by Janice Tracy

Created on: December 10, 2008

My paternal grandparents began their life together 1922 in a rural community located in Attala County, Mississippi near almost all of the people to whom they were related. Their only child, my father, was born the next year, and his life, like the lives of my grandparents, was set on a path that would change because of the Great Depression. My grandparents lived in a very simple house, with no conveniences, located on land they farmed. They used kerosene or "coal oil" lamps for light, their water came from a well, and they heated the house with wood burned in an iron stove. Food was cooked on yet another cast-iron stove, and water for bathing was heated on that same stove. There was no refrigeration. My grandparents' living conditions in rural Mississippi in the 1920s are almost impossible for most people my age to even imagine.

I thought it seemed "right" to write about the depression years at this particular time, since our world is filled with information about the troubled economic conditions that prevail now in our country. Our economic experts tell us that we are in an economic recession, and there is talk that another Depression may be around the corner. This story is about how difficult economic times during the Great Depression and the period that followed affected my grandparents, my parents, and others like them.

Around 1932, when my father was about 9 years old, his parents, my grandparents, moved from Attala County to the Mississippi Delta. This was quite a bold undertaking for my grandparents, because they left the only place that either of them and their son had ever called home, to travel to Humphreys County, Mississippi, where they would continue to live for the next twenty-three years. The decision to go somewhere else to farm must have been a difficult choice for them to make; likely it was a necessity rather than a choice at all. It must have been a sad experience for all three of them, since they left all their family members behind. My father was a child, an only child at that, and he had to leave his numerous cousins and his young friends to attend a school in a place that was "next to nowhere." He later graduated from high school in a very small town in the Delta that had only 450 residents. He was one of only 14 students in his graduating class.

Moving to "The Delta" meant more years of farming and guiding a plow for my grandfather, at least until times improved and he acquired a tractor and the machinery that went with it. For my grandmother,

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