Sweet Potato Capitol and Main Street

Sweet Potato Capital and Main Street

It was a little town in northwest Mississippi that prided itself on being the sweet potato capital of the world. Life there had always been about hardworking cotton pickers and sweet potato diggers. At one time cotton was king. Then it died out, and the sewing factories became the popular place to work and earn a living. Life was grand.

Then the Mexican immigrants began to move in.

They were willing to ride the low-bed trucks out into the fields and set out potato slips twice as fast as any local farmer could do it. They didn’t mind the long hours or the six-day weeks. They ate bean burritos out of foil and drank water by the gallon in the hot, sticky humidity of those sweet potato fields, working through heat that would have laid a local man flat by ten in the morning.

The community accepted them. That’s the truth. There was some grumbling at first, the way there always is, but it cooled off. They contributed to the local economy. They helped make farmers rich — richer than cotton ever had, some of them said quietly, though they wouldn’t say it loud. The families were housed together in a cluster of little places off Main Street. White buses came to get them before sunup and brought them back after dark.

On Friday evenings they flooded into the Piggly Wiggly to cash their paychecks and buy a few groceries to keep them going through the week — tortillas, dried peppers, big plastic jugs of oil. The store knew exactly what it was doing. They cashed those checks because they knew the money was going right back across the counter before the men ever made it out the front door. Whether the Piggly Wiggly took a little something off the top for the trouble — well. I never asked, and they never said, and the men standing in line didn’t have the English or the leverage to ask either. That’s how it works in a small town. You take the deal in front of you because it’s the only deal there is. A man who doesn’t know what a check-cashing fee is supposed to look like will pay whatever the woman at the counter punches into the register, and he’ll say thank you on the way out the door.

After a while, nobody even stared. They were part of the wallpaper. They were the reason the fields got planted. They were the reason the Piggly Wiggly stayed open late on Friday nights with all the lights on and the registers ringing.

Everything was fine.

Until an Arabic family moved in and opened a Subway.

Mahmood and Selma. Selma’s brother, Mohammed. They bought the franchise on the corner where the old tax office used to be. Painted it. Put up the green and yellow sign. Hung the bell on the door.

And the town did not know what to do.

The women wore long dresses and covered their heads. In a place where the air sat on you like a wet wool blanket — a hundred degrees and the humidity off the river — those women walked from their car to the back door of the shop in all that fabric, and people stared. Pickup trucks slowed down for a better look. Old men at the gas station watched over the tops of their coffee cups and didn’t even pretend they weren’t watching.

The thing was — and this is the part that breaks my heart even now — Mahmood and Selma made wonderful sandwiches. Better than any Subway I ever ate at. Selma would build that thing like it was going to be photographed. She’d remember your name on the second visit. She’d ask after your mama by the third. Mohammed worked the register, and he laughed at every joke the old farmers told, even the ones that weren’t funny, even the ones I think he knew were a little bit at his expense.

I knew a woman who wouldn’t go in there. Wouldn’t. Drove twenty miles over to Senatobia for her lunch instead. She told me once, with her mouth tight, that she didn’t trust them. I asked her what she thought they were going to do. Poison the mustard? She didn’t laugh. She just looked at me and said, You know what I mean, Carol.

I did know what she meant. That’s the worst part of small-town living — when you understand exactly what somebody means and you wish to God you didn’t.

But here’s what I came back to tell you.

Mahmood and Selma made a go of it.

They figured out what every small Southern town actually wants, which is something to do and somewhere to sit. So they put in free wi-fi. Just like that. A little sign in the window — FREE WI-FI — and within a month the high school kids were sprawled across two tables doing homework and pretending to do homework. The retired men started coming in for the coffee, which was bad but cheap, and they’d sit in the back corner and argue about football and the weather and the price of diesel. Young mamas came in with their toddlers because the booths were clean and Selma always had a sticker in her apron pocket.

That’s all it took. Wi-fi and a sticker. The same town that had slowed their trucks down for a better look at a woman in a scarf was sitting in her dining room three afternoons a week eating a six-inch turkey on wheat.

You couldn’t tell me the day it shifted. There wasn’t one. It was a thousand small Tuesdays. Somebody asked Mahmood how he was doing and meant it. Somebody told Selma her English was getting good and they didn’t say it mean. Mohammed remembered which deacon liked extra pickles, and the deacon noticed, and the deacon told his wife, and his wife came in the next Saturday.

The Mexican workers were already part of the landscape by then. The buses still ran before sunup. The fields still got planted twice as fast as a local could do it. The checks still got cashed at the Piggly Wiggly. And now Mahmood and Selma were part of the landscape too — the lights on Main Street, the bell on the door, the only place in town where you could get a hot sandwich after six.

Three different countries, three different languages spoken at home, all of them showing up every morning to do the work the town needed done. All of them buying gas at the same pump, picking up prescriptions at the same Walgreens, paying property tax to the same county. All of them building, in their own quiet way, the economy that kept the place alive.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about a small Southern town. It will fight you at the door. It will stare at you in the parking lot. It will say things behind your back you’d give anything not to hear.

And then one day it will sit down at your table, and it will not get up.

— Carol Seymour