What Is The Mississippi Delta

The good Lord made some people to heal us.  My new friend Jennifer gave me a copy of Delta Hot Tamales by Anne Martin.  Jennifer's mom runs Sollys in Vicksburg, so she knows a thing or two about Tamales.

You have to be careful with Delta girls.  They'll steal your heart, and you'll never get it back.  Lord knows, there are pieces of mine from Memphis to Natchez. I don't regret a minute of it.  Lightning can strike the same spot many, many times.

It begs the question, though, what exactly is "The Delta."   In season six, episode one of Andrew Zimmerman's Bizarre Foods about Delta cuisine, he covers Sollys in Vicksburg, but he also includes Jackson and reviews The Big Apple Inn and Walker's Drive-in.  Lord knows I love Big Apple Inn and Walkers, but is Jackson The Delta?  I never heard such, but The Food Network seems to think so.   

A geologist will tell you the Mississippi Alluvial Plain includes parts of Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.  Flooding the Mississippi River as it goes into the Gulf of Mexico creates it.  It only looks like a triangular delta when it gets to New Orleans.  Is New Orleans The Delta?

Fay Wray with Debbie Reynolds
Tammy and the Bachelor (1957)

You've probably heard that The Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and runs to Catfish Row in Vicksburg.  Sometimes, it's the duck-pond fountain in the Peabody to Under the Hill in Natchez.  These definitions have been used so long that I"m struggling to find out who said it first.  It's often attributed to Twain, but I'm not ready to plant my flag there just yet.  

Fay Wray once told me she made a movie about The Delta with Leslie Nielson set in Natchez, so as far as I'm concerned, Natchez is in The Delta.  I'll take Fay Wray's side on anything. The film was based on the book Tammy Out of Time, written by Cid Ricketts Sumner, a Millsaps Alumni, and produced the hit Tammy's In Love, sung by Debbie Reynolds.  

Why the Peabody Hotel, though?  Before cotton was king, The Delta primarily grew tobacco.  Cotton was easy to grow but difficult to process. Ely Whitney changed all that with his Cotton Gin.  Once Mississippi started growing cotton, they had to get it to market.  The river flows north to south, so all our cotton and tobacco went downstream to New Orleans for many years, with growers cashing in there and making their way home with the profits as best they could by the Natchez trace.  

When the steam engine came to the Mississippi,  up-river was as easy as down-river, so the Cotton Exchange in Memphis became the financial center of the Delta economy, with the Peabody just scant blocks away.  Planters traded their cotton for coupons at the Cotton Exchange and spent them at Beal Street and the Peabody.  Don't ask what they spent it on.

So, does cotton define The Delta?  My great-grandfather grew an awful lot of cotton and corn outside of Kosciusko in Hesterville.  Is Attala county The Delta?  Many farms in The Delta don't even grow cotton anymore; soybeans are easier on the soil and often more profitable. What about catfish and rice?  India and China grow almost twice as much cotton as the United States. Are they The Delta?

Maybe The Delta is political.  Despite being yellow-dog Democrat for many years, the Mississippi Delta was one of the most conservative places in the United States.  Florida passed them years ago, and now the Mississippi Gulf Coast is far more conservative than The Delta.  

What about culture?  If you go by country of origin, Mississippi Delta citizens include African, American Native, French, Spanish, English, Scottish,  Irish, and Italian.  Toward the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, Jewish, Hispanic, Chinese, Indian, and East Asian peoples started populating The Delta.  Religiously, you'll find Catholics, Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Methodists (united and independent), and don't forget about the Jewish, Muslim, Shinto, and Buddhist congregations.  

Shelby Foote is from Greenville, but some of the most famous writers about The Delta aren't even from there.  Eudora Welty is from Jackson, and William Faulkner is from New Albany. Is that The Delta?

If you're from here, you know many parts of Mississippi aren't The Delta if you're from here. There's The Coast, The Piney Woods, The Golden Triangle, and more.   But, If you're not from Mississippi, you probably think it's all Delta.

Maybe, The Delta is what you say it is.  Andrew Zimmerman and his producers seem to think so.  Try telling people not from here that Elvis was born in Lee County, not The Delta.    I don't want to start any arguments, and I'm not one to tell you how to think, but if you're from here, you really should have an opinion on this.

The Kidnapping of Annie Laurie Hearin

 This story is pretty hard for me to tell.  Those are the stories worth telling though, so bear with me.

July 1988.  I still worked for my dad at Missco and lived at Pebble Creek Apartments in Jackson.  I opened the mail with my dad at six-thirty that morning.  He was uncharacteristically silent. It was the busy season, and the company was doing well.  Usually, I'd have coffee and chat with Mrs. Jeffreys, Mrs. Noel, and him after finishing the mail until eight am when the workday started, but he went straight to his office that day.  I began to suspect something was up.

Three or four times during the day, he asked his secretary to close the door to his office.  That rarely happened.    I knew something was up, but what?  That night, I brought laundry to my mom's house.  There were machines at Pebble Creek, but I had a bad feeling, so I used hers.  My brothers were at their homes, and my sister was with her college friends.  

My dad watched television in the den without making a sound.  I made a fried egg sandwich in the kitchen while my laundry cycled.  Mom sat in the kitchen, watching her little television and drinking her scotch and tab (I know that sounds gross, but it was her drink of choice).  She held the plastic glass in her hand but didn't sip it while the ice melted.  She didn't want a sandwich.  My dad didn't either.  

The doorbell rang.  It was Leon Lewis.  Leon Lewis in the middle of the night, without Mrs. Lewis.  Something was up.  Dad and Mr. Lewis retired to the living room, not the den.  The living room we never used. They spoke quietly.  I began to worry in earnest.  Dad came to the kitchen and gave me a ten-dollar bill.  "Get me a couple packs of Viceroy, buddy."  My dad wanted two packs of cigarettes in the middle of the night.  That had never happened before.

I went to the gas station next door to what used to be the Tote-Sum at Maywood Mart, now converted into one of Jackson's first Subway franchises.  I got the two packs of Viceroy and added one pack of Merit Ultra Lights and a pickle in a napkin for me.  I put his smokes in a bag with the change and ate my pickle on the drive home.

Brum Day joined dad and Mr. Lewis in the living room when I got home. Whatever was going on, Trustmark was involved.  I loved Brum, but his appearances carried weight.  I was very worried and gave my mother a look.  She said she'd tell me later.  After delivering the bag with the Viceroys, all three men left silently but together.  I still don't know where they went.  They looked horrible.

That night, Mayor Dale Danks went on television to say that Annie Laurie Hearin, wife of Bob Hearin, Trustmark Chairman, had been kidnapped the day before.  Danks was a pretty good lawyer in his own right and often took a leading role in bigger police affairs.   The FBI took over the case from JPD.  It was that big of a deal. 

The press agreed to a 24-hour news blackout while the FBI began its investigation.  My dad agreed to a 24-hour don't-tell-Boyd blackout for reasons I completely understood.  That's why he behaved so strangely at work.  After the news, my Mom went to bed.  I waited for daddy to come home.  "Can I do anything for you?" I asked.  "There's really nothing you can do," he said, "I wish there were," and went to bed.   Seeing my dad that sad and that powerless shifted the foundations of the universe for me.  

Bob Hearin was my dad's mentor, and my dad loved him.  He was the principal stockholder for Trustmark National Bank, Mississippi Valley Gas, Lamar Life insurance company, and Yazoo Big Wheel Mower Company.  As I understand it, Yazoo made the best mowers in the world but couldn't compete with the less expensive Snapper versions.  Besides Trustmark, Mr. Hearin got my dad involved in MP&L, Bell South, Lamar Life, and The PineyWoods Country Life School.   He also could tell you about every barbeque place in central Mississippi.  For Mr. Hearin, the best was near Pocahontas, where he had a farm.  He was friendly and spoke kindly, but he still terrified me.

The first time I ever met Bob Hearin was at the Trustmark/Deposit Guarantee joint Christmas party.  Every business person in Jackson filed through these parties as a strictly held tradition.  We started at Trustmark, then used a (semi) secret passage between The Trustmark building and the new Deposit Guarantee building (now Regions).  I wonder if it's still there.

In his office, Mr. Hearin smoked a cigar the size of a big carrot.  His still dark hair was arranged neatly with pomade.  Everyone else was doing Christmas party things, but he was working.  I was nineteen at best, maybe eighteen.  "You were named for somebody," he said to me.  I'd heard that about a million times before.  By "somebody," he meant my Uncle Boyd.  I was flattered but dumbfounded.  He knew who I was.  Twenty years before, my uncle died at the Walthal Hotel across the street.  They used to say, "the only thing separating Trustmark from Lamar Life was Capitol street.  Eventually, the feds stepped in and made Trustmark divest most of its Lamar Life stock, but the boards were still tangled as a bird's nest.  

Some Saturdays, Mr. Hearin came by Missco to visit with my dad.  "Tell Mr. Hearin the story about the gorilla," My dad said.  I honestly cannot tell you the story about the gorilla here.  It was filthy, and I stole it from a Redd Foxx album.  Pretty funny, though.  Mr. Hearin laughed, my dad laughed, and the pattern was set.  From then on, I had to have an equally inappropriate joke for Mr. Hearin every time he visited.

Mrs. Hearin was in her seventies.  She was very involved in Jackson becoming a vital patron of the arts, especially the symphony.  The Hearins lived humbly but well in Woodland Hills.  Despite their vast wealth, the Hearin's never led what you would call a flashy life.  They maintained their membership at their Capitol Street church long after everyone else in town moved to the one on North State Street.  He was a fan of West Capitol Street, maintaining the Mississippi Vally Gas offices there long after everyone else moved northeast.

Everyone loved Mrs. Hearin; she was friendly and very much a lady.  The day she disappeared, she had a bridge party at her house.  The idea that anyone might do her any harm that way is still disturbing.  

In the late sixties, Mr. Hearin purchased a company called School Pictures Inc.  They sold franchises to photographers who took student portraits and then sold the prints to the parents.  If you're my age from the South East, you probably had your pictures taken by a School Pictures franchise.  I still think it was a pretty good business model.  Considering how much gross profit they made on the photos, it should have made a mint.  My dad had stock; lots of people in Jackson did.  The franchisees took the photos, School Pictures developed the negatives, made the prints, and packaged them for parents.  It was slick.

The company ran into problems when some of the franchisees weren't paying the company their processing fees.  Hearin sued the franchisees that were in arrears.  That proved fatal.  The ransom note for Mrs. Hearin demanded Mr. Hearin repay the people he sued.  

The FBI soon made a case that Newton Alfred Winn, a School Pictures franchisee in Florida, conspired to kidnap Mrs. Hearon.  Two of his co-conspirators made a deal to testify against him.  At trial, he was convicted of conspiracy, but not murder.  Mrs. Hearin's body was never found, and Winn never confessed or gave any information on what happened to her.  Winn left prison in 2006 and died six years later.  After the kidnapping, School Pictures collapsed in on itself.

Before the kidnapping, Mr. Hearin seemed like Agamemnon, vital and legendary to me.  After the abduction, he was a broken man.  He continued to visit some Saturdays.  I continued to tell questionable jokes, but it wasn't the same.  He lost weight, making his suits hang on him.  His eyes lost that fire that paralyzed me on our first meeting.  

Two years after the kidnapping, Robert Hearin died, never knowing what ultimately befell his beloved wife.  The courts declared her legally dead the next year to help settle his estate.  Her fate is still a mystery and an FBI open case.

The Easter Flood Taught Me To Drink Coffee

Easter weekend, 1979: I get a phone call to help John Robinson because his house flooded.   That made no sense to me.  Flooded?  How bad could it be?  It was late afternoon, so I took my old Ford to John's house.  I met Johnny Kroeze at the top of the street.  I had to park there because the rest of the road was under three feet of water.

This was a bad dream.  I knew some of these people, and their houses were knee-deep in water.  In the Robinson house, water was already two feet deep.  They had a second story, so we moved as much of the furniture as we could up the stairs to wait out the water.  Surely it wouldn't get any higher.  

After we moved as much as we could, Mr. Robinson asked if we would help his neighbors.  One neighbor was out of town, and the water was up to his car's engine, and no one had a key.  I met Joe and Johnny Iupe, sports rivals from St. Joe.  Seeing them hip-deep in flood water instead of the sports field was surreal.  Joe strapped a four by eight sheet of plywood over two canoes which we dubbed the "flood barge," and moved as much furniture to high ground as we could.  

One man gave us bottles from his bar as payment for saving his grandmother's piano.  In the dark, in the water, boys our size probably didn't look sixteen.  We worked into the night, not knowing any of these people but doing our best to help.

Each time we landed the barge, women we didn't know gave us hot coffee to help counteract the chilling, brown Pearl River water.  I wasn't a coffee drinker before that, it was for old people, but  I learned to appreciate it.  To this day, I associate hot coffee with kind strangers trying to warm a very cold and very frightened Boyd.   

I knew exactly where the river was.  In better times, we camped and fished and rode the rope swing four or five hundred yards away through the woods.  All of that was underwater now.  Nothing was familiar anymore.

Around ten o'clock, the national guard said we had to go home.  They were afraid of looting.  The water covered the wheels of my old Ford.  When I parked, it was dry.  I drove by Mayor Dank's house on the way home.  All his lights were on, and many cars were in the driveway, but he was at city hall, on television.  I don't know if he slept or even came home that night.

Once home, I got a hot shower and dry clothes.  Some of us met at Mr. Gatti's for hot pizza and maybe sneak a beer.  The staff at Mr. Gatti's was pretty understanding that way, as we were all underage.  They had the first big-screen TV I ever saw; it was tuned to the news.  Burt Case came on.  Mayor Danks made an announcement.   The levee and spillway to the Ross Barnett Reservoir were in imminent danger of breaking.  They had to open the spillway and release pressure.  John Robinson's face fell.  We thought the worst of the flood was over. With the spillway open, it got much worse.

We went home confused and afraid.  There was a pretty tall hill between my house and the river, but were we in any danger?  Nobody knew.  Once home, I learned that Mississippi Power and Light came to my brother's dorm at Millsaps, looking for volunteers to sandbag their facility downtown to preserve electricity to the city as long as possible.  They worked all night.  It kept their communications center and computers working, and Jackson never lost power.  My dad was at Trustmark with Brum Day and Bob Herron. I have no idea what they talked about. He was silent when he got home.

Just about dawn the next day, I get another phone call.  Stuart Speed's house was in pretty big trouble.  Off I go again.  Johnny Kroeze brought his dad's johnboat.  We needed it.  Mr. Speed was organized and focused, and very intense.  He had a look in his eye I seldom saw in anyone.  Mrs. Speed was crying.  We rescued what we could, but their beautiful home was in bad shape.  When we'd done all we could, someone asked if we could help Mr. Palmer down the street.  

John Palmer said he cared nothing for the furniture, but could we rescue some clothes for his daughters.  They were my age, and I knew them.  The idea of girls from my school with no clean clothes to wear made all this shockingly real.  I have no idea whose room I was in, but I got as big an armload of closet clothes as possible and made my way to the waiting johnboat.  After dumping off the load, I made my way back for another.  The water was just below my chest now.  We made jokes about alligators and snakes in the water, only in the days after did I learn how real that threat was.

I don't know if it was Mr. Palmer's house or one of his neighbors, but somebody had a pool. I had no way of seeing it walking through unfamiliar yards in chocolate-colored water up to my nipples.  Suddenly the world went away.  Water that was four and a half feet deep was suddenly six feet over my head.  It took a few moments for my brain to comprehend what had happened.  I swam to the surface and continued my work, giving the hidden pool a wide berth.  

We had a makeshift harbor on Eastover drive where the water ended.  Again, mothers, I still don't know the names of, had coffee, some even had donuts, but I couldn't eat.  The higher the water got, the more frantic and frightened the homeowners became. I continued on.  

The National Guard let us work through the night that night.  Before dawn, I rested in some stranger's yard, only for a moment, I thought, but exhaustion set in, and I slept in the grass.  A few hours later, I woke with the sun, still in someone's front yard but wearing clean pants and a clean shirt.  They were my clothes.  I have no idea who dressed me or who got the clothes.  My mother swore it wasn't her. 

I began work again.  Some people had given up.  Their homes were in eight feet of water by then. At three o'clock that afternoon, the radio said the floodwaters crested.  I went home exhausted and unbearably sad.  A hot shower and another set of clean clothes later, my Mom asked if I wanted anything.  "Coffee," I said.  She never questioned it.

Many of my friends lived in hotels, fishing cabins, or whatever they could find and rebuilt their homes in the days that followed.  People with flood insurance were the lucky ones.  Most didn't.  The rest took out second mortgages and lived with them.  

Workers stripped the carpets and drywall from their homes, leaving great piles of mud-smelling debris on every flooded street for the city to remove while Jackson rebuilt.  My friends were sad but alive.  Eventually, life got back to normal again.  

Shortly before my birthday that year, I got a letter from John Palmer, thanking me for rescuing his daughter's clothes from the alligators in his living room.  I still have it.  Southerners often respond to tragedy with comedy.  Outsiders say it's an attempt to mask our feelings, but sometimes it's the only thing that makes any sense.   I still drink coffee.  To me, it means someone's love, despite adversity.  

Flooding Downton

What I'm Reading - May 10

Greenlights 

My dear friend (and former football trainer) gave me a copy of Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey.  I met McConaughey briefly when they were shooting A Time To Kill and had no clue he would be such a powerful and charming writer.  

Part autobiography and part philosophy, McConaughey gives a very frank and candid review of his life and how he managed and interpreted it all.  Greenlights is a very Southern book, both in his experiences and attitude.

Although I primarily use kindle to read now (mostly a matter of storage), some of you may know I'm something of a bibliophile snob, especially when it comes to the physical book.  This first edition of Greenlights (my copy came from the fabled Square Books) is a joy to touch and leaf through.  They use heavy rag paper, almost like expensive drawing paper with a substantial tooth.  It switches between different colors of ink and shades of paper so often that I wonder if this book was printed on a web press at all.  Some of the signatures may be from a sheet-fed press, which is unusual.  

Greenlights earns its spot on the best-seller list, primarily on the strength of the writing alone.  This is a book of life, not your typical Hollywood expose.  It's a book that speaks especially to Southern men in a voice they'll find familiar.

The Screwtape Letters.

I tell people that I"m an agnostic because I am, and I believe everyone is; no matter if they claim absolute belief or absolute disbelief, everyone has questions and doubts.  I've read many Christian apologists through the years, and I can only call Lewis beloved, at least by me.  This is my third time through on Screwtape and probably not the last.  

Written before he lost (and ultimately regained) his faith, Lewis dedicates Screwtape to his dear friend and fellow scribbler, J.R.R. Tolkien.  It's a fictitious series of letters written from a supervisor daemon to his nephew, advising his efforts to collect the soul of an English "client" recently converted to Christianity.  

In this and other works, Lewis makes Christian apology entertaining and digestible.  Lewis has a pragmatic opinion on Christian practices and philosophies, which come through almost effortlessly here.

Like the Narnia books, The Screwtape Letters is a quick read and a staple of English-speaking Christianity.