It was interesting. Eye opening. I'm not sure how or why it touched me like it did. Funny thing was, it really wasn't relevant to my job, but it's left me with a feeling that I'm somehow less, or maybe more, than I thought I was, without really knowing what is missing.
The tour was offered by a resource in the area, to different sales people. The premise was to familiarize ourselves with more of the Delta and what is part of the bigger picture in the area. I went thinking I'd just sort of a get a day off from work. I came home thinking I'd missed something for a long time.
It's odd, you know. I can give you the itinerary. Tell you about the sites and locations we saw. They're able to be found on websites and the internet. I looked a few of them up when I got home last night. But to get on the bus thinking that I am "Southern" and to get off realizing there's so much I really did not understand.
Did you know there is a town in
The hospital still stands, boarded up. Even the plywood is appears to be rotting. The design of the entrance seems to be Art Deco. Sitting on the bus in the parking lot, I felt I could see in my mind's eye the invisible landscape, the hustle and bustle of a hospital once so busy in a community once thriving. It's a romantic notion to imagine the doctors and nurses who faced discrimination anywhere else standing tall there and taking care of those who would not be seen anywhere else. In a world where blacks were let in through the back door, if at all, this was a place within a place, built just for them, by them, made alive by them. A place where someone seemed to have said, "The back door is not good enough." It was once a hustle and bustle community where blacks came to succeed and be treated like equals. But the highway moved and depression hit and it's drying up like so many other small towns in the South.
We went to the gravesite of a woman who, after having been fired from her job, beaten, threatened, all for registering to vote in the state of
We went past farm land where, once upon a time, the farm was managed and run almost entirely by blacks, slaves. They kept the books, graded the cotton, and did all the management tasks. Yes, they were still the farm hands picking the cotton. But they did so much more and were paid for it. Paid for it. Sometimes saving enough money to buy their freedom, and choosing to stay where they lived.
We went to markers and crossroads where people claim that "blues was born" and lives were changed. Though they didn't know it at the time. By day they were poor farm hands. By night, they sang the blues. Or even worse socially, they were just blues singers. They would earn the same in one night as a farm hand did in a week. $5 was a lot for a week's work at the time. They said that only a preacher or a blues man wore a suit during the day.
Preachers and blues singers were, at their very nature, competitors. They were competing for the same congregation and the same donation. One wanted the money on Friday night and the other on Sunday morning. I learned the true definition of a jook joint. How many times have I called a bar "Just a juke joint" and not realized that no, it's many things, but not a jook joint. They believe the word 'jook' is derived from an African word that meant sin or evil. On the farms, so far from town, with all the share cropper houses lined up, one person or one family would decide their house could be the 'jook house.' The house of sin – of whiskey and music. And on weekends, that's where the others would come to play and to party. Just down the road. How could I think that I've been in juke joints all my life, and not really know that I had no idea what a jook joint really was?
I found one on the tour. They say it has been a jook joint for "about 50 years." The man who lives there works for a farmer by day and the farmer owns the house. They say the farmer "looks the other way" at night when the blues d.j. comes in or the live musicians come over. 3 nights a week minimum. $5 at the door. Quart beer is $5. It's appropriate to bring your own hard liquor in, but buy your beer and sodas from him. He lives in one room of the tiny place. There is a sign with a lock bock for donations if you want to take pictures. It almost seemed like the catch phrase "poor-ism." Take a photo of the man's home and leave him a dollar. Marvel at how he lives. While we sat in an air conditioned motorcoach and contemplated future trips to the jook joint. They say all are welcome. I want to go and see. But do I want to go and see because I want to hear live blues? Or because I want a peek, like a voyeur, at the inside of his home? See how he lives? Look at it and compare the appearance of squalor on the outside to the lively bar on the inside? Will I even appreciate the sounds and emotions that fill the air? Will I appreciate the small corner in which he lives? They said the room is just big enough for his bed, and with nails to hold his hangers with his shiny blues suits.
Will I understand why it bothered me so? That a woman should be buried in a town where she had to go when she lost her job, just because she wanted to vote? Will I understand why I wanted to tear down plywood and walk through the halls of a long abandoned hospital? Or why I want to put a dollar in a lock box and take a picture of a man's home? I feel like I somehow just missed something. Misunderstood it. Never saw it or the value of it. I'm not sure what it is. But it's out there. I got a glimpse of it yesterday.
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