[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As anyone who has studied history of South knows, racial hostility was ubiquitous across Mississippi Delta throughout hundred years following Civil War. But contrary to dominant narrative, conflict there was not purely limited to relationships between blacks and whites. As Haseeb George Abraham, a Lebanese peddler who immigrated to Mississippi Delta in 1885, discovered, those who came to Delta from elsewhere had to learn customs of region before they were accepted into social culture there. Gregory Thomas of Vicksburg describes how his great-grandfather traveled across region peddling his wares, once unintentionally asking a lady on a Delta plantation to sleep with him, instead of asking if she could provide shelter for night. Knowing little English, he soon found himself upon back of a horse with a noose around his neck, prepared for his hanging. Only when another Lebanese man came along and inquired as to what had happened was mistake made clear and Abraham's life spared. (1) Haseeb Abraham's experience provided him a crash course in ways of Delta. Generally, itinerant peddling gave immigrants opportunity to gradually learn and adapt to prevailing social customs of South, including its stringent social codes and harsh judicial practices. Interactions with rural farmers and, occasionally, townsfolk gave peddlers chance to view culture as somewhat passive observers in sense that they were perpetually passing through. MOVING TO THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA Between 1880s and end of World War I, a combination of famines, epidemics, extreme poverty, and religious and political genocide led to more than 100,000 deaths in Mount Lebanon region of Ottoman Empire-controlled Syria. During that same period, over 100,000 Lebanese residents of predominantly Christian region participated in a mass migration that scattered them across globe to places such as Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and United States. While most of these Lebanese citizens intended to emigrate only until conditions at home had improved, many eventually realized that life of an emigrant in United States was preferable to that on what was commonly known as the Mountain. Ironically, many Lebanese fleeing hardship and oppression found themselves in Mississippi, settling in caste-based, Jim Crow Delta, where they were considered neither black nor white. These Lebanese immigrants--mostly male--found work peddling wares to blacks and whites across Delta, forming close economic bonds in and with black communities and hoping one day to assimilate into economically and socially dominant white community--all while retaining vital elements of their own cultural heritage. (2) For decades, observers from within and beyond mostly rural Mississippi Delta have chiefly defined region as a black/white dichotomy that consisted primarily of planter-class and poor whites, and slaves-turned-sharecroppers-turned-impoverished blacks. William Alexander Percy furthered that notion in his 1941 autobiography Lanterns on Levee: [T]he cloth of Delta population--as of whole South--is built of three dissimilar threads and only three. First were old slave holders, landed gentry, governing class; though they have gone, they were not sterile; they have their descendants, whose evaluation of life approximates theirs. Second were poor whites, who owned no slaves, whose manual labor lost its dignity from being in competition with slave labor, who worked their small unproductive holding ignored by gentry, despised by slaves. Third were Negroes. (3) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The reality, however, is that region has long been peopled with inhabitants as diverse and distinctive as its soil is fertile. …