"The Mississippi Delta starts in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on catfish row in Vicksburg according to writer David Cohn. The Delta is an alluvial deposit of thirty feet of fertile loam, stolen from the prairies of America's Midwestern breadbasket by the Mississippi River and moved down south by annual flooding. The soil of the Corn Belt is now nurturing King Cotton. In the 1950s the Delta was more than a geographical location; it was home to a unique social, political and economic system that reflected the best and the worst of our southern agrarian society. The plantation system was colliding head on with the twentieth century. A black majority was held in the grip of segregation by a mostly benevolent white minority. These stories tell of one boy's experience coming of age in a now, long lost time."--Publisher's description.