It’s taken two trips to Alabama and one trip to Laurel with a trip to Hattiesburg thrown in for me to finally finish listening to “The Most Southern Place on Earth” by James Cobb on Audible. I’ve had to resort to audio books recently as eyesight changes have made it difficult to read books for now.
The book is a comprehensive history and commentary on the Delta.
After finishing the book, I can say with confidence, anyone who refers to the Delta proudly as the “The Most Southern Place on Earth,” hasn’t read the book.
It is the appellation “Southern,” which the book defines as the last vestiges of the plantation class in America.
The sometimes-graphic detail of how the land was conquered and labor exploited, both during and after slavery, to make vast amounts of wealth is not kind to those who did both.
And rightly so.
But there isn’t a story of the growth of America, especially in the 19th century, that isn’t without winners and losers.
While many decry the widening gap between rich and poor in America today, there was no time in our country’s history when the gap was wider than during the mid-to-late 1800s.
The book chronicles the period after the Civil War in excruciating detail.
While it lays out a pattern of theft by rich white planters, it equally tells the stories of their lives outside of their business interests.
And what a life some of them led.
The overarching theme of the private lives of the planting class seems to be one of a hard-charging, boom-and-bust mentality working hand-in-hand with an extravagant partying ethos.
You can’t say they worked hard and played hard as most didn’t seem to do much hard working.
Their hard-playing attitudes though helped bring along some of the things the Delta is most notable for, namely arts and letters.
They spent the piles of money their plantations produced on education for their children at far-away schools and tours of the world for themselves.
From the education and tours, they brought back things not often seen in an agrarian society.
On the other side of the coin, the workers who toiled relentlessly to produce this wealth created what would become another legacy of the Delta: American music.
It’s the dichotomy of the Delta as a place that can produce wonderful sights and sounds and equally barbaric conditions for its residents.
While the book is not kind to and paints a depressing picture of the past in the Delta, it’s worth reading as that past does not have to be the Delta’s future.
Vast empires do not have to be built at the expense of fellow citizens as inequities created from such will linger for decades, perhaps generations, as we see in the Delta now.
Every society is a culmination of all the things which happened before and that is why understanding a place and situation’s history is so important.
It’s not enough to simply read and know the history of a land, it is incumbent on us to understand why things happened the way they did.
What we are left with today in the Delta could have been very much a different place if certain paths had not been taken.
But that’s counterfactual history and some call it irrelevant.
While it is fun — for history nerds like myself — to wonder what would today look like if a certain thing in the past had either occurred or not it is also a good way to understand the consequences of those actions.
Had the Delta not been built on the backs of slave and slave-like labor for the vast majority of its history, how much different would it look today?
While we cannot change that reality, we need to know and understand it as central to the makeup of our community today.
Especially since we do live in, “The Most Southern Place on Earth.”
Jon Alverson is proud to be the publisher and editor of the Delta Democrat-Times. Write to him at jalverson@ddtonline.com or call him at 662-335-1155.
