Ellington

Like an omen, Floyd Graham stands in a Coahoma field, backlit against a fiery Delta horizon. Fifty-something, chain-smoker, charismatic and self-admittedly privileged, he recounts the story of this field—one of many his family owns, one of many where, for decades, 20th-century plantation owners exploited African American tenant farmers. Fifteen people, deceived by the earlier high temps and now clad only in light jackets, huddle in the February chill, spellbound by Graham's booming voice.

"Everybody had 40 acres," he says of the black tenant farmers. "That's what they were responsible for. They weren't really sharecroppers, because these people didn't get a share of the crops."

A large diamond glitters each time Graham raises a hand to light a cigarette. He prefaces anecdotes with apologies—how, as a teenager he threatened a black girl who catcalled when he biked past, or how every Saturday, he'd wake to several hundred field hands, lining up in his backyard, waiting to get paid.

"We weren't unique," Graham continues. "Pretty much every family did the same thing."

He recalls the "pickin' seasons" of childhood, coal smoke rising from shacks, raised voices ringing through autumn haze. "I don't think they were singing because they were happy," he chaffs. "What they had to do was pretty monotonous. … My father didn't believe in mechanization. I asked him why we didn't buy more tractors, and he said, ‘Why buy tractors when these people do it cheaper?'"

Forty years later, as Graham acknowledges his sins and those of his fathers, the winter-shorn field pulses with its own muscle memory—and those muscles ache.

Act I: Fielding Stories
A collection of photojournalists and videographers have made their way to the Mississippi Delta from all over—San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle and France—to learn the rudiments of documentary filmmaking. When they signed up for the two-week Barefoot Workshop, they probably weren't expecting an apology-punctuated monologue in a field. But Chandler Griffin, the 32-year-old workshop creator and Jackson native, knows what he's doing. For four years he's delivered students to Graham's dusk-heavy field for introductory lessons in the Southern tradition of oral story-telling and the Delta's intensely conflicted sense of place.

"I want students to be aware of the impact they have on people and the impact people have on them. It's not about the literal subjects Floyd's talking about. I want them to recognize the universal themes," Griffin says.

In 2007 Graham's rhetoric so unnerved Australian-songwriter and Barefoot student Adrian Kosky that he wrote "Silver Dollars," a song chastising a plantation owner who offered to pay tenant farmers in cash or check. The owner would write the check for the full amount owed—several hundred dollars. The cash deal was less straightforward. The farmer would dip both hands into a large bucket of silver dollars. What he could carry without dropping, he could keep. The plantation owner knew tenant farmers couldn't cash checks without bank accounts. He also knew that two fistfuls of silver dollar amounted to, roughly, 60 bucks.

Silver Dollars fillin' up my hands/ Ain't enough for workin' on this land/ A shotgun shack that I don't own/ And 14 kids to help the cotton grow/ I see Mr. Floyd drivin' in his yellow Corvette/ While I get deeper an' deeper in debt.

Kosky played his song for Clarksdale icon and lounge owner George Messenger, another cordial local who annually logs time with Griffin's students. An elderly man with coffee-colored skin and startling blue eyes, Messenger then touched Kosky's arm and said solemnly, "That could have been my story. That was my story." It was a transformative moment for Kosky, illustrating the essence of what Griffin hopes to instill in his students.

"Telling others' stories is more than lighting, sound and editing," Griffin preaches, interrupting his own midnight Final Cut demo to impress what has suddenly occurred to him as more essential knowledge. His pupils sprawl attentively across shabby couches, haphazardly nestled in the Shack Up Inn's loft living room. "It's a responsibility and a vulnerability. And always, it's self-revelatory," he adds.

After graduating from Jackson Prep in 1992, Griffin earned a BFA in film and photography from Savannah College of Art and Design. A decade later his work took him to the northeastern United States, and to places as exotic as Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

"It's funny, because I couldn't wait to get out of Mississippi, and I had no desire to come back. I thought Mississippi was closed-minded and backward," he admits. "Then I went out and had these experiences, and I realized it's about bringing your skills and your knowledge back, sharing it with the people at home. And it's about bringing people from the outside in."

Consequently, Griffin started Barefoot Workshops in 2004. "I had been working with the Maine International Film and Television Workshops, but I wanted to try it my way," he explains.

Griffin and his Jackson-based assistant Damien Blaylock were intrigued by Clarksdale's Shack Up Inn. As part of their $1,850 workshop fee, students stay in refurbished sharecropper shacks, located at a former working plantation that retains its original cotton gin and outbuildings. Part history lesson, part junkyard and—controversially and perhaps unintentionally—part kitsch, the place seemed provocative and perfect. "When we first saw the Shack Up, we thought, ‘Fruitcakeville.' So I said, ‘I guess that's where we're having the workshop,' " Griffin says with a grin.

Barefoot is a two-week crash course in documentary filmmaking. Students are provided professional equipment and fast instruction in everything from outlining a story to cutting together a finished product. They create their own seven-to-10 minute documentaries, which screen at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, the Crossroads Film Festival in Jackson and on the Barefoot Web site.

Griffin chose the Delta in order to boost recognition and help the tourism economy in his home state. But he also needed his workshop "to be this place where (students) are out of their element, kind of confused by everything. They don't get distracted by dinner and opera plans." He knew that his students would have preliminary impressions of Mississippi, but he wanted to replace assumptions with legitimate experience.

"People come from all over the world, and they leave in love with this place," he says.

Since its inception, Barefoot students have come from India, Nepal, Italy, Indonesia, Australia and America. A 2008 participant, Karim Amara, says that Clarksdale works because "everyone is friendly, and everyone's a character. It doesn't matter where you point your camera in this town, you'll get a story." A San Francisco resident, he adds: "I don't know if you could pull this off in my city, where everyone's media savvy and full of canned answers. Here, people are genuine, in a real, contextual sense."

Appropriately, Amara finds his story close to "home." In "Motherload of Trophies," he and Kristen Daly follow Bill Talbot, co-owner of The Shack Up Inn, on scavenging trips for discarded "treasure" to transform into the ubiquitous fountains and sculptures that mark the property. At one point, Amara gets so involved with his subject that he abandons the camera on the floor and eagerly joins Talbot in looting a movie-poster jackpot, recently rescued from half a century under someone's bed.

"All you see are feet and cables," Griffin says of the resulting footage. "I think it's a great example, because Karim is telling a story about something he understands. Initially, maybe he didn't even realize that's why he chose Bill. What it comes down to, making documentaries is about real people and relationships, and being honest with yourself as a storyteller."

On the first day of the workshop, students camp in the living room, munching donuts and discussing potential stories. Some of them have researched well. Daly, a doctoral candidate from Columbia University's journalism program, mentions Riverside Hotel, where Sonny Boy Williamson, Ike Turner and Robert Nighthawk lodged and, in its earliest life as a hospital, Bessie Smith spent her final hours. Other ideas include studying the effects of Tunica casinos on Clarksdale's economy and interviewing HIV-positive women from a nearby clinic.

Like Amara's movie posters, the suggested topics demonstrate each student's unique interests and expertise. Rebecca Parrish, a recent college grad, works with teenagers at the infamous Chicago housing project, Cabrini-Green. Her activism surfaces in a desire to probe Wal-Mart's presence in a small town—the conundrum of job potential vs. local industry displacement. Jenifer Hyde, of Normandy, France, mentions her faith-fueled interest in contrasting the gospel as "God's music" to the blues as "the devil's music." Rachel Hamilton and Karen Kohlhaas, New York-based actresses, hope to do something with live performance, perhaps capitalizing on Clarksdale as Tennessee Williams' boyhood home.

Another New Yorker, Alison Jones, focuses on an issue that quickly becomes personal to the workshop students. As a photographer for an international conservation program called "No Water No Life," Jones documents pollution and irrigation problems. And since pesticide-steeped wells service the Shack Up, the tap water is unusable. Thirsty students drain jugs faster than Griffin can supply. For Griffin, this results in panicky pre-dawn forays to the grocery, before cranky, caffeine-craving students awaken. "No water, no coffee—no coffee, no life" became a running joke, albeit the deep-rooted, disturbing implications.

Act II: Action!
As the first week progresses, the community embraces the documentarians, offering contacts and hospitality, while "work" fizzles into playtime. In "Babies Got the Blues," Hamilton and Kohlhaas decide to focus on the Blues Museum's education program, which offers everyone the opportunity to learn to play the blues, regardless of their ability to afford instruments or lessons.

Tracking a Blues School alum, 19-year-old "Little" Anthony Sherrod, led to a Thursday night shoot-turned-dance-party at juke joint Sarah's Kitchen and later in the week, a pajama-clad expedition to blues club Ground Zero, to get footage of Sherrod onstage. "We didn't have advance notice," Kohlhaas defends. "We had to get down there with the camera, now!"

By week's end, sleep is scant, emotions taunt, drizzle steady and Mississippi mud abundant. Apparently only Daly read Griffin's pre-workshop supply list, which suggested galoshes. One student, Memphis native Emerson Ables spends an entire night in James "Super Chikan" Johnson's work shed, drilling the bluesman about his familial history, his political views and the high-celebrity-demand guitars that he makes out of found objects. The interview for "Black and Blues" ends at 4 a.m.—about the time Amy Benson and Chris Thompson, a Seattle-based videographer and grantwriter, are setting up to film sunrise over Sunshine Baptist Church, only to discover upon playback that the camera had been switched to a low-light, grainy setting. ("Only use this setting if you're in a cave with Osama bin Laden," Griffin regularly admonishes.)

The next morning at 4 a.m., they set up all over again.

As week two opens, Parrish and her partner Brooke Bassin still don't have a coherent story line. They had hoped to explore the town's attitudes surrounding the (then) upcoming presidential primaries, but at this point, they have a collection of fascinating interview clips and no clue how to conclusively link the clips together.

"I'm not voting for Monica Lewinsky's boyfriend's wife," Parrish mimics one of their subjects, while scourging the communal fridge for something she can eat. A vegetarian with food allergies in the deep-fried, barbequed South, Parrish's frustrations are not limited to mere filmmaking.

"Right now I'm sort of wallowing in the pain of ‘we don't have a project.' So then I think, ‘well, you have to find one.' But pressuring myself like this feels artificial and not that meaningful." She steadies a pan of rice and beans, releasing the weary sigh of a classic over-achiever. "My main goal is to leave here not feeling depressed and defeated."

Meanwhile, Benson and Thompson return elated from a shoot, and Griffin connects the camera to the TV so everyone can view their footage. Choir practice had just finished at Sunshine Baptist, and as they were packing to leave, Mattie Shoemaker approached, wanting to talk about her dead relatives. Not expecting much, Benson grabbed the camera and followed Shoemaker's methodical, cane-assisted procession through the adjoining cemetery. As Shoemaker reminisced, she began to weep.

"It was intensely personal and very moving," Thompson recalls—not to mention expertly captured from a dramatic low-angle perspective, in extra-warm color balance. Benson modestly attributes the angle to her short stature more than skillful camera maneuvering, but evidentially, the pair has stellar listening skills—"Shoot at an angle for greater dimension; white-balance on a blue rather than a white, for a ‘warm' picture," Griffin had instructed, a few days earlier.

By the middle of the second week, no one is sleeping. Around-the-clock convenience store runs are rampant, and jumbo bags of M&Ms disappear by the hour. Romantic soliloquies in twilit fields are but a distant memory. Except for the taped index cards snaking across the shacks' walls (an editing trick-of-the-trade) and Griffin knocking on doors at 3 a.m. (in response to editing-crisis texts), the scene is uncannily reminiscent of university finals week.

The films have to be delivered to the Blues Museum by 4 p.m. Friday to be in place for the 7 p.m. screening. At 6 p.m. Friday, some students are still editing.

Act III: Post ... Production
At 6:15 p.m. Hamilton and Kohalaas settle on the porch of the Pinetop Perkins Shack, sipping beer and taking deep breaths. They're the lucky ones. They're the first group to have a finished project.

"I feel like this is the first moment in two weeks that I've really sat down and felt like I don't have to be frantically studying my notes or gathering equipment or trying to get as much sleep as possible. I'm crawling out of a creative black hole," Hamilton exhales.

Kohalaas adds, "Well, I feel like things are going to crawl out of this couch."

Hamilton shrugs off her partner's concern. "This morning when I took a shower, I couldn't find my towel, it had been so long since it was employed," she responds glibly.

Born-and-bred city girls, they try to process their first taste of Mississippi. "It's the weather and the people," Hamilton muses. "They're both crazy."

"People take the time to be eccentric here," Kohalaas agrees. "The unfolding of their day is the unfolding of their day. In New York, everything is abrupt. I found myself having to slow down my New York rhythm, because every time you say goodbye to someone, that starts a whole other conversation, and you'll be on the phone setting up an interview, and you'll say, ‘OK, bye, thanks,' and you can just tell people feel that's jarring."

Hamilton spent a full day trying not to be the one to end a conversation. "It was hilarious," she says. "It took a lot of muscle, emotional and otherwise, to stand my ground."

Parrish views the slower pace as valuable. "People here seem rooted, connected to themselves," she notes. Like many of the students, Parrish expressly bonded with one of her subjects, Sarah Moore, septuagenarian and owner of the café and juke, Sarah's Kitchen. A local fixture, Moore was a Parchman Penitentiary cook for many years. Now, in addition to her café, she works in casino kitchens.

"Miss Sarah has so much wisdom," Parrish says, nodding. "She's like Buddha or something."

Feisty and opinionated, Moore eventually agrees to an on-camera interview but refuses Parrish and Brooke's proposal that she be the sole subject of their documentary. On the day she leaves Clarksdale, Parrish presents Moore with a houseplant as a farewell gift.

The Barefoot experience is powerful, even for those with insider insight. Thompson may pay rent on the West Coast, but he grew up on the Gulf Coast, received a journalism degree from Ole Miss, and started his career at The Clarion-Ledger.

Even so, his time in Clarksdale broadened his home-state perspective. "I think I've learned a lot about who people are here, how they live, and what's important to at least this particular group of people [that we've been working with]. Being someone who's not very religious, it's been interesting to pay attention to people who are, and try to objectively look at what matters to them and why."

It's laundry day at the Shack Up, and as he pauses to set the washing machine dial, he considers his next thought. "You hear how the blues are dead, that Clarksdale is dying, the old way of life is sort of passing by. There's this sense that it'll all be gone tomorrow," he says, hesitantly.

"I think in the back of our minds, we were expecting to find that at this church. And that's not the case. The members that we've met, they're very determined to keep it alive."

Somehow, everyone manages to organize their footage and finish editing, although a few filmmakers arrive at the Friday evening screening with wet hair and minutes to spare. The Blues Museum swarms with curious locals, wanting to see for themselves what this "Barefoot thing" is all about.

The ladies of Sunshine Baptist form an anxious cluster, grinning for photos with Benson and Thompson, chatting among themselves, and informing passersby that they are in a documentary. Bill Talbot rocks on his heels, hands in pockets, and responds to someone's "looking forward to seeing your movie?" with an uneasy, "guess so." In the back of the museum, Super Chikan peruses David Turnley's photography, which includes photos the Pulitzer Prize winner snapped of Super Chikan himself. The screening is so well attended that even standing room is scarce.

Afterward at the Delta Amusement Café, "Yankees" test their coordination against pungent boiled crawfish, while a Blues School instructor and a key figure in "Babies Got the Blues," 27-year-old Richard Crisman—aka "Daddy Rich"—regales the celebrants with Delta tunes, until the ample supply of liquid nostalgia breeds requests for ‘90s rock.

Daddy Rich appeases with dexterous renditions of Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and early Radiohead, accompanied by the multi-accented vocals of a table full of triumphant filmmakers.

The final stop is Reds, a beloved dive known for cool blues, hot women and authentic grime. Little Anthony plays bass behind Bill "Howl-N-Madd" Perry, one of his former Blues School instructors. It's the exact inverse of last week's performance at Sarah's Kitchen, where Little Anthony played lead and Howl-N-Madd supported on bass. It seems a harmonic metaphor—the passing of the torch, the youth honoring his teacher.

Reds has become a regular haunt for the Barefoot students, and as everyone's favorite local dancing girl shimmies in her zebra mini, Benson leans over to Thompson, awe-struck, and whispers, "You know, there's no other place like this anywhere in the world."

She's right. For all its economic despair and crumbling façade, the Mississippi Delta manages to offer both gorgeous mystique and visceral rambunctiousness in an astoundingly self-contained package. It's an evasive beauty, something many people intuit but few accurately interpret or portray.

Kosky has traveled from Australia to Clarksdale three times since his initial Barefoot experience and is considering a permanent relocation. To him, the power of the Delta is in "the sounds, the accents, the history and, musically speaking, its sense of place … also, the changes that have occurred, the atrocities that have happened and the fact that it still survives, still manages to be proud."

Kosky's own voice, with his soft Australian accent, comes across as measured and musical. "The Delta's not outwardly beautiful," he says, "but it's inwardly stunning. It's handsome in a way that is rugged and credible. Finding beauty here is like finding beauty in the desert. And for me, all of this is really exciting to write and think about and expand on."

A few short hours later, the Shack Up exudes chaotic energy, as sponsor-lent equipment is sorted, bags packed and airport carpools organized. The general consensus is that everyone will miss the Shack Up, Bill Talbot and his tunefully head-bobbing parakeet. They'll miss Rest Haven pies, the wacky weather and the people of Clarksdale, who quickly graduated from "subjects" to friends. And, of course, they'll miss each other.

"The best part of coming here was meeting you," Bassin tells Parrish, as she bequeaths a goodbye hug on her partner in tension and laughs.

For the most part, 2008's Barefoot participants aren't quite as eager as Kosky to start their lives anew in the Mississippi Delta, but few would deny that the Workshop was an intense, affecting experience. "Most of all," Thompson says, "I think of our church members. I walked away being able to respect their views, and I appreciate their willingness to share them with us."

So it's time for the fresh graduates of Barefoot Workshop to take their new skills into the world. There are places to go and stories to tell.

Several Barefoot Workshop films will screen at the Crossroads Film Festival at 3 p.m. on Saturday, April 5. For more information, visit http://www.barefootworkshops.org.

Cinematastic!: Crossroads Film Festival 2008
Shopocalypse Now!
What Would Jesus Buy?
We Call it Irresistible

Previous Comments

ID

82265

Comment

In 2007 Graham's rhetoric so unnerved Australian-songwriter and Barefoot student Adrian Kosky that he wrote "Silver Dollars," a song chastising a plantation owner who offered to pay tenant farmers in cash or check. The owner would write the check for the full amount owed—several hundred dollars. The cash deal was less straightforward. The farmer would dip both hands into a large bucket of silver dollars. What he could carry without dropping, he could keep. The plantation owner knew tenant farmers couldn't cash checks without bank accounts. He also knew that two fistfuls of silver dollar amounted to, roughly, 60 bucks. Ever since I read that last night, I keep thinking about it, and the more I think about it, the angrier I get.

Author

LatashaWillis

Date

2008-04-04T08:43:39-06:00

ID

82266

Comment

I think it's a "rural legend" might have happen in the late 1800's by some racist farmer, but not in the era Graham is talking about. Graham's not but 10yrs older than me and I grew up on one of the larger farms in the Delta and I never saw anything like that happen. My mother even keep the books and did the payroll, and everyone had to come to her to get their pay. I even helped stuff pay envelopes. All the larger farms and plantations had stores/offices that had some type of bank or an actual bank in them. They paid in cash, dollar bills, not silver dollars. I am not saying the tenant farms weren't taken advantage of, they were. They usually owed so much money from getting credit at the farm store during the winter to feed their families that they never got out of debt. Tenant farmers were just white and black slaves by another name. My grandfather moved to the Delta in the early 20's from south Mississippi to log and clear land and to tenant farm, he gave up the tenant farming to manage a cotton gin because he had 9 kids to feed and never could get out of debt tenant farming and He used to talk about how bad the black and white tenant farmer treated.

Author

BubbaT

Date

2008-04-04T09:51:16-06:00

ID

82267

Comment

Bubba, I'm quite certain that it is documented that plantation owners cheated sharecroppers in such unfair ways well into the second half the 20th century. That doesn't mean every single one of them did.

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2008-04-04T10:10:46-06:00

ID

82268

Comment

I'm glad you didn't see the "silver dollar" thing happen, BubbaT. I also agree that tenant farming was atrocious, and I'd venture to say that the shady loan companies of today have replaced them.

Author

LatashaWillis

Date

2008-04-04T10:14:18-06:00

ID

82269

Comment

Donna can you tell me where to find the documention on the "silver dollar" thing. The only reference I can find is in Muddy Waters bio "Can't Be Satisfied" by Robert Gordon. "Delta farmers still tell of one landowner who invited each 'cropper individually into his office, served bonded whiskey from his good glassware, then asked the farmer whether he wanted to take home a thin check or run his hands through a tub of silver dollars and carry home an armload." From that it seems like it was just one farmer. I know sharecroppers were cheated, my grandfather was one for a time.

Author

BubbaT

Date

2008-04-04T10:54:04-06:00

ID

82270

Comment

I saw the title to this article and thought you guys wrote one about ME! :) I spent most of my life "Barefoot in the Delta". For all of its faults, I'm glad people from other places are getting a taste of "home". When I was growing up my stepfather had a large farm outside of Panther Burn (I'll love anyone who knows where that is!) But, his farm was pretty "automated" and it was the early '80's....so there wasn't as much tenant farming. Of course, he was an asshole...so I'm sure if there was a way to cheat someone, he'd find it. My father is a ag pilot. He's owned an airstrip in Shaw my entire life. He didn't have "tenant" farmers, but he had workers that lived on his land and helped him load the plans. They lived in shot gun shacks at the end of the air strip. I learned to drive in the field at the end of it. A lot of the workers couldn't read and I remember Daddy getting out of bed in the middle of the night when one of them had a sick baby so he could read the instructions on the bottle of medicine. My Daddy has been pretty racist my whole life. I think he wouldn't admit how much his heart hurt when his main 'hand' got stabbed during an argument between his wife and his girlfriend. He worked for my dad for twenty years and if you saw one, you saw the other. I always contend that this man was my Dad's best friend. My Daddy's upbringing would never let him admit this. But, I saw him cry when he got the news. It truly is a different world. I'll echo Benson and restate, “You know, there’s no other place like this anywhere in the world.”

Author

Lori G

Date

2008-04-04T12:11:20-06:00

ID

82271

Comment

Lori G- we might know each other or each others families. I know where Panther Burn is. My mother's father was a farm manager there in there in the 40's and my father's family was from Shaw/Longshot area. I lived in Skene till I was 19. Did your father have the air strip on 448 by Crow's store? My grandparents lived in green house in middle of the field behind it.

Author

BubbaT

Date

2008-04-04T12:19:28-06:00

ID

82272

Comment

I come from a Delta cotton farming family and have never heard anything like that "silver dollar" story. Sounds like an urban (rural?) legend...someone contact Snopes.com.

Author

QB

Date

2008-04-04T12:51:45-06:00

ID

82273

Comment

My dad worked at the airstrip on 448 then bought his own when I was a baby. At least I think it was that one. Crow's is the store with the trailer park (or rather four trailers) beside it? Sittin' at the intersection of the last road coming out west of Cleveland and 448 (I'm not that good with the road names anymore). I used to drive that way to my g'parent's cabin in Benoit when I was growing up. My daddy's strip was behind Dixie Tobacco and Candy Co in Shaw. Take the road that goes down in front of the high school, go over the railroad tracks...there it is. He's out of the business now. Too much G force over too many years knocked his back out. My mother's side is some of the Delta Italians. I'm half redneck and half Italian. I ain't complainin'.

Author

Lori G

Date

2008-04-04T12:58:30-06:00

ID

82274

Comment

I know exactly where you are talking about between Martin Grain and Dixie Tobacco, forgot about the air strip there. You know where Crow's grocery is, but it's intersection of Shaw/Skene road and 448. I spent a lot of time fishing/sking at the Outing Club too.

Author

BubbaT

Date

2008-04-04T13:15:36-06:00

ID

82275

Comment

"think it's a "rural legend" might have happen in the late 1800's All the larger farms and plantations had stores/offices that had some type of bank or an actual bank in them. They paid in cash, dollar bills, not silver dollars." I have a video segment of a Mr Hunter, farm manager at Stovall Plantation, where he displays silver "dollars" that were paid to sharecroppers and used as currency in the commissary store at Stovall. They look like an older coin, like a colonial coinage, not a St. Gaudens style silver dollar, but they're unmistakably a silver dollar type of coin and say "Stovall Plantation" on them.

Author

willdufauve

Date

2008-04-04T15:13:43-06:00

ID

82276

Comment

Another Delta native would like to chime in (even if the Louisiana Delta - 50 miles SW of Greenville, to be more precise). Like yours, Bubba, my family came to the Delta from S. Miss - albeit 10 years later. By the time I was old enough to be vaguely aware of what was going on, sharecropping pretty much died out. The former sharecropers were (those who didn't move to town or out of the parish) paid farm laborers. Fortunately, I never heard anything bad reports about my grandfather -- in fact, he made a point of treating his employers fairly. So in the end, it does depend on the individual. The system might be bad, and i'm sure there are the stories of genuinely good people trapped in bad systems (and yes, even the outright bastards who treated their sharecroppers little better than slaves).

Author

Philip

Date

2008-04-04T18:07:26-06:00

ID

82277

Comment

My sister lives about mile from the Stovall store. My grandfather,father and I all did work repair work at Stovall Plantation gin, know alot of people in that area and used to eat lunch the Stovall store when we worked on gins near there . I have one of the coins from Stovall Plantation (somewhere in my mother's attic) They are really just tokens made of tin to use at the company store. Most of the plantations had tokens to use in there stores. The story of the silver dollars is about real silver dollars not the tokens from what I can find out.

Author

BubbaT

Date

2008-04-04T19:20:02-06:00

ID

82278

Comment

It's reasonable to think that most sharecroppers wouldn't know the difference between tin, a silvery colored shiny metal, and genuine coin silver. It's also reasonable to say many, if not most, sharecroppers had little ability to read and spell. I'm bringing up the commissary coins as a possible historical explanation for the "silver dollar" aspect of the story.

Author

willdufauve

Date

2008-04-04T19:56:31-06:00

ID

82279

Comment

Anyone know whats playing today and what times??

Author

Kamikaze

Date

2008-04-05T10:15:17-06:00

ID

82280

Comment

The 'silver dollar" story seems like those stories/talltales the farmers swapped when they garthered around the pot belly stoves in those old stores when they got rained out of the fields and it's been told so many times and for so long it is assumed true. I would just like to know for my own curiosity I would like to know it it based on fact or folklore.

Author

BubbaT

Date

2008-04-05T11:24:44-06:00

ID

82281

Comment

Kaze, this website has a calendar of events on it (http://www.crossroadsfilmfest.com/).

Author

MAllen

Date

2008-04-05T16:18:39-06:00

ID

82282

Comment

I come from a Delta cotton farming family and have never heard anything like that "silver dollar" story. Sounds like an urban (rural?) legend...someone contact Snopes.com. I just sent them an email. I don't know if they'll get around to it, but it's worth a shot.

Author

LatashaWillis

Date

2008-04-05T20:47:59-06:00

ID

82283

Comment

I saw this series Saturday. Great work. Loved the one about the primaries!

Author

emilyb

Date

2008-04-07T11:06:54-06:00

ID

82284

Comment

This may shed a little light to the continuing questioning of the "Silver Dollar" story....My father is Floyd Graham, the "fifty-something, chain-smoker, charismatic" storyteller in the preceeding story.....Although he did tell this story, it was only a recount of a popular story told among the people of this place we call "The Delta." There is a specific farm owner the story is said to refer to, but it was not my grandfather who supposedly paid workers this way. My father was a priviledged child. Although, the story doesn't tell you that this was only after his biological father died in his 30's from leukemia when my daddy was only 7 years old, and his mother remarried a rich plantation owner who moved them to Mississippi from a dusty, run-down farm house in Arkansas. It also doesn't tell you that the life living under the roof of a controlling, arrogant racist was probably not my daddy's idea of a wonderful life, Corvette or not...and that sometimes when you leave home and get out in the real world, you still have to work hard every day to make a living, especially when your adopted dad didn't believe that anything should ever be given to you as an adult when you have the ability to work for it....Oh, and the "large diamond" glittering on my daddy's hand is not a family heirloom, passed from generation to generation....It was an anniversary gift from my mother...a replica of a ring worn by my grandfather that was promised to my father but was "mysteriously lost" in their house and never recovered.....I guess greed and arrogance can blur your vision just a little because to a young boy who had never been poisoned by the sins of his father, it was more than just a ring...a possession...another asset...It was his daddy's, and that's all that mattered to him. Thanks for the opportunity to share my story and my admiration for my daddy....the hardest working and most generous man that I have ever known. Luckily a person's character can take them alot farther in life than the environment in which they were raised. Much Delta love to all of you reading this!

Author

deltagirl74

Date

2008-04-07T14:02:40-06:00

ID

82285

Comment

I think the story is local to Coahoma county or extreme northern Bolivar county. I've checked with a few friends (Bolivar County) this weekend most of whom's families have been farming in the Delta, 60+ yrs, and they had never heard this story. So it seems like with the mentioning of it in Muddy Waters bio. and your father repeating it from what he had heard it was just told in Coahoma County area and not all over the Delta.

Author

BubbaT

Date

2008-04-07T14:26:37-06:00

ID

82286

Comment

Thank you for telling us about your father, deltagirl. I wonder what kind of planet we would have if everyone was willing to share their stories and struggles.

Author

LatashaWillis

Date

2008-04-07T15:23:45-06:00

ID

82287

Comment

Actually, the story as I first heard it back in the 60s was about a big farmer in the South part of Coahoma County. Is it true? I couldn't say and that is the way I presented it to Adrian. This story along with a 100 others I heard at the hunting camp listening to the ole men during their nightly poker games or at Buster's service station on a hot July afternoon are simply that, stories. I'm sure there is some truth in most of them and some embellishment, but these stories are part of what I think makes the South unique. Stories by both black and white have been handed down for generations and I think this is part of what gives us in the South a sense of place. Some are uplifting and inspiring while others reveal are darker side of our past, just like any other part of the country. Certainly the characters in these stories don't represent all of us in the South but hopefully the stories do cause us to examine ourselves. Are we making any progress?

Author

FG

Date

2008-04-07T15:46:38-06:00

ID

82288

Comment

I really enjoyed this article on many levels - as someone new to Mississippi with many things yet to learn and to try to understand; as someone who likes films, filmmaking, and even some filmmakers; as an aspiring writer who admires Cheree's craft and perspective; and as a story about people trying to understand each other and maybe dropping some of their defenses. Good work. Thank you for writing it and thank you for publishing it.

Author

gwilly

Date

2008-04-13T13:16:58-06:00

ID

82289

Comment

PS Can the pictures within this online version be made larger or linked to larger versions of the pictures so I can really see them?

Author

gwilly

Date

2008-04-13T13:18:57-06:00

ID

82290

Comment

PS Can the pictures within this online version be made larger or linked to larger versions of the pictures so I can really see them? Sounds like a good idea to me. How about clickable thumbnail-sized photos that link to a gallery of larger photos?

Author

LatashaWillis

Date

2008-04-13T15:12:21-06:00

ID

82291

Comment

Folks, we're in the middle of a big Web switcheroo right now. We'll see about doing something like that when this is done. Exciting times ahead ...

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2008-04-13T15:40:49-06:00

ID

118750

Comment

I have been away from the internet for a few weeks and am just now reading the comments on this story. I am impressed by the passion and intimacy in many of these reactions—what I perceive as further testament to the extraordinariness of the Delta, how the people, landscape and stories burrow beneath our skin. The debate over the Silver Dollar Story is terrific. To me, in this instance, the power is in the provocation, rather than in nailing down the exact time(s) and place(s) of the incident. A culture’s truth is contained in its stories, whether those stories be myths or factual accounts. That being said, a journalist’s truth is in facts, and you guys are dissecting this anecdote like strident journalists—so kudos! Floyd presented the story as a story. He never claimed to know it’s tactile origins, so it could very well have happened one farm over or a hundred years ago. Regardless, the story resonates, as does Floyd’s candidness and willingness to self-monitor and openly wrestle with his conscience. I agree with Deltagirl’s assessment of her father as a generous man—he acquired a personal risk (of disclosure) in order to contribute to a “greater good”—that of the attempted comprehension of Barefoot students, in a sense, the “masses.” I love the Mississippi Delta, but even as a Mississippian, I am an outside observer. I can’t claim to know or understand everything about the Delta, or Floyd and his family, or the residents of Clarksdale and the Barefoot students. I can only tell you my perceptions on what I experienced. Thanks for commenting on these perceptions and sharing your own, thanks for engaging in this story!

Author

cheree

Date

2008-04-19T10:45:26-06:00

ID

118752

Comment

a link to another story about Barefoot: http://tri-statedefenderonline.com/articlelive/articles/2796/1/Healing-in-a-Mississippi-cotton-field/Page1.html

Author

cheree

Date

2008-04-19T11:03:40-06:00