Why did you choose to write a book on the Mississippi Delta and why is it important for Americans to understand this region of the country?

One of the looming issues in contemporary American society is income inequality, and the Delta stands as an example of what happens when inequality is ignored and even encouraged. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed inequities that have been hidden by a broader narrative of economic prosperity in America, and you see those profoundly in the Delta. As my reporting in April 2020 for Business Insider revealed, over half of Mississippi households don’t have enough cash or liquid assets to subsist for three months if their income is interrupted. When you place a layer of race over those statistics, the racial disparities are staggering: 7 out of 10 Black households could not withstand  losing their income for three months. The roots and causes of American income inequality come into greater focus when you see what happens in a place like the Mississippi Delta, where inequality is part of the origin story of the region.

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. 

You write the Mississippi Delta is a palimpsest, “a place where what the land means and how it and its people are seen has been erased and written over time and again.” What do you see as the contemporary meaning of the Delta and what is it about its past has it erased or written over?

During my boyhood I witnessed the Delta’s waning days as a cotton kingdom. By the time I left Mississippi in the late 1970s, the common belief was catfish farming would succeed cotton farming, but those days have now faded as well. By the 1990s, casinos began to dot former cotton fields on the landscape of impoverished Tunica County. Now those casinos employ less than a third of the people they did when gambling in the Delta was at its peak.

Today towns like Tunica are selling the Delta as a place tourists can visit to gamble in a casino, and Clarksdale is marketing itself as a way to see the land that gave birth to the blues. Yet the question remains as to whether selling casino gambling and the Delta Blues to tourists imposes a new mythology on this land, one that overshadows harsher realities that have yet to be confronted. Blues tourism focuses more on the personas of those who created the music and often glances over how the music was created out of pain and as a means to protest the circumstances that created that pain. If history is a guide, turning the blues into a commodity won’t necessarily create a new economic foundation for the Delta; it is more likely to erase a piece of the Delta’s past. I’m just not sure the pain of the past captured in the blues can be commodified in the present.

Other than James Cobb’s history of the Delta The Most Southern Place on Earth, the last in-depth study of the Mississippi Delta was done in the 1930s by psychologist John Dollard in his book Caste and Class in a Small Southern Town and anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker in her book After Freedom. Where does When It’s Darkness on the Delta expand the narrative of the Delta from these three important books?

With respect to Dollard and Powdermaker, When It’s Darkness on the Delta looks less at the Delta as a product of the culture of the American South and more at the ways that it mirrors current issues in this country with respect to income inequality. Dollard and Powdermaker captured the pervasive and oppressive nature of legal racial segregation and white supremacy in the Delta. But if you read their studies today, it is clear much of what they wrote also contributed to the mythology of the Delta as a world unto itself, a place influenced exclusively by the culture of the South rather than a broader American social policy. Both saw the Delta almost as if it were a foreign culture and that certainly influenced the way they perceived the place and its people. 

Still there was much that they got right. Most important, they understood the plantation system. The plantation system they wrote about is gone, but the remnants of that system still wield power. Reading Dollard and Powdermaker helped me recognize how what they observed lives on as well as how much has changed.

In The Most Southern Place on Earth, James Cobb’s deep and detailed history of the Mississippi Delta published in 1992, Cobb concludes the book by asking his readers: As economic disparity and indifference to human suffering in this country grows, have the forces that made the Delta the South writ small now seeped into the rest of the country, rendering parts of the entire nation the Delta writ large? From Cobb’s perspective of more than three decades ago, he thinks the Delta is a cautionary tale for the rest of the country. When It’s Darkness on the Delta argues that the economic and social polarization Cobb associated with the Mississippi Delta has indeed spread across the country. I hope readers can begin to see how the issues of inequality that have historically affected the people of the Delta now exist on a national scale.

One of the places you visit to look at places that mirror the Delta is in 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.

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 at the Mississippi State Prison at Parchman in Unit 29, which where inmates serve life sentences. What did your time at the state prison teaching writing 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. When I started looking at the Kellogg Foundation’s work in the Delta, I began to wonder what is the role of foundations in creating social change in places like the Mississippi Delta?

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 any of 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. 

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.”

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 inevitably is 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.

What do you feel are the ways that most people misunderstand about the Mississippi Delta? And why do you believe the Mississippi Delta matters and should matter to all Americans?

The way we see the Mississippi Delta and places like it is clouded by mythology. I often refer the Delta as my Sargasso Sea because the Sargasso Sea is the only sea that exists without shores. It is an extended region surrounded by ocean.  When I look at the Delta that is what I see: people unmoored and adrift at sea, though they live on a great expanse of land with the richest soil in North America. It is a place adrift between what some see as the glories of its past and the tragic poverty and abandonment of the present.

But not everyone sees that because of the power of the mythology of the Delta and the American South in general.

Writing When It’s Darkness on the Delta made me realize that mythology keeps us from seeing that the sins committed against the people of the Delta belong to all Americans because they have been committed in our name. By seeing the music of the blues only as something that is a deep personal expression that sprang from Delta soil, we fail to see how those blues are rooted in a shared American experience. By seeing systemic racism as a myth, we are obscuring the reality of racism’s impact not only on the Delta but on the rest of the country. The Mississippi Delta matters, but it will only matter to more people if we change our way of seeing. To change the way we all see the Delta—and impoverished places like it—the quantitative and the qualitative must inform each other. It is important to know the size and scale of the problems faced in the lives of poor people in the Delta, both historically and today. And to change our way of seeing we must also understand the ways public policy has institutionalized poverty in this county and numbed us from seeing it. 

But how do we change our way of seeing? To change what we see, we must also change what we know. That means that first we must understand the ways the Delta was shaped by economic, political, and emotional forces that are American at their core, not merely Southern. And we must also recognize that the same forces that created inequality in the Delta have led to many of the same inequities across this nation.