Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination

1 Down the Line: Blues Brilliance, Displacement, and Living under the Shadow of Levees

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 historical archive and how historians make sense of the 1927 flood through “traditional ” sources. For many reasons, traditional archives obscure more than theyrevealaboutblacksocialrealitiesduringthe1927flood.Adearthoffirsthand 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 archival sources from the flood. This is not to say important sources do not exist. Blackleaders,institutions,andnewspaperswerevocalthroughouttheordeal, 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 25 26 down the line rationale behind migration to Chicago or Houston? Were they already looking 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 Progress 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 archivepresentsatbestatemporalspaceof knowledgearoundthe1927flood. 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 understanding of the limited archive.1 Equally important was the violence toward and surveillance of black people in southern states and the way it undermined 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 suffering 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 constantly 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 presence of the letter reject ideas of illiteracy, but the tone perhaps implies a middle-class status undermining most treatments of flood survivors that 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...