The Tallahatchie and the Yazoo run parallel to one another, but like bitter siblings, the two bodies of water flow in opposite directions. Many believe the word “Yazoo” means “river of death,” which is fitting, since twenty-nine sunken Civil War ships rest below the river’s greenish-brown surface. As if to not be outdone by its rival, the Tallahatchie River was the site where a child’s body was found in the mid-1950s. The nature of the murder and the inconceivable torture perpetrated against that child would shake the nation and initiate a change in the destiny of an entire race of people.
But long before that historic event, Greenwood was barely anything at all. With just 308 residents in 1880, the town was a stopping point, a place to take a break, for people using the Yazoo River to transport cotton. Mary Carol describes early Greenwood as “a rickety shantytown of saloons and sheds.” However, an increased focus of the US government on flood control between 1880 and 1920 meant that more and more people were able to purchase farmland in the Delta without having to worry that the Mississippi River would come and wash their investments away.
In time, Greenwood was surrounded by small farming communities, and South Greenwood was the center of commerce. At the turn of the century, the view of North Greenwood from the Yazoo was that of a vast, flat landscape that ended only when it yoked with the horizon. All this would change, though, when two investors began buying up land in North Greenwood and building estate-size lots on a street called Grand Boulevard.
The wife of one of the investors felt that since it was named “Grand,” the street should offer more than flat, rectangular plots. With the help of her husband, she traveled along the edge of the Tallahatchie River and placed markers on young oak trees she wanted to have uprooted and moved to North Greenwood. In the end, a thousand trees were replanted along Grand Boulevard. Decades later, the boulevard would be defined by those towering oak trees, turning the street into a Greenwood landmark. Years later, in a New York Times article, the US Chambers of Commerce and the Garden Clubs of America would name Grand Boulevard one of the “10 Most Beautiful Streets in America.”
The Delta was quickly entering a period some would later refer to as the Second Cotton Kingdom, and Greenwood positioned itself right at the center of it. In 1917, the town drastically shortened travel time to major cotton markets when it debuted a new train station on the Illinois Central Railroad, commonly referred to as the “Main Line of Mid-America.” To capitalize on the new opportunities made possible by the station, more and more cotton men flocked to Greenwood. So many offices opened on River, Front, and Market—the streets that ran parallel to the Yazoo on its south side—that the area quickly came to be known as Cotton Row.
After studying the photographs taken during that season of innovation and newness, Mary Carol observed,
It’s not necessarily an attractive community, with piles of coal littering the dirt roads, oxen parked on the main thoroughfare, dirty plumes of smoke rising from steamboat stacks and muddy, ragged riverbanks winding through town. But there’s an air of vibrancy and optimism evident in these photos, the sense that this place was on the verge of something huge, something that would carry it along to prosperity in the next century.
From 1900 to 1920, Greenwood was the fastest-growing community in the entire state of Mississippi. “Profits from cotton production and all its secondary industries brought an influx of money rolling through Greenwood’s banks and out into the hands of grocers, haberdashers, milliners, hoteliers, doctors, and lawyers. With those abundant funds came an architectural revolution.”
South of Market, behind Cotton Row, was Washington Street, where new, one-story homes with front-facing gables, modest front lawns, and wraparound porches were popping up. On the wide, dirt roads of Walthall, Main, Howard, and Fulton Streets—all of which ran perpendicular to Cotton Row—new businesses were opening almost daily. The streets were often crowded with cars, horse-drawn carriages, men in three-piece suits, and ladies in ankle-length, light-colored dresses who carried umbrellas to protect themselves from the Delta sun.
In 1914, a man named W. T. Fountain opened Fountain’s Big Busy Store on Howard Street. From where it stood, Fountain’s bright red building, with thirty different departments in its 22,500 square feet of selling space divided among three floors, was a symbol of prosperity not just in Greenwood or the Delta but for the entire state of Mississippi. “Every year,” Sara Criss wrote in her memoir, “[Fountain’s] would put a large curtain over the side window until Thanksgiving afternoon, when they opened it for everyone to see what the new toys were that year.”
Several blocks south of Howard Street, on Carrollton Avenue, Quinn Drug Company erected a long, dark brick building that took up almost an entire block. A Jewish couple, Mr. and Mrs. J. Kantrovitz, shortened their name to Kantor and built their own department store across from Fountain’s. The building, which they called the Adeline, was made of white marble and brick. Others opened hardware stores, shoe stores, fine-dining restaurants, and jewelry stores. There was even a chiropractic office that went up, as well as a 10-cent only shop. In 1921, Charles and Marie Lusco opened Lusco’s Grocery Store just south of Carrollton, on the corner of Johnson and Main.
What began as a grocery store eventually turned into a place for men, well-off members of the planter class, to gather in the small storeroom to drink an illegal alcohol concoction that Charles Lusco made himself. The locals called it Dago Red. The term Dago was a racial slur for Italians, many of whom were settling in the Delta.
Just when the grocery store was really becoming a success, the family was rocked by three tragedies. First, the grocery store burned to the ground. But Charles and Marie didn’t waste any time worrying about what was lost. Instead, they quickly purchased another, much larger building on Carrollton Avenue, a few blocks from the train tracks, and opened Lusco’s Restaurant in 1933.
Then, their oldest daughter, Marie, whom everyone called Dear, was married to a fireman and raising a family when her daughter died of pneumonia. The entire Lusco clan was devastated by the loss. The final blow came when, while still mourning their daughter’s death, Dear’s husband suffered a heart attack while he was battling a blaze. The people of Greenwood said he must have died of a broken heart. Dear was left with children to raise and no skills besides working in the restaurant. So that’s what she did. She joined her parents in the business. Eventually, her two sisters came on board as well, and they continued to thrive in the restaurant business even after Charles and Marie passed away.
Even though everyone knew the Lusco family, not everyone chose to dine at their restaurant. For example, Sara Criss’s father worked at a cotton oil company, one of the many businesses that sprang up in response to Greenwood’s growing cotton industry. Yet, for reasons he kept to himself, Sara’s father differed from most of his peers in that he didn’t make going to Lusco’s a tradition for his young family. But Sara never felt like she missed out on anything. As the town continued to grow, circuses and traveling shows would come to Greenwood at least once a year. The traveling entertainers would set up a large tent in a vacant lot and offer educational classes, plays, and minstrel shows throughout each day. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wildly popular minstrel shows portrayed dimwitted, ever-jolly Blacks dancing, wisecracking, and performing plantation songs. Minstrels solidified the image of the happy, simple-minded slave and were often performed by Whites in blackface.
Mary Carol acknowledges that the way her mother remembers her town’s history doesn’t quite encompass the entire picture. She writes that “Greenwood and the Mississippi Delta, in the 1920s, was a harsh and brutal place for many of its inhabitants, white and black, but . . . for Sara, looking back from 1990 to her childhood, Greenwood was a magical town, set squarely in the center of the universe, and peopled by kind and quirky characters.”
One of those “quirky characters” might have been Tom Hunley, who was the inspiration for one of the most iconic and lasting images of ste
reotypical poor, simpleminded Southern Blacks. A man named J. P. Alley was living in Greenwood during the early 1900s when he walked past Hunley, an ex-slave, mopping the floor of an office building. The two had a brief conversation that somehow humored Alley. He decided to create a comic sketch based on Hunley, which he called Hambone’s Meditations. Hambone spoke broken English and shared with readers half-baked philosophical ideas. Eventually, the cartoon was syndicated and the caricature of Tom Hunley became a part of national consciousness. Two cigar companies used Hambone in their logo and the image appeared on numerous “plates, clocks, tins, cans, and glass jars.”
In 1943, another character of note rose out of Greenwood and onto the national stage. A young Black kid who’d grown up forty minutes outside of Greenwood got the chance to play his guitar live on the radio. The station, WGRM, was broadcast from the second floor of a building on Howard Street and marked the introduction of B. B. King to the airwaves. Inside of ten years, King would become one of the most important and influential figures in R&B, producing songs that regularly appeared high on the Billboard charts, touring and performing almost nonstop, and founding his own record label.
It’s no wonder that Sara saw magic in her town. It must have seemed as though anything that came out of Greenwood was destined for greatness. Mary Carol put it best when she observed that “looking back at those days, captured by these long-discarded cameras, there is a pervasive sense of pride and energy infusing the streets of Greenwood, a belief that the good times were just going to roll on forever.”
A Not-So-Magical Town
Similar to where Booker lived when he was young, a good number of the Blacks who called Greenwood home in the 1950s and ’60s were living in areas the locals referred to as “the country.” These were plantation communities on the outskirts of Greenwood.
On weekends, Black and White “country folks” would gather up their families, along with their minimal weekly earnings, and head into town. Before noon on a Saturday, it often felt as though Greenwood’s population had doubled with the mass of people that flooded the downtown shopping district. Once they arrived in town, though, Blacks and Whites went their separate ways.
Author Sara Criss describes this division by explaining that in Greenwood, “we had a totally segregated society. There were no black employees in stores or businesses except in janitorial and maid capacities. Blacks did not go to white restaurants, theaters, and other places of entertainment. Public swimming pools were for white only and black only. They [blacks] did not use the City Park or participate in any of the summer recreation programs except in their own part of town, which had one park, a swimming pool, and a summer playground program sponsored by the Park Commission. The schools were totally segregated, as were the churches.”
Johnson Street, just a few blocks from Booker’s Place, marked the farthest north that Blacks were allowed to freely travel in Greenwood, and the street was the heartbeat of Black commerce. Blacks bought clothes at Stanley’s Department Store or Kornfield’s, had their shoes fixed at Collins Shoe Shop, and saw films at the Dixie, the Black-run movie theater. There were places to get hot dogs where only Whites could enter, but Blacks could wait outside and order through the window.
On Friday and Saturday nights, almost all the stores on Johnson Street stayed open late to accommodate the Blacks who crowded into the shops and eateries. Someone walking down the street during those bustling hours would get a sampling of whatever sounds were trending in Black music at the time, intertwined with the boisterous voices of friends gathered together in small cafés to exchange news and gossip. It was in these late hours when the economic difference among Blacks really showed. There were Blacks who could afford not just the food at Booker’s Place but the complete experience. Booker’s patrons had nice clothes, cars to get from here to there, and cash to buy the booze they brought in with them, and they weren’t saving up all their money each week for a single night out. Blacks who could afford to go to Booker’s Place were in the minority, because the level of poverty in their communities had reached catastrophic highs.
Segregation and discrimination greatly limited their employment opportunities. Good paying jobs for Blacks were so scarce that the very idea of moving up the economic ladder was almost mythical, little more than fodder for children’s bedtime stories. Most of the jobs for Greenwood’s Black middle class were service positions in the homes of Whites.
Most Blacks barely made enough money to feed and clothe themselves and their children. Finding decent housing was a constant problem. According to historian Charles Payne, “Eighty-two percent of Negro housing in [Leflore] county was substandard, which in the Delta could mean sub-any-human-standard. Nevertheless, Negroes living in tar-paper shacks with one or two light bulbs would regularly receive higher utility bills than White families in modern homes.” In 1960, the average White family in Leflore County was bringing in $5,200 a year, just below the national average of $5,600, while Black families in Leflore averaged an income of $1,400 annually.
In a moment that illustrated what those numbers actually meant for daily living, a young Black veteran returned to the Delta in 1946 and was deeply disturbed when he visited a family “where there were fourteen children, half-naked, without a bed in the house, with no food, burning cotton stalks to keep warm.” Greenwood resident attorney Alix Sanders mentioned that while not all Whites hated Blacks, many did. “All you had to do to qualify for the hatred was to be Black. And being Black meant you were not free to do a lot of little things.” Race dictated “the language you used, the tone, where you worked, how you walked, what you did.” Sanders explained that Blacks were “trained at a real early age” how to act in a way that would be acceptable to Whites. These social rules were not required of all Blacks.
In a sort of caste system, Whites in Greenwood had different expectations for different types of Blacks. Sanders recalled that some of the things Booker was able to do “would not have been tolerated from a Black of quote lesser standing.” Sanders described owning a business and driving a nice car as things Booker was allowed to do when other Blacks were not. Booker “was held in a unique kind of esteem as a business person functioning and making money.” Sanders said that while Booker would have been referred to by some Whites as an “uppity nigger, but he was smart enough to never allow himself to be trapped into being cast as an uppity nigger. He could go places and function where lesser Blacks would not go and function well.”
Booker had connections. Walter Williams worked at a local car dealership, and he marveled at how Booker’s relationships with Whites enabled him to get “help that the average person couldn’t get, especially if he was Black.” On one occasion, Booker provided Walter with a massive amount of cash as a down payment on a car; the difference was being financed through the local bank, a place where most Blacks would not dare enter.
It would seem that Booker wore an air of respectability, that he had a presence about him that could have cost other Blacks a severe beating. If it was believed that a Black person felt good about themselves, if they came across as holding themselves in high esteem, they might be called “uppity.” A Black person with the confidence to make even momentary eye contact with a White person in Greenwood ran the risk of being called “insolent,” and potentially of having someone decide to prove to you that you were nothing more than trash.
These were the things Booker never talked about. How he managed to operate a business on the Black side of town, and not just work on the White side of town but to build something akin to rapport with the White elites. It would appear that, like walking on a high wire, Booker was able to make the necessary shifts in tone and stature in order to morph into whoever he needed to be in any given moment.
Local Blacks must have seen in Booker a man who, in a climate of poverty, unemployment, and unchecked violence, was doing quite well financially, in spite of his color. Even if they didn’t personally witness the practiced camaraderie Booker shared with Whites, they were cer
tainly aware that his job was a rare one for a Black man. It was a solid, highly respectable, middle-class job at an exclusive restaurant with prices beyond the budgets of many White, mid-income families. This meant that, almost nightly at Lusco’s, Booker spent time conversing and laughing with some of the most powerful men in town.
In addition to holding a respectable job far from the fields, it was widely rumored that Booker took home a considerable amount of cash from tips every time he waited tables at Lusco’s. This theory was proven correct by the rental properties he purchased and the money he was able to invest in his own restaurant.
After working at Lusco’s for two decades, Booker took what he’d learned and opened his own place. Because of segregation, he didn’t have many locations to choose from. He decided on a little building at 211 West McLaurin Street. He knew that since his place was on McLaurin, most people would just assume that it was like all the other dives on the street. His business would have to thrive from word-of-mouth; therefore, just like at Lusco’s, it was the customer’s experience that needed to shine.
To someone driving past, Booker’s Place couldn’t have looked like much. A Coca-Cola sign with the words “Booker’s Place” hung above the entrance, which was a set of wooden double doors, each containing a large window through which sunlight flooded the restaurant. Though the interior was only about thirty feet across and fifty feet in length, Booker managed to create a space that worked both as a full-service restaurant and a nightclub.
When people entered his restaurant, Booker almost always knew them by name. He’d greet them with such warmth it was if he’d been waiting all night for their arrival. He’d ask for updates about sick relatives or inquire about recent travels. After catching up with Booker, his customers would find a place to sit.
The Song and the Silence Page 9