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Driving South
No region of the United States has been more written about and analyzed than the South. It is a place of great mystique and mystery, rough-edged and roguish on the one hand, magnolia-scented and charming on the other; a place of severe poverty and enormous wealth. It is a geography with everything from coastal oceans to mountain lakes; marsh grass and live oaks in one place, bluegrass and piney forests in another; oysters and shrimp on the coast, cotton and catfish inland; sophisticated urban cities, and rural areas constituting the greatest concentration of poverty in the United States.
Crisscrossing the region is a system of interstate highways. On the easternmost border is Interstate 95, one of America’s busiest highways. It starts in Houlton, Maine, at the Canadian (New Brunswick) border, and runs the entire length of the East Coast, ending in Miami Beach. Along the way, it takes the traveler from the bucolic countryside of New England to the urban density and gridlock of Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. As it enters Maryland, it crosses the Mason-Dixon line and, according to some people, enters the American South. But for many, a truer sense of having entered a new region of the country begins once “outside the Beltway” of Washington. The further into Virginia the traveler goes, the more southern things feel—from the ways people talk and interact to the stores one finds.1
Signs for “historic Williamsburg” (which used slaves imported at Jamestown) and for the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond are further reminders. Once one crosses into North Carolina, cotton bolls start appearing in fields adjacent to the highway, and South Carolina brings signs for Charleston and for Georgia’s coastal and equally southern-feeling counterpart, Savannah. Even nearly fifty miles inland from the coast, live oaks festooned with Spanish moss and occasional scenes of marsh grass are reminders of this gothic area that locals call “the Lowcountry.”2
Given that the South’s geography is so expansive, it is possible to find oneself in tremendously diverse circumstances. Places in the hills or mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, or Georgia look different, and their people in fact sound different, than do those in other parts of the South. One of the most striking differences is that the northern parts of the region are also the whitest, with many counties having no African Americans or other minorities among their populations. One of the South’s most unique subregions is largely unvisited and unknown to most southerners and those traveling through the region; this is an area called “the Black Belt.”
The Black Belt
The Black Belt is the quintessential South. It has what is stereotypically the South’s defining characteristic—plantations, with their slavery histories. Not coincidentally, the Black Belt still has a disproportionate number and percentage of the South’s African American population. The Black Belt actually forms a crescent, beginning on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and going down the Atlantic coast through the Tidewater of Virginia, the coastal (except the Outer Banks) and central areas of North Carolina, and the marshy Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia; it then heads west through the red clay hills of south-central Georgia (where farming replaces fishing), and on through the central parts of Alabama and Mississippi, before ending in the Mississippi Delta, with the Mississippi River’s adjacent states (with contiguous counties), including the largest expanses of the Delta in Mississippi and Louisiana and lesser parts of Arkansas and Tennessee.
Sociologist Arthur Raper described the region well in the 1930s: “In the heart of the South, there are approximately 200 counties in which over half the population is Negro. These counties are like a crescent from Virginia to Texas and constitute the Black Belt. . . . The Black Belt includes the most fertile soil of the South, and contains a disproportionate number of its poorest people. The ownership of the best land is in the hands of a comparatively small group of white families; landlessness and chronic dependence is the lot of over half the white families and nearly nine-tenths of the colored.”3
Over a half century later, little had changed. In the mid-1980s, Jim Auchmutey and Priscilla Painton, reporters for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, put it this way: “Beyond the swelling suburbs of the modern South lies a land of rich soil and poor people, a crescent-shaped region stretching from the tobacco fields of Virginia to the cotton flats of the Mississippi Delta. This was slave country, sharecropper country, the wellspring of the great black exodus to the North and to cities such as Atlanta. Today the Black Belt is an abandoned land, avoided by industry, failed by agriculture, left behind by the rising black political class it spawned. By almost every measure—industry, income, infant mortality, education, poverty, housing—the Black Belt badly trails the rest of the rural South.”4 In other words, it is the poorest place in a region that has more than its fair share of poverty, and its poverty is as well-rooted as the oldest trees there. It is heavily characterized by what economist Robert Hoppe has called “persistent poverty”—that is, places in which poverty is embedded so deeply that it replaces itself from one generation to the next.5
If one drives across the Black Belt, through many of these persistently poor places, one journeys through time. It is as though the hands on a clock were wound backward and the old and the new collide. Although this kind of experience often occurs when one travels through rural areas, it is especially pronounced in the rural South in general and the Black Belt in particular. One can still find Mail Pouch ads on the sides of barns; huge, weathered Coca-Cola signs made of aluminum (not the newer plastic models); crossroads communities; small towns with “the quarters” or what were at one time called “Niggertowns” or, more politely, “nigra neighborhoods”; town squares with casual workers waiting early in the morning for whatever work might be available for the day; old, slow-moving men in coveralls (sometimes pronounced “coverhauls”); domino parlors, sometimes in strikingly ramshackle buildings without air conditioning; Nehi cola or RC Cola signs; women walking with umbrellas opened like parasols against the sun; children riding bikes alongside the road or shooting baskets at a makeshift basketball goal; wooden houses along the road with up-ended tires buried in the yards to hold flowers; bottles with colored water at the windows; trucks hauling trees to a mill; vegetable stands; melons and other fruits for sale alongside the road; pickup trucks (that staple of rural America), many with beaten-up aluminum fishing boats in the back (but some pulling the latest in high-tech bass fishing rigs); trailers that look like anything but “mobile” homes; the occasional public school but at least as often a Christian academy (another term for “segregation academy”); roadsides frequently littered with Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes, beer cans, and other signs of contemporary America; unusable trucks, cars, and similar refuse in yards and alongside houses; a hot dusty feel in summer, a cool sometimes frigid feel in a winter accompanied by the expectancy that winter won’t last long; red mud on roads during rainy times; dead animals on and alongside the highways; mangy-looking dogs in yards; and everywhere, winding in, among, and through everything near the road, mile after mile of kudzu vines. Indeed, kudzu appears to have a plan of its own for what the rural South should look like—and to have decided that it should be everywhere.
No matter how dense the kudzu grows, however, it cannot hide the weathered appearance of so much that is there, so much that constitutes, collectively, what we think of as the rural South. And no part of the rural South is more weathered, more beaten-looking than the Black Belt. The scenic hills of Appalachia provide “hollers” that help to hide the abject poverty of many of the residents (nearly all of whom are white); such scenery is mostly absent in the Black Belt. Even in the coastal Tidewater (of Virginia and North Carolina) and Lowcountry areas, where kudzu has recently started to appear, the presence of poverty is more apparent than hidden. It is found most often right alongside the road in a patchwork quilt of “communities,” a term that refers to any collection of several small houses and, occasionally, a neighborhood store.
Geographically and economically, the Black Belt is characterized heavily by plantations as well as by farms. Planters, as a class, were unlike farmers; they were more involved with running a business than with tilling the soil themselves.6 Indeed, it was former slaves and poor whites who, after the Civil War, constituted the bulk of a plantation’s population, and they were the ones who did the actual field work. In a British model of gentility, the planter had a fiefdom, on which the serfs (poor whites and blacks) were, in effect, indentured servants. But eventually this land-based economy faltered, the industrial revolution occurred, world wars took men off the land, and people exposed to the idea of a better life began to seek it outside the region.
The Promised Land?
Beginning in the immediate post–Civil War period, the first large-scale, nonforced migration of blacks in the South began. The movement was initially limited and concentrated mostly in moving close to one’s previous home. It was only toward the end of the nineteenth century that the rate of migration picked up and that the destinations came to be farther away. Eventually, what started out as a trickle grew to a flood. Reinforced and celebrated with spirituals and hymns, some sung before the Civil War, the movement increased of African Americans leaving the South in search of a better life in the North. As an old Negro spiritual says,
We’ll soon be free.We’ll soon be free.
We’ll soon be free.
When da Lord will call us home.
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