March / April 2002 - Working Women

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Mississippi Delta Blues
Behind the zines

Mississippi Delta Blues

If you are driving east with the desert at your back, take a right in Little Rock to reach the upper corner of the Magnolia State. Although Biloxi is geographically further down, it's common belief that you need go no further to reach the most Southern place on earth. Snowy cotton fields and still, deep bayous with red Cypress growing thick as murder weapons out of the water hint that you are in a place that can hold a secret. You are now in Mississippi - the state where Medgar Evers was shot, student civil rights workers were murdered and the literacy level remains among the lowest in the country. The state that is still as likely to celebrate Robert E. Lee's birthday as Martin Luther King Day seems to have condensed its essence and bottled it all up in the Delta.

Jonestown is a city of roughly 1600, depending on who passed through town and found kin to stay with on the day you chose to count, and who high tailed it out of town to search for better times in Chicago or St. Louis. The population is mostly black, with just a handful of white nuns; a few retired planters; and the Wongs, who came from China to run a small grocery store on Main Street.

Economically depressed is a term we can save for the social scientists and The New York Times. People here are poor. Sharecropping disappeared with the advent of cotton-picking machines that could do the work of a hundred hands. People gravitated into small towns with all of the other out-of-work croppers, sometimes literally moving their houses from the country to the city with them. There never really has been any work to replace the lost jobs.

In the 1950s and '60s, shotgun shacks sprang up all over town and what started as miserable housing only got worse over the decades. Some farmers actually moved the existing cabins that once nestled in the fields into town. Extension cords snake through houses, supplying electricity to three rooms from a single outlet. Broken windowpanes are covered with plastic garbage bags and duct tape. A couple of big rocks are the sole foundation for the porch. The only source of heat may come from turning the oven up to 400 degrees and then placing your hands by the element.

After almost four months in Mississippi, I still spend most days in the haze of cultural shell shock. What am I doing here? Well, the muse of inspiration visits in many forms. For a painter it may be an angelic face, for a poet a new tree unfurling from the cracks of a sidewalk and for a musician it could be the rhythm of breaking waves. For a secretary with an underutilized college degree, it may be a little Tibetan man dressed all in red.

A year after graduating from college I was working as an administrative assistant in a job I had found through a temp agency, dragging myself to work five days a week to photocopy and fetch coffee for eight hours. The work was easy and the people were nice, but it wasn't long before I was bored. The more that I worked in an office, the less I ever wanted to do it again. I was looking for another opportunity, but I wasn't sure what, when fate gave a little rap on my desk in the form of tickets to see the Dalai Lama speak (provided, ironically, by my employers). Although he wasn't the most charismatic speaker, the Dalai Lama said something that I longed to hear. He cocked his bald head to the side, looked myopically through his glasses so I could have sworn he was talking directly to me, and said, "True happiness can only be obtained by helping others."

So began my career in public service. Luckily, I had a ready-made opportunity. My aunt has been a nun in the Mississippi Delta for almost 20 years. A petite woman who exchanged her habit for a pantsuit in the 1970s, she came down from Seattle hoping to do something to help change the ugly face of poverty. After various teaching jobs in the area, she started a preschool program on the Delta and has been working there ever since.

Armed with only a slightly misguided notion of what it means to get off the beaten path, I decided to join her. I quit my job, traded my little Japanese car for a big American truck, said goodbye to good friends and good credit and headed southeast on Route 66 to work for Habitat for Humanity as an AmeriCorps volunteer. Now I'm a familiar face around town and as I watch closely, in one day I see enough to fill a Tennessee Williams play.

Jan. 14, 2002

The property on which we are building our houses sits at the edge of a cotton field and still has no running water or electricity. Arnie and I spend a fair amount of time running back and forth between the dorm and the worksite; that is, when we aren't running back into Clarksdale to pick up forgotten supplies, or rummaging through our shed to find a white trim nail or an undamaged vinyl starter strip. The morning starts a little slow, but the students are hard workers and we quickly pick up speed.

11: 30 a.m.
An hour later, and infinitely richer on the subjects of juvenile delinquents and crack babies, boiling black eyed peas, judging when a child needs a whippin' and how hot the upcoming summer is going to be (for the record, it's going to be hotter than a fry pan), I step out of the cloistered darkness of Miz Lillie Mae's apartment and into the thin January air.

11:45 a.m.
After leaving Miz Lillie Mae's, I head uptown to find Big Sam in his "office," the Peach Tree. The Peach is the only sit-down restaurant in the ragged string of buildings that comprise Uptown. Double Cola is 35 cents a bottle; a hand written sign declaring "No Cussing" hangs over the table. No one in the Peach ever seems to be eating anything. Big Sam, the Habitat board president, is a retired schoolteacher. He cooks a mean sweet potato pie and his last suggestion for a fundraiser was a "wild sale." I was thinking wild, crazy. He was thinking opossum and 'coon.

I give Big Sam an update on construction and he gives me a couple of papers that need to be filled out for Habitat's regional office. I make it out of the Peach in a record 15 minutes and head across the street to City Hall. I am trying to get the City of Jonestown to bring their backhoe to the worksite. The city's labor is provided by prisoners, and after a couple of minutes of chitchat, it's decided that the boys in green and white will bring the backhoe out the next day.

Noon
I send the students uptown to have lunch at Reverend White's soul food stand. I decide that I have neither the stomach for a pig ear sandwich nor the genetics for another meal of fried catfish and macaroni and cheese today. I spend the lunch hour eating left-over tuna casserole with Sister Fiona, my aunt's roommate, as she watches CNN.

1 p.m.
Habitat is searching for its next prospective homeowners and I'm giving a seminar to anyone who is interested. I explain what Habitat is, who is eligible for a house and what kind of a commitment we expect from our homeowners. I explain that one of the things we will consider is whether applicants currently live in substandard housing. One of the women at the meeting raises her hand. "Is not having a sink something I can put down?" she asks. We decide that it is.

2:30 p.m.
There is a shortage of work for the volunteers. We ran out of some necessary supplies, so I make the trek back to the hardware store in Clarksdale. In the light fixture aisle I run into Hinkley, who works for the local gas company. He would've played college football for Mississippi State if he hadn't blown out his knee his senior year. We talk a little bit about the weather before the conversation turns, as it always does with Hinkley, to hunting.

"Damn I'm tired. I've been sittin' in my duck fold since 3 a.m.," he says, rubbing his eyes. "You lookin' f'r some more duck? I got four today." I think of the last time he showed up at my door holding a dead duck at 8 a.m. on a Saturday and say thanks, but no thanks. I learned quickly here not to show too much enthusiasm for down-home foods or you may have to eat more than your words.

4 p.m.
There is a crisis back at the work site. When I return, the students ask me if I've talked to our new surveyor. They tell me I should call him right away. When I get a hold of him he tells me that not only are the two houses that we have built in the last two years taking up two lots each, but they are also 20 feet smaller than the county minimum. This is bad. The surveyor and I discuss our options for a couple of minutes and then I call my roommate so I can have a proper fit, all the time wishing I had never, never moved to the Delta. All of my usual stress relief techniques are out of the question here. Jogging is hazardous to your health on the country roads and I can't bear the thought of another person pulling over to ask, "Girl, you OK? Someone chasing you?" It's a hundred miles to the closest bar and even if there was one nearby I wouldn't have enough money for a Budweiser. Movie theater? Forget it.

4:30 p.m.
I stop by Miz Loubirdie's house. Miz Loubirdie is our next homeowner, the one we are currently building a house for. Her current house is one of the most rundown in Jonestown. To make matters worse, her three grandsons share the cramped two-room house with her. She has been sick and hasn't seen the progress on her Habitat house, so I ask her if she would like to go for a visit now.

The last time Miz Loubirdie saw her new house, it was a plywood-covered skeleton. Now, it is a real home, complete with pink walls and gold-flecked tile on the floor. Miz Loubirdie's face absolutely lights up. I can't think of anything better than that time-worn phrase to describe the look on her face. Normally she seems tired, with deep jowls and down-turned eyes and both her hands over her stomach, which causes her constant pain. For the moment she is completely altered as she clasps her hands together and walks from room to room talking curtains over the window, a sofa in the living room and a rocking chair on the porch where she can watch the red Mississippi sun settle on down into its bed of cotton.

All of the stress of the day is erased for the moment. I feel ashamed of the comparisons I've made between my old home and my new one. My desire to sit in a darkened theater with a tub of popcorn to drown my sorrows slowly fades as Miz Loubirdie and I walk out to my car on the edge of the cotton field. I wrap my arm around her shoulder and offer her a ride back to her current house - her temporary house. I decide there aren't really any good movies this year anyway.NG

Angela Torretta is still writing and volunteering in Mississippi.

On first glance, Zoe Trope seems like an ordinary teenager. Her pink Converse shoes peek out below her jeans; a Hello Kitty watch holds tight to her left wrist. She carries a cell phone, likes MTV and loud music. She likes shopping, loves parties. As she sits in a caf� with her best friend, she is laughing and cracking jokes.

But there�s something different about this 15-year-old girl from suburban Portland. She prefers reading Mother Jones and The Progressive to Jane or Seventeen. Just two years before she can legally drive, Trope was busy writing her first published book, Please Don�t Kill the Freshman, a memoir that eloquently describes high school angst and lust, day in and day out.

When Nervy Girl! met up with Zoe in Portland, we learned that Trope is not her real last name. Even the characters in her book � many of them her close friends � are given aliases. The goal was to protect the identities of those involved and to show that this could be reality at any high school across the nation.

�I never want my life to seem like it�s horrible, because it�s not,� Zoe says, remarking on the veritable angst in her book. �Writing helps me get through to people. Sometimes, I think writing and books are the only things that will save me.�

What does she need saving from?

Think back to high school (this may be harder for those who�ve banished all memories of Beginning Algebra, wedgies and after school fights). Who could forget all those hours strapped to a desk, listening to lecture after lecture? �This is not an education. I am in daycare,� Zoe writes at the end of her first entry in Please.

And what people are wearing (or not wearing) is still a major concern in the hallowed halls. �A stoner girl in a few of my classes hates the popular people who wear Converse shoes. Like when you go to buy Converse shoes she thinks you have to show your anarchy-punk ID card,� Zoe writes. ��all I really wanna know is: when the fuck is this shit going to matter?�

If Zoe has one flaw, it may be that she thinks and cares too much about the world around her. Her father describes her as idealistic � he even chides his mother for giving Zoe a subscription to Mother Jones and The Progressive at age 12.

�I see a lot of kids who just don�t care,� Zoe says. �Girls aren�t happy with themselves, they�re on medication. It just frustrates me. Ever since middle school I was like, �when are people gonna wake up?��

Zoe seemingly had her first awakening in eighth grade through a Portland Public School Talented and Gifted Program (TAG) class. Teacher Kevin Sampsell encouraged his TAP students to write freely about what they know. Students read Bukowski, not Shakespeare. �He showed me a whole other side of writing that is raw,� Zoe says. Inspired, she began firing off e-mails of her own writing to her newfound teacher/mentor. Sampsell remembers Zoe as one of the more outgoing students:

�She actually missed the first week of the class, but then by the third week she had already done some research on me and read one of my books, which are not really meant for kids. I told her not to show her parents my work. During the classes she would sometimes make arcane references to my own writing. I thought I was going to get fired.�

After reading more of Zoe�s work, Sampsell, who also runs Future Tense Press, related he would like to publish Zoe�s work as a chapbook. �I think since she was writing about her life, there was a very real sincerity that was combined with this wild energy,� said Sampsell. �I can�t think of any other young writer nearly as good as her.�

After reading Please, Trope�s friends and family were surprised. �I really thought it was interesting and exciting to see her talk about people I knew,� says her best friend, known in the book as Linux Shoe. �When I first got to know her there was this strength�it�s interesting because I come from an Asian background � I was taught that women shouldn�t be like that.�

In a card for their daughter�s 15th birthday, Zoe�s parents even wrote, �Be a rebel, always.� They�ve known since Zoe was born that she was different.

�When she was four, she beat up an eight year old who was sitting on her brother,� said Julie, Zoe�s mom. �She questioned authority from a very young age, she always wanted to know �Why?��

This penchant for knowing all has caused some problems for Zoe and her family. Zoe was recently reprimanded for having a political cartoon from Mother Jones taped to her locker. The cartoon � showing a woman in a burqa slowly disappearing � accompanied a news report on how Afghani women were murdered in their country. When the school demanded that Zoe remove it from her locker, her father, Vance, read them the riot act. �Here�s a student who does wonderful things for the school � she�s in band, the Earth Club, gets straight-A�s�and you make her cry because she thinks and wants other people to think?� Vance said. �I find it sad that a school cannot embrace one of its gifted students. What they want is a docile environment.�

Vance has read excerpts of the book; Julie read it from cover to cover. Both approached it on their own terms and were amazed. �I thought it was a wonderful first effort from a 15-year-old,� Julie said.

And though the school administration does not appreciate the honesty within Please, Zoe is optimistic. �I hope it [the book] just teaches people to be more open-minded about youth and people in general,� she says.

Zoe Trope is now working on her online diary and writing letters to friends and old teachers. Please Don�t Kill the Freshman is available at Powell�s Books, Reading Frenzy and other small bookstores across the US.