite powerful persistence of the old planter culture, is exactly what it did.

Translation is always an act of interpretation, a reconstitution of a creative act, but despite the work of the most acute translators, something is inevitably lost. After living in the Delta and seeing how aspects of the blues are being lost, I came to realize that now may be the time to take what has been lost in the translations of the  blues and recover its real value as instruction on how to survive, thrive, and move forward—and to do so with a certain sly humor and insouciance that subverts the schemes and dreams of those who want to bring back an imagined past that will provide even less to those whom it promises most.  The blues recognized evil in the world—often speaking of it as the devil himself—and the blues called that evil out. That is the real power of the blues.

You write about white segregationist academies across the Delta, which arose after Brown and stand as a reminder of the ways the Delta served as a model of resistance to social change.  That section includes a conversation with your friend, the Delta-born novelist Steve Yarbrough, who recalls receiving severe beatings from his father for playing with Black children in his neighborhood and today feels intense shame at having attended a segregation academy. How do the academies and private schools as they exist today, in the Delta and elsewhere, continue to reinforce white political and economic interests? 

Steve’s story of his beatings for playing with Black children just broke my heart. It was a hard story for him to share, but we have always been honest with each other.

The places that have come to be known as “segregation academies” stand as symbols of white Delta residents’ preservation of a way of life rooted in the segregationist past and at odds with the interracial realities of the modern-day South. What failed to happen in the Mississippi Delta and all over the United States after integration is a process of reconciliation that addressed inequities of power and access in society. By “reconciliation,” I don’t mean just restoring broken relationships or engaging in some superficial joining of hands but learning how to live together. Blacks and whites in the Delta still live profoundly divided lives. They have never confronted the legacy of the segregationist past with openness and honesty because they are still living it. Instead, separate spaces—educational, social, economic, and political—were created, which led to broader inequality. As a result, the divisions of the past persist.

Although the Mississippi Delta has some of the richest soil in North America, many of its towns lack access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Why isn’t more food grown in the Delta?

The agricultural infrastructure of the Delta is set up to bolster a commodity economy that intrinsically favors large farms and export markets. From the cotton gins and the grain elevators along the Mississippi to the banks that provide crop loans to the USDA and university labs that research new varietals and growing strategies, all are set up to support growing cotton, soybeans, corn, and rice. So, above all, are federal subsidies, which offer crop insurance and price supports to commodities but little to growing vegetables and produce. 

And then there are the pesticides, which would kill many vegetable crops. Despite all of the challenges, two people I interviewed for this book are trying to provide more locally grown food to people in Delta communities. Calvin Head in the Delta town of Mileston is growing fruits and vegetables and trying to revive the farm cooperative model that sustained his community for decades. Marquitrice Mangham in Webb has opened a grocery store that not only provides fresh food to people in the town but also bolsters the Delta’s food system by working with small farmers and providing a market for their produce. Both are very much rooted in the idea of food sovereignty, which emphasizes local food production and distribution.

You spent a year teaching writing at the Mississippi State Prison at Parchman in Unit 29, which is where inmates serve life sentences. What did your time teaching there tell you about the Delta?

I came to Parchman not only to teach writing, but I thought that teaching writing there would allow me to see how much of the poverty and violence that exists outside of the prison walls in Delta towns affected by high crime rates actually leads these men to incarceration. I began by asking my students to write memoirs of their time before prison. But what the men really wanted to write about was their life inside prison.

I came to realize that I asked students to write about life before prison not just to understand how poverty and violence intersected with their lives before prison. I thought having them write about their memories before prison would somehow take them out of a place that, if I am being truly honest, scares me like nothing I have encountered on a deserted city street. The truth, I realized, was that I wanted them to write about life before prison because the life they have inside prison is unimaginable to me, just as it is to millions of Americans. Now I know why Parchman haunts my very soul, having learned that there is a thin line between those inside Parchman and those outside of it in the Delta and beyond.

Each week when the gate closed behind me, I understood more and more that there is little that separates me from these men. Having listened to their stories from childhood, as well as their life inside prison, I began to see pieces of their experiences mirroring my own.

One of your chapters focuses on what you call “social change philanthropy,” which is essentially private philanthropy providing funds to change the circumstances of the people of the Delta. What do you see as the role of private foundations in creating social change in places like the Mississippi Delta?

At the outset of their Mid South Delta Initiative, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and its officers saw the people of the Delta as their greatest asset. As they ended their focus on the Delta, they saw the people as their greatest hinderance.

I came to believe that there is a great danger of investing in a region through what might be called “social change philanthropy”—grantmaking to address root causes of social and economic inequity. Groups like the Kellogg Foundation that engage in social change philanthropy must offer a clear explanation of what exactly the goals are and how they can be achieved. Even more important, a foundation can only go so far in creating social change without the cooperation of state and local government. The local communities of the Delta seemed to embrace the work of Kellogg, but the state of Mississippi did not engage any of the initiatives in a substantive and meaningful way to see if there was sufficient “proof of concept” to grow the initiatives beyond the places and organizations where they began.

Instead, from 2017 to 2022, the state of Mississippi was using $77 million in federal dollars from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)—the fund that provides cash welfare benefits—to fight poverty through programs that help develop parenting skills among the poor, sponsor a “wrestling ministry,” or start questionable initiatives for school-dropout prevention and job readiness.

Private foundations can play a role in creating social change, but it must be done in collaboration with state government. In the case of Mississippi, it had its own ideas of what social change philanthropy looked like.

“The Delta and places like it are poor because we allow them to be poor,” you observe. “And that poverty persists because of decades of neglect and policies engineered to keep people poor." How is that reality in the Delta, including how poor people there are underserved by the welfare system and the fact that the state refuses to accept nearly $2 billion a year in Medicaid expansion, connected to the long-ago plantation system? 

Mississippi’s refusal to expand Medicaid is a prime example of how we allow poor places to be poor. In Mississippi today, twenty rural hospitals are at immediate risk of closure, several of them in the Delta, largely because Mississippi refuses to expand Medicaid. And the rate of uninsured people in the state is 10.5%. These uninsured people are largely poor. Mississippi has relied on revenue generated through a financing tool — known as a provider tax — to draw down more federal dollars and boost Medicaid reimbursements to providers. But changes to the formula by congress could hamper the state’s ability to collect those taxes.

Depending on how Congress restricts provider taxes, Mississippi could lose hundreds of millions in federal Medicaid funding, crucial in a state with such a high uninsured rate. And in a state that has not expanded Medicaid, these changes will largely affect poor people. In a state without Medicaid expansion, poor people will be the ones who are hurt by this change.

Mississippi experienced its first taste of equalized access to medicine in the late 1960s, with the opening of the Delta Health Center, the first federally funded health care center. The center was started to provide care to anyone regardless of race or ability to pay and continues to do so to this day. The center’s philosophy was to look at what the organization’s founders called the social determinants of health, which included dilapidated housing, poor sanitation, malnutrition, and inadequate social welfare services.

John Fairman, the current director of the Delta Health Center told me during an interview that “It is the poor who tell us what the world is and what our service to the world should be.” As a Delta native, Fairman recognizes how the legacy of sharecropping and poverty in the region continues to affect the people of the Delta. Just like a plantation owner, those in power in Mississippi today do not want to think about the ways the health care past affects the health care present, even though there is data that reveals current inequities.

Who were the historical figures connected to the Delta that inspired your writing?

There were so many: Robert Kennedy and his 1967 trip to the Delta alongside Marian Wright Edelman. Then there are activists like Fannie Lou Hamer and Amzie Moore, as well as the Carter family of Drew, Mississippi, who all bravely integrated the schools of that small Delta town. Yet many of the people who have worked to change the Delta don’t turn up in history books. I tried to focus on unsung heroes as well as prominent historical figures.

But the historical figure I did not expect to become a guide was the poet and essayist June Jordan. One afternoon I could not stop reading notes she wrote before a trip to the Mississippi Delta in 1970. After I found these notes in the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, they inspired me to seek to understand the power of the Delta’s mythology. Insights from Jordan’s writings allowed me to see the Delta more as an American entity than a Southern one. As Jordan wrote, “Given its mythological reality, comparable to that of Plymouth, The Great Frontier, and Harlem, my purpose is partly to demythologize that place by going there and learning what I can. I submit that this purpose is valuable since only when myth shrinks from reality can we usefully assess the status and experience of that reality.”

One of the regions you visit to look at places that mirror the Delta is the Appalachian hills and hollows of Eastern Kentucky. Why Appalachia?

Interestingly enough, part of Mississippi is designated as part of Appalachia. Mississippi lacks mountains, yet twenty-four counties in its northeastern region fall within the service area of the Appalachian Regional Commission, a Great Society program that sought to bring economic development to the Appalachian region. By using a map doctored by a group of politicians, part of Mississippi was reimagined as Appalachia, giving segregationist Senators James O. Eastland and John C. Stennis a way to bring Great Society funds to the whitest part of Mississippi. These are the same senators who sought to obstruct the economic empowerment of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the Delta because of its linkage with the Black freedom struggle.

The cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta and the hills of eastern Kentucky may be distinguished by their radically different landscapes, yet focusing on the differences in region, culture, and topography risks overlooking the similarities between these places. Both places were shaped by a single commodity—the Delta by cotton and eastern Kentucky by coal. There were much fewer plantations in Kentucky, but the corporate bosses that shaped the coal industry there were just as powerful as the Delta’s plantation class. The Delta is majority Black and eastern Kentucky is majority white, but both places have been shaped by the poverty of the people who live there. Poverty rates in coal country mirror those of the Delta. Visiting Appalachia with the Mississippi Delta on my mind and talking with the people who live in its hills and hollows shortened the distance I had perceived between these two points on the map.

When you traveled to Appalachia, you visited Martin County Kentucky, where President Johnson launched his War on Poverty. With the help of the local historical society, you also found the Fletcher House, which served as the backdrop for launching Johnson’s initiative. Your local guides cautioned you not to stereotype residents of Eastern Kentucky "as a bunch of isolated hillbillies." When you were writing the book, how did you balance trying to avoid furthering stereotypes with the need for removing the veil that cloaks poverty and makes it hard to see?

That was difficult. Americans think of the Mississippi Delta as an outlier with regard to the way inequality and race have shaped the lives of people in this country. Yet we fail to recognize that there are other regions and places that have also been shaped by racism, extraction, and dispossession. I think many Americans look at Appalachia as an outlier as well, yet because the region is largely white a regional stereotype of the “hillbilly” evolved that unfairly characterizes the people.

The tricky part of writing about these two places is how in the United States region and race are tied together, particularly in the South. When we use the term “southerner,” all too often we are referring to White Southerners, who are seen as having power. White residents of Appalachia are often depicted as powerless, which has led to cultural stereotypes being imposed on its residents.

Many of the people I spoke to in Kentucky were resistant to my use of a photograph of the Fletcher House, a tar-paper shack that is virtually unchanged since Johnson’s visit in 1964. The Fletcher House has become a symbol of the region’s deep poverty. Yet the people who objected to my use of this photograph were middle-class whites who sought to distance themselves from an image they felt had unfairly characterized them, since they felt all white people of the region were only seen through this lens of poverty. Yet Martin County Kentucky is just as poor as Sunflower County Mississippi.

What I realized is that the impact of King Coal was different from that of King Cotton. Black residents of the Delta feel a pride about the place because they feel their labor and blood built and shaped the region. Strip mining poisoned Appalachia, leaving ravaged land and cultural shame.

Social status influences how people see their community and what they want others to see. When those concerns dictate how a community is depicted, we block people who live below the poverty line from our field of vision. By not showing poverty, we render it invisible. In eastern Kentucky, as in the Mississippi Delta, I experienced the wealth of the culture, the pride people feel for the land where they are from, and their love for the music that sprang from the soil. Both places have a long legacy of social action that continues today. Traveling to Appalachia taught me that there is a complex interaction between social action and social embarrassment. It’s a common experience of humanity. If we are only concerned with avoiding social embarrassment, we diminish the lives of people who live below the poverty line by not allowing them to be seen.