Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War.

By John C. Willis. The American South Series. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Pp. [xvi], 239. Paper, $19.50, ISBN 0-8139-1982-7; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8139-1971-1.)

Neither historians of Mississippi nor readers of James C. Cobb's The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York, 1992) will consider startling the overarching thesis that John C. Willis posits. For more than two decades after the Civil War, African Americans looked upon the interior of the Mississippi Delta as a land of opportunity. With varying degrees of success, they became backcountry landowners and political power brokers. By the 1890s these halcyon days of black liberty had ended. An increasingly satiated lust for regional economic development and steadily declining cotton prices made a class of independent black landowners antithetical to visions of an emerging plantation empire. African Americans, whose labor as sharecroppers and whose willingness to carve farmland from the swamps of the Delta had once been desired, fell victim to political chicanery, violence, and the shady dealings of merchant-creditors.

Willis's contribution to southern historiography lies not so much in his thesis but rather in his ability to ferret out the stories of ordinary black Mississippians from county deed records and manuscript censuses. His achievement is most evident in the first four chapters of Forgotten Time, in which Willis establishes a significant difference between African American life in riparian and interior counties. In the former, the hegemonic influence of white planters survived the Civil War, but in the latter, owners of vast tracks of untilled acreage proved willing to extend favorable terms for the rental or purchase of land to ex-slaves. Willis expertly uses the lives of Bohlen Lucas, Lewis Spearman, and William Toler to illuminate the paths to property holding that black Mississippians pursued. Ironically, however, African American success in filling in the Delta interior helped lead to a compression of the distance between the river counties and the backcountry. Railroads, economic distress on farms, organized violence against black political power, and lynchings turned the entire Delta into a closed society unfriendly to the maintenance of African American liberty.

The research that brings the first half of the book to life is impressive, but the same cannot be said of the book's second half. As the story unfolds and black autonomy devolves, Willis largely abandons courthouse documents in favor of secondary works and observers' accounts. While the author's decision to cast his tale as a tragic one justifies such a shift, readers will long for the rich and unfamiliar stories that appear in the first half of the book.

That observation notwithstanding, Forgotten Time merits the close attention of southern historians. It is a finely crafted and well-written work of original scholarship.

BRADLEY G. BOND
University of Southern Mississippi