Quotes from Richard Grant

It's why the Delta doesn't progress. It's not having anything, and not really wanting anything, because that would mean change. That would mean taking on more responsibility. Too many of our people are not interested in progress and change.

that it was good for different cultures to come together, and chip away at human prejudice one party at a time.

In Natchez, you only use the word home if it's antebellum," said Doug. "If your house was built after the Civil War, it's trashy to call it a home.

It's just the South. There's no point trying to explain it.

White people were similarly invented. Europeans coming to America boarded ships as Germans, Poles, English, French, and so on. They soon learned that in America they had a new privileged identity based on something they had scarcely considered before: the pale color of their skins.

Sometimes, when people in the South tell you to have a blessed day, it means fuck you and I hope you have a nice time in hell.

Mississippi is the center of the universe," he said. "The two biggest issues in western Christian civilization are the white-black race issue and the rich-and-poor issue. Mississippi is at the apex of both. And if anybody in the world can solve the problem, it's Mississippi.

People here talk about firearms and hunting in the same way that urban liberals go on about nutrition and exercise.

No state has a more beautiful name—Miss and Sis are sipping on something sippy, and it's probably a sweet tea or an iced bourbon drink—but no state is more synonymous in the rest of the country with racism, ignorance, and cultural backwardness.

The problem with divisiveness is that it doesn't lead to prosperity. It holds us back. We use up all our energy fighting over a pie that is getting smaller and smaller as our population and tax base declines

When I was growing up here, slavery was hardly ever mentioned," said Regina. "Or people would say that the slaves were happy and well looked after, and the Civil War was about states' rights and honor. You still hear that, of course, but we are finally making some progress. The best thing we can do about our awful history is to acknowledge it openly and honestly.

There was white racism aplenty in Natchez, but most of it wasn't hateful, and it didn't preclude voting for a black man. It was subtler and more complex than that, and arguably more insidious because it was less easy to call out.

Think about three hundred Donald Trumps walking around here shopping for niggers. 'Look at that one, didn't they shine him up nice? What if I buy that other one, will you make me a deal?' " That

Whatever race might be, it is certainly not logical or scientific.

Alan Lomax recordings of the prisoners singing

And there's a whole spectrum of behavior that we refer to politely as 'eccentricity.

There were no slaves in Natchez," she insisted haughtily. "We had field hands on our plantations, of course, but they were out of town or across the river. Here in Natchez, we had servants and we loved them. They were part of our families.

By tracing paternal ancestry through Y-DNA, geneticists have found that a third of African American men today are directly descended from a white male ancestor who fathered a mulatto child in the slavery era, "most probably from rape or coerced sexuality," in the words of Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of African American studies at Harvard, and presenter of popular television shows on black genealogy.

White and black citizens are bound together in the most fundamental way possible—at the level of the genome," he writes, and yet divided by the racial pseudoscience originally devised to justify slavery and perpetuated in slightly shifting forms ever since.

The people in charge blame the whites, blame the parents, blame the teachers, blame the students, and now they're blaming the buildings. The facilities are run-down because they haven't maintained them properly. They say there's no money for maintenance, but they spend a fortune on hiring consultant after consultant. Oh my God, so many consultants when we didn't have any textbooks or paper.

F-rated Natchez High, with 700 students, had four principals and four assistant principals, all making between $50,000 and $82,000 a year plus benefits. By contrast, the A-rated public high school in Tupelo, Mississippi, with 2,100 students, had just one principal, working with one assistant principal.

Any white person who doesn't care about the public schools is a fool. The whole future of this town depends on fixing the public schools, so we can stop our population decline and attract new families and businesses. If we can't fix the schools, I'm afraid we're going to lose the town.

The value of identity of course is that so often with it comes purpose.

One of her classmates asked a prisoner what was the worst thing about being there. "The first time they fuck you in the ass," he replied, and this was the first time that she and her classmates learned about that kind of rape.