Blues, haints and bayous: snippets from the Deep South: Dulling the pain

The poverty is really grinding us down. It is like a weight on our spirit every day. How must it affect the people who live here day after day after day, we ask? When they can literally do nothing to avoid it.

Small towns we are driving through still have, to our eyes, a very clear differentiation in housing, parks and surroundings, between upscale neighbourhoods and downscale ones.

Greenwood, for instance, has a row of a thousand oaks lining a boulevard, planted by the garden club in the 1950s. It was once named one of America’s ten most beautiful streets. Along one end of town, on one side of the bridge, in the spring, with the leaves out, much of it would still be appealing, with its large homes with their lawn frontages and neat footpaths for pedestrians lining the boulevard. At the other end of town are ramshackle shacks, we felt it too intrusive, and too sad, even to photograph. Greenville is similar. Tullullah, across a bridge in Louisianna, if anything, is even sadder.

Travelling in some of these counties brings back memories of the Ku Klux Klan, who are still active, we hear. We remember James Meredith setting out on his lone March of Freedom from Memphis to Jackson in 1966, but, before he made too many miles he was shot enroute. His efforts inspired others to take his place in the march, Stockley Carmichael and Martin Luther King, among many others. At Greenwood, Carmichael was arrested. For trespassing. When he was released, hours later, he gave his famous Black Power speech insisting that, to rise up, black folk needed to build their own platforms to gain power and independence and freedom. The way you build anything. From the ground up.

But, as we look around these parts, those steps have oftentimes been small. We see individuals who have started out with enthusiasm. They have put a sign over a shop door at the shared back end of a Melco-box type hut, for example, intending to set up a hairdressing business, but that is now closed. Boarded up. Failed. Folk just don’t have spare cash to get their hair done in these parts. We even saw a school built. A big expensive looking place. Then, for whatever reason, it was closed and left vacant, the structures left to rot, attracting vandals.

Food outlets sometime appear to make a successful business. Mr Edward’s Rib Shack is still working in back of a grim area in Greenwood. Rick Stein called here a few years back and tried these famous ribs. While it is not opened today, the little cabin kitchen has been spruced up and repainted since then, so Mr Edward’s shop seems to be surviving.

There are other parts of town, and other towns, where folk are having a go, attempting to attain the American Dream. But, in many parts, it looks like hope has gone. We have seen lost souls wandering the streets aimlessly in their pyjamas. Any time of the day. Going nowhere. Ranting to the heavens.

It looks, for them, as if the American Dream -- that you can attain anything you want if you just put your mind to it and try hard enough — is but a myth. There are simply too many barriers. The cultural gap between the haves and the have nots is simply too deep, too vast now, to negotiate. And they have sunk into an abyss of misery from which they cannot escape. There are no moves.

Religion and churches are everywhere, here, still. Possibly because religion offers the wholesome belief that what you don’t attain in this life you will in the next, if you but persist. And if you are good. There are just so many many churches. Forty-four, we counted this Sunday in just a tiny 4.1 mile radius. Even more than last Sunday.

So these, no doubt, are helping some of the folk. Though, in the 60’s and 70’s many of the political activists around here would have considered them ‘the opiate of the masses’. As Marx postulated. Satiating the people. Any crutch, though, seems welcome when you need to dull the pain.

And religion really saturates life here. At one tourist site we visited, a fellow was sitting in his car with the volume turned up, listening to gospels on his radio. But, still, the burden of life is heavy.