Bear Grease - Ep. 130: The Mississippi River - The Delta (Part 2)

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

On this episode of Bear Grease, the second in a series on the Mississippi River, host Clay Newcomb guides you through the story about the settlement of the Mississippi Delta, the people of the area, and the challenges that shaped their identity. We’ll be veering out of the river into its floodplain because, as William Faulkner said, “To understand the world you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” Once again we’ll be leaning on author Hank Burdine, New York Times Best Selling author John Barry, and a new voice to Bear Grease--a dear friend raised in the Delta--Mr. Earl Jasper. This is as unique a Bear Grease episode as we’ve ever made. We really doubt you’re going to want to miss this one! Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. After the West had been won, the gold had been gotten, this was the last frontier in America, this Godforsaken swamp. Telling a story as big as the one the Mississippi River has is a challenge. Like its drainage basin, which stretches from New York to Idaho all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, its reach is wide and diverse, like its stories. The end of episode one was like coming to an intersection that split into seven different roads

that all looked equally as promising. Each road is story. I have simply chosen a direction that suits me and seems logical. I want to talk about the settlement of the Mississippi Delta and the people who were here and the challenges that gave them their identity. We'll be veering out of the river into its floodplain because as William Faulkner said, To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi. Once again, we'll be leaning on author Hank Burdine and New York Times bestselling author John Barry

and a new voice to Bear Greece. Misty and I's dear friend raised in the Delta, Mr. Earl Jasper. This is as unique a Bear Grease as we've ever made. I really doubt you're going to want to miss this one. Faith, family, community. Keep you grounded, help keep your mind straight, and kept you to the point where you said, okay, this is the way there's right now, and you won't have to deal with this always. Just stay focused.

My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. It's not like most rivers, beautiful to the site, not one that the eye loves to dwell upon as it sweeps along, nor can wander along its bank, or trust yourself without danger to its stream. It is a furious, rapid, desolating torrent, loaded with alluvial soil, pouring its impetuous water through wild tracks. It sweeps down whole forest with its course, which disappear in tumultuous confusion, whirled away by the stream now loaded with the masses' soil which nourished their roots, often blocking up and changing the channel of the river, which, in its anger at being opposed, inundates and devastates the whole.

country around. It is a river of desolation and instead of reminding you like other rivers of an angel which has descended for the benefit of man, you imagine it a devil. A European traveler wrote this about the Mississippi River in 1837. I saw this in John Barry's book Rising Tide. She's a real beast. The Mississippi River drains parts of 31 states and two Canadian provinces and 41 percent of the continental United States. If you count the Missouri River, it's tributary, the Mississippi is the longest river in the world. Only the Amazon and the Congo have larger drainage basins. We misstated in the last episode and said that the Nile had a bigger drainage basin,

but the Big Muddy has a bigger drainage basin than the Nile. The river slopes in an average of three inches per mile runs through some of the flattest ground in the world with average speeds around nine miles per hour and 18 in a flood. The riverbed can scour 60 feet deep and fill itself back in in a month. At flood stage, the river can pump out over 4 million acre feet of water per day. In the last episode, we learned about the energy of rivers,

their hydraulic complexity and their drive to carry sediment. We learned about levees and dikes and jetties and cutoffs and got a sense of the river's sheer size. We've learned about some of the early human beings. history of the river and its importance to America. And if you'll give me the liberty, we're going to focus on the people in one particular part of the lower Mississippi, a place called the Delta. But we first have got to define the big concept of the Delta. There's two deltas. Stay with me. A river delta is a triangular shape made by the deposition of sediment as

moving water intersects a non-moving body of water and the slowing speed makes the sediment settle out. And from above, this would look like a triangle like the Greek letter Delta. The true geologic head of the Mississippi Delta starts at Cape Girardo, Missouri, and runs all the way to New Orleans. At one time, the Gulf of Mexico extended far north into America and the river filled in the ocean with sediment building this big delta. However, the term Mississippi Delta can mean a more specific region in Mississippi and Arkansas. And when people say the delta in the south, they're often referring to the alluvial floodplain of the Mississippi from Memphis to Vicksburg, which also includes the floodplain of the

Yazoo River, which flows through the interior of Mississippi and empties into the river at Vicksburg. This delta also includes the west side of the Mississippi in this stretch in Arkansas. It's the delta inside of the delta. Here's our captain Hank Burdine from Chatham, Mississippi, introducing us to the Delta. What we call the Mississippi Delta was an alluvial bottomland, an alluvial hardwood bottom land of the azou and the Mississippi deltas. It was an impenetrable jungle. Flooded every year.

It was solid hardwoods and in the swamp areas, cypress trees, your oxbow lakes, willet trees, cypress trees, cypress trees, Cypresses, you could hardly walk through a lot of the areas along the riparian banks of the rivers, creeks, and streams in here because of the dense, dense cane breaks. And you couldn't walk through them unless you hacked them with a cane knife or follow the game trail. In the woods itself, the trees were comparable to a lot of the redwoods and all out in California. because you had these massive oaks, some of them 16, 18 feet in diameter

with a canopy over the top that shaded below. So you didn't have a lot of trees underneath that brush because the sun couldn't get to them. But then you'd get up next to a creek and there was a cane break that you couldn't walk through. And it was an impenetrable jungle. It was loaded with bear, wildcats, panthers, Alligators, alligator snapping turtles, alligator gall.

You had monstrous, cotton-mouthed watermarkering, diamond-back rattlesnakes. It was a wildlife paradise, but you couldn't hardly get in here. It's hard to imagine these ancient virgin forests and cane breaks. And he didn't mention the waterfowl super highway the river was and still is today. The incredible natural resources of the Delta were protected by the flooding of the river far longer than most places in America. Mississippi became a state in 1817, but much of the western side of the state,

the riverside, was undeveloped until after the Civil War. The government levies of the late 1800s made this region habitable, but before levies it was a wild place. Here's an excerpt from John Barry's book Rising Tide about the pre-civilized Delta. The land, wrote another traveler,

was a jungle equal to any in Africa, with dense forests of cane and giant trees from which hung great clinging vines of wild grape and muskidine. The density of growth suffocated, choked off air, held in moisture, and a pulsating heat was so thick a horse and rider couldn't penetrate. Even on foot, one needed to cut one's way through. Only the trees, some 100 feet high,

burst above the choking vines and cane into the sunshine, Stinging flies, gnats, and mosquitoes swarmed around any visitors. One pioneer reported killing 14 bears in eight days. One warned of wolves and the fatted alligator, while the panther basks at the river's edge and the cane breaks, almost impervious to man, nearly as large as a young calf. They're the most savage-looking animal I ever saw. Their strong, sinewy legs with large, hooked claws like a cat could tear a man to pieces

in a trice if they chose to. The wild animals, the rattlesnakes and water moccasins, the yellow fever and malaria, made it, worried one settler, quote, almost worth a man's life to cast his lot in the swamp. Yet the river made it worth the risk. The river left gold in the delta. It was gold the color of chocolate, gold that was not in the earth, but was the earth. Elsewhere one measures the thickness of good topsoil and inches. Here, good lush soil measures tens of feet thick.

A 1901 report published by the American Economic Association said, quote, Nature knows not how to compound a richer soil. A 1906 scientific assessment concluded that the nutrients and the soil were un excelled by those of any other soil in the world. The Delta, however, overwhelmed individual farmers to take the land from the river to clear it, to drain it, and protect it required an enormous outlay of capital and labor. From the first, the Delta demanded. organization, capital, entrepreneurship, and gambling instincts. It was a place for empire.

That's a wild place. Here's Hank with how this jungle, the riverside of the Mississippi, was settled. And it was not until before the Civil War that the Delta even began being cleared. Folks would come down the river from Kentucky, get on the riverbank, which every River has a riparian bank which builds a natural levy on it itself as the floods come and the water overflows the banks. What it does, the heavier particles come out first. That is your sandier particles, your heavy loamy type things will drift down and away from that bank you get into bottom lower areas and that's where you're real silty fine, fine sands.

find dirt and loam settle down. That's what we call buckshot, gumbo. It's a real heavy clay-type dirt. Your sandier upper ground, we call sandy loam. Call it ice cream. Ice cream dirt. I mean, you can go out there and throw a kernel of corn out there and next thing. You know, you've got a corn crop.

You know, some of the most fertile dirt, as we've said, in the world. So the only areas beginning to be cleared and farmed for cotton were along the Mississippi River. The only agriculture on the western side of the Mississippi before the Civil War was right along the banks of the Mississippi River. They didn't penetrate into the interior of the Delta. That's important to understand. In 1879, less than 10% of the Delta was developed.

That means 90% of it was virgin forest. It truly was a wilderness. And here's how they eventually got in there. During that time, there weren't no roads. There were no railroads. There was no way to get in here. It was a swamp. So the state of Mississippi gave rights of way, huge tracks of rights of way to railroad companies,

to begin opening up the delta for cotton production and logging. So once the railroad companies realized the higher routes that they needed to take. take to get into the Delta. Then they began nudging into the North Delta out of Memphis. And off of those railroad lines, they'd run what we call it little dummy lines. And they'd have what we call a groundhog sawmill, easily moved sawmill. And because of the timber, the oak, the ash, the cypress, the pecan that came out of the Mississippi Delta, Memphis became known as a hardwood capital of the world. They were producing more hardwood. and anywhere else across the Mississippi Delta.

Now, as those lands were cleared by the timber companies, if it was good ground, they would sell off those excess rights of ways to folks coming in from Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, different areas, to continue the clearing and opened up for cotton production. The railroads opened up new country paid for by logging. At this time, wood was the primary construction material for almost everything. thing that man made. Once the land was cleared, it went into private ownership for farms. Here's some perspective on the timing of the settlement of the Delta.

During that time in the early 1800s, on up through the middle 1800s, as the West was being opened up, Transcontinental Railroad was completed. The gold rush had gone on in California. they had already cut the majority of the timber in the northeast, and then they hit the northwest, the redwoods, the big Sequoia areas, Washington State. This was the very last area in the country. The timber here was massive. I would ask my mom in conversations, what is so unique about the Delta? You say it's the people.

And I would say, yes, that's absolutely. I never disputed my mama on anything. But I would say, yes, it is the people. And I want a little step further. The people that were in the Delta then, after the West had been won, the gold had been gotten, this was the last frontier in America, this God-forsaken swamp.

And those people that came in here were true pioneers. They were in an uninhabitable place trying to eke out a living on some of the best dirt in the world. So when I think of that, it's that pioneering spirit that helped create the Delta to make the Delta what it is today.

And a lot of the people that are in the Delta right now today, that's their grandparents. I say grandparents. That's their grandparents. That were true pioneers that came in here opening this place up. Hank's grandparents cleared land for fields and started farming

and helped found the town of Ruleville, Mississippi. It's not intuitive to think that the Mississippi Delta region of this country was one of the last to be settled. We typically think of the West being the last region settled. However, nowhere else had such a giant flooding river. It wasn't until after the big government levies of the late 1800s that this region was truly safe to live in. Well, sort of safe.

As all of that was happening, the Delta was being cleared from the top down toward the bottom. William Faulkner would come in here and hunt. He called it to Big Woods. And he saw what was happening and wrote in one of his books that the Mississippi Delta was denier rivered, deswamped, and denuded in two generations. once those railroad started coming in, and that's what happened.

Once they learned how to live in the Delta, it opened up fast and furious. If you remember Bear Grease Hall of Famer Hulk Collier, a former enslaved man, was a market hunter who sold bear meat to log in the late 1800s. He was legitimately believed to have killed 3,000 bears in his lifetime. He was a hound hunter. You can hear that whole series on Bear Greece Episode 68, 70 and 72. It's all about Hulk Collier. And I hope you remember that our boat captain, Hank Berdyne, is one of the guardians of Hulk Collier's legacy in Mississippi. He and Minor Ferris Buchanan

worked hard to get Holt's grave turned into a monument in downtown Greenville, Mississippi. Hank can hardly talk about Holt without crying. I think that's something. William Faulkner, who Hank talked about, was from Mississippi and is considered one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century who rebirth the southern narrative to the country. He was known for his elaborate prose and for using multiple narrators called Stream of Consciousness Writing. But his big theme was exposing the sense of tragedy carried by the people in the South after the Civil War. This place was war-torn and beat up. Faulkner was known for writing about the complex racial issues in the South. Here's the quote that Hank was talking about.

It's from Faulkner's book, Go Down Moses, written in 1940. I've slightly revised this quote omitting a touch of the original language. Here it is. This delta, he thought, this delta, this land which man has deswamped and denuded and de-rivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis. and black men own plantations and ride in Jim Crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires' mansions on Lakeshore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like black people, and blacks crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks,

and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese, African, Aryan, and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which is which nor cares. No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don't cry for retribution. The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge. It's clear that, like the natural system of the river, the history of this place is complex. I don't fully claim to understand what Faulkner meant, except for one part. He was saying that the people who destroyed the physical delta drained her swamps and cut her ancient trees will self-inflict the land's revenge. He connected the social challenges of the South to its treatment of the land, which is an interesting thought.

It's almost like the richness of the soil bred a unique kind of human greed. But the South doesn't stand out in this country as the only place that has abused the land. The impact of civilization and all that that includes has been widespread. And interestingly, it seems like we're having social issues everywhere. I have a question for John Barry about the Delta. So there was a quote in the book from a geologist in 1857, and he said, whatever the delta of the Nile may have once been will only be a shadow of what this alluvial plain of the Mississippi will be. it will be the central point, the garden spot for the North American continent, where wealth

and prosperity culminate. This was in 1857, about the time that man really started to put his hand on the river. Much of the delta was still virgin wilderness at that time, a lot of it. So this is like the beginning, a look into the future of what this land could be. And as I read that, that doesn't sound like what the Delta, became. Well, you know, the Delta, and again, we're talking not just, when you say Delta, people may think the Mississippi Delta, technically the Yazoo, Mississippi Delta, but it really means a much larger area. But that area has been, you know, a tremendous agricultural producer, you know,

whether, obviously best known for cotton, but there's a lot more than cotton. So I think in that sense, the prediction, you know, pretty much came true. Okay. In terms of poverty, that's a different story. You know, you have some of the greatest discrepancies anywhere in the country. And, you know, some of those counties, you know, are among the poorest in the United States. The poverty, obviously, is a relic of slavery. And the sharecropist system, which persisted after slavery.

slavery when a tremendous amount of exploitation of African Americans, you know, school systems didn't get the same support that, you know, white schools did and so forth and so on. I just read the same quote to longtime Mississippi resident Wilbur Primos, the one from 1857, and I asked him if he thought the geologist's prediction of the Delta's success came true. Here's what he said. I think that it did. I mean, if you look right before the Civil War, Natchez had more millionaires than any city in the United States.

It all made from the Delta, on the Louisiana side, the Mississippi side. Agriculture. Agriculture, Arkansas side. And, of course, slavery was a huge part of that. And to understand that and how that came about, you know, it was to have cheap labor. And then they were brought to the Delta to be a part of that process. They even got Italians. That's why there's so many Italian farmers from the Mississippi Delta now,

because they were brought over here from Italy to be the labor. Right, to be sharecroppers. In John Barry's book, it talks about how there were in Italy, there were signs on however they were traveling to get here by boat that said, if you're going to Mississippi or if you're going to Arkansas, basically you should reconsider it's a trap. It's a scam because they brought over

all these Italians to be sharecroppers and it was like a failure. I mean, they were really mistreated and weren't, the deal wasn't as good as it should have been, but there's still lots of Italian immigrants in the South. That's right. And the living conditions were deplorable. On blood trails, the stories don't end

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or wherever you get your podcasts. For a long period of time before the Civil War, Natchez Mississippi claimed to have more millionaires per capita than anywhere in the United States. That's a wild stat. Here's Hank describing a very unusual happening in Delta culture, one that you might not expect. But during this time, as these places were opened up,

and these families were coming down here on Virginia, Kentucky, South Carolina. Somewhat, if you may say aristocratic families, that's where they came from, that's what they'd been used to. They'd build big houses. I don't like to call them mansions in the Delta. We call them big houses.

Every big place had a big house. And in those big houses, you had libraries that were filled with Shakespeare, Trost, Keats, all of these literary volumes from all over the world that these people were used to having around, used to reading. Most of those houses had music rooms filled with grand pianos, cellos, harpsichords. The music that would be played in those during party times, during social seasons, was unbelievable.

And because of that influence, so to speak, there was a literary and artistic, cultural, whether it was a revolution or just a happening that was here. And the Percy family in Greenville, William Alexander Percy, was a poet, a world traveler, and his house was filled with people from all over the world as they traveled and knew him and would come in here and visit with him. And sometimes they'd stay for a year at a time. Some folks would come in and stay and write whole books while they stayed at the Percy Mansion, which we called it in Greenville. Folks like Langston Hughes, Carl Sandberg, Malvina Hoffman, who stood under Auguste Redaane.

You had Walker Percy, Shelby Foot, hiding quarters. You had people from everywhere that gravitated in here. You had William Faulkner would come stay. And from that influence, so to speak, came. an aura of literature, culture, and all of this artistic stuff that was being held right there. And at one point in time, because of that, Greenville, Mississippi was known to have more writers per capita than anywhere else in America, right out of the middle of the Mississippi Delta. These folks wouldn't be the owners of the planations and all, they wouldn't stay all the time.

They couldn't. It's too hot for them. It was too, it was full of mosquitoes, the humidity. So they'd go back up in Mont Eagle, Tennessee. They'd go back up to Kentucky. They go back up in New York. Well, it was cool. And then they'd come back down in a wintertime and hunt. A lot of them hunted. Greenville, Mississippi has been called the most southern place on earth. It was called the Queen City of the Delta. And in the first half of the 20th century, it had more riders per capita than anywhere in the United States. Honestly, there are a lot of writers in Mississippi today. Every turkey hunter I know down there has published a book. That's a bit hyperbolic, but you get the point, and I think it's really interesting.

Hank mentioned a man by the name of William Alexander Percy from Greenville. John Barry actually devoted multiple chapters in his book Rising Tide to the Percy family because of their influence in the Delta. Charles Percy was known as the Grey Eagle. He was a Civil War hero. And for just a minute, I want to talk about the Civil War as we're building up this idea of who these Persies were. They were important. John Barry wrote chapters in his book about them.

This is important stuff. Grant and the Union Army blew up the levees to defeat Vicksburg, flooding the town, and which in Big River Country is a really low, almost unforgivable blow. Many people in Vicksburg still talk about this today like it happened yesterday. In Mark Twain's book, Life on the Mississippi, written in 1883, he talks about this very thing. And I think all these little pieces of information give us data points on understanding the South and this river. Here's Mark Twain. In the north, one hears the war mentioned in social conversation once a month, sometimes as often as once a week.

but the case is very different in the South. There, every man you meet was in the war, and every lady you met saw the war. The war is a great chief topic of conversation. The interest in it is vivid and constant. The interest in other topics is fleeting. Mention of the war will wake up a dull company and set their tongues going when nearly any other topic would fail.

In the South, the war is what AD is elsewhere. They date from it. all day long you hear things placed as having happened since the wall and the wall or before the wall or right after the wall or about two years before the war it shows how intimately every individual was visited in his own person by that tremendous episode it gives the inexperienced stranger a better idea of what a vast and comprehensive calamity invasion is than he can ever get by reading books at the fireside. At a club one evening, a gentleman turned to me and said in an aside. You notice, of course, that we are nearly always talking about the war. It isn't because we haven't

anything else to talk about, but because nothing else has so strong an interest for us. And there is another reason. In the war, each of us, in his own person, seems to have sampled all the different varieties of the human experience. And as a consequence, you can't mention an outside matter of any sort, but it will certainly remind some listener of something that happened during the war. And out he comes with it. This gives some insight into the South's interest in the war. And I think what Mark Twain said is still accurate to some degree today. At a high level, wars are fought for economics, policy, and ideology. On the ground and in the trenches, though, war is very personal, and most who are fighting are disconnected from the high-level reasons of the bloodshed.

Remember what William Faulkner said? To understand the world, you must understand a place like Mississippi. We're in pursuit on this here Bear Greece podcast to understand the world. Anyway, I want to get back to the Percy family, you know, that powerful family. And I want to say, too, that I'm going to pronounce Leroy Percy's name the same way that Hank Burdine does. you might read it and call him Leroy Percy. Anyway, Leroy Percy reorganized the levy system after the Civil War, which was a noble job, and with it came power.

But also what gave him power was cotton. Here is an excerpt from John Barry's book, Rising Tide. You should really check this book out. Two-thirds of the world's cotton supply came from the American South. The river had made the Delta soil. so lush that without fertilizer it produced far more than any other land did with fertilizer, even the black loam of Alabama. Often Delta yields doubled and tripled that of other soils. Delta cotton, for reasons of climate and soil, even had some resistance to the bowl weevil,

which had entered Texas from Mexico in 1892 and spread east at 40 to 70 miles a year and was devastating the rest of the southern crop. In the early 1900s, world textile manufacturers began to fear a cotton famine. British and northern investors poured ever more cash into the Delta. Development required three things. Protection from the river, transportation into the interior, and labor. Increasingly, labor shortages were limiting the Delta's growth. No area of the South was more short of labor than it.

In the South, of course, the issue of labor is inextricably bound up with race. It was also inextricably linked to the society the Percy's intended to create. On the issue of labor, the Percy family would play more of a role than any other. Percy reorganized both the economic problems and the need to accept a new order and advocated a solution. Planners had land but no cash. Blacks had labor but no land. They resisted working in gangs under a foreman, which smacked of slavery and oversteward. Sears. So Percy, who understood both the capital shortage and the importance of making labor content in order to maximize efficiency, advocated sharecropping. One man even credited Percy with inventing the system. And contemporaneous reports in other states did attribute the system's beginnings to Mississippi. Planners supplied the land, blacks supplied the labor and gained some independence. Profits were theoretically split 50-50. The cropper

got more if he had his own mules, making blacks and whites partners and by implication comparable, if not equal. However, abusive sharecropping later became, because of the system's implied partnership of white and black, initially whites resisted it while blacks welcomed it. The advocacy of sharecropping was not the only reflection of Percy's sensitivity to the inefficiencies of racial animosity. As Reconstruction dragged on, as the federal government, became less and less willing to support black rights with army bayonets. Percy, like most southern white leaders, became increasingly aggressive in his efforts to seize back power from the Republicans and Negroes.

But he did not want to frighten away either labor nor northern investors. Elsewhere across the South, Democrats took power by murdering hundreds of blacks, including dozens in the Delta, intimidating thousands away from the polls and perpetrating massive vote fraud, but Percy prevented the Cluclux Klan from operating in his own Washington County and no murders were reported there. On one occasion, Percy waited into a crowd to stop the lynching of a black man accused of murdering a white. Charles Percy, the Grey Eagle, was attributed by some, to creating this idea of sharecropping, which became a big part of the post-Civil War South.

Here's Hank Bredan. As the Delta was being cleared and begun to be farmed, this was after the Civil War, after emancipation, there was no slavery, and there was labor, but who's going to pay their labor? How are they going to pay the labor? You don't have money in the cotton crop until you pick your cotton. So there was a system that came up called sharecropping,

where, and this black and white people would come in, and the owner of the place would give them a house to live in, given about 27 acres of land to farm, of that which had a little garden on it in the house area. They farm normally about 24, 25 acres. He and his family, he was supplied with the mule, supply with all the implements, supplied with all the seed, fertilizers, whatever he needed,

and he had credit at the company store, at the commissary. So all during the year, he could get what he wanted, what he needed to subside on, but he grew that crop. And he was in charge of that. And then at the end of the year, when it came time to pick cotton, and the cotton was picked and sold, then was divvy up day. When you came in and the boss man going to get his share first, his cut, whatever percentage that was.

Then you took the indebtedness at the store out, and the rest of the debt on everything else and whatever was left over went to the share of crop and family. Now, some years, it wasn't bad. You had a good crop. Price of cotton was high. A man, family could get by, you know, and he had a place to live and food to eat the whole time. Wood to cut for his one-of-time heat. There was an instance where that system could be abused by the guy sitting behind the desk, you know, with his pencil.

I don't think that happened as much as a lot of people assume it may have because you wanted good people on your place and you wanted them happy. You didn't want them to get upset and leave, then you hadn't got to bite a place and farm your cotton. No matter which way you shake it, sharecropping was tough. It certainly was abused and other times it worked as it was supposed to. In 1888, Charles the Grey Eagle died at the age of 53. But his son, Leroy Percy, born in an 1860, took up the family's empire-building mantle.

Leroy Percy owned the 20,000-acre Trail Lake plantation near Greenville. This is complicated, but he grew up with and would be a lifelong friend of the bear hunter, Hulk Collier, who was the former slave of his father. Leroy became a friend of President Theodore Roosevelt after becoming the Mississippi Senator and invited Roosevelt to bear hunt in Mississippi with Holt. You guys remember that. That's when the teddy bear was created. That's a wild story.

Leroy once gave his 11-year-old son a rifle as a gift. Tragically, in 1902, another child accidentally shot and killed the boy. The Persies weren't immune to the tragedy that strikes all men. Here's an excerpt about Leroy Percy from Rising Tide. Leroy Percy had a clear conception of the society he intended to build. It would be a great agricultural factory that chested its way into the forefront of the new South, more humane than in every bit as efficient as the textile mills in North Carolina or the coal mines in Alabama. It would have rich and poor and little middle, but it would provide opportunity.

It would be a place in which a superior civilization might flourish. and although Percy was not burdened by sentimentality, he expected the society to adhere to a code of honor. If ruled by an elite, that elite would take care of its less fortunate members. This is kind of hard to believe based upon the general frequency coming out of the South in this era, but for a period of time, the Mississippi side of the Delta was a kind of oasis for blacks, and much of it had to do with Leroy Percy, who would advocate for blacks in the height of the Jim Crow era.

This isn't historical revision written by those wanting to smooth over the past. This is from John Barry's book, and I've read it in many other places. Leroy made sure blacks in Greenville were policemen, mailmen, and justices of the peace. He advocated for them getting loans and owning land. On March 1st, 1922, Leroy Percy had a... a public debate with organizers of the KKK who wish to legally enter Washington County, Mississippi. He was quoted in newspapers across the country saying, Friends, let this clan go somewhere else where it will not do the harm that it will in this community.

Let them sow dissension in some community less united than ours. I want to read another section from Rising Tide. You got to get this book. The Delta did offer blacks at least relative promise. Judge Robert R. Taylor of Indiana, a member of the Mississippi River Commission, pointed out that levies, by allowing the mining of the river's wealth, also allowed, quote, the Negro to better his condition. In considerable and increasing numbers, he is buying land and becoming an independent cultivator.

Nowhere else in the South are as favorable opportunities offered to the black man is in the reclaimed Mississippi lowlands, and nowhere else is he doing as much for his own uplifting. Percy and the men with him, whom he dominated the region, and particularly Washington County, did create something special, at least given the times. Largely because of Percy, who was on the board of one bank and influenced others, lenders did not hesitate to offer Black's mortgages. In 1900, blacks owned two-thirds of all Delta Farms, probably the highest proportion of Blacks

land ownership in the country. Also largely because of Percy, Greenville had black policemen, a black justice of the peace, and every mailman in the city was black. In 1913, the Census Bureau concluded that the plantation organization was, quote, more firmly fixed in the Yazoo, Mississippi Delta than any other area of the south. But even sharecropping could offer opportunity. Alfred Stone founded an agricultural experiment station to develop a better cotton, and as a social scientists kept meticulous records of his settlements with his sharecroppers. In 1901, the average family on his plantation cleared $1,000 after all expenses were deducted. In 1903, they cleared roughly $700. The Mississippi outside the Delta was contrasted sharply with this picture. There,

whites were driving blacks off the land, burning their barns, whipping them, forcing them to sell at a loss, murdering them. In one Mississippi County, 309 men, including the sheriff, were indicted. Some towns bragged that they were inward free. More important was an outbreak of lynchings of almost incomprehensible viciousness. What Percy created in his Washington County in much of the wider Delta was kind of wild. But then in other parts of the South, all the stuff that a lot of us have heard about was absolutely going on. But Percy and his motivations, however, were more pragmatic than one might hope. In a speech, he also stated that if all the blacks left, the economy would plummet. Charles Percy, Leroy's father, had distributed tens of thousands of a pamphlet titled

The Call of an Alluvial Empire, which spoke of the potential prosperity of the Delta. The Persies were ruthless pragmatists, and they were set on building this alluvial empire, and it required labor. One governor who was advised to put the Persies in their place said, quote, you cannot conciliate them and retain your self-respect. They demand nothing short of the earth. These guys knew how to wield power, and this labor thing had been a problem since the Civil War.

Leroy Percy was dead set on not recruiting the poor whites from the hill country of Georgia and Alabama, who were problematic and prone to make racial, issues worse. It's interesting that the KKK was primarily lower income marginalized whites. The clan did well with this group because they rallied around two common enemies, one below them, the blacks, and an enemy above them, the establishment, which they perceived to be run by wealthy Jews. In 1920, the KKK had three million members, and they called themselves the invisible empire. and they weren't even primarily based in the south.

Between 1915 and 1944, here are the top 10 states with the highest KKK membership. Indiana, Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Oklahoma, New York, Michigan, Georgia, New Jersey, and Florida. That's wild. Prior to Leroy Percy, Delta Planners had recruited even Chinese laborers from Hong Kong. and at one time there were over 50 Chinese grocery stores in Greenville, Mississippi alone. Do you remember when Holt Collier used to make the kids go buy him an orange pop and a plug of tobacco from the Chinese store before he would tell him a story? That was in Greenville.

The Chinese didn't work out, so around 1900, Percy himself went to Italy to recruit workers and hire labor agents. They would bring over thousands of Italians. and have them work as sharecroppers on Delta plantations. The experiment failed miserably. The people felt cheated and misled, and the Italian government even got involved warning their citizens not to go to Mississippi or Arkansas.

I think I'm beginning to understand Faulkner's quote about the complex social issues of this place. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a full of blood. Oh, my God. He doesn't have a hit.

Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen. backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are

no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, iHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's another excerpt from John Barry's book, Rising Tide, about LaBroy Percy. In the meantime, his views on race were as progressive as those of any mainstream figure in the nation. Percy began his speech with the observation, quote, The statement is daily heard that education ruins the Negro.

I deny that any man is rendered worse by having his intelligence quickened, end of quote. It was a long speech. It affirmed the moral reasons for educated. blacks and treating them fairly and honestly, including the fact that abusing blacks corrupted whites. Percy was an interesting character. When we applied the values of today to his life, you could find much error in his doctrine, but he was doing more than anybody else in the region at the time. In summarizing the story in the most simplistic way, Leroy Percy would never see his alluvial empire come to fruition.

John Barry said, in 1903, Mississippi elected James K. Vardaman, the great white chief governor. He was the first man in Mississippi to realize, in the sense of making real, the politics of race hatred. End of quote. Percy viewed Vardaman as pure evil, who was going to drive blacks out of the south. Vardaman would help set the tone for the next 70 years of politics in the state and in the south. Huge amounts of blacks would leave the south for good. The Roy Percy would be engaged in this fight his entire life and his son William Alexander Percy or Will Percy would inherit it. Will's

name will come up later when we talk about the flood of 1927. This series is going to wind like an alluvial river, but in the end we'll have a greater understanding of the river, its influence, in the people of the Delta. I want to introduce you. to a dear friend of the Newcomb family, Mr. Earl Jasper. He was born in Pine Bluff on the Arkansas side of the Delta in 1952. I want to hear his story of growing up as a black man in the Delta. It's one thing to read about it in a book. It's another thing to hear the voice of a man, the ultimate primary source, a man who lived there.

Meet Mr. Earl. my grandfather Avery Jasper he should have been born right after slavery ended his father Sanders yeah I'm naming these

name of his name because I keep up with the family history stuff Sanders Sanders Jasper was into slavery in other words the jaspers that come to southeast Arkansas came from South Carolina and Virginia

and came right after slavery. That's when our family, Patriot, migrated to Arkansas, southeast Arkansas. And it was not a good experience. Why didn't they come here?

They wanted to get out of South Carolina and Virginia, moving west, hoping for something better. The universal reason for human migration is hoping for something better. It's in our DNA. It's what made people cross the Bering Land Bridge. It's what made the pilgrims cross the Atlantic.

It's what made Boone go into Kentucky. It's what made Crockett go to Texas. I want to learn about Mr. Earle's early life. Okay, I was born August 12, 1952 in Lincoln County. It's between Pine Bluff and Dumas or between Dumas and Star City in that particular area. And I was born on the plantation because it was in an incorporated area. It was out in the country. And my parents were sharecroppers and then became just plantation workers after the farming went south and everything.

And my childhood in southeast Arkansas in the south during the 50s, it was a lot of outdoor time. you know now people pay guys and whatnot to go find game and look for for sports it was existence the grown-ups went hunting for food you know so you remember your dad going hunting oh yeah well my my uncle and my big brother and whatnot they they went hunting and you know it was unusual for them to bring home a rabbit know this may sound so dreadful to the 2023 crowd. You know, I get it, I get it, but you have to be there to understand it. And yeah, they went hunting in all type of games, ducks, raccoon, squirrels, all the stuff that people hunt now. And it was for a meal. I mean, I know it's unbelievable that someone

really had to get their next meal from going out in hunting. I know some of the older ones that looked at the Beverly Hillbellies and saw Granny and Jed them and all that funny stuff. That was a sort of like it wasn't as funny, but it was, that's the way it was. That's the way it was. In the Delta, you work all the time until it got where the crop was in and whatnot. and then you had to survive so many months until work time come again. These people were truly connected to the land through farming and hunting.

This was a way of life. When I was a child, my parents, they were farmers themselves. They had 40 acres, they had the land, a small amount of land. They would have to borrow money from certain larger farmers. and whatnot and to make a crop. And then after a certain other time, so many crops you failed, you will lose it and you would have to start working for someone else. And that's how the sharecropper went down to just general labor on a farm.

You have so many bad crops and you can't repay your loan. And they call in a loan and so they'll take the land and you'll stay there, You won't own it anymore. You'd be working for the people that loaned you the money for so many years to do that. And when I was small, I was born in the country out from a hospital, and that's all I knew growing up was farming. They wasn't sharecropping necessarily, that once I got to be in high school.

They were just general farmhand. To understand the economic progression of Mr. Earle's family, when he was young, they were sharecropping, which offered some independence and in a favorable year some income. This was good. However, they lost their farm and had to work on a plantation as laborers, which had little economic future other than subsistence. Growing up, like I said, during the spring, when, you know, it was cotton, keen cotton, you know, in the South, when we got out of school, they called it. horned cotton, but we call it chopping cotton, you know, grassing it and whatnot. That was a regular routine, just like kids now going to get a job at McDonald's or whatnot. We was going to the

fields. When school was out in May, that Friday, we would go to the field that Monday, and we would work it until when the cotton got to a certain height, they wouldn't have to do certain things. They didn't have all the chemicals and big equipment to spread and stuff like they do now. So once around July the 4th, can't be too big to chop. And then that's when we'll take a break. Did your family sing in the fields like you hear people talk about? A lot of that stuff is Hollywood dramatic.

But they wasn't moaning and groaning and complaining because that's just the way it was. And it was some singing, but all the time, not in the field I was in. and I went to a lot of fields during time. But you didn't have people full of anger about what was going on because of their faith. Faith, family, and community. That's what kept stuff moving forward. So you were raised on a farm, went to school at a public school there? segregated school until about my sophomore year.

What happened then? They integrated grade school system. So did your school move? Or did new students come into your school? The way that worked, they had freedom of choice, as they call it. And in Lincoln County, you had, well, I think you had four different schools. When you had the freedom of choice, the parents had the choice to let their black student go to the white school. Okay.

And yeah, the white kids could have went to the black, but we know that was. wasn't going to happen. And that's what did. It was it was freedom of choice, I think, for a couple of years. And then when it went forced integration, as they call it, when they just combine the two schools together, I think when I was a senior in high school, that was the first year. It went all the way, just graded the black and the white school, went together as one. I think I was a senior in high school. What was that like for you? Oh, boy. What was satellite. It was fights every day. It wasn't a good atmosphere. It wasn't good. But for the most part, a lot of kids taking it in its drive because that's just the way it was. It wasn't good at all,

not for a lot of kids. And you had white flight, which was not unusual. And the ones who stayed had to endure attitudes of certain teachers that did not want to teach you. And so it was an experience that I would not want my child to go through. How did you handle that, Mr. Earl? Did it cause you to become more insulated? Did it cause you to become more vocal and outspoken? Did it cause you to kind of retreat or advance? How did you survive that?

All the above. You couldn't be one-dimensional. You had to adjust to what was going on. And being respectful, you had to be respectful or else. That was sort of difficult being respectful for people who really didn't have your best interests at heart. But your parents said, I don't want to have to come to the school for any reason because of your attitude. And we knew they meant business deal with it. It's going to work out.

Okay. Once again, faith, family, community, help keep you grounded, help keep your mind straight, and kept you to the point where you said, okay, this is with us right now and you won't have to deal with this always. Just stay focused. Just stay focused. I knew Mr. Earl was involved in the civil rights movement, and I asked him when he first knew that he had to take action. This is what he said. As soon as MLK was assassinated and whatnot, that had a traumatic effect on us. We were seniors at the time in high school. And you remember the second thing happened. I remember. Where were you at, Mr. Rowe? If I'm not mistaken, I was at home with my mother because it was a news flash, they don't

call a news flash back then was breaking news, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was just shot in Memphis, Tennessee. And you're talking about shockwave in the black community. It was pouring down of emotions, all kind of emotions at the time. And the adults, you know, back then you didn't go into a present of adults listening to what the conversation were because you was a child. You know, so they was talking and talking. But I was a teenager at the time. So I was pretty much knew what were going on.

And so fast forwarded when they want to make MLK a legal holiday. And of course, the administration of our school wasn't going to be supportive of us, want to stay out of school to honor that day. And so the seniors, all of us, we said, okay, this is the day they are doing it. And this is a day we're not going to come to school. They can just do what they have. have to do whatever for that day because we were going to graduate anyway. So they would let you off a deer hunting, but they would honor what we was trying to do. So we said we'd take a deer day,

but that wasn't too good because they knew what we were trying to do anyway. That's what we're going to do because that's how important it is to us to honor his legacy by trying to show that we support that it need to be a national holiday. And at that particular, the time, it sort of springboarded from there when I was the president of the PTA and I was the president of the local NWACP for Lincoln County for years. We had a lot of different issues and whatnot in the southeast as well as the state of Arkansas. That's just some of the things. And the NAMI National Alliance mental illness that's out of Ler Rock and disability rights, I was the president of the board of both of those because those issues was important to my community and important to me also.

Everything that affected my family and my community and my church, I wanted to be a part of it. Mr. Earl is a man of action. To give a short summary of his personal history, he graduated from high school in 1970, went to college for a year, and then went to work for the railroad in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1972. and he worked there until he retired in 1997. I asked Mr. Earl how he could best help someone understand what it was like growing up in the Delta. He had an answer. It's hard for, if you haven't, to answer your question, Mr. Newcomb,

it's like males trying to understand what it is to have a baby. you really have to be all in it to understand it. So to really understand what I'm trying to say is you have to be black to really understand it. And that's not in a backhand way of trying to do anything except just it's hard to understand. Because when you try to understand, you're going to run across somebody who might say, man, you can't believe that. But if I've never been white, so I can't understand how it is to be white

when it come to certain things in society. But when it come to being a human being, we write on time. If you need oxygen, so do I. If your heart beat so many times a minute, so do mine. So human beings, we together. Now, when this different treatment come, that's when we start losing one another. But in general, your listeners, the Arkansas Delta is a great place to live.

What I would like for your listeners, the ones that are trying to wrap their mind around growing up in the Delta back in the 50s is that the black kids wanted the same. thing that the white kids wanted. They wanted opportunity. They want to be free. They want to not be looked and watch everywhere they went with a different perspective of mindset

about who doing the watching. All the black kids wanted was to have fun like all the area of one else. We have white friends down there. We did until integration came.

and they got with their friends. And then we saw, hmm, something changed when integration came and you got around your white friends. And we understood it. We wouldn't have been out of shape about it because we knew that's the way it worked. You're okay to play with us when we away from school. But when you come to school, I'm not going to even speak to you. The same kids we've been playing with all the time. Because every plantation had just about white kids, white family, and whatnot.

But growing up, that's one of the things that I would like for your viewers, your listeners, to understand is that there was the only difference in the white kids and the black kids was their skin color. Both you cut them, they bleed red blood. They may have different ethnic values when they come to religious, leave and whatnot, and they want to have something in life. Those kids did not want to have to leave the state of Arkansas to be able to get a job or to be able to get a loan to buy a house or buy a car. And we wanted to be treated just like everybody else. No special, but no less. What do you think the answer is to the problems that are in the Delta today?

Collaboration, commitment by the power to be the help, and really trying to help everyone. Equal treatment to all citizens from the one that's supposed to be doing it would change the Delta physical dynamics and loving as we say we are as Christians would change the spiritual. That would change it because you dealing every day with the physical delta person and a spiritual delta person. And believe me, that spiritual has to be strong to survive with the physical dynamics. That's what's going on.

And that's the reason why I keep going back to the church, the family, and the community. because those three, they make one complete family dynamics. I think those are wise words, maybe wiser than the academics and politicians and high dollar think tanks who set out to solve the problems of the Delta, and there are many of those, many, many, many. I counted a great privilege to sit with Mr. Earl

and hear the story of his life. I had a feeling that the story of this great river would be surprising, enlightening, and humbling all in the same current. And I think that's what's happening. We've got a lot of topics yet to cover, like the river's fishery, the history of taming this river, and even the blues.

We've got a long ways to go. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Gris. We're putting our heart and soul into these episodes, and I really appreciate you listening. Please share our podcast with a friend this week, and I look forward to talking with everyone on the bare grease ring. First Lights field wear collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends.

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