The Senator
Who Feeds the Delta Willie Simmons picked cotton, fought in Vietnam and opened a restaurant. He couldn’t have found better training for the Legislature. By Eliza McClure
A
hard rain falls. Clouds shooting swiftly across a bulletgray sky. French-style townhouses tangled in vines. A muddy road littered with tin cans, canvas tarps, broken china. Mortar shells crying in the distance. Five men in uniform squat near the steps of a townhome. White, black, Chinese-American, Samoan-Indian, Italian—they wear olive fatigues caked with mud, M-16s slung across their shoulders. All five huddle around a fire topped with chicken wire. A can marked “Ham and Lima Beans” simmers on the mesh. The baby-faced black man, still wearing a helmet, uses his pinky as a thermometer. He feels the ground tremble beneath his muddy boots but ignores it. It’s the rain. Worse than April in the Mississippi Delta. “We got any more crackers?” he asks, licking his finger. The white man — more boy than man — plucks a package from his rucksack, passing it to his left. “Think we got enough to go ‘round,” says the blue-eyed, acne-pocked boy. He passes the crackers to his left. Each soldier takes a cracker, dipping it in the can. THE MEEK REPORT 81
