Front Street, once partitioned into about a dozen different cotton factors, is uniformly Viking Range Corp. today - all except for one tattered, old battle flag of an awning labeled "Buford Cotton."
Most days, Lewis "Bubba" Buford III can be found sitting in the shaded window beneath that sign. Dressed in a wrinkled golf shirt, the cotton man keeps his eye on a ticker that gives him live market prices for cotton, glancing occasionally outside, amused at the people in shiny, pressed button-down shirts who buzz from one side of Viking headquarters to the other.
"I'm giving them a lot of exercise," Buford says, his eyes growing bigger as they do when he emphasizes a point.
At 45, Buford says he's the youngest independent cotton broker left in the Southeast. He has occupied the front office since he inherited the business from his father at 21. In that time, his hair has grown gray - prematurely, he says, because he stayed in a business that has killed some and caused every other broker on Cotton Row to sell out to Viking.
"The cotton business is too much pressure," he explained. "Can't many people stay in cotton."
But Buford has, even as the awning outside has faded to a pale green. A recent New Yorker article about Viking's success deemed his operation "moribund" based on the looks of his office.
The description baffled him at first, he says. "They said I was moribund — and I had to look that up in the dictionary. That means dying, dead, over, decaying, done, finished."
Buford is a survivor, though. Within that haggard facade, he says he still does a lot of business throughout the South. And the transactions aren't small.
"They actually don't know how much money goes through this little old hole," he said with a defiant grin. "One year I ran $33 million through this little dump."
He's also president of another rarefied institution, the Greenwood Cotton Exchange. The group of cotton brokers who monitor market prices and protect each other's interests is one of the few remaining in the South. Now located on Main Street, the exchange was once housed in one of the Front Street buildings that Viking bought.
"People talk about me being moribund and dead, a dying business - over," said Buford. "We'll, I don't think so."
Many of the former cotton operations on Front Street could have been called moribund when Viking began buying them out in the mid-1990s. At least, the cotton men, who had seen other brokers fold over the years, chose to take the offers Viking made rather than stay in the business.
The homegrown kitchen appliance manufacturer, now a global dealer, restored the Victorian facades to their former brilliance, even down to the gold florets in the framework and a replica of an old Coca-Cola mural. At the same time, the building's interiors were gutted and completely reconfigured to make way for a modern office complex and design studio.
Now, Buford Cotton is all that stands in the way of a Viking takeover of the whole block.
That isn't a problem for Viking, according to Dale Persons, the company's vice president of public affairs.
"We've got a good relationship with Bubba, and he's a personal friend of many of us," Persons said. "We try to work really hard to be a good corporate neighbor to him. We try really hard to honor his space and to keep guests from parking in his spaces."
The parking situation has been the only major complaint from Buford over the years. The problem isn't the people who work at Viking, he said; it's the ones coming in from out of town, who don't know the law of the land.
But through a campaign of no-parking signs and a relentless vigilance toward his two front parking spaces to let out-of-towners know of their transgressions, Buford has prevailed.
"I think we got most of the parking pretty much straight," he said.
Despite his obstinance, Buford is quick to mention the reason no magazines use the m-word to refer to Greenwood as a whole. Viking has saved Greenwood, he said, and the historic architecture that cotton money built on Front Street.
"If it wasn't for Viking Range, I don't think a lot of people in this town would be here," Buford said. "I'm glad they're here. I'm glad they're doing good, or we'd be dried up and gone."
Buford says Viking's encroachment onto Front Street has helped his reputation. The international prestige associated with Viking has carried Buford Cotton along with it to unlikely places.
Every time a publication features a picture of Viking's headquarters, Buford Cotton is right there, ragged and sandwiched between the polished new glass and painted ironwork of the restored Victorian facades.
"I'm worldwide," Buford crowed. "There have been just as many pictures taken of Buford Cotton as there have of Viking Range because I'm right in the middle."
Persons said the obvious next step for Viking - when Buford is ready - will be to join the two unconnected parts of its headquarters.
Buford said he has received a few offers but nothing he couldn't refuse. He also doesn't want to disappoint his father, Lewis Jr., who founded the business in 1948.
"Put it this way - I haven't seen anything that interests me just yet," he explained. "Plus, my daddy's still alive. He's still walking around here, too. So this gives him a place to come."
Besides, Viking isn't interested in forcing him out, according to Persons.
Any arrangement "would be a natural thing that would have to work for both sides," Persons said. "Assuming it would be good for Bubba, I'm certain it would be logical and good for us. We also respect that Bubba's a viable business."
Buford says it isn't hard to figure out the secret to surviving in a "New South" increasingly favorable to industry instead of agriculture: Don't change, even as the world does. He says he continues to do business the way he did when he started, the same way his father did when he started.
"The old cotton way is 'Our word is our bond,'" he said. "My word is my bond. If I say I'm going to give you so much, that's what I'm going to do, even if it costs me."
That way of doing business has kept his clients loyal because they know Buford can get them the best price for their product, he said. He works with six Delta farmers who own about 22,000 acres, and his work extends to five other states.
That's not to say Buford won't fold his cards and sell to his neighbor next year. "I'm not saying that I won't leave next year," he asserted. "I'm not saying that. I'm not going to tell you that I won't. Yes, I will."
Buford said one of his friends told him he has repeated that assumption for the last nine years. But time to shut everything down is approaching, closer than it once was.
"I want a little more time to finish up, and you can have mine last," Buford said. "The finishing touches."
