![]() ![]() Some of the differences from places I’d lived before were trivial. I couldn’t even describe to friends and family back home - “It’s real down here” is the best I could come up with. Even more remote than an island, it seemed detached from both space and time. This tiny rural town felt like an island. I joined the Teach for America program and signed up for a two-year stint in a new public charter school on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River.Īt first, I hated it. My journey in the South started as a middle school teacher. So why would I, a black man from the Midwest, volunteer to move to the cradle of American racism? Cobb called “the most Southern place on earth.” For most people it’s a region that brings up pictures of slavery, lynching, and poverty. This history is in the ground you walk on and the people you live among. Nothing stands between you and the stories you hear about slavery, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement. This is what strikes me most about the Deep South - the immediacy of the past. The first question I get when I tell people I live in the Mississippi Delta is, “Why?” But when those fields are blooming, you can’t help but picture slaves dressed in rags, hunched over in the oppressive heat, their hands scarred from years of labor. The cotton gets smashed into huge rectangular bales that are loaded onto flatbed trucks and shipped off for processing. Huge machines comb the plants for their fibrous cotton centers. She described to me how the plant grudgingly yielded its prize, how the spiny shell would scrape open her fingers.Ĭotton farming is all automated now. My wife’s grandmother spent some of her childhood days picking cotton. Nothing moves fast in the South - except when it does. Then, practically overnight, the cotton bolls exploded to reveal their fluffy prize. I had seen the dull green cotton plants crawling toward the sky through the summer months. #In the deep movie did both girls survive full#I almost swerved off the road the first time I saw cotton in full bloom. ![]()
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