From the shadow of the chapel, Jimmy Mack and Mendelsohn watched the two cars barrel back onto the highway, tires squealing as they swung into the gas station. Hooting and gesturing at the darkened chapel, the boisterous men disappeared into the office. A moment later the outside lights of the Kilbrew station were turned off. Only the pale light of the office window was visible.
Jimmy and Ted walked together, hugging the side of the road, half-waiting for another run by the cars from the Kilbrew station. When they reached the Williams house, Jimmy Mack touched Ted’s arm in the dark. “They’re coming back, but not tonight. Those bottles were just meant to let us know they’re watching.” He heard Mack’s low chuckle. “Why don’t you go meet the mayor tomorrow?” he suggested. “Let him know you’re here, writing it all down. Let him know we’re watching.” His laugh was so surprisingly boyish, it startled Mendelsohn. It was easy to forget how young the always composed Jimmy Mack really was. “Time he welcomed you to Shiloh, Mississippi, Ted. Southern hospitality.”
When he left Mr.Williams’s house it was barely nine o’clock in the morning, yet the yellow Chevy already felt like an oven. Little Sharon was pushing on the screen door, waving as though he was leaving her forever. Rolling down the dusty window, Ted waved back. “See you later, baby!”
Easing past the deserted Sojourner Chapel, he squinted through the shimmering heat at the Kilbrew station across the highway. Nothing seemed to move in the breathless air. The dusty town square was nearly deserted as he parked next to a lonely pay telephone outside the feed store, where he called the office of Mayor Burroughs. The secretary said that the mayor was not yet in, but she would take the information and make sure to tell him that Mr. Mendelsohn, a reporter from Newsweek, wanted to meet him and would come to his office at 11:00.
The damp heat seemed to smother the town. When he got back in the overheated car, he eased out from the curb, and drove slowly around the square. Life in Shiloh appeared listless, its existence justified by the few stores and services it offered to the great plantations that stretched regally from horizon to horizon. Guarding one end of the square, the Tildon Bank threw its shadow, offering a brief blessing of shade to the black men who were now carrying bales from the Brion Brothers’ feed store to waiting trucks, and to the few housewives making their way on the steamy sidewalk to the small Stop and Save grocery. Mendelsohn stared at the small, well-appointed bank building, the launch pad for the political behemoth of Senator Sterling Tildon. On the opposite end of Shiloh’s melancholy downtown, a three-story tan building, the Shiloh Arms, stood rooted. Once the finest Delta hotel to be found by the drummers who came to do business with the great plantations, it was now shuttered, a plaintive echo of a more prosperous time in the ’20s. On the parched town green, just beyond the gaunt, pigeon-stained statue of a Confederate soldier, the town constable coaxed a police dog from the police pickup truck, trying to exercise the reluctant animal in the sweltering air. East of the square were the comfortable, ample homes of the merchants and managers of Shiloh. With large, shaded porches nestling under great maples and elms, the neighborhoods were an oasis of cool green that ended abruptly at Highway 49.
On the other side of the highway was the Sanctified Quarter, home of the Negroes of Shiloh, where Percy and Rennie Williams lived. Ted had learned about the Sanctified Quarter before he ever came to the Delta. But now it was here before him, a visible history that was as exotic to him as it was tragic.
When the out-gunned and exhausted Confederate troops had been forced to flee south from the Delta, they left behind a smoldering land of burning buildings, thousands of abandoned fields with rotting cotton, and a hungry, bewildered, and rootless population of slaves. So when the pursuing Union troops swept through the cotton hamlet of Shiloh, they left behind a small garrison to secure the vital Delta crossroad and offer protection to the thousands who were newly free.
The Union encampment was on the Daniel Wilbur plantation, adjacent to the one good wagon road that stretched north to Memphis and south nearly to the cotton ports on the Gulf of Mexico. Emboldened by the Yankee presence, Negroes from the Wilbur plantation took over the looted and abandoned granary and proudly christened it their Sanctified Church. It was the first black house of worship in the Delta that belonged to the parishioners. The small, unheated, and unlit building became, by its mere presence, the spiritual center for the throngs of ex-slaves who roamed the region as they foraged for food and shelter.
Three years after fleeing Shiloh, Daniel Wilbur, his wife, and his only son, George, returned from their long exile. To their despair, they found that their great plantation house had been gutted. From the remains of the veranda Wilbur could see, from horizon to horizon, the desolate ruin that had once been the family plantation. Thousands of his acres of cotton, the richest in the whole Delta, his daddy had said, bore only the rotted and desiccated remains of cotton plants that had died of suffocation by encroaching weeds, thirst, and disease. They too were the victims of the savage war. The powerless slaves, who had been forced for generations to keep the fields alive and productive, had abandoned the land they had nurtured and fled toward freedom. It was an irony that was lost on Daniel Wilbur. He knew only that he must rebuild the family legacy.
He surveyed the throngs of black men, knowing that without them the plantation could never be revived. And an agreement was reached that history would morally judge a hundred years later, an agreement forged only from a shared desperate need to survive. The ex-slaves became indentured servants to the old masters. For shelter and food they would once more drain the swamps and master the killing labor and suffocating heat of the cotton fields. For a pittance of a wage, they would once more become voiceless and powerless beasts of burden that could secure the legacy of the white aristocracy of the Delta. And when Daniel Wilbur commanded that they tear down their Sanctified Church and rebuild a greater granary, there were no black voices that said no. All that remained of the Sanctified Church, Dale Billings had told Mendelsohn, was the small overgrown burial plot that the Negroes had built in the lee of a stand of locust trees behind the church. Among the tangle of ivy and bayberry bushes one could still see a few remaining tiny rock headstones with some names still legible: Tobias, Daddy, Martha, January.
With fierce resolve, Wilbur had recreated the great plantation despite the turmoil of the Reconstruction years. He was demanding and autocratic with his family. His son, George, considered him an unloving man dedicated only to success, who had no empathy and was a stranger to compassion. Blacks who worked at the Wilbur place thought he was a hard taskmaster but a fair one. When Daniel Wilbur died in 1874, he left the thriving plantation of 3,000 acres to his son, a canny businessman who had managed the family fortunes during the hard years of rebuilding and was determined not to emulate his father. He decided early to enjoy his inherited wealth and travel abroad. So in the spring of 1875 he sold the plantation to an eager young Yankee banker who had come to settle his family in the Mississippi Delta. His name was Amos Tildon.
Mendelsohn eased across the highway, eager to see more of the Sanctified Quarter and to understand what it had become. Unadorned by street lights or paved roads, the black Quarter had sprouted like swamp weeds over the decades from depleted acres where cotton had once flourished. Few trees provided shade, and drainage ditches by the side of the dirt roads had to serve as sewers for the Quarter. On the metal roofs of the cobbled-together houses the Delta sun was blinding. As he had already learned at the Williams house, the stifling heat in the summer made the lives below almost unbearable. Yet in almost every sere front yard he noticed tin cans and discarded containers blossoming defiantly with petunias, nasturtiums, geraniums, and field daisies. And behind nearly every little house he could see a vegetable garden that might provide the tomatoes, okra, and beets that could be preserved for the cold months ahead.
Before six in the morning, Mendelsohn had heard the trucks from the plantations pick up the men, women, and children of the Quarter,