By J. Wes Yoder | June/July 2009 | 

Shack Up Here

In the heart of the Mississippi Delta, a collection of sharecropper homes lures international blues travelers  

Blues Hotel: In the foreground, the Full Love shack, followed by the Robert Clay and the Pine Top. Photo by Peter Frank Edwards

At the shack up inn off highway 61 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, there are no signs commemorating the lives begun or lost in any of these nine sharecropper homes. There is just the wood and the tin and the low porch ceilings, the cypress and the rust and the wet Delta wind forcing itself indoors through so many cracks, as if it were trying to escape from itself.

These were the homes of people who knew that more children meant more hands in the field. Beneath them was topsoil a hundred feet deep, some of the richest naturally irrigated land on the planet. It was theirs for share, meaning if they called forth from the land an acceptable amount of “white gold,” they could sleep at their place of employment. They were living in the jewel of modern agriculture, while among their ranks infant mortality was at third-world levels. Children learned math by adding their family name to a commissary store credit ledger for another sack of meal. They learned to read tacking newspapers on the wall for insulation. And yet the land nurtured a culture in spite of the landowners. Now and then a rich man with a radio would realize worker so-and-so’s boy was now Mr. John Lee Hooker or Ike Turner or Sam Cooke.

That change that was gonna come, the one Cooke sang about, has never quite made it to the Delta. Unless you count the mechanization of farming, which allowed one man and one tractor to do what thirty families had done before. The families abandoned the shacks and headed up to Memphis, or Detroit.

Ten years ago a group of friends decided to buy two decrepit shacks for someplace to get together, tell stories, and drink. It was preservation of sorts—they had grown up in this cotton country when all the way to Memphis the road was lined with these vernacular homes, red, green, and unpainted, and pretty in a way. Now there wasn’t a mule anywhere, and almost all of the shacks had been pulled down by vines or burned.