by Paul Theroux
One of Sam Chatmon’s songs, which he played with his group the Mississippi Sheiks, was “Hollandale Blues” (“My woman says, ‘Come home, Sam’”). Others were “God Don’t Like Ugly,” “Sitting on Top of the World,” “You Shall Be Free (When the Good Lord Sets You Free),” and “Nigger Be a Nigger.” My favorite (recorded by folk musicologist Alan Lomax in 1978) was “Make Me Down a Pallet on Your Floor,” which Chatmon claimed he heard when he was four years old and remembered his whole life.
From old photographs, Sam Chatmon was a slightly built but heavily bearded man, the son of Henderson Chatmon, a former slave from Terry, Mississippi, who had lived to the age of 105. Sam had died in 1983, age 86, in Hollandale. He was buried in the local cemetery.
The music, the crowds, the many cars parked under the trees, the food stalls, and the festive air—none of it could mask the fact that, like the Delta towns of Rolling Fork and Anguilla and Arcola, the place was boarded up and looked bankrupt. I mentioned this with as much tact as I could to Mayor Willis, asking about the hard times in the Delta.
“We’re poor,” he said. “I don’t deny it. Our tax base is so low.”
“How low?”
“It’s $300,000.”
“To run the whole town?”
“The whole town, yes,” he said. “We survive on grants. We just got a federal grant of $450,000. Sounds like a lot, but it isn’t.”
Given the hundreds of millions in aid, both government and private, dumped into Africa, it did not sound like a lot of money. It was the price of one above-average house where I lived in Massachusetts.
“Out of that we have to pay teachers, the firemen, the police, the town hall workers, and so much else. Infrastructure needs tending to, and that costs money. We’re said to have a population of 2,700, but it’s actually more like 3,500. No one has money, no one in this town. We got so little tax revenue, yet we got to keep going.” He sighed and lifted his baseball cap and scratched his head.
“Not easy,” I said.
“Lord, it’s not easy at all. The cotton doesn’t employ many people. The catfish plant was here. It closed. The seed-and-grain closed. The hospital closed twenty years ago. We got Delta Pine, they process seeds. That’s about it. There’s no work hereabouts.”
A white man approached us, put his arm around Mayor Willis, and hugged him with affection. “Hi. I’m Ray Schilling. See this man? He used to work for my daddy at the grocery.”
The grocery was Sunflower Food Store, in the middle of Hollandale, one of the few stores still in business. And I’d seen the other Sunflower store in Rolling Fork. Ray, like Mayor Willis, was an exuberant booster of Hollandale, and still lived nearby.
Ray said, “Over there where the music is playing? That was Simmons Street, known as the Blue Front, every kind of club, all sorts of blues. I tell you, it was one lively place on a Saturday night.”
“One of the great places,” Mayor Willis said.
“Bootleg liquor and fights,” Ray said.
But the Blue Front had quieted down in the late sixties, and the music stopped in the early seventies.
“People left. Mechanization. The jobs dried up. We’re still in business, though,” Ray said.
More people joined us, and it was beautiful in the setting sun, the risen dust, the overhanging trees, the children playing, the music, the thump and moan of the blues from the musicians onstage.
“My father had a pharmacy over there, City Drug Store,” a man said. This was Kim Grubbs, brother of Delise Grubbs Menotti, who had sung earlier at the festival. Both Kim and Delise had been raised in Hollandale.
Delise was a petite blonde with a strong voice, and she’d held her own among the gravelly voiced bluesmen. One of her songs, which she’d written herself, was “The Mississippi Delta”: “Oh, the Mississippi Delta, the flatland is my home . . .”
“We had a movie theater,” Kim said. “We had music. Yes, it was very segregated when I was growing up in the sixties, but we were still friendly, black and white. We knew everyone.”
Mayor Willis was nodding, “Yes, that’s true.”
“It was a kind of paradise,” Kim said. “How can we bring it back? What can we do?”
Gesturing to the music and the food stalls and the dancing children, all of it awhirl in the dazzle of the setting sun, I said, “This is a good start.”
Mayor Willis put his hand on my shoulder and said to me earnestly, “We can do it again. You come on back. You’ll see.”9
Doe’s Eat Place
Up the road in Greenville, looking for a place to have dinner, someone suggested Doe’s Eat Place. I knew the odd name from a satirical piece that Hunter Thompson had written for Rolling Stone in 1992, during the presidential election, when he had interviewed Bill Clinton, who had suggested meeting at “a diner called Doe’s Eat Place.”
“I nodded meekly,” Thompson wrote with his customary mockery, “and sat down in a tin chair at what was either the Head or the Foot of the table, thinking that the Candidate [Clinton] would naturally sit at the Other End, far out of reach of me. But no. The creepy bastard quickly sat down right next to me, about two feet away, and fixed me with a sleepy-looking stare that made me very uneasy. His eyes had narrowed to slits, and at first I thought he was dozing off.”
As Thompson sighed with exasperation, Clinton explained that there was a Doe’s in downtown Little Rock, that it was “a knockoff, of sorts, of a steak-and-seafood shack in the Mississippi Delta.” Though it was part of the franchise, it bore no resemblance to the original in Greenville, Mississippi.
Doe’s was not a café, not a diner, not any sort of restaurant, really. It was an enormous old kitchen with greasy walls and a much greasier ceiling and yellowing newspaper clippings praising it and smeared photos clapped to the wall. This kitchen and some side rooms were in a plain wood-frame house on a back street in a dense residential neighborhood of darkened homes. For that reason, the place was hard to find—there were no landmarks, no other stores or places to eat. I drove from the center of Greenville, followed detailed directions from street to street, and there on a corner at last was Doe’s.
The evolution of this place was odd even by Southern standards. The small building had begun in 1903 as a family grocery, Papa’s Store, run by the Signa family (apparently immigrant Italians; Signa is a municipality in Tuscany, about half the size of Greenville); among the founding Signa clan were Dominick (“Big Doe”), his wife Mamie, and brother Frank (“Jughead”). But the grocery business failed because of the Mississippi flood of 1927. This flood—one of the worst natural disasters in US history—destroyed the levee, put Greenville and many other towns in the Delta underwater, killed a thousand people, and wrecked the Delta economy for years.
Moonshining, another Southern tradition, then became the Signa family business, according to Doe’s Eat Place’s website: “Big Doe Signa went into bootlegging to help the family get back on its feet. After several years he sold his 40 barrel still for $300 and a Model-T Ford.”
Reinventing himself as an impresario, Big Doe turned the front part of the store into a honky-tonk (“strictly for blacks”) in 1941, and in the meantime, Mamie Signa had perfected a recipe for tamales, which were sold in the honky-tonk. (Greenville calls itself the “Tamale Capital of the USA.”) Whites in Greenville heard about the food, and, craving tamales and steaks but unable to enter by the front (black) door, they found their way to the back door of Doe’s, and the rear of the building became the (whites only) “eat place,” as opposed to the (blacks-only) honky-tonk “music place” out front. The website helpfully explains, “Like segregation in reverse.”
Big Doe “eventually closed the honky-tonk and focused on the eat place.” He retired in the 1970s, and his sons, Charles and Little Doe, run the restaurant now (with occasional visits from Jughead’s wife, Florence), along with a team of hurrying women and perspiring fry cooks in the hot kitchen and adjoining rooms, serving plump steaks and platters of fries in one of the most chaotic
and most accommodating eating places I found in the South.
After a dozen broiled shrimp, a side of chili, a platter of fries, and three beers, I swayed in the darkness outside Doe’s, and Greenville seemed a much mellower town.
Sunday Morning in Monticello: Church, Catfish, Football
Hearing that the juke joint Po’ Monkeys, in nearby Merigold, was closed for the next few nights—I’d wanted to stop there for the music—I drove west out of Greenville, across the new bridge over the Mississippi, into the flat fields of Arkansas. I followed the far bank of the river for a while, ducked inland, and went through the pinewoods to Monticello. There, I spent the day, first at Shady Grove African Methodist Episcopal Church—a “Pack the Pews Sunday” was planned by the pastor, Reverend Thelma Hampton—and then I walked around town and, following the suggestion of a man from the Shady Grove congregation, went to Ray’s Catfish and Barbeque, “A Monticello Tradition Since 1964.”
Monticello was a small gray town in green southeastern Arkansas, woods and farming country, nowhere near an interstate. It had once been a busy place of light industry—boat building and weaving—but that was mostly gone. Like many such towns in the rural South, the old shops in the venerable and well-planned town center—the drugstore, the grocery store, the traditional bank, and the dry goods store—had become thrift shops and secondhand dealers. Several well-stocked pawnshops thrived on the outskirts.
The Sunday ritual for Monticello citizens was to go to church—Calvary Baptist, First United Methodist, Pauline Baptist, Faith Baptist, Zion Hill, Rose Hill Free Will, Shady Grove AME, and there were six more within walking distance of the town’s main square—and after church to go out to eat lunch, at Cowboy’s or Mazzio’s or the busiest place on Sundays, Ray’s, for the catfish.
Every table was taken, and many were shoved together so that a large extended family could sit in one place, from grandparents down to grandchildren and all the others in between, a dozen or more at some tables.
Though the man who advised me to go there was black—and he claimed he was headed there himself—all the diners at Ray’s were white, a hundred or more of them.
Pausing over a plate of catfish at a crowded table, Grandpa held up his fork and said in a fat, assertive voice, “I think everyone over the age of eighteen ought to strap on an iron when he leaves the house. Yes, I do.”
“Hear that, Daddy?” a woman said, apparently to her husband, a man in a blue denim blazer and wearing a John Deere cap.
“Shoot anyone you want to,” Grandpa said.
No one challenged him, though not everyone was listening—most were eating. Satisfied with the silence, Grandpa raised his elbows and worked his knife and fork into his mess of catfish.
“If you has a reason,” Grandpa concluded in his drawl.
At the window under the sign ORDER HERE—no wait staff, Ray’s was self-service—Hannah, the cashier, said, “Now and then a black person comes in, but not very often. They get takeout mostly. Blacks kinda live on one side of town, and whites on the other.”
The patrons in Ray’s were wearing their churchgoing clothes, bright shirts and polyester pants and some of them white shoes or boots. They were eating hungrily and shouting back and forth in the facetiously aggrieved way of Southern whites in public places. The only reason I could hear Grandpa clearly (“And there’s a big ammo shortage coming, I tell ya”) was because his family table was next to mine. Small children ran among the tables, chasing each other through the restaurant; single mothers and daughters sat at some tables; and from across the room I saw a solitary biracial boy sitting with a big white family, and chipping in on the conversation.
As he had promised, the man from Shady Grove entered Ray’s by the side entrance, a single black man in a sea of whites. I wandered over to talk to him as he was saying, “To go.”
He was Marvin Hobson. Marvin had been born in the small town of Wilmar, about ten miles west of Monticello. Wilmar’s population was mostly black and poor, and even now a third of the town lived below the poverty line.
“It was very hard when I was growing up,” Marvin said. “I mean, the civil rights thing. There was fighting—mean, bad fighting—people getting hurt and some dying.”
“How did your family manage?”
“My father was a farmer, and when I say he was a farmer, I mean he had a horse and plow, on rented land.” He laughed in admiration at the memory. “That man worked! Our family picked two hundred acres of cotton, two rows at a time, a nine-foot bag dragging along behind, all day at harvest time.”
He was another older Southerner—he was sixty-two—with a memory of picking cotton, someone who could distinguish between “picking” (pinching off the loose cotton) and “pulling” (yanking at the tight boll), describing the long, narrow muslin “picksack,” and lying on the soft sack at lunchtime, marveling at the achievement of “tall cotton”—six feet high sometimes—and then the tally of the sacks at sundown, the end of the workday. I met many men and women like him, and I was to meet more of them, black and white, and very few of them ever spoke about cotton picking as misery or forced labor. What I heard—and it was distinct in Marvin Hobson’s voice—was how they could pick two or three hundred pounds in a day, and how they looked back on it with nostalgia and pride.
“My father planted cotton, corn, peanuts, and watermelon,” Marvin said. “He had that horse and plow for years. Finally he got himself a small tractor, an old Ford 8N. That’s the only one he ever had.”
Marvin’s route out of Wilmar, in the Southern tradition of self-liberation from segregated schools and substandard hospitals and general exclusion, was to enlist in the US Army, making a career of it.
“I retired after twenty-six years—82nd Airborne out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky,” Marvin said. “The last action I saw was the first Gulf War. I’m back home now—and glad to be back.”
“But business doesn’t seem to be thriving.”
“This was a busy town once,” Marvin said. “We had three carpet mills. Burlington carpets was big. Muffler plant, boats, some others. They all left—probably went to Mexico or China. All we got now is the wood chip factory over on Midway.”
Burlington Industries, maker of rugs and carpets (“tufted bath and accent rugs”), had a manufacturing plant in Monticello of a million square feet. It closed, and its 200 employees were laid off in 2005. Arvin Industries, a maker of car exhaust systems, shut its local factory. The boat maker SeaArk, once a Monticello employer of 220 people, discontinued its plant operations in 2011 after fifty-two years, though its competitor, War Eagle Boats, maker of duck-hunting and fishing aluminum skiffs, was still in business.
Marvin was probably right about Burlington taking its rugmaking to China. As for Arvin Industries, it too was in China, supplying mufflers these days to Chinese carmakers.
At this point in our conversation, standing at the takeout line at Ray’s, Marvin was handed his mess of catfish in a Styrofoam container and we were bidding each other goodbye.
“Sure enough, this is a Sunday tradition in Monticello,” he said. “Church. Catfish. Then watch football.”
“Is that everybody, black and white?”
“No, sir. White folks eat out on Sunday,” he said. “Most black folks cook on Sunday.”
That was another tradition, based on the fact that the black cook in the white household had Sunday off, to go to church and cook for her own family, while the white family went to a restaurant like Ray’s.
Hot Springs—Pleasures and Miseries
My afternoon drive from Monticello to Hot Springs was a long panning shot of sad towns and beat-up villages, Warren to Edinburg, which was poor and small and lifeless, and Fordyce, which I’d heard about in Alabama as the birthplace of the beloved coach “Bear” Bryant, a town where every store was shut or abandoned or turned into a thrift shop. At the crossroads on Fordyce’s Main Street, the faded signs and empty premises were a testament that there was no call for Benton Hardware, Farm Implements
, a dress shop, or a soda fountain in the Walmart era. Then tiny Tulip, and Malvern, which had some vitality that radiated from Hot Springs, farther along the road.
In a sudden, rocky, high-sided vale of the Ouachita Mountains, with two tall Soviet-looking buildings, one the VA hospital, the other the Arlington Hotel, Hot Springs was a surprise, a spa town with a claim to architectural splendor and the gamy smell of an old circus. The thermal-spa buildings that lined Bath Row were Art Deco marvels well restored, and narrow buildings lined steeply sloping streets on the cliffsides. Half the place was painted, decked out, yet with a residue of its vicious past existence; the other half was blandly residential. The town looked carved from rock in the mountain gap, one of the most dramatic physical settings in any Southern town.
Many signs on the main streets extolled its raffish atmosphere, its criminal history—allusions to the visits of gangsters, gloating mentions of crime, brothels, and sensational murders. “It’s hard to imagine the city as a hotbed for organized crime, such as gambling, prostitution and bootlegging,” said the Hot Springs promotional brochure, piling it on (it was subtitled “The Past Is Where the Fun Is”). “But from the late-1800s through the mid-1900s, especially in the 1930s, Hot Springs was a popular hangout for Al Capone, Frank Costello, Bugs Moran, Lucky Luciano, and other infamous mobsters. The safe, secluded scenic location of Hot Springs made it the ideal hideout.”
Of the many houses of prostitution, the busiest was “The Mansion,” owned by the celebrated Hot Springs madam Maxine Temple Jones, who catered to the rich and powerful, criminals and politicians. For decades resisting the mob, whom she ratted on in return for a pardon, she stayed in business into the mid-1960s and later wrote a book about her life and times.
“Honey, I like an old-fashioned whorehouse that has respect and dignity,” she told the Arkansas Times in 1982. “And my girls were always very proper. I always taught them what my daddy taught me: to walk tall and always remember that it’s not what you do, but how you do it.”
