“Welcome to Tutwiler”
Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area & National Park Service Meeting
By Shannon Evans
I have not been to Tutwiler in over 50 years. I do not really remember why I was in Tutwiler the last time. I might have accompanied my grandfather on a bridge inspection tour, but I could be wrong. There were times we went on trips to “inspect bridges,” but that was just a ruse to either go fishing or pick up bootleg liquor. Mississippi was still mostly dry in 1968 and my grandfather always said, “ill-got liquor just tastes better for some reason.”
In 1886, half the counties in Mississippi (41) went dry under local option laws. The Mississippi legislature ban alcohol across the state in 1908, and the federal government passed a constitutional amendment in 1920 that made Prohibition laws nationwide. Though the federal dry laws were repealed in 1933, the state of Mississippi held firm to the ban until 1966. Still, the only way to repeal the liquor prohibition was to get an initiative on the individual county ballots, and the expense of making that happen–as well as the social dynamic of racism that permeated southern Baptist churches–resulted in many counties remaining dry.
Whatever the reason for being in Tutwiler, I remember it being just a wide spot in the road, bisected by a railroad track. Everything smelled of cottonseed and dust. There was a Black chain gang in Parchman Farms Penitentiary striped pajamas clearing the riverbank with swing blades and sickles taking directions from a wizened grey faced, grey haired trustee. Parchman is one of the ugliest scars on the Mississippi landscape and one of the worst penitentiaries still in existence in the United States. Built in 1901, at the height of the Jim Crow South, Parchman Farms has housed some illustrious characters. Vernon Presley served a brief stent there for check forgery and blues artist Booker Washington (Bukka) White was sentenced to three years for stabbing a man in the leg. White’s song, Parchman Farm Blues was written as a warning to the perils of the farm where prisoners were leased out to local plantations to work the fields.
As we drove past, the white gun bulls on horses and on foot with shotguns slung over their shoulders stood guard on the road. One of the guards spat a tarry black stream of tobacco slobber at my grandfather’s Dodge truck as we rattled over the wooden trestle bridge into town. He must have been a Ford or Chevy man.
We meandered into town and stopped at the old garage in town for slightly frozen cokes and sleeves of peanuts. I poured mine in my coke bottle and greedily slurped the rising, salty icy foam. Nothing is better on a dusty day. There wasn’t much in town beyond the railroad office, a brick funeral home, a beauty parlor, and a corner store advertising fresh cuts of meat on the screen door. Children played on the stoops and porches of the small clapboard shotgun shacks that lined the road out of town that lead to the highway. All the buildings in town looked tired and old. All the children looked thin, dressed in tattered play clothes, barefoot, and covered in dust. Some older boys shot an old basketball at a bent, spokeless bike rim nailed to an old sign on the side of one of the houses. We drove out across the highway and onto a gravel county road, deeper into the cotton fields and Tutwiler disappeared in the dust behind us. I never figured I’d be through there again.
Fast forward more years than I care to admit, and I am headed toward Tutwiler. The sign to the turn off to Parchman triggers the memory of the trip with Granddaddy. I push on down the highway that splits the miles and miles of cotton fields. A crop duster makes practice runs over the ankle high young cotton plants. I marvel at the tight turns the yellow plane makes over powerlines that line the highway. I have been listening to Tutwiler natives Sonny Boy Williamson and John Lee Hooker from my home in east Mississippi all the way to the Delta.
The Mount Zion Memorial Fund restored the headstone of Sonny Boy Williamson II outside of town. Before the day is done, I plan to leave a harmonica at his grave. But that is reserved for later. For now, I am headed to a grant writing workshop in the community center built by a group of nuns who initially moved to Tutwiler in the 1980s to provide health care to the town’s dwindling and aging population.
I arrived at the community center for the workshop and paused across the street from the only modern building on the street. The drive into town does not initially look familiar to me; the shotgun shacks along the fields leading into town are gone now. I was early and decided to drive around town armed with my adult Blues knowledge of the significance of Tutwiler. I drove past the abandoned and collapsing funeral home where Emmett Till’s battered, bloody body had been taken after he was pulled from the river and untied from his gin fan anchor. I paused on the empty road to study the ivy covered walls and reflect on how the death of a Black child deep in the Mississippi Delta helped trigger a movement that would change the course of American history forever.
I rode to the end of the main street between the same buildings I remember from my childhood. The gas station was still there, the pumps now rusted and unused, a man sat on the ground working on a bike tire. Music blasted from a nearby ancient muscle car filled with men in ball caps and sleeveless undershirts. I reached the T intersection at the river. To the left was the railroad track and to the right was a road that leads across the river over a low concrete bridge. Road work was being done by men in pajama striped pants and baggy tops. I sighed; time had frozen in Tutwiler like it has in most of the Delta.
I turned back toward the tracks and follow a road that paralleled the tracks and the main street. According to Google Maps, it would take me back to a parking lot for the community center. I recognized an old battered house facing the tracks, it had been the brief home of W. C. Handy for the year he lived in Tutwiler, chasing the Blues. It is now in near ruin, unmarked, overgrown, and forgotten. It will soon be lost to history too. It was a sobering reminder of what I am here to do. So I drove on and try to wrap my head around the importance of this day, this place, and the opportunity I have been given in attending this workshop.
I enter the community center to find it filled with other participants and the most beautiful collection of quilts and quilted handmade items. The community center came about as a result of a small group of Sisters of the Holy Names order who initially came to Tutwiler to provide healthcare at the once defunct clinic. One of the nuns happened to meet a local quilter, Mary Sue Robertson who designed beautiful traditional quilt tops from scraps of material, repurposed clothing, and whatever else she could scrounge for piecing. Sr. Delaney knew her work was significant and found quilters in the area to finish Mary Sue’s pieces. A group of quilters and top pieces began to work together and sell the quilts they made. A micro-business arose and the quilters’ work began to gain recognition in the Delta and beyond. They joined the Craftsmen’s Guild of Mississippi. This led to the founding of the Tutwiler Community Center which included a large quilting room and supply closets, a display hall for their work, a professional kitchen for events, and a gymnasium. The center truly became a community gathering place for programs for children, games, adult education programs, and neighborhood movie nights. The center grew and formed an organization that hosted multiple programs to directly address the needs of the community.
I sat down at a large table not knowing what to expect from the presentation. Little did I know that by the end of the day I would meet the staff and board members of important sites like the Emmett Till Museum, the Medgar Evers Museum, and the B. B. King Museum to name but a few. It was intimidating to be at a table with the men and women who work day in and day out to preserve Black history in Mississippi and beyond. I sat there listening to their stories, their missions, and their dreams for the future for their organization. I listened as they shared their grant successes and failures and their common story of struggling to keep their doors open post Covid. While none of us had the “correct” answer for how to raise funds, spread the knowledge of the history we each are the stewards of, we did create open dialogues and had frank discussions. Discussions about history, asset hoarding by wealthier historical organizations, generational poverty in the Delta, reluctance of various communities to share information, and the various frustrations that goes with the work before us. We began to form a community among our small group. We may have different charges and responsibilities and budgets but we all had the same focus, preserving that which is fragile and perilously close to being removed from our collective memory. By the time we left, we had exchanged not just ideas but phone numbers and email addresses. We had expanded our own circle and created new community bonds. We still have the same issues before us of funding and expanding our spheres of financial influence; however, we are no longer working in a vacuum and have others to share with, bounce around ideas, and to reach out for collaborative opportunities. Across the board, we shared a common mission: We can’t change the centuries of social injustice and economic slavery in our home state, but we can preserve the history of African Americans in Mississippi so those who built this state and scratched this land out of the swamps and clay and forests are never forgotten.
I got in my car to return to the hills of east Mississippi, but first I had a task to complete. I headed back down main street, past the mortuary, past the old gas station, and turn left at the river. I rumbled across the tracks and kept going south, out of town and into the cotton fields that are ubiquitous to the Delta. I follow the road to a patch of hard pack dirt and grass erupt from the perfectly plowed lines of the fields. Headstones rise like shoe-peg teeth, wide, differently sized, and in ordered rows. I parked on the narrow shoulder, grabbed a small item from my purse sticking it in my skirt pocket, and walked to the short back row of graves in the shade of a kudzu covered tree.
Sonny Boy Williamson’s headstone was littered with various Blues treasures: a smattering of rusted harmonicas, empty liquor bottles, coins, pics, and a glass bottle neck slide. Some were fresh but most were weathered. I cleaned off the twigs and branches that had fallen on the grave and then I reached in my pocket and pulled out a slightly used B flat Blues Harmonica. I put it on his headstone before returning to my car. I turned on some music and sang along as I drove away in a rooster tail of Mississippi Delta dust:
April 4, 2023 @ 12:51 am
Shannon – I have always admired your sense of community, character, and desire to defend the underdog and be of service. Thank you for this article and for inspiring me to get on the stick and finish my online course. Please add me to your publications list. – Best regards, Don –