Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [29]
He became an outspoken critic of the catfish industry. It would not exist without the women who do the processing work, he said. Yet the women are ignored. There is no place for them in the town’s catfish museum. And they were discouraged from setting up a booth at Belzoni’s annual World Catfish Festival. Denise LaSalle, a black R&B singer who had moved on from Belzoni to the big time, was turned down by the catfish festival’s entertainment committee. So Myers organized an annual African-American Heritage Buffalo Fish Festival, scheduled on the same day that Belzoni holds its catfish festival. Buffalo is a carp that is not raised commercially. Pollution in the Mississippi has made local buffalo fish hazardous to eat, so Myers has the fish for the festival brought in from Louisiana.
In April 2002 Belzoni’s two fish festivals were as divided as the black and white neighborhoods in the town that calls itself the Heart of the Delta. At the white folks’ World Catfish Festival, fifteen thousand people wandered the downtown streets. In the course of a day thousands lined up for catfish and hush puppies. Crafts were sold from booths. On the steps of the Humphreys County courthouse, which serve as a stage for local talent, a couple of white guys fronting a big jazz ensemble offered up something that was supposed to be the blues. The crowd swelled when an entrant in the talent contest began to sing the “Dixie” variation in Mickey Newbury’s “American Trilogy.” The entire downtown was given over to this local celebration of the catfish. But the festival—with its funnel-cake booths, craft sales, and children’s games—was whiter than Brigadoon. There was hardly an African-American face to be seen.
They were all three blocks away, where Belzoni’s African-American community was gathered in front of a stage made of two-by-fours and plywood, listening to hip-hop contestants, local musicians with bad amplification, and other contests and readings organized by “the Doc.” Late in the afternoon Denise LaSalle’s touring coach pulled up at the makeshift stage and the local-girl-made-good led her band through an R&B show that made the white bluesmen on the courthouse steps sound like the Carpenters. She closed with a gospel number—“because when I left Zion Rock Church in Belzoni, Mississippi, I took God along with me.” She came back for the Buffalo festival because “Doc asked me and because of the women working up in those catfish houses.”
The doctor, a beatifically sweet man who weighs close to three hundred pounds and runs on adrenaline, returned to a theme he’d been working all day. He has organized carpal tunnel workshops, fried buffalo, directed traffic, served as an emcee. Onstage, he got back on-message. “They brought our ancestors here to chop cotton; now we chop catfish for six-fifty an hour,” he told the all-black crowd gathered on the vacant lot beside his small clinic. (Actually, nonunion companies pay less than $6 an hour, and even union workers don’t start at $6.50. Sherry Durst started at Freshwater Farms at $5.95. Many of the line workers at Delta Pride top out at $7.30 after fifteen years.)
Labor unions can help with wages and some working conditions, but only the federal government has the muscle to protect workers’ bodies in the Third World pockets of this country, places like the Mississippi Delta, the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and Appalachia.
As the clock ran out on Bill Clinton’s second term, it looked as though the federal government wouldn’t be coming to the aid of the tens of thousands of women cutting catfish in the Mississippi Delta. The corporate coalition that had hired Scalia to block ergonomics regulation was close to achieving a goal