by Paul Theroux
Ninety acres, a family smallholding, with a mule-drawn plow and mule-drawn wagons—it was the 1950s, but in terms of equipment, it was a glimpse into the distant past. And the era was archaic in Arkansas terms. Any sort of racial conflict in 1950, especially in a small white town, could turn into serious trouble. Earmer Senior, proud and premonitory, had had a bad feeling in Parkin and acted upon it.
“It was all cotton then,” Ernest said. “We young kids was choppin’ cotton.” He explained that chopping is weeding the cotton plants, hacking around them, clearing them with a hoe. “After that, picking cotton by hand. That was some hard work. First time I chopped cotton I was nine years old. I chopped all day for my neighbor. He was a black man. He said to me, ‘I like what you do. You come back tomorrow and I’ll pay you.’ Huh!”
Ernest grew, the farm grew, his brothers each built a house on the property, and they farmed together, their sons now too, a classic family farm—an extended family, living together in their own small community of one-story brick houses and high sheds, with a million dollars’ worth of green and yellow tractors and harvesters. The family had stopped growing cotton twenty years ago and now concentrated on sorghum and milo and rice, like the other farmers.
“I believe farmers got to stop telling their sons to leave,” Ernest said. “We know why our parents told us to leave. Because it was so difficult.”
Seeing us, Ernest’s older brother, Earmer Junior, had walked over as Ernest was speaking. He said hello and took a seat. He wore a battered wide-brimmed hat and faded work clothes. He was in his mid-seventies, but heavy work had clearly taken its toll on his body, and his hands were knotted and arthritic. He eased himself onto a stool, then sighed and said, “Sure was.”
“But we don’t suffer physical abuse no more,” Ernest said. “Now it’s more mental and financial.”
Earmer Junior nodded and looked at his shoes, which were battered and dusty, like his hands when he leaned to tighten the laces of one.
“But there are benefits,” Ernest said. “You can make a good living. Anything worthwhile is worth fighting for. We’re still trying to prove ourselves. Years back, we’d look for finance. It was hard. The loan officers in the Farm Service Agency in the 1970s used to say, ‘I’m not going to give you the loan. Y’all won’t to be able to farm next year.’”
“What was your reaction to that?” I asked.
“We didn’t give up,” Ernest said.
Earmer Junior said in a gruff, downright tone, “Man said to me, ‘Blacks got no business farming.’”
“In the 1970s?”
“Last year.”
“Dumb as a box of rocks,” Andre said, and blew out his cheeks in frustration. “The black farmer has to put up with more resistance than the others. It’s not on paper, but it’s true. We can feel the opposition.”
With the sun lower and a slight breeze ruffling the leaves of the oak trees that shaded the houses, we walked around the sheds and barns, among the machinery, and then I got into Ernest’s pickup truck and we toured some of his fields.
“A lot of white people have helped us,” Ernest said. “But if you can tell a white farm from a black farm, you in trouble.”
An Agitator at Cypress Corner
Sometime during those days in the Delta, driving again, this time with Roger Smith and Larry Terry, we stopped for lunch at Cypress Corner Bar-B-Q, on Highway 1 outside Marianna. The diner was popular with farmers, set in what had been an old corner store at a crossroads in the middle of plowed fields, no other structure around it. Near a stern sign forbidding the use of cell phones at the order desk was the menu: pork and beef barbecue, catfish and hamburgers, with the usual sides of beans, hush puppies, coleslaw, and fries.
I had the sense, entering, the screen door loudly slapping behind me on the twang of its spring, the place full of white farmers, that I was intruding on a men’s club, a roomful of muscular outdoorsmen and portly, like-minded members sitting together and conferring. They dropped their voices when Roger and Larry and I—just as farmer-looking in our old clothes—took the only empty table in the middle of the room. We got no greeting, but neither was there any hostility. Something else occurred, a soundless vibe—averted faces, the odd glance, one from a man in a feed cap with a jaw like a ham. Conspicuous at our table, we were conspicuously ignored in a room otherwise full of cordiality.
When you’re strange, I was thinking. In Little Rock, at the John Lewis event in the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, a hall full of attentive blacks, I had attempted to hold a conversation with the well-dressed members of Lewis’s entourage and local greeters. I had failed, got what I took to be an unmistakable rebuff, something rare for me in my Southern travels. I had a flicker of insight, that they regarded me disapprovingly as a peckerwood or a cracka.
Here at Cypress Corner I was strange again, in a new context, not peckerwood enough, sitting among thirty white farmers, picking at my barbecue with two black farmers, the only blacks in the place. And the silent message I felt was that I was that much more dangerous an outsider, probably a Yankee, undoubtedly a subversive, definitely an agitator.
Harvest
Standing at the edge of a field bursting with tassels of medium-grain rice—“We call it Jupiter rice; we export it to those countries that like to eat medium grain, like China and Japan”—Andre Peer pronounced his harvest a success. He plucked a stalk, and in a flourish swept the air with its heavy tassel of rice grains as though in benediction. He hoped to have 30,000 bushels, at roughly $6.50 a bushel, and would harvest the rice in a few days with the same combine he used to harvest his soybeans.
“What’s driving the price up here is the floods in California this year,” Andre said. “They couldn’t get their rice planted. But even so, I’m still a small farmer. My neighbor has thirty-five hundred acres of rice.” He plucked one of the tassels and handed it to me. “I didn’t inherit any land like he did. He’s on his forty-third crop.”
I mentioned how I’d heard, from Dr. Calvin King and others, that a great number of African Americans owned land that they didn’t farm, that even some large landowners showed up at food pantries, and that many had sold their inheritance.
“A lot of African Americans don’t want to use their land,” Andre said. “That’s also called being lazy.”
“Mind if I quote you?”
He raised his hands and shouted, “You go right ahead! Hey, they ain’t makin’ no more land. But who wants to get up at four in the morning and rassle with this?”
The complexities of farming were daunting. His farm loan was almost half a million dollars. His equipment and labor costs were very high—his used combine harvester cost $270,000. He had seed to buy, land to rent, and two huge grain bins (recently built for $212,000) to pay off—another note at the bank. “They don’t want black people to own these,” he said, “because this makes us independent.” Each bin held 32,000 bushels, and one was almost full, with $128,000 worth of yellow corn kernels. All this detail made my head spin, and it was easy for me to understand someone who was unable to face the complexities of farming.
“This is like money in a bank,” Andre said as we stood on a ladder at the top of a grain bin, looking down at the brimming yellow kernels. “If I need money, I can sell some of it.”
But, he insisted, he was a small farmer, and from a year of working every day, of struggling to get loans, of worrying about fickle weather, of planting and weeding and fertilizing, of finding workers and keeping machinery in good repair, he hoped to make a profit of $100,000.
“Maybe more, depending on prices.”
Roger Smith reported a good harvest, and so did the Cox brothers. Rickey Bone had bad news: although he was only thirty miles north, he had experienced heavy rains, flooded fields, and—except for pumpkins—a failed crop.
Lunch Under the Pecan Tree
Samuel Ross, whom I had last seen at a table in Fargo, was climbing down from Andre’s combine harvester when I approached, walking across
a stubbly, just-cut field of straw-like soybean chaff on a very hot Delta day. This was in the flat, dusty land outside the town of Marianna.
“I own this field. I rent it to Andre,” Samuel Ross said, laughing. “By running the combine and getting these soybeans in the truck, I’ll be sure to get my money from him.”
But he was less a landlord than a good neighbor, helping out in this frantically busy time. The truck, shaped like a tanker, was nearly full with a thousand bushels of soybeans, harvested that morning; ten thousand dollars’ worth of beans would be taken to Helena later today to be weighed and loaded onto a river barge.
Two other men, Vaughn and Roy, were headed across the field to the yard of a deserted shack and the shade of a pecan tree and a nearby garden. The dusty, thumb-sized nuts were scattered on the ground. Staked tomato vines and bushes of snap beans filled the garden, and one edge of it was untidy with a tangle of yellowing watermelon vines and some plump watermelons that had straggled into the tall grass. A young man whose name I did not hear hugged a watermelon to his chest. He placed it on the back gate of Andre’s pickup truck and slashed it open with a hacker, offering pieces to the rest of us.
To thank this helpful crew, I had just come from Marianna with the lunch they’d suggested, two buckets of fried chicken and containers of mashed potatoes and gravy. It was midday, the temperature in the nineties, all of us gathered in the shade of the pecan tree. These men had been up since before dawn, and this was their first meal of the day. Their shirts were soaked with sweat, their boots dusty. Samuel Ross, who out of respect for his age they called Mr. Ross, wore a straw hat that was sweat-stained too.
We ate in silence for a while, and then I asked Vaughn where he’d been born.
“Around here, nothing interesting,” he said, a piece of chicken in his fist. “Ask Mr. Ross—he got the stories.”
“Mr. Ross?”
“I was born in Indianola, Mississippi,” Mr. Ross said. “Nineteen forty-six. My father was sharecropping for a white man—cotton, about twelve acres, maybe less. Small place.”
“What sort of life was that?”
“Sharecroppers are always in debt,” he said. “You plant, you work, and all that time you’re getting credit at the store. But at the end of the picking you don’t make enough to pay off your debt at the store, or your rent to the owner. So that debt is added to the next season, and what you owe gets more and more. You’re always owing. Gets so you never able to pay it off.”
He was describing the situation known as peonage, or debt slavery, the sharecropper tied to the landowner in a never-ending and impossible trap of owing.
“There were five of us kids, and my mother and father,” Mr. Ross said. “We all worked. We picked by hand, we chopped. I was just a little kid, but I worked in the fields too.”
He was still eating, mopping his brow, taking his time, in the lacework shade of the pecan tree boughs.
“So what happened?”
“We come to Marianna—Aubrey, in fact, which is nearby, where my mother had an auntie.” He chewed slowly.
“I see,” I said, but it seemed anticlimactic, the sudden shift from Indianola in Mississippi to this small town across the river in Arkansas.
“That’s the story,” Mr. Ross said. “It was dangerous.”
“What was dangerous?”
He tossed his chicken bone into the trash bag and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. He took a drink of soda, then said, “Dangerous leaving at night. Dangerous because we owed money. Seven of us in the car. We had to be right careful. We’s sharecroppers with no rights. If they catch you, no telling what they do.”
“You had to escape?” I said.
“That’s right. At night. Seven of us in the car. Maybe two in the morning my daddy woke us up. We didn’t know he was fixin’ to run. We had to get out so fast we left everything behind—pots and pans, chairs, clothes, everything. All we had was the clothes we was wearing.
“That’s dramatic—scary too.”
“Very scary,” Mr. Ross said. “We got in the car in the dark. It was a Chevrolet. This was 1953. My father was worried he’d get caught and dragged back. We drove all the way to the Mississippi and waited for the ferry to Helena.”
Afterward, looking at their risky, desperate flight on a map, I saw that they would have driven a long way, probably on back roads, north to Drew or Cleveland, and then to Clarksdale, over seventy miles in the dark, in an old car, and another thirty miles to the ferry landing, more than a hundred miles altogether, all the time fearing that they were being followed by the angry landowner, threatening capture and punishment. They were leaving a county in Mississippi that was near Leflore County, where, one year later, Emmett Till was lynched for being insolent—“biggity”—to a white woman.
“They were no bridges then, just the ferry,” Mr. Ross said. “I was six-seven years old, but I remember it all. Crossed over through Helena, came to Aubrey, and we were taken in by the auntie. And then things changed. We sharecropped cotton, but we made money here, because the owner of the land was black. Robert McCoy. He had a one-hundred-percent different attitude from the man in Mississippi. We raised sorghum, cotton, and our own hogs. I drove a tractor when I was thirteen. This was ’58, ’59. I got five dollars a day.”
“No more debt,” I said.
“We were never in debt after that.”
With the money he’d saved, Mr. Ross’s father bought some land, and later Mr. Ross himself added to it. He was now a large enough landowner to rent some acreage to Andre and, at this time of year, to help with the harvest.
We were still standing under the tree, eating. Then Vaughn and Roy went back to loading the soybeans, leaving Andre and Mr. Ross and me in the shade.
“Mr. Ross has the stories,” Andre said.
“That was a good one,” I said. “I’ve got another question, a personal one.”
“Go ahead,” Andre said.
“I’m just wondering, did anyone ever use the n-word with you?”
“No one ever used that word on me,” he said. “I have never encountered it.”
“I’m a little surprised.”
“It doesn’t mean black person, you know,” Andre said. “It means abuse. Look it up in the dictionary.”
“I’ve looked it up,” I said. “It means black person.”
“But it also means abuse,” he said, and as he talked, he tidied up the chicken bones and soda cans and watermelon rinds, filling a trash bag. “Funny thing. We were over at the garage in Marianna, and there’s two white guys in the back working on an engine. They didn’t see us, but we could hear them. One says, ‘You’re getting on my nerves, you damned nigger’—to a white guy!”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing to say. We’re just standing around the corner, out of sight. But then the guy who said it came out and saw us. He said, ‘I apologize for that. I didn’t know you was here.’”
“You weren’t offended?”
Andre sighed, bugging out his eyes, as he often did when he took me to be obtuse or slow to understand. “He was saying it to a white guy!”
Mr. Ross said, “No one ever used that word against me. Maybe they said it about me some other place, behind my back, but I didn’t hear it.”
He stretched and yawned, preparing to walk back to the combine and finish the day’s harvesting. He saw me writing in my pocket notebook, recording the details of Andre’s story about the garage.
“Ask the older folks,” Mr. Ross said. “They probably got a different story.”
“The Whole World Is a Family”
In circulating around the Arkansas Delta, I kept moving and seldom stayed in the same motel two nights in a row. One afternoon, at a motel near Forrest City, a man dragging a suitcase out of his car in the parking lot saw me and said, “You’re going to like this place.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I smiled.
“It’s clean, not like the others.” He leaned closer. “No Indians.”<
br />
He was referring, without saying the name, to the inevitable Mr. Patel.
The motel was fine, clean, well swept, with the customary complimentary breakfast of orange Kool-Aid, brown-spotted bananas, and Froot Loops in a Styrofoam bowl. The clerks were older white women, the cleaners Hispanic.
Passing through the lobby, I was greeted by a smiling Indian, who introduced himself as the owner and manager.
“You can call me Bee,” he said. “Kind of a nickname.”
“Bee for what?”
“Bert,” he said. “Bert Patel.”
That made me smile. I said, “I think your birth name is more exotic.”
Now he smiled. “Bhakti,” he said. Bee and Bert were unremarkable names, but Bhakti, in Hindi, means devotion.
His was the old story: Born in Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, he had come to America as a student decades ago. Engineering. He had stayed. His marriage had been arranged in India. And like the thousands of other Patels, former students, recent arrivals, he had become a motel owner in the South.
“Warm weather is a factor,” he explained, for his choice of region. As for the motel business: “Indians can’t run restaurants, because we are Hindu, and the selling of meat would be a problem.”
“Why a problem?” I asked, baiting him.
“How can you run a restaurant and not taste dishes?”
“No meat for you.”
“No meat.”
“What about life here in Arkansas?”
“Life is good.”
