Delta in Detail

WHERE I WAS BORN AND RAISED (380 pp.)--David L. Cohn--Houghton Mifflin ($4).

This book is like an evening of mellow talk over bourbon and water. Its author, who once wrote a bestseller about the Sears-Roebuck catalogue, was born and raised in the Mississippi Delta country he writes about. Instead of a serious study of the cotton economy and the problem of race relations, he has reported loquaciously, and with the leisurely humor of an old-school Mississippian, on the moods and customs of Delta society.

He has observed that Negroes will flock to work--and work just as hard--for a farmer who is known to be unfair and cruel as for a kind and honest one. His explanation: almost every Negro suspects in his heart that all white men are alike, that all will rob and deceive him, no matter what their conduct seems to be.

Experimental Ownership. The same profound suspicion, he says, accounts for many odd quirks of Negro behavior. Negro tenants who pick up and leave their farrners sometimes do so, Cohn says, for a purely experimental purpose: to find out if they will really be allowed to keep mules or farm implements which they have bought from the landlord.

The iron law of the white society still decrees that sexual relations between a white woman and a Negro are punishable with death "for both parties, or, at least, banishment of the woman from the community." The rigidity and violence of such a tradition, Cohn thinks, is a logical consequence of segregation, and segregation a logical consequence of the whites' refusal to tolerate intermarriage. He says flatly that there is no solution to the problem, if this is the problem. He believes that Northern Negroes and civil-rights defenders who, in attacking segregation, also attack complaisant Negroes as "handkerchief heads" and "Uncle Toms," are merely being reckless. But, says Cohn, if Mississippi whites were sure that Negroes would accept social segregation, they might be much more inclined to give them every other kind of equality (in voting, schooling, jobs). He thinks they should.

Lick Skillet Dialogue. Cohn believes that most Southerners only faintly glimpse the inner lives of the Negroes by whom they are surrounded--Negroes who live apart in sections with such names as "Lick Skillet," "Spot Without a Wrinkle" and "Balance Jew" (where lots were bought on deferred payments and it took a long time to pay the balance due). Cohn has spent time with Negroes, learned how they feel, collected their stories of "hoodoo" and "conjure" episodes, and listened to them closely. An example of his ear:

" 'Manny,' she says, 'is you gwine care me to de dance?'

" 'Gal,' he replies, 'I ain't stud'in' 'bout car'in' you to no dance. Heah you is doin' ugly all de time wid dat sloo-footed nigger from over on Triumph and won't give nobody else none, den you comes axin' me to care you to de dance . . .' "

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