Tom Dent interviews Unita Blackwell in Mayersville, Mississippi. She talks about her work as mayor of Mayersville. They talk about current issues in the town that have come up since they last spoke, two years prior. Job creation is an issue. Riverboat gambling has been greatly discussed. The population of Mayersville is around 526 people, and it is the county seat. It is the only incorporated town in Issaquena County, which has a population of around 1800 people, recently down from 2500. Dent talks about his drive into the delta and the striking “absence of Black bodies” working in the fields, and the changes that have occurred since his first trip to the region in 1967. Blackwell says that many of the Black workers have left the area to find work in larger cities, first to Chicago, and then Los Angeles and Dallas. They left to find unskilled work, usually in menial jobs. People in Greenville are no longer outside looking for work during the day because there is no work. On a recent trip to Detroit, she was surprised by how many people she met from Mississippi. The Black people are leaving the rural areas for the cities. White people are gentrifying the cities. It has been a step-by-step migration, first to smaller towns in Mississippi, then larger towns. The next generation moves on to larger cities. Blackwell talks about her recent trip to New Orleans with a delegation from China. She has a hard time guessing what percentage of Mayersville residents work, but a very high number are out of work. They used to have a large number of dropouts, but that trend has changed. This is not due to a formal program, but just general encouragement from the community to stay in school. One job maybe people in the area have is laying concrete mats along the river to save the levee. The welfare department is the only county department to employ Black workers, and they only employ three. Blackwell sees the advantages to living in a place like Mayersville as the peace and quiet and the sense of “home” and community she feels there. They have no movie theater or other forms of entertainment, but that also means that there is nowhere to spend the little bit of money that people get. They do not have bars, but they do have a couple cafes where people can drink and dance. There is are drugs in the town, but the community generally keeps an eye out. Everyone in town knows when someone has a problem. They use the county police for the town. About 15-20% of the town is White. They discuss the proximity of the Mississippi River, by which Blackwell has always lived. Dent thinks of the river as a throughway that opened the continent to European expansion and exploitation, but is also the route from Africa “and maybe the route back.” Blackwell points out that there were more slaves per slave owner in Issaquena County than anywhere else in the United States. Mayersville was a port. It also had one of the first newspapers. She sees the development she has spearheaded in the area as something that is in her blood, inherited from her ancestors. The slaves were the people who thought up ways to sustain the society. That knowledge was brought from Africa. The Black community has a closer relationship with the land than the White community does, because they were the ones who worked and prayed over the land. She feels a strong connection to her African heritage, but that was pressed out of most people, who were trying to find acceptance.