TUTWILER
By Murphy Givens - 1979
Photos by Jimmy Dempsey & Bill Ferris
Like they say, the Delta is the Delta. Period. People who try to explain it are oblivious to all that it is, and was.
THIS
SMALL Delta town lies on the map an index finger north of Jackson and a
ring-finger's length south of Memphis. It is the railroad junction where the
Southern crosses the Yellow Dog. The town sits pretty much in the center of the
Mississippi Delta, which is as much a state of mind as a geographically
defined place. People tell you the Delta is, well, the Delta, as if to say that
is all the explanation needed, or as if the Delta is beyond description. One of
the best quotes comes from David Cohn. which is often mistakenly attributed to
William Faulkner. The Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis
and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.”
It
owes its official allegiance to Jackson, but it is north toward Memphis that
the Delta looks. It is Memphis where the Delta Blues were “hearsed and
rehearsed” giving the country a new style of music unlike anything else in the
world. And it is to Memphis, first, where the Delta poor escape, trading the
hot dusty fields for the steamy city asphalt.
But
the Blues came straight from the dusty fields and the Saturday night
juke-joints of the Delta, and it was in the small town of Tutwiler where W.C.
Handy, known as the originator of the unique ballad form, first heard this
haunting music.
In
his book The Father of the Blues, Handy says: "One night at Tutwiler, as I
nodded in the railroad station while waiting for a train that had been delayed
nine hours, life suddenly took me by the shoulders and wakened me with a start.
"A
lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I
slept. His clothes were rags: his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on
it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the
strings of the guitar... The effect was un-forgettable. His song, too, struck
me instantly. “Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog.”
THAT
IS ONE of two reasons for the visit to Tutwiler. There is a footnote to Handy's
Tutwiler experience in a Mississippi historical brochure of a decade ago, and
it shows a picture of man named Lee Kizart, called "a current Blues singer
in Tutwiler."
I
wanted to talk to Kizart about the Blues. And secondly, after living in
Mississippi for eight years, it was time to test my toes in the Delta. There is
just too much sung and written about it. One has to see for himself what all
the commotion is about.
When
visiting Jerry Clower in Yazoo City, he stopped his Cadillac at the top of a
modest hill and pointed north. That is the Delta, and this is the last hill
for...awhile." It is said that no two hills are exactly alike, but
every-where on earth plains are one and the same. Texas and Oklahoma are no
different from the Pampas in South America. Flat land is flat land. But that is
not true of the Delta. It has that sameness, true, but it also has an infinite
variety if one looks close enough.
The
Delta is a great field of green plants — cotton and soybean — with dirt roads
straight as plumb lines running at perpendicular angles off Highway 49, through
the fields.
The
monotony of all that flatness is broken by deserted brown-shingled tenant
houses, sitting in the middle of the fields. They once housed share-croppers
who have long since fled to the cities. It has been many years now that the
weary backs gave way to the bright new machines — startling green cotton
pickers that can swallow eight rows of cotton at a time, moving down the rows
faster than 50 field hands.
Looking
at the ungothic shacks, I remembered some-thing in a story about a letter found
in an old abandoned home, something written from one sister to another that
said, "We are not like to ever see each other again.”
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AS
STRANGE AS it seems, driving across the lower reaches of the Delta was like
coming home, and I had never been in the Delta before.
The
kinship. I guess, is the flat cotton lands north and somewhat west of Memphis,
where I was raised in the "Bootheel" of southern Missouri. Even after
20 years absence, cotton, for me, holds the memory of generations.
There
is the still strong remembrance of getting "the worst beating ever"
for slipping away from the cotton field, trying to escape the hot, tiring work
— was it hoeing, or chopping, or picking cotton? We youngsters used to pray
daily that it would rain so we could escape the fields. The Delta no doubt
holds the same memories of people caught up in the losing struggle of
"making ends meet" in times that Uncle Dave Macon sung about: "
'Leven cent cotton and forty cent meat."
One
of the Delta's most famous writers, the late Will Percy of Greenville, the
uncle and mentor of Walker Percy, wrote in the book Lanterns on the Levee that
he could "forgive" the poor whites, as the Lord forgave those who
crucified him, but to admire them or love them or trust them, never. You see,
he came from the planter aristocracy and the poor whites, and probably the poor
blacks too, felt the same about his class.
THE
DELTA — land as fertile, it is said, as the valley of the Nile — is 200 miles
at its greatest length and 85 miles at its greatest width. It is a leaf-shaped
plain, bordered on the west by the Mississippi. and on the east by rugged hills
known as the Bluff Hills. It is criss-crossed by bayous, which overflow in the
spring and bring to the Delta its wealth of topsoil that makes the land among
the most productive in the world.
The
crops are tall now, and driving up 49 you can see crop dusters flying low over
the fields, releasing white misty blankets of chemicals, then pulling up
steeply be-fore the power lines by the highway. They make a tight bank, drop, and
release the spray again. There is an acrid taste in the air.
In
the distance, the trees — willow and cypress and lots of gum — seem always to
stand at the edge of the horizon, marking the line between the flat earth and
the sky always just beyond the wide greenish brown fields. From Yazoo City. you
pass through small and larger towns, like Midnight, Silver City, Belzoni,
Inverness, Sun-flower, Doddsville, Ruleville, Drew, and Parchman.
The
town of Midnight, it is said, was founded when a party of men stopped and
camped in the swamp, and started playing poker. One of the men laid claim to
the land where they were camped, and then later put it up as a bet. He lost.
The winner, looking at his watch, said, "Well, boys, it's midnight, and
that's what I'm going to call my town."
With
that hot Mississippi sun affecting you like a sleeping pill, the Delta rolls
by, and you notice the signs of passing interest, like Kobweb Antiques in
Paulette, and the Molasses Bucket Cafe, somewhere along 49. There was a sign
that said, "This is a Vigor Profile Field."
And
then there's Parchman, the squat buildings strung out west of northbound 49,
almost hid from view behind a low embankment by the highway. It stirs thoughts
of hogfat guards in sweat-stained khakis, of sniffing blood-hounds, of
desperate prisoners "with rabbit in their blood" trying to run with no
place to run to. And indeed, the radio reported even as I drove by that there
had been an escape that day.
Back
in the 30s, Parchman was viewed this way in the Mississippi edition of the old
Federal Writers' Project:
“The
'fifth Sunday' of months that have more than four Sabbath days is visitors'
day, and it is then that Parchman is best seen. A train called the 'Midnight
Special' brings the visitors to the farm, arriving about dawn and leaving at
dusk. The...prisoners have made up ballads about the train, which they sing and
chant while they work, waiting for the fifth Sunday.
“Heah
comes yo woman, a pardon in her ban' Gonna say to the boss, I wants my man...
Let the Midnight Special shine its light on me.”
Tutwiler is the
hometown the Delta town
 |
| © Bill Ferris |
There
are a lot of abandoned buildings, with jagged windows and sagging roofs, in
downtown Tutwiler, including the movie theater, named for the surrounding
little towns. The name was taken from Tutwiler, Rome, Vance and Sumner. It was
called Tutrovansurn.
A
woman's club is trying to restore the old theater. but, as one woman said,
"the old people are too tired and the young people are too busy being
young."
Other
abandoned buildings were said to be owned by Mayor Vince Spinoza, whose father
came to Tutwiler decades ago as a poor Italian immigrant shoemaker.
The
mayor's daughter, who laughed when asked if she is the "Spinoza of Main Street,"
is a stoic philosopher who doesn't mind that she has a college degree and yet
pumps gas on Tutwiler's main drag for a living. She runs the service station,
which is owned by her father, because it allows her to work and at the same
time care for her husband. He was both mentally and physically hurt in a car
accident.
As
she talked, she reached over and with light fingers brushed a lock of hair on
his forehead. and smiled.
TUTWILER'S
ONE black alderman, Pete Burnside, runs a welding shop that is located.
according to a resident's directions, "past the liquor store, the colored
cafe, and the old used car lot, which is the mayor's mess."
Burnside's
daughter, back from college, has started a newspaper in town, named the
Tutwiler Whirlwind, and printed on a mimeograph machine. She charges 50 cents a
copy and, said Burnside, "stirred up more interest than she ever meant to.
In fact, it'll take her about 10 years to live down all that interest she
stirred up."
What
she did was to reveal just who was dating who, and who was seen with who, on a
Saturday night in Tutwiler. In the case of one married man. it led to domestic
difficulties. The errant husband's wife threatened to pull out his girlfriend's
hair, for starts.
The
town's librarian, Mrs. Charles McElroy — who is a unique librarian in the sense
that she will offer you fresh-brewed coffee and send you on your way with a
basket of tomatos picked from her own garden — said most of the youngsters move
away to get jobs and never move back. "But now Tiffany McCoy and his wife
Linda have just come back home and opened up an antique store. He has a girl's
name, but nobody kids him about it. He's a big, huge guy." He runs
Tiffany's of Tutwiler.
Mrs.
McElroy said Tutwiler "is mainly a town of old people."
The
state of the crops, and the weather, is Tutwiler's Dow Jones Index, as it is
for the Delta at large. The town is liveliest on Saturdays, when people from
the farms come in to trade and stock up for the week. an old custom that still
exists. When the weather is bad, sales fall off in Tutwiler.
There
are no big celebrations anymore like there once was, said Mrs. McElroy,
"but once a month at the Methodist Church (the First United) we have a
family night and everybody brings a dish. One lady specializes in fried chicken,
and one brings her cakes and Dr. Clay always brings sausage and biscuits."
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| © Bill Ferris |
There
were several black men resting in the shade, and one younger man who looked at
the picture and tried to put one over on the city visitor. He marveled at it,
saying "How you do that? How you get old Lee's picture, exactly the way he
looked, natural, in that book? Ain't it sometin' else again?" he said,
"old Lee Kizart's image, just as spiteful as you please. right there on
that paper.”
An
older man sitting in his car, parked close by the benches, said, "Man, you
know what that is. It's a picture. It's a picture in a book. You quit acting
the fool. Your black mouth gone get you in real deep-down trouble one of these
days."
The
young man laughed.
"Lee
Kizart," said the man in the car, "is dead. I went to his funeral. It
was about, oh, it was ten years ago. Yeah, it was in 1968, or maybe it was
1969. But he is buried. Dead and gone. I went to the funeral myself."
Kizart
was the last, the men said, to actively play and sing the blues in Tutwiler
"Everybody else is too busy trying to
make a living," said one man in his twenties, who confided that next month
he intends to move away, "maybe Memphis, or maybe all the way up to St.
Louis. All you can make around here is the minimum wage, over at the
picture-frame factory." Everybody in town, he went on, works at the
picture-frame factory, `cepting for this old man here, and he work down at the
compress."
TUTWILER
HAS two locally famous citizens, one a white man, Dr. T.F. Clay, and the other
a black man, Tom Dumas. There was a newspaper article about Dr. Clay in the
Clarksdale paper and Dumas was "written up" by a reporter from
Memphis. Dr. Clay's parents came to Tutwiler, he tells in a printed version, in
May, 1831 after a four-day buggy ride from Aberdeen.
"Tutwiler
then was nothing but virgin timber with lots of red gum trees." He was
born in 1885, in a big "dog-trot" house facing Hopson Bayou. He said
that W.C. Handy played at all-night dances in Tutwiler, "and the Blues was
born in the waiting room of the Tutwiler depot."
But
Handy wasn't playing the Blues then. It was later, after he left the Delta for
Memphis, that he wrote the St. Louis Blues.
"In
those days every time a new store opened they would have a dance, and Handy
played at many of them."
Handy
in his book The Father of the Blues.
said "I came to know by heart every foot of the Delta, from Clarksdale to
Lambert on the Dog and Yazoo City rail-roads. I could call every flat stop,
water tower and pig path on the Peavine with my eyes closed."
And
his song runs:
I know the Yellow Dog district like a book, Indeed I know the route that Rider tookEv'ry crosstie, bayou, burg an' bog Way down where the Southern cross' the Dog.
There
is no one left in Tutwiler today who makes his living singing the Blues. In
fact, it is said there is only one man in town who can be called a Blues or
folk musician, who is now 96 years old and only plays for very special reasons,
because, he says, his fingers are too soft. His name is Tom Dumas and he is one
of Tutwiler's best known citizens.
Dumas
is so old that the whites of his eyes have a blue tinge around the edges. He
tells about his daddy, who was born a slave. And he tells about how he picked
up the fiddle one day and started to play. ". .. Done the same thing with
the guitar and the jew's harp ... Tried to blow the French harp for years but
never could make a tune come out of it."
Dumas
recently sold his fiddle, which he was told once belonged to Andrew Jackson and
was given to Dumas' daddy. The label was chewed out by mice, who resided in the
fiddle when it was kept under his bed, and nobody today knows for sure whether
it did, indeed, belong To Andrew Jackson. Dumas sold it to a Memphis couple who
paid him "with ten $20 bills, each bearing the picture of Andrew
Jackson," a reporter wrote. "Somehow that seems quite
appropriate."
Later,
Tom had second thoughts about selling the fiddle for $200, figuring he let it
go too cheap, and "might could've got as much as $1,500 for it."
Now
that the fiddle is gone. he has a banjo he keeps in a canvas sack. He got it
out for the photographer and, though protesting that his fingers don't work
right any-more, he strummed and sang:
"Had a peach pie and a huckleberry puddin'
Give it all away to see Sally Goodin.
And
there was also:
"When I was a pretty little boy
Sixteen inches highI would court the little gals
And make the old `uns cry
I would not marry a yaller gal
And I'll tell you the reason why.Her neck is so long and strainy
I'm afraid she'll never die.
Dig the sweet potatoes and roast them in the sand.
If I can't eat 'em all, save 'em for Julie Ann.
Get along home, CindyI wished I was an apple, hanging on a tree
Every time Cindy passed, she'd take a bite of me.
Possum up the `simmon tree,
The raccoon on the ground.
Raccon told the possum.
`Shake them `simmons down.'
It's
been many years now. Tom Dumas reckons, since people enjoyed hearing the old
songs, the folk tunes and the Blues.
A
few years back, he went into the joints.
"Well,
I'd drink a little whiskey, then I'd go tune up my fiddle and commence playing
a little. They'd have the Seeburgs (jukeboxes) in there and they'd turn them on
just as loud as they could — dadda-dump, dadda-dump, dadda-dump — and I'd just
pick up my fiddle and go home."
Things
change. The Delta and its famous sons — the great people of the soil who are
now mostly dead or gone away to the cities, replaced by the "Seeburg"
generation who is waiting to move away — are "not like to ever see each
other again."
Leaving
Tutwiler, I heard a screen door slam in the distance, a child crying, and
watched a yard dog worrying his fleas in a timeless pantomime...and suddenly I
realized it was very hot, and there was a taste of dust in my mouth.
Like
they say, the Delta is the Delta. Period. People who try to explain it are
oblivious to all that it is, and was.
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