He owns a small bar in the Delta of Mississippi. There were no windows and I felt as if I should knock to go inside.
There were about six men sitting out front drinking and smoking on a beautiful Sunday morning and they looked at me as if I were lost, however they invited me to go inside.
After I walked in I was greeted by Henry, the owner of Nickson Juke Joint… I did not see a sign on the front of the bar and his Mississippi drawl was long and sincere, but a foreign language to me. We then started to talk about the past as I sat down at the bar with my camera in hand.
Henry is 72 years old and has lived in Mississippi his entire life. He told me, “When I grew up around here, they was pickin’ cotton paying like $1.25 per hour for pickin’ cotton – mostly everybody, that’s what they was paying and $5 a day for driving-driving a tractor.”
I talked to him about growing up in the Delta and he said, “It was hard, during the time that I come up.” He then told me that his family lived in a small farm house, “My parents and them, we stayed on a farm like a sharecropper and picking cotton, pick ten bales of cotton a day they get $10 and they split the money with you.”
Juke joint: a bar featuring music on a jukebox and typically having an area for dancing.