essay

PADM5390MizelleJr.-2014-DownthelineBluesBrillianceDisplacementand.pdf

Chapter Title: Down the Line: Blues Brilliance, Displacement, and Living under the Shadow of Levees Book Title: Backwater Blues

Book Subtitle: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination

Book Author(s): RICHARD M. MIZELLE <suffix>JR.</suffix>

Published by: University of Minnesota Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.5749/j.ctt7zw69r.5

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Minnesota Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Backwater Blues

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.5749/j.ctt7zw69r.5

1 Down the Line Blues Brilliance, Displacement, and

Living under the Shadow of Levees

Well, in the old days, you see, you weren’t allowed to express your feelings all that much. A lot of stuff was bottled up inside. . . . You can’t explain it in a conversation so the best way to do it is to sing.

—Bluesman Cash McCall

We who are under the lash . . . pray God daily that the way may open for us to leave these terrible conditions.

— Letter from an unknown survivor of the 1927 Flood to the Chicago Defender, July 16, 1927

The blues serves as an important theoretical counternarrative to the histori- cal archive and how historians make sense of the 1927 flood through “tradi- tional” sources. For many reasons, traditional archives obscure more than they reveal about black social realities during the 1927 flood. A dearth of first- hand sources from black people precludes tying archives to a materiality of experience. Moreover, we have very little of black people’s own words in the form of letters, diaries, oral history, circulars, census records, and other archi- val sources from the flood. This is not to say important sources do not exist. Black leaders, institutions, and newspapers were vocal throughout the ordeal, but the materiality of black people’s experience is still largely lost to us. By “materiality” I mean the personal recollection of the day a local levee broke or the time of day floodwaters first rolled across fields onto their porches, how long and hard it rained, and the smell of mud and dead animal carcasses. What was their personal experience inside a Red Cross relief camp or the

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

26 down the line

rationale behind migration to Chicago or Houston? Were they already look- ing to migrate like the million that preceded them, or was it a realization that life after the flood would be even worse? Even the much-used Works Prog- ress Administration source materials yield few results. Much of how we account for black people is through reductionism, where the totality of black experiences might be reduced to how many people were housed and fed by the American Red Cross or immunized by public health departments. The archive presents at best a temporal space of knowledge around the 1927 flood.

A high rate of illiteracy among African Americans in the 1920s, itself a legacy of slavery and lack of citizenship, accounts for only a surface under- standing of the limited archive.1 Equally important was the violence toward and surveillance of black people in southern states and the way it under- mined their ability to safely articulate experiences in public spaces. An open expression of black resistance to white hegemony (either oral or written) during this period in the Yazoo Delta often met with violence and death. Concomitantly, when black people wrote letters to newspapers they often did so anonymously, as they understood all too well the lethal penalties for outspokenness on racial matters.2 As a result, even the small nuggets of anonymous truth provided by the historical archive unearth as much about the actualization of blackness in the 1920s as it does the 1927 flood. The anonymous letter to the Chicago Defender that appears in the epigraph of this chapter is a prime example. Not only does it express outrage at being mistreated and a desire to leave a land of bondage, it also takes into account the peculiarity of blackness during the flood. Like a blues verse, “we who are under the lash” marks a collective black identity as the universal suffer- ing group. The survivor never specifies what he or she is under the lash from exactly—the environment, racism, or both. “Under the lash” is also telling because of its historical reminder of slavery, when the whip was con- stantly employed to subjugate Africans and African Americans. Because of the letter’s succinctness and lack of information, we can only speculate about who wrote the letter. Was the writer male or female? Where exactly did she or he reside during the 1927 flood and did he or she live in a Red Cross relief camp that informed the experiences? Not only does the pres- ence of the letter reject ideas of illiteracy, but the tone perhaps implies a middle-class status undermining most treatments of flood survivors that

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

down the line 27

assume black victims were always poor sharecroppers. Indeed, the chief reason we have so few accounts from black voices is that many feared white retaliation by going on the historical record, a hard reality facing survivors, regardless of status or class.

The fearful reality for black flood survivors still does not fully account for the limited archive. Archives are ideological creations with their own set of arguments and racialized discourse wedded to the recent emergence of social history. Legislation in the 1960s was successful in tearing down overt dis- crimination in American society through the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. The 1960s also witnessed a significant push for establishing African American history / studies programs in predominantly white colleges and universities and advancing a more inclusive type of historical narrative. The training of more black scholars and the general trend toward social history as an integral part of historical research by the mid to late 1970s pushed the historical field as a whole to think more critically about people who had been left out of historical narratives, including minorities and women. The 1927 flood represents a limited ideological archive because in the decades leading up to the civil rights era and beyond the experiences of black flood sufferers remained largely invisible to most archives. Very little attention was paid to documenting black flood survivors in the form of correspondences or oral history, leaving historians to piece together black experiences through small nuggets and reading between the lines, so to speak, of correspondences about black people, statistical analyses, and parochial federal documents. The importance of blues and other black art forms in representing black realities becomes clear. Such mediums offer valuable cultural perspectives that are otherwise unavailable to the historian.

The 1927 flood inspired the richest groundswell of recorded blues after a specific environmental disaster in history. This chapter resituates blues as part of the 1927 flood’s historical narrative, serving the dual purpose of creating memory around the disaster in the 1920s and 1930s and archiv- ing those stories for the historian. The blues was not necessarily political, but the creation of songs served the purpose of a political and historical act addressing what some black flood survivors still living in the South could not express safely, what black people familiar with the South knew to be true even if they no longer resided there, and what people outside the South

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

28 down the line

perhaps had little awareness of. As literary scholar Cheryl Wall reminds us, “Blues is the music that represents a past that is there, even if one is not conscious of it. . . . Music is also a metaphor for the unspeakable: what can- not be said both because it is too painful or dangerous to express in words and because no one could hear or understand the words if they could be found.” In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Wall describes how the character Paul D remembered the pain and trauma of his enslavement: “Sang it sometimes but I never told a soul.”3 The music is a salve, a coping mechanism that allows one to face human atrocity. Culturally speaking, blues gave voice to the pain of black life in ways that no other medium—save perhaps gospel—could. Close scrutiny of blues music in response to the 1927 flood provides crucial insights into the untold story of black survival and loss.4

The blues can be read as a counterhegemonic force or corrective impulse that sets the record straight, so to speak, about what the 1927 flood and broader environmental world meant for black folks at the time. To be sure, the 1927 flood was not the unifying or patriotic moment for black people in the way the federal government and Red Cross framed it for the nation. Indeed, the blues makes the argument that the flood, unlike any other national moments in recent memory, revealed the Yazoo Delta’s inhumane treatment of black people. Early twentieth-century contemporary narratives of envi- ronmentalism suggest that black people rarely, if ever, commented on the environmental world in any meaningful way. The blues (voice) proves other- wise. Environmental issues ranging from boll weevils, floods, droughts, and tornadoes are featured subjects in blues music.5 Considering the extent to which black people depended on agriculture to survive, it is hardly surpris- ing that their sentiments about the environment and their racial subjectiv- ity emerge in this tragic and comic blues medium.6 For example, both black and white farmers were made painfully aware of the loss resulting from boll weevils, which entered the United States in massive numbers via Mexico in the 1890s. Weevils are small insects that attach to young balls of cotton, destroying their potential to reach maturity; by World War I boll weevil infestations had reached epidemic status in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, causing severe financial damage. Expressed in the following blues lyric, the reality of black sharecroppers was to deal with both race and environment: “The white man he got half the crop, boll weevil took the rest;

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

down the line 29

I ain’t got no home.”7 Environmental disasters were particularly disastrous for black families because they left them with few alternatives in the midst of an already limited economic existence.

This chapter focuses on the themes of displacement/homelessness and citizenship that emerge as a palpable blues explanatory framework on the 1927 flood. Blues singers frequently struck the tension-filled chord of move- ment and uncertainty of place by highlighting the ways in which race often superseded everything in the environmental world. At the same time that black people were pushed “down the line” and displaced by the flood, Yazoo Delta planters were reinventing ways to control black movement so as not to lose a valuable workforce. As a result, technology became an ever-present force in the lives of Yazoo Delta residents. The reality was that everyone within the Mississippi River’s reach lived under the shadow of levees and feared being pushed down the line by the failure of massive levees; far from being apolitical technological structures, levees instead represented social and cultural constructions of race and class during the disaster.8

Finally, the blues archive complements other ways of knowing about the 1927 flood, providing a fuller account of the historical record. There are moments when specific historical experiences of black survivors, unearthed by historians only decades after the flood, were already explained and con- textualized by the blues archive. It is important to tie these overlapping nar- ratives of race and environmentalism together in a way that helps us create, in the words of Angela Davis, “a patchwork social history of black Americans during the decades following emancipation.”9

Known as the “Empress of Blues,” Bessie Smith was born on April 15, 1894, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By 1912 she had already left home and was trav- eling with a blues troupe headed by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. Smith was one of the first classic blues singers to sign a deal with Columbia Records, record- ing “Down Hearted Blues” in 1923. It was a commercial success, selling close to a million copies while helping make her the most well-known clas- sic blues singer of the era. Her deep, rich, tonal voice captivated audiences in the 1920s and 1930s, propelling her to stardom along with Rainey. On stage, Smith’s extravagant personality and wardrobe were unparalleled, and off stage the business intelligence she exemplified would be emulated by

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

30 down the line

blues musicians long after the automobile accident that took her life in 1937 on a rural Mississippi road.10

Like other blues singers, Smith’s explanations of the world around her were partly informed by personal experiences. In early 1927 her touring band was traveling by train in the South when they encountered a major flood. It remains unclear whether this flooding had anything to do with the 1927 flood; nonetheless, the water was enough to temporarily halt their travel. Smith’s sister-in-law Maud Smith recalled the ordeal years later: “We came to this little town, which was flooded, so everybody had to step off the train into little rowboats that took us to where we were staying.”11 Not only was the train segregated, according to custom, but the housing of blacks and whites was also segregated. Whites were taken to a local theater for safety while blacks were taken to the top floor of a local funeral home. Smith was less than thrilled by the arrangement and informed those around her that “no, no, I can’t stay here tonight.”12 But this was 1927 in the Deep South and she, like the other black people she encountered, had fewer options than whites during this period of calamity. It made no difference that she was the Empress of Blues. Inside the funeral parlor, hearing stories of beleaguered and marginalized black folks trapped in a racial caste system hell-bent on keeping them oppressed, and having little protection from the environmen- tal world, Smith began the process of formulating the backwater blues.13

When Smith returned home to Philadelphia she immediately drafted a version of “Backwater Blues,” which was released for the public in February 1927. By the time “Backwater Blues” hit the airwaves it had been raining consistently for months in many states, but the idea of an epic flood had yet to take shape in the imagination of most Americans. National newspapers were preoccupied with other national news, and the federal government was still a month away from mobilizing resources in response to the flood. The timing was nothing short of perfect for Bessie Smith, if not a bit prescient. A month after the release of the song a new spring flood, this one more powerful than any before it, was shifting the public’s consciousness, making “Backwater Blues” a powerful representation of what individuals and groups were experiencing.14

“Backwater Blues” is a song exclusively about race and nature. Sung in the traditional AA’B format, the song opens with a grim description of rain for

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

down the line 31

five days producing an ominously dark sky. The hook in “Backwater Blues” that provides the meaning, commentary, critique, or evaluation is always about displacement. “I woke up this morning, can’t even get out of my door; there is enough trouble to make a poor girl wonder where she want to go.” The song concludes with the warning, “It thundered and lightenin’d and the wind began to blow; there were thousands of poor people didn’t have no place to go.”15 Smith’s words make sense in the aftermath of her own experi- ence of being displaced by a flood and hearing the stories of other black people in that funeral parlor just a month before. It also struck a chord with poor African Americans displaced by the flood and shepherded into Red Cross camps like cattle, their movements watched by white planters, the police, and the Mississippi National Guard.

By late March the federal government and entire nation slowly began to take notice of what was occurring in the Mississippi Valley. This was not like an earthquake or tornado that struck quickly and violently. Instead, the 1927 flood was a slow-moving disaster that built up to a crescendo over time as levee after levee began to fail during the spring. No single backwater flood created as much damage and contributed to the imagination and memory of the 1927 flood as the Mounds Landing crevasse. The Mounds Landing levee protected farmlands and cotton-producing areas in the heart of the Yazoo Mississippi Delta, including Cleveland and the powerful cotton capital of Greenville. When the levee finally gave way on Thursday, April 21, it created a crevasse of epic proportion, summed up in a telegram from an Army Corps official in the region to General Edgar Jadwin, head of the corps: “Levee broke at ferry landing Mounds Mississippi eight a.m. Crevasse will overflow entire Mississippi Delta.”16 This was not the first levee break, nor would it be the last, but the Mounds Landing crevasse significantly shaped the 1927 flood because it demanded intervention from the federal government. Remark- ably, the Red Cross claimed only two people died during the crevasse. The Mississippi National Guard reported only that no guardsmen were killed. While we have no official account of how many perished during the break, the death toll among blacks was likely underreported, and telling of how blacks remained largely invisible in the official records of the flood.17

According to eyewitness accounts it sounded like the detonation of a bomb as the entire Mounds Landing levee catapulted forward. The crevasse

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

32 down the line

pushed floodwaters onto the landscape covering an area an astonishing fifty miles wide and one hundred miles long; in places the water was twenty feet deep. Floodwaters swept some people away never to be seen again, while others hung precariously to life in trees, on rooftops, and in attics. People took refuge wherever they could (and if they were black, anyplace they were allowed and was safe). The Mississippi River flowed with such tremendous force and height that tributaries like the Ohio and Missouri Rivers could no longer flow into the larger body of water. In some cases these tributaries actually began flowing backward because of the Mississippi River’s current, providing yet another definition of backwater.

Fred Chaney, who was white, survived with his family for several days in a boxcar after escaping floodwaters in Washington County, Mississippi, about fifteen miles from Greenville. They were desperately trying to make it to Greenville, where they heard people were receiving food and supplies on the top floors of downtown office buildings, but floodwaters rose so quickly they could only reach a nearby rail yard. Here they found a number of black and white survivors living inside boxcars.18 The socialization of race informed why black families took refuge on one side of the rail yard and white families on the other. This was custom and expected; no amount of floodwater could wash away the lines that separated black from white.

After a few days, floodwaters were beginning to lap across the inside of the Chaney boxcar, causing the family to relocate on top of the boxcar, exposed to the elements. The Chaneys still had food, so they were in better shape than others. Not long after moving to the boxcar’s top they heard the screams of a white man hanging precariously from a tree branch not far away. They didn’t know how he got there or how long he had been holding on, but they were certain floodwaters were too deep and current too power- ful for him to survive long trying to swim. The only chance for rescue was to find a boat, which Chaney and his family did not have. On the other side of the rail yard, where African Americans were living, they noticed that someone did have a boat, a man by the name of Michael. Chaney demanded that Michael bring his boat to the other side of the freight yard and com- mandeered the vessel for a rescue attempt. We don’t know who Michael was, whether he objected to the request or felt he had no other choice, but refusal might have lead to repercussions down the road for him and his family. The

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

down the line 33

boat was old and unstable, and Chaney feared it might not stay afloat long enough for a rescue. It stayed afloat long enough for the two men to put together an impromptu rescue with Michael’s boat, which had the biblical verse The Spirit of God is Upon the Waters inscribed on one side and Noah’s Ark on the other.19

The day after the Mounds Landing crevasse, President Calvin Coolidge appointed Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover as chairman of relief operations in the Yazoo Mississippi Delta, giving him authority over the American Red Cross and the power to mobilize segments of the Ameri- can military. Red Cross supplies were locally funneled through citizens and relief committees. Hoover held firm to the philosophy that local needs were best understood by local citizens and that the American Red Cross should not encroach on local customs and beliefs; it provided resources but refused to insist on how they would be distributed. William Alexander Percy, the son of influential banker and former Mississippi U.S. senator Leroy Percy, was placed in charge of relief supplies in Greenville, Mississippi. The Percy name held tremendous influence in the Yazoo Delta region, representing land barons and politicians.20 Close to two hundred thousand people lived in the Yazoo Delta region during the flood, and most were either temporarily or permanently displaced from their homes. Over a five-month span, some seventy thousand survivors resided in Red Cross relief camps while close to ninety thousand were assisted by the Red Cross in personal homes, hotels, boxcars, and buildings. Countless other blacks and whites fled the Yazoo Delta never to return. The Red Cross operated 154 relief camps in the seven states flooded during the disaster, the vast majority of inhabitants being poor blacks.21 The immediate aftermath of the disaster exposed the ways in which issues of race and power were embedded within the process of charity and relief, revealing these tensions as everyone attempted to make sense of the transformed environmental landscape. Aerial shots of flooded land- scapes by the military, Mississippi River Commission, and Illinois Central Railroad were common. Photographers commonly employed an ideology of documenting and reproducing (Figure 1) aerial images that showed the flood blurring landscapes below.

The Percys and other white landowners around Greenville forced as many black flood survivors as possible into these Red Cross relief camps so they

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

34 down the line

could better prevent migration and have a readily available labor supply when the waters finally receded. Differences between the mostly black Red Cross relief camp in Greenville and the mostly white camp in Vicksburg show not only differences in space and quality of camp life but also how much the plantation bloc was wedded to policing blackness. The Vicksburg camp was in much better condition because Vicksburg was largely spared by the flood. White flood victims were also more likely to receive Red Cross assistance in homes and downtown office buildings in places like Greenville, while black survivors, from beginning to end, could not expect help from the Red Cross unless they entered one of the relief camps.22

Alice Pearson’s “Greenville Levee Blues,” recorded in July 1927, provides a window into the experiences of black people in Greenville. The specificity of this song sets it apart from other songs in the 1927 blues archive. Pearson had a brief recording career, recording only one session (with Paramount

Figure 1. This aerial shot of Arkansas City, Arkansas, shows backwaters spread wide

across the landscape. Red Cross tents are lined up for miles on the levee. Photograph by

the United States Army Air Forces, May 5, 1927. Courtesy of the National Archives and

Records Administration.

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

down the line 35

Records in Chicago), and seemed to be especially interested in questions of nature. Three of her early songs, “Greenville Levee Blues,” “Water Bound Blues,” and “Memphis Earthquake,” dealt specifically with environmental disasters, and other scholars have suggested that Pearson lived near Green- ville during the 1927 flood.23 The first two stanzas set a tone similar to Bes- sie Smith’s “Backwater Blues.” “I woke up this morning, couldn’t even get out of my door; the levee broke and the town is overflowed.” Her most inci- sive commentary comes in an overt critique of citizenship and blackness in Greenville. “People (living) on the levee, sleeping on the ground; I want to tell everybody that Greenville’s a good old town.”24 When Pearson uses the term “good old town” she doesn’t mean it as a positive term. Instead she is highlighting the oppressiveness and racial experiences of living in Green- ville and, in particular, what it meant to be displaced in this racial landscape of vulnerability. The Greenville Red Cross camp was physically located on top of the city’s levee because it was the highest point, but by mid-April it was in such horrific condition as to make the space basically unlivable. It was unbearably hot and muggy during the day, cold and windy at night, and the persistent rainfall and floodwaters washing up against the levee made the camp a slippery mud hill; because Red Cross tents were in short supply some people slept unprotected on the levee, exposed to the elements. Pearson’s words represent a historical truth for displaced black people who lived on levees and slept on the ground in Greenville, and whose move- ments were controlled by a “good old town” network.25 Figure 2 shows sim- ilar conditions in the Yazoo City, Mississippi, Red Cross camp where the background environmental landscape can be read as a public health docu- ment. Poor diet, rainy and cold conditions, and small pockets of stagnant water elevated the risk for disease inside many Red Cross camps.

It was clear from the beginning of the relief process that William Percy wanted to wield as much power over black flood survivors as possible. Dem- onstrating white paternalism, he later wrote in his memoir that “none of us was influenced by what the Negroes themselves wanted: they had no capacity to plan for their own welfare; planning for them was another of our burdens.” 26 The Greenville levee was in such bad shape that Percy con- templated moving African Americans to Vicksburg, an unpopular decision among his father and other planters. Even though there was widespread fear

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

36 down the line

of disease, including malaria, yellow fever, tuberculosis, and pellagra, on the Greenville levee, planters protested the move by arguing that blacks might easily elude the surveillance of landowners and escape if taken out of the immediate vicinity. The move was successfully blocked by planters who appealed to the elder Leroy Percy over the son with the specific intention that black workers—whose importance was only tied to their labor—must not be allowed to move freely lest the region’s future prosperity become imperiled.27

Efforts to undermine movement were painfully connected to the reinscrip- tion of power over black bodies through labor. When Alonzo “Lonnie” John- son recorded “Broken Levee Blues” in 1928, African Americans throughout the diaspora heard about forced labor in Red Cross camps through word of mouth and black newspapers. Johnson also confronted listeners with this

Figure 2. Black survivors in a Yazoo City Red Cross camp. Close attention to the

surrounding landscape shows an extremely muddy and unhealthy environment in which

survivors lived for months. Photograph by the Illinois Central Railroad, May 13, 1927.

Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

down the line 37

reality through blues. Born in New Orleans in 1899, Johnson was no stranger to heartache. He accompanied his vocals and topical subject material with unique skills on the guitar, banjo, violin, and kazoo, making him a very pop- ular performer at home and overseas. While he was touring Europe, most of his family was wiped out by the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918–19. “Broken Levee Blues” is rare in its direct and unflinching appraisal of forced labor during the flood. “The police run me from Cairo, all through Arkan- sas; they put me in jail behind those cold iron bars. The police say work right or go to jail, I say I ain’t totting no sacks; I won’t drown on that levee and you ain’t gonna break my back.” Johnson paints a treacherous social existence in which black survivors faced displacement from nature and harassment from police and authorities. Black men were pressed into backbreaking labor and Johnson articulates what some felt: they would rather face imprisonment and death than be placed in a situation resembling slavery.28

Black bodies were desired not only to secure and fortify vulnerable levees around Greenville and throughout the Yazoo Delta but also for unloading Red Cross relief supplies. Blacks were forced to unload supplies at gunpoint in Greenville and threatened with death if they tried to leave or refused work. If a local white person needed help clearing land or unloading supplies, any black person inside or outside a relief camp could be conscripted. William Percy issued a work demand for the Greenville area giving whites authority to force African Americans not residing in Red Cross camps into whatever work whites wanted done. “All Negroes in Greenville outside of the levee camp who are able to work should work. If work is offered them and they refuse to work they should be arrested as vagrants. Names and addresses of those refusing to work should be telephoned to police headquarters.” Stories circulated of black people being pulled out of their homes and off the street at gunpoint and physically taken to the levee.29 One unknown African Amer- ican man was shot and killed by police after refusing the demand of local whites who were going house to house looking for laborers. As it turned out the man had already worked close to twelve hours on the levee earlier that day and had just returned home. He was killed after refusing to go back.30

In Mississippi the National Guard was activated to patrol Red Cross camp perimeters and control the movement of African Americans. If a black person worked as a sharecropper before the flood, he or she had to provide

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

38 down the line

the name of that landowner before entering a relief camp and receiving food. Black people who did not work for a white person still had to be vouched for by a white person. Every black family, single man, woman, and child, had to be vouched for by a local white person to receive food and shelter, with- out exception.31 Any black person caught living outside the Greenville relief camp without suitable explanation was arrested. Movement surveillance was largely achieved through a tag system reminiscent of the slave codes used during slavery and the black codes during the post-Reconstruction era.32

This tag included the person’s name, who he or she worked for, and the person vouching for him or her. Even more insulting was the fact that this identification had to be visible at all times, and those who didn’t have a tag or whose tag was missing could be jailed or forced to work on a levee detail. The intent of local white planters and politicians was clear in their desire to prevent migration and ensure the return of poor black field hands into the contractual conditions of peonage existing before the flood.33 These ideas were perhaps best voiced in a letter from Curtis T. Green, commander of the Greenville National Guard, to the NAACP’s Walter White. Green wrote, “We do not propose to have it [the Delta] stripped of labor.” Green decided blacks should be controlled and kept in place until floodwaters receded and individual planters could come and find “his niggers . . . no man being allowed . . . any other but his own niggers.”34 Writing on postbellum exer- cises of freedom and terror in the nineteenth century, Saidiya Hartman asserts that “in the context of freedom, the need to re-impose black subordi- nation was no less pressing and was actualized not only through forms of legal repression and punishment but also through the inculcation of rules of conduct.”35 Any type of actions by African Americans that did not coincide with what former slaveholders were accustomed to was seen as insolent behavior. In postbellum nineteenth-century America, particularly the South, former slaveholders reinscribing subordination often meant restricting the mobility and movement of African Americans across the southern landscape and thus limiting the freedoms associated with economic independence. In the early twentieth century as well, moving about freely was one of the many ways black people asserted their citizenship; the restriction of movement was an abhorrent abridgment of citizenship rights commented on in sermons, work songs, and the blues.36

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

down the line 39

As much as black people knew what it meant to enter one of these camps, in many ways they had no choice. Not only did the threat of jail and violence hover over them, but the more pressing concerns of starvation and disease significantly limited their options. Destroyed crops and flooded stores left them with virtually no other way to secure food, while parents also had to worry about feeding children. Black people were not allowed in the white spaces where the Red Cross was taking care of white flood survivors; plant- ers like the Percys had a vested interest in keeping the Red Cross from pro- viding resources to black survivors outside of camps. Hunger tied to disease was not an unusual experience for black residents in the Yazoo Delta, liv- ing in abject poverty and a constellation of peonage and poor health since Reconstruction. Still, the African American Louisiana Weekly framed the fear of pellagra and other diseases as a “new menace” among survivors.37 The fear was not without merit. Pellagra had long been endemic to the Yazoo Mississippi Delta region as an illness associated with poverty. The etiology of pellagra is a poor diet lacking essential nutrients found in fresh meats, vegetables, and milk—the antithesis of the average poor southerner’s diet of fatback, cornmeal, and molasses. Symptoms of pellagra were known as the “Four D’s,” consisting of dermatitis (skin lesions), diarrhea, dementia (or mental defects), and, if left untreated for an extended period of time, death.38

Pellagra was still a mysterious disease in some medical circles in 1927, par- ticularly among those who held tightly to the reductionist ideology of a microbe-centered base for diseases in the germ theory era. The numbers were telling, however: approximately one hundred thousand people in the southern states alone died of pellagra during the first four decades of the twentieth century. African Americans suffered at least a two-to-one morbid- ity rate from pellagra compared to whites, as they did from almost every other disease during the era.39 An impending fear after the 1927 flood was that breakdowns in food production, consumption, and transportation would leave the region vulnerable to pellagra outbreaks, as happened after the Mis- sissippi River floods in 1912 and 1922.40 In the Yazoo Delta, African Ameri- cans suffered higher morbidity and mortality rates than whites from typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, dysentery, pneumonia, rheumatism, influenza, pre- mature birth, accidents of labor, and almost every other disease. Many went from cradle to grave without ever visiting a physician, highlighting Talcott

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

40 down the line

Parsons’s theory of a “sick role.”41 By the 1920s there was only one hospital bed for every 1,941 black patients nationwide, compared to one for every 139 white patients.42 Poverty, squalid housing, unsanitary living conditions, poor diet, the stress of racism, and overworked bodies made up the social landscape African Americans negotiated before, during, and immediately after the 1927 flood.43

In Greenville, African Americans found it exceedingly difficult to secure common necessities outside the matrix of charity and relief tied to the American Red Cross.44 Across flooded landscapes black survivors sent let- ters to the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro- American, and other black newspapers asking for help. One anonymous letter printed by the Defender informed readers that blacks were “made to work like a dog under a gun and club and tagged like a bale of cotton.”45 Another survivor wrote to Walter White of the NAACP, “Thousands of us will choose death by starvation rather than enter another camp.”46 In Vicksburg black people opened their doors to assist displaced victims while other black survivors drew inspiration from a legacy of maroon communities in Brazil, Jamaica, and the United States by temporarily surviving in swamps and forests to avoid the controlling arm of the Red Cross, the National Guard, and local planters.47

Blues musician Charley Patton captures the mood and sentiment of the black experience in Mississippi during this era. Patton was to the male- dominated country blues era what Bessie Smith was to the classic era. Of all country blues singers none was as popular as Charley Patton, known as the “King of the Delta.” Born in Hinds County, Mississippi, sometime between 1887 and 1891, Patton influenced a generation of Delta guitar blues artists, including Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker. Patton’s signature voice was rough and coarse in a way that became identified with the Delta blues itself, and his showmanship on stage was unmistakable—playing guitars behind his back and between his legs before crowds. Indeed, his voice was so rough that occasionally it is difficult to discern words in some of his songs.48 His topical songs were known for their expression of life within the Yazoo Delta, particularly such songs as “High Sheriff Blues,” which describes life inside Mississippi Delta prison camps. Patton recorded two separate parts of a song called “High

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

down the line 41

Water Blues” about the 1927 flood, and interviews place him, like Alice Pearson, near the disaster. The driving hook in part 1 is the “line”: “Back- water done rose around Sumner, drove poor Charley down the line; Lord I tell the world the water done jumped through this town.” The image of being “driven down the line” and backwater actively moving through the environmental world is a powerful description of an actual experience that implies displacement or mobility, in this case floodwaters forcing Patton “down the line” to leave his home. But nature is not the only thing driving Patton down the line: “Lord the whole round country, man is overflowed; I would go to the hill country but they got me barred.”49 “Hills” (or hill coun- try) is a term that occasionally shows up in flood blues songs and can be interpreted to describe movement to safer ground. It is a metaphor; there are not many hills in the Yazoo Delta, but Vicksburg or Memphis might be considered the hill country in terms of escaping the flood’s immediate path. Peonage conditions, forced labor on levees, and tag systems all restricted movement of black people into certain spaces. Patton is claiming the right to move freely across the landscape to a place of safety, to move without being forced into a charity camp that was really a labor camp. Bluesman George Carter also picked up the limited social existence and options for black people after the flood in “Rising River Blues.” “Rising river blues running by my door, it run sweet mama like it haven’t run before; I gotta move in the alley, I ain’t allowed on the street; These rising river blues sure have got me beat.”50 His critique of segregation, citizenship, and the marginality of what an alley represents is unmistakable. George Carter was an alias of Thomas Dorsey, best known as a pioneer of gospel music. It was not unusual for record companies during the era to change the name of blues singers already under contract with another company so they could also record the singer. Some musicians, like Dorsey, took aliases so they too could take advantage of recording with more than one record company at a time.

Living under the Shadow of Levees

The 1927 flood is fundamentally a story of worthiness and unworthiness in a powerfully racialized society. Charity, displacement, and race-based peonage were powerful markers of social worth in 1927. But we can also see markers of social worth embedded within a part of the flood that is not as

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

42 down the line

easily accessible. The artificial construction of massive levees, including the one involved in the Mounds Landing crevasse that set the federal govern- ment in motion, was blamed for creating the suffering that black and white Mississippians experienced. Levees were not simply structures of concrete, wood, and dirt, disconnected from social history, and their construction and presence were far from a disentangled social theory of decisions by engineers and politicians regarding flood control. The control of the Mississippi River and construction of levees was about more than the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Levees were designed to protect people and the Yazoo Delta cotton-growing economy. But the process was not unilateral; people physically and psychologically fell through the gaps of levee coverage, a point that emerges in the blues archive. Still, how might we take note of 1927 tech- nology and the ways in which it shaped life? In his classic work The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, social theo- rist Langdon Winner asks whether “artifacts have politics” and how we might imagine culture, politics, class dynamics, and race within the theoretical and practical development of technological systems. “At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions to efficiency and produc- tivity and their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and author- ity,” Winner writes.51 Ultimately, people made choices about levees, decid- ing when and how to build them, the appropriate height and width, and whether certain communities would be protected. The failure of levees was not simply happenstance, an occurrence devoid of human culpability, but rather demonstrated the power certain groups held over other groups in the shaping and creation of suffering.

New Orleans during the 1927 flood represents a powerful marker of social worth, pitting country against city, and urban metropolis against rural hinterland. From its founding by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, in 1718 as the French capital of Louisiana, it was a vulnerable environmen- tal landscape. Surrounded by the Mississippi River and another body of water later named Lake Pontchartrain, the French capital was called L’Isle de la Nouvelle Orleans.52 Bienville and the settlement’s boosters hoped that New Orleans would become the most important city in the South and the

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

down the line 43

commercial gateway to Europe and the Atlantic world. What the physical landscape of New Orleans provided in spatial location as a commercial gate- way it also took away as a uniquely vulnerable environment, becoming a city in the middle of a fishbowl surrounded by fifteen- to twenty-foot-high levees.53 As the height and breadth of levees continued to grow, the vulner- ability of living under its shadow was not lost on residents and visitors to the region. In New Orleans, elevated levees and the Mississippi River that flowed behind them provided a heightened sense of insecurity. T. L. Nichols visited New Orleans in the late nineteenth century and described the unset- tling environmental landscape, juxtaposing the low-lying landscape of New Orleans surrounded by water with the massive levees that protected the city. Making a conscious connection between the river and the artificiality of technology, he wrote that “hundreds of ships and steamers were floating far above the level of the streets—as high, indeed as the roofs of the houses in the back streets of town.” For some, the sight of commercial ships floating high above their heads was unnatural and surreal, even ghastly, while others questioned the ability of artificial levees to keep floodwaters out of the city. John Hammond was jarred by the size of levees when he visited the city in 1916, noting in his writings how seemingly inconsequential the levees were in relation to the Mississippi River, “a mound of earth that somehow made me think of the Pyramids.” After climbing the levee and seeing the Missis- sippi River’s power, he describes his impression: “The city lay back of me, far beneath the level of the mighty river upon whose brink I stood. It seemed so easy for the river to dash away the barrier of earth, imposing as that had seemed a few minutes ago.”54

Greenville residents had similar experiences. The sight of large steam- ers hovering above the city’s physical landscape was not uncommon. In his book Where I Was Born and Raised, Mississippi writer and cultural critic David Cohn talks about the shadowing presence of levees surrounding the low-lying Queen City of Greenville in the early twentieth century: “In the springtime when the waters of the river are high against the levees, [resi- dents of Greenville gaze] at the yellow flood and ponder the possibilities of disaster.” Cohn’s description of elevated artificial levees surrounding Green- ville is equally powerful when situated within a theory of vulnerable land- scapes and levee construction. Cohn paints Greenville, like New Orleans, as

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

44 down the line

a defenseless city where “steamboats on the swollen stream pass high above the level of the earth like monstrous birds in slow flight.”55 Artificial levees had grown into massive technological structures that could have a perva- sive, even intrusive, presence in the lives of Yazoo Delta residents. Levees designed to protect the economy and protect human life were, at times, transformed into mechanisms for the creation of suffering that became part of living under the shadow of levees.

For New Orleanians during the 1927 flood, the vulnerability of living under the shadow of levees was a reflection of the built environment and manipulation of technology. New Orleans politicians and businessmen, in- cluding the recently elected Democratic mayor Arthur O’Keefe, considered the Crescent City the most important economic city of the South. As flood- waters barreled down the Mississippi River and its tributaries toward New Orleans in late March, correspondence between city, state, and local officials reflected an adamancy that a flooded New Orleans would be disastrous for the region, if not the entire nation.56 The business-friendly Times- Picayune hoped to quell fear within the city and the rest of the world about the city’s impending crisis. One headline read, “Safety Assured in New Orleans: Mer- chants and Residents Concerned over False Reports about City.” The article opened by noting that “New Orleans is and has been doing business as usual. Residents and merchants are pursuing their vocations and avocations with- out interruption. The levees surrounding the city are intact and not one drop of flood water from the river has touched the city and no such intrusion is expected.”57 This proved to be false bravado; city leaders did not have complete faith in the levees surrounding the city. Instead, behind closed doors, city officials gathered support for a plan to ensure that vulnerable New Orleans would be safe from the flood.

On Good Friday city officials initiated a new civic organization called the Citizens Flood Relief Committee (CFRC), composed largely of the city’s business elite. Its primary goal was to protect the valuable waterfront and commercial interests of the city. Their biggest fear was that a tarnished image would keep visitors and investors from the city even if floodwaters stayed clear.58 O’Keefe and Marcel Garsaud, New Orleans’s dock board man- ager, presented a resolution to the Mississippi River Commission (MRC) to destroy the levee at Poydras, twelve miles downstream, flooding the New

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

down the line 45

Orleans hinterland parishes of Plaquemines and St. Bernard. This would have been unthinkable before, but now the future of New Orleans was at stake. Historian Ari Kelman describes the MRC’s initial reaction to this idea as “chilly,” primarily because such an action would effectively “jettison decades of policy and admit culpability in raising the river.”59 At the same time, CFRC delegate James Thomson met with President Calvin Coolidge, Edgar Jadwin of the Corps of Engineers, and Secretary of War Dwight Davis in Washington. Somewhat reluctantly, all parties agreed to the proposal, with the contingency of a 100 percent reimbursement of adjusted claims filed by displaced residents of the proposed blast. The vast majority of the ten thousand residents were the Acadian descendants of ancestors who had migrated from Nova Scotia over a century before and worked in the Loui- siana fur-trapping industry.60

On Tuesday, April 26, Democratic Louisiana governor Oramel Simpson signed the order to cut the Poydras levee, setting the stage for one of the more baffling moments in the history of environmental disasters. Residents of the two doomed parishes had three days to collect their belongings and leave for what was supposed to be a temporary displacement. For most, the displacement was anything but temporary.61 They refused to go quietly into the night; armed citizens in St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes began patrolling the Poydras levee, showing they were willing to use violence to protect their property and livelihood. On a few occasions shots were fired by patrollers as a warning to unknown individuals coming too close to the levee, and in a well-publicized incident shots were even fired near Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. When rumors circulated that the angry resi- dents from St. Bernard and Plaquemines were planning to sabotage New Orleans’s levees in a preemptive strike, New Orleanians took no chances and formed their own round-the-clock armed levee patrols, calling in the National Guard to provide additional protection.62 Moving day was April 26: residents drove and walked out of the parishes in what one observer wryly described as an “endless caravan which streamed out of the doomed area.”63 Those displaced would be temporarily housed at an army base inside New Orleans city limits, one floor for blacks and another for whites. People were forced together by the actions of others, but racial customs and norms were nonetheless maintained during this human-made disaster.

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

46 down the line

Three days later, during the early morning hours of April 29, officials blocked entrance into the two parishes while military planes flew above looking for last-minute evacuations. Reporters, journalists, and interested bystanders gathered at the Caernarvon levee twelve miles away from a por- tion of Canal Street at high noon; some traveled across the country to witness an event likened to a strategic military maneuver that would spill flood- waters over an estimated seventy thousand acres of economically viable Louisiana landscape in a visually fantastic show of human’s control over nature. The end result was successful, but the show itself was rather pedes- trian. It took three separate blasts until a fifteen-foot-wide stream of water finally began to emerge from the levee, hours after the first blast. It was perhaps disappointing to those whose lives and livelihoods had not been destroyed in an instant. As one witness observed, “There was to be a mighty wall of water suddenly unleashed, Niagara-like, ripping, tearing all before it;

Figure 3. The human-created levee crevasse near Caernarvon, Louisiana. Notice the

spectators near the blast. Photograph by the United States Weather Bureau, April 29,

1927. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

down the line 47

whirling down toward the Gulf of Mexico like the onrush of Attilla’s horde of Huns. Was there? There was not.”64 One thing did fantastically explode with the Caernarvon crevasse—the much-maligned “levees only” policy. The dirty secret had once and for all been brought into the open with this act, and no longer could the Corps of Engineers and the Mississippi River Com- mission deflect the criticism that a narrowly conceived policy of flood con- trol had brought such pain to thousands of people. One of the few lasting images (Figure 3) of the event shows the act of human-created suffering with a trickle of floodwater coming through the levee.

The numbers were staggering. Close to ten thousand people were dis- placed, and 70 percent of the region’s muskrat population was destroyed. It took several years for the muskrat population to come back and even longer for the trapping and fur pelt industry economy to recover. Muskrats are noc- turnal creatures, and the blast forced them out of their natural habitat and routine. Those not among the hundreds of thousands that drowned eventu- ally perished from overexposure to sunlight.65 The return of a viable trapping industry was significantly hampered by a depleted muskrat population and bureaucratic obstacles put in place to deny paying 100 percent reimburse- ment. Settlements proved more costly than the city anticipated, and law- yers for the CFRC found loopholes in settlement agreements to enable the CFRC to withhold payment. The CFRC agreed to bear the cost of housing and feeding victims displaced from the blast while temporarily residing in New Orleans, but it also deducted food allotments from final settlements. Over $35 million in claims was quickly reduced to $2.9 million by CFRC lawyers, and most of this amount went to the Acme Land and Fur Com- pany.66 Most of those displaced received somewhere in the range of $300, while others received nothing. Rather than face uphill and costly court bat- tles they could little afford, St. Bernards and Plaquemines Parish residents accepted meager payments for their suffering and began the slow process of rebuilding their lives from scratch. Most would never recover.67

This was far from the only moment when social worth was defined through levees during the 1927 flood. The blues provides an aperture into that which is difficult to verbalize, forgotten, and best never remembered. Classic blues singer Mattie Delaney echoes this sentiment in “Tallahatchie River Blues.” “Tallahatchie River Risin’, Lord it’s mighty bad; some peoples

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

48 down the line

on the Tallahatchie done lost everything they had. The people in the Delta wonderin’ what to do; they don’t build some levees, I don’t know what became of you.” A tributary of the Mississippi River, the Tallahatchie River is also known as the site where Emmitt Till’s body was found in 1955 after being savagely beaten by white men near Money, Mississippi, for allegedly whistling at a white woman.68 “Tallahatchie River Blues” suggests that, even before the flood, not every community enjoyed the same measure of defense from levees. Uniformity of levee construction under the Mississippi River Commission and Corps of Engineers was still not a reality by 1927, and gaps continued to plague the coterminous levee system throughout the Yazoo Delta.69 Levee construction and repair work was a never-ending process. For instance, the Riverton levee in Bolivar County, Mississippi, was initially completed in January 1883. Over the course of three decades the levee had so weakened from water washing against and underneath the structure that by 1919 the local levee board of commissioners targeted the Riverton levee as an area desperately in need of revetment and extension work. They justi- fied the work by saying the weakness of this particular levee might place the entire region in peril. Flanked by important cotton-producing regions in the Delta, including Rosedale two miles away and Greenville thirty-five miles away, a weakened Riverton levee put countless lives at risk and had signifi- cant economic ramifications for planters.70 “Tallahatchie River Blues” reified the meaning of vulnerability for people who depended on levees to provide protection but also understood how their security might be tenuous. This was the historical truth Mattie Delaney spoke of. Even if the corps was per- haps alone in its steadfast belief in the levee system leading up to the 1927 flood, others clearly had a more polysemous faith.

Sippie Wallace made a much more concrete analysis of the vulnerability and unnaturalness of levees. Born Beulah Thomas on November 1, 1898, in Houston, Texas, she was one of the more commercially successful Texas R&B singers of the 1920s. On May 6, 1927, during the height of flood displacement and relief operations, Wallace recorded “The Flood Blues.” “They sent out a law for everybody to leave town; but when I got the news I was high water bound. They dynamite the levee thought it might give us ease; but the water still rising do you hear this plea?”71 The social critique described in the song is of an experiential truth. It is a cruel reality that a

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

down the line 49

levee crevasse that destroys one community might result in the safety of border communities downstream. Pressure placed on levees throughout a contiguous stretch is lessened when a crevasse occurs at one specific spot in the system, even if floodwaters might spread across the landscape as back- water. The severity of Mounds Landing in 1927 was rare as most breaks did not cover that much ground. In most cases neighbors breathed a little easier if they heard of breaks in nearby communities, but people also did a little more than wish bad luck on neighbors. Rumors of residents deliber- ately sabotaging the levee of a neighboring community with dynamite under the dark of night were taken seriously. Indeed, by the middle of April armed citizens in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi patrolled levees day and night to prevent such attacks, with friends, neighbors, and bordering states suspi- cious of each other’s activities and motives at every turn.72

Rosemary Howe Scioneaux experienced this firsthand in Southern Loui- siana. Her family lived near Donaldsonville, thirty miles from Baton Rouge, and though she was just a child at the time she would later recall how the adults were terrified that the levee would not hold.73 They were afraid of something more than nature. They were also afraid of neighbors who might sacrifice the area around Donaldsonville to save themselves, which was just as much part of her memory of the disaster as the flood itself. “People who lived south of Donaldsonville set up patrols along the levee,” Scioneaux recalled years later. “They were afraid the people in Gonzales would dyna- mite the levee on our side.”74 Scioneaux’s parents and other adults measured the river every day, hoping flood levels would decrease, but when it remained high they hardened themselves to remain vigilant against their own neigh- bors and friends. On Good Friday, Scioneaux asked her mother what they would do if the levee broke, to which her mother quipped sarcastically but also seriously, “Get a raft and hang on.” A few days later the river’s depth decreased significantly in Donaldsonville. As it turned out, the levee near Morganza, Louisiana, west of their community, had failed.75 Scioneaux’s family was safe, but only at the expense of a neighboring community.

Seven months after “Backwater Blues,” Bessie Smith recorded another song, “Homeless Blues.”76 By now the flood had been seared into the American imagination through patriotic appeals for money that cast the disaster as the

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

50 down the line

greatest of its kind in history. Red Cross camps were still in existence and hundreds of people remained homeless, but for most Americans the autumn of 1927 brought a semblance of normalcy. Coverage of the flood was lessen- ing in newspapers and slowly the country was moving away from its disaster consciousness. Nonetheless, “Homeless Blues” was a reminder of what thou- sands of people had recently experienced and many were still dealing with. Wounds of the disaster were still fresh in the public imagination when Smith’s second song, this one less prescient but equally forceful, hit the air- waves in September 1927. As cultural theorist Farah Jasmine Griffin describes “Homeless Blues’s” infinite wisdom, it was direct in its critique of the Missis- sippi River and the limits of black citizenship.77 “Oh Mississippi River, what a fix you left me in.” When Smith sings the line “Hungry and disgusted, no place to lay my head,” she is indicting both the Mississippi River for creating the initial suffering and American racism for prolonging the pain. At one particular juncture she suggests that death is perhaps preferable to being homeless and without protection, setting the stage for a final critique. She concludes “Homeless Blues” with a scathingly metaphorical critique of the limits imposed on African Americans in the South and their desire to escape a limited life. “Wish I was an eagle, but I’m just a plain old black crow; I’m gonna flap my wings and leave here and never come back no more.”78 As Griffin argues, the dichotomy of an eagle versus a crow is telling; the former represents freedom and the very meaning of citizenship and the latter a stark reminder of everything the eagle is not. An “old black crow” is taken from Jim Crow, the term used to describe an American apartheid system of segre- gation.79 The last line of “Homeless Blues” critiques the South in the same way millions of African Americans did. One by one, individually and col- lectively, black people left the South in a mass exodus known as the Great Migration. There was never just one reason they decided to migrate. Share- cropping, violence, education, health, freedom of movement, and social and kinship networks all played varying roles in migrants’ decision to leave. Bes- sie Smith’s particular critique in “Homeless Blues” posits the importance of environmental disasters alongside the limited social existence of Jim Crow’s inhumanity in that decision-making consciousness, a limited social existence Richard Wright would also pick up in constructing his own blues voice on the 1927 flood.

This content downloaded from ��158.135.1.178 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:01:14 UTC��

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms