TUNICA, Miss. — Her one-story house was slumping inch by inch, day by day, into the wet ground of the Mississippi Delta. Rot climbed up the wooden beams and mildew crept across the ceiling. Soft spots spread across the damp and buckling plywood floor. Holes opened up that led straight to the soil.
Linda Fay Engle-Harris, 60, had always tried to manage on her own, and so when she found new openings in the floor, she crumpled paper into tight wads and jammed them into the gaps.
One night, when she grew particularly panicked about the future of her home, she handwrote four pages in a notebook left over from her teaching days, trying to gather her thoughts. ‘‘My biggest fear,’’ she wrote, ‘‘is that our house will collapse.’’
For two decades, ever since her county of plantations and shotgun shacks had struck it rich, she’d been awaiting the prosperity. Great jobs for all, she’d imagined. Improved living standards. Perhaps no place in America’s Deep South had ever received a better chance to create new economic opportunities for its people.
Starting in the early 1990s, Tunica had become a neon-lit casino destination. The county had since raked in $760 million, a fortune for a county with 10,000 people.
But as she worried about her house, Engle-Harris — like many others in Tunica — was beginning to sense that the greatest windfall in the history of the rural South had failed to lift up a community where many African-Americans still lived in crumbling homes.
Despite all the casino money, a county that ranked in the 1980s among the nation’s poorest today still has one of Mississippi’s highest unemployment rates. A county lashed 30 years ago in a CBS News ‘‘60 Minutes’’ segment for its ‘‘apartheid’’ schools still had a mostly white private academy and a public school system that was 97 percent black, and was given a ‘‘D’’ grade by the state.
A county that the Rev. Jesse Jackson once described as ‘‘America’s Ethiopia’’ had changed little in its poorest neighborhoods, even as riverfront casinos and other lavish development had sprouted up along the farmland hugging the Mississippi River.
Tunica’s strike-it-rich narrative is a rarity in the Deep South. But the disappointing way it played out shows how fundamental — and possibly intractable — the problems are in an area that lags behind the rest of the country as the poorest region with the least economic opportunity.
A major study last year on upward mobility, measuring a poor child’s chances of climbing the economic ladder, found that Tunica had less opportunity than all but six other counties in the United States — scattered across Alaska, South Dakota, and Virginia.
It is a downbeat reality for a region that for much of the second half of the 20th century was closing its gap with the rest of the country, helped by the federal war on poverty and the end of legalized segregation. But during the past 15 years — and particularly since the Recession — the catch-up has stalled.
But the troubles in the Deep South go well beyond race to include frayed state finances, which have eroded the safety net for the poor, as well as public school underfunding, which leaves those who can afford it scrambling to private schools.
What went wrong in Tunica is a matter of perspective. For many African-Americans — and the county’s current officials — it was a story of a largely white political leadership that did not grasp the depths of poverty facing many black residents and did not choose to use in an equitable way the casino revenue reaching the county.
To the political leadership that developed the casino plans and spent that money, however, the story is one of good intentions gone awry, an attempt to boost an industry that could potentially create jobs in a corner of the country that never had much of an economy or hope for the future.
Of the hundreds of millions of dollars that Tunica earned from its gambling venues between 1993 and 2015, just a sliver — about 2.5 percent, according to county records — was used on social programs to help the poor.
The county is now facing its own financial problems, pinched by declining gaming revenue, and many in Tunica fear that a massive opportunity has been squandered.
Poverty analysts who have studied the county say the government would have been better off trying to foster broader economic growth by paying greater attention to job training, building skills, and trying to recruit better-paying industries.
Tunica’s leaders ‘‘didn’t do a good job in building opportunity for those who were vulnerable,’’ said Cynthia Duncan, an expert on poverty at the University of New Hampshire.