Lillian turned on him, furiously, in the dark and whispered, “I’m not going to leave,” but the picture was ruined. He squirmed until its end.
The next morning, wearing a leather jacket instead of his suit coat, he went out to the garage. Lillian thought he had gone to work on the car and was scrubbing the sink with bleach when she heard a thud, a slight boom, and the house shook. Thinking the furnace had exploded she was about to scream, realizing the next moment the house was not only intact but totally silent. Out the back window she saw a little cloud of smoke dispersing into nothing, dirt splattered around a large hole in the ground, and Son just coming around a corner of the garage, a smile turned up like a quarter moon across his face. Going down the back steps, she saw the Woolfords peering from a window and over the back fence the top of the orange garbage truck, the collector standing in it, a large garbage can in his hands, his mouth dropped into a perfect O. Seeing her, the Negro instantly disappeared and she thought, I can’t even face the garbage man again.
Gleeful as a child, Son cried, “Did you see it? It went up just as pretty, just as eas-y as a airy-plane!”
She stared at the hole where the stump had been, realizing only now that it was gone, she had always set her clothes basket on it.
“Frank,” she said, “somebody’ll call the police on you. The windows in our house, probably everybody’s, almost shook out.”
“Woman, I can get new windows. And I can get out of jail,” he said. “Don’t you realize I just blasted out my first stump. There isn’t any way now another man can beat out my estimate.”
“Frank, you just can’t blast off dynamite in your back yard in the middle of the city with neighbors right close up.”
“Hell,” he said. “I just did,” and with the smile as big as ever he got in the car and drove away.
Standing alone in the back yard, Lillian felt like a fool without exactly knowing why. She told herself it was not her fault he did all these wrong things, that his people ought to know just how many wrong things he did, and that it was not her fault.
All winter it had rained frequently over the whole lower Mississippi Valley and now, with March, it rained almost every day. From Cairo, Illinois, south to the mouth of the river, below New Orleans, a flood larger than any the valley had ever known seemed imminent. The river rose enormously the valley’s length, the crest not in sight. Fear mounted, like the river itself. Radio programs were continuously interrupted for bulletins about the river’s stages and people stayed home to hear.
On Sunday, at Cally’s and Poppa’s, Son opened the door to a smell of roasting beef rushing toward them on a shimmer of heat as if he had opened the oven door instead. The little bungalow was almost exactly like their own; they stepped into the living room and beyond was a dining room exactly the same; a hall ran the length of the two and at each end was a bedroom, called the front and back; the latter Cally had recently rented to a young woman from North Carolina who was a school teacher.
Cally came down a short pantry from the kitchen toward them, and Son wondered who the little old lady was. Seeing it was Cally, he was surprised at how stooped she had become. She wore heavy black oxfords that made her feet look as clumsy as a clown’s. He knew they must be the new arch supporters she had asked Lillian to take her to town to buy: that had cost ten dollars. He had said it was the last damn pair he was going to buy. Cally had decided all the pains in her back came from her feet. Poppa was asleep on the sofa and woke to say he had been listening to the news, had only just dozed.
“What is it?” Lillian said. “We haven’t heard any since early morning.”
Poppa looked blank and Cally said, “I could hear it all the way back in the kitchen. They don’t have but one railroad to their name running up near Cairo, Illinois, and they’re afraid the levee’s going to break right over yonder in Wilson.”
“Wilson!” Lillian said. “Frank, that’s not anywhere from Mamma.”
“She’ll get warning in plenty time to get out,” he said.
Toward the end of dinner, Poppa said he wondered what was happening in Mill’s Landing, and Son laughed. “Old man De Witt’ll have niggers out slapping down sand bags,” he said. “I don’t know how he’ll do it but he’ll pass that water on down to somebody else!” He stopped talking to laugh again and the others looked at him, not thinking funny all the devious ways people used to shunt high water away from themselves, to their neighbors, who in turn used any method to pass it on to those below them.
At their objections, Son said, “It’s every man for hisself.” He did not necessarily think it was right; but there were a lot of things in life that weren’t: that didn’t change them any. “It isn’t right folks in Washington don’t go more than fifty-fifty helping us keep the river away from our doors. Shoot, it wasn’t too many years ago the government wasn’t paying even half to keep up the levees. Folks had to build their own and keep them up too. The whole country drains into the Miss’sippi and it ought to be the whole country paying to keep it in its bed. If this turns out to be as bad as it looks like it is, the whole country’s going to hurt though. Farmers are going to be wiped clean out and I mean clean. Folks everywhere going to be looking for food and paying the price.”
After dessert, Lillian and Cally washed dishes. Son, picking at a tooth that always bothered him after eating, followed Poppa to the living room and turned on the news: Special trains, the announcer said, from the North loaded to capacity with old trench sand bags from the war were being rushed to Cairo and points south in an effort to stem the river that was at some points already overlapping the levee a foot.
“Oh hell,” Son said. “We got it now.”
Poppa, recalling all the floods he could, ’03, ’12, ’13 and ’22, said he did not remember such excitement, such precautions before. By the time the women came from the kitchen, warming their chapped-looking hands before them, the news was worse and they all sat hushed, communicating infrequently by lifting their eyes to one another as some word or phrase struck them each differently at different times. Unfamiliar words became familiar by the time the afternoon was over and would become a large part of their daily life in the weeks to come: breaches, inundations, evacuations. Over and over that afternoon in announcing that untold numbers of people had fled home and were either destitute or dead, that industries were paralyzed and crops flooded, what had happened to the people of the valley was declared to be a national disaster. Local authorities, losing no time, were already on the air to ask, Would the Federal Government at last commit itself to a definite program of flood control? Admit, at last, that only full Federal responsibility for building the levees would provide at least a chance of controlling the great river on a rampage?
It was later than usual before Cally said, “You all getting hungry again?” and she went to the kitchen, with Lillian following. By now the news was repetitive and, standing, Son turned off the radio. He had smoked all afternoon and the smoke remained, pushing against the ceiling. Poppa, as he had since noon dinner, was dozing. Shortly he would wake. Son went to the front door and opened it to the wet March night. Far off, farther away sounding than it really was, he heard a train and thought of it rushing away through the night, a sliver of dark patched with yellow. He was thinking how glimpsing the people and having them quickly gone made you feel left behind when Poppa said, “Son.”
As Poppa had known the night Son spoke his name before telling he was going to get married that it was going to be something important, Son knew it now.
“Close the door,” Poppa said.
That’s not it, Son thought, closing it; he came back into a room as cool as the night now.
Poppa clasped his hands and said, “Boy, the store’s not doing so good.”
Son ran his tongue around his gums looking for a fleck of tobacco that had been worrying him. Finding it, he stuck out his tongue, removed the fleck, and said, “Is that so?”
Other times Poppa lost businesses he had not told until it was t
oo late; Son knew it would be too late now. If he asked why Poppa had not spoken earlier, he would say what he always did: he hadn’t wanted to be a bother.
Son said, “What are you going to do now, old man?”
Poppa looked around as if he might find the answer in the confusion of yellow on white that was the wall paper, and his eyes grew moist. Son said quickly, “I can hep you out some. Hep you find something else.”
“I thought maybe a little grocery,” Poppa said. “If I could just work in a little grocery somewhere, I believe I could do all right.” Medicine was helping a kidney infection the doctor had found, had lessened both his dizziness and his sleepiness. Poppa considered himself on the road to recovery, but the doctor held back. Something in his hesitancy, in the set of his mouth, had kept Poppa from telling he had even been to a doctor. Only noticing that he had a little more get-up-and-go, Cally had told him so.
Son asked if he had told Mammy about the store. By a slight lift of one shoulder, Poppa indicated he had. Cally called them to supper and the new boarder was with her. Kate Jefferson, Cally said, and was happy introducing Son, sensing he and Poppa had been talking about what she had wanted them to. When Son came forward to shake hands, to hear Kate had come all the way from North Carolina to teach school, Cally, looking at him, thanked him silently for help. Kate said she had heard a lot about Son; she was glad to meet him. He did not notice too much about her, except that she was tall.
In the next few days Son, like everyone, thought only about the flood and not once about the golf course job. Daily, he and Scottie watched from the office window as the river rose, and finally crested close to fifty feet. From the Delta and as far away as Kentucky, refugees who had been plucked from tree tops, roof tops and the highest windows of buildings, were brought into the city. Son watched as bus loads of people stared at him with faces acknowledging their homelessness and sometimes hunger, holding in little bundles all they now possessed. It sure looked, he said, like the Government was going to have to take over flood control; levees people had now just couldn’t do the job. Always, people living in the lower valley had had a solitary struggle to protect themselves and their settled land from high water. Unbelievably long, flood control had been left to chance and isolated local effort.
And always there had been floods, old Red Johnson said; he spent much of his time now reading the valley’s history. He told that De Soto, searching for gold in 1543, had been delayed by a flood lasting forty days, and La Salle, exploring for the French, had found much of the valley under water. Both men had noted mounds the Indians lived on in spring when the river annually overflowed. Everyone stayed at the Army Engineers office, talking. Red said one afternoon as bad as this flood was, it didn’t represent the old river’s full flood potential. “Someday,” he said, “all the rivers going to flood at the same time, you watch.” Terrible as that day would be, he could not help a look of amusement. He called the names of the rivers, relishing them: O-hio, Red, White, the Mo, Tenny-see, Cumberland, Arkansas, upper too.
“Jesus,” Son said, unable to picture anything that bad happening, yet knowing it could. He drove into the Delta with Red and Shut-eye to view damage. Shut-eye called the river hongry. “That river’s hongry,” he said. “Always going to be.” The land would not drain even in time to plant ridges, higher ground; a year’s worth of crops were lost. Red said, “Before levee days, the river’s natural flow-way was forty miles wide. It overflowed and met all the other rivers overflowed and it was all high water then, just high water five or six months out of the year.”
“Naw,” Son said, not skeptically but in astonishment. Then Red went on to tell about the first levees, how the French built them after settling New Orleans in 1717. (Son never had thought about any Frenchmen having to do with anything he had to do with.) In the Delta, where now they stood, the first levees had been built by slaves after a war with Mexico when the cotton plantations were beginning to flourish; afterward slaves were too valuable to risk in malarial swamps beneath the broiling Delta sun. Irish were imported from ports, New Orleans, Cairo, St. Louis, and continued the work using wheelbarrows, the slaves’ only implements. Muckers, Son said. By 1890, yellow fever had driven them from the Delta forever: the unmarked graves of those left behind made clear the early railroad and levee lines.
Shut-eye drove them back home. Son settled in the living room with a snack of cheese and crackers and opened the afternoon paper to read that if the flood had been confined, water would have reached almost sixty feet everywhere, nearly seventy in some places. Existing levees had not even been designed to hold such water. Water in such volume had not even been thought of. The newspaper printed a chart, a brief flood history. Having listened to Red so much, Son read it with unusual attention:
1844: one of the valley’s worst floods; the following year, at a convention in Memphis, John C. Calhoun termed the Mississippi River an “inland sea” and claimed it a proper object of Federal interest. Abraham Lincoln, Horace Greeley, Thomas H. Benton advocated Federal flood control. But aid for navigation would come sooner.
1849 and 1850: the valley was hit by severe spring storms causing numerous levee crevasses. The Government showed a slight awareness of its suffering: passed a Swamp Act granting states unsold swamp land within their borders, funds from sales to be used for flood control projects. But lack of cooperation between states and levee districts involved caused the plan to fail.
1851–1858: prosperous years for the Delta; but in the latter year and in 1859 floods severely damage the levees, now a straggling and broken line from New Orleans to Memphis. Delta people clamored for one unbroken line from the Chickasaw Bluffs of Memphis to Vicksburg, but the Civil War halted all progress.
1862: levees were damaged by military operations and a flood; no men remained at home to repair them. The following February, Grant, to reach Vicksburg, ordered a mine exploded in the Yazoo Pass levee. Additional levees were cut to overflow Confederate guns on low embankments. Toward the war’s end a flood severe and remarkable in duration caused more than a mile of levee to cave into the river. After the war communities struggled to rebuild but by 1878 hundreds of miles of main line levees had disappeared or were worthless because of crevasses.
1879: Congress established a Mississippi River Commission to mature plans and estimates that would correct and permanently locate, deepen the channel, and protect the banks of the river. “To improve and give safety and ease to the navigation thereof; prevent destructive floods; promote and facilitate commerce, trade, and the postal service …”
1880: the Commission submitted its first report. Congress has appropriated a million dollars for the construction of improvement works under the Commission’s jurisdiction; the bill states specifically that funds are to be spent only for deepening or improving the river’s channel. This marks the begining of a coordinated levee system for the lower Mississippi. However, expenses are limited to levee construction as part of navigation. This will hold true for thirty-five more years.
1882–1903: seven major floods inundate the lowlands. Levee work begun in 1882 under the Commission marks the beginning of actual construction of a coordinated levee system.
1912–1913: severe floods in both years, the former causing $40,000,000 worth of property damage. The President requests from the Commission a report on methods of flood prevention; levees, reservoirs, cutoffs, outlets, diversion channels and reforestation are to be considered. Despite the report, Congress took no action toward authorizing a flood control plan for the entire alluvial valley. The Commission’s work continued to be limited to repairing levees and keeping the navigation channel open.
1916: another severe flood results in the first Federal Flood Control Act.
1917: on March 1, the Act is approved. The control of levees for flood becomes by law a definite part of the Commission’s work and responsibility. The Act authorizes the construction of levees for the control of floods but affirms the policy of local cooperation; local interest sho
uld contribute not less than one-half the construction cost, in addition to furnishing rights-of-way. Local interest was charged with the maintenance of levees once the work was completed. The Commission was allowed to spend Federal funds for work on tributaries as necessary to protect the upper limits of any alluvial basin from flooding. Under this act many miles of levees were constructed, but the end result was unsatisfactory. Local interests could not meet the responsibilities; a fifty-fifty split with the Government of the costs of flood control was more than the local districts could handle.
1922: during March and April almost every stream east of the Rockies is in flood. Inundation into the Mississippi Valley continued into May and June.
1923: a second Flood Control Act is passed further clarifying the River Commission’s jurisdiction.
1927: the valley has suffered the most disastrous flood in its history.
Son, having finished the chart, sucked at crackers caught in his back tooth and glanced at the rest of the front page; all articles had to do with the flood. Physical loss had been estimated at $236,000,000 read one headline and another that such disparate groups as the American Investment Bankers and the American Legion had taken up the clamor for the Government to accept flood responsibility. Advocates of Federal flood control argue that waters from as far east as New York and as far west as Montana contribute toward floods in the valley. Only the might and wealth of the whole country can attempt to hold back the Mississippi, they say. The flood has shown that a levee system as the only method of flood control is inadequate. The curving channels of the river increase flood in high water. The river does not stay in a fixed channel; it meanders. Those for Federal control argue further that national benefits will come from it; it will add to overall prosperity. They say that the Government has accepted responsibility for navigation, built revetments to restrain low water so ships can move on the river always. Why does it not maintain levees which restrain high water? Those opposed, sectional-minded men, claim that once the Federal Government assumes all financial burden, a maximum demand for flood protection will result. Local adjustment will reduce itself to a minimum.
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