by Michelle Kuo
In speaking, Richard and I quickly realized what we had in common: We both wanted to know what, after all that brutal history, people in the Delta went through today. Standing outside my classroom, we talked as a sea of students let out of fourth period moved from the classrooms to the cafeteria.
“Who’s that?” he asked, pointing at a slowly ambling figure with stooped shoulders.
“That’s Patrick,” I said. I watched Richard watch Patrick. It wasn’t just me, I realized: There was something distinct about Patrick that made you want to help him.
“What’d he do to get dumped here?” Richard asked, instantly understanding the gist of our school.
“Bad attendance,” I said. “A lot of students are sent here for that. But then we don’t help them. So then they start missing school again.”
Richard wanted to film Patrick, and within days he and two others in his film crew showed up to get some footage of him at his house. Patrick seemed flattered by the attention. Did they want to see his go-cart? We followed him to the backyard. He’d fixed the sprocket himself, he said, the chain and everything, and the only thing left was the brakes. He bent down, tightening a bolt. Then he showed them how the wheels moved: They spun flawlessly.
He looked up and beamed. It had taken Patrick just a few seconds to captivate the film crew.
“You think you want to be a mechanic?” asked the camerawoman.
“Yes, ma’am,” Patrick said.
Richard got the camera going and asked Patrick what he thought of Stars.
Patrick said a lot of nice things about me. He said I’d motivated him to come to school. He said I called or went to his house when he was absent. “None of that happened at Miller. That’s why I flunked,” he said. “That’s why I don’t think I’d never flunk here at Stars, because Ms. Kuo, she care so much.”
It made me happy to hear about myself in this way. One of the crew members turned to look at me, and I detected her admiration. Back at the school, Richard pivoted the camera toward me. I heard myself say, with the guileless passion of a zealot, “The most fundamental thing is just to make sure these kids feel cared for. And it’s that simple.”
—
ONE WEEKEND AFTERNOON in May, I took a walk through my neighborhood, trying to find the Maple Hill Cemetery, better known as the “Confederate Cemetery.” I walked past what had once been a mansion: pillars, square windows, steps leading up to the porch like a wide white ladder. A woman with Down syndrome was sitting at the top of the steps, petting a cat. She was one of the few white people left in the neighborhood.
I kept walking. A stray dog poked his head into a discarded bag of chips, and I watched the dog as two kids watched me. I waited for them to yell, “Ching chong.” Nothing—I was relieved. Soon the procession of poplars and oaks ceased, so that there was no shade from the hot sun. I began to sweat in the terrible heat. I took off a thin hoodie, revealing a tank top. My neck was dripping. The Victorian homes had disappeared and been replaced by one-story shacks so uncomfortably close to the street they revealed their interiors to passersby. Instead of glass in the windows, plastic wrap was duct-taped to the frames. Several of these buildings were churches. One marquee said: JESUS IS YOUR TICKET TO HAVEN. Another advertised: MIRACLES HERE.
More stray dogs appeared. I recognized a street name where one of my students lived and became worried that he would see me in a tank top. I put my hoodie back on. People sat outside their houses, watching me, fanning themselves. A toddler played with a dirty plastic cup.
I stopped. There, in the distance, was the cemetery, its green, sunlit hills of unseemly majesty. Large strong stones were shaded by thick trees. The entrance had an arched metal gate. It was, by far, the nicest public space I’d seen anywhere in Helena.
I ascended one hill, then another, until finally I reached a plateau of paved stone under a dense shelter of cedars. At the center stood a tall monument. I strained my neck to see the top: a sculpture of a soldier, mustached and holding a rifle. At the top was engraved, SHILOH. And then, CHICKAMAUGA. Above thirteen stars, it said, OUR CONFEDERATE DEAD.
Then, in etched capitals: THIS MONUMENT REPRESENTS AND EMBODIES HERO-WORSHIP AT THE SHRINE OF PATRIOTISM AND SACRIFICE, DEVOTION TO THE MEMORY OF THE LOST CAUSE, AND HONOR TO THE SOLDIERS KNOWN AND UNKNOWN, WHO REST IN ITS SHADOW.
“Hero-worship,” “the lost cause”—where the hell was I? Or when? In 2006, in a majority black area, where cotton production and slaveholding had once skyrocketed in tandem, one of the city’s rare public spaces still memorialized the Confederate cause.
The Union army marched through Arkansas in 1862 and took Helena, choking off supplies to Vicksburg, the site of a bloody battle in 1863. Union soldiers, twenty thousand of them, manned the defense of Helena; they evicted people, took control of farms, and freed slaves. Not just in the Delta but across the South, slaves pinned their freedom on making it to Helena. The volume of emigrants was staggering. Thousands of people poured into Helena, “wandering around the camp thick as blackberries,” as one Wisconsin soldier observed.
The Confederate Congress passed a proclamation that any black soldier who fought for the Union would be executed. They fought anyway. The first black regiments in Arkansas were formed in Helena. By the end of the war, more than five thousand black volunteers in Arkansas would serve—85 percent of these were from the Delta.
Where were the memorials to the black soldiers and refugees? How much had gone wrong in this long century that so few traces of them could be found? The black cemetery in town, called the Magnolia Cemetery, was a sorry sight, unkempt, its tombstones hidden in knee-high weeds. The neglect and erasure of these stories belong to the long, unfulfilled history of black emancipation in the Delta.
The end of slavery brought new injustices. Reconstruction helped lift black people to power, but the quick demise of that power brought more despair.
Within a decade of emancipation, a vicious system of sharecropping had already developed. It worked like this: At the end of the year, around Christmas, the sharecropper would be called to the plantation office to get paid for his year’s work. It was often a moment of bitterly dashed hope, as Nicholas Lemann writes. The sharecropper would be handed a piece of paper with a single number. Sometimes it represented the amount he owed the planter; other times, after a year’s worth of work, he’d earned just a few dollars. It could be fatal to ask for a detailed accounting. The false-promise aspect of sharecropping, the constant assertion by planters that your poverty was your own fault—you and he were simply business partners, your loss was right there in cold type on the statement—made it especially painful, Lemann writes. As a sharecropper, you found your life was organized in a way that bore some theoretical relation to that of a free American—and yet the reality was completely different. There were only two ways to explain it, and neither one led to contentment: either there was a conspiracy dedicated to keeping you down, or—the whites’ explanation—you were inferior, incapable.
The fever of a black emigration movement to Liberia testified to the desperation of rural black Southerners. Helena became the birthplace and hotbed of activists for this early Back-to-Africa Movement. The first convention of the Liberian Exodus Arkansas Colony took place in Helena, at the Third Baptist Church, in 1877. Still, very few would make it to Liberia—no more than one hundred people from Phillips County; they were too poor and too far inland, and white planters would not release them from their fabricated debts.
At around the same time that black people in Helena were organizing to get out, Frederick Douglass vigorously denounced any kind of movement in favor of migration, whether west, north, or to Africa. Great work, he exhorted, needed to be done in the South. For Douglass, the South was a home and homeland, a ground of his political powers and possibilities. In 1879, he declared, The colored people of the South, just beginning to accumulate a little property, and to lay the foundations of family, should not be in haste to sell that little and be off to the banks of the Mis
sissippi. A man should never leave his home for a new one till he has earnestly endeavored to make his immediate surroundings accord with his wishes. The habit of roaming from place to place in pursuit of better conditions of existence is never a good one….It is a more cheerful thing to be able to say, I was born here and know all the people, than to say, I am a stranger here and know none of the people.
Douglass’s optimism fueled his insensitivity. If black people could fight and win the Civil War, they could fight and win their freedom now. For as much as black emigration reflected the assertion of power of individual black people, it also admitted the triumph of mean and lawless Southern states. Above all, Douglass was a dreamer: He believed in the promises of Reconstruction, refusing to accept that it was a dead project. He had not anticipated that black people would express freedom by abandoning the South he’d hoped to reconstruct. The world’s most famous fugitive wanted black people to stay in the South.
Douglass was in the minority. Other black leaders understood, more profoundly than he did, that the oppressive institutions of the South would continue unfettered and uncorrected.
This was true in Helena. Like other states across the South, Arkansas jailed ex-slaves as a way of extorting their labor. Before emancipation, jail populations were mostly white, as masters needed their slaves’ labor and bailed out any who were arrested. But after emancipation, these jails’ inhabitants were disproportionately black. Local courts acted as a conveyor belt for labor-starved employers throughout the state, as the historian David Oshinsky writes. Charges were minor, and sentences harsh. In Phillips County, two ex-slaves were convicted for forging orders for one quart of whiskey; one got eighteen years in prison, the other thirty-six.
One former slave described the new system as worse than slavery, because the freedom was fake and the game rigged. Ex-slaves and their children continued to do the same work that they’d always done: building levees, clearing swampland, and harvesting cotton. Industrialization soon made the work even more perilous. Coal mines, sawmills, and railroad camps had a high number of fatalities.
Still, other sources of dignity persisted and bloomed. Black parents started their own schools. In Phillips County, a shady grove served as a classroom. Another classroom was a floorless mule stable. Quakers from Indiana came to help; locals called them “nigger teachers and nigger spoilers.” Black soldiers stationed in Helena raised two thousand dollars to help the Quakers build Southland College, soon to become the first black institution of higher learning west of the Mississippi River. And there was always the blues. Saloons and juke joints were packed with people who danced, flirted, fell in love, and shared the bootlegged liquor that, in Arkansas, flowed more freely than in Prohibition-strict Mississippi.
But the blues and the free schools could not stop the violence propelled by white supremacy. From the end of Reconstruction to the Second World War, more lynchings occurred in Phillips County than in any other county in America. During the Elaine massacre, as the historian Nan Woodruff writes, one teacher in Phillips County witnessed twenty-eight black people killed, their bodies then thrown into a pit and burned; he saw sixteen more hanging from a bridge near Helena. Grif Stockley cites a Memphis newspaper’s account, Enraged citizens also fired at the bodies of the dead negroes, as they rode out of Helena toward Elaine. And a local resident testified, “When we saw them shooting and burning them we turned running and went to the railroad east from there, and the white people tried to cut us off. They were shooting at us all the time….By 5 o’clock that evening, there was near 300 more white people coming on with guns, shooting and killing men, women and children.”
In 1923, four years after the massacre, the desire for violence still raged: Over ten thousand people attended a Klan rally in Helena, arriving from Tennessee and Mississippi. Meanwhile, an NAACP field secretary visiting the Arkansas Delta had recently concluded that rural districts of Arkansas are more unsafe for colored people today than they were thirty-odd years ago; perhaps more than they have ever been.
Masses of people left Arkansas. Instead of Liberia, they aimed for the North. In the 1920s and 1930s, Arkansas saw a higher proportion of its people leave than any other state in the country. One-third of its black population left. Then came a transformative machine, the mechanical cotton picker: It could pick a thousand pounds of cotton an hour; a human could pick just twenty. Suddenly, black labor—indispensable to the Delta for nearly a century, for which a bloody civil war had been fought, vagrancy laws invented, jail sentences falsely imposed, penitentiaries built, rebellions crushed, and schools closed during planting or picking season—was an anachronism, and blacks were cast off like old shoes. Those who could go north continued to do so. The exodus grew.
In Arkansas, as across the South, the people who left tended to have higher education and some connections. Those who remained, often living in the most remote and interior parts of the Delta, lacked means to leave. They could not read or write. And they were afraid: of violating their “contracts” with their employers; of violent reprisals against family and loved ones who could not leave; of places that were unknown and unfamiliar. Bad conditions could impel one to leave, but they could also sap one’s strength to go. Much has been said about the difficult and courageous journeys of those who migrated to cities like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. But few have considered those who stayed. Perhaps, then, Douglass, who was so unfeeling toward the black migrants of 1879, can be forgiven: He was expressing sympathy for those who stayed behind.
Living in the Delta today meant living under the shadow of this age-old question: Do you have the means to leave and live elsewhere? I was beginning to grasp that the Great Migration of the early twentieth century—like the Civil Rights Movement, like the emancipation of slaves—offered its own parable of salvation. In this story, black people made a choice to gain freedom by breaking out and merging into the teeming melting pot of the North. In this story, escape was heroic: You got out, you fled north, you did it for your children, you did it for your dignity, you did it to survive. In this story, what matters is not so much where you left but that you did. In this story, where you left—the Delta, the Black Belt, the whole Deep South—hardly existed. Eventually, like a bad memory, like the past itself, it would disintegrate.
So the story of the Great Migration shrouded from view those who could not leave or those who chose to stay. They were, likely, among the most destitute. The ones with the least contact with the outside world. The ones most accustomed to defeat. And yet they—perhaps by virtue of these very characteristics—endured. They grew old, they had children, and the world their children entered was bleak. There were few jobs. The schools were bad. The stories of mob violence seemed far away. The main thing, some told their children, was that you had to lift yourself up on your own.
Patrick, Miles, Tamir, and the rest of my students were descended from the people who had been left behind.
—
IN A WEEK, my parents were due to arrive for their visit, and I still hadn’t told them that I planned to stay in Helena. My friends gathered to help me strategize.
“Wait until the end of the weekend before you tell them,” one said. Another disagreed. “Tell them from the beginning. Get it over with.” “No, no,” said another, “wait until after they’ve seen everything.”
Until after they’ve seen everything. This made me hopeful. A plan was made. We would eat cornbread and ribs. I would show them my classroom. Wall by wall, picture by picture, poem by poem. I would take them to an event called “Delta Idol,” a big fundraising event for a Boys & Girls Club that my friends were starting. Kids from across Phillips County, from Elaine to Marvell to Helena, would dance, sing, read poetry, and perform. DeSoto kids would take part, too, making this event the first one in a decade at which white and black students shared a stage. I’d show them the press release my friend Danny and I had written, which the newspaper had published verbatim.
And last, everyone agreed, I needed to clean
my house.
—
FOR THE WEEK before my parents’ arrival, I’d planned a field trip to Cleveland, Mississippi, for a workshop on rap and spoken word. I’d begun doing this more regularly, picking up a few students in the morning and taking them on day trips—to the Memphis Library, to Beale Street, to bookstores.
I was a bad driver, which pleased my students. They caught every mistake I made: a missed turn; a bump over a curb; a red light skipped. Once, having pulled into the wrong driveway, I backed the car into a mailbox trying to get out. “Shit,” I said.
Patrick, usually brooding, was delighted.
“Aw, Ms. Kuo cussing!”
“Ms. Kuo, you get your license from a Cracker Jack box?”
“You’re supposed to teach us, not kill us.”
“Man, this how people in China drive? I’m never going there.”
“Don’t call her Chinese! Ms. Kuo was born in America,” Patrick offered.
“But she’s still Chinese.”
They liked that in my car there were fewer rules than in my classroom. What this meant, practically speaking, was that they could bicker without fear of reprisal.
They liked, too, the opportunity for music. They fiddled with radio stations and rummaged through my CDs. They never took to my repertoire of Nick Drake, Sufjan Stevens, Iron & Wine. They squabbled over who got to choose what music.
Patrick was the one who found my 2Pac CD. He put on “Changes” and tapped his fingers along the dashboard. “Man, it’s getting crunk in here,” Tamir said from the backseat. “Tupac, he’s hard.”
Up front, Patrick was listening to the words.
“But you made it in a sleazy way, sellin’ crack to the kid,” he repeated to himself as he peered out the window.
I followed his line of sight: a boy, no more than eight years old, riding a scooter. Patrick nodded at the kid, who saw Patrick and, staring at him distrustfully, rode on. “Do you know him?”
“Naw,” he said. “Just trying to be friendly.” He began to hum.
