Forgotten time
Subtitle: the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War
By: John C. Willis.
Series: The American South Series
Publisher: University Press of Virginia; University of Virginia Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Charlottesville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 239
Subjects: African Americans -- Mississippi -- Delta (Region) -- History -- 19th century; Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877) -- Mississippi -- Delta (Region); Delta (Miss. : Region) -- History -- 19th century; Delta (Miss. : Region) -- Social conditions -- 19th century
Description: "Although it came to epitomize the Cotton South in the twentieth century, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta emerged as a distinct entity in the decades following the Civil War. By looking beyond white planters to the region as a whole, John C. Willis uncovers surprising evidence of African-American enterprise, the advantages of tenancy in an unstable cotton market, and the dominance of foreign-born merchants in the area, including many Chinese.

Examining the lives of individuals - freedmen, planters, and merchants - Willis explores the reciprocal interests of former slaves and former slaveholders. He shows how, in a cruel irony replicated in other areas of the South, the backbreaking work that African Americans did to clear, settle, and farm the land away from the river made the land ultimately too valuable for them to retain.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Delta began to devolve back into a stereotypical southern region with African Americans cast back into an impoverished, debt-ridden labor system."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-232) and index.