HOMAGE | DOMESTIC TRAVELS

THE RIVERSIDE HOTEL
Travels in the Delta, 1992
Emily Hiestand



Written in 1994, First published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2025)
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance

Sign over the entrance of the Riverside Hotel; unknown photographer

Clarksdale, Mississippi, September 1992


Mrs. Z.L. Hill, founder and proprietress of the Riverside Hotel, is settled in a cozy chair just inside the front screen doors of her hotel where her body catches a shaft of warm light from the gauzy morning sun.

As my husband Peter and I open the door, she calls out, “Come in and be welcome,” speaking in an accent so much like my Alabama grandmother's that I feel I know something of Mrs. Hill already. Even the way she reaches out her hand to us, even her lips, slightly purpled in places with age, are reminiscent of my grandmother. Mrs. Hill looks to be in her late seventies, and her young assistant, Carlton, has just brought her a breakfast tray of biscuits, bacon, and grits with butter. She insists that we sit with her as she has breakfast.

"Sit down right next to me," she says pointing to two chairs in the narrow hallway that also serves as the lobby of the hotel, an establishment that Mrs. Hill envisioned, created, and has run since 1944.

Her hotel, which fronts on Sunflower Avenue in Clarksdale, Mississippi, is a one story red brick building with tall, graceful windows, and a smart red and white striped awning. There are several lawn chairs and a bench placed hospitably on either side of the entrance, and a cola machine in nearby. Behind the hotel, the land slopes down a wooded bank to meet the dancing Sunflower River. Driving by and not seeing the hotel sign you might judge the building to be a small municipal office building.  

But this edifice has been both home and a home away from home for many of the nation’s finest blues musicians, among them Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Nighthawk, John Lee Hooker, Ike Turner, Muddy Waters, Sam Cooke, and Howlin’ Wolf, as well as several mighty gospel groups including The Staple Singers and the Five Blind Boys. The hotel has also long been popular with African American travelers, and was listed in the legendary Motorist Green Book, a guide to welcoming, safe places for African American travelers to stay during the decades of both de jure and de facto segregation in the U.S.

The hotel facade faces east and morning sunlight is now slanting through the entrance screen doors, spilling on Mrs. Hill's shoulders and illuminating a sprinkling of dust particles that float dreamily in the soft light. It is September 26th, officially fall, but still 91-degrees and humid in this “most Southern place on earth.” 

Mrs. Hill knows why we are here—two White people with New England accents, who have come bearing a flowering plant for her. "You've come seeking the Blues," she announces, stressing the word “seeking.” And she knows what to do with us, which is to let us pay court to her, to ask about her life and hotel, and the musicians who have lived here. And then to have her assistant, Carlton, give us a tour, and let us pay respects to the memory of one particular person who was once here. She also assumes, perhaps from previous visitors or because "The Tina Turner Story" is still playing in movie houses, that we will want to hear about Ike Turner and his misbehavior toward Tina. I am such a partisan of the goddess Tina that I do not especially want to hear more about Ike, but a chance to hear Mrs. Hill's deeply informed perspective on the matter is irresistible. 

"He brought Tina here," Mrs. Hill says, "but she didn't stay here long. None of the unhappy things were here. But you see, I knew Ike's mother, and Ike was a little boy just coming up when I first knew him. I was always ‘Mrs. Hill’ to Ike, and he was not sassy to me. None of the unhappy things were here." 

Mrs. Hill lets us know that, while in her establishment, Ike Turner was under a firm hand and keen eye. She also tells us about the man from Cleveland who came through, stayed at the Riverside Hotel a while, and then arranged with Mrs. Hill to take his son in for a summer. At home, the father had explained, the son was a difficult boy, in trouble at school and with other children. 

"I said that yes, the son could come to stay with me, and he was a good boy here, yessir he was, he was a very polite boy, and he did whatever I asked him to do. I had no trouble with that boy." I have the strong sense that the august Mrs. Hill, who is wearing a pink sweatshirt, a robe, and oversized eyeglasses, would have had no trouble with anyone when she was younger, or even now when she has, as she puts it, "a little trouble getting around."

Mrs. Hill then shows us an album of photographs of her own son, daughter, and grandchildren, and of former tanks of tropical fish. The daughter, who lives in Providence, Rhode Island, is a single mother who works as a medical technician. "She is a hard worker,” Mrs. Hill says, with pride. “She is raising these children and she has educated herself.” 

After admiring photos of the two bright-eyed grandchildren, and asking if her daughter enjoys New England (she does, although she misses her mother and Southern biscuits), we ask Mrs. Hill about how she came to be a hotelier.

"I decided that it could be a hotel," she says simply. "I decided in 1943, and opened the Riverside in 1944.” It is such a matter-of-fact statement, one that glides entirely over how extraordinary it was for an African-American woman, living in Jim Crow-era Mississippi in 1943, to make such an entrepreneurial plan and to bring her vision to fruition.

“Before I made the hotel,” she continues, “this building was the hospital for Black people, the G.T. Thomas Afro-American Hospital.” She looks at us for a moment, has bite of toast, and then continues. "It was a crude sort of hospital, you understand. They did not have anesthetics at the Black hospital then, and when they had to amputate an arm or a leg…” she trails off, then reiterates, “It was a crude place.”

The word “crude,” as articulated in Mrs. Hill's soft voice, hangs in the air. The word is used carefully and specifically, and because its meaning contrasts so radically with Mrs. Hill's own refined spirit, the era to which she alludes surges forward in her sentence; it is translated into a language event, which is what poets hope to do.

CRUDE: Of natural objects: coarse, clumsy. Of products of the mind: not matured, not completely thought out; Of action or element: rough, rude, blunt, not qualified by amenity; Of manner and behavior: unpolished, “rude.”

Of course, what Mrs. Hill describes with this word is not only the lack of medical supplies and equipment in the hospital, but the crudeness of mind and of culture that could set up an inferior hospital for one group of human beings and a superior one for another group of humans beings — and that would not, on an infamous September night in 1937, admit a badly injured woman to the better-equipped hospital where she might have had a chance to live.

For a time the story was that the woman, Bessie Smith, was taken first to a nearby White hospital, was denied entrance, and lost precious time on a journey to the Black hospital by the Sunflower River. It certainly could have happened that way, but the accurate story, which emerged somewhat later, is that the ambulance company from Clarksdale raced directly to the G.T. Thomas Afro-American Hospital, knowing that no Black woman would ever be admitted to the hospital for White people.

The accident happened as Bessie Smith was traveling in her elegant Packard, from Memphis where she had been appearing in "Broadway Rastus," to a performance in Darling, Mississippi. Her romantic partner, Robert Morgan, was driving, heading south on Highway 61. Not far from the small town of Coahoma, Mississippi, he misjudged the speed of a large truck just ahead of them, tried to swerve around it, but ran the right side of the Packard into the truck at high speed. Morgan was uninjured, but Smith, sitting on the passenger side, absorbed the full impact of the collision. The ambulance brought her here, to this building in Clarksdale where, in an operating room twenty feet down the hall from where we are sitting, America's Empress of the Blues succumbed to severe injuries, in spite of heroic efforts. The day of our visit is the 55th anniversary of her death, at age 45.

Mrs. Hill also knows that we would like to make a pilgrimage visit to the former operating room, now Room 2 in her hotel. So after she finishes her tea and some more conversation she asks Carlton to show us to the room. We follow him down a narrow hallway, passing dozens of framed photographs of acclaimed musicians who have been hotel guests, as well as a photo of John F. Kennedy, Jr, who had stayed at the Riverside for three days not long before our visit, chatting with Mrs. Hill about blues musicians — and did not, according to her, "say anything interesting." Mrs. Hill's standards for interesting conversation must be very high after all the years among singularly imaginative and talented artists, and I imagine her sense of discretion is also very high.

As Carlton stops in front of Room 2, digs out a key and fits it into the lock, he says quietly, "She doesn't like to rent this room.” After moment he adds, “But, she will." He explains that many people who now come to Mrs. Hill's hotel are young and White, seeking the blues, and that some of them want to stay in this particular room. Carlton's look as he shares this information suggests that he finds the recent wave of interest in Room 2 and the Riverside Hotel, not entirely unwelcome, but a new and not fully legible phenomenon.

He opens the door on a room with drawn curtains, and steps back into the hall a few paces away. Our eyes slowly adjust to the dimly lit space. The room that was a medical surgery is now furnished as a lady’s bedroom with a deep-blue flowered coverlet on the bed, a handsome, 1940s-era chest of drawers, and a glass vase full of white roses. There is also a vanity with a small bench and an elegantly curved mirror. A sliver of light comes from a part in the drawn lace curtains. Unlike some historic rooms, nothing here, save the wooden floor, remains of what was present in 1937. The interior has instead become one woman's vision of a very pretty, very cozy bedroom with flowers.

And, yet this room, unlike many other historic rooms, feels alive with a presence so vivid that Peter and I both halt at the threshold. Although the air is utterly still, we feel as though a wind is rushing out from the room toward us. It is not easy to say what is in that room, what moves out toward us. We manage gradually to step into the room a few feet, where we stand in silence for some time, taking in this shrine as the wind ruffles our hearts. Carlton, who may have seen this happen before, steps back and waits for us further down the hall.

We had come prepared to pay our respects, well aware of what this room signifies, but we had not imagined that we would be rendered immobile by a kind of presence in the sanctuary that Mrs. Hill has made to honor Bessie Smith. Has anyone ever been able to actually sleep in this room? (I once tried to sleep in a room in Robert Frost's farmhouse in Franconia, New Hampshire, while visiting a poet friend in-residence there, and that was a restless night.)

As we linger in silence, the phrase "Ain’t nobody's business if I do" begins to run through my head. It’s a line from one of Smith’s signature songs, and as she sang it, the song zestfully exorcised several norms of behavior that working women were expected to embrace in her era. By this song and others Smith’s music often claimed freedoms, independence, and happiness beyond traditional norms for women. She was open about her bisexuality, about drinking, generally carrying on, and expressing a great range of human emotion. She could sound soulful, sassy, languorous, ethereal, stoic, plaintive, wry, lonely, resilient, sometimes touching on many of those tones in the course of one performance. A phrase could start out rough — the "got" in "got me going," was a growl — then close in a wistful, honeyed sound.

She started in F. S. Wolcott's Rabbit Foot Minstrels show, along with Ma Rainey, and Bertha "Chippie" Hill. The southern twelve bar blues became her personal territory, a land in which she was the most sophisticated stylist of the time. She had an inimitable contralto voice. Even the poor recordings of the time capture its immense weight, her delicate bending of blue notes, her finesse, emotional depth, and gorgeous intonation. Her kind of intelligence comes to earth only rarely.

After a while Peter and I step back into the hallway, Carlton relocks the door, and then leads us further to a sun-room at the back of the hotel from which we can see the lively Sunflower River glinting through a fringe of trees.

"She has built some new rooms," Carlton says of Mrs. Hill, and leads us outside and through a shaded woodland on the west side of the hotel, to show us the expanded wing. "And she's going to build more," he adds, chuckling. "She has plans!" he says, openly admiring his employer's ongoing entrepreneurial vision and fortitude. Then, he walks with us back to the hotel entrance and lobby where we find that Mrs. Hill is taking a late morning nap in her rocker.

We leave another gift for the hotel on a side-table in the lobby, then tiptoe out of the living history museum that is the Riverside Hotel and onto the front porch, where Carlton and Pete continue talking about music. They both play guitar. I sit in a nearby lawn chair under the shade of the awning, and think about taking a nap myself. After a while, the two men shake hands, and I hear Pete, who has his guitar in our car, ask Carlton if he knows of a nearby music spot open this evening. He does and suggests a few local places, but adds that he hasn’t been to any of them in a while.  "I don't go out at night and run around anymore,” he explains. “I stay here with her. I'm her legs now."

•

Afterword

In the years since our visit with Mrs. Hill and her death in the late 1990s, the management of her storied hotel passed first to her son Frank Ratliff and his wife Joyce, and then to their daughters Zelena Ratliff and Sonya Ratliff Gates, who continued the family’s long tradition of innovation and hospitality. In 2020, however, the two sisters were forced to close the hotel due to the Covid pandemic. In that same already difficult year the hotel building was also badly damaged in a storm would need extensive repairs and restoration before it could re-open.

In response to this crisis, the sisters founded the non-profit Riverside Hotel African American Historic Preservation Center, which is dedicated to preserving “the hotel’s rich history of African American culture, blues music, and civil rights.” The mission of the Center and the hotel’s significance in American history has been recognized by the Clarksdale community, by historic organizations, and by the National Park Service — and the Center has now received several grants to help restore and sustain the hotel and its vital stories.

In 2021, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the Riverside Hotel as one of America’s Most Endangered Places, and the City of Clarksdale proclaimed the Riverside Hotel as a place where the blues gave birth to rock and roll. In 2022, the Riverside Hotel was awarded a $499,500 NPS African American Civil Grant “towards the restoration and preservation of the hotel” as “one of only a few structures in America today that was in the Green Book and is still in operation.”

Additional grants have come from The Association of African American Museums “to undertake research, documentation, and creation of a library,” and from the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area “to establish an interpretive center within the hotel.” In 2024, the sisters released this announcement: “The Riverside Hotel African American Historic Preservation Center, in partnership with the Mississippi Heritage Trust, has been awarded a substantial grant for the restoration and preservation of the Riverside Hotel…from the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Fund’s African American Civil Rights Grant Program.” The $750,000 grant will be used “for essential repairs, infrastructure upgrades, and building preservation.

To learn more about the Riverside Hotel and to contribute to restoration efforts, visit:

The Riverside Hotel Information Page

Media inquiries: Brenda Williams, brendawilliams2121@hotmail.com, 778-847-7121

The Riverside Hotel African American Preservation Center, (501C3), Ron Woywitka, Director
The Riverside Hotel website | Facebook page | GoFundMe page
The Mississippi Heritage Trust, Lolly Rash, Executive Director
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