Up and Down Old Man River, Change Is a Slow Current

In the towns along the lower Mississippi, from around Cairo, Ill., to below New Orleans, there is lots of talk about the good old days.

Cairo had the most wealth per capita anywhere, they say. Of course, that was 100 years ago.

In a Louisiana town called Waterproof, people tell of Saturday night crowds so thick “you had to walk the street sideways.”

Nostalgia is hardly unique to the Mississippi Delta, but it may help to reconcile the paradoxes evident everywhere in this region. After all, this is where the pain of slave labor took sweet expression in the words and rhythms of the blues.

In towns long abandoned by river traders and plantation society, to harken back is also looking ahead. An antebellum mansion on a river bluff or an ersatz showboat may attract tourist dollars, a hope for the future.

Just after dawn in Cairo, a towboat’s engine hums as it pushes barges against the current, birds twitter and Daniel Hartmann’s shotgun can be heard on Commercial Street. With official blessing, he blasts pigeons from rooftops and window ledges downtown.

Long gone are the human inhabitants of many buildings on the boulevard, shown in old photographs as a bustling main drag. Hartmann explains that he’s just trying to keep the pigeons from taking over.

A mile away, a community group is trying to keep despair from taking over.

The focus of Operation Enterprise is the wedge of land where the Ohio River joins the Mississippi. Ft. Defiance stood here, and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant directed Union operations on the river. Grant triumphed, but a park at the site surrendered to neglect. A few years ago, a newspaper called it “The Ugliest Park in America.”

The headline prompted efforts not just to save the park but to put Cairo “through a self-analysis,” said Angela Greenwell, a leader of Operation Enterprise.

“We’ve identified our problems,” she said, and they are familiar ones in the Delta region: their town of 4,500 people is suffering from lingering racial divisions, poverty, unemployment and an attitude of resignation about it all.

Among Cairo’s assets Operation Enterprise counted the confluence of the rivers, considerable history, willing workers and a friendly Southern style. Then came development plans: first a showboat-mall complex, then citywide restoration and, finally, a theme park.

The tourists may or may not come, but the group has launched other projects, including an ambulance service, and has brought blacks and whites together. It also is maintaining the park that started it all--and the members are undiscouraged when the water rises, as it did this spring, and covers their work in mud. “We are survivors,” Greenwell said.

Across a bridge from Cairo, a sign tells travelers they’ve entered Kentucky. “Open for Business,” it adds hopefully.

And there is big business on the big river: Barges move 420 million tons of cargo on it each year.

“Coal, grain, fertilizer, sugar . . . .” Jim York, a barge line dispatcher in Columbus, Ky., names the commodities carried on vessels such as those tied up in the channel outside his window. “Alcohol, chemicals, diesel fuel, gas. . . .”

Once he saw human cargo: 12 flattop barges, the kind used for hauling rock, loaded with National Guard troops who had pitched tents on deck. “Looked like a big party going upriver.”

Every so often, the radio on York’s desk picks up a familiar voice, his father’s. Jim Sr. is a towboat captain.

“They say (if) you wear out your first pair of boots out there, you’ll be out there all your life,” the son says.

On the gentle hills that slope down to the river, hawks perch in dead trees that look like antennas. Real antennas pick up gospel stations, the play-by-play of stock-car races, country songs:

I’m seein’ my father in me;

Guess that’s how it’s meant to be....

Ronnie and Tammy Harper’s modest house occupies a rise outside Clinton, Ky. “My parents live in the fifth house on the right. Her daddy’s across the road,” said Ronnie, a carpenter who often does remodeling work for retirees settling in the area.

As older folks move in, many people in their 20s, the Harpers’ age group, are moving away in search of jobs or a change from a pace of living that can be as predictable as the river’s flow.

Not the Harpers. They figured on staying put even before their first child, Christopher, was born Feb. 28.

And when he grows up, where would they like him to settle? “Next door would be fine,” the new father said.

Like other kids, he will probably play and fish on the sandbar here--that is, if the river doesn’t swallow it. For centuries, the twisting Mississippi has straightened and shortened its course by carving “cutoffs” that eliminate bends.

Towns such as Millikens Bend and Hopefield, Ark., are gone, washed away by the river’s shifting course. Other settlements have been moved to higher ground. Ste. Genevieve and New Madrid, in Missouri, have been relocated several times.

Below New Madrid lies the busy farming center and river port of Caruthersville, Mo., where barges are built and the uniform downtown is overalls.

Here, the Mann family plies the oldest trade on the river. Dorothy Mann’s husband, John, and son Byron catch the fish. Son Mike runs the market.

It’s true, Mike says, that a few customers concerned about contamination have walked out when they learned that the fish came from the river.

Many parts of the Mississippi have become cleaner in recent years, with sewage treatment and other improvements, but toxic materials remain at the bottom and fishing is restricted in places.

Still, most folks who walk into Mann’s want a taste of the river--or perhaps something wilder, like raccoon. “We cooked eight for Christmas here,” Mike Mann says. “Coon’s delicious if you fix it right.”

Downriver a ways, Memphis, Tenn., offers a different taste of the Mississippi. The city still bills itself as a party town. Memphis is where W. C. Handy migrated with music called the blues, and Beale Street today pulses to updated, urban variations.

Memphis was the royal court of King Cotton. Trucks laden with burlap-bound bales of cotton still lumber up Front Street. But, says cotton buyer Chris Hill, as workers gather up fluffy sweepings left by graders in one warehouse, many big brokers have moved away. “It’s not like it used to be,” he says.

No, but cotton gins still stand everywhere in the Delta. Matted tufts catch in the stubble along roadsides, including the stretch of “The Great River Road” that runs south through Arkansas from the Memphis bridge.

Some of that may have been cotton grown by B. McCollum Jr. before he retired.

He still keeps busy as a justice of the peace, like his father before him, and by telling stories. By the way, he noted: “That’s my legal name--B.”

“My dad moved here somewhere around 1920 and named the place Mack’s Corner,” McCollum said. “He had a grocery store, a restaurant, a grist mill, a little repair shop to work on old cars.” One day, a mechanic eating lunch at the restaurant left an oil-smudge fingerprint on a plate. To the next customer, it was Mack’s Corner, Ark., no more, according to McCollum.

“‘Hell,’ he said, ‘this is Greasy Corner.’ And it’s been Greasy Corner ever since.”

Even says so on the road signs.

When McCollum was 8, his father gave him an acre and seed, lent him a mule and a double-shovel plow and said they’d split the profits of his “sharecrop.”

“He said the best fertilizer you can put on your farm is your footprint and your shadow.”

McCollum now owns 700 acres, including the place where he was born.

Not everyone has been so fortunate, he knows. Hundreds of farming families once lived all around, but machines displaced them. Blacks, especially, moved to cities to get jobs and “just never came back home.”

“I can’t blame ‘em,” McCollum said, recalling wages of 50 cents a day and a justice system that often failed to prosecute crimes against blacks. “It was tough back then.”

Fodder for the blues--and there’s more, traveling downriver into Mississippi.

In Tunica, one of the poorest places in the country, 44-year-old Mack Whitfield has the dark energy of the blues in his eyes.

“This is where the houses were,” he says, gesturing to vacant lots along the infamous Sugar Ditch drainage trough, where an outcry a few years ago brought federal action to move some residents of the shacks to new apartments. “What sold out, sold out. They just knocked all the houses down.”

Not all. Several remain, including the tarpaper-covered shanty Whitfield lives in and Mable Kinchloe’s house across the ditch. She owns both, won’t sell and has no trouble explaining why she won’t.

She grew up here but has lived away, in Chicago. She was a teacher and, at age 73, still takes substitute assignments to help finance repairs to the family home she returned to less than a year ago.

A wiry, bespectacled woman with no easy smile, she could be that teacher whose lessons one remembers best. “Most children want to learn,” she said, “but it seems like, with these children, somebody’s been whispering in their ear, ‘You can’t do anything. . . .’ ”

“I say, ‘We are something. You can do anything that you want to do, but you’ve got to study to do it. And that’s going to be hard.”’

Of her property by the ditch, she said: “They want to tear it down because it’s so ugly. . . . They want us out of here. But we’re here, because my daddy struggled too hard.”

The Mississippi glides southward.

It passes grave markers on the battlefield at Vicksburg, Miss., where Grant gained control of the river after a siege of 47 days. It flows past mansions at Natchez, where every spring, as in many towns, Confederate uniforms and pastel gowns are worn and the doors are opened to the public for “pilgrimages” into the antebellum South.

Lydia McManus made a different kind of pilgrimage to Natchez when, as a girl, she and her family were evacuated there to escape the 1927 flood. McManus’ hometown, Waterproof, La., failed to live up to its name that time.

Waterproof (pop. 1,483) has a general store, a grocery, two gas stations, two banks and the Western Auto franchise that Lydia and W. J. McManus, ages 66 and 71, run for the companionship it gives them as much as anything else. “Friends come in and visit,” she says. “And we might sell a pound or two of nails or a few screws, something like that, once in a while.”

When she was growing up, her parents ran a restaurant in town and she remembers serving coffee to store clerks weekend nights so they could stay awake to handle the crowds. Trucks were sent out to bring plantation workers into town, where they would shop and party until the wee hours.

Frank Roach smiles at that recollection. He played blues guitar then and still does, at 74.

“You had to walk through the street sideways to get up there, so many people out of the country. Now all the country people have left,” he says.

“People’d get themselves something to drink, be talking all night, dancing all night. Yes, sir, that was back in them good old days.”

The only thing that’s the same is the river--Mark Twain’s “symbol of eternity”--pushing past the bright gardens and the punctual ferry at St. Francisville, past the shallows of New Roads where baptisms were performed, past blaring New Orleans and finally Pilottown, to pay its debt--in mud and memories--to the Gulf.