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“Wages could be higher,” said White. For a forty-hour week skinning fifty thousand to sixty thousand catfish, Sherry Durst earns $240, an annual income that keeps her and her son $540 above the federal poverty level. “They tax us so hard, we keep only about $160 or $170 each week,” Durst said. Eugene Scalia and Baruch Fellner could spend that much on dinner at the Red Sage. “You got to decide if you are going to buy a car, pay your house rent, or buy your food,” said another Freshwater employee.

Sherry Durst manages, as Bush once said, “to put food on her family.” She says she hasn’t been treated for carpal tunnel problems or tendonitis, but her hands do hurt at night. She plans to leave before the serious problems set in. “A catfish house is not a place for a young person to spend the rest of their life,” she said. “I want a job sitting behind a desk, like white folks.” Durst is young, smart, eloquent, and determined. But the unemployment rate in Humphreys County is 12 percent. The average income for households where the women are the breadwinners is $15,833.

The commercial catfish business—like the plantation system to which it is sometimes compared—is feudal in structure. Workers and their bosses are bound together and locked in place in a relationship defined by land ownership. Up and down the Mississippi Delta the landowners have moved from cotton to catfish, but land ownership still shapes the social hierarchy. The more ponds a landholder owns, the larger his share in the local catfish co-op. At the bottom of the feudal pyramid are the African-American men who work in the catfish ponds and the African-American women who work in the processing houses.

“You can go to a chicken house, but there’s not much else you can do around here,” said Carrie Ann Lewis. Lewis, like Durst, went to work in a catfish-processing plant when she was in her early twenties. For four years in the late 1980s she worked at Delta Pride. Today she is physically worn out. Each of her wrists has a large prominent knob on top. “Gangliatic cysts,” said Dr. Ron Myers. He is standing in the crowded space that doubles as a bedroom–living room in the four-hundred-square-foot house Lewis shares with her two children.

Lewis was a “long gunner.” She spent her days grabbing fish off the conveyor belt and thrusting them into the vacuum “gun barrel” that sucks out the intestines. “Sometimes so many of those fishes go by you see fishes in your sleep,” she said. Within a year Lewis began to develop tingling and numbness in her hands. Pains in her shoulder joints were diagnosed as tendonitis. At night her hands ached. If the pain lasted all night, she was unable to sleep. She agreed to an operation on one wrist and it provided some relief, so she had the same operation on the other wrist. She was out on workers’ compensation for six months. When she returned to the plant she asked to be assigned to something other than the long gun. “The supervisor told me, ‘You can go back to the long gun or you can go home.’ ” She went home and has been there ever since. A local lawyer, whose ad is on the back of the forty-seven-page Belzoni phone book, got her a $2,000 settlement. At twenty-nine, she was finished. She has other health problems and lives on a $545 monthly disability check. Carrie Ann Lewis reached her highest lifetime earnings, $3.45 an hour, in 1989, the year she left Delta Pride. It’s not likely she will ever make that much again. According to Dr. Myers, she can never work on a cut-and-gut line in any of the half-dozen catfish-processing plants that surround Belzoni.

Ron Myers grew up in Chicago and graduated from medical school in Wisconsin—a place as far from the Delta in culture as it is in miles. His great-great-grandfather had been enslaved on a plantation one hundred miles from Belzoni. Myers, who is also an ordained minister, left the Midwest to open a clinic in Mississippi when a congregation in Wisconsin agreed to support his work. “I began to see twenty-four-, twenty-five-, twenty-six-year-old ladies with the arthritic wrists of sixty-year-olds,