MOORHEAD - Driving through the heart of the Mississippi Delta last week on a bleak, cloudy day, my 78-year-old mother gazed out the window at the seemingly endless expanse of cotton fields and said softly through a wry smile: "It makes my back hurt just to look at it."
Growing up near the Humphreys County hamlet of Midnight - located southeast of Belzoni near the more metropolitan enclave of Silver City - Alline Haskins spent the days of her youth, when not in school, in cotton fields like the ones we were passing last Friday afternoon. One of 10 children of a hard-working Delta farmer reduced to sharecropping after losing his crop and his farm in the Great Flood of 1927, my mother picked cotton under the blazing Delta sun - pulling the staple crop from the stalks until her fingers bled.
The house where Momma's family lived near Straight Bayou in those days of hard times is no more. We did well last week to find a general location out from Midnight that looked vaguely familiar to her. She said little, but her face belied a flood of conflicting memories of the Delta home she had loved - and of the numbing Delta poverty she had worked so hard as a teenage girl to escape.
With no school at Midnight, Momma and her siblings were carried north to Silver City to the school there to get their educations. In two of her years there, she completed two grades in one year and found herself at the ripe old age of 16 the salutatorian of the Silver City High School Class of 1939.
As mother became the first in her family to graduate from high school, the Great Depression was ending and World War II was beginning. In the Delta, poverty reigned for most of the people living on the richest acres of Mississippi soil.
Alline Haskins spent the next year working with her father in the cotton fields. Her future seemed as bleak as the Delta landscape. There simply was no money, and without money there appeared little chance of getting the education she believed would be her ticket out of the cotton fields and into a better life.
It was at that crossroads of my mother's life that she joined another "family" - a family that would provide the means to a poor Delta girl to pursue her dreams. My mom enrolled at Sunflower Junior College in Moorhead in the fall of 1940. As he had done for countless other Delta boys and girls, SJC President Paul West helped my mother find a job on the campus that allowed her to work her way through school. Momma got a job working in the school cafeteria.
In 1942, Alline Haskins became the first of her family to graduate from college. Mom taught elementary school for a little over a year after Sunflower, but spent most of the war years working for South Central Bell - serving an extended stint as the switchboard operator at Camp Van Dorn near Centreville.
While teaching school in Kemper County after graduating from SJC, she met a fellow educator named Leo Salter. When he returned from the battlefields of Europe in 1946, she married him. They were inseparable until the day he died 43 years later.
They spent their lives together as educators, as parents and later as grandparents. Mom and Dad taught in Mississippi public schools for a combined 79 years. Momma taught literature and English for 40 years.
Friday, it was my great honor to take Dad's place as Momma's escort to her 58th class reunion at Sunflower Junior College - now Mississippi Delta Community College.
With my sister down from Memphis for the day, we toured the MDCC campus with Mother and visited the one building from her tenure there that is still standing.
At a reunion banquet that night, we heard the reminiscences of fellow SJC alumni like the ebullient Dollye Strickland Smith and the hilarious Winston Taylor, who was a graduate of the old Sunflower Agricultural High School that was associated with SJC.
Mrs. Smith told the story of the night - much appreciated by her former classmates - of the former Sunflower Junior College student she said had declined her invitation to attend the reunion because she had recently married.
"I asked her," said Mrs. Smith, "why she got married after all these years?"
"I asked if he was handsome, and she said, 'Not particularly.' Then I asked if he was rich, and she said, 'Not at all." Then I asked her if he wasn't handsome or rich, why she married him at all? She said: 'Because he can still drive at night!'"
When I related the joke to my ninth-grade daughter, she didn't get it. But my mother - and about 75 of her contemporaries who had survived flood, war, poverty, recessions, depressions, age, disease, hard times and good times as part of what Mrs. Smith reminded her classmates Tom Brokaw had called "The Greatest Generation" - howled with laughter.
At first blush, it is easy to dismiss the community college system in Mississippi. It's also easy to point to the competition for sparse resources between the four-year institutions, the two-year institutions and the historically black colleges in this state.
But my mother's story is typical in the community college system. Some of Mississippi's best and brightest are products of community colleges - and some of Mississippi's best and brightest in this new century will continue to be produced in those schools unless we forget what those institutions have meant to this state over the last century.
Walking with our momma on the campus of MDCC after driving through the cotton fields and seeing how far she had come in her life and how difficult the journey, my sister and I learned for perhaps the first time why after 60 years our mother still cherishes her diploma from the little school at Moorhead.
Near the end of the reunion dinner, Mom nudged me and quietly directed my attention to a group of students wearing aprons near the cafeteria's kitchen door who had earlier served us the meal and who were waiting to clear the tables.
As it had been as we drove through the cotton fields earlier in the day, I saw on my mother's softly lined face that little wry smile. "That was me," she whispered, "all those years ago, that was me!"
