The Mississippi Delta Trip - Part II

Go back to Part I

Day 4 (Monday - New Orleans to Natchez):

Monday morning I wolfed down a quick breakfast so that I could be on the bus in time for our 8 AM departure for Whitney Plantation. In New Orleans we had been getting around by summoning fleets of Ubers; Monday marked the beginning of the chartered bus part of our tour.

Whitney is an old sugar plantation which, admirably, is dedicated to educating the public about the history and legacy of slavery in the south. As bad as it was working cotton, apparently sugar was worse; the life expectancy of slaves was only a few years. That's because while cotton is processed elsewhere once picked, sugar is processed on site, so in addition to field work hacking tough sugar cane, slaves manned a 24 hour processing plant in which the sugar was extracted from the cane and then concentrated down into molasses. That meant long hours stirring huge boiling cauldrons. Terrible, hot,  dangerous work on top of all the other horrors of slavery. Our guide, a very passionate woman who was happy to be leading a group "of her generation", did point out that Louisiana  was unique in that slaves were allowed to earn money in their (minimal) spare time, and if they saved up could buy their freedom. Even though she was eager to present an unvarnished version of plantation life, even she couldn't resist a little whitewashing, as we learned later that the ability of slaves to buy their freedom was pretty much stamped out in practical terms if not in statute.

Sugar kettles 

On the plantation tour

Children's Memorial at the Plantation

The plantation house. Interestingly, it was only one room deep - for ventilation in the sticky climate

Slave quarters

After the sobering plantation tour we got back on the bus, headed to Natchez. I wish I had kept my phone out to take pictures of some of the businesses we passed, like "Praise the Lard" pork shop. We ate lunch on the bus. The food, from Mulberry Market in Baton Rouge, was surprisingly good. Who would have expected decent bagels and lox in Baton Rouge, Louisiana?!

Yes, bagels and lox in the Mississippi Delta!

In Natchez we visited Temple B'nai Israel. There's no active congregation there anymore, but the building is preserved by the city and the Institute for Southern Jewish Life. Clearly it was built by a well-heeled congregation (cotton trading money), and apparently it was always oversized - sized aspirationally for a large Jewish community which never came to pass. Instead, after peaking in the 1950's, the Jewish community slowly dribbled away - the next generation moved away to larger cities, and the community and its historic businesses pretty much died out. As one of our guides said, "the Jewish history in the South is of fathers building businesses for sons who didn't want them." Hearing that as a son who didn't go into a family business which had been built over two generations, that quip smarted! Anyway, I imagine there are lots of buildings like this across the South and small-town America in general. This one is being preserved - but not all have such a lucky fate. 

B'nai Israel had a lovely pipe organ - not atypical in "classical" Reform Judaism, which modeled aspects of its religious practice after Christian church services (my childhood synagogue had an organ, as, at the time I joined, did the synagogue I belong to in Virginia). As I may have mentioned in Part I, the Jews of the South were largely German/Alsatian immigrants, less traditionally religiously observant than the Eastern European Jews who came later, and more likely to affiliate with the more assimilated Reform variant of Judaism, hence the organ and choir. Another quip: "there were Jews in the South, but not necessarily Judaism." Unfortunately, no one was around to power the organ up, so I just posed with it for pictures.

Wish I could have played this baby!

Temple B'nai Israel: Exterior

That organ again

B'nai Israel: Interior

We also visited the historic Jewish cemetery, which includes the grave of seven year old Rosalie Beekman, the only Natchez resident to die in the Union attack on the town in 1862.

We stayed overnight in downtown Natchez, which is a small city witht a lovely setting alongside the river. We went out for a walk to see what we could find in terms of food. A lot of the group chose a tamales restaurant, and others chose BBQ. That left just three of us who didn't want a meat-heavy dinner: Rabbi Stein (a vegetarian), a fellow congregant Rebecca, and I. The three of us ate at a surprisingly upscale Italian restaurant, where I had a very nice salad and flatbread pizza. Overnight was at the Hampton Inn - which was a step up from the Hampton Inn I stayed at in Vicksburg long ago in that there wasn't an armed guard in the lobby.

I will add that my fellow traveler Rebecca is originally from Texas and so Southern Jewry wasn't as much of a surprise to her as it was to some of the rest of us. Also, she was certain that her Galveston relatives must know my brother's wife's family, since there aren't many degrees of separation between most Galveston Islanders. We each texted our relatives. Indeed, they did know each other.

Day 5 (Tuesday - Natchez to Jackson, MS):

Another early morning departure. Our first stop was the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, which is pretty up-front about the state's nasty history of racism, including violence directed against civil rights activists. The peak of the civil rights movement was during my toddlerhood, so I've just got a fuzzy, jumbled history in my head. There was a lot of focus at the museum on, for example, the Freedom Riders - integrated groups of activists who rode Greyhound and Trailways buses into the South to test the United States Supreme Court decision banning segregation in public interstate transportation. Needless to say, in Mississippi Freedom Riders were arrested, and in some cases jailed. Buses were bombed, people were beaten - it wasn't pretty. 

Mississippi racial history isn't pretty

Shame on you, Mr. Friedman, for contributing to this song

We also visited the home of civil right leader Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in his driveway by a member of the White Citizens' Council, a segregationist/racist group. Evers was enough of a target that he usually had police protection - strangely absent the day of his killing - some say the cops were Klan and were in on it. The house has been preserved; you can still see where a bullet from the high powered hunting rifle used by the assassin went through the front of the house, traveled through the living room and another wall into the kitchen, and dented the refrigerator. Evers was taken to a local hospital where he was initially refused admission because the hospital was whites-only. He died at the hospital, having under tragic circumstances achieved the milestone of being the first black person to be treated there.

Medgar Evers' house

Bullet hole by the toaster. Evers' wife and young children were at home at the time of his assassination

We also visited Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, which was founded in 1860. Unlike the synagogue we visited in Natchez, Beth Israel is an active congregation. Their rabbi had interned at our congregation while he was in rabbinical school; in fact, the congregant with whom he had stayed during his internship was part of our group, so he was happy to see us. 

The congregation's rabbi during the 1960's, Perry Nussbaum, was a Yankee transplant and a strong advocate for civil rights, which put him a little out of step with his congregants, not all of whom were on board with this whole black/white equality thing. Both the synagogue and Nussbaum's home were bombed by the Ku Klux Klan, but apparently he was undeterred. At Beth Israel Rabbi Nussbaum was spoken of with great veneration. It was interesting after the trip to read up on him in Wikipedia. Apparently, while he was indeed a fearless advocate for civil rights, he was also a headstrong, sometimes abrasive character, who was shocked to find how assimilated his congregants were and chided them for having Christmas trees in their homes, and he complained they had no interest in Hebrew, Zionism, or much in the way of traditional religious practice. Welcome to Mississippi, Rabbi Nussbaum!

I will say that after Beth Israel was bombed, the Greater Jackson Clergy Alliance, which Nussbaum had founded, marched in support of the synagogue. The group of 60 clergy representing 10 faiths was the first interfaith event ever to take place in Jackson!

At lunch Rabbi Stein were again the odd people out, choosing a ramen restaurant where we could get vegetarian food (the ramen was much better than one would expect in Jackson, MS - and was delivered by a robot!). The group ate dinner together at Jackson institution Hal and Mal's. The vibe of the place was a little hard to figure out - TGIFriday's kind of decor, but a more upscale menu, and a live jazz trio. I had a tasty redfish platter ("redfish" is a southern thing - but I think it's really the same fish as either what we call drum or some species of snapper).

The next day we were headed to Greenwood Mississippi.

Ramen delivery robot

Continue to Part III