THE Delta

The Mississippi Delta is an iconic region in the American South lying between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers, running from Memphis to Vicksburg. It is a place that I have crisscrossed driving tens of thousands of miles, camera in hand, cherishing the beauty of the vast horizons and its people.

From Rick Bragg’s Introduction to my book:

“The Delta, while I am sure there are dreams here that have yet to die hard, was made, constructed, not imagined. It was hacked out of a vast, dark, primeval forest, and trans- formed by pain and blood and muscle, in an age of human bondage. Men felled the trees and burned the stumps and turned this wide, flat place into a landscape of forever fields, of cotton rows that stretched farther than a strong man could pick in a day. 

It is not, despite appearances, the end of nowhere. The empty fields are its destination. The weeds let you know where one crop ends and another begins. While other man- made places were covered in people and concrete, here it was the dirt that mattered, and there was just so much of it, between porch lights, and schools, and hospitals. There still is. In the open land between the towns and the wide places in the road, dark drops like a lid on a box, and that very isolation has shaped life here, held it, and marked it deeply and sometimes horribly. 

Its loneliness would be a stage for some of the most chilling moments in the struggle for civil rights. Its rivers would give up their dead; its nowhere roads hold secrets still. It would be called the most Southern place on earth, and I do not believe that meant teacakes and cotillions. 

Here, the poverty hits you between the eyes like a hurled chunk of loose asphalt. It is one of the poorest places in the United States, where deep pockets of wealth are surrounded by third-world houses, tilting mobile homes, and one of the saddest infant mortality rates in the industrialized world.”