Soon after Patrick won his award, a scruffy New York filmmaker, Richard Wormser, with wrinkled slacks and graying hair, descended on Helena. He had been told by several people that if he wanted to talk to the “at-risk” kids in Helena, he should come to Stars. Richard had recently done a film about Elaine, Arkansas. Just fifteen miles inland, near the center of Phillips County, Elaine was “the country” to Helena residents. It was in Elaine that Richard Wright’s uncle had been killed by whites for owning a thriving liquor business that they coveted. The night he was shot, his family fled to Helena, loading their clothes and dishes into a farmer’s wagon and rolling away in the dark. There was no funeral, no farewell, no burial. This was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled, Wright wrote. Why had we not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence.
Wormser’s film, I gathered, told the story of the “Elaine riots,” as they were called around here. That was a misnomer. The “riots” had been a straight massacre of black people.
It began at a church: Black sharecroppers had gathered to discuss their plans to sue planters for failing to pay them. Whites stormed into the church, firing inside. When one white person got shot, the town erupted. Within days, hundreds of whites poured in from neighboring counties, hunting down any black man, woman, or child—in the open streets, in the cotton fields, anybody in plain sight. Federal troops came, too, armed with machine guns. According to some historians, they helped shoot down black people. Five whites died; hundreds of black people died. The police arrested only black people, depositing them in Helena’s county jail. Because no whites were charged, no murders of black people were recognized.
In speaking, Richard and I quickly realized what we had in common: We both wanted to know what, after all that brutal history, people in the Delta went through today. Standing outside my classroom, we talked as a sea of students let out of fourth period moved from the classrooms to the cafeteria.
“Who’s that?” he asked, pointing at a slowly ambling figure with stooped shoulders.
“That’s Patrick,” I said. I watched Richard watch Patrick. It wasn’t just me, I realized: There was something distinct about Patrick that made you want to help him.
“What’d he do to get dumped here?” Richard asked, instantly understanding the gist of our school.
“Bad attendance,” I said. “A lot of students are sent here for that. But then we don’t help them. So then they start missing school again.”
Richard wanted to film Patrick, and within days he and two others in his film crew showed up to get some footage of him at his house. Patrick seemed flattered by the attention. Did they want to see his go-cart? We followed him to the backyard. He’d fixed the sprocket himself, he said, the chain and everything, and the only thing left was the brakes. He bent down, tightening a bolt. Then he showed them how the wheels moved: They spun flawlessly.
He looked up and beamed. It had taken Patrick just a few seconds to captivate the film crew.
“You think you want to be a mechanic?” asked the camerawoman.
“Yes, ma’am,” Patrick said.
Richard got the camera going and asked Patrick what he thought of Stars.
Patrick said a lot of nice things about me. He said I’d motivated him to come to school. He said I called or went to his house when he was absent. “None of that happened at Miller. That’s why I flunked,” he said. “That’s why I don’t think I’d never flunk here at Stars, because Ms. Kuo, she care so much.”
It made me happy to hear about myself in this way. One of the crew members turned to look at me, and I detected her admiration. Back at the school, Richard pivoted the camera toward me. I heard myself say, with the guileless passion of a zealot, “The most fundamental thing is just to make sure these kids feel cared for. And it’s that simple.”
—
ONE WEEKEND AFTERNOON in May, I took a walk through my neighborhood, trying to find the Maple Hill Cemetery, better known as the “Confederate Cemetery.” I walked past what had once been a mansion: pillars, square windows, steps leading up to the porch like a wide white ladder. A woman with Down syndrome was sitting at the top of the steps, petting a cat. She was one of the few white people left in the neighborhood.
I kept walking. A stray dog poked his head into a discarded bag of chips, and I watched the dog as two kids watched me. I waited for them to yell, “Ching chong.” Nothing—I was relieved. Soon the procession of poplars and oaks ceased, so that there was no shade from the hot sun. I began to sweat in the terrible heat. I took off a thin hoodie, revealing a tank top. My neck was dripping. The Victorian homes had disappeared and been replaced by one-story shacks so uncomfortably close to the street they revealed their interiors to passersby. Instead of glass in the windows, plastic wrap was duct-taped to the frames. Several of these buildings were churches. One marquee said: JESUS IS YOUR TICKET TO HAVEN. Another advertised: MIRACLES HERE.
More stray dogs appeared. I recognized a street name where one of my students lived and became worried that he would see me in a tank top. I put my hoodie back on. People sat outside their houses, watching me, fanning themselves. A toddler played with a dirty plastic cup.
I stopped. There, in the distance, was the cemetery, its green, sunlit hills of unseemly majesty. Large strong stones were shaded by thick trees. The entrance had an arched metal gate. It was, by far, the nicest public space I’d seen anywhere in Helena.
I ascended one hill, then another, until finally I reached a plateau of paved stone under a dense shelter of cedars. At the center stood a tall monument. I strained my neck to see the top: a sculpture of a soldier, mustached and holding a rifle. At the top was engraved, SHILOH. And then, CHICKAMAUGA. Above thirteen stars, it said, OUR CONFEDERATE DEAD.
Then, in etched capitals: THIS MONUMENT REPRESENTS AND EMBODIES HERO-WORSHIP AT THE SHRINE OF PATRIOTISM AND SACRIFICE, DEVOTION TO THE MEMORY OF THE LOST CAUSE, AND HONOR TO THE SOLDIERS KNOWN AND UNKNOWN, WHO REST IN ITS SHADOW.
“Hero-worship,” “the lost cause”—where the hell was I? Or when? In 2006, in a majority black area, where cotton production and slaveholding had once skyrocketed in tandem, one of the city’s rare public spaces still memorialized the Confederate cause.
The Union army marched through Arkansas in 1862 and took Helena, choking off supplies to Vicksburg, the site of a bloody battle in 1863. Union soldiers, twenty thousand of them, manned the defense of Helena; they evicted people, took control of farms, and freed slaves. Not just in the Delta but across the South, slaves pinned their freedom on making it to Helena. The volume of emigrants was staggering. Thousands of people poured into Helena, “wandering around the camp thick as blackberries,” as one Wisconsin soldier observed.
The Confederate Congress passed a proclamation that any black soldier who fought for the Union would be executed. They fought anyway. The first black regiments in Arkansas were formed in Helena. By the end of the war, more than five thousand black volunteers in Arkansas would serve—85 percent of these were from the Delta.
Where were the memorials to the black soldiers and refugees? How much had gone wrong in this long century that so few traces of them could be found? The black cemetery in town, called the Magnolia Cemetery, was a sorry sight, unkempt, its tombstones hidden in knee-high weeds. The neglect and erasure of these stories belong to the long, unfulfilled history of black emancipation in the Delta.