RACISM

I was born in 1945 in Greenwood, Mississippi, ten miles from Itta Bena, Mississippi, where I spent the first six years of my life in the Delta land of cotton farmers, one of whom was an uncle who married my mother’s oldest sister and lived near Inverness and Morehead. They had two sons, my cousins. The oldest was 13 years older than I am and became my mentor of sorts beginning in my early teens, which meant staying two months each summer with him and his wife and children well into my college experience. They had a country store on the place and employed, probably 50 or so field hands who hoed weeds where the cotton grew and picked cotton when the mature seed pods of the cotton plants burst open at harvest time to expose the fluffy cotton fiber inside. The seed pods are about 2-inches in diameter and weigh 2-4 ounces. They were hand-picked by the black laborers with a six to eight foot long cotton sack looped at one end over a shoulder and dragged behind them down the rows of cotton. When their cotton bag was filled with the ripened seed pods, they would drag their bag to a trailer with a scale on it to be weighted and dumped into the trailer to be taken to the cotton gin where the fibers were removed from the pod and pressed into a bail about six feet by four feet by two feet, to be taken to a mill and turned into clothing.

The field hand were paid a penny a pound for their bags of cotton. They lived in shanties on the plantation that provided little shelter against the rain, heat and cold. They had no running water and had to walk to a single faucet standing upright in the cotton field near their house to fill jars with water for drinking and bathing.

They bought what they needed for life at the country store. They were paid a pittance for their work in the field and spent the money they made there for what they needed at the store. Theirs was a life of extreme poverty with no hope of ever being more than it was.

I moved to Louisiana in the fourth grade but returned to Itta Bena during the summer reentering the culture as a child and a teenager. I was appalled at the system of apparent, if not actual, slavery, and have carried throughout my life the shame and anguish of having no means of altering the outcome of that practice throughout the south in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s etc. and to some extent even today.

Restitution is in order and it will not be delivered. But I am a witness, and I will never forget what I have seen and know to be so. It is atrocious and a crime against humanity, and will be forever, a crime never to be forgotten by all the perpetrators throughout eternity.