W. Ralph Eubanks, "When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land" (Beacon Press, 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Episode Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: W. Ralph Eubanks, "When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land" (Beacon Press, 2026)
Host: Sullivan Sommer
Guest: W. Ralph Eubanks
Date: January 7, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation with author and scholar W. Ralph Eubanks about his newest book, When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land. The discussion explores the layers of history, myth, memory, economics, and racial politics that have shaped the Mississippi Delta, blending personal narrative, archival research, and on-the-ground reporting. The conversation interrogates the myths and truths that construct the Delta’s identity, drawing out why its story matters to all Americans.

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Main Discussion Points and Insights

Defining the Book and Its Approach

• Genre-Bending Narrative (03:00)
  • Eubanks describes the book as "narrative nonfiction that blends memoir and historical narrative as well as reporting...blending the past and the present and also trying to imagine a different future for this place.”
• Questions Guiding the Research (03:56)
  • Eubanks began with three core questions:
    1. What are the policy, political, and cultural issues that have disadvantaged the people of the Mississippi Delta?
    2. What are the myths that keep us from seeing them?
    3. What role does race play in shaping those myths?
  • Chapters are structured with sub-questions derived from those central themes.

Myth, Memory, and Truth

• The Delta as Palimpsest and Mythology (07:18)
  • The Delta is "a place of layered stories," and much of its narrative is entwined with constructed myths—often rooted in seeing the Delta as “other” instead of fundamentally American.
  • Eubanks: “If a place as rich and tortured as the Mississippi Delta did not exist, some raconteur south of the Mason Dixon Line would have to make it up.”
• Thesis of the Book (09:03)
  • The Delta is argued to be "the most American place on Earth" because of its centrality in shaping American inequality, especially through extractive economies (cotton, coal, steel).

Archival Work, Lived Experience, and Responsibility

• Archival Method and Landscape as Archive (05:41)
  • Eubanks approaches both the landscape and people's memories as archives to be excavated—“I'm looking at that landscape, and I'm thinking about what can I excavate from that landscape?”
  • He prefers archival research to relying fully on personal memory: “I'm a memoirist who doesn't trust my memory.” [05:30]
• Moral Obligation and Immersion (23:09)
  • Eubanks embedded himself in Clarksdale for four months to confront the realities of poverty: “When I found myself embedded in Clarksdale...poverty could no longer be an abstraction.”
  • He reflects on privilege and the challenge of telling stories ethically: “I feel this obligation to these people whose story that I am telling and weaving this together and am I getting it right?”

Love, Power, and the Delta’s Inhabitants

• Multiple Kinds of Love for Place (11:45)
  • The Delta is loved differently by leaders: for wealth and power (e.g., Senator James Eastland) versus community uplift (e.g., Fannie Lou Hamer).
  • “People can love the place, but for different reasons. Fannie Lou Hamer is thinking about...trying to uplift them. Eastland is thinking, how do I keep maintaining the system so I can maintain my wealth?” [11:45]

Memory vs. Fact: The Case of Emmett Till

• Dangerous Myths and Selective Memory (15:53)
  • Eubanks: “The Delta has this very tenuous relationship with the truth...memory and imagination hold more power than fact.”
  • He recalls being told upon arrival in Clarksdale, “Well, you just stay away from that Emmett Till stuff now, you hear?” [15:53]

Truth and Misinformation in the Modern Era

• Challenges of Truth in the Age of 'Alternative Facts' (20:09)
  • “The impact of truth is that it is difficult for people to discern what is actually true, what’s real and what is part of someone's imagination...That is the great challenge of our time.”
  • Eubanks is frustrated by skepticism even when fact-checking is rigorous: “As a writer, that is very. It's very upsetting to me.” [22:09]

Race, Class, and Economics

• Race as Economic Construct (38:32)

  • Referencing economist Trevon Logan: “Race is not just a social construct, it is an economic one as well.”
  • Eubanks agrees: “We conflate blackness and poverty. We see them sometimes as the same.”

• The Role and Limitation of Philanthropy (35:45)

  • Social change philanthropy must be place-based and collaborative; one-time “philanthropy bombing” is ineffective: “Not everybody was at the table.”

Institutions: Education, Prison, and the Landscape

• Education in the Delta as Segregation Re-spawned (41:33)

  • “The classroom is the most segregated place because as schools began to integrate, segregation academies popped up across the Delta.”
  • The normalizing of private/white schooling and historical disinvestment in public schools is examined; students are often unaware of the roots of these inequalities.

• Parchman Prison—The Delta’s Bleeding Wound (49:03)

  • Parchman Prison is both a literal and metaphorical scar: “It is a prison and a plantation...a great wound on the Delta landscape. And violence is baked into the whole system of the place.”
  • Experiences teaching writing inside underscore the thin line between 'inside' and 'outside', and the way poverty, violence, and education collide in the penal system.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Genre and Method (03:00, C):
  “I tell people it's a work of narrative nonfiction that blends memoir and historical narrative as well as reporting.”

• On the Delta as Myth (07:18, C):
  “It's almost as if the Delta is part of America's myth making and that we had to have this kind of piece of our mythology...it's a palimpsest. It is a place of layered stories.”

• On Obligation and Privilege (23:09, C):
  “What are my obligations as a storyteller? To tell the story of people whose lives are...economically, socially, culturally, are different from my own?...As I told friends of mine over and over as I was writing this book, I said, this book has scared me.”

• On Emmett Till, Myth, and Silences (15:53, C):
  “The Delta has this very tenuous relationship with the truth...I always say to find a really strong story in the south, follow the silences. What is it? The things that people are silent about that they don't want to talk about.”

• On Race and Economics (38:55, C): “Race is an economic construct. Because so often..., we conflate blackness and poverty. ...Looking at the Delta specifically, it is race as an economic construct.”

• On Education and Normalization (41:33, C):
  “The classroom is the most segregated place because as schools began to integrate, something began to pop up...segregation academies...these kids aren't even questioning why there are these inequities.”
  “We become what we normalize. And in the delta, with these segregated schools, it has become normalized.”

• On Parchman Prison (49:03, C):
  “Parchman looms very large in the mythology of the Delta. ...I often describe it as this great wound on the Delta landscape. And violence is kind of baked into the whole system of the place.”

• On Who the Book Is For (58:55, C):
  “In some ways, I wrote it for the people of the Delta, but in some ways I wrote it for myself...I feel this need to understand this place. ...I wanted people to begin to see this as well...for those people in the Delta who may not, they feel as if they are voiceless and trying to give them a voice…”

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Key Timestamps by Topic

• Defining the Book and Approach: 03:00–05:30
• The Delta as Myth, Palimpsest, and ‘Most American’ Place: 07:18–11:05
• Love for the Delta – Eastland vs. Hamer: 11:45–14:42
• Emmett Till, Myth, and Truth: 14:42–19:02
• Information, Mythmaking, and Modern Misinformation: 19:02–22:54
• Author’s Immersion, Privilege, and Obligation: 23:00–27:18
• Mound Bayou and Black Self-Reliance/Myth: 30:46–35:33
• Philanthropy, Economics, and Race/Class: 35:33–41:07
• Segregation Academies, Education, and Normalization: 41:07–48:30
• Parchman Prison and the Prison-Industrial Complex: 48:55–55:31
• The Book as Introduction/Invitation: 56:11–58:34
• Audience and Motivation for Writing: 58:55–61:18

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Tone and Style

The conversation is intimate, thoughtful, and unsparing in confronting uncomfortable truths. Eubanks blends personal humility with deep scholarship, and the exchange repeatedly circles back—deliberately—to the ideas of myth, silence, race, economic extraction, and memory that haunt the Mississippi Delta.

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Conclusion

This episode offers listeners a sweeping yet detailed introduction to the complexity of the Mississippi Delta and an honest exploration of history, myth, and the ongoing struggle for truth and justice. Eubanks’ book—and this discussion—asks readers to see the Delta not as a distant Southern curiosity, but as a microcosm of American identity and inequality. Essential listening for anyone interested in history, race, economics, or the American story.

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Transcript

[A]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

Despite its expansiveness, beauty and the lush, loamy richness of the soil, suffering and injustice permeate visions of the Mississippi Delta landscape as much as the whale of the blues, a musical form inspired by the pain and inequities this land has inflicted on its people. But near the dimming of the day, a warm light envelops this southern plain. At dusk, the skies above Mississippi Delta fields glow with red and orange as if the sky were a fireplace. Maybe it is the expansiveness of the land that creates this light. Whatever it is, for a brief part of the day, beauty soothes like ghost, like silence that seems to howl across this wide and often empty place when it's Darkness on the Delta. How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land is the latest book by esteemed author, scholar and current faculty fellow and writer in residence at the center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, W. Ralph Eubanks. Ralph, welcome to the New Books Network.

[C]

Thank you. Thank you very much for having me here today.

[B]

So I loved this book.

[C]

Well.

[B]

Off the top, I and I. The book was different than I expected it to be. Not that I didn't expect to love it, but it was a little bit different. And what I'm curious about how you describe this book to other People from a. I mean, on the one hand, genre is made up, right? Like, who cares about genre? On the other hand, it is also helpful in trying to tell someone, hey, I'm reading this great book. And then they say, well, okay, well, what is it? Like, what's it about? How do you describe the book to people?

[C]

I tell people it's a work of narrative nonfiction that blends memoir and historical narrative as well as reporting. So I'm, you know, I'm doing some on the ground reporting, Reporting and interviews, trying to bring in these contemporary voices. So it's. I'm blending, you know, the past and the present and also trying to imagine a different future for this place.

[B]

That's interesting. Imagining a different future for the place. In every single chapter, I notice there are these series of questions which seem to be very reportage type questions. But talk to me about how the questions shaped your research and shaped the writing. And there's two. I wish we could go. There's too many questions to go through. There's like, literally every chapter has a bunch of questions in them.

[C]

Right. Well, I will tell you the big questions that I really began with. I had a whiteboard in my office, and I had three questions there. What are the policy, political, and cultural issues that have disadvantaged the people of the Mississippi Delta? And the second one is, what are the myths that keep us from seeing them? And then what role does race play in shaping those myths? So those were the three big questions. And from each of the chapters, one of those questions, they were, like, sub questions out of those that came out of that. And those were the things that I was researching at the time. And then kind of blending all of that research with that, because that's kind of the way that I'm a writer. Even though I have written memoir, I'm very much a person who uses the archive for creating narrative. So those questions were a way for me to also direct. Well, where do I go in the archive to find answers to some of these questions?

[B]

This idea of reporting, archive myth making.

[C]

And memory.

[B]

And memory, which we know is flawed at best, perhaps, yes.

[C]

I mean, memory has its flaws, but as I tell people all the time, I'm a memoirist who doesn't trust my memory.

[B]

Say more about that.

[C]

That's. So that's where the archive comes in.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

And I also mean I'm using the physical archive, but I'm also thinking about the place I'm writing about as an archive itself. I'm looking at that landscape, and I'm thinking about what can I excavate from that landscape. What does that building on that landscape? Tell me about it. So kind of looking out at, you know, an old rusting cotton gin outside of Drew, Mississippi, which kind of leads me into looking at the WPA guide and learning that Drew, Mississippi had more cotton gins than anywhere in America. So you're beginning to kind of excavate things that the landscape is telling you. Why are all these abandoned cotton gins here? How did that all happen? Looking at walking the fields of cotton, were these rows always this long? Or is this a result of automation? And then learning from interviewing people doing oral history with the former sharecropper that they were always that long, that it had nothing to do with automation. So using the landscape as an archival source as well, and then plumbing not only my own memories, but the memories of other people who remember that time as well.

[B]

You have this quote in. It's early in the book. It's in chapter one that it really hit me hard. It said, if a place is. If. If a place is as rich and tortured as the Mississippi Delta did not exist, some raconteur south of the Mason Dixon Line would have to make it up.

[C]

Well, that's that line. I think that's. That's very true. It's almost as if the Delta is part of America's myth making and that we had to have this kind of piece of our mythology. And it's a place that has, as I say in the prologue, it's a palimpsest. It is a place of layered stories. So I'm trying to excavate each kind of layer of that story at some point in the book, but also realizing that there are things about the place that have been made up. And then I think that. And that's kind of where myth comes in. You know, what are the things that are real about the place? What actually happened there? And what is it that we've imagined or what is it we have actually projected on this place so that we can think about it as a geographic or regional other rather than a piece of America? Because that is the idea for me was to get people to begin to think about this place as not the most Southern place on Earth, as the great Southern historian James Cop calls it, which I believe it is, but also the most American place on Earth, because this is where this idea of inequality was kind of bred, in the bone of America.

[B]

Or is that. You know, you talked about your three questions at the beginning, though, but this. This idea that. That the Mississippi Delta is the most American Place on Earth. Is that the. Is that the thesis of the book, do you think?

[C]

I would say that is the thesis of the. Of the book that I'm trying to. I'm looking at this place that I love. That's part of my family's story. But I think so often we put it in this separate sphere. We have all these different ways of thinking about it. Thinking about Paul Simon. Thinking about the Delta is our national guitar. Or thinking about other ways. Even the song When It's Darkness on the Delta, which is written by these two Tin Pan Alley songwriters, two nice Jewish boys from New York who've never been to the Delta, which is why they talk about nightingale singing. There are no nightingales at the Delta. So how these. These stories have really kind of. We've. We've set this place up as this other place when it is not kind of exceptional. It is, but it is. It is part of our whole American story. Because so much wealth was. Was built there. There's been so much that's been extracted from it. And then it has so much in common with other places that, you know, that sociologists refer to as places of deep disadvantage. And what. What connects those places is that there is usually some extractive industry or business that is there, whether it is cotton in the Delta, coal mining in Appalachia, or the steel industry in western Pennsylvania. So these are all industries that have been extracted and have left the detritus of their. Their operations behind and signs of them left on the landscape. And along with that, they've left the people, too.

[B]

Yeah, you do. Throughout the book, there's a lot of. I want to say examination, but examination, I think, is two arm's length of a word, because I think you are very. You're very close to the people. You mentioned a minute ago that you love the Delta, which. That love very clearly comes through from page one. But I'm thinking also about many of the people, politicians, community leaders that you talk about in the book. I wonder, well, do. Do they love it? Do you think they love it?

[C]

I think they love it, but they love it for different reasons. You know, thinking about kind of an example of that might be James Eastlett, who loved the Delta for what, the wealth that it gave him and everything to preserve that wealth. And kind of the flip side of that would be Fanny Lou Hamer, who also loves this place, but is working in opposition to everything that Jim Eastland is doing there. There's a great book called the Senator and the Sharecropper. And looking at those two Figures and how they represent different sides of the Delta. And that is, I think, that really captures it right there. People can love the place, but for different reasons. Fannie Lou Hamer is thinking about the people who have been oppressed there and trying to uplift them. Eastland is thinking, how do I keep maintaining the system so I can maintain my wealth? And so you have that push and pull between those who are. Have economic power and those who don't. And for a long time who didn't have political power, now that they've gained political power, they've never quite gained the economic power. As someone once said, after getting the vote, you can't eat freedom. And so people had to find a way to, once they had this power to vote and which people. And as the cotton industry changed, people were left without jobs to find a way to eat. I mean, it's something that the great civil rights worker Bob Moses said in a speech at Stanford. He said these people, he said, in five years, the whole automation of the plantation will be completed and these people will be left without jobs. They have no education because no one saw that it was anyone's problem. And that is the way that I think a lot of people looked at is that this is a place that is no. The people there, it's no one's problem. And the people weren't even thought of as human. They're thought of as workers. When you think about going Back to the 1927 flood, the great flood, when those people are stuck on that levee, all those black people are stuck on that levee and they're not allowed to leave, the reason is that's our workforce. We can't lose our workforce. And it's not that they were. They weren't seeing them as people in crisis. It's just those. They're our people. So it's a way that almost this, the. The mentality of slavery really persisted well after slavery was over.

[B]

One of the people I want to touch on and you talk about in the book is of course, Emmett Till. And I have a quote from the book. Before I read the quote, I'm going to acknowledge we've already started to talk about memory and myth making and the layers that are really throughout this book. And I'm going to talk about it again in this quote. And I'm acknowledging what feels like, even in this discussion, that we're having a returning and a returning and a returning, which I think is very apropos of the book, because there is that returning, returning, returning. And so I want to acknowledge up front that I understand what I'm doing, which is returning to this. This question we've already started to talk about, I'm going to talk about again, and we're probably going to talk about it again. And so when you're talking about Emmett Till and you're talking about the. The 1950s, you write in a place like the Delta, which already possesses a tenuous relationship with truth. Memory and imagination hold more power than fact.

[C]

Talk.

[B]

Talk about that.

[C]

Well, with respect to Emmett Till, that's a story that, as you probably know, there was a Look magazine article by William Bradford Huey where the two men who murdered Emmett Till confessed. And for a very long time, that became the story of Emmett Till. And I would argue that that was the white story of Emmett Till. If you read that article, there is no mention of Mamie Till and her pain and her loss. So it's a way to kind of get the story out there from one perspective. And so the Delta has this very tenuous relationship with the truth. As you know, I moved to Clarksville, Mississippi for four months to kind of be on the ground there, to kind of embed myself in the place to write about it from that vantage point rather than the distant one. My first night in Clarksdale, I was introduced to a man and my friend said, well, Ralph here is writing a book on the Mississippi Delta. And the man said, well, you just stay away from that Emmett Till stuff now, you hear? And it's that he had that story there that he wanted to kind of keep there. And I think that was really almost inspiration for my writing that line, because it's clear that he did not. You can see where people have that tenuous relationship with the truth, because once that truth comes out, it changes things. One of the things that I've been involved with over the last couple of months is they have bought the barn where Emmett Till was tortured. And the questions that we are asking as part of this team with the Emmett Till Interpretive center is how do we portray this place and kind of maintain this idea of truth where we're getting to the truth of this place? Because there's so many ways that people think about this story, and that has no relationship to what actually happened. Because we. It's. It's the way that we've told it in order to. So we don't have to deal with the horror of it all. I don't know if that makes sense, that myth making is a way for us to deal with. I think for a lot of people in the south to try to put up a barrier to what it is that we want to see. I mean, I always say to find a really strong story in the south, follow the silences. What is it? The things that people are silent about that they don't want to talk about. And one of those was the bar. People talked about that for years, but it was never really part of the record of the place. And now that has become one. It's like, how do we make sure that we tell the truth and don't create a new mythology that comes over this all?

[B]

Yeah. Something I've asked other authors who work in this area of history and myth making and memory and storytelling is, you know, in this, in our current era of AI, in alternative facts in information disguised as truth that I acknowledge we have had, we have had myths disguised as truth since the dawn of time. This is not, this is not, this is not new. No, it's not new. But I, but I feel like it, the speed at which those, those myths permeate and get out there today feels like it's faster and more accessible perhaps.

[C]

Oh, but I don't know.

[B]

What do you, like, what do you think about this? And also from your perspective, like, what's the impact on truth to having all of this other stuff out there?

[C]

The impact of truth is that it is difficult for people to discern what is actually true, what's real and what is part of someone's imagination. And that is why we can have these, continue to have these debates about what is true. I think that is, I think particularly about how fast a story can spread now. And going back to the Emmett Till story, how, I mean, it has taken us 70 years to figure out pieces of that story. Information traveled a lot slower in 1955. And now when something like that happens, there are all kinds of things that come up that you're trying to figure out what is actually happening. And that is the thing that is so it's the great challenge of our time is that there are probably people who will read this book in Mississippi and say, oh, well, he just made a lot of this up because that's not really what the Delta is. Because they believe that mythology. And I'm trying to. At the same time that I'm trying to weave a story, I'm also trying to change some of my readers perception of this place, that they have projected this idea on it. And some of that was some of my own mythology of the place as well that I've had to wrestle with. So those are, those are all of the things. It's so, it's. That is the great challenge of our time, is our. Our society's tenuous relationship with truth, that someone will. Someone will read something that is that, you know, I've done, you know, a great deal of research on. I've gone through and had a fact checker check every single statistic in this book and will still challenge it because you can make anything up, which is. As a writer, that is very. It's very upsetting to me. I mean, I'm the president of the Authors Guild, and one of the things that I'm thinking about in this next year is the work that I have to do is that we have to begin to think about these ideas of truth. And that is part of what I think our advocacy work has to focus on that as well.

[B]

You mentioned before that you moved to Clarksdale for four months to embed yourself.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah. Talk about how you thought about. You're writing this book about a place where you don't live.

[C]

Yeah, well, you know, my dear friend Edward Vaughn, who is no longer with us, this is probably 20, 25 years ago, said to me, you know, if your family had stayed in the Delta, the way you look at the world would be completely different. That question, you know, that idea has. And it wasn't something he said to me in a way that was kind of dismissing me. It was that he felt this obligation to kind of uplift the Delta in his work. He spent his entire career working with first generation college students trying to. He. He believed that that was the way to get people out of the Delta. So that has kind of stuck with me and realizing I'm writing about a very poor place and I'm a very privileged person and how. What are my obligations as a storyteller? To tell the story of people whose lives are very lives, economically, socially, culturally, are different from my own. And how do I actually begin to understand the daily realities of their life? And that's why when you are. When I found myself embedded in Clarksdale and spending every day in the Mississippi Delta, poverty could no longer be an abstraction. It wasn't just something that I was looking at through statistics. I witnessed it every day. Even though I lived in this fancy apartment that was really meant for French tourists who were doing blues traveling in the Delta. My next door neighbor downstairs, and this was, you know, didn't have laundry and would hang out laundry in this alley. So our lives were completely different within just a few feet of each other. Or if when I left there and I. Some would invite me over to the Clarksdale Country Club where they're having a, A, a golf game with a $50,000 prize that they're distributing in cash. And I had just been doing some reporting at the Sunflower County Freedom Project with a building that needs a new roof. That $50,000 would, would give them a new roof plus some other things. And that way that. So for me, I had to begin to think about what is it that I had to put myself in the position of the people that I was writing about as closely as I could. But it's kind of recognizing the privileged position that I have, but also questioning my moral obligation as a storyteller. As I told friends of mine over and over as I was writing this book, I said, this book has scared me. Why does it scare you? I said, it scares me because I feel this obligation to these people whose story that I am telling and weaving this together and am I getting it right? And that's the thing. That's what I had to focus on all the time and come back to. It's probably one of the reasons I began to take so many photographs along the way. There's a whole photo section in the book. Kind of here's what I see, here's what I saw. And that's only kind of like a limited amount of what I saw. But it's like, I think I probably have 200 to 300 pictures of the Delta that became my A memoir when I wasn't in the Delta. So I'd look at those, those images begin and think about it and that how I could evoke that landscape and how I could tell the truth about that landscape. Photographs provide evidence, as Susan Sontag said.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I really, I appreciate that I found myself when I was reading. I've spent very little time, I've a tiny bit of time, a couple of trips, I should say, to Mrs. To Mississippi. So no significant amount of time. But the last time I was there, I was at a conference in Jackson. I was down for the 50th anniversary reconvening of the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival in 2020.

[C]

Amazing event.

[B]

It was an amazing event. It was an amazing event. And while I was down there, I was, you know, staying in the official hotel by the conference center and I found what purported to be the oldest, I think the oldest black owned bookstore in Mississippi, if not one of the oldest in the U.S. and so I took a walk down there and I was, I was shocked at, I mean, everything was boarded up, absolutely everything along the Street. And I had this moment where, you know, I live in New York City, where I thought, man, I could come down here, I could buy one of these places. I could, you know, set up something. I don't know what, but set up shop. And, you know, this area, you know, is ripe for revitalization for the community. And then I thought. And then I caught myself, like, for, like. It was a savior mentality. I'm just gonna say it. It was a savior mentality. That was a hundred percent the mentality.

[C]

And. Yeah, and that was the thing that I was really trying to stay away from is it's very. It is very easy to fall into that mentality when thinking about these places. I mean, I. I remember I was. While I was working on this book, a gentleman came and was connected with me through. I think it was through the Harvard Divinity School. And he says, you know, there are things I really want to do in the Delta. And I'm meeting with him in Cleveland. And I said, okay, well, I'm glad you're interested in that. I said, who are your people here? Right? And he said, oh, I don't have any people here. I said, that's where it's going to be hard, because this is a place where you have to be connected in some way. As I would travel the Delta, I would have to kind of. And I would interview people. I would have to kind of throw out my Mississippi bonafide that my family started out in Milestone. Oh, you're. So that you have this connection to. To the Delta or, you know, all of my family's Tuskegee connections. You know, I would mention the Vaughn family in Clarksdale. I would, you know, the, you know, the Brewer family. All these people that I knew growing up, I kept that Rolodex in my head so they would know he's connected here. He's not just someone coming here to kind of hoover up a story out of us and leave that he feels an obligation to the way that he's telling this story.

[B]

Yeah. So you talk about. We talked about some of the people. There are many locations you talk about throughout the book in such that. I think many of the locations in the Delta, I think, are characters themselves. And one of the places you talk about is Mound Bayou. Can you talk a little bit about Mound Bayou?

[C]

Mound Bayou is a fascinating place. Mount Bayou is started in the late 1800s. I think it's 1887, and by Isaiah T. Montgomery and Benjamin Montgomery. They are brothers. And there's also a cousin, Benjamin Green, who's Involved with it. They are people who are. They worked on a plantation that was once owned by the brother of Jefferson Davis, Joseph Davis. After the Civil War, Joseph Davis tries to reclaim this land, but he's already leased it to them. Isaiah Montgomery and his family buy it. They end up in a dispute with Jefferson Davis, who reclaims the land. So once they leave this place outside of Vicksburg, they find this spot of swampy land in the delta that's on a railroad and they found an all black town there. And all these people move from Vicksburg to this malaria infested place and they make a town. I mean, these people come there and it's almost like they said, you know, that idea, I'm going to make me a world. Well, that's exactly what they did. So we're going to make a world here. And it became this place that was very self sufficient. It was this, it was an independent all black town. And they would always say, well, you know, this is. We don't even have a jail here. That's one of the things that they would brag about all the time. But it's also a place that I began as I began to dig into it. I mean, it is a big part of the Delta mythology of Mount Bayou. And the way that I began to kind of come into this is thinking about the way the poet June Jordan saw it when she was there in 1970. And then looking at June Jordan's notes from her visit there in 1970, kind of thinking about what it is that I'm seeing as well. Again, this idea of the palimpsest, what she's seeing, what I'm seeing, where do they meet, who, where the stories overlap, what's one covering up the other and then trying to learn it's a place that is now. I would say what the people there value is their storied past. And that seems to be all they have right now. And that's one of the things that I found troubling about it. And I really do believe it is a place that deserves to be preserved. It should be uplifted. But it's also very complicated because Isaiah T. Montgomery was part of the constitutional convention of 1890 in Mississippi. And that is the convention that disenfranchised black people in Mississippi. And it's a part of the story that people who are part of Mount Bayou's story don't like to talk about very much. But then, you know, kind of fast forwarding, you know, through time, Mount Bayou becomes, you know, a place where this Great experiment in healthcare comes about at the Delta Health Center. We're beginning to think about the social determinants of health, and it becomes the first rural health center in the country. So something really important because they already had an existing hospital there, Taborian Hospital, that was run by the Knights and Daughters of Tabor, and really. Which functioned like a health maintenance organization. But the Delta Health center was to kind of bring this idea of healthcare in the Delta up to date, rather than this somewhat outdated approach to it. So Mountain Bayou is a place that I think epitomizes the way that black people wanted to think about the Delta. It's a place my father loved because one of the things he got to do in Mount Bayou is he got to hear his queen of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson, perform there. So you had. And. And it was one of those places that I went as a boy where, you know, it was point out, this is a black town, and there was this pride in that. But it's. How do you think about your. Your past and how do you think about your present and. And how. And once again, how do you imagine a future for it that doesn't keep you always looking backward? You have to look at.

[B]

In this constant examination that you're talking about, One of the terms you introduce in the book is social change philanthropy. And you talk about social change.

[C]

Well, I have philanthropy. That is not my term. That's a term that actually was used by the economist Lawrence Katz at Harvard when. And. And he introduced that term to me. And the social change philanthropy is foundations coming in to try out, injecting money in places like the Delta, places of deep disadvantage, to try to foster some type of change, whether socially or economically. And social change. Philanthropy is something that I think can be effective, but it's something that has to work alongside the government sector. It has to be done in collaboration with the people in a place. One of the things that I really learned about the Delta from my time being embedded there is that each town's history is different. Each town's economic and social circumstances are different. And that all has to be taken into account when deciding what is it that that place needs. And I think in the case of particularly the Kellogg foundation, they came in and essentially what someone said to me, they philanthropy bombed the Delta. They put lots of money in places. Kind of seeing what stuck state of Mississippi basically says, okay, you go ahead and do that, whatever you want to do. We don't have to do anything. And really beginning to analyze that and recognizing, well, what does effective social Change philanthropy look like it's rooted in a place it's rooted in, and it's also lots of different places. It can't be a one size fits all. It has to be done with government, and it also needs to be done with the economic sector. I also spoke with people at the Federal reserve Bank of St. Louis, which has responsibility over the Delta, and thinking about what does monetary policy in a place like that look like? So trying to think about what is effective social change, philanthropy, and then also kind of looking at not only the large philanthropic organizations, but local, like the Community foundation of Northwest Mississippi, speaking with people who were involved with that project and how do they see philanthropy? And as I think it was Lawrence Katz who said to me that it really can't be effective unless you've got all the players at the table. And that's one of the things that I realized in thinking about all this money that Kellogg spent in the Delta, that not everybody was at the table.

[B]

In speaking about philanthropy and economics, one of the quotes I wrote down was you spoke with an economist at Ohio State, Trayvon Logan, and wrote that in his view, race is not just a social construct, it is an economic one as well. Do you agree with. Do you agree with that?

[C]

I. I do agree with that. And I mean, I. I've read a great deal of Dr. Logan's research, and Dr. Logan has an interesting background. His. His grandparents were sharecroppers in Coffeyville, Mississippi, which is on the edge of the Delta, at the delta and the hills meet together. And he has studied his family's cotton books where they kept track of what it was that they picked every year. And economically, he did a whole economic analysis of that. And that's where he began to see this labor of black people. It was designed to keep them in a certain economic segment and that this is the way. So these things were very much based in race, and they were also based in class as well. One of the things in the Delta, yes, you had a majority of the people who were tenant farmers who were black. There were white ones too. But if you look overall throughout the south during that period of tenant farm, the majority of tenant farmers and the. The south were white. So it was a system that was not only kind of constructed to keep black people in a certain segment, but it was also for class, to keep a certain class of white people in their place as well. So that's where I see race is this economic construct. But it's. You could even argue that it is both race and class, which is One of those things that we as Americans don't like to talk about. Class. No, we don't. But race and class are part of that. But looking at the Delta specifically, it is race as an economic construct. Because so often what we do, we conflate blackness and poverty. We see them sometimes as the same. And that's where I see his. That Dr. Logan's idea of race is an economic construct really rings true for me.

[B]

So we've touched some on some of the institutions that are across the Delta that you, that you speak about in the book. One of the, one of those institutions we haven't yet talked about is, is the education, educational institutions. And you write the most segregated social space in the Mississippi Delta after the church, is the classroom.

[C]

Yes. And the classroom is the most segregated place because as schools began to integrate, something began to pop up across the Delta and across the south, but especially in the Delta, were segregation academies. So there was a, a system called Freedom of Choice that was where you could opt in to kind of integrate a school. And as the Alexander v. Holmes case said, that that system put a cruel and intolerable burden on black families because once they made that decision to get a better education for their children, they were outcast. And one of the people that I talk with about this is Gloria Carter Dickerson, whose seven siblings all made the leap to do this. And then thinking about that system and kind of, I was involved in a play with Gloria with her Emmett Till Academy with these kids kind of acting out this process of school integration. And I realized they're acting out this integrating of schools, and they've never attended an integrated school. And I'm on stage every night and I'm looking out. I'm. I'm playing the civil rights advocate Amsy Moore. And I look out and see every white face out there in the, from the Delta. I know it's every white liberal in the Delta that I know there's no one there under the age of 25, not a single white person. We are right down the, the road from Sunflower Academy, West Sunflower Academy. Why are there no young people there? I know there's another school there with a lot of, why aren't those kids there learning this story? And that's why I went to talk with people at the Sunflower County Freedom Project, which basically functions as a freedom school on the freedom school concept, an after school program and enrichment program. And I wanted to find out what do these kids know about the system that has created the segregated system, that they are a part of. And they didn't know. They just knew that there were these schools that were all white that you had to pay to attend, and that most black people could not afford to pay to attend these schools. They did not realize these schools were set up to keep them from having to be socially integrated with each other. And they got really angry once they learned the truth about that. But it's one of those things that we have, once again, that relationship with truth rather than kind of confronting that. These kids have gone about as if they don't know that I have. My friend, the theologian David Dark, says we become what we normalize. And in the delta, with these segregated schools, it has become normalized. And these kids aren't even questioning why there are these inequities. And as I wrote in the book, that it's not that these schools, the white private schools, are better. It's just that this idea of separateness is something that people have constructed and never really confronted. My dear friend Steve Yarborough attended one of those schools, and he talked with me about his experience of that and his whole experience with integration. His father was part of the white citizens council in Indianola, Mississippi, which was, you know, essentially the uptown clan. It was klan in suits. And he was put into a segregation academy when he was 7 years old. And then he said he didn't encounter a black person until he got to college and played football, and then began to question everything that he had been taught, but then also realizing that so many of the people that he went to school with don't question, has become normalized and they can't see the need to question it. And that's where these inequities have been built up because there was this disinvestment from the public school system. People have put their money into these private schools to put. Keep their kids in these all wide environments. I mean, the private schools even had, you know, they even took, you know, mascot names from the schools that they were part of. So essentially what they were doing is they were maintaining a system of segregation. They just kind of took it and put it somewhere else. It's. It's a really. It's sad, but it's also where we as Americans, there's the piece of reconciliation that we didn't have in the civil rights movement. And I don't mean kind of this kumbaya moment. It's kind of like, okay, there's this big social change that's coming, how we're going to live together down the road. Those discussions never happen. And that is a prime example of how that didn't happen.

[B]

I think there is also this. There is this assumption. I mean, you said that this normalization, which is what it is, but this assumption that this. What I'm experiencing today is just the way it's always been.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Always. Forever. Since the dawn of time.

[C]

Yes. And in the Delta, it is because it was this system yet. But the difference was that white students went to school longer than black students because black students worked in the cotton fields. And the reason the Carter family decided to make that leap is they wanted to go to school for nine months. And May Burfick and Matthew Carter wanted their kids to get an education. That was the only way they saw. To get out of sharecropping. And it worked. Those kids all went to college. They all came to the University of Mississippi, where I was as an undergraduate. There was a Carter above me in one class below me. There was not a Carter in my class, but they all went through there. And they all, I think, for the most part, got advanced degrees. They all. May, Bertha and Matthew Carter had this vision for what they wanted for their family, but they were. They paid a price for it. Yeah. Gloria says that, you know, it's only been, I think, maybe in the last 10 years that she doesn't have nightmares about it anymore. And she said years of therapy.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I think that the discussion about Sunflower in this section of the book was one of my favorite. There's a lot of favorites. You know, if I get pressed, I'll name, you know, eight favorite sections of the book. But this is one of my favorite sections. Another section of the book, though, that I feel like, at least from a. From a. From a philosophical standpoint, we have to talk about. Is. Is parchment.

[C]

Oh, yes.

[B]

We can't. We. We cannot have a discussion about the Delta and about visibility and memory and myth making and skip over Parchment.

[C]

Well, Parchman looms very large in the mythology of the Delta. It's a. It is a prison and a plantation. And that's how it started as a prison, slash, plantation, which kind of tells you that, you know, in a lot of ways, a plantation is a prison. But I went to teach at Parchment to teach creative writing there to a group of inmates who opted into the class. And what I was trying to understand is this intersection of poverty and violence that you see across the Delta and how are those two interrelated. And I began to see that collision of poverty and violence inside the Delta, inside the walls of parchment. So I wanted to get the stories of These men. But I came in and I started. First, I started to ask about getting them to write about their lives before. Because I was trying to understand who they were before they were in prison for life. Because I'm also. These are people who are in for life. And then I came to recognize the reason I was getting them to write that wasn't what they wanted to write about. They wanted to write about their lives inside prison. Because they'd been inside prison, and they had more memories of that than they had of their life before. And I came to recognize it. That was my way of not having to deal with that life that they had inside. Because that was just too hard for me to imagine. Because once you begin to work with people in prison, you realize you have a lot in common with them. And you realize there's not much that separates you from people who are. Are behind bars and. Or in this case, behind razor wire. Because parchment is a prison that doesn't have. It doesn't have walls. It's not a wall Place. It's 5,000 acres. It's enormous. It's like. I often describe it as this great wound on the Delta landscape. And violence is kind of baked into the whole system of the place. Toward the end of my time there, this boxing ring shows up in the place where we teach. And I look over there, and I'm thinking immediately about the battle royale scene in Invisible man, about people boxing for spectacle. And one of the men says, yeah, they have it there. It's kind of people. They want us to kind of face it. But I'm a writer, and that's kind of who I am. And I realize that's his man's identity. That's part. And we are both the same. We are both writers, but our circumstances are very different. I walk out of here, and once I hear that gate shut, I'm free. He will never be free. And that's for me, that was the hard part of it all. I had to. I felt you could not write about the Delta without writing about parchment and going inside of it, which I had done before. But I worked with people who were in pre release, which is a very different. You see people who are going to get out and maybe do something with this writing. These are people who will never leave.

[B]

It had me thinking about. So I. When I was 21, when I was a senior in college, which blows my mind to think about this now. When I was a Senior in college, 21 years old, I tutored at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility outside of New York. Women's maximum security prison. I was a tutor for their public speaking, college level public speaking class. And I would go in once a week and work with any of the women who wanted to practice their speech for the upcoming class. And I would do that every week. And what would blow my mind then because I would spend, I was spending all my time in two places in my own college classroom and in the prison. And how similar those two places were in many ways, of course I had, I was at liberty. I had the freedom to come and go. And so I don't want to downplay that at all, but the similarities were astounding.

[C]

And, and that's the thing. Once you begin to engage with similarities, you there, there are all kinds of questions that you begin to ask yourself about our, our ideas of crime and punishment. And that's when I began to, to think about how Mississippi imprisons so many people. If you begin to look at the map of Mississippi and where the prisons are, it covers the state. I mean, one of the largest industries in the Mississippi Delta is the prison system. There are private prisons there, there are public prisons there. And even the town of Tutwater, Saucett, that having a private prison there was going to be this, going to be the economic savior of that town and that we think that incarcerating people is going to change. But what I saw is people, men who were, who were quite smart, but maybe I think a lot of them quite brilliant, but an education system that didn't know how to work with someone who may have been a little bit outside the box. I mean, I'm thinking about how I was able to kind of find places for schools for my kids that kind of play to their strengths. They didn't have that. And it kind of shows you what happens to this collision of poverty, lack of education, violence. All those things come together inside the walls of a prison. And we think that these are places that are making us safer. And they're not, they're just masking larger social issues that we as a society refuse to confront.

[B]

So I mean, we hope that many people are going to pick up and read this book. We hope. And, and many of, for many folks, I would imagine they may have ideas or things they think they know or think they understand about, about the Delta, but really your book may be their first real introduction to it. Yes, the truth, the truth of it. The truth of it. How do you think about that? How do you think about, you know, your book as being not simply a truth telling or a myth busting, but an introduction.

[C]

I do think about. I mean, I think that's one of the things I thought about with this book, is how to tell the story. I thought about it as this introduction to this place. I mean, fortunately, my family started out in Mileston, which is at kind of the bottom of the Delta. And I began to think about. Essentially, we travel all the way through the Delta up to Tunica, where the casinos are. So I was trying to think about the people who have not been there that I'm basically taking. If I'm taking you on a trip, kind of travel along with me, see who I meet along the way. And then maybe you can come here and you can begin to kind of add to that palimpsest where you begin, what it is that you begin to see. And kind of using this as a guide. So I wrote in terms of thinking about those people. One of the things that I think someone told me, and maybe it was a freshman essay class. Never assume that your reader knows anything about the place that you're writing about or what you're writing about. And I tried to kind of keep that in mind. What is it that people should know? And then the people who. Who do know the place, what are things about it that maybe they've overlooked? And then also the things that. That I think everyone knows about it, but also making sure that those are. Are stated. So I was trying to think about just a lot of different. Different ways that people will approach this. This book and from. From different perspectives. People who will know the place, people who think they know the place, people who want to know more about it, or people who've never really traveled there, but have heard about it for a long time, who may be fans of the blues. And then beginning to think about, well, what does. How did the blues actually spring from this. This land itself? And that's why the blues is a thread that kind of goes throughout this book. Because it's not a book about the blues. But you can't write about the Delta without talking about that.

[B]

So one last question. I don't think it. It's the same question that you just gave an answer to, but maybe. But maybe it is, which is, who did you write this book for? Like, who is the book for? Or maybe who the. Who is the book to?

[C]

You know, I think I. In some ways, I wrote it for the people of the Delta, but in some ways I wrote it for myself. Because understanding the place, I am from Mississippi, as I told friends, it's become a spiritual necessity for me to. I see Mississippi as my Spiritual home. I Live in Washington, D.C. which is where my children grew up, where I married, kind of where I put down roots. I mean, this is my real home, but spiritually, it's Mississippi. And I feel this need to understand this place. And I also want people to understand it more as well. I also think we're at a point in our American society where, let's just be honest, we're all kind of living with aspects of the South. We're all kind of living with one foot in the south, and part of that foot is in the Delta. And that those inequities had come from there. So I wanted people to begin to see this as well. So those. I think so I was writing it to people who would think that they don't have any. That this place has nothing to do with them. For them to understand. It has everything to do with you. For those people in the Delta who may not, they feel as if they are voiceless and trying to give them a voice or thinking about the young people that I interviewed there, thinking as I told them, maybe one day you will tell your story of this place. I mean, I had a student in a writing class. I remember sitting down, talking with her. She's from the Delta. And she said, I just don't know if this is a place that people want to hear about. And it really kind of hurt me. I said. I said, you are from a very special place and you need to. I mean, there are stories of this place that you know that no one else knows. And I want you to make sure that you use those and you write about them. That this is a place worth writing about. It is worth that. Stories for those people who think from the Delta, who think their story isn't worth telling. I wanted to do that for them too.

[B]

The book is When It's Darkness on the Delta. How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land by W. Ralph Eubanks. Find Ralph at his website, wralf eubanks.com and I am your host, Sullivan Sommer. You can find me at my website, sullivansummer.com on Instagram @thesullivansummer and over on substackullivansummer. Thank you for listening to the New Books Network.

[C]

It.