The Thorntons of Mississippi: Peonage on the Plantation

by Paul Good

IN THE fields alongside Mississippi Highway 49, where the Meredith Freedom Marchers plodded in June, another Delta cotton crop is nearing harvest, continuing a partnership between man and earth that is more than a century old. The Delta’s rich alluvial soil, spread over nineteen Mississippi counties, has long been a dependable producer of human riches. For some. The cotton industry, lavishly subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, brings more than a quarter of a billion dollars a year to Delta farmers alone. Cotton is America’s leading cash crop, cotton exports are the single biggest source of foreign exchange, and 11 million Americans depend directly on cotton for their livelihood.

At the bottom of these impressive statistics are Negro families whose squalid lives do not seem to belong to this century, and certainly not to the biggest agricultural business in the richest nation on the earth. That these families are black is a historical heritage; that they are American is a present cause for national shame. And the questions raised by their existence go beyond pathos to make one wonder how they and meaningful democracy can exist side by side.

Visit one family with me.

The shack at first seemed deserted when I approached it late one afternoon traveling fast along Route 12, hurrying out of the Delta to Jackson and a flight back to my home in Atlanta. Many tenant shacks fool you like that, so woebegone that no one could be living inside. But often someone is there, and he is always black. Swooshing past, I saw a dozen or so Negroes clustering around a sagging porch. There was a quick impression of children in tatters or naked, poverty extreme even by black Mississippi standards, and then the monotony of dull green cotton fields began reiterating itself. My notebook had dozens of samples of privation, and there was little leeway to catch the plane. But one more smudge of squalor, one more story to touch the heart ... A quarter mile down the highway I turned around and drove back.

Back in the powerful air-conditioned car, windows shut tight against the Delta heat, like an astronaut hermetically sealed against a hostile environment, dropping from space to reconnoiter a lower form of life on a distant planet. Landing and debarkation. Acrid fertilizer smells off the cotton fields growing up to the edge of the shack laced with whiffs of human excrement. Silence from the porch, game’s end for the children, everyone immobilized into a wondering tableau at the man from outer space.

The children were barefoot, the youngest ones naked, the rest in rags, black legs and arms gray with dirt. Three women sat on the porch, scrawny, their frizzly hair dusty, caught with linty scraps. One gave an insignificant breast to an infant. They watched warily, their eyes a blend of torpor, sullenness, and suspicion. I explained that I was trying to write about conditions of Delta Negroes for papers up north.

“You can talk to my daddy,” said a woman in her early twenties. “Here he come now.”

He came up the highway, taking old, cautious steps, carrying two tin gallon cans filled with something. I went out and introduced myself. He put down the cans, shuffled, scratched; he had his doubts. But a white man who wanted to talk would be talked to. His cans held milky water.

“Don’t you have any water in the house?”

“No, suh, sure don’t. Pump’s been busted in the well. We ain’t had no water for three weeks. We sure ain’t. No, suh. They lets me draw some yonder to the station.”

We walked inside the shack, the girl who had spoken trailing behind. The first room smelled of smoke and urine: the air was like a vile broth. The walls were papered with old newspapers, shredded by time and browned from chimney smoke and fires, which had charred one wall and much of the ceiling. The only furniture was a bed, its bare mattress splotched with islands of stain. Flies swarmed about. The floor looked dirtier than the ground outside, the mattress dirtier than the floor. I stopped short in the next room. There was a naked boy about two years old lying on the floor, eyes tightly shut and body rigid. His mocha skin crawled with flies. They explored his nose, his mouth, his eyelids, his genitals. The baby looked dead.

“Is something the matter with him?”

The young woman came up to look.

“He just sleepin’. He sleep like that. Hey, Richard, wake up. C’mon, stop layin’ there like that. He do like that. Dunno why,”

She shook him, and after what seemed a long while his eyes snapped open and he began crying. The room was like the first except there was no fireplace. One sour-smelling bed, no other furniture, a rag pile of clothing in one corner.

Another narrow bedroom with only a mattress on the floor led to the kitchen.

“Be careful that floor,” the young woman said. She tittered. “Last week Richard he fell in a hole in the floor there, an’ we had to get a ax to chop through an’ get him out.”

The kitchen — it was hard to believe the kitchen. There was a small pothellied coal stove with a tin grease-lined baking dish on top. There was no sink, no table, no chairs, no knives, forks, or spoons. There was no sign of food, but the flies evidently knew something on that score. They blackened a lone, otherwise empty plate.

“What do you eat with?” I asked the young woman. “Huh?”

“Do you have any forks or spoons?”

She shrugged and shook her head, mumbled that the children had thrown them all away. Out back, mellow Mississippi sunlight still filled a tiny yard hemmed in by cotton. About twenty feet from the shack there was an outhouse. Its weathered boards were peeling apart, and the walls seemed to sag in two or three different directions. I let imagination inspect it.

BACK in the first room, the father told me his name was Columbus Thornton and that he was seventy-one. He was the grandson of a slave, and had sharecropped all his life until sharecropping about died out and he was too old for it anyway. The past winter in Yazoo City (a stopping place on the Meredith march) a white farmer had turned them off his place, and the family had come to Route 12 outside Belzoni looking for work. The shack had been standing empty, and the boss man who owned the cotton fields around it let them stay, on the promise to work in the fields during cultivation and harvest. He counted out the family — a wife, Betty, seventy; daughters Mary, thirty-two, with six children, twenty-nine-year-old Pearie Lee, with three, and Florida, twenty-four, with two — sixteen human beings living in the shack.

I sat on the bed, but Thornton would not sit, out of deference to my whiteness. His eyes and tongue were alert after what must have been a taxing lifetime, and he wore the only decent item of clothing in the family, a stout pair of work boots.

“This place,” I said. “It’s pretty run-down.”

“This is the roughest house we ever lived in since I been a grown man. We tricked it out best we could last winter. It was hard times though. There’s only one chimney in the whole house, an’ it smokes so most times you can’t use it. Holes in the walls . . . roof leaks . . . it gets cold.”

The daughter was sitting on the floor with Richard.

“Remember the ceilin’ caught fire,” she said.

“Y’suh, that’s right, it sure did, Florida. That’s my daughter Florida, suh.”

The child, mucus glazed around his nose, began urinating on the floor. Florida clucked disapprovingly, looked at me, and smiled. In the next ten minutes she would alternately chide the child for offenses I could not detect, hitting him lightly with a twig, then hug him, looking my way for reaction.

“What do you eat?”

She said: “We cats — let’s see — we cats pinto beans, greens—”

“Fatback,” her father said.

“An’ fatback.”

“Do you ever have milk or meat?”

She rolled her eyes comically. “Don’t never have that. No chicken neither.”

“Couldn’t eat one chicken nohow,” her father said. “Take five to feed all what’s here.”

Florida, her two sisters, and the thirteen-yearold daughter of one worked in the boss man’s fields chopping cotton at $3 a day for ten hours. There are no state or federal minimum-wage or -age laws for cotton field hands, and this is standard Delta pay for chopping, the manual hoeing away of grass and weeds that stunt the growth of young cotton plants. The owners of plantations, increasingly mechanized, say it is not economically feasible for them to pay any more to the hoe-hands. It wasn’t economically feasible for the Thorntons either.

“Some week we make sixty dollar, all of us,” Florida said. “But he don’t give us no more’n twenty cause he take out. He take out what he give us last winter. He give us two hundred an’ fifty-four dollar, an’ we paid back already er, uh, seventy-eight dollar.”

There was some animation in her voice for the first time, something that may have been pride at accomplishing repayment. The children in the shack ranged in age from seven months to thirteen years, and five went to school sporadically, although there was no sign in the house of a book, a pencil, or even a piece of paper. The Thorntons never saw a truant officer. Florida was the only one in the family who could read and write; her parents had never attended school, and her sisters had never gone long enough. I gathered that the fathers of the children came and went. This was more than any county, state, or federal health or housing official ever did. Or any local charity. I was on the verge of suggesting to Florida that the house be swept out, bedding washed, everything cleaned up to cut down on the flies which could endanger the children’s health. But there are limits to the presumption of a visitor for an hour.

I had to catch the plane, and the thought of leaving was agreeable. Thornton accepted a few loose dollars with proper servility, and Florida brightened at the promise of some clothing beingsent, and I left. The trouble is, once you go into such a shack you can never really leave it. As soon as I got back in the car and waved good-bye I realized something: with eleven children in that shack, there had not been one toy. Not a ball, a rattle, a battered doll, or game. It seemed the darkest dimension of poverty.

Five miles away from the shack, at the Jackson turnoff, a fat-bellied chestnut mare suckled two sleek foals in a green pasture. A spring glittered down one border. A comparison etched in the mind.

Now let it be said that the plight of the Thorntons is not typical of most rural Mississippi Negroes. Thousands are that bad off, and I suspect most of these are like Thornton — a worked-out old man who didn’t produce enough sons to sustain him when he could no longer pull his weight in the fields. But Thornton and his family are a logical product of a system that has left tens of thousands of Southern Negroes social and economic cripples, the degree of lameness varying with the luck, character, and intelligence of the individual. Columbus Thornton possibly had less of all three than those Mississippi Delta Negroes who still live day to day off the white man’s cotton but manage with a little better grace. A little.

Yet a tour of the Delta — including Senator James Eastland’s Sunflower County, where he has a big plantation with better-grade shacks — reveals an oppressive pattern virtually undented politically by the civil rights laws or economically by the poverty program. Start with the shacks. Some are half a century old, in worse shape than many stables, barely better than nothing. White indifference to their condition is a historic fact of life in the state, although now it is the prevailing white Mississippi style to admit past inhumanities while doing as little as possible to rectify them. The newspapers that are used to insulate the shack walls were sold by plantation owners at ten cents a bundle to “help” the freezing nigras. Often, cracks are stuffed with cotton. The federal government never inspects these shacks. Of course there are no inspections by any Mississippi agency.

B. F. Smith is the affable president of the Delta Council, which lobbies with varying success in behalf of cotton growers. The council magazine, Delta Review, prints handsome covers in color of handsome white-columned houses set amid romantic old trees, the best that antebellum architecture and modern dollars can buy. He told me:

“The council has been a responsible organization since it was founded in 1935. We’re urging people to tear down old vacant shack houses.”

Was it a progressive sign that decent homes would be built for tenant Negroes? Well, not really.

“You see,” explained Mr. Smith, “the program is designed to make the area appear better. People driving through look at that kind of thing and get a bad impression.”

IN 1940, Negroes picked the entire cotton crop. Today they account for only 15 percent of the bolls; the rest is harvested by tractor drivers who are predominantly Negro. Seven hundred thousand Negroes streamed north from Mississippi towns and plantations after World War II as the appearance of tractors closed down on jobs and visions of freer Northern living opened hopes. Hopes for a decent life often turned to despair in Northern ghettos, and the despair found release in violent protest. The Delta has supplied much of the manpower for the riots in Watts and Chicago, the price of inhumanity in a cotton field eventually paid for by the entire country.

Mechanization all but ended sharecropping. Under its system, a Negro and his mule were vital to the cotton plantation, the one judged about as human and expendable as the other. The Negro was roundly cheated (a favorite trick at weigh-in time was to have the owner’s wife supervise the scales, thus rendering the sharecropper liable to the charge of insolence with dread sexual implications if he challenged her word), encouraged to believe in his self-degradation, and often dismissed when the tractor ended his usefulness. The plantation owner buying an $18,000 tractor understandably was not about to split the crop with its driver. Where once it took one hundred and sixty manhours to make an acre yield by hand, it took only forty hours by machine. Cotton that cost $50 a bale to pick by hand was machine-picked for $18.

But depending on topography, weather, and other factors, the council’s own figures and plain observation show that mechanization can’t do it all in the Delta. At the peak of the 1965 chopping season, 19,000 Negroes were hired daily in the Delta counties alone. At harvest, 15,000 worked throughout the state, and received $2.50 for each 100 pounds picked. An average picker may do 200 or more pounds a day.

These figures demonstrate that human hands in numbers are needed for a crop that last year under federal subsidies brought $339 million into Mississippi. Since the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union began a strike of choppers and drivers in the spring of 1965, cotton spokesmen have tried to minimize the human role, possibly in the hope that the numbers involved would appear too trivial to merit federal intervention in the system. Federal intervention has only been sought in the form of Commodity Credit Corporation dollars to buy up the staggering surpluses and shore up prices. Nearly 17 million surplus bales were carried over last year, and when the Meredith Marchers went through Canton, they passed long warehouses where some cotton bales have sat moldering for seventeen years.

Now a new cotton bill is, in effect, designed to reduce surpluses and make American cotton competitive both with domestic man-made fibers and on the world market. It calls for drastic mandatory and optional acreage cutbacks ranging from 12.5 to 35 percent. A complicated system of direct cash payments in lieu of an artificially high support price is expected to knock down U.S. cotton prices to around 21 cents a pound and may revitalize the entire industry. Farmers, brokers, merchants, textile mills, and even the U.S. taxpayers are expected to benefit. Where federal subsidies have been costing about a billion dollars a year, the cost is expected to drop to about $800 million. But shrinking the acreage inevitably means squeezing more Negroes off the land. It was predicted that 6500 tractor drivers out of a 26,000-man work force would lose their jobs this year. Losing jobs means losing shacks; Mississippi officials project a figure of 30,000 persons displaced in 1966. Yet in all the multibillion-dollar cotton legislation, not one cent was earmarked for worker relief, relocation, or retraining!

Despite cutbacks, chemical weed killers to make chopping unnecessary, and tractor harvesting, there seems to be an irreducible minimum of Negroes needed to go out in the fields with their hoes or to pick the cotton over once by hand during harvest. Bolivar County Sheriff Charles Capps, who worked ninety-five hands in 1965, said:

“Every year we feel we aren’t goin5 to need choppin’ with the improved chemicals. But then we always do. Nowadays the drivers get six to seven dollars a day. From sunup to sundown, yes. [Note: Midwest farms pay ten dollars.] But if a man went out an’ did a job like he should, not bullin’ his tractor through the woods an’ wreckin’ the machinery, then we could pay ‘em more. If I could treat niggers like white men an’ not be their guardians, then they’d get more.”

The sheriff is accused by civil rights workers of trying to break the Freedom Labor Union in his area. He, in turn, boasts of two old Negro couples “just livin’ out their days” on his small plantation, rent free.

“One of them nursed my grandfather,” he says, in the Deep South manner that somehow changes Negro service to white beneficence. “Now I feed ‘em an’ nurse ‘em, pay their light an’ water.”

LISTEN long enough to a Delta planter, and you will get the impression that the day-labor system constitutes a quasi-welfare agricultural environment for Negroes. One told me that chopping was a social exercise for Negro women, like a big quilting party. Stand in the murderous July heat of a Mississippi cotton field for one hour, without bending to hoe, and then ravel out the experience to ten hours’ hoeing, and you may feel a certain disbelief at his words. Much also is made of the planters’ loans to shack dwellers during the bleak winter — the Thorntons again — when there is little day work. Three points are pertinent here.

First, the result if not intent of this arrangement is to keep Negroes in perpetual bondage, assuring the planter of help at his price when spring greens the Delta. Second, the planters rely on Negro help around the plantations for emergencies, for the inevitable winter farm repair and clean-up work, and possibly to satisfy certain lordly cravings in the big house. Third, the amount advanced is just enough to maintain a sparse existence, the average advance for families with six or eight children around $300 a winter at most. I’m sure that the boss man of the Thorntons, presented with these realities, could still make a case for his benevolence in sheltering that homeless family down from Yazoo City in dead of winter. Place needed some fixin’, course, but it was a roof over their heads when they needed it. An’ cash money to boot.

Inevitably, there is the exceptional planter who provides good houses for his help. Up and down the Delta, you are referred to him when you express an interest in shack conditions. Dan Smythe has a quarter-million-dollar investment near the city of Greenville, the cultural heart of Mississippi and home of Hodding Carter’s Delta Democrat-Times.

Seven families live in Smythe’s houses, and three of them are white. A white driver reportedly makes the same as a Negro, the rate varying with length of service. One Negro man there for nineteen years gets $40 a week in addition to rent, light, gas, and extras. Others get a guaranteed $20 a week, year round, for tractor driving and other work, and their families chop and pick at prevailing rates.

Smythe is a deep-voiced, self-made man on the physical order of a younger John Wayne. He lived in a shack himself when he started out twentyfive years ago and now has a fine and tastefully furnished home. He sees himself as a man who succeeded against odds, and he has scant sympathy with the bulk of Delta Negroes.

“I think the nigra is basically inferior, don’t you?” he says. “Now, I have really tried sincerely working with the darky to help him, but it’s been discouraging. Six or seven years ago I tried to switch to whites completely to do the work, but I couldn’t get enough whites. It’s monotonous and takes people without much imagination. Whoever works for me, I get ‘em up early and work ‘em late, Sundays and nights if we’re behind. If they don’t like it, they can get off.”

Smythe warns that if a union should ever succeed in putting his workers on a higher, flat hourly rate, fringe benefits along with the vaguely defined “old relation” would end. In his case, the “old relation” includes supplying his tenant-drivers with insulated winter underwear, garden seed for vegetable plots, and money loans at no interest. It also includes feudal controls. For example, when the federal government began distributing surplus food commodities, he would not at first permit families on his place to accept them.

“I don’t think it betters them not to do for themselves,” he explained. “It reflects on me if a family on my place is on welfare. I tell you though, I had a pretty disgruntled group of darkies until I agreed.”

In the spring of 1965, disgruntled Negroes who were tired of being treated as “darkies” by white Mississippians and of being overlooked by the national government staged the first Delta strike since the bloody labor unrest of the thirties.

“Listen,” said Mack Ingram, twenty-eight, one of the thirteen tractor drivers who walked off the job at a plantation in Tribbett, near Greenville. “We made six dollars a day, thirty-six dollars a week, six days mornin’ to dark. Andrews, the owner, he took out ten for what I owed from the winter plus gas an’ lights. So I had twenty-three sixty left. With three kids. I’d rather be dead in my grave then work for six dollars a day. Die fast or slow, it don’t make no difference.”

But this handful of tractor drivers were the only ones in the Delta who could be persuaded to join the strike. A few hundred field hands drifted in and out of the union, but fitfully. The strike owed much of its initial impetus to the Delta Ministry, an arm of the National Council of Churches, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. But it received little backing from national labor, although it was in desperate financial shape almost from the minute the strike began. Even unions like the United Auto Workers, with many Negro members who are Detroit transplants from the Delta and who understand conditions back home, did little or nothing to help. The UAW’s Walter Reuther would eventually march with James Meredith into Jackson. But he would not involve his union with the pitifully thin ranks of strikers. After some initial emotional interest by the national news media, there was scant coverage. The strike did not produce violence, and of course the American press shrugs off the chronic, quiet loser, no matter his cause.

Some of the reluctance to associate with a strike that seemed in the best traditions of exploited labor striving for a new day of dignity stemmed from the Freedom Labor Union’s support. The Freedom Democratic Party had been a kind of political Typhoid Mary among civil rights groups ever since it rejected President Johnson’s compromise over the seating of the regular, white-segregationist Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention. By insisting on both letter and spirit of convention law, it ran afoul of the President’s mandate for consensus, and it was thereafter damned. The Delta Ministry had also acquired a reputation as being excessively militant, although its defenders pointed out that if Christ Himself tried to practice pure Christianity in the Delta, He would be condemned as an ultramilitant.

In its early efforts to secure equitable treatment for Negroes, the Ministry and some of its leaders were so frustrated by the refusal of Washington to see, no less to act on, crimes against federal law in the Delta that they became suspicious and truculent when dealing with the outside world. The outside world might be the press, local white moderates, or anyone else who did not burn in the night over the way people like the Thorntons lived; or who did not believe that Delta Negroes had a right, even a human mandate, to make their own decisions and their own demands in a sea of white authority. This attitude lost some potential friends, summer patriots who were frightened off by the Ministry’s intransigence. Many Negro hands who bravely left the fields believed that help was coming from the North when, in fact, only sketchy preparations had been made for dependable sources of food, money, and political support. The union insisted on a blanket minimum wage of $1.25 an hour for both tractor drivers and hoe-hands.

“You can’t cut the mustard at those prices,” observed the council’s Smith. “You can’t pay a hoehand $12.50 for a ten-hour day. But I think the drivers’ pay will go up as they increase in skills and cover more ground with larger equipment.”

In Rosedale, a woman striker in her late fifties told me: “This strike has really brought on a lot of desperate people. I went to the Chinese grocer an’ he was chargin’ twenty-five cent for a ham hock. ‘Ain’t stuff high?’ a friend said to me. Yes, I says, everything except cotton choppin’. What I want to know is, if a ham hock costs twenty-five cent, how much is ten hours in a hot field worth?” Then she added: “The President gets on the TV an’ talks about how things are bein’ put right. But that talk’s a long way from us.”

Unfortunately, the President’s conceptually promising poverty program has produced very little change in the Delta. It has been fought every step by state and local Mississippi authorities. The considerable committee powers of Mississippi senators Stennis and Eastland have enabled them to exert all kinds of pressure against federal help for Delta Negroes, although of all American citizens they would seem to merit large-scale and immediate aid: their median income, according to a 1964 Department of Agriculture report, is $456 a year; the chance of a Negro baby dying in its first year is twice that of a white baby; 90 percent of rural Negro homes have no flush toilets or baths.

Yet even federal food-surplus distribution was blocked last winter until late January when Negroes, led by the union, the Ministry, and the MFDP, forced their way into national headlines by squatting on the Greenville Air Force Base and demanding that Washington act. A state agency called HELP and headed by a Mrs. Evelyn Gandy, who was executive secretary to the late racist Senator Theodore Bilbo, had dragged its feet on compliance with a $1.6 million program of the Office of Economic Opportunity for hiring Negroes to distribute surplus food. After the squat-in, HELP acted. But other OEO programs like Head Start and STAR (Systematic Training and Redevelopment) are organically incapable of providing jobs for the thousands of Negroes who either must depend on plantation peonage or have been squeezed out of even that by circumstance.

The Reverend Bruce Hilton, a staff member of the Delta Ministry, who has been in Mississippi for a year, says: “We have consistently asked the federal government for a task force to come in here and do the kind of job that only it can do. It is morally wrong and practically impossible to expect various civil rights groups to carry the ball for the federal government here, whether it’s in the area of voting rights or the poverty program. We have to go to Health, Education, and Welfare, to Housing, to Agriculture, to the Justice Department for the simplest things that the government is supposed to provide. We keep getting shunted from one department to the other while the people depending on Washington get more desperate.”

Resources of civil rights groups are rapidly dwindling. Widespread financial support that once could be counted on no longer is there since legislative gains have apparently convinced the American public that a job that is really only beginning has nearly been done. The Ministry had to fire more than half its small staff in recent weeks. CORE, SNCC, and Dr. King’s SCLC all are feeling the pinch of indifference. Besides, their funds must be centered on projects like voter-registration drives with rehabilitation a distant enterprise.

Where does all this leave the Thorntons? Precisely where we left them.

For many reasons buried in their past existence, the Thorntons lack the prideful inner dynamism that propels other Mississippi Negroes to persist against unholy odds to become part of the awakening black consciousness in the South, to achieve minimal decency in their private lives and strike out as thousands are doing for public power. Among America’s socially sick, they appear terminal cases. An agency with time, patience, resources, and people who care might be able to put together these fragmented lives, bit by bit, year by year. They need water to wash with and lessons in cleanliness, food for the body and self-respect for the soul, a plan for living beyond tricking it out this winter and next and forever. If Columbus Thornton and his daughters are irresponsible, then is no one responsible for the eleven dirty fly-covered children growing up without the grace of foals in a field? Apparently, nobody is.