A Story of Hope and Perseverance
Nearing the end of his life, a man reveals his struggles as a child born into poverty in the Deep South, and his will as a young an to rise above his family's dark secrets and leave his past behind.
Overview
As a boy, Sonny knew something wasn't right. But the people who knew him best wouldn't help him understand why he felt so out of place. Born in a time and place proudly cloaked in Jim Crow traditions and lynch mob justice, Sonny sees little opportunity to escape the cotton plantations that his family has worked for generations. But as hopeless as things appear, Sonny is driven by a will to rise above his conditions.
Raised by a grandmother who was forced to take him in, Sonny soon realizes even his family didn't think he would ever amount to much more than a sharecropper. With guardians who had little use for education or pipe dreams, he is left to find his own motivation. Sonny is inspired time and again by a precious few who recognize his potential, but he knows without an education, there is little chance he will ever leave the Delta. Forced to work in the fields, it didn't take long for him to fully understand that sharecropping was only slightly better than slavery.
In the decade leading up to the second world war, lives of black males in the Delta were precarious at best. For many, if a lynch mob didn't get you, the court system did. Seventy-five years after slavery, the cotton industry in Sunflower County addressed its shortage of laborers by arresting countless blacks for petty crimes and slapping them with long prison sentences. In no time they were transferred to Parchman Farm where they would work on chain gangs, providing the state with free labor all across
the region.
Delta Son reflects the lives of a growing number of forward thinking young blacks who wanted more than their parents before them. Slowly they decided it was no longer good enough to live in fear of being arrested or to blindly accept the miserable existence of a field hand, working under a merciless sun for wages they could barely survive on. By the 1950's times were indeed changing, as more and more families began to migrate to cities in the north. But for Sonny, his family was from a different era
and very much entrenched in Drew, Mississippi. As relatives and friends left the Delta for good, the only way he would make it out would be of his own accord. And it wouldn't be easy.
Sonny's story is a test of one person's will to succeed in a place where everything is set against them.