Delta Fragments: The Recollections of a Sharecropper's Son

by John O. Hodges

Overview

The son of black sharecroppers, John Oliver Hodges attended segregated schools in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the 1950s and ’60s, worked in plantation cotton fields, and eventually left the region to earn multiple degrees and become a tenured university professor. Both poignant and thought provoking,  Delta Fragments is Hodges’s autobiographical journey back to the land of his birth. Brimming with vivid memories of family life, childhood friendships, the quest for knowledge, and the often brutal injustices of the Jim Crow South, it also offers an insightful meditation on the present state of race relations in America.
     Hodges has structured the book as a series of brief but revealing vignettes grouped into two main sections. In part 1, “Learning,” he introduces us to the town of Greenwood and to his parents, sister, and myriad aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers, and schoolmates. He tells stories of growing up on a plantation, dancing in smoky juke joints, playing sandlot football and baseball, journeying to the West Coast as a nineteen-year-old to meet the biological father he never knew while growing up, and leaving family and friends to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta. In part 2, “Reflecting,” he connects his firsthand experience with broader themes: the civil rights movement, Delta blues, black folkways, gambling in Mississippi, the vital role of religion in the African American community, and the perplexing problems of poverty, crime, and an underfunded educational system that still challenge black and white citizens of the Delta.
     Whether recalling the assassination of Medgar Evers (whom he knew personally), the dynamism of an African American church service, or the joys of reconnecting with old friends at a biennial class reunion, Hodges writes with a rare combination of humor, compassion, and—when describing the injustices that were all too frequently inflicted on him and his contemporaries—righteous anger. But his ultimate goal, he contends, is not to close doors but to open them: to inspire dialogue, to start a conversation, “to be provocative without being insistent or definitive.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781621900863
Publisher:	University of Tennessee Press
Publication date:	03/01/2014
Edition description:	1
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

John O. Hodges is associate professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he was also the chair of African and African American Studies from 1997 to 2002. His articles have appeared in the CLA Journal, the Langston Hughes Review, Soundings , and The Southern Quarterly. He holds a PhD in religion and literature from the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Read an Excerpt

Delta Blues
If you ever been mistreated,
You got to know what I’m talking about.
Worked five long years for one woman,
And she had the nerve to kick me out.
—Muddy Waters, “Five Long Years” According to a woman I knew as Miss Emma, one of my mother’s closest friends, my uncle Obe was the meanest man she had ever seen; she asked for water but he gave her gasoline. That line, of course, comes from the Muddy Waters1 song “Meanest Woman,” which he recorded in June 1960:
I asked for water she brought me gasoline, oh
The meanest woman boy I most ever seen
I asked her for water and she come runnin’ with gasoline. Miss Emma flipped the script to express her own feelings of hurt and pain. She, like Muddy before her, was expressing the most classic theme in the blues: a relationship gone bad between a man and his woman. Again, Muddy Waters expresses this type of rocky relationship in his song “Mean Mistreater”:
She’s a mean mistreater,
And the woman she don’t mean me no good
Well you know I don’t blame you baby,
I’d be the same way if I could.
In the following lines from “My Fault,” recorded by Waters in 1961, the singer takes full responsibility for the broken relationship:
It’s my own fault, I don’t blame you
For treating me the way you do
When you was deep in love with me,
At that time, little girl,
I didn’t love you.
It seems to me that the blues always deal with relationships, if not between a man and a woman, then between a man and his boss or overseer, or between himself and his own existential circumstances.
Growing up during the 1950s and 1960s in the Mississippi Delta, I got to see the pain of thwarted relationships in my own family between my mother and stepfather and between my sister and her husband. There was also the pain of trying to get the plantation owner to pay a fair wage for services rendered. So, around mid-afternoon on Saturdays, my parents and sister, along with a number of others, crowded into a truck bound for Mr. Hodges’s store on Henry Street. From there, it was a fairly easy walk to Johnson Street and Carrollton Avenue, where most of the juke joints were located, or to some of the good-time houses scattered along Main and McLaurin streets. These businesses were prepared to offer, for a reasonable price, whatever sedative was necessary to soothe an aching heart, but nothing seemed to do the job as well as the blues. Too young myself to have the blues, I experienced them vicariously through others. After skipping the second movie of the double feature at the Walthall Theater, I would amble across the street to get a closer look at the frenzy. Except for the presence of liquor and profanity, you might mistake the scene for one that took place the next day at Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church as the Reverend W. H. Kingston neared the end of his sermon. It was not church, but the people seemed to be just as refreshed and revitalized and, yes, determined to get through another day.
The fried fish, the liquor, and the blues, the staple of Saturday nights in Greenwood, were repeated throughout various venues in the Delta. There must not have been much of an age restriction then, for I couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve. There was no real worry or concern as long as I was back at Mr. Hodges’s store in time to catch the truck heading back to the Whittington plantation around midnight. While liquor was off limits, I had a healthy dose of the blues and fried buffalo fish, washing them down with a Double Cola. In some joints and houses, the music went from nine o’clock Saturday night to early Sunday morning, finishing just in time for those willing to make it to Sunday school.
When we moved to Greenwood, we lived right across the street from the 82 Grill. Now older, I could venture as much as I wanted into these places. Although it had a juke box and smoke and fried fish, the 82 Grill was not really a juke joint. For one thing, there was little room for dancing. Just a few blocks over, however, was a place that qualified as a juke joint in every sense. Occasionally, I ventured over there to dance with some older women. I really couldn’t dance as well as Jeffie McNeal and Joe Lee Lofton. But I could slow drag well enough to get by. I waited for a slow record and would ask a woman who was kind enough to dance with anyone who asked. I placed my head on her breast, and we did a slow grind to the music of John Lee Hooker. I learned that the blues was not only a sedative; it could actually help you make out.
The lyrics were filled with various codes. Several years earlier, they didn’t make much sense to me: “Nobody can bake a sweet jelly roll like mine.” The sexual innuendo was rampant in this music: “Jelly, jelly, jelly, all the time!” Was this what the big boys meant when they called out to a woman with an ample backside? “It must be jelly, ’cause jam don’t shake like that.” Or, this: “My pencil won’t write.” The key was being able to break the code. Earlier, I had asked my stepfather what these words meant; he only dismissed me as a mannish boy.
It was not until my freshman year at Morehouse, however, that I gained a real appreciation for what I’d been hearing all those years in the Delta. The 1960s marked an important revival of interest in the blues. Those artists who once played an entire weekend for two or three dollars, a bottle of whiskey, and the company of a willing woman were now being discovered and their music was being electrified. One could see gigs performed now in towns outside the Delta and often outside the state. So, when Prof. Stephen Henderson found out that he had a student in his class from the Mississippi Delta, he immediately approached me about getting some recordings of these artists for his own collection. He believed, as did Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown before him, that the music held significance as great literature. In his book Understanding the New Black Poetry, he pays tribute to this art form.
Langston Hughes, in his book Fine Clothes to the Jew, offers us a definition of this form: “The Blues, unlike the Spirituals, have a strict poetic pattern: one long line repeated and a third to rhyme with the first two. Sometimes the second line is slightly changed and sometimes, but very seldom, it is omitted. The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung people laugh.”2 Hughes’s definition could be expanded, but it does suggest a major aspect of this genre. Singing gives the individual the ability to cope with his or her circumstances. The very singing of the blues is a way of acknowledging the “isness” of one’s situation. The hope is not so much to overcome that situation but to share it with someone who understands and is willing to listen. The blues thus have a communal effect, and the blues singer can say with some assurance: “If you ever been mistreated, you know what I’m talking about.”
While scholars are not in complete agreement about the origins of the blues, most have indicated that the Mississippi Delta is the likeliest birthplace.3 B. B. King4 has gone so far as to indicate a specific plantation, the old Dockery farm near Cleveland. For it is only on such plantations that we find the major ingredients that make up the stuff of the blues: plantation life, low wages, huge disparities between the haves and the have-nots. The region also had a large state penitentiary, Parchman, which was perhaps more like a big farm than a correctional facility. It was a brutal place that was, by some accounts, worse than slavery. Some of the greatest artists did stints there: Son House, Bukka White, and others.
We have only to consider the many artists who were either born in the region or spent a large period of time there. Indeed, the Mississippi Delta has made the greatest contribution to this uniquely American art form. Each year, in various cities in the Delta, there are blues festivals that celebrate the music’s rich history in the region as well as introduce the world to the next generation of artists determined to keep the tradition alive.
Of all the artists from this region, we immediately recognize the work of B. B. King, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters. But there were also David “Honeyboy” Edwards and Son House, among many others. In fact, the bluesman who has proven to be the most influential spent only a short time on the stage: Robert Leroy Johnson, who was himself influenced by House and Charley Patton. As a youngster, Robert followed the two older artists around and played whenever he got the opportunity. After a year’s absence, Johnson reappeared, and to the amazement of both Patton and House, his musical skills had improved dramatically from just the year before.
Johnson was born in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, in 1911 but spent a great deal of his short and enigmatic life in Greenwood, where he died and is buried.5 The myth is that he sold his soul to the devil for the gift of playing the guitar. Honeyboy Edwards first met Johnson in Greenwood in 1937. At that time, Johnson was playing in a number of country towns throughout the Delta, places like Leland and Indianola, as well as Greenwood. Robert Johnson, according to Honeyboy, had his own style: while others like Rube Lacy and Tommy Johnson had that “bookity-book Delta style, Johnson had a classic Blues style, with mostly a lot of minor chords. He had a lot of seventh chords in his Blues and it sounded better than just playing straight. And that took with the people, because he had a different sound.”6
A man of mild temperament, Johnson had just two vices: he loved whiskey and was crazy about his women. Those two things proved to be his downfall. By Honeyboy’s account, a beautiful married woman visited Johnson every Monday at a rooming house in Baptist Town, where he was staying, and spent the entire day with him. When the cuckolded husband got word of his wife’s indiscretions, he had one of his lady friends poison Johnson’s whiskey. Falling ill almost immediately, Johnson hung on for a few days, but in the end “he was crawling around like a dog, and howling.”7 He was just twenty-seven years old when he died. As with many incidents associated with Johnson, the actual specifics of his death haven’t been clarified. If, indeed, he was poisoned, as most commentators argue, what poison was used? Those claiming it was strychnine would have to reconcile their claim with the fact that, as Honeyboy Edwards pointed out, this poison causes almost instant death. Johnson couldn’t have survived for just over three days. Some accounts indicate that a woman stabbed him to death. Then, there is the famous Faustian myth of his selling his soul to the devil. Had he bargained away his life at the crossroads?
While there are those who downplay the crossroads legend, there seems to be little doubt that Johnson’s guitar playing improved dramatically and within a very short span of time. During Johnson’s brief life, his talents went generally unappreciated and unpaid. Only since his death have there been efforts to pay tribute to his talent and influence. He was inducted into three major halls of fame: the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 (Kudos owing more, perhaps, to Johnson’s influence on artists like Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan than to any real achievement in the rock and roll genre, which hadn’t yet emerged when Johnson was alive), and the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame in 2000. He was also posthumously awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. By the time of his death at age twenty-seven, Johnson had, in just two short years, produced a body of work that would have a greater impact than that of any of his contemporaries, including Bukka White and Blind Willie McTell. Bob Dylan, who was among the first to publicly perform one of his songs, “Rambling On My Mind,” had this to say about his music: “From the first note, the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up. . . . Robert Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard.”8 But, as I noted, such praise would come only long after his death.
Unlike Robert Johnson, some blues artists have received and are now receiving a bit of their just due—better contracts, better royalties, and acknowledgment of the blues’ influence by such rock and roll artists as Elvis Presley, Keith Richards, Bonnie Raitt, Jack White and the White Stripes, and numerous others. John Lee Hooker actually lived long enough to enjoy fame and commercial success. Born somewhere near the Mississippi Delta town of Clarksdale in 1917, Hooker made a number of appearances on late night shows near the end of his life. His appearances with rock stars such as Clapton, Raitt, Richards, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Carlos Santana boosted their careers as well as his own.9 But had Hooker moved too far beyond his Delta roots? Had he become so electrified that he had, by the time of his death, moved beyond that classic Delta blues style? Some suggest that indeed he had.
There is no doubt, however, that Hooker, Johnson, Waters, and all the other great bluesmen paid their dues. For them, it was just about the music. Fame and commercial success, when and if they came, were extra. Honeyboy Edwards spoke for this group when he closed his autobiography, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, with the old line popularized by several bluesmen: “I’ve had my fun, / If I don’t get well no more.”

Notes
1. Muddy Waters (1913–1983) was born McKinley Morganfield in Rolling Fork, Mississippi.
2. Langston Hughes, Fine Clothes to the Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), 13.
3. For a fuller discussion of the origins of the blues and its tradition, see Robert Santelli, “A Century of the Blues,” in Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey, ed. Peter Guralnick, Robert Santelli, Holly George-Warren, and Christopher John Farley (New York: Amistad, 2003), 12–59.
4. B. B. King (1925– ) was born Riley B. King in Berclair, Mississippi. I understand that “B.B.” stands for “Blues Boy.”
5. There are, in fact, three sites in and around Greenwood that are claimed to be the final resting place of Robert Johnson.
6. David Honeyboy Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1997), 102.
7. Ibid., 104.
8. Quoted in Tom Graves, Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson (Spokane, WA: Demers Books, 2008), 75.
9. Several essays in Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, ed. Guralnick et al., provide important information on traditional blues artists and their influences on later rock and blues artists.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction xiii

Part I Learning

The Delta 1

The Wilsons 7

The Hodgeses 15

My Mother 21

My Sister 27

My Stepfather 33

Whittington Plantation 39

Settlement Time 45

One-Room Schoolhouse 51

G Street Boys 55

Schoolmates 61

My Teachers 65

Going to the 'House 71

Part II Reflecting

Delta Blues 79

Gambling on the River 87

Black Ways and Other Folkways 93

African Gods in Mississippi 101

A Delta Revival 105

The Black Church 119

The Black Preacher 125

The Folk Sermon 131

Is God Good? 139

The Color Line 145

Emmett Till 153

Ruleville Revisited: Reflections Fifty Years After Marius 159

Civil Rights 167

Medgar 175

1963 181

Endesha: A New Walk for Freedom 187

Whites in the Struggle 191

Reunion as Pilgrimage 197

Epilogue: The Delta Then and Now 203

Appendix 1 Table of Black and White Persons in the Delta by Population, Education, and Income 211

Appendix 2 Reports Relating to 1962 Civil Rights Activities in Which Author Was Involved 212

Selected Bibliography 217

Index 223

What People are Saying About This

Mary Coleman

"Clear, compellingly written, reminiscent of a good novel. . . . What Hodges has done is write a story about a place he adores as home. He brings all of the contradictions and longings for a better place into his musings."

Editorial Reviews

Clear, compellingly written, reminiscent of a good novel . . . What Hodges has done is write a story about a place he adores as home. He brings all of the contradictions and longings for a better “place” onto his musings.”
—Mary Coleman, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies, and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

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