In some ways the town feels like a suburb. There are things to do, places to eat, and friendly neighbors. However Cleveland does not have big city problems such as traffic and crime. The people are friendly and most everyone knows everyone else. With all the town has one expects to find a major metropolitan area hidden somewhere in the cotton fields. Except of course there isn’t one. You have to drive over two hours in any direction to find anything approaching a big city. In between there is nothing, but farmland and poverty.

Living in Cleveland is like living in a bubble. All those friendly people don’t seem to care what the outside world thinks of them. They blissfully go to and from work, Kroger, and Walmart spending Friday nights at Delta Meat Market or maybe Hey Joe’s. It is all a self contained world centered on Delta State University. The school looms large here and is the sole reason Cleveland does not look like Clarksdale or Greenville or any of the other Delta towns. Fortunately the college is going nowhere. So there seems to be so little need to do anything differently.

Yet step outside the safe boundaries of the white community in Cleveland and reality quickly intrudes. A few days ago I attended the wake of a colleague’s relative. Driving up along South Chrisman, I saw block after block of run down houses, dilapidated corner stores, and rusted cars. The faces, of course, were all black. Then comes Court street and suddenly its all shops and familiar territory.

Make no mistake there is a wealth gap in Cleveland. The racial divide is somewhat blurred, but is there all the same. The white and black communities might as well be separate towns. They exist in different areas and don’t really mix. I have yet to see many examples of overt racism, but its legacy is on display for all to see. Sadly I don’t have statistics, but if I did they would not be encouraging.

In the grand scheme of things Cleveland is insignificant. It’s a small college town in the middle of nowhere. Few historical events of note have occurred here and it has no real claims to fame. For a while I bought into the idea that Cleveland, MS is the best place on earth. Then I traveled outside it. Returning home in particular helped put things in perspective.

Yet Cleveland is also unique. Somehow this small, insignificant town has managed to attract a diverse population. There are college professors from all over the country, international students from many countries, TFA corps members from all walks of life, and more. It’s as if there is some inverse hellmouth drawing people into the land of the lotus eaters. You see once here, many people don’t want to leave. Life is cheap, friends are close, and anything you can’t get at Walmart is available on Amazon. Only the reality of better employment elsewhere pulls people away.

It’s hard to say what the future holds. The Mississippi branch of the Grammy Museum opens in about a month. There is a lot of buzz about the number of tourists it will attract. Personally I am skeptical. Delta State, meanwhile, is going nowhere. Yet thirty miles away one can find its mirror image in Mississippi Valley State University. It too is a regional university. Being a Historically Black College and University there is little appetite to merge the two school although the idea has been floated in the past. So for now life in Cleveland continues on as it always has.

But something got me thinking.  Recently I ran into a map which brought all the above back into focus.  Done right, maps can put things into perspective and show things in a completely different light.  This one was no different.  It was created by the  Demographics Research Group at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia.  They took aggregated data from the 2010 census and plotted it out on a map.  Each person is represented by a dot which is then color coded to represent race.  Of course I scrolled over to Cleveland, MS. Here are the results:

The visual representation drives home how starkly divided Cleveland is.  Historically the dividing line was the railroad which ran through the center of town.   The tracks are gone, but people still live on either side of where they were.   The only exception is Delta State which is the mixed blue/green area off to the left.

Looking at the map, I realized so much of my life is lived in the white part of town.   My apartment is two blocks from Delta State, all of my friends live within a few miles of it, and most of my favorite places are there too.  Clearly my perspective is shaped by life in only one part of Cleveland.  Suddenly calling it an oasis does not seem entirely appropriate.  The fact is, I have no clue what life is like on the other side of town.

When it comes to segregation Cleveland is not remotely unique.  The map does an excellent job of representing America’s racial divisions. They’re especially stark in big cities such as New York, Baltimore, or Philadelphia to say nothing of Detroit and St. Louis.   So its not fair to single out one small town just because its in Mississippi and happens to be divided along racial lines.

Ironically the African American side of town if the one people are most likely to see.  Davis Ave, which runs through the center of the map, is the local name for Highway 61.  As the main North-South thoroughfare in the Delta, it is the one route through which people are guaranteed to pass through Cleveland.   When they do so, all they see is Walmart, strip malls, fast food, and Cleveland’s African-American population.  To the uninitiated, the town must look little different from any other Delta town.  Everything which makes it special is off the beaten path and thus invisible to passing travelers and, I suspect, journalists.

My experience upon first coming here during my job interview reinforces the above point.  All of the hotels in Cleveland are located along Highway 61 and the restaurants I went to are not far from it either.  So my first impression of the town was of a flat land filled with a giant Walmart, some fast food joints, a few strip malls, and a lot of poor people.  Delta State is in a nice area and the library’s Assistant Director drove me through the neighborhood around it, but it was a whirlwind tour.  In any case, we ended up going through some less desirable areas where I saw more poor people and a broken down strip mall.  On top of everything, the weather was cloudy and dreary much of the time.  Cleveland seemed like the saddest place on earth.

It wasn’t until I began living here that I realized there are a lot of cool things happening.   The problem is they are well hidden.  Not only is the most developed part of town off the beaten path, but the inhabitants don’t really advertise themselves.  Many people in Cleveland aren’t too keen on self promotion it seems.  And there is no reason for them to be.  If you work at Delta State and have friends who live in the nearby neighborhoods there is not much incentive to tell strangers about your life.  On top of that a lot of the natives are rather insular.  Its possible the local culture is hidden by design.  The only time we all come out of our collective shell is when Teach for America arrives in June.  Of course in that case there are more incentives than usual to put on a good face and show the newcomers around.

Nevertheless Cleveland is still a great place to live.  There is certainly life on the other side of the tracks.  The Senator’s Place is on that side of town.  I’ve also heard great things about East Side High School.   It may not be an oasis, but the town is still far more developed than most others in the Delta.

The Atlantic recently ran an article about the Delta.  Titled “How White Flight Ravaged the Mississippi Delta” it chronicles how the out migration of affluent white residents has hurt the region. The tl;dr version is: a lot.  Driving through the Delta feels like stepping back in time.  This part of the country feels frozen in time. People have been leaving for years a fact which can be seen in run down buildings and empty streets.  The Atlantic does a good job of showing that.

However there are a few problems I have with the article.  First of all the writer doesn’t seem to have a solid idea of  where the region begins and ends. Its boundaries are the Mississippi River to the west and the Yazoo River to the east from Vicksburg north to the suburbs of Memphis.  So while Tchula is indeed a Delta town, Philadelphia, MS is not.

More importantly, the situation in the Delta is complex.  Its telling that whenever journalists come through they never mention the town I live in.  Cleveland is a thriving college town which attracts people from all over the world.  We’ve got a strong local culture and a lot of stores and restaurants.  It is not your average Delta town.  Furthermore there are efforts, such as the Grammy Museum opening this year to improve the situation.  Farming is also big business which is why the USDA has a huge research lab down in Stoneville.  The Delta also attracts tourists looking to explore the history of the Blues as well as Teach for America Corps members.

Yet the broader picture is not so rosy.  Cleveland’s success proves The Atlantic right in many ways. Not every town can have a university.  And while the hope is that the Grammy Museum will bring in more tourists that is in the future.  Based on how hard it is to find the existence of the museum on their website, I am not encouraged.   Hopefully my doubts will be proven wrong.  So while there are some bright spots, the Delta is still a deeply impoverished placed.

And there are macroeconomic trends to consider as well.  The article quotes a hardware store owner as saying “We need everything. But now we need police cars foremost. Our streets need to be redone. We need to try to find somebody to open some businesses. Nobody is really coming in until we get our infrastructure improved”.  That’s a problem too.  For all the attention the Delta gets from TFA and Blues travelers there is little to actually attract businesses.  Again Cleveland is an exception in this regard.  But most towns are decaying fast.  Without some sort of government assistance its hard to imagine life turning around.  Perhaps that’s for the best.  The Delta has some of the most fertile soil in the country and so maybe its wide open spaces should remain that way.  I don’t have many answers to these questions and increasingly don’t seek them.  It is the way it is around here and only time will tell if life will ever change,

You see every town in the Delta has it’s claim to fame.  In Greenville it’s tamales, in Leland it’s Jim Henson, Cleveland has Delta State, etc.  And many of these towns have festivals in the spring and summer.  However when passing through it is easy to miss all of that.  From the perspective of the Highway the Delta appears to be a flat, desolate expanse of farmland which has seen better days.  It’s not until you get off the road that it’s culture and history become apparent.  Cleveland is something of an exception because Delta State tends to attract people from elsewhere.  But even here there is more than meets the eye.  Just google “Keep Cleveland Boring”.  There is a small, but active group of people that has been working to promote local businesses and put on festivals.   The catch is that the main avenue of publicity is word of mouth so one won’t know about most of what Cleveland has to offer without making an effort to find it.  The same is true of the rest of the Delta.

But the message is starting to get out.  A lot of international travelers come to follow the Blues Trail and see the places where the Blues came from.  Along the way they find some of the hidden gems waiting to be uncovered.  For example when I was at the Jim Henson Museum, an elderly couple from Germany was also there.  The guestbook was full of people who had come from all over the world and the guy running it told me he recently had a group of 20 Japanese tourists come through.

So as with all things Delta there is more than meets the eye.  That has really been one of the themes of this blog and indeed of my time here thus far.  With festival season beginning soon there will no doubt be much more to write about.  In the mean time here are some pictures from the museum and from the levee on the Mississippi river in Greenville.

Me and Kermit.

From the top of the levee.

Before the flood of 1927, the levee only rose as high as that road.