Drawn to the Delta

Why would anyone love it here?  It's flat, it's hot, and it harbors mosquitoes the size of a baseball mitt.  Historically, and now perhaps even more than ever, it harbors poverty juxtaposed by sometimes extravagant wealth.  It is a land of unforgiving extremes.

My mother's family migrated here long before my memory.  Down through Appalachia, down through the foothills of Alabama, where they settled for a while near Mentone, into the anonymity of a small bayou community called Pace.  They scratched a living by being salesmen and homemakers, contracting tuberculosis in the case of one grandparent, and mothering 12 children in the case of the other.  My mother was one of the 12, born in the year of the Great Flood of 1927.

The older ones--of which there were many--shared their resources and their love with the younger ones.  They took each other in.  They took nieces and nephews in.  They worked hard.  They studied hard, valuing the benefits of a hard-fought education then denied to many.   They passed on a musical talent that runs through generations, a reverence for education and industry, and a strong pride of family.

The two youngest of the 12 are now approaching 80, the cousins have scattered, and the third and fourth generations in many cases are strangers to each other.  Our lives are busy, but we decided on a whim to convene as many cousins as we could.  It was time to reunite.

And so to the Delta I went.  A cotton boll towers over the landscape, but the fields now are just as likely to be full of rice, often guarded by the hovering skeletons of irrigation systems designed to thwart the blasting temperatures.  There are more vacant buildings and more abandoned, once-thriving roadside businesses.  There's less activity than I remember.

The Delta is now also home to a chemical industry, a high-end manufacturer of commercial-grade cooking appliances, at least two institutions of higher learning, and, a casino.  "The Help," a best-selling novel set in Mississippi, will be filmed in Greenwood beginning this summer.  None of these places, however, are in the wide open spaces between towns that are shrinking to no more than a couple of convenience stores.

But family is there, shrinking to only a very few of the original 12.  So we gathered to reconnect, meet the children--and sometimes grandchildren--of cousins, tell stories, share our music, remember our past. 

There, in the middle of it, were the "babies" of the original 12, reveling in the cacophony of voices and laughter and discovery.  Here's the life of the party, who will be 80 on her next birthday. 

So much has changed.  But so much continues through what they all gave to us.  We are a rich family beyond measure.  And from California, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, and points around Mississippi, the Delta draws us, always, back.