Seven Years on the Margins in Rural Mississippi | The New Yorker

The small city of Greenwood, Mississippi, at the eastern fringe of the Delta, is home to the historic black neighborhood of Baptist Town. The area is known for its contribution to the blues—musicians like Robert Johnson and David (Honeyboy) Edwards played there—and for housing some of the city’s poorest residents. According to census data, forty-eight per cent of Greenwood’s black residents live in poverty, compared to eleven per cent of white residents. Baptist Town, an enclave of mobile homes and shotgun shacks, cut off from the rest of the city by train tracks, has the feeling of being stuck in time. In the 2011 film “The Help,” it was used as a stand-in for Mississippi during Jim Crow.