There's no future like the past, to hear the executive director of the Arkansas Delta Byways tourist association, and she's right. At least as far as tourism is concerned. Lest we forget, tourism is big business throughout this state. Why not in the much too long ignored Delta, too?
"When you're talking about tourism in the Delta," Ruth Hawkins reminds all of us, "it's extremely significant because a lot of these small rural communities lack the infrastructure to attract traditional businesses. The more things that can be created for people to do, the better chance we have of keeping them in our region for more days, which translates into more lodging and more restaurants and so forth."
To translate all that from the business-speak, there's no business like show business, or rather no business like old business. In this case the racially troubled history of this state. Mississippi ain't got nothin' on us, at least not any more. And that goes even for Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta, a classic study in the Southern Gothic and Romance genre.
Let's leave it to folks from Mississippi these days to say Thank God for Arkansas! Which is a neat reversal from the bad old days when economic development meant only the development of the economy, not the history, of the region. Listen to Rick Bragg in his introduction to New Delta Rising: "Some people who come here even say they have tumbled back in time, but I do not think that is true. They have merely slipped sideways into a place they do not recognize and may never understand."
Nice try, but no cigar. That soft-shoe, sidestep-shuffle is really a highly developed art form, much like the only original American contribution to our musical history: the jazz that came up The River from New Orleens-Land-of-Dreams.
To dream a dream is a great thing, as we all should have learned from Scripture: "And Joseph dreamed a dream ..."
Our dream in these blessed, ever verdant latitudes is inextricably bound up with our tortured and tortuous yet somehow redeeming vision of black and white together--till somehow We Shall Overcome. And yet, writes Richard Rubin in Confederacy of Silence: "Nothing in this world is a matter of black and white, not even in Mississippi, where everything is a matter of black and white."
Ditto Arkansas, or at least the Arkansas Delta, if we would only gaze at it with eyes prepared to wonder and a mind still as open as a child's. Instead of being overwhelmed by the blues in the night. "A strange and detached fragment thrown off by the whirling comet that is America," David Cohn wrote in Where I Was Born and Raised, his paean to the Southland, and there is no need to revise it now, only to revive it.
Pat Kienzle, a native of Fayetteville of all places, has studied a subject I was warned never, never to mention when I first arrived in Arkansas. For the Elaine race riots were considered strictly taboo. I still see old Clarence Taylor of the even older Pine Bluff Commercial almost holding his hand to his lips as he warned me against daring to bring up the subject, like that of rope in the house of a man who had been hanged. Now it's all the rage--and I do mean rage. And ought to be. For what does it profit a people to forget its own history? A lot, it turns out.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 05/18/2016