Delta Days

According to writer David Cohn, The Mississippi Delta starts in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on catfish row in Vicksburg. The Delta is an alluvial deposit of thirty feet of fertile loam stolen by the Mississippi River from the prairies of America’s mid-western breadbasket and moved south by annual flooding. The soil of the Corn Belt became the nurturer of King Cotton.

In the 1950s the Delta was more than a geographical location; it was home to a unique social, political and economic system that reflected the best and the worst of our southern agrarian society. The plantation system was colliding head on with the twentieth century. A black majority was held in the grip of segregation by a mostly benevolent white minority. These stories tell of one boy’s experience coming of age in a now long-lost time.