Ladell Jackson walks toward two machine sheds that once served as the only schoolhouse he ever knew. They sit on the edge of cotton fields that he worked by mule full-time after the sixth grade. His children don’t believe him when he talks about sharing a pair of shoes with his brother or picking off pieces of wood from the walls of the cramped family shack to start a fire. “You knew there had to be a better life somewhere,” said Jackson, who was drafted to serve in Vietnam. At the age of 21 he fled the Delta to become a bus driver and later CTA supervisor in Chicago. Jackson returned home to Indianola after retiring and now lives in a custom-designed home with his family on the same country road where he grew up.