CLARKSDALE — Talk about a blast from the past, here's one that will blow you completely away.

On a once-sprawling cotton plantation just south of this blues-rich Delta town, shotgun shacks that once housed families of black sharecroppers are now being slept in by an amazing assortment of people. And they pay $50 to $60 a night.

Guests range from a former Mississippi governor and English blues-lovers all the way to black folks scattered across the country whose ancestors were forced by mechanization to leave the cotton fields and go north, east or west.

It's difficult for me, as one who has vivid memories of their past, to see these formerly lowly, poverty-saturated dwellings now upgraded into chic hostelries for nostalgia-hungry patrons.

But that's what is happening out at historic Hopson Plantation — founded in 1852 — at a compound that the present owner/managers have cleverly named "Shack Up Inn."

In a row alongside the plantation's original commissary (commissaries were early self-contained shopping malls where dozens of tenant farmers and field hands drew their pay, bought groceries, clothing and supplies, and socialized) are six authentic Delta sharecropper shacks, retro-fitted with a few modern conveniences.

None of the shotgun abodes was on the Hopson spread, but were located elsewhere in the Delta. "Shack Up" owners hauled in and pressure-cleaned them on the inside.

All of the tin-roofed, cypress board-and-batten shacks, however, retain their original character. However, they no longer have the oozing smell of poverty that was a trademark of their former life. (I can never forget the stench inside the tiny, child-packed shotgun hovels I visited with then-Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in his impromptu 1967 tour to see firsthand malnutrition of blacks in the Delta.)

Each shack relocated to Hopson is named for the plantation from which it came, or, in the instance of the Robert Clay shack, its former inhabitant. 

Occupied by him as late as 1998, Mr. Clay had raised a family of seven sons in it without electricity or running water.

"To me, Robert Clay was a real hero," says Bill Talbot, one of the five owners who also lives full time in a building that once was the tractor shed of Hopson Plantation. "We're honoring blacks, not making fun of them. Robert Clay was a thinker, we find evidence of that everyday. He's an example of what makes America great."

The demand for overnight (sometimes several day) stays in the shotgun shacks is so brisk that Talbot and partner James Butler (married to a Hopson great-granddaughter) has become booked most of the time.

Something of a boom began last year after an Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer who had come to Clarksdale for a blues story, discovered the Shack-Up Inn and published a syndicated article about it.

Among the guests who celebrated the recent New Year's Eve at the place were former Gov. Kirk Fordice and his new wife, Ann. They stayed (and I'm not making this up) in the Fullilove Shack, so-named for the plantation from whence it came.  

There's another named for Pinetop Perkins, the noted blues musician, now 88 and living in Chicago, who had once worked at Hopson Plantation as a mechanical cotton picker driver. (Even given an exemption from World War II service for doing a job considered vital to the war effort.)

Hopson Plantation gained fame in 1944 for developing (with International Harvester) the first mechanical cotton-picker, an invention that revolutionized the labor-intensive cotton industry.

Considerable memorabilia such as funeral home fans, a portrait of the Kennedy brothers, John and Robert — both heroes of blacks — and calendars with photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are in evidence on the walls of several shacks. Some of it was found in shacks acquired by the owners, or picked up in flea markets.

There is still some sign of the newspapers which had served as wallpaper, but practically all of it disappeared in the pressure cleaning. As legend has it, newspapers were put on the walls to keep the "haints" occupied reading during the night until daylight came.

And in the memorabilia-laden commissary is a bust of another black hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Plus, there are original brass post office boxes that came from Lyon, a barber shop from New Albany, and a soda fountain from an old drug store in Shelby.

Mainly, however, the commissary serves as a beer lounge where sounds of blues can frequently be heard at night when blues musicians come in to entertain.

Talbot doesn't know exactly when the commissary was built on the plantation, but he pretty well dates it to the early 20th century, making it almost 100 years old. The original concrete floor, without a crack in it, is still in place, and the commissary walls are the original thick slabs of cypress.

An original two-holer outhouse stands next to one shack, an irresistible target of personal inspection by this inquiring reporter. For me, it served two purposes: First, historic inquiry, and secondly, utilitarian.

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