Always there were the smells, cornbread and buttermilk, garlic and ginger, fresh longbeans and green onions. The scents filtered into the store from the kitchen out back and mixed with the tobacco smoke and dip jars, stale sweat and laughter emanating from the men out front. There were the smells that made a throat grow whiskers, fuming from gas cans and jugs of turpentine, shoe polish and tar. And there were the sweet smells of Mary Janes, peppermints, Whitman’s chocolates, Wrigley’s gum, Tootsie Rolls, butterscotch, and caramels.
As evening set in, and sharecropper children left the store with candies pressed onto the roof of their mouths for safe keeping, Martha and Berda, Jeu Gong, and Katherine made sure the money was taken in and counted. The bills were sorted, change rolled. And on Monday, they rose early, walking to the bank on the corner of Main and Richardson to deposit the weekend’s earnings.
Both the grocery and the bank faced east. When dawn came, a gold haze settled over the fields along Main Street, its alchemy interrupted only by a freight depot. The shadowy depot served the Gibson Cotton Gin, arguably the most successful business in town. It boasted two cottonseed warehouses, an iron conveyor belt, and four Munger gins with eighty saws each.
In autumn, the grinding wail of the machinery overtook Main Street. Beneath clouds of coal smoke, wagons from local plantations delivered billowing piles of cotton to the Gibson gin. There it was vacuumed from the wagons through a suction pipe and run through the Mungers, which, by means of narrowly spaced teeth, removed the seeds from the fiber.
The cotton was then funneled into a compressing room, where it was pressed into bales, wrapped in burlap, and bound together with steel bands. From there, the bales went right out onto the gin’s own platform, the train depot that faced the Lums’ store. Then the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad shipped the bales south to New Orleans or north to markets in Memphis and Chicago.
Even with its cutting-edge cotton gin, Benoit was a timeworn town. Main Street, with its rough assembly of decaying brick storefronts and mud-caked windows, was home to an old hotel, two drugstores, a bank, a telephone company, and a few scattered groceries and meat markets. As with all Delta towns, life was injected into Benoit from outside forces, firms across the Atlantic pricing cotton futures, Northern capitalists seeking short-staple for their mills, the boll weevil, the railroads, the rains, the levees, the soil. From its very inception, Benoit was at the mercy of an expanding, industrialized world.
Benoit began life in the year 1889, with the coming of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad. There was never any plan to run track through the plantations south of Rosedale, but James Richardson, the largest individual cotton grower in the world at that time, offered the railroad free use of his land if, in turn, the company built him a station.
James was the eldest son of Edmund Richardson, a planter whose holdings at one time included banks, steamboats, and railroads. He owned three-dozen cotton plantations and had a controlling interest in Mississippi Mills, the largest textile plant in the Lower South. His New Orleans-based brokerage house, Richardson and May, handled more than 250,000 bales of cotton every year.
Edmund Richardson was not always so prosperous. By the end of the Civil War, he had lost almost his entire net worth, close to $1 million. So in 1868, Richardson struck a deal with the federal authorities in Mississippi to contract labor from the state penitentiary, which was overflowing with ex-slaves, and work the men outside prison walls. He promised to feed and clothe the prisoners, and in return, the government agreed to pay him $18,000 a year for their maintenance.
The contract struck between Richardson and the State of Mississippi began an era of convict leasing that would spread throughout the South. Before it was over, a generation of black prisoners would suffer and die under conditions that were in many cases worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves. Confining his laborers to primitive camps, Richardson forced the convicts to clear hundreds of acres of dense woodland throughout the Yazoo Delta. When the land was cleared, he put prisoners to work raising and picking cotton on the plowed gound.
Through this new system, Richardson regained his fortune. By 1880 he had built a mansion in New Orleans, another in Jackson, and a sprawling plantation house known as Refuge in the Yazoo Delta. When he died in 1886, he left his holdings to his eldest son, James.
As an inveterate gambler and drunk, James decided to spend his inheritance building a new town, developed solely as a center for sport. He bought racehorses and designed a racetrack. He built five brick stores and four homes. In 1889, when the station stop was finally completed for his new city, James told the railroad to call the town Benoit, after the family auditor. James’s sudden death in 1898 put an end to his ambitions for the town. But decades later, a Richardson Street still ran through Benoit, westward toward the river, in crumbling tribute to the man.
With hundreds of miles of new track, poured over acres of fertile land, the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad changed the very fabric of Delta society. It opened up the region to international trade with large port cities like New York and New Orleans and created a direct line to burgeoning Midwestern cities like Chicago and Detroit. The railroads brought the world to the Delta and the Delta to the world. The station stops and tiny towns that sprang up around them, however, disrupted the region’s traditional social structure.
Until the final decade of the nineteenth century, there had been only one society in the Delta—plantation society. Its structure was rigid, with boundaries that were drawn in the very blood and marrow of those who lived within its confines. “The plantation tended to find its center in itself,” wrote the journalist and historian W. J. Cash, “to be an independent social unit, a self-contained and largely self-sufficient little world of its own.” At the dawn of the twentieth century, that little world was under threat by virtue of its own expansion.
After the railroads, the factories followed, and the Industrial Revolution of the North spread southward, along the veins of progress and industry it had constructed. Its steel spikes and wooden ties served as bedrock for hundreds of cotton mills, seed oil plants, and lumberyards, supplying markets across the nation and throughout the globe.
With laborers no longer dependent on a plantation economy, the physical and social order of the past faced extinction. Fueled by greed and the desire to expand their empires, planters inadvertently set the stage for their own demise. “To accept Progress at all was manifestly to abandon the purely agricultural basis from which the Southern world, and ultimately the Southern mind had been reared,” wrote Cash. “To bring in the factory, to turn to the creation of industrial empire . . . would be to bring in the machine and the town, [which] would naturally be to bring in the laws of the machine and the town.”
With their hegemony in jeopardy, the planters moved from plantation to town, laying claim to a new, mechanized frontier. By the early 1900s many of the Delta’s plantation homes were abandoned, their owners moving into mansions on spruce-lined streets. Such relocation assured that the South’s social hierarchies would remain intact, even as its economic landscape was transformed.
The new mills functioned under the same social order as the plantation, each factory built inside a series of small private villages. Just as the plantation provided meager provisions for its slaves and tenants, the mills owned the beds on which their workers slept, the streets on which they traveled, and the land on which their houses stood. They provided commissaries, from which a workman could get advances on rations against his future earnings. In the mill town, just as on the plantation, the laborer was stripped of all autonomy, every aspect of his life controlled by his employer.
Still, from Mississippi’s Piney Woods and Red Clay Hills came the poor yeoman farmers, to work the mills as they had once worked the land. Families moved from fields they had worked for generations. Children as young as six and seven, boys and girls, and their pregnant mothers, labored in the cotton mills. By the hundreds they migrated to factories, accept
ing wages barely half the pay at Northern mills.
They rose before dawn to man the machines, some so young they carried boxes on which they could climb to reach the spindles. “I have known mills,” wrote the clergyman Edgar Gardner Murphy in 1904, “in which for ten or twelve days at a time the factory hands—children and all—were called to work before sunrise and dismissed from work only after sunset, laboring from dark to dark . . . finding their way with their own little lanterns through the unlighted streets of the mill village, to their squalid homes.”
Industrialization, which drove the creation of Benoit and the Delta towns surrounding it, spread rapidly throughout the South. In just one decade, the number of cotton mills multiplied dramatically. Between 1900 and 1910 the South had come to operate more than 39 percent of the nation’s mills, more than the entire country had in 1880.
Yet with the factories came tax subsidies and with those subsidies came paved roads and water systems and electric lights. Most importantly, for the Lums and other immigrant families, the tax revenue brought public education to the Delta and other farming regions across the South. By 1914, a year after Berda was born, every Southern state had some sort of uniform school system, and virtually every rural community had a schoolhouse. In total there were nearly eight million pupils in the public schools of the South—for the first time, almost as many in proportion to the population as the rest of the country.
Benoit’s two-room schoolhouse was as much a source of pride for the community as the town’s gin and lumber mill. Martha Bonds, Martha Lum’s namesake and godmother, was the school’s longest-serving teacher. She had no children of her own, so the town’s scattering of pupils substituted as her makeshift family. Mrs. Bonds lived with her husband on Main Street, next door to the Lums, beside the hotel.
Mr. Bonds, twenty years his wife’s senior, had left his position as a dry goods salesman to work in the town’s lumberyard. The couple’s most prized possession was a jewelry stand from the Coghill family of Virginia that was over one hundred years old. The antique looked as if it came from another, more graceful, time, from one of the books written by Englishmen about elegant love affairs and palace gardens. There, beside the jewelry stand, in the guardianship of her godmother, Martha learned all the things a lady should be.
Until Martha was old enough to attend school, her childhood was spent with Mrs. Bonds or at her family’s grocery store, where she studied the cycle of seasons and the lives of the customers who depended on them. The winter months were the hardest. By the end of January, most of the croppers were out of harvest money, so the Lums were forced to extend credit until planting season. Without any profits, the family barely sustained themselves through winter, rationing their modest income for basic necessities.
At last, March would arrive, its rains turning the fields into bogs. Inside Benoit’s clapboard church, congregants prayed the levees would hold. When the fields began to dry, and leaves burst into spring, hyacinths thrusting into bloom, the men began breaking up the soil. They left their cabins before dawn to hook their plows to their mules and turn up the land. Just as the men labored, the Lums labored with them, opening the store well before the day’s first light. They sold the blades, bolts, straps, feed, and ties with which the men could furrow the earth.
By early May the fields were ready to plant. The men would dig narrow trenches in the mounds they made and, at every pace, drop in cottonseed. Once the plants sprouted, the men would bring their families to the fields. Together, in the stifling heat, they chopped weeds with long-handled hoes, in a syncopation all their own.
At the end of spring, a light-hued blossom grew from the cotton stems. It stayed only a few days before darkening, wilting, and falling beside the young stalks. Then the summer arrived and with it the storms that came without warning, crackling along a low sky. Tiny green pods appeared at the base of the faded cotton flowers. The pods, filled with seeds, would swell with fleecy fibers during the summer months. In late August, when the air moved through the trees slow as butter, the bolls split open and the fields erupted into white.
Again, the men took their families to the land. They moved together through the cotton rows, long burlap sacks dragging behind them, sometimes so heavy the straps would draw blood. By November, all of the cotton had been harvested and the men were paid a share of the crop. Whatever they made would have to last through the winter, until the earth was ready again for planting.
Until Martha was school age, she observed the seasons in much the same way the tenant farmers did. When they had money, her family had money. When the crop yield was poor, Martha was poor. The ebb and flow of the land and its production was her only method for keeping time. Then, when Martha turned six, school began and time was measured in semesters. Spring planting and fall harvest were eclipsed by writing exercises and arithmetic. She studied distant worlds outside her own, with ancient kings and great armies. The two crowded rooms that made up Benoit’s schoolhouse were an escape from everything Martha had ever known.
The school was located on the far west side of town at the end of Richardson and Adams Streets, where they ran at right angles to Second Street. Beyond Second, the town gave way to farmland and the levee. None of the streets were paved, and when the rains came in spring, mud spilled all the way from the bayous down to the shops on Main Street. Martha and Berda would have to trudge west three blocks along Adams or Richardson, up toward their swamp of a schoolyard.
Adams Street, lined with symmetrical shotgun shacks, belonged to the Negro tenant farmers. Most of the farmers came from somewhere else, another county, maybe even another state. It was in their nature to move often, always following the best wages and crop shares, but they were quick to make a home from their cabins of rough lumber, with walls beaten and weathered as reeds. In town, the farmers joked that they could “study astronomy through the openings in the roof and geology through holes in the floor.”
There was only one room to each house. The room had a fireplace for heat and one or two windows for light, but the landlords didn’t waste money on glass, so the houses were shuttered when the weather grew cold. In the winter, when temperatures dipped near freezing, the children patched up the drafty walls of their cabins with newspapers. If it was an especially cold winter, they pulled up fences from their yards to burn for fuel.
Richardson ran on a parallel course beside Adams Street, but despite their proximity, the two streets were worlds apart. Richardson, on its path west toward the school, was lined with humble vistas of shoe repair shops and hardware supply stores, but as the street arched slowly toward the river, the porches of regal mansions blossomed in perfect rows behind wrought iron fences. The hum of Main Street quickly faded as magnolias unfurled over manicured lawns.
The children in these houses played games of lost legacy. They were raised on stories of life before the war, reminiscences of “Christmas on the plantation . . . [when] there was a big tree with strong branches, lighted with many candles, and on or under it, wonderful presents . . . There were the breakfasts with the hot rolls, as light as sea foam; the beaten biscuit, white as snow; the corn muffins; the broiled chicken; the eggs; the hominy; the waffles; the coffee and cream. . . . Comfort and even luxury were visible in every room of this rambling plantation house.”
The children of Richardson Street clung to distant memories. To play their games was to act out their legends, to resurrect their past.
Martha and Berda passed their mansions on the way to school. The looming residences belonged to their classmates, but the sisters were not welcome there. Confined to the bustling, crowded streets of town, Martha and Berda returned each day to where the immigrants lived, beside the line of track that had brought their father south. Night after night, they awoke to the roar of a steam train clattering past, bearing another future, another legacy to be constructed behind other brick storefronts.
Inside, the infants, cradled by wooden crates, carried with them the expectations of an entire generation. Thes
e children, sunburned and threadbare, born on the rich soil of a foreign land, inherited only the debt they owed their own future. Martha and Berda, the daughters of Delta immigrants, were to make the hardships of their ancestors worthwhile.
In the cramped room behind her family’s grocery, Martha made good on this promise. Under the yellow glow of kerosene, she learned to read and to write, to keep the books for her father’s business. Yet beneath that dedication was a deep and incurable loneliness. Martha would never be one of the charmed ones, the golden people, the lo fan, the children of Richardson Street. There was no Lum family Bible, linking generations of blood to Mississippi land. Martha’s heritage slept behind a grocery every night. She could trace her lineage only in the creases of her father’s eyes, the dark stages where scenes from distant places flickered and were never explained.
If her family had been different, maybe she would have been invited to dine at the long, elegant lo fan tables. She could have attended their picnics and visited their wealthy relatives in New Orleans and Memphis. She could enter through the front doors of their hotels without the paralyzing fear that she was not welcome, that girls like her had to enter through the back. Sitting in rows of desks, inches from Martha, was the world of the lo fan, a world of privilege more distant to her than China. And in this exile, quietly practicing her penmanship, Martha developed a strength of character that would one day threaten the very structure of Southern society.
CHAPTER III
WINTER, 1919
MOONLIGHT LEAKED THROUGH THE gaps in the door onto the dirt floor and cold walls of the grocery. Sunday nights were always the quietest, and now they belonged to Jeu Gong. Katherine insisted the store remain closed one day per week, out of respect for religion. While he accepted Katherine’s belief in divinity, Jeu Gong himself had no interest in Christianity. He never attended church services. He wasn’t baptized. Religion for Jeu Gong was a pact that he made with himself long before he arrived in America, that he would one day provide for his family. Six years ago they had come here to Benoit, raised two daughters, and Katherine was now six months pregnant with a third child. The promise he made himself was almost realized—almost.
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