Tallulah

I grew up on a farm outside Tallulah, a fairly prosperous middle-class farming community in northeastern Louisiana, and when I was about sixteen years old, we moved into a house my folks had built within the city limits.  I received my grammar and high school education in Tallulah.  The town's population then was evenly divided between black and white residents, with a railroad track the dividing line between the two.  That was during the segregation era, when there were separate drinking fountains, restaurants, and schools for white and black.  When my parents died, Nancy and I put my family home up for sale; that was in 1999, and I hadn't been back since. 

All my coming-of-age memories are from Tallulah, so I was really curious as to how it had changed in the years since I saw it last. 

We drove the twenty miles from Vicksburg and parked beside the house in which I spent my high school years.  Under the carport was a crowd of black people.  Some of them didn't look friendly.  Two dogs were with them - a Doberman and a pit bull mix.  There were four or five cars in the driveway, and things weren't neat and tidy.  Nancy and I walked over to the group, and I said, "How are y'all?  I grew up in this house, and twelve years ago we sold it to a minister."

An elderly man sitting in a chair and holding a cane smiled and said, "That's me!"  He told us that he had had a stroke a few months before, but even though his speech was not back to normal, he had missed only one week of preaching.  He and his wife had had ten children, nine of them still alive, and a bunch of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  "Go get your mama," he told one of his sons.  A nice looking, sweet, somewhat younger woman came out in a nursing uniform.  "It was so nice of y'all to pay for the heater that went out when we bought the house," she said.  She asked for our address so they could keep in touch.  They seemed genuinely delighted that we had stopped by to say hello.

I asked the old gentleman, "How are things in Tallulah these days?"  "Not so good," he said.  "No jobs for the young people."  I didn't feel comfortable inquiring about current race relations.

As we walked away, he said, "God bless you, and have a safe trip."  I told them that we were headed for New Orleans.  Lot of sin in New Orleans, I pointed out, but Nancy assured them that we were going there for the food, not the sin.

I didn't see any white people in my old neighborhood.  We drove to the end of the street, to what had once been a nursing home.  It had become living quarters for migrant Latino farm workers.

We passed the long building within which I had attended both Tallulah Elementary School and Tallulah High School.  An impressive edifice at one time, it was now deserted and run down.

We next went to the Methodist church I attended as a boy, and I hoped to have a look at the elevator whose construction my mother had helped organize and which bore her name on a plaque.  No one was there; it didn't look well kept up.  I began to wonder if perhaps all the white people had fled the area.

Downtown Tallulah was never Rodeo Drive, but the main street had always had thriving businesses throughout its length.  Now only a few shops remained open.  Most of the storefronts were delapidated; some were boarded up.  It was a depressing sight.

It was obvious that the downtown area - and in fact everything on one side of the bayou that flows through town - was pretty much exclusively black now.  I said to Nancy, let's go over on the other side of the bayou, where the upscale homes have always been.  It wasn't long before we realized that the only people we saw walking in that area were black as well.  Unfortunately, the upkeep of those residences appeared to be deteriorating.  Further out, there were a few areas that were still largely white-dominated, as far as we could tell.  Tallulah is not much better integrated now than it was when I was a boy, and the people are poorer.  That makes me sad.

Wikipedia tells me that the total population hasn't changed much since I lived there - still about 10,000 - but the racial demographics of Tallulah are now 75% black and 25% white.  This is classic white flight, southern small town variety.

So the town of my childhood memories is gone.  It surely won't make a comeback during my lifetime.  Almost all the people I knew there have died or moved.  It's unsettlling.