Alligator, Miss. : Delta Town Falls Victim to Progress

“The economy is pathetic,” Postmaster Sammie Burchfield said. “Food stamps, welfare and Social Security are all that keep us going.”

A woman modern enough to insist that she is not a “postmistress,” Burchfield still can recall fondly the good old days when, in the Mississippi Delta, cotton was king.

“During World War II we had three gins running,” she said. “We had a hotel, two drugstores and three doctors.”

Alligator, near the Mississippi River, 88 miles south of Memphis, Tenn., on Highway 61, now has a grocery and a general merchandise store and little else.

Alligator, which has a population of 240, got its name from an adjacent lake shaped like the reptile.

Nobody recently has seen any alligators in the lake, but the state reintroduced them to the environs some years ago to get rid of beavers. The beavers were making a nuisance of themselves by chomping down trees to dam streams, impeding their flow.

But it is not really necessary to know about gators and beavers to understand that Alligator--like a lot of other small towns in the Delta--is in deep trouble.

Economic Basket Cases

Sagging prices for soybeans, rice and cotton and low yields caused by drought have turned towns like Alligator into economic basket cases.

Alligator’s Methodist church, served by a nonresident preacher who holds services twice a month, has 10 active members. There is another church for the town’s black residents.

“Trains used to bring mail three times a day,” said Burchfield, but they no longer run.

Black children are bused from Alligator to predominantly black public schools in nearby towns, white children to an all-white private one in Clarksdale, 12 miles to the north.

“Ninety-nine percent of my business is food stamps,” acknowledged Ronnie Fava, proprietor of the grocery.

“The railroad used to bring traveling salesmen in here,” Fava said. “I guess we used to have a population of about a thousand or so. It’s tough now, but I can’t complain. I raised three children here. They’re in college now. I hope they leave Alligator. I told them to pack their grips because there’s nothing here for them.”

Alligator was really stumping when Aaron Kline, 76, left Lithuania 50 years ago and settled in the Delta.

“When I came here you could hardly walk the streets on a Saturday, it was so crowded,” said Kline, who owns the dry goods store. “There were lots of big plantations.”

Mechanization Brought Change

But farm mechanization, speeded by the minimum wage, displaced the black plantation hands, Kline explained, irrevocably changing life in the Delta.

Kline, who attends synagogue in Clarksdale and is president of the area’s small Jewish community, said he often has been asked how he survives in Alligator. “I tell them you have to have a strong back and a weak mind,” he said, laughing.

Then, turning serious, he said: “It makes you sad. So many prominent farmers have lost their land. Now it’s all gone with the wind. Thousands of acres have grown up in weeds.”

Kline, as a Jewish merchant in the Deep South, is part of a great tradition.

Some Jewish immigrants started as peddlers and built fortunes. Before the Civil War, traveling peddlers, who often were versed in the art and culture of their native European countries, were welcomed, housed and fed by their customers, isolated farm families. But, in hard times, Southerners sometimes turned on Jewish businessmen, blaming them for economic slumps.

In the modern South, Southerners, including Kline, still are assessing blame, putting a lot of it on those who make law and policy in Washington.