![]() Decades after the first casino arrived, Tunica offers “ less opportunity than all but six other counties in the United States.” Since the height of the casino boom, a number have shuttered, including the largest in Mississippi, Harrah’s, in 2014. Little of the windfall was used for career training or to recruit other industries to the area poverty rates, while markedly improved, remained among the highest in the nation, and schools continued to be some of the lowest performing. ![]() The casinos grossed hundreds of millions of dollars, but according to a Washington Post, despite the jobs they brought to the region, the revenue primarily benefited the white property owners - called “plantation owners” by County Administrator Michael Thompson - who leased their land to the casinos. In the early nineteen-nineties, casinos had been the great hope for renewal, especially in Tunica County, the northernmost part of the Delta. The Blues Trail, a state-sponsored attempt to drive tourism to the Delta, may be Mississippi’s last, best chance at revitalizing the area, one of the poorest in the country. Seaberry is one of the last in a line of sharecroppers, and today much of the land in the Delta has been given over to agribusiness: Monsanto and Dupont signs mark the fields of corn and soybeans along Highway 61, while fast-food chains and Walmarts have pulled commerce away from downtowns and closer to the highways.Ī few years ago, a Mississippi Blues Trail Marker - surrounded by a barbed-wire fence to ward off would-be thieves - was placed in front of Po’ Monkey’s Lounge. Traditionally housed in shacks like Seaberry’s, juke joints flourished in the South before World War I, but the Great Migration began a process of significant decline. These roadside barrelhouses offered rural blacks a place to drink, dance, hear live music, and gamble, at a time when they were forbidden from patronizing white establishments. Run by Seaberry since 1963, Po’ Monkey’s is one of the last of the Mississippi juke joints (derived from a Gullah word, “jook” or “joog,” meaning disorderly) that once peppered the cotton fields and plantations of the Delta region. Dressed in suspenders, a magenta dress shirt, and a black tie, he greeted the guests who came to listen to blues and soul music - locals from Cleveland and Mound Bayou, and Teach-for-America workers, and teachers on a professional development trip - though he didn’t so much talk to his guests as nod approvingly while chewing on an unlit cigar. On a suffocating July night, Seaberry, nearly six feet tall and solidly built, perched inside the door of his house. ![]() He doesn’t own the fields, or the house, though on Thursday nights, when he opens its doors to the public for a $5 cover charge, it’s easy to think otherwise. Willie “Po’ Monkey” Seaberry, now in his mid-seventies, still farms the fields that surround it, and lives in a room in the back. Po’ Monkey’s Lounge, an assemblage of old cypress planks and corrugated steel covered in hand-painted signs, sits on the edge of a cotton field outside of Merigold, Mississippi. ![]()
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