“Broad and Slow and Yellow”: Navigating Precarity in Shirley Ann Grau’s Mississippi River

Pultizer prize winning Louisiana novelist Shirley Ann Grau was born on July 8, 1929, and has spent most of her life in the Big Easy. As a child she read voraciously, studying Greek and Latin (Simpson 1) and learning about her native city. She attended the historic Ursuline Academy High School near the Mississippi and later graduated with a degree in English literature from Sophie Newcomb College for women at Tulane University. In 1955, she married James K. Feibleman, who taught philosophy at Tulane, and raised four children in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, which is a short distance to the river. Grau’s living so close to the Mississippi River throughout her life emphasizes the importance of the river to her fiction. The people, music, food, goods, and services associated with the Mississippi River inform and enliven Grau’s work. The bayous and marshland surrounding the lower Mississippi and the city of New Orleans itself supply more than a colorful backdrop for her stories; they profoundly influence the characters, plot, and major themes of her work, especially her early work. In fact, Grau’s first collection, The Black Prince and Other Stories (1954), includes several stories about characters living and working near the waterways surrounding the lower Mississippi, and her first full-length novel, The Hard Blue Sky (1958), focuses on Cajun fishermen and their families who reside on an island near the mouth of the river. In 1965 Grau was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her third novel, The Keepers of the House (1964), a story of retributive justice that highlights the social inequities between men and women, black and white, and rich and poor (Graham-Bertolini 52). The novel includes vibrant passages about the fictional Providence River—the hanging foliage of its banks, its dangerously innocuous whirlpools, and the river rising in spring, to “top its low bluffs and inch across the land” (109).

Although Grau is reluctant to call herself a regional writer, much of her early fiction is rooted in place. In an interview with John Canfield from 1987, Grau comments, “I probably started out in the fashion of the late ‘40s and ‘50s as more or less a regionalist with heavy, heavy emphasis on place as dominating character” (1). Grau is indeed adept at describing the Southern landscape—her vivid descriptions of pervasive and relentless heat, the smell of rain on dry soil, the vegetation and plant life, the architecture, and local dialects, bring her stories to life. Too often, however, critics have overlooked the ecological design within her work. Ann Pearson wrongly claims that Grau’s descriptions of nature have “a chilly impersonality” the result of which is “that nature becomes meaningless” (48). Many critics have characterized Grau’s fiction as detached and disconnected; however, such readings overlook Grau’s attention to ecological detail and significance—particularly the way she uses the Mississippi to structure her narratives and to imbue them with meaning. In fact, Grau portrays the Mississippi River as a liminal space; it is a place of transition, where unknown dangers suddenly approach from without and move inland, upriver, threatening the lives and livelihood of those who reside nearby. In reading The Hard Blue Sky, “Joshua,” and The Condor Passes, I will demonstrate how Grau’s characters struggle to succeed economically and socially within the setting and mythology of the Mississippi River, and will show how these characters’ struggle for identity is paralleled and reflected by the changing river.

Grau’s anxiety for the communities of people living along the lower Mississippi has a basis in fact. Since the great Mississippi flood of 1927, the Army Corps of Engineers has redirected the flow of the Mississippi with levees, cut-offs, and flood plains. Thus, the once “natural” and “wild” river has in fact been cordoned off and disciplined, at least to the best of human ability. The result is that the once wild Mississippi is now a contained waterway that does not replenish the barrier islands with sediment. Further, the portion of the Mississippi River that runs past New...