place,” he says now. But it was here, at the river, that his people came to settle, to snatch once more at the good life after the high ground failed them for the last time.
“If you’re ashamed of where you’re from, then you’re ashamed of yourself,” he says of the years he lived in overalls, mud-bound. “I ain’t never been ashamed. Ferriday, Louisiana, is where I’m from. We lived a while at Black River, and lived a while down at Angola, when Daddy helped build the prison there. Daddy was up at four o’clock, and Mama was up five minutes after. Daddy followed carpentry work, so we moved all the time, moved three times in one week, to old shanty houses, mostly. He farmed cotton, corn, soybeans, split halves with my Uncle Lee, and he made some whiskey. Mama picked cotton. It was a small place, but it never seemed small to me, when I was a boy.” It is where his people, all of them, are buried, “so it’s home to me.” He has never been one of those poor Southern children who claim to have lived in blissful ignorance of their poverty and the life into which they were born; such a thing leaves no room to dream. “It kind of dawns on you after a while. It occurred to me pretty quick.” His mama and daddy never owned much of the bottomland when he was a boy, sometimes not enough to fill a teacup, but that only made it more precious. It was their last stand, this Concordia Parish, and even now, as he crosses the bridge from Natchez, he breathes easier, as if someone has lifted a heavy hand off his chest. He has to try to remember the bad of it; the good comes easy, “all good, good singin’, good eatin’, good—You know that song about the tree?”
I’m like a tree that’s planted by the water.
I shall not be moved.
People have been dying beside these waters a long time, hoping for a piece of the unsteady ground, hoping to grow something from it. Would he have been the same if he had come from a gentler place? “The talent would have come through,” he says, “even if I’d been born in some big city. But it mighta been . . . different.” It might have been, somehow, gentler. “I think my music is like a rattlesnake. It warns you, ‘Listen to this. You better listen to this.’” That essence, the toughness and meanness and maybe even a spike of savage beauty, he believes, crawled straight out of this mud.
In Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, historian Lee Sandlin identifies a quality that seems to have marked Mississippi River people from earliest days: “They all lived for the spontaneous, heedless surge of wild exuberance, the sudden recourse to violence with no provocation—the violence if not of act then of thought and language. They routinely did and said extraordinarily foolish things for no reason other than joie de vivre.” One such character was a Bunyanesque scalawag named Mike Fink. “He was a creature of pure impulse—and yet whatever he did, no matter how bizarrely random it might be, he did perfectly. He achieved without effort what nobody else could do in a lifetime of labor. His air of godlike grace, of what in classical literature was called arete, transcended everything about his personality—which was in all other ways appalling.”
Figures like Mike Fink “had a ritual game they’d play called shout-boasting,” Sandlin writes, “the point of which was to make up surreally violent claims about themselves, and then dare to fight anybody who challenged them.”
But it is not boasting, as Jerry Lee says, “if you really done it.”
The Spaniards came to the river in 1541. Hernando de Soto led men in iron helmets into the malarial jungles in a bloodthirsty search for nonexistent gold and was one of the first white men to die in the heat, damp, and mosquitoes thick as fog; some say his rusty conquistadores still ride in the mist. Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville et d’Ardillières, knight of the Order of Saint-Louis and founder of the Colony of Louisiana of New France, brought settlement and Bible and sword; soon the indigenous tribes were extinct. Flags would go up and down as white men fought over it all, till the Old World finally retreated from the yellow fever and floodplain.
In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase gave the mud to a new nation, and Thomas Jefferson sent naturalist William Dunbar to see what all the dying was for. Dunbar explored the Mississippi, Black, and Ouachita rivers by boat and horseback, and in his journals he made the land sound like paradise. “Vegetation is extremely vigorous along the alluvial banks; twining vines entangle the branches of trees [with] the richest and most luxurious festoons.” The result was “an impenetrable curtain, variegated and spangled with all possible gradations of color from the splendid orange to the enlivening green down to the purple and blue and interspersed with bright red and russet brown.” Dunbar saw endless oak trees, red and black, along with ash, pecan, hickory, elm, and persimmon; the soil was “black marl mixed with sand,” the riverbanks “clothed in rich canebreak.” The forest along the river would offer “venison, bear, turkey . . . the river fowl and fish . . . [along with] geese and ducks surprisingly fat, and excellent.”
And the river itself? Dunbar wrote of its unpredictability and moods, of whirlpools and crosscurrents where, “even in the thread of the stream, we can make no sense of it.”
Natchez would become the seat of civilization here, and it was a city of two faces. One was gentility itself, a place of plantations that set a standard for opulence, of cotillions and white columns, of high tea and fine saddle leather, London silver and Parisian gowns, all resting on a foundation of human bondage. On the other face was a leer, a wild gateway to the West peopled by gamblers, whores, pirates, riverboat men, trappers, no-accounts, swindlers, and dope fiends, where keel-boats, riverboats, and oceangoing ships lined the docks; the river was so deep that the big merchant ships could creep all the way from the English ports to the whorehouses in Natchez Under the Hill. Sailors from around the world drank, fought, and cursed here in their language of origin. Beyond the lights, pirates used lanterns and bonfires to lure boats aground, robbed passengers, and rendered their bodies to the catfish.
Across the river, in Concordia Parish, in rich bottomland fed by centuries of flood, the land was hacked and burned into vast, gray-brown fields. Small towns like Vidalia, Waterproof, and St. Joseph bustled with commerce, as great steamboats tied up to take on unending cargoes of cotton and lumber. The Southern Belle, Princess, Magnolia, Natchez, and New Orleans served meals to rival any restaurant in New Orleans and had staterooms to rival the grandest hotels. The Indians called them “fire canoes,” and they routinely burned to the waterline. But every arrival in Natchez or Concordia Parish was a carnival, to see what the river would bring. Their captains became mythical figures, and poets told of them as the Greeks sang of Agamemnon:
Say, pilot, can you see that light?
I do—where angels stand.
Well, hold her jackstaff hard on that,
For there I’m going to land.
That looks like death a-hailing me
So ghastly, grim and pale.
I’ll toll the bell—I must go in.
I’ve never missed a hail.
It took muscle to power it all, and by 1860 there were 12,542 slaves in Concordia Parish alone, compared to 1,242 free whites—a cold-blooded economy wherein many plantations were controlled by absentee owners who saw the fields as a pure business venture. Life expectancy was so poor for slaves here that slave owners in other states used Louisiana plantations as a lash to keep their own slaves in line, saying if they misbehaved, they would be sold south. With populations in such disproportion and order kept by bullwhip and rope, it was a tense and brittle arrangement, prone to insurrection. One often-told story involves a slave, found guilty of murdering white men and kidnapping white women, who was burned on a pyre, or at least it was planned that way till he pulled his chains free of the post and staggered off—only to be shot dead, disappointing the crowd.
Violence lay thick here, like the air. Duels were so common on the sandbars that they take up fifteen pages in Robert Dabney Calhoun’s History of Concordia Parish. Democrats shot at Republicans, husbands shot at judges in their wives’ divorce claims, and physicians and generals shot at senators, congressmen, and the commanding officer of the Mexican War. In 1827, Dr. Thomas