Book Excerpts
Synopsis
Delta Jacks is a humor-filled look at the lives and times of a colorful pack of Mississippi Delta characters. The book begins with a quick, but deep, romp through the history of the storied region, and focuses on the Perry family’s many Jacks.
First is the author’s Granddaddy “Jack,” who was nicknamed for a mule and migrated to the Delta in 1900 after an old friend spotted him working as a conductor on a mule-drawn streetcar in Memphis.
Overnight this Jack went from a 14-cents-per-hour job to a $350-per-year position, with perks, as manager of a pioneering Delta plantation. He ended up owning more than 17,000 acres of fertile Delta farmland in Tunica County.
Once proclaimed the “poorest county in the United States,” Tunica County now rivals Atlantic City in casino development. The county is also believed to be where Hernando de Soto “discovered” the Mississippi River and it produced blues legend Robert Johnson, said to be the grandfather of rock and roll. These and other historical highlights are touched on in the book
In Granddaddy Jack there are faint echoes of the Big Daddy character from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams, who often visited the Perry home as a youngster. Jack’s wife, Miss Sallie, another wonderful character, descended from a Norman knight and British royalty (a genealogy which let the author humorously trace the family history all the way back to Adam, thanks to some ancient royal revisionism).
Jack and Sallie were a dynamic team, with lofty goals. They built schools for the farm children, opposed the Klan and founded an Episcopal church in Tunica.
They had nine children, including the author’s father, Jack Whitley Perry, the joker of the deck. The book hits its stride when it gets into Daddy Jack’s endless shenanigans, including his famous Fun Closet, his patented “suicide” drives off the levee (which included victims such as legendary stage and movie director Elia Kazan) and his stories of the farm hands, who merit a chapter of their own.
There are also touching stories of Daddy Jack’s honesty, his love of family and his generosity. Each year he gave away thousands of watermelons, even delivering them for free when recipients got too old to make the trip to the farm.
Daddy Jack was 35 when he met his wife-to-be on one of his rambunctious weekend getaways to the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, where Delta planters often congregated. Georgia Pace worked at the hotel as a hatcheck girl and had won the title of Miss Peabody in a beauty pageant.
They wed within a year and reared four children, including the author, whose first name is just plain J, making him just a “quarter jack.” He goes by Whit.
Growing up on an 800-acre farm alongside the Mississippi River levee, Whit had a Huck Finn boyhood, highlighted by the summer visits of his California cousin, Jack Perry Selman—who promptly was nicknamed Bonehead since there were already too many Jacks.
Boyhood adventures included shooting the bull (literally) and trying to avoid air-borne sacks of flour when the youths persuaded a local crop duster to dive-bomb their Jeep.
There are other tales, such as the time the author got swept up in a vigilante manhunt when he was too young to fully understand what was happening. Titled “Of mice and men,” this story will surprise you.
There’s a glimpse into Daddy Jack’s early days when Hollywood, Mississippi, was a growing railroad town where, one writer said, “Every white man carried a pistol and no Negro was to be caught with one.”
The author takes us through his own early, asthmatic years, when he realized he was allergic to The Delta and farm work, and began to free himself from the region’s gravitational pull.
As a teenager he worked summers on the West Indies island of Tobago, teaching scuba diving and spear fishing at a boys’ summer camp, building up his lungs—and dreaming of what was over the horizon.
When he was 21 he set off alone with a backpack and a guitar and traveled across Europe, North Africa and Asia, arriving in Nepal in sight of Mount Everest on the day that the first American made it to the summit.
His abodes ranged from a Peace Corps hut in the Iranian desert to the stone floor of Angkor Wat, the abandoned, vine-entangled temple ruin in Cambodia, complete with an Indiana Jones cast of idols, bats and reptiles.
His transportation included a dung cart in India and buses filled with people, sheep and chickens in Turkey. His guitar was his meal ticket. He’d play a few folk songs and people would open their hearts and hearths to him. He often slept on rope beds, boards and floors.
He was in Saigon when the Viet Cong made its first raid on the city.
The high point of the trip, literally and figuratively, was when he was in the Himalayas, on top of the world, free to go wherever he wanted. Feeling like a weightless astronaut in space, with nothing to push off on, he headed home to start a family, refuting Thomas Wolfe’s famous dictum that “you can’t go home again.”
Although the author now lives in Georgia, a long way from The Delta, the Mississippi region never left the author. One day, after wishing that his parents could have known his granddaughter, it hit him: at least she can know them!
He sat down and began this story.