(5 of 11)
MISSISSIPPI: The Grip of The Man For most of his 38 years, Earl Perkins has chopped cotton for The Man —the white plantation owner. The most he ever earns is $3 for a twelve-hour day in the fields, and usually he is paid off with a fraction of his actual pay in cash (the rest probably goes to the company store). To supplement the larder, Perkins sometimes hunts rabbits, not with a gun but by skewering cottontails in their warrens with a sharp stick. Although he lives on the plantation year round, he works only about one month of the year— since cotton growers began picking mechanically and controlling weeds with thin-stream flamethrowers. Perkins, his wife and eight children pay $10-a-month rent for dilapidated "shotgun" shack* which has no indoor plumbing, electricity or gas. Perkins' life is typical of the more than 100,000 Southern blacks in the Delta whose mode of existence has changed little in 150 years.
In contrast to Perkins, another cotton chopper named Walter Abney, 35, has eluded the grip of The Man. Working the same hours for the same wages as Perkins. Abney was spared the burden of children; two years ago, the Delta Ministry — a branch of the National Council of Churches — set up Freedom City near Greenville, Miss., and Walter signed on. Now he and his wife live in a rent-free, two-room apartment with a somewhat leakproof roof, and receive $30 a week of deus ex machina handouts. Walter Abney is free of The Man.
TEXAS: Women of Houston Those Negroes who try to improve their lives by moving to Southern cities are scarcely better off. Mrs. Lillian Glenn, 57, is black, underweight and nervous. She says that she has a "plastic stomach" — the result of three abdominal operations — and she fears that she is going blind. Her two sons are unable to provide for her: one is in reform school for car theft, the other in county jail for violating probation on a suspended burglary sentence. Her daughter, Willie Mae, 24, had a job in a wastepaper factory until a co-worker last March told the boss that Willie Mae had a tumor on her heart. She does not, but she was fired. Now Willie Mae stays home, watching television (daytime soaps, mostly) and reading paperbacks cadged months ago from the wastepaper company. Recently, she read Somerset Maugham's Ashenden ("What I really like is sex novels," she says). Mrs. Glenn pays $10-a-week rent for her quaky quarters in "The Bottoms" but has got only $22.80 from welfare for a gas bill. As a result, she is always in debt.
Mrs. Marjorie Jenkins, 37, is black, proud, and stands 4 ft. 10 in. "I tried for welfare but I wasn't very successful," she says. "I wasn't barefoot and my clothes weren't ragged and my hair wasn't all knotty on my head. They so much as told me to go to the doctor and have my tubes tied and stand on the corner and sell my body. Even though I had my first baby before I was married, I've got pride." Mrs. Jenkins lives in Kelly Village, one of Houston's four public housing projects, with her three children and a granddaughter.