In 1923, four years after the massacre, the desire for violence still raged: Over ten thousand people attended a Klan rally in Helena, arriving from Tennessee and Mississippi. Meanwhile, an NAACP field secretary visiting the Arkansas Delta had recently concluded that rural districts of Arkansas are more unsafe for colored people today than they were thirty-odd years ago; perhaps more than they have ever been.
Masses of people left Arkansas. Instead of Liberia, they aimed for the North. In the 1920s and 1930s, Arkansas saw a higher proportion of its people leave than any other state in the country. One-third of its black population left. Then came a transformative machine, the mechanical cotton picker: It could pick a thousand pounds of cotton an hour; a human could pick just twenty. Suddenly, black labor—indispensable to the Delta for nearly a century, for which a bloody civil war had been fought, vagrancy laws invented, jail sentences falsely imposed, penitentiaries built, rebellions crushed, and schools closed during planting or picking season—was an anachronism, and blacks were cast off like old shoes. Those who could go north continued to do so. The exodus grew.
In Arkansas, as across the South, the people who left tended to have higher education and some connections. Those who remained, often living in the most remote and interior parts of the Delta, lacked means to leave. They could not read or write. And they were afraid: of violating their “contracts” with their employers; of violent reprisals against family and loved ones who could not leave; of places that were unknown and unfamiliar. Bad conditions could impel one to leave, but they could also sap one’s strength to go. Much has been said about the difficult and courageous journeys of those who migrated to cities like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. But few have considered those who stayed. Perhaps, then, Douglass, who was so unfeeling toward the black migrants of 1879, can be forgiven: He was expressing sympathy for those who stayed behind.
Living in the Delta today meant living under the shadow of this age-old question: Do you have the means to leave and live elsewhere? I was beginning to grasp that the Great Migration of the early twentieth century—like the Civil Rights Movement, like the emancipation of slaves—offered its own parable of salvation. In this story, black people made a choice to gain freedom by breaking out and merging into the teeming melting pot of the North. In this story, escape was heroic: You got out, you fled north, you did it for your children, you did it for your dignity, you did it to survive. In this story, what matters is not so much where you left but that you did. In this story, where you left—the Delta, the Black Belt, the whole Deep South—hardly existed. Eventually, like a bad memory, like the past itself, it would disintegrate.
So the story of the Great Migration shrouded from view those who could not leave or those who chose to stay. They were, likely, among the most destitute. The ones with the least contact with the outside world. The ones most accustomed to defeat. And yet they—perhaps by virtue of these very characteristics—endured. They grew old, they had children, and the world their children entered was bleak. There were few jobs. The schools were bad. The stories of mob violence seemed far away. The main thing, some told their children, was that you had to lift yourself up on your own.
Patrick, Miles, Tamir, and the rest of my students were descended from the people who had been left behind.
—
IN A WEEK, my parents were due to arrive for their visit, and I still hadn’t told them that I planned to stay in Helena. My friends gathered to help me strategize.
“Wait until the end of the weekend before you tell them,” one said. Another disagreed. “Tell them from the beginning. Get it over with.” “No, no,” said another, “wait until after they’ve seen everything.”
Until after they’ve seen everything. This made me hopeful. A plan was made. We would eat cornbread and ribs. I would show them my classroom. Wall by wall, picture by picture, poem by poem. I would take them to an event called “Delta Idol,” a big fundraising event for a Boys & Girls Club that my friends were starting. Kids from across Phillips County, from Elaine to Marvell to Helena, would dance, sing, read poetry, and perform. DeSoto kids would take part, too, making this event the first one in a decade at which white and black students shared a stage. I’d show them the press release my friend Danny and I had written, which the newspaper had published verbatim.
And last, everyone agreed, I needed to clean my house.
—
FOR THE WEEK before my parents’ arrival, I’d planned a field trip to Cleveland, Mississippi, for a workshop on rap and spoken word. I’d begun doing this more regularly, picking up a few students in the morning and taking them on day trips—to the Memphis Library, to Beale Street, to bookstores.
I was a bad driver, which pleased my students. They caught every mistake I made: a missed turn; a bump over a curb; a red light skipped. Once, having pulled into the wrong driveway, I backed the car into a mailbox trying to get out. “Shit,” I said.
Patrick, usually brooding, was delighted.
“Aw, Ms. Kuo cussing!”
“Ms. Kuo, you get your license from a Cracker Jack box?”
“You’re supposed to teach us, not kill us.”
“Man, this how people in China drive? I’m never going there.”
“Don’t call her Chinese! Ms. Kuo was born in America,” Patrick offered.
“But she’s still Chinese.”
They liked that in my car there were fewer rules than in my classroom. What this meant, practically speaking, was that they could bicker without fear of reprisal.
They liked, too, the opportunity for music. They fiddled with radio stations and rummaged through my CDs. They never took to my repertoire of Nick Drake, Sufjan Stevens, Iron & Wine. They squabbled over who got to choose what music.
Patrick was the one who found my 2Pac CD. He put on “Changes” and tapped his fingers along the dashboard. “Man, it’s getting crunk in here,” Tamir said from the backseat. “Tupac, he’s hard.”
Up front, Patrick was listening to the words.
“But you made it in a sleazy way, sellin’ crack to the kid,” he repeated to himself as he peered out the window.
I followed his line of sight: a boy, no more than eight years old, riding a scooter. Patrick nodded at the kid, who saw Patrick and, staring at him distrustfully, rode on. “Do you know him?”
“Naw,” he said. “Just trying to be friendly.” He began to hum.
The driving was always more fun than the destination. I never had to tell the kids to look out their windows. Patrick always had his rolled down, as if the wind blowing in was proof that we were going somewhere. A car felt powerful. A car could zoom across vast empty spaces, unceasing flat land, quickly. No place seemed impassable. And no one spoke as we crossed the Helena Bridge over the Mississippi—for most, it was the first or second time.
The quiet in the car as we went over the bridge was the quiet of silent reading.