Because my lifelong friend and mentor Jaybird had seen hucksters, hawkers, and horse thieves come and go, the old black man often warned me: “Boy, if somebody offers you sumpin’ that sounds too good to be true, it is.” But even he fell for the great rainmaking hoax.
Before large-scale irrigation was feasible, droughts could be disastrous for Mississippi Delta farmers, as was the case one year when my father’s cotton seedlings started off well and needed only a timely rain to bloom and begin setting fruit. But no rain came.