Inspired by the Arkansas Review’s “What Is the Delta?” series of articles, Defining the Delta collects fifteen essays from scholars in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities to describe and define this important region. Here are essays examining the Delta’s physical properties, boundaries, and climate from a geologist, archeologist, and environmental historian. The Delta is also viewed through the lens of the social sciences and humanities—historians, folklorists, and others studying the connection between the land and its people, in particular the importance of agriculture and the culture of the area, especially music, literature, and food. Every turn of the page reveals another way of seeing the seven-state region that is bisected by and dependent on the Mississippi River, suggesting ultimately that there are myriad ways of looking at, and defining, the Delta.

Eugene Richards first came to the southeastern part of Arkansas--the so-called Delta--in 1968 as a VISTA volunteer. After nearly two years in that organization working to set up a daycare center and recreation programs, he and some of his associates in it left to found RESPECT Inc., a private social-action program providing paralegal services, publishing a community newspaper, and distributing food and clothing in West Memphis (across the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tennessee).As he lived and became increasingly involved in the black community, Richards, a skilled photographer, began to use his camera to record what he observed--not only the poverty and suffering of these people but also their laughter, contemplation, and triumphs. His subjects range from children at play to an African-style wedding to scenes of work and home life. Death, religion, and imprisonment are major elements of Delta existence, and so of these photos.The 110 photographs collected here express the quality of life in a part of the South where 60 percent of the black families barely earn $2000 a year, and 70 percent of the dwellings are deteriorated and without plumbing. Richards' camera catches the cotton compresses, the cement mill, the broken fields and small cafes, Logan the mortician, the two blind brothers Willy and Isaiah McCowan, and the Reverend Ezra Greer at the state capitol in Little Rock, while his few but carefully chosen words complement these images. Together they hold the people and the place in a world that Richards feels "slipping by, while I merely observed its disappearance."I feared being only eyes, only a cameraman," he says, but through his camera his eyes become ours, and the power of his feelings, ours too.

The tragic, true story of Helen Spence, the teenager who murdered her father’s killers in the insulated lower White River area of Arkansas in 1931. The once-thriving houseboat communities along Arkansas’s White River are long gone, and few remember the sensational murder story that set local darling Helen Spence on a tragic path. In 1931, Spence shocked Arkansas when she avenged her father’s murder in a DeWitt courtroom. The state soon discovered that no prison could hold her. For the first time, prison records are unveiled to provide an essential portrait. Join author Denise Parkinson for an intimate look at a Depression-era tragedy. The legend of Helen Spence refuses to be forgotten—despite her unmarked grave. “Most memorably, Parkinson evokes the natural beauty of the White River itself. But more importantly, she’s given Helen Spence, daughter of the river, a sympathetic hearing—something in its pulp version of events Daring Detective did not.”—Memphis Flyer “Denise details Helen’s life, from the murder of her father to the horrific treatment she received at the hands of the law, including how prison officials seemed to entice her to escape a final time, with the attempt culminating in her murder.”—Only in Arkansas

Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta examines the history of labor relations and racial conflict in the Mississippi Valley from the Civil War into the late twentieth century. This essay collection grew out of a conference marking the hundredth anniversary of one of the nation’s deadliest labor conflicts—the 1919 Elaine Massacre, during which white mobs ruthlessly slaughtered over two hundred African Americans across Phillips County, Arkansas, in response to a meeting of unionized Black sharecroppers. The essays here demonstrate that the brutality that unfolded in Phillips County was characteristic of the culture of race- and labor-based violence that prevailed in the century after the Civil War. They detail how Delta landowners began seeking cheap labor as soon as the slave system ended—securing a workforce by inflicting racial terror, eroding the Reconstruction Amendments in the courts, and obstructing federal financial-relief efforts. The result was a system of peonage that continued to exploit Blacks and poor whites for their labor, sometimes fatally. In response, laborers devised their own methods for sustaining themselves and their communities: forming unions, calling strikes, relocating, and occasionally operating outside the law. By shedding light on the broader context of the Elaine Massacre, Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta reveals that the fight against white supremacy in the Delta was necessarily a fight for better working conditions, fair labor practices, and economic justice.

The Arkansas Delta is fertile ground for delicious food and iconic restaurants. It's a thickly layered culinary landscape built on generations of immigrants, farmers and cooks. Savor Delta tamales at Pasquale's Tamales, Rhoda's Famous Hot Tamales and Smokehouse BBQ. Meet the masters of barbecue like Harold Jones at the James Beard American classic Jones Barbecue Diner in Marianna. Dine where Elvis Presley ate, travel to Bill Clinton's favorite burger joint and cross the roads where Johnny Cash grew up. From legendary catfish havens such as Murry's Restaurant in Hazen to divine drive-ins like the Polar Freeze in Walnut Ridge, author Kat Robinson and photographer Grav Weldon explore more than one hundred classic joints, superb steakhouses, pie places and decadent doughnut palaces in this tasty travelogue.

"Cotton obsessed, Negro obsessed," Rupert Vance called it in 1935. "Nowhere but in the Mississippi Delta," he said, "are antebellum conditions so nearly preserved." This crescent of bottomlands between Memphis and Vicksburg, lined by the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers, remains in some ways what it was in 1860: a land of rich soil, wealthy planters, and desperate poverty--the blackest and poorest counties in all the South. And yet it is a cultural treasure house as well--the home of Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Charley Pride, Walker Percy, Elizabeth Spencer, and Shelby Foote. Painting a fascinating portrait of the development and survival of the Mississippi Delta, a society and economy that is often seen as the most extreme in all the South, James C. Cobb offers a comprehensive history of the Delta, from its first white settlement in the 1820s to the present. Exploring the rich black culture of the Delta, Cobb explains how it survived and evolved in the midst of poverty and oppression, beginning with the first settlers in the overgrown, disease-ridden Delta before the Civil War to the bitter battles and incomplete triumphs of the civil rights era. In this comprehensive account, Cobb offers new insight into "the most southern place on earth," untangling the enigma of grindingly poor but prolifically creative Mississippi Delta.

As a young English teacher keen to make a difference in the world, Michelle Kuo took a job at a tough school in the Mississippi Delta, sharing books and poetry with a young African-American teenager named Patrick and his classmates. For the first time, these kids began to engage with ideas and dreams beyond their small town, and to gain an insight into themselves that they had never had before. Two years later, Michelle left to go to law school; but Patrick began to lose his way, ending up jailed for murder. And that’s when Michelle decided that her work was not done, and began to visit Patrick once a week, and soon every day, to read with him again. Reading with Patrick is an inspirational story of friendship, a coming-of-age story for both a young teacher and a student, an expansive, deeply resonant meditation on education, race and justice, and a love letter to literature and its power to transcend social barriers.

Emerges is a rich tapestry of dichotomies that is the Delta - a land of black and white, of wealth and poverty, of progress and stasis, of despair and hope - in which all that is dear and terrible about this often overlooked region of the South is revealed.

In Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South Jeannie Whayne employs the fascinating history of a powerful plantation owner in the Arkansas delta to recount the evolution of southern agriculture from the late nineteenth century through World War II. After his father’s death in 1870, Robert E. “Lee” Wilson inherited 400 acres of land in Mississippi County, Arkansas. Over his lifetime, he transformed that inheritance into a 50,000-acre lumber operation and cotton plantation. Early on, Wilson saw an opportunity in the swampy local terrain, which sold for as little as fifty cents an acre, to satisfy an expanding national market for Arkansas forest reserves. He also led the fundamental transformation of the landscape, involving the drainage of tens of thousands of acres of land, in order to create the vast agricultural empire he envisioned. A consummate manager, Wilson employed the tenancy and sharecropping system to his advantage while earning a reputation for fair treatment of laborers, a reputation—Whayne suggests—not entirely deserved. He cultivated a cadre of relatives and employees from whom he expected absolute devotion. Leveraging every asset during his life and often deeply in debt, Wilson saved his company from bankruptcy several times, leaving it to the next generation to successfully steer the business through the challenges of the 1930s and World War II. Delta Empire traces the transition from the labor-intensive sharecropping and tenancy system to the capital-intensive neo-plantations of the post–World War II era to the portfolio plantation model. Through Wilson’s story Whayne provides a compelling case study of strategic innovation and the changing economy of the South in the late nineteenth century.

Whayne also offers an analysis of the forces at work on the local level. She suggests that concerted opposition to modernization existed even before New Deal programs gave power to the planters in the 1930s. She also demonstrates that the Arkansas delta experienced many of the same conflicts based on social class and racial caste that were evident in former slaveholding areas.