Delta reeling from decades of poverty, racism - and hurricane

The view is the same across the Southern Delta: row houses with peeling paint, sagging facades and tired wooden boards clustered between the cotton fields.

And that was before Hurricane Katrina damaged many of the towns and brought thousands of unemployed, homeless new residents.

Stanley Bates lives in Midnight in a skinny maroon house a few hundred feet from the church and the gin. For years, he has worked the fields during cotton season, which has dwindled from four months to three weeks.

The work is hard, and it pays only $5.15 an hour, but it’s the only payday for the 300 or so people here. And when the season’s over, Bates says, "We right back where we started."

Decades before Katrina struck the Gulf, the storm that hit the Mississippi-Louisiana border was named Poverty. It left Midnight and neighbouring towns slumped along the two-lane highways like grandmothers in rocking chairs, watching life pass them by.

Midnight is a sorry town, a throwaway, Bates says, looking with cloudy eyes at his cramped, worn hands.

"We were suffering before that damn hurricane came," he said.

New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Alabama were Katrina’s most obvious casualties, but the predominantly black, perennially poor Louisiana and Mississippi Delta is also reeling - its legacy of poverty and racism magnified by the storm.

For years they have been waiting. Waiting for better jobs. For decent housing. For good schools.

What they got instead is a flood of jobless and homeless hurricane refugees from the coast - people seeking help from towns that can barely help themselves.

Overnight, populations grew by the hundreds in Delta towns that were the end of the road for evacuees who went as far as they could on one tank of gas.

"Before we got any evacuees, we were already struggling," said Lake Providence Mayor Isaac Fields, Jr., who estimated his Northern Louisiana town of 5,000 swelled by 1,000 in the days leading up to and immediately following Katrina.

Fields had no idea so many would be coming. After all, Lake Providence is 280 miles from New Orleans, and there’s not much waiting when you get there.

"We want anybody who wants to stay to stay," Fields says. "But we don’t have the jobs to offer them."

The town has the highest unemployment rate in the state, he said. Those lucky enough to have jobs work for the cotton industry or the government.

But finding work might be a snap compared to finding a place to live. With up to 200 people on the affordable housing waiting list before the hurricane, those who blew in after the storm have little hope of finding a home in the city any time soon.

Like the rest of the Delta, it’s not the best place for an evacuee to make a fresh start - unless you’re a much-needed teacher, retiree or someone with entrepreneurial pluck.

Tallulah, La, is poor but proud, with well-kept yards abutting trailers and shotgun houses. Walnut Bayou and warm brick facades are welcoming. The town motto is painted on the water tower: "Tallulah: A City on the Move."

"We have hopes and dreams like everybody else," says Police Chief Earl Pinkney, who grew up here. "That’s what hurts, that the potential here is so great,"

Here, folks who have little themselves have given evacuees clean clothes, a bed and a hot meal, prayers, money and toiletries. Friends, relatives, churches and community organizations were often several steps ahead of the federal government and charity agencies.

"We’re down home. We take people in," said Mississippi Valley State University English professor Ron Hudson, a native of Itta Bena.

The plantation legacy created a village mentality that makes those who have the least among the most generous. Here, they say, you give what you have to those who need it more.

Workers never did make much when cotton was king, but they could usually find work. But economic changes and technical advances in the farming industry since the Great Depression of the 1930s destroyed that life, and nothing has arrived to replace it.

"As agriculture declined and as machines took over, the Delta became increasingly poor," Jackson State University economics professor McKinley Alexander said. "The people who remained were either elderly or least prepared to enter the work force."

White landowners abandoned the fields - and masses of black laborers. Some blacks headed North for manufacturing jobs.

According to 2000 US Census figures compiled by the Mississippi Urban Research Center at Jackson State University, at least a third of the nearly 454,000 people living in the Delta’s 18 counties are below poverty level. In some counties it’s 40 percent. The national average is about 12 percent.

Most of the homes here are at least 25 or 30 years old, and worth an average of $56,000 - less than half the national average home value. Thirteen of the counties are more than 50 percent black. Nationally, blacks average household income is $29,423, compared to $44,867 for whites.

Many who fled here to escape Katrina are new to the Delta, but others are people who grew up here and moved away.

"The problem is, what’s going to happen if these people choose to settle in and remain there?" Alexander said. Money from FEMA or the Red Cross could create a temporary boom in towns where evacuees have landed, he said, but soon that will run out.

Fields, who was born and raised in Lake Providence, does not like talking about the poverty there. Since becoming mayor three years ago, he has adopted the motto "New Vision, New Voices," and dreams of the day the empty landscape might be filled with industry.

But for now, "it’s just like a sore," Fields said. "Poverty means you have people suffering, not being able to take care of themselves."

Brian Cain tried to get to Mississippi but only made it to the state line. For days, he slept on the levee in historic town of St. Joseph, La., until he walked past Wenda Fry’s front yard three weeks ago.

He offered to mow her lawn, noticed she had a vacant trailer around back and asked if he could move in. She agreed.

Before long, Mayor Ed Brown noticed the slim, scrappy 46-year-old working in Fry’s yard and offered him a job on the spot.

"I been working ever since," Cain says. "I do anything."

Brown is glad Cain is here. Now that Katrina has exposed the Delta’s plight, perhaps this region, as well as the storm-ravaged Gulf, can begin anew.

And for that, the little town of St. Joseph, population 1,600, will need all the hardworking people it can find.

Brown says he’ll take Cain and whoever else wants to come.

"I want more than I can handle," Brown says. "This is my opportunity to turn this place around."