“Paddle Your Own Canoe”: Eddy L. Harris’s Mississippi Solo and an Invitation to Communitas

If your birth denied you wealth,   Lofty state and power;Honest fame and hardy health   Are a better dower. But if these will not suffice,   Golden gain pursue;And, to win the glittering prize,   Paddle your own canoe.

—Sarah T. Bolton

“Now to gain the social prize / Paddle your own canoe.” So William Wells Brown quotes—or misquotes—the widely circulating 1865 poem then song of Indiana writer Sarah T. Bolton. His reference to the song appears in his 1880 compilation of southern memories and commentary, My Southern Home: or, The South and Its People. The rewards of Reconstruction having done a quick about-face and the “hue and cry about Negro Equality” racing on unchecked, Brown here makes a moderate argument. It is not, he says, as if

the liberating of a race, and securing to them personal, political, social and religious rights, made it incumbent upon us to take these people into our houses, and give them seats in our social circle, beyond what we would accord to other total strangers. No advocate of Negro Equality ever demanded for the race that they should be made pets. . . . Then away with this talk, which is founded in hatred to an injured people. Give the colored race in the South equal protection before the law, and then we say to them—

“Now, to gain the social prize, Paddle your own canoe.”

(251)

A century later, Eddy L. Harris, another young, African American man from St. Louis, takes up this challenge—literally. He decides to pursue his childhood dream “to be somehow part of the river” (2) and “paddle his own canoe.” “Putting a canoe into the headwaters of the Mississippi and aiming it for New Orleans is not something a man is supposed to do,” he writes (3). He does it, just the same, though he is “no expert canoeist” (6) and owns no canoe. When his friends’ ridicule of his idea gives way to celebration, one, a woman, offers to drive him to Lake Itasca and “wonder of wonders, she knows where I can borrow a canoe” (10). If Harris knows the song fellow-St. Louisan Brown cites or Brown’s citation of it, he doesn’t say so. And yet, in paddling not his own but someone else’s canoe, he pushes beyond what Wells Brown requests “for the race” in 1880. Whether or not in the 1980s he will necessarily receive the “equal protection before the law” for which Brown pleaded, Harris sets out alone on a journey in which he repeatedly takes a seat among strangers, human and more-than-human.

Mississippi Solo, in some editions subtitled A Memoir on its cover and A River Quest on its title page, is a travelogue seeking a presentation of personal identity worthy of nonfiction’s heritage. It’s the first of Eddy Harris’s nonfiction accounts of his travels. Others took him to the southern United States, southern Africa—where he did not find his roots—and back to Harlem, the place of his early life before his family moved to the Midwest. He has also written about France where, like Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin before him, he now lives. Missouri has, belatedly, it has to be said, embraced this Harlem-born, Stanford-trained writer as its own. The Missouri Humanities Council Board chose Mississippi Solo in 2004 for its state-wide Read MOre program and gave Harris the Missouri Governor’s Humanities Award for Literature that same year (MOHumanities; “Celebrations”). If one is interested in the relationship between literary value, cross-species acuity, environmental justice, and public engagement, as I am, Harris’s book offers an occasion to consider again what flowering of those relationships is possible. Its being nonfiction, I am especially interested to place Mississippi Solo, and its author, particularly as he lives in its pages, among postcolonial, environmental writer-activists of the later twentieth century.

Environmental humanist Rob Nixon’s attention to the special value of nonfiction poses key questions applicable to Harris’s work: his...