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

Ahard 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.

“Doesn’t beat my Mama’s ham and limas,” the man in the helmet chuckles.

The men laugh, hands reaching for the same can, minds drifting to the same place —home — where a scene like this might never happen.

Fear, they’ve discovered, is color-blind.

Willie Simmons, a 66-year-old Mississippi state senator, learned a lot about himself during his 11 months in Vietnam. “I think [the war] helped me find myself and motivated me to reach out and love and care for all people,” says Simmons, sitting in his spacious restaurant in Cleveland, a place where you’d be hard pressed to find a table for two. Noted Cleveland Mayor Billy Nowell: “The tables are close enough so that you can carry on conversations to your right and your left.” Perhaps this setup plays to the senator’s sense of community: the more people huddled around a table, with varying perspectives and experiences, the more productive the conversation. After the war, Simmons devoted his life to public service, whether that meant passing legislation in Jackson, approving school board budgets or doling out collards to hungry customers. It’s something else he learned in Vietnam: food has the power to bring all types of “The tables are people together — transcending skin tone, background, beliefs, age. He sees it play out close enough in his restaurant every Saturday afternoon. so that you On a Saturday afternoon 50 years ago, Willie Simmons was chopping cotton can carry on alongside his mother, father and 10 siblings in Utica. Although his parents never finished conversations high school, they instilled in their son the importance of education. And at age 20, he to your right left the stage at Alcorn State University, a bachelor’s degree in social science in hand. and your left.” He wanted to be a teacher and so it wasn’t long before he ended up in Rosedale, where — MAYOR BILLY NOWELL he taught high school social studies. After his stint in Vietnam, Simmons became the first black part-time carrier at the Cleveland Post Office. Later he worked for the Department of Corrections, creating a program that helped ex-prisoners find jobs. In 1992, after nearly 15 years in corrections, where he rose to deputy director, Simmons sought a new way to serve his community: He decided to run for the Senate. That idea came from an unlikely source. His son had served as a Senate page in Jackson as a high school junior and called his father each night, relaying the day’s events. “I was seeing a lot of tomfoolery in the Senate at that time,” recalls Reggie. Hearing the son’s stories of legislative inefficiency eventually motivated the father to take a shot.

But something else also motivated Simmons to take that shot: As a black man running for political office, he wanted to stand out, wanted to defy odds, wanted to unite members of his community.

So the former Army machine-gunner decided to battle Sen. Robert Crook, a 28-year legislative veteran. Asked how he won, Simmons credited voters. “It was fun, challenging and very, very inspiring to see how people came together to be supportive.”

Truth be told, the community that came together for him then is much like the community that comes together now — at his restaurant.

“H old on a minute,” Sen. Willie Simmons says under his breath, turning to the buffet. He leaps from the table, tying loose apron strings around his waist, and rushes toward a young woman in a blue work shirt, gives her a big hug, then kneels to greet her son. Despite her cries of “that’s plenty,” the senator piles collards, black-eyed peas, two cornbread muffins, brown sugar-crusted sweet potatoes and a large breast of golden fried chicken onto her plate, passing it over the buffet top. The woman grabs the plate from underneath, her hand trembling under its weight.

Located on U.S. Highway 61, The Senator’s Place has served Cleveland for nearly 10 years. And its popularity extends far beyond the sleepy Delta town. Tourists visit the restaurant from around the world—ranging from a Nebraska student group to a married Dutch couple.

And then, of course, there was the most recent stranger from afar: noted New York foodie Anthony Bourdain, filming for his CNN show, Parts Unknown.

Today’s special is neck bone. Eager customers line up to get a taste of this Delta delicacy. Soon the senator returns to his seat, balling plastic gloves in his palms. His daughter, Sarita, flies through the kitchen’s swinging door, a legal pad in the crook of her arm, cell phone pressed against her ear. She’s the restaurant manager. But don’t be fooled by the title: She makes a mean homemade biscuit.

And now Reggie barrels through, lugging a tray of steaming grilled chicken to the buffet. A self-titled “Meat Man,” he works the grill in the back when he’s not printing register receipts. Still chatting, the senator eyeballs Reggie’s path. When Reggie tosses the last wing into the buffet, the father points to an elderly white man leaning against the counter, cash in hand.

Soon after, the man hobbles over to the senator’s table. “No matter what the senator’s telling you,” the slump-shouldered man says to a nearby customer, “he’s not telling you enough about what a good worker he is and how much he’s helped everybody around here.”

Hard work. Yes. Before he knew anything else, Willie Simmons knew about hard work.

Cotton field, Utica, Miss. – August, 1956

Asea of cotton. The cicadas’ cries rise and fall — the only sense of movement in the late afternoon heat. Even the boy stands still, thumbing a small boll of cotton. He wears thick gloves, a sweat-stained T-shirt, a canvas sack across his shoulder. Willie Simmons is 9 years old.

A boy holler. A boy whoop. A boy crying, “Willie, I’m gonna beat ya!” Six boys, to be exact. All six brothers race through the field, leaping across tidy parallel rows, pushing each other out of the way. Willie’s hand closes around the soft white globe in his palm.

The little brother approaches, eyes wide with excitement. “Daddy says whoever picks the most before dark gets to go to the rolling cart store!” he squeals.

Willie chucks the fluffy boll into his sack. He weaves down the row, fingers moving quickly, rhythmically, the cotton rising and falling into his bag with the sound of the cicadas. He keeps a steady pace, never running, never jumping, scavenging every fully blossomed boll before moving to the next plant. He feels the weight of the cotton, feels the sack’s strap blistering his bony shoulder.

In his mind, the white fibers crystallize—becoming sugary and sweet and hard as marble. Becoming jawbreakers, his favorite candy from the rolling cart. The more cotton in his bag, the more likely he’ll fall asleep that night tasting the fruity residue on the tip of his tongue.

And that’s what happened. He collected four pounds more than any of his brothers. With the nickel from his father, he bought a rainbow-flecked jawbreaker. Candy that’s impossible to break.

But he almost did. After fighting on the front lines for 11 months, Simmons returned to Cleveland thinking those diverse companionships from the battlefield would not be lost when he came home. In reality, he returned to a country where employers refused to hire him for one reason: the color of his skin.

“That was very, very frustrating,” Simmons says matter-of-factly. But he came to see the inequality as a challenge. A challenge not so different from the cotton races back in Utica. “It challenged me to continue to go forward and work to do other things, to eventually try to own my own business, and just work through it.”

And work he did, making a career of breaking barriers. When his children were in school, he served five years on the school board. When he joined the board, Cleveland faced a dual school system. East Side High School, predominantly black, did not get the same equipment as predominately white Cleveland High School. East Side’s business center was littered with broken typewriters; Cleveland High’s was lined with shiny new machines.

He wondered: Would students at East Side “receive the same quality of education if the equipment and materials were in fact different, older, or not properly functioning?” So he set out to level the playing field.

In the legislature, Simmons has taken a number of equally bold stances, using community needs as his moral compass. Favoring charter school legislation, he challenged the anti-charter advocates in the community. Touring the district’s schools, he saw magnet schools were out-performing other public schools. So based on community needs, as well as a national trend toward charter schools, he decided this bill would best benefit those who elected him.

When Simmons makes these political decisions, he says, party, race and religion are always secondary. “I think when we get into developing and supporting public policy based upon race, religion, region— then the state, or country, is in big trouble.”

Instead, he sounds out voters when forming his political decisions. And what better way to hear them than over catfish and spaghetti?

It’s 2:30. Most of the Saturday lunch crowd has vanished, leaving behind polished plates, save for neat piles of chicken bones. For three hoursplus, the restaurant has been bustling with white, black and Hispanic patrons, from 2 to 92.

Now, four men eat fried chicken around a table, their greasy fingerprints blotting the back pages of the Bolivar Commercial. At the register, Reggie counts out the money. Nearby, a man in a Vietnam Veteran cap gently spreads flyers across the counter.

“Is it OK if I leave these here?” he asks.

The senator points at the man’s cap. “How many tours you do?”

“Two rounds,” the vet replies casually. “You?”

“Only one,” the senator says. “I was sent to Hue when the 1st Cav was blown up.”

“My cousin was in Hue, too. They called him White Eye. Because the night they bombed his platoon, all you could see was the whites of his eyes.”

Laughter. Then it dies.

The vet’s smile fades. He leans in.

“You know, a large part of the country has forgotten about us,” he says, fingering the brim of his cap, VIETNAM VETERAN written in gold. “Can’t hardly find one of these caps anymore.”

Across the restaurant, chicken bones pile up. One of the four men at the table neatly folds his newspaper.

“Hey, senator! Why ain’t you making news anymore?”

Sen. Simmons turns, grinning. He clasps the veteran’s shoulder, easing him forward.

“Let me introduce you to some of my friends.” Design by Conner Hegwood

BENNIE THOMPSON

Thompson, shown here with bluesman Super Chikan, greets congressmen in the Delta on a civil rights pilgrimage. PHOTO BY IGNACIO MURILLO