Like many towns across the Southern Delta of the US, Midnight is little more than a faded general store, a towering cotton gin, a Baptist church and shotgun homes scattered along a few narrow streets.
Row houses with peeling paint, sagging facades and tired wooden boards are clustered between the cotton fields.
Before Hurricane Katrina, these towns already struggled with poverty. For years they have waited for better jobs, decent housing, good schools. Now, damaged themselves from the storm, they are trying to cope with an influx of thousands of unemployed, homeless new residents who fled the hurricane.
PHOTO: AP
"We were suffering before that damn hurricane came," said Stanley Bates, a man with cramped, worn hands who has worked years in the cotton fields for US$5.15 an hour.
New Orleans and coastal Mississippi and Alabama were Katrina's most obvious casualties, but the predominantly black, perennially poor Delta region is also suffering. Overnight, populations grew by the hundreds in the towns that were the end of the road for evacuees who went as far as they could on a tank of gas. Now, evacuees are seeking help from towns that can barely help themselves.
Lake Providence, Louisiana, a community of 5,000 residents, swelled by 1,000 in the days leading up to and following Katrina. Mayor Isaac Fields said he had no idea so many were coming. After all, Lake Providence is 450km from New Orleans, and there's not much waiting when you get there.
There were 200 people on a waiting list for affordable housing before the hurricane. The town has the highest unemployment rate in the state, and those who are lucky enough to have jobs work in the cotton industry or government.
"We want anybody who wants to stay to stay," Fields said. "But we don't have the jobs to offer them."
In the height of the cotton industry, workers never made much, but they could usually find work. Now, workers like Bates have seen the cotton season dwindle from four months to three weeks. Economic changes and technical advances in the farming industry since the Great Depression of the 1930s destroyed the availability of cotton work, and nothing arrived to replace it.
"As agriculture declined and as machines took over, the Delta became increasingly poor," Jackson State University economics professor McKinley Alexander said. "The people who remained were either elderly or least prepared to enter the work force."
According to 2000 US Census figures interpreted by the Mississippi Urban Research Center at Jackson State University, at least one-third of the nearly 454,000 people living in the Delta's 18 counties are below poverty level. In some counties it is as much as 40 percent. The national average is about 12 percent.
Most of the homes here are at least 25 or 30 years old, and worth an average of US$56,000 -- less than half the national average home value. Thirteen of the counties are more than 50 percent black. Nationally, black average household income is US$29,423, compared with US$44,867 for whites.
Many who fled here to escape Katrina are new to the Delta, but others are people who grew up here and moved away.
Quick-fix money given to evacuees from the Federal Emergency Management Agency or aid from charities could create a temporary boom in towns where evacuees have landed, but the money will soon run out.
Brian Cain tried to get to Mississippi but only made it to the state line. For days, he slept on the levee in the historic town of St. Joseph, Louisiana, until he walked past Wenda Fry's front yard three weeks ago.
He offered to mow her lawn, noticed she had a vacant trailer around back and asked if he could move in. She agreed.
Before long, Mayor Ed Brown noticed the scrappy 46-year-old working in Fry's yard and offered him a job.
"I been working ever since," Cain said. "I do anything."
Brown is glad Cain is here. The one good thing Katrina did was expose the Delta's plight, and he hopes the region can begin anew. For that to happen, towns like St. Joseph, population 1,600, will need all the hardworking people it can find.
"I want more than I can handle," Brown says. "This is my opportunity to turn this place around."
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