THE RIVERSIDE HOTEL
Travels in the Delta, 1987
Emily Hiestand

Written in 1987, First published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance

Mrs. Z.L. Hill, the founder of the Riverside Hotel, is settled into a cozy chair just inside the front screen door of her hotel where her body catches a shaft of warm light from the gauzy morning sun. As we 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, purpled with age, are reminiscent of my grandmother. Mrs. Hill looks to be in her eighties, 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 Riverside Hotel, an establishment that she envisioned, created, and has run since 1944.

Mrs. Hill’s hotel fronts on Sunflower Avenue in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Just behind the hotel, the land plummets down a wooded bank to the Sunflower River. The hotel, separated from the avenue only by a low privet hedge, is a one story red brick building with tallish windows, the entrance marked by a curving metal awning of red and white slats, and by a Coca-Cola machine stationed to the left of the front door. There are also several lawn chairs and a bench on either side of the entrance. Driving by and not seeing the name, 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 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 famous “Motorists Green Book,” a guide to safe and welcoming places for African American travelers to stay in the days of segregation.

The hotel facade faces east and morning sunlight is now slanting through the screen door, spilling on Mrs. Hill's shoulders and breakfast tray, illuminating a sprinkling of dust particles that float dreamily in the light. It is September 25th, officially fall, but still 91 degrees and humid in the most Southern place on earth. 

Mrs. Hill knows why we are here, two polite, White people without Southern accents. "You've come seeking the Blues," she announces, stressing in her textured voice, the word “seeking.” And she knows what to do with us, which is to let us pay court to her, to ask about her hotel and the musicians who have lived here, and to have Carlton give us a tour. She 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 particularly 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 saw 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 eye. She also tells us about the man from Cleveland who came through, stayed at the Riverside Hotel a while, and, before he left, arranged with Mrs. Hill to take his son in for a summer. At home, the son was a difficult boy, in trouble at school, and with other children. 

"I said that yes, he could come to stay with me, and he was a good boy, 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 sense that the august Mrs. Hill, who is wearing a pink sweatshirt, a robe, and oversized eyeglasses, would have 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 shows us photographs of her own son and daughter and grandchildren, and her 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 obvious 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.”

Such a matter of fact statement, which entirely glides 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, this building had been the hospital for Black people in our region," Mrs. Hill continues. 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, they would just saw it off and throw it out into the back yard where a dog might gnaw on the bone. 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 of 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 crudeness of the hospital, but the crudeness of mind, and of a culture, that could set up an inferior hospital for one group of people and a superior one for another group, and that would not, on an infamous September night in 1937, admit a badly injured woman to the well-equipped hospital where she might have had a chance to live.

There is no agreement about the events of that night, and for a long time most people in Clarksdale believed that the woman, Bessie Smith, was taken first to the White county hospital, was denied entrance, and lost precious time on a long journey to the other Black hospital. More recently, investigators have said that her ambulance raced directly to the G.T. Thomas Afro-American Hospital (knowing that she would not be admitted to the main county hospital), and that she died there on the operating table in spite of heroic efforts. What is known for sure is that Bessie Smith was returning South from Memphis where she had been appearing in "Broadway Rastus." Her Packard was being driven by a longtime friend when it collided with a truck on Highway 61, near Coahoma, and she was thrown from the vehicle. The Black ambulance company for Clarksdale was called to the scene and brought her here to this building where, in an operating room, located about twenty feet down the hall from where we are sitting, America's Empress of the Blues bled to death. Tomorrow will be the 53rd anniversary of that sorrowful night.

Mrs. Hill knows that we would like to make a pilgrimage visit to the former operating room, now Room No. 2 in the hotel. After our conversation, she asks Carlton to lead us to the room down the narrow hallway, where we pass dozens of framed photographs of musicians who have been hotel guests, as well as John F. Kennedy, Jr, who stayed with Mrs. Hill for three days recently, and chatted with her about blues musicians, but according to her, "didn't 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 discretion is also very high. As Carlton finds the key and fits it into the lock, he says quietly, "She doesn't like to rent this room.” And after moment 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, which they can do for $38.00 a night. 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 also a new and not fully legible phenomenon.

He opens the door on a room with the curtain drawn, and steps back into the hall a few paces. Our eyes slowly adjust to the dimly lit space, which, on the night in 1937, was a spare operating room. Now it is a lady’s bedroom with a deep blue flowered coverlet on the bed, a handsome, 1940s-era wooden dresser, and a glass vase full of white roses. A sliver of light comes from a tiny part in the drawn lace curtains, pressing through an ivory shade. Unlike most historic rooms, nothing, except the floor itself, remains of what was present when the room was made historic. The interior has, instead, become one woman's vision of a cozy, pretty bedroom, with flowers, a vanity with a small bench, and an elegantly curved mirror.

And, yet this room, unlike many other historic rooms, feels alive with a presence so strong 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 gradually manage to step into the room a few feet, and stand there in silence for some time. Carlton, who may have seen this happen before, drops back discretely down the hall a bit further.

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

"Ain't nobody's business if I do," runs through my head, a line from one of Bessie Smith’s signature songs. 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," 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 voice. Even on the poor recordings anyone can hear its immense weight, delicate bending of blue notes, her finesse, her emotional depth, and gorgeous intonation. Her kind of intelligence comes to earth only very rarely.

After a while we step back into the hall. Carlton relocks the door, and leads us further down the narrow hall to a beautiful sun-room along the back of the hotel, from which we can see the Sunflower river glinting through a fringe of trees. "She has built some new rooms," he says, of Mrs. Hill, and takes us outside and around to the north side of the hotel, where he shows us an expanded wing. "She's going to build more," he says, chuckling. "She has plans," he says, openly admiring his employer's ongoing entrepreneurial vision and fortitude.

Peter, who has his guitar in the back of our car, asks if Carlton knows of any nearby juke joints that will be open tonight. "No," Carlton says with a smile: "I don't go out at night and run around anymore. I stay here with her," he says. "I'm her legs now!"

2024 updates

In the thirty-seven years since our visit with Mrs. Hill in 1987, 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. Then, in 2020, the two sisters were forced to close the hotel due to the pandemic. In that same year the building was badly damaged in a storm. As a result of the storm damage, the hotel needs extensive repairs and restoration before it can 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 have begun to be recognized widely — by the Clarksdale community, by historic organizations, and by the National Park Service — and the Center has now received the following grants which will help restore and sustain the hotel and its 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 the place where 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 and the adjacent shotgun houses,” and, as “one of only a few structures in America today that was in the Green Book and still in operation, participated in the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling Green Book Exhibition.”

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.” And, 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 the current restoration efforts, visit:

The Riverside Hotel African American Preservation Center, Ron Woywitka, Director
The Riverside Hotel website | Facebook page | GoFundMe page
The National Park Service | Historic Preservation Fund
The African American Civil Rights Network, a project of the National Park Service
The Mississippi Heritage Trust, Lolly Rash, Executive Director
Story in the Architect’s Newsletter

Related links

About Bessie Smith
National Museum of African American History & Culture

Some favorite Bessie Smith recordings:
Cake Walking Babies from Home
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
St. Louis Blues
Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out
Back Water Blues

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance