Letter from America
A native of Mississippi recalls floods past and present and says they can be festive as well as fearsome
NEW ORLEANS: Two weeks ago I drove from New Orleans, where I live, to Greenville, Mississippi, where I grew up, for what I thought would be a pleasant few days in the place I stubbornly still call ‘home’. The weather had finally warmed up and I knew thousands of daffodils would be covering the slavebuilt levee that fronts our house. About thirty miles from home, I stopped at the Onward Store (a few miles from the spot where President Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a tethered bear, a non-event that led to the creation of the ever popular ‘teddy bear’ toy) for a six-pack of cold Bud, and by the time I made the turn onto our gravel drive, I was in such a good mood I was singing along with the radio. Then it began to rain.
That first night it rained so hard water was gushing down our chimney. By the next afternoon, fourteen inches had been recorded and our country road was under water. The only thing that kept people from driving off into the ditch was the car that had already done so, helpfully providing a marker. Then it rained for three more days.
I don’t know why I was surprised. It’s spring; we flood. Greenville is on the Mississippi, smack in the middle of what is known as the Mississippi Delta – not the actual delta of the river where it gushes into the Gulf of Mexico, but the diamond-shaped alluvial floodplain of the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. Largely uninhabitable until well into the 19th century, the Delta was drained and hacked out by well-off but slightly crazy planters from places like South Carolina and Kentucky whose land had already been tapped out. Eager to get at some of the richest soil in the world, they took a gamble and battled panthers and gators and snakes and a tangled mess of a hardwood forest before they could even think of dropping a seed into the ground.
In those early days, water was, sort of, kept at bay by levees like the one in our front yard (part of the old Locust Plantation along the aptly named Rattlesnake Bayou). By the 1850s, the patchwork system of private and government-built levees was taken over by the US Army Corps of Engineers with mixed results, and battling the yearly massive overflows remained key to settling the Delta’s 7,000 or so square miles.
Even in (or perhaps because of) such a frontier environment, the intrepid settlers made the best of the flood season. A diary kept by a young woman named Florence Sillers Ogden reports that during one incident her Aunt Mamie provided non-stop diversion by playing a piano that had been placed on a scaffold in case the water invaded the house. Folks foraged for chickens in trees or on rooftops and took their skiffs to the levees for ‘overflow parties’, all ‘in an effort to turn inconvenience into a frolic’.
There was nothing festive about the great flood of 1927, which devastated both Greenville and New Orleans. (Until Katrina, it was the worst ‘natural’ disaster to befall the US.) A bit belatedly, the Corps realised that levees alone could not contain the mighty river and began building spillways into which flood waters could be diverted. Since then the levees have generally held and flooding comes from water coming over the top (in years when there’s an abundance of melted ice and snow flowing from the north) or heavy rains.
In my lifetime, on our stretch of the river at least, the system has worked. Our floods have been bothersome and sometimes even deadly, but rarely catastrophic. Mostly, they remind me of how little the Delta has changed. These days there’s still more land than people—the population is about 500,000 and more than 2.7 million acres of land are under cultivation – and the frontier spirit still marks us. Also, the critters haven’t gone anywhere. The black bears Roosevelt came to hunt, for example, still live among us – last year the high water drove one hefty specimen all the way to Greenville’s downtown where he was discovered up a tree by the fire station.
When the water finally receded enough for me to head back to New Orleans, I stopped off to visit my friend Hank Burdine, a commissioner of the Mississippi Levee Board and an avid outdoorsman. On the winding road to his house, dozens of people had simply stopped their cars and trucks and were plundering the bounty of the high water with fishing poles and bows and arrows. When I pulled up in Hank’s driveway, he greeted me with a Bloody Mary and pointed to the back of his truck. Inside was a hundred pound alligator snapping turtle that had gotten tangled up in one of the fishermen’s lines.
Our job, Hank said, was to get him back to safety by dropping him into a nearby oxbow lake. An alligator snapper, also known as a loggerhead or cooter, can easily bite through a man’s arm, but Hank knew to pick him up by grabbing his shell just behind his head and in front of his tail. Since they can live to be 200, I wondered if this one had survived the ’27 flood or been to any ‘overflow parties’. Either way, he was certainly contributing to our own seasonal ‘frolic’. We drove him to the bridge at Cocklebur Slough and Hank tossed him into the water with a shout: ‘Hasta Mañana, my buddy.’ Then we made another Bloody and toasted to his – and our – good fortune. It had been a pretty good flood.