W. Ralph Eubanks, courtesy of the author. Credit: Maude Schuyler Clay
W. Ralph Eubanks, courtesy of the author. Credit: Maude Schuyler Clay
Dear Subscribers of The Narrative Matters, This week we’re talking to essayist and author Ralph Eubanks about his new book, “When It’s Darkness on the Delta: How America’s Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land.” The book focuses on the Mississippi Delta and how policy, or lack thereof, has created poverty and inequality there that is persistent and acute. And also very American. It weaves Eubanks’ own history with the region’s — he is a Mississippi native whose parents, both Tuskegee Institute graduates, had wanted to make a home in the Delta. They worked in a community called Mileston, Mississippi, one of 13 New Deal-created model farming and industrial communities for Black people. Black sharecroppers were given an opportunity to own and work their own land, a real anomaly in the order of the Delta. Mileston’s farming cooperative ultimately fell apart due to white hostility and Eubanks’ family fled, but the ghosts of many what-ifs haunt the narrative. Eubanks is also the author of “A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real And Imagined Literary Landscape,” “Ever Is A Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past” and “The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South.” I spoke to Eubanks recently. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Desk: You’ve written a lot about Mississippi in your previous books. What did you want to explore with this book that you hadn’t in your previous books?
Eubanks: One of my intentions with this book was I wanted readers to engage with the Delta not so much from the perspective of the South, but the “Americanness” of the place. The original subtitle of this book was “An American Reckoning.” And I used that as the working subtitle because as I wrote about the Delta, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t forget that I was writing a book about America and not just about Mississippi in the South. I was trying to get people to see the Delta and Mississippi as a mirror to America. For me, that is probably the thing that really drove this book. I think all too often we like to assign the sins of this country to the South rather than seeing how we are all complicit in those sins. What I see in the mirror from the Delta is the seeds of American income inequality. So I was trying to be true to the Southernness of the Delta, but also to capture the Americanness of the place.
Book cover courtesy Beacon Press
Desk: Tell me about Mileston, Mississippi — it’s where you start your book.
Eubanks: Well, as a place, Mileston was originally a plantation. It was sold to the federal government and subdivided into plots for former sharecroppers, Black sharecroppers, to become landowners.
And my father, [an ag extension agent], arrives there at the tail end of the Farm Security Administration program that started Mileston and really becomes immersed in that community, kind of embedded in that community of the Delta in Holmes County. My parents are both Alabamians and I’d often ask my father, you know, why’d you come to Mississippi? And he said it was for opportunity. It seemed to be a somewhat flippant answer. I think it was, just basically, “Kid, don’t ask any more questions about this.” But I felt the need to kind of understand my family’s origins in the Delta and also understand why we left. And then also why I was always taken back there. I was constantly going back here with my father.
It wasn’t until I’m well into middle age, that I really begin to see that it was much more than opportunity. It was his idealism that brought him to the Delta because there were things that he thought his work was going to do there that were going to be transformative.
I interviewed Griffin McLaurin, [a farmer who also lived in Mileston in the 1950s and 1960s]. He’s the one who told me my father never wanted to leave, but felt he had to leave. [My father] liked the idea of Mileston so much that the farm that I grew up on is basically constructed on what Mileston was. There was the fruit orchard that we had. We did grow all of our own vegetables. We were very much self-sustaining. So the idea of Mileston is part of my entire childhood. And it wasn’t until I was writing this book that I realized that the underpinnings of my entire childhood came from Mileston.
Desk: You refer often to the idea of the Delta’s story being misrepresented, half remembered, imagination superseding truth. You’re talking about whitewashing, but you’re also talking about our desire to forget or hide the difficult history of the place. Those things are true in much of America. Can you talk about how they’re different in the Delta?
Eubanks: Yes, there are lots of places with grand mythologies. The American West is a place of incredible mythology. But in the Mississippi Delta, it’s that the myth seems so powerful that it can erase pieces of the past. The best example of that that I encountered is that … I moved to Clarksdale for four months to write this book. I’m in a restaurant with a friend from the Delta, who explains to this gentleman who’s there (who I later learn is a member of the Delta Council, which is this very prominent group of planters in the Delta) that I’m working on a book on the Delta. He says, “Well, that’s great. Now, you just stay away from that Emmett Till stuff now, you hear?”
It is this idea to erase certain parts of the past. Yes, you can talk about certain aspects of the Delta, but certain parts of it we don’t even need to wrestle with. And that’s what’s really different about the Delta, is this very tenuous relationship that the place has with the truth about it, about the place, Emmett Till being kind of the sterling example of that. But there are many others.
And for me, the big truth about the Delta that we don’t talk about is that the ways that people who have worked to transform it over the years have been hindered by the Delta’s belief in a certain idea of itself, and that if it really changed from this historical idea of itself, it wouldn’t be the Delta. If you had racial equality, it wouldn’t be the Delta. If you had integrated schools, it wouldn’t be the Delta. If you had access to healthcare, it wouldn’t be the Delta. That inequity just seems to be baked into the place. And over time, each time you see where there’s this attempt to change it or to try to transform it, something keeps it from happening.
I mean, that’s why I look at the War on Poverty, the dissolution of ProvidenceFarm , [an integrated cooperative farm], and the way that that could have been transformative to the Delta. Or even the Kellogg Foundation’s time in the Delta where they come in and they think, “Oh, we’re going to transform this place.” But the state of Mississippi says, “Okay, y’all go right ahead and do that. We won’t have anything to do with it.” There was no buy-in from the state of Mississippi. They weren’t really thinking about how some of the work that Kellogg has done here, we could actually kind of take over and build on and transform the Delta.
There are all these things that have to work together in order to transform a place. And what I’ve seen over time is each time there’s something that is going to be transformative for the Delta, Mississippi seems to kind of throw a spanner in the works to keep it from happening.
If you look at Mississippi right now, and you look at economic development in Mississippi, there is very little economic development happening west of Interstate 55. It is all east of Interstate 55, the majority of it. It’s the Delta where there’s this big gap.
Desk: Did your understanding of the Delta change in any way after writing this book?
Eubanks: It changed significantly. First of all, I confronted my own mythology about the Delta. Having been there so much, and having to reckon with the ways that I didn’t see the way poverty manifested itself on the landscape. I had to think about my own relationship with the blues and how I saw as a young man, the blues as this music of oppression, not realizing that it is this music of protest and liberation. But then also, going back to Mileston, if there had been more Milestons, what that would have meant for the Delta. Mississippi kept that from happening as well.
I think we often look at the Delta as a place that is poor, and that it is poor because of the failings of the people there themselves. That is the way that Americans think about poverty: Poverty is rooted in a personal failing. If you are poor, it is your fault, rather than there are certain structures that are at work that have kept the Delta poor. You know, we allowed sharecropping to dominate for a very long time. And we left those structures there. And where does the structure of sharecropping come from? It came from slavery. I mean, sharecropping’s the successor system to slavery.
Desk: You also write about people that have been trying to make the Delta a more livable place for poor people and for Black people. And that’s true today. And I wonder, do you want to highlight one of the people doing that today?
Eubanks: I think that Marquitrice Mangham, her work with the Farmacy Marketplace, her work there is helping with food access and also trying to get people to grow food on that Delta land, which is difficult to do given the preponderance of chemicals and chemical drift.
Gloria Carter Dickerson’s work there with her We2gether Creating Change. Here’s someone who worked with the Kellogg Foundation and when the Kellogg Foundation said, “Well, we can’t continue this work because we can’t change the minds of the people.” Gloria said, “Well, if the work that we need to do is to change the minds of the people, who’s doing that? And if nobody’s doing that, I’m going to do that.”
For the most part, these are young people who are doing this work, which is quite inspirational to me.
Desk: What would you tell reporters covering agriculture in Mississippi and in the Delta about doing it well?
Eubanks: Oh boy. I don’t know if it’s a question about doing it well. Maybe it’s looking beyond big ag. And I think we have to begin to look at the specter of climate change. Here we are on some of the richest soil in the country. And America’s bread basket in the Central Valley of California is undergoing tremendous shifts in climate. The Delta could be poised to become America’s bread basket. Are we even thinking about it? No. We are really focused on big ag. We have to begin to imagine what the Delta’s future looks like if it became less a place for commodity crops.
Desk: Are there any books you’d recommend for someone writing about the Delta? Especially writing about food, ag and environmental issues?
Eubanks: Bobby J. Smith’s book “Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement.” Clyde Woods’ “Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta” was transformative to me. The book that was probably the biggest influence on me was James Cobb’s “The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity” because he’s asking a question at the end of that. Are we allowing the rest of the country to become the Delta writ large? It was that question of his that really drove the way that I was thinking about this book.
The Desk is in the news business — we report on goings on within agriculture and environmental issues. But one of the things I’ve encouraged our reporters to do is to incorporate deep historical context for many of the issues we report on, whether that’s looking at why soybeans dominate our farmlands or how FEMA disaster declarations came to be unilaterally controlled by the president.
Reading “When It’s Darkness On The Delta” reinforced this impulse for me.
“As a nation, we like to think of the past as a place or region that we would prefer not to visit — as if confronting the realities of history could harm us — rather than acknowledging how much of the past lives on in the present,” Eubanks writes in the book. Here’s to asking more questions, deeper questions, and facing the past even as we report on the present.
Sincerely,Irina ZhorovAssistant Director, Ag & Water Desk
Ralph Eubanks interview, When It’s Darkness on the Delta book, Mississippi Delta poverty, richest soil poorest land, American inequality, Delta history, policy and poverty, systemic racism in America, Southern economic history
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Author W. Ralph Eubanks reflects on the Mississippi Delta
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W. Ralph Eubanks, courtesy of the author. Credit: Maude Schuyler Clay
This week we’re talking to essayist and author Ralph Eubanks about his new book, “When It’s Darkness on the Delta: How America’s Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land.” The book focuses on the Mississippi Delta and how policy, or lack thereof, has created poverty and inequality there that is persistent and acute. And also very American.
It weaves Eubanks’ own history with the region’s — he is a Mississippi native whose parents, both Tuskegee Institute graduates, had wanted to make a home in the Delta. They worked in a community called Mileston, Mississippi, one of 13 New Deal-created model farming and industrial communities for Black people. Black sharecroppers were given an opportunity to own and work their own land, a real anomaly in the order of the Delta. Mileston’s farming cooperative ultimately fell apart due to white hostility and Eubanks’ family fled, but the ghosts of many what-ifs haunt the narrative.
Eubanks is also the author of “A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real And Imagined Literary Landscape,” “Ever Is A Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past” and “The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South.”
I spoke to Eubanks recently. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Desk: You’ve written a lot about Mississippi in your previous books. What did you want to explore with this book that you hadn’t in your previous books?
Eubanks: One of my intentions with this book was I wanted readers to engage with the Delta not so much from the perspective of the South, but the “Americanness” of the place. The original subtitle of this book was “An American Reckoning.” And I used that as the working subtitle because as I wrote about the Delta, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t forget that I was writing a book about America and not just about Mississippi in the South. I was trying to get people to see the Delta and Mississippi as a mirror to America. For me, that is probably the thing that really drove this book. I think all too often we like to assign the sins of this country to the South rather than seeing how we are all complicit in those sins. What I see in the mirror from the Delta is the seeds of American income inequality. So I was trying to be true to the Southernness of the Delta, but also to capture the Americanness of the place.
Book cover courtesy Beacon Press
Desk: Tell me about Mileston, Mississippi — it’s where you start your book.
Eubanks: Well, as a place, Mileston was originally a plantation. It was sold to the federal government and subdivided into plots for former sharecroppers, Black sharecroppers, to become landowners.
And my father, [an ag extension agent], arrives there at the tail end of the Farm Security Administration program that started Mileston and really becomes immersed in that community, kind of embedded in that community of the Delta in Holmes County. My parents are both Alabamians and I’d often ask my father, you know, why’d you come to Mississippi? And he said it was for opportunity. It seemed to be a somewhat flippant answer. I think it was, just basically, “Kid, don’t ask any more questions about this.” But I felt the need to kind of understand my family’s origins in the Delta and also understand why we left. And then also why I was always taken back there. I was constantly going back here with my father.
It wasn’t until I’m well into middle age, that I really begin to see that it was much more than opportunity. It was his idealism that brought him to the Delta because there were things that he thought his work was going to do there that were going to be transformative.
I interviewed Griffin McLaurin, [a farmer who also lived in Mileston in the 1950s and 1960s]. He’s the one who told me my father never wanted to leave, but felt he had to leave. [My father] liked the idea of Mileston so much that the farm that I grew up on is basically constructed on what Mileston was. There was the fruit orchard that we had. We did grow all of our own vegetables. We were very much self-sustaining. So the idea of Mileston is part of my entire childhood. And it wasn’t until I was writing this book that I realized that the underpinnings of my entire childhood came from Mileston.
Desk: You refer often to the idea of the Delta’s story being misrepresented, half remembered, imagination superseding truth. You’re talking about whitewashing, but you’re also talking about our desire to forget or hide the difficult history of the place. Those things are true in much of America. Can you talk about how they’re different in the Delta?
Eubanks: Yes, there are lots of places with grand mythologies. The American West is a place of incredible mythology. But in the Mississippi Delta, it’s that the myth seems so powerful that it can erase pieces of the past. The best example of that that I encountered is that … I moved to Clarksdale for four months to write this book. I’m in a restaurant with a friend from the Delta, who explains to this gentleman who’s there (who I later learn is a member of the Delta Council, which is this very prominent group of planters in the Delta) that I’m working on a book on the Delta. He says, “Well, that’s great. Now, you just stay away from that Emmett Till stuff now, you hear?”
It is this idea to erase certain parts of the past. Yes, you can talk about certain aspects of the Delta, but certain parts of it we don’t even need to wrestle with. And that’s what’s really different about the Delta, is this very tenuous relationship that the place has with the truth about it, about the place, Emmett Till being kind of the sterling example of that. But there are many others.
And for me, the big truth about the Delta that we don’t talk about is that the ways that people who have worked to transform it over the years have been hindered by the Delta’s belief in a certain idea of itself, and that if it really changed from this historical idea of itself, it wouldn’t be the Delta. If you had racial equality, it wouldn’t be the Delta. If you had integrated schools, it wouldn’t be the Delta. If you had access to healthcare, it wouldn’t be the Delta. That inequity just seems to be baked into the place. And over time, each time you see where there’s this attempt to change it or to try to transform it, something keeps it from happening.
I mean, that’s why I look at the War on Poverty, the dissolution of ProvidenceFarm , [an integrated cooperative farm], and the way that that could have been transformative to the Delta. Or even the Kellogg Foundation’s time in the Delta where they come in and they think, “Oh, we’re going to transform this place.” But the state of Mississippi says, “Okay, y’all go right ahead and do that. We won’t have anything to do with it.” There was no buy-in from the state of Mississippi. They weren’t really thinking about how some of the work that Kellogg has done here, we could actually kind of take over and build on and transform the Delta.
There are all these things that have to work together in order to transform a place. And what I’ve seen over time is each time there’s something that is going to be transformative for the Delta, Mississippi seems to kind of throw a spanner in the works to keep it from happening.
If you look at Mississippi right now, and you look at economic development in Mississippi, there is very little economic development happening west of Interstate 55. It is all east of Interstate 55, the majority of it. It’s the Delta where there’s this big gap.
Desk: Did your understanding of the Delta change in any way after writing this book?
Eubanks: It changed significantly. First of all, I confronted my own mythology about the Delta. Having been there so much, and having to reckon with the ways that I didn’t see the way poverty manifested itself on the landscape. I had to think about my own relationship with the blues and how I saw as a young man, the blues as this music of oppression, not realizing that it is this music of protest and liberation. But then also, going back to Mileston, if there had been more Milestons, what that would have meant for the Delta. Mississippi kept that from happening as well.
I think we often look at the Delta as a place that is poor, and that it is poor because of the failings of the people there themselves. That is the way that Americans think about poverty: Poverty is rooted in a personal failing. If you are poor, it is your fault, rather than there are certain structures that are at work that have kept the Delta poor. You know, we allowed sharecropping to dominate for a very long time. And we left those structures there. And where does the structure of sharecropping come from? It came from slavery. I mean, sharecropping’s the successor system to slavery.
Desk: You also write about people that have been trying to make the Delta a more livable place for poor people and for Black people. And that’s true today. And I wonder, do you want to highlight one of the people doing that today?
Eubanks: I think that Marquitrice Mangham, her work with the Farmacy Marketplace, her work there is helping with food access and also trying to get people to grow food on that Delta land, which is difficult to do given the preponderance of chemicals and chemical drift.
Gloria Carter Dickerson’s work there with her We2gether Creating Change. Here’s someone who worked with the Kellogg Foundation and when the Kellogg Foundation said, “Well, we can’t continue this work because we can’t change the minds of the people.” Gloria said, “Well, if the work that we need to do is to change the minds of the people, who’s doing that? And if nobody’s doing that, I’m going to do that.”
For the most part, these are young people who are doing this work, which is quite inspirational to me.
Desk: What would you tell reporters covering agriculture in Mississippi and in the Delta about doing it well?
Eubanks: Oh boy. I don’t know if it’s a question about doing it well. Maybe it’s looking beyond big ag. And I think we have to begin to look at the specter of climate change. Here we are on some of the richest soil in the country. And America’s bread basket in the Central Valley of California is undergoing tremendous shifts in climate. The Delta could be poised to become America’s bread basket. Are we even thinking about it? No. We are really focused on big ag. We have to begin to imagine what the Delta’s future looks like if it became less a place for commodity crops.
Desk: Are there any books you’d recommend for someone writing about the Delta? Especially writing about food, ag and environmental issues?
Eubanks: Bobby J. Smith’s book “Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement.” Clyde Woods’ “Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta” was transformative to me. The book that was probably the biggest influence on me was James Cobb’s “The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity” because he’s asking a question at the end of that. Are we allowing the rest of the country to become the Delta writ large? It was that question of his that really drove the way that I was thinking about this book.
The Desk is in the news business — we report on goings on within agriculture and environmental issues. But one of the things I’ve encouraged our reporters to do is to incorporate deep historical context for many of the issues we report on, whether that’s looking at why soybeans dominate our farmlands or how FEMA disaster declarations came to be unilaterally controlled by the president.
Reading “When It’s Darkness On The Delta” reinforced this impulse for me.
“As a nation, we like to think of the past as a place or region that we would prefer not to visit — as if confronting the realities of history could harm us — rather than acknowledging how much of the past lives on in the present,” Eubanks writes in the book. Here’s to asking more questions, deeper questions, and facing the past even as we report on the present.
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