The Mississippi Delta and the World

The Memoirs of David L. Cohn

James C. Cobb

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 1995
• Print ISBN: 9780807153321
• eBook ISBN: 9780807153338
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

No one knew the Mississippi Delta more intimately or told its story more eloquently than did David L. Cohn (1894-1960). Between 1935 and 1960 he produced ten books including his best known, God Shakes Creation, later expanded into Where I Was Born and Raised -- and scores of articles and essays, including more than sixty such pieces in the Atlantic Monthly alone. One of his greatest frustrations, however, was not finding time to organize and prepare for publication the memoir he began in 1953.
James C. Cobb discovered Cohn's memoir in 1985 in the David L. Cohn Collection at the University of Mississippi. Struck by its richness and convinced that it should be published, he undertook the task of arranging and editing the material. What Cobb has brought forth is an immensely valuable­and entertaining work of both literary and historical significance that plots one extraordinary man's course through the changes of the twentieth century.
Cohn was in essence a "cosmopolitan provincial, " an observer who realized that the problems and circumstances of the Delta were at the same time unique and universal. A native of Greenville, he was educated at the University of Virginia and Yale University Law School. A brief but highly successful career in business allowed him to pursue his dream of being a writer. He traveled widely but remained faithful to his Delta roots, counting among his close friends both William Alexander Percy and Hodding Carter. He was intensely interested in politics and served as speechwriter for Democratic party leaders, including Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, and Lyndon Johnson.
Lamenting the trend toward overspecialization, Cohn did not shrink from expressing his views on a wide array of topics: race and religion, free trade and internationalism, technology and culture, and materialism and matrimony, among others. Southern to the marrow and an almost zealously patriotic American, he was also a Jew, and he managed a harmonious integration of all three identities rather than the separation or suppression of any one.
In his Introduction, Cohn describes his memoir as "primarily an evocation of persons and places... the physical and spiritual terrain of my youth, " a period that takes him from birth through approximately 1934. Cobb picks up the thread in a concluding essay, surveying Cohn's later life and analyzing his literary career in light of his southern origins, racial views, ethnic ties, and internationalist perspective. Perhaps better than any other single work by Cohn, The Mississippi Delta and the World reveals that he was a truly learned commentator on the human condition, one who benefited enormously both from his travels and from his determination to maintain his ties to the place where he was "born and raised."

1
Growing Up in Greenville

Blacks who grew up alongside but apart from Cohn in the turn-of-the-century Delta might have disputed his opening assertion that the Delta constituted “a good place for a growing boy.” As the following chapter reveals, however, Cohn was considerably more secure in the bosom of parental love than in the larger physical and racial environment, which he admits “weighed heavily” on him, causing him to feel “a doom on the land where I was born and raised.”

The Mississippi Delta, in the opening years of the century, was a good place for a growing boy. The simplicities, serenities, and optimism of the nineteenth century still lingered among us. I had the amenities, such as they were, of our little town of Greenville (population about 6,000) and reveled in the life of the countryside. The Mississippi River was my playground—the levee that contained it, the fields, the forests, the creeks. I came to know in some degree the ways beyond marvel of birds and beasts and growing things. I was stained in-eradicably with the autumn’s and summer’s juices.

The nose, primitive, with the unforgetting memory of the primitive, stored its reminiscences forever fresh against the ravages of time: the fragrance, faint and far, of clover after rain; the aromatic pungency of woodsmoke; the soft scent of rambler roses running red fire along white picket fences; the rich fatness of black-eyed peas simmering with bacon in a black iron pot; the washed-baby smell of new-turned plantation loam; banked honeysuckle impregnating with perfume the warm, star-entangled summer night, drifting blue upon a sea of blue. Food became flesh; calcium bone; tissue muscle; the young body an arrow eager to the bow.

In the town, as in all towns since men began to live in ordered societies, there dwelt lust, hate, greed, bigotry, and envy. But there also dwelt love, generosity, and fairness. Daily we repeated the long experience of the race. Whatever had “happened” from dawn to dawn in Baghdad on the Tigris, happened to us in Greenville on the Mississippi.

The Delta’s (and Greenville’s) early citizens were unique among pioneers. Here were no lean Yankees marching with rifle, family, and meager possessions across the Western plains. No refugees from the Germany of forty-eight. No Irish of the famine years, empty handed and eager, searching for a new home in a new world. The men who came to the Delta were the embodiment of a seeming contradiction—pioneers with means. They were the sons of wealthy and moderately wealthy planters of Virginia, Kentucky, and the Carolinas, come to a virgin land to open new cotton plantations. Traveling like princely patriarchs of the Orient, they brought with them their slaves and their household goods. They also brought numerous volumes of the classics, Greek and Latin textbooks, and tutors for their children. They left an ineradicable mark upon the community.

And so it was that the town’s greatest blessing for me was this. If most of my townsmen were not of the Attic breed, there was among them the saving remnant—a meaningful group of mellow, informed, perceptive men and women. From them, in many ways, I drew my essential life; a life anchored in a happy household.

My young, newly married parents had come to Greenville shortly after The War from a village lying in a twilight zone between Germany and Poland. The town overwhelmingly Christian in creed, my Jewish parents were welcomed by their new neighbors with dignity and warmth. They were one with them throughout their lives in sickness and death and hard times and rejoicings, and they lie now in the soil of the Delta where there lie also those who were young when they were young together in the young community.

(I am sometimes surprised by what one might call the tautology of the newspaper obituary column. Thus, for example, “William Llangollen Lewis died last night … leaving $142,000,000. He came here a penniless immigrant.” Why say “penniless”? Did any rich European leave his castles, wines, mistresses, and other amenities to emigrate to Wyoming and live there on jerked beef while fighting Indians? Everyone who came here came to improve his economic or social condition or because he was run out of town where he lived. Everyone, that is, except Negroes. They alone, among our people, were satisfied with their home-place and saw no reason to leave.)

Members of the tiny Jewish group of Greenville, they [Cohn’s parents] repeated the experience of pioneers: others had gone up into the land of Canaan before them and, finding the land good, had bade them come. They had been preceded to Greenville by some of my mother’s relatives who had made a place for themselves in the business and farming areas of the community, and my father had worked awhile for them. After acquiring English, he became a traveling salesman and later a merchant. His labors provided for the needs of his wife, two daughters, and three sons; his task was made the easier because there was little pressure upon anyone to emulate our few “highflyers.” But more important to me—how important I was to understand only in retrospect—we were familiarly secure. The harmony between my parents made for the tranquillity of the household.

I believed therefore as an article of faith that all fathers and mothers endured in a relationship of harmony and mutual respect; that parents loved and sheltered their children while children loved and respected their parents. Even now when someone tells me that he hated his father or mother, I find it unnatural and hard to believe.

As a small Sunday school boy I had no understanding of most of the Ten Commandments. They appeared merely addenda to the catalog of “don’ts” with which little boys are often assailed. But I seemed instinctively to understand the injunction “Honor thy father and mother” and gave it spontaneous obedience. How could it be otherwise? You loved your parents. They loved you. Besides, they were not only parents but “older people.” You respected them because—well, because they were older. You did not sit before older people sat or “sass” them. You did not think out these things. They were part of you, and, you were sure, they were part of all boys everywhere.

My father was a big, genial, life-loving, laughter-loving man, marked by the gentleness so often characteristic of big males. Impeccably dressed, warm, friendly, a lover of good food, cigars, and the noble game of poker that he played with zest, it was perhaps inevitable in the atmosphere of the town that he should be brevetted “Colonel” by many of his fellow townsmen. He wore white linens in summer, and a broad-brimmed Panama hat, and carried a walking stick—I was proud to go with him to a baseball game between Greenville and another team of the Cotton States League. I missed him when he left home on business trips, and I never tired of being with him when we were at home together. Neither he nor my mother ever “demanded” anything of me or asked me for an accounting of my behavior, and since this was equivalent to putting me upon my honor and treating me as a responsible adult, I responded to the best of my ability, as boys usually do in such cases.

We embraced one another in the European fashion upon meeting and departing, and we were at peace together all the days of our lives. I was the fortunate son whose father had admitted him early to the warm companionship of his tender spirit.

My mother, cast in a less heroic mold than my father, was the exemplar of the old-fashioned woman who was preoccupied with her household. She was inexperienced in the affairs of the “world,” but I soon found her judgments about it sounder than those of many who pretended to know it. Thus I early learned to value the conclusions of so-called impractical people, and to be dubious of the conclusions of the practical concerning things that are not the subject of measuring devices.

An indefinable sadness marked my mother’s eyes and was part of her spirit, yet she was given to laughter and to a humor that found expression in drolleries illuminative of the seriocomic situations of life. From childhood until I left my parental roof, I had found it comforting to talk lengthily with this sad, wise, humorous mother of mine, loving her as a son and adoring her as a friend, not least because she sometimes permitted me to glimpse her secret sorrows.

The earth of the Delta in which I lived is a violent earth. Its fields are fecund to the touch of the plow. They seem to cry out for fulfillment of life under the blazing suns of summer. Heat then stands upon the Delta during long days and nights. It stings the flesh. It opens cracks in the fields. It drains men’s minds and wearies their bodies. A clear sky suddenly blackens with cloud, rolls with thunder, crackles with lightning, and tumultuous rains flood the steaming earth. Then they are gone. Now the trees shine richly green, the dust-gray mules gleam black, the ditches gurgle with water. Soon the soil is dry again, white clouds float high in the sky, jaybirds shriek from thorn trees, buzzards circle loftily against the blue, and men once more walk the endless cotton rows of the Delta.

Against this landscape, variable, heat-tortured, shifting; amid swamps dark and mysterious and lost; in the presence of the mighty river rolling onward to the Mexican Gulf; under sudden suns and swarming stars; never far from the Negro speech and the Negro singing; within America and yet withdrawn from it, whites and Negroes, in the strangest mass relationship of men on this continent, painfully tried to work out their singular destiny together.

So outnumbered were the whites by Negroes that on the streets of little towns on Saturdays, where country people had come to do their tradin’, you might have to look hard to find a white face.

In Coahoma County there were 3,000 Negroes for every 1,000 whites.

In Humphreys County there were 5,000 Negroes for every 1,000 whites.

In Tunica County there were 7,000 Negroes for every 1,000 whites.

There the Negro was a problem to the white man, and the white man was a problem to the Negro. The question was the more acute because Negroes hugely outnumbered whites. More than seven out of every ten persons in the Delta were Negroes. In some sections of the area, nine out of ten persons were Negroes. But Negroes accounted for only one out of ten persons in the nation.

Race, religion, or color prejudices tend to rise in relation to the numbers of the so-called despised minority. And as war—not peace—is the normal state of mankind, so prejudice rather than love is the normal state of mind of most men. This melancholy theorem is somberly illuminated by Pascal’s figure who is made to say to another: “I shall have to kill you, little brother, because you come from the other side of the river. But if you did not come from the other side of the river, I shall not have to kill you.”

The Delta whites were racially of a piece. More than 99 percent of them were native-born of English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish ancestry, or they were mixtures of these stocks. Together with their brethren elsewhere in the South, they constituted the largest racially homogeneous bloc of whites in the United States. Here were nearly all of the elements of tribalism, including a fierce insistence upon the maintenance of taboos held inflexible. Nor is this all.

Wherever European kinsmen of these men had gone as conquerors and colonizers, they had set up a color bar. The Dutch colonial in Java might marry a native girl, rear a Eurasian family, and retire to the Netherlands to live with them in honor. But the Englishman, Scotsman, Irishman, Welshman not only did not marry colored women of the colonies but generally had no free social relations with the colored population. And if we look to Latin American countries—Brazil, say—we shall see that the color bar is not a device of Latin peoples. It is a device of the groups I have mentioned, and Delta whites almost to a man were of the same racial stock.

Both whites and Negroes of the Delta, through a tragedy not of their making, were prisoners of their environment. Since many a Delta plantation contained more Negroes than lived in Vermont, and one county had more Negroes than lived in eight western states, the white Deltan had never been a free man in the sense that the Vermonter or the Westerner had always been a free man. The Deltan’s whole society—its laws, customs, manners, and institutions—and how he bore himself in innumerable ways were conditioned by the presence of the Negro. Nor was the Negro a free man, since his society was conditioned by the presence of the white man.

A society that had no counterpart outside the Deep South, it was kept going by the use of intuitive and exquisite tact on the part of both whites and Negroes. It was governed less by the written law than by unwritable codes, an intricate ritual of manners, and a constant adjustment among members of both races. All this was a drain upon the spirit and a sapping of the energies of everyone in the area. It was quiet there. But it was the quiet of a storm center.

Secure within my own household, the environment in which I lived often weighed heavily upon me. I felt there was a doom on the land where I was born and raised. The moccasin coiled by the stagnant pond. The buzzard defiled the white of summer clouds. The mosquito sang a song of chills and fever. The turtle lifted from the slime. Beyond the town, beyond the levee, beyond the willows, the river ran heavy and muddy and slow: timeless, ceaseless, waiting.

The sun was too hot for too long, the rains too heavy, the soil too passionate for fruition, the vegetation too dense, the honeysuckle too sweet, the fields too flat, the horizon—mocking the limited eye—too wide. The dog howled, the ax rang afar off, the lamp smoked, the ripe persimmon fell with silent plop to the forest floor. In the thorn tree a butcher bird impaled a wren.

Members of two races lived out their lives on parallel lines, to meet but in infinity, each with a wound in his heart and a torment in his mind. They savored salt and the moon and tasted delight and felt bitterness in the constricted throat, heard the cry of the newborn child and made way for the pale guest; passing pilgrims, they met in the dreadful marches of the desert and, giving no sign, went on. Living, their ways were separate. Dying, they became a common but not commingled dust. Of these things each spoke only to his own kind.

Theirs was the fatal flaw. They were a little lesser than the angels. But there had been withheld from them the divine calculus by which they might bridge the gulf between themselves and the angels.

2
The Idea of the Soldier

Here, Cohn reflects on the all-pervasive influence of the Civil War on the society in which he grew up. His observations reflect as well his awareness of his Jewish heritage and the concerns of one who had lived through two world wars and the Korean conflict only to spend the last few years of his life worrying about another war that promised to be far more terrible still.

The sun rising blood-red, the air sweet after a stifling night, the new morning tender upon the landscape, I could see across the street from our Washington Avenue house, on the courthouse lawn, the monument to the Confederate soldier. White in the risen dawn, he stood tall, youthful, leaning slightly on his rifle, a bird singing from his marble cap.

He had come, I heard as a small boy, from a faraway place called Italy. It was a strange land. Many of its men were “artists”; probably because they were foreigners and knew no better. Their work, folks said, was not entirely unbecoming even manly men. But it had no appeal for our Delta men. They aspired to become cotton planters or cotton merchants.

The Italians, however, who settled among us, quickly became Americanized. Abandoning the follies of their homeland and adopting the wisdom of ours, they became cobblers, peddlers, merchants, keepers of restaurants. No one of them, clinging to the outmoded ways of the old country, was an artist. Some of them, on the contrary, rose even to the eminence of cotton farming, among them the former barber, Mike Tamburo.

He came often to our house to shave my father during his last illness. Small, dark, belly drum-tight with pasta, the accent of Sicily garlic-pungent upon his English, Mike, brought to Father’s bedside not only the tools of his trade but also a gentle manner, dimpling smiles, and a gushing stream of commentary upon the town’s events of the day. These were medicaments soothing beyond any known to science.

Mike came to talk knowingly of middle busters, pedigreed cottonseed, cover crops. But the Mediterranean so strongly marked him that if one could hold him close to one’s ear one might hear the murmurings of that hyacinthine sea.

Despite the stigma of the artists, there were redeeming features about Italy. A few local Italians peddled bananas from mule-drawn wagons, the great golden stems fatly recumbent upon straw beds. Swarthy men, one wore earrings pirate fashion, the sword-and-cutlass effect heightened by the red handkerchief at the throat. We boys believed they got the fruit from banana plantations in Italy, and we envied Italian boys who could stuff themselves to bursting with bananas as we stuffed ourselves with dewberries that grew wild on the protection levee at the edge of town on the farthest rim of the known universe. From Italy, too, came not only the organ grinders who sometimes appeared on our school grounds but also, we thought, their cunningly dressed monkeys that, cap in hand, ran about among the crowd collecting nickels between bursts of music. (My own favorite—the clanging of it still sounds in my ears—was “The Anvil Chorus” from Il Trovatore.) And somehow, in time, the bananas, the organ grinders, the monkeys outweighed in my mind the unfortunate tendency of Italians to become artists.

After the Confederate soldier, in a huge crate, bad arrived at the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley depot from New Orleans whence he had come by ship from Italy, Crockett brought him to the courthouse lawn. A tall, reddish skinned, well-liked, prosperous Negro, Crockett did all the heavy draying in the town; he was the only Greenvillian who could move such ponderous objects as gin boilers, having for this purpose logging wagons with wide wheels drawn by six-mule teams. And when the soldier finally stood upon his pedestal, he was covered with cotton sheeting to await the day of his unveiling.

I vaguely remember the crowds, among which a small barefoot boy trod nimbly to keep grown-ups from stepping on his “stone bruises”—the occupational disease of barefoot Delta boys in school-free, delirious summer; the minister’s invocation during a period of interminable immobility when I stood stark still lest God strike me dead for “disobedience”; the martial music and wild yelling as Professor Dixon’s band played Dixie (“away, away, away down South in Dixié”); the orator saying something about “gallant men in gray”; and, unaccountably, elderly men and women acting like little girls as they openly cried or blew their noses into handkerchiefs.

Places of honor were reserved for Confederate veterans—venerable, bearded men who, except for their medals, resembled the Moses of the Illustrated Sunday School Lessons. They were captains, majors, colonels. There were no privates in the Confederate army. Certainly there were none from Mississippi, the second state to secede from the Union and home of Jefferson Davis. If a man was good enough to fight for the Confederacy, he was good enough to be an officer.

Yet, as I later learned with disillusionment, in east Mississippi—far from the Delta—there was, by an unexplainable vagary of behavior, a former private named John Allen.

About twenty years after The War had ended, he was suddenly called upon to make a speech in his hometown explaining how the South had been defeated. He found himself on a platform surrounded by former Confederate officers, and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, as I look about me I see on my right Major——, Captain——, and Colonel——, and on my left General——, Lieutenant——, and Colonel——, all, ladies and gentlemen, high-ranking rear ranks. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I was asked to account for the Confederacy’s failure in the late conflict, but I will be brief. I will ask you to look at these officers, and at me, and then draw your own conclusions.”

The speech instantly made him well known, and he ran for Congress. The people of his district, whether admiring his eccentricity or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Growing Up in Greenville
• 2 The Idea of the Soldier
• 3 A Walk Down Washington Avenue
• 4 Change and No Change
• 5 Drunk on Cotton
• 6 It Ain’t What I Owes That Worries Me
• 7 Drummers and Peddlers
• 8 The River I Knew
• 9 The Education of a Rounded Man
• 10 Student of the Law
• 11 Where Is the Way?
• 12 Small-Town Daily
• 13 Tinsel Belongs on Christmas Trees
• 14 I Leave the Business World
• 15 Eighteenth-Century Chevalier
• Editor’s Afterword: The Rounded Man as Writer