The Stranger Next Door

Written by Josh Nathan-Kazis

Growing Up with Jim Crow in the Mississippi Delta
Clifton Taulbert sits at a small round coffee table on the brightly-lit stage. He pauses for a moment to collect his thoughts. Then, with the measured tone of a practiced storyteller, he speaks about the day when an old Jewish woman invited him into her home to share a meal of Kosher sausage and matzo ball soup. A spoonful was enough—he didn’t like the soup one bit. But the meal marked his first experience of something much more palatable—it was the first time a white person had ever invited him to share a meal. In Glen Allen, Mississippi during the 1950s, eating a dumpling was a radical act.
Eugene Dattel sits across the coffee table from Taulbert. He reaches down and pulls a cast iron skillet from a duffel bag at his feet. "This was the common denominator of the South," he says, holding the skillet up for the audience. Both men smile. Taulbert begins to call up fond memories: hot biscuits, fried chicken—the shared elements of their Delta childhood.
A tremendous swath of land in the northwestern part of the state, the Mississippi Delta has historically been sparsely populated, its inhabitants predominantly black. Thanks to the Mississippi River, the soil is particularly fertile, and the region’s economy has always been largely agricultural. At the onset of the Civil War, the Delta had a population of only 50,000 people, 90 percent of whom were slaves. By the 1950’s, when Mr. Dattel and Mr. Taulbert were growing up there, the population had grown to approximately 500,000, of which about 75 percent were black. Dattel calls the Delta "the taproot of black culture," and it is known, among other things, as the birthplace of the blues.
While their hometowns were no more than an hour and a half apart on the Delta flatland, tremendous but intangible barriers stood between Gene Dattel and Clifton Taulbert during their youth. Because Dattel is Jewish and Taulbert is black, they grew up in separate worlds, segregated from each other. Yet, today, when Dattel and Taulbert speak about the Delta in their performance piece, "Parallel Lives: Growing Up Black and Jewish in the Mississippi Delta in the 1950’s," it is clear that they come from the same place.
For the past six years, the two men—writers who have long since moved away from the Delta—have, from time to time, staged their performance at a wide variety of venues, including the Yale Hillel, the Episcopal Church in Jackson, Mississippi, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and high schools across the country. Most recently, it was presented at a Martin Luther King, Jr. day commemoration held jointly by The American Jewish Historical Society and The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding at Manhattan’s Center for Jewish History.
Dattel first got in touch with Taulbert after reading his memoir, Once Upon A Time When We Were Colored. "I recognized from Clifton Taulbert’s book that I had a lot in common with him," says Dattel. Taulbert’s description of his own family resonated with Dattel’s memories of the black families he knew in the Delta. Introduced by Taulbert’s publisher, they soon decided to work together.

On stage, Dattel has begun to talk about sports. He tells the audience that, as a ten-year-old, he knew everything there was to know about Ole’ Miss football. He lived and breathed the stats of its players, the team’s win/loss percentages. In high school, he, along with the other Jewish boys in the area, were so involved in athletics that the coaches would confer with the local rabbi before scheduling any games. Ole’ Miss played no such role in Taulbert’s life—people in his neighborhood didn’t follow the games. The team’s squad, like the rest of the student body, was entirely white.
"The world had carved out a place called ‘colored,’" says Taulbert, and that place is where black people were expected to stay. Dattel shares a story about weekend nights in Ruleville, when he would take a break from working at his father’s store to visit a nearby restaurant. On his way, he would greet the crowds of African-Americans walking on the same road. Once he arrived at the restaurant, however, they would have to part, and he would enter alone.
By contrast, says Dattel, there was no anti-Semitism in the Delta. While the number of Jews in the Delta was relatively small, especially compared to the number of blacks, they owned many of the stores in each of the towns, and held a disproportionately large number of positions in local government. "Jews were extremely assimilated," says Dattel. "They were presidents of the country clubs." Blacks, who made up the vast majority of the population, remained impoverished and disenfranchised.
In the six years that Dattel and Taulbert have been presenting "Parallel Lives" across the country, Dattel says that the feedback they have received is "all positive." "Our discussion is about people….people want to talk about their stories, and they are fascinated with the Delta….There is the occasional time warped 1960s person who wants Clifton to be angry. And he’s not." Instead, says Taulbert, "the challenge for us is forging bridges between people, and seeing each other on equal planes."
Even during Dattel and Taulbert’s childhood, people worked around segregation. Dattel shares stories about his father’s store, which was the only place he knew that was racially integrated. He talks about the mutual respect between the patrons and his father, and the general friendliness between the Jews and blacks that he knew, who circumvented segregation by connecting in those spaces, such as the store, where such contact was possible.
But since the visible wrongs of segregation have faded, "Jews essentially have done nothing for black people," says Dattel. "There hasn’t been a Rabbi [from the North) or a group of Jewish students in the Delta in 40 years." In the 1960s, Jews ventured to all parts of the South, including Mississippi, in support of the Civil Rights movement. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched in Thelma, Alabama alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1964, many Jews traveled to Mississippi to register black voters as part of "Freedom Summer." James Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two of the three civil rights activists murdered that summer by the Ku Klux Klan (as depicted in the film "Mississippi Burning"), were Jewish. Their deaths provoked a national outcry, forcing the F.B.I. to crack down on the Klan.
But instead of maintaining the relationships begun in the 1960s, the Jewish community now largely ignores the problems of blacks, according to Dattel. And in Mississippi those problems are dire. Dattel says that in many ways the Delta is like the third world. Even though legal discrimination has ceased, poverty is rampant. "What we’re dealing with is a massive social problem," he says.
It was the sense of a lost alliance between Jews and blacks in America that prompted the American Jewish Historical Society and the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding to jointly host "Parallel Lives" on Martin Luther King Jr. day. Rachel Chodorov, the Director of Programming and Special Projects at the American Jewish Historical Society, who co-organized the event, shares many of Dattel’s views on the state of relations between the two communities. "In the sixties, during the civil rights movement, American Jews were very much involved in the movement, young and old, rich and poor," she says. "That relationship has deteriorated over the past 35 years or so, and we’d like to see it strengthened today." "Blacks and Jews do not enjoy the same alliances as they have in the past, whether they are geographic, political, or socioeconomic," says Rabbi Marc Schneier, the President of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding. "It is important to reformulate them for the new century."

As they bring their presentation to a close, Dattel and Taulbert shift the topic to today’s Delta. Many things have changed there since they were children, some for the better and some for the worse. They mention that public education in the Delta is abysmal, and that only 35 percent of students at Delta State University are African-American. On the brighter side, however, many important governmental positions in the area have been held by black people, including state superintendent of public schools and assistant state attorney general.
As for the Jews in the Delta, Dattel feels that there are fewer of them, or at least they are more assimilated than they were fifty years ago. Many left for the Northern cities because of the lack of economic opportunity in the Delta. "I’ll bet there aren’t fifty [Jewish] families in Greenville now," he says.
For the two men on stage the Delta they knew as children is gone. But the memories are still clear. As the sun set and the workday came to a close, Taulbert says the people of his neighborhood would gather on their porches. They would sit and talk. Fifty years on the boys from the Delta are still talking about home. "[There’s] something powerful, physical about the place," says Dattel. "The sunsets, the sunrise, the bayous, the open stretches, the small town—something that draws you back."

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.