Mississippi Delta

This crumbling Delta town, set amid cotton fields, abandoned railroad tracks and cypress-studded bayous, is a hard place. So hard that the plaintive sound of a local musician drawing a knife blade across the strings of his guitar gave birth to the blues here a century ago. So hard that a Roman Catholic nun named Anne Brooks has struggled for the last 27 years to keep a medical clinic open for the poor. "It's a pretty hand-to-mouth existence," said Brooks, 71, a physician with a wry sensibility and a profane streak.

A person of interest is being held in the death of an openly gay candidate running for mayor of Clarksdale, Miss., officials said on Thursday. The person being held has not been charged, Will Rooker, a spokesman for the Coahoma County sheriff's office, told the Los Angeles Times by telephone. “We have an ongoing investigation into the death,” he said. The sheriff's office has not classified the death as a homicide, Rooker said. “It's not clear at this time what has happened,” he said.

Willie Mae Watson lives with her six children and 11 grandchildren in a four-room shanty without plumbing or even an outhouse. It is little more than plywood walls and a torn tin roof. Not far away, 22-year-old Flora Knight is struggling to earn a high school diploma while rearing her six children--ages 7, 6, 5, 3, 2 and 4 months. "They don't have too good a chance," she said of the youngsters. "I don't think they'll have a job waiting here for them, even if they go to school and finish."

Red Paden was pouring Bulleit bourbon into little plastic cups, one for him, one for his buddy Antonio Coburn. It was just the two of them inside Red's Blues Club, arguably the last of the real Mississippi Delta juke joints, set downtown between a weedy graveyard and the lush eastern bank of the Sunflower River. They were mourning Big Jack Johnson, Red's best friend, star attraction ? and, arguably, the last of the great Delta bluesmen. The pair sat at a table next to the worn carpet, patterned like a loud tie, which serves as a kind of stage, and upon which Big Jack had stomped out countless rhythms.

Hamza Brimah, a doctor credited with dramatically improving health care for HIV patients in the Mississippi Delta, has died. He was believed to be 40. Brimah, a Nigerian who received training in AIDS care in London and New York, was found dead of a gunshot wound to his head Monday at his home in Greenwood, Miss., authorities said. Sheriff's deputies found a note from Brimah specifying his burial wishes. The coroner ruled the death a suicide.

Signs with skulls and crossbones are posted now in Devil's Swamp, but nothing warned Barbara Dixon's husband of the dangers when he hunted and fished there in 1986, bringing home the bounty of this "Sportsman's Paradise." Barbara Dixon loved the crawfish, the catfish and the rabbits, and ate them all while pregnant. At age 3 weeks, her daughter began having seizures. Before her first birthday, tiny Emily was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a rare cancer on her spinal cord.

The lower Mississippi River region is so poor that one section is called "America's Ethiopia," and a federal commission is seeking new ways to help its dying towns and end generations of dependence on welfare. There are counties with more than one-quarter of the work force idled, a lack of capital to attract new jobs and waste of human resources, such as teen-age mothers with sickly babies and adults who cannot read or write.

As the morning mist lifts, groups of mostly older men and women, faces shielded from the sun by cone-shaped straw hats, make their way to a large, low-lying field to cultivate garden plots. It's a ritual startlingly reminiscent of scenes shown on television during the Vietnam War. But this is the Mississippi Delta, not the Mekong. "I have seen this same thing in Vietnam, many times," said Tu Pineda, an interpreter for Associated Catholic Charities of New Orleans.

She went from prostitute to professor to playwright. Endesha Ida Mae Holland, whose autobiographical play, "From the Mississippi Delta" opens at the Old Globe's Cassius Carter Centre Stage today, is proof that some spirits cannot be broken. To look at this large, lovely woman with her warm, penetrating eyes is to be amazed not just by what she has survived, but by the way she has survived rape, prostitution and poverty as well as her mother's murder. She is without bitterness or rancor.

On a spring afternoon seven years ago, a man arrived at Dr. Anne Brooks' clinic near the Tutwiler, Miss., post office with a sore back. He'd been chopping cotton in a nearby field--moving methodically up and down the rows, digging weeds with a hoe. Like most of Tallahatchie County's residents, he was black. As a matter of principle, Brooks, a Catholic nun who trained as an osteopath, likes to suggest ways for patients to help themselves.

Pinetop Perkins, a regal piano player who was one of the last of the original Mississippi Delta blues musicians, died Monday of cardiac arrest at his home in Austin, Texas. He was 97. "He was absolutely the premier blues piano player," said Bruce Iglauer, founder of Chicago's Alligator Records, an independent blues label. "His career spanned literally over 80 years. He was the symbol of a whole generation of musicians. " Just last month Perkins' easygoing keyboard virtuosity won him a Grammy Award for best traditional blues album, for "Joined at the Hip: Pinetop Perkins & Willie 'Big Eyes' Smith.

This crumbling Delta town, set amid cotton fields, abandoned railroad tracks and cypress-studded bayous, is a hard place. So hard that the plaintive sound of a local musician drawing a knife blade across the strings of his guitar gave birth to the blues here a century ago. So hard that a Roman Catholic nun named Anne Brooks has struggled for the last 27 years to keep a medical clinic open for the poor. "It's a pretty hand-to-mouth existence," said Brooks, 71, a physician with a wry sensibility and a profane streak.

Tornadoes ripped through four states in the South, leaving broken crosses in front of a flattened church, splintering houses and overturning vehicles as they killed 10 people, including two children. One of the hardest hit areas was Mississippi's Yazoo County, where Gov. Haley Barbour grew up. He described "utter obliteration" among the picturesque hills rising abruptly from the flat Mississippi Delta. More than 15 other counties in Mississippi also had damage. The swath of debris forced rescuers to pick up some of the injured on all-terrain vehicles the west-central part of the state.

Dr. Aaron Shirley has devoted his career to serving the rural poor in the Mississippi Delta, but now the 77-year-old pediatrician believes the key to reducing the nation's highest infant mortality rates lies in a surprising place: the Islamic Republic of Iran. Never mind that America and Iran broke diplomatic relations after militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, or that the White House is seeking new United Nations sanctions to punish the regime for its nuclear development program.

Fans of playwright Tennessee Williams will be shouting for Stella this weekend in Clarksdale, Miss. Williams drew some of his most powerful images from his boyhood hometown in the Mississippi Delta, where an annual festival now celebrates the city's role in Williams' award-winning stories. The name Stella in "A Streetcar Named Desire" belonged to a friend of Williams' mother in Clarksdale. Brick, the alcoholic athlete played by Paul Newman in the 1958 film "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," was the name of a local boy who bullied Williams while he was a student at Oakhurst Elementary.

U.S. scientists in the Gulf of Mexico unexpectedly netted a 19.5-foot giant squid off the coast of Louisiana, the Interior Department said Monday, showing how little is known about life in the deep waters of the Gulf. Not since 1954, when a dead giant squid was found floating off the Mississippi Delta, has the rare species been spotted in the Gulf of Mexico. The squid, weighing 103 pounds, was caught July 30 in a trawl net more than 1,500 feet underwater. It did not survive the rapid rise to the surface and was preserved and sent to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

The Mississippi Delta changes the same way it was formed by the muddy river: particle by particle. A year after a federal commission's "plan of action" envisaged a rebirth of this poverty-crippled region, no transformation has taken place, but particles of change can be isolated--things as seemingly inconsequential as Cora Stamps' prized red blouse.

Three inmates shot and killed a sheriff's deputy Thursday and escaped into the Mississippi Delta, but authorities recaptured the fugitives less than three hours later. The inmates apparently overpowered and shot Rankin County Deputy T.O. Biddle, who was transporting them from Brandon to the state penitentiary in Parchman.

The swampland here still tries to reclaim its past, swallowing up concrete foundations reinforced with steel beams and spitting out its buried dead. The past haunted Dyess Colony's most famous resident, Johnny Cash, his entire life. His older brother was killed here when a workshop blade cut through his body. This is where the Big Muddy came in 5 feet high and rising, where a young Cash let cotton picked off the vine dissolve in his mouth. That past remains visible in Dyess, tucked into the corner of northeast Arkansas among dirt roads carved out of the muddy fields by Depression-era workers.