New Fiction on the Great Flood of 1927

In terms of scale and scope of destruction, the series of floods that struck the Mississippi River system in the spring of 1927 (now known simply as “the great flood of 1927”) is regarded as one of the nation’s greatest natural disasters. More than 16 million acres of land were inundated, with human and economic devastation so massive as to be scarcely imaginable. According to cultural historian David Evans, “over 162,000 homes were flooded, 41,000 buildings destroyed, between 600,000 and a million people made homeless, between 250 and 1,000 people drowned, and up to a billion dollars in economic losses incurred.” That’s in 1927 dollars, of course, at a time when the entire federal budget hovered around $3 billion. In today’s dollars, the destruction would amount to about $13 billion. The long-term social and political impact of the flood was also enormous, a point Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly make in their authors’ note to The Tilted World, their new novel set during the time of the flood. The great flood, they write, “permanently altered race relations and American politics, causing hundreds of thousands of African Americans to migrate north, ushering Herbert Hoover into the White House, and cementing the belief that the federal government—which had done nothing to help the flood victims—should create an agency to prevent emergencies and assist recoveries.”

Despite its tremendous impact locally and nationally, the flood of 1927, as Franklin and Fennelly further note, remains today a buried cultural memory which they hope their novel will help recover. A similar claim could also be made for another recent novel, Bill Cheng’s Southern Cross the Dog, which appeared shortly before The Tilted World. If the floodgates haven’t exactly opened, the publication of two novels about a largely forgotten era seems significant, and indeed both novels have generated a good deal of discussion, though often focused on the writers themselves rather than on the depictions of the flood and its aftermath.

This author-directed focus is particularly true in discussions of Cheng’s Southern Cross the Dog, a novel that follows the disruptions to the lives of several African Americans during the flood and then their struggles to reground themselves over the next fifteen years or so. Aside from some nods to the quality of the writing, a great deal of the media and critical attention given to Southern Cross the Dog has centered on the fact that Cheng is an Asian American from New York City (Queens) who, before his book tour for the novel, had never set foot in the South. Virtually every review and interview calls attention to the great divide between the world of Cheng the man and the world that Cheng the author created. Considerations of that divide have been both Cheng’s blessing and his curse, initially generating a lot of buzz (and no doubt helping him land a gig for Bon Appétit to report on the food he sampled on his book tour through the South) and yet eventually shoving aside any serious consideration of the novel itself. Not surprisingly, Cheng’s patience of late has at times worn perilously thin when the same questions and comments keep coming up. I’m afraid that Cheng has found himself stuck on a tar baby.

Cheng’s defense of his capability to write about African Americans in the segregated South is forthright: The human experiences that are the subject of his novel—fear, love, hated, loss—are universal, not race-determined. “I would posit that the experience of being black or white or Asian or Hispanic or whatever else are the same as any human being,” Cheng comments in a lively conversation with Christine Lee Zilka, an Asian-American writer not entirely comfortable with Cheng’s positions. “We have the same sense of pain and love; we have the same sense of fair play; we equally fall victim to our own anger and pride; we are capable of the same insights, want the same things...