Mississippi River Road - Part 2

Cadillac John at Po’ Monkey's Lounge credit: Andy Anderson

In the beginning, the only road was the river. Farms and plantations in the eighteenth century drew sustenance from its serpentine course, loading their crops onto its broad back in canoes, skiffs, flatboats, and rafts. On the lower Mississippi, towns and a few rural mansions developed among the cotton and sugarcane fields, and the rising population was decidedly African. By 1850, 70 percent of the inhabitants of the river parish of Ascension were slaves, and many white residents were considered petits habitants, or small farmers of little wealth or prospects. The money of the region was concentrated under the thumbs of the very few, most of it spent on enormous houses and grand balls.

After the Civil War, many former slaves stayed on, actors in the deteriorating agricultural drama that played out through Reconstruction and beyond. The roads along the river were linear mud sloughs connecting tract to tract, so for most people travel was a dream not to be realized. Even after the locomotive whistles came ululating through the virgin cypresses in the late nineteenth century, common people along the river seldom wandered more than a few miles from their houses during their lifetimes. Few had a place to visit either by train or the diminishing number of steamboats that hung on into the next century. A pattern was set way before the first usable roads were graded and graveled in the 1930s, roads that actually went somewhere. For more than a hundred years river people had no real roads at all. They were sealed into their lives by a profound isolation, and were ruled by the notion that they should stay — stay by the house. Around here is all we know.

One might wonder why the really isolated sections of the river road are still populated at all, since agriculture is mechanized nowadays and there is little other work. The answer is that although river dwellers put up with a very basic lifestyle, they are not stupid. The river region is a real place where their relatives live — not a subdivision of strangers severed from any particular culture. In any given slice of river road everyone shares the same old stories that are the sinew and bone of family; the same music, be it blues, jazz, locally tinged hip-hop, or moaning gospel; the same recipes for rabbit spaghetti and hog headcheese; the same church. In short, despite the drawbacks of a place, place and life are inseparable.

Religion is as real as a brick and abounds in all forms — from soaring Catholic churches to little hammered-together affairs containing a few butt-worn benches and a leaning pulpit. There’s something about the God-sized black trees and constantly reborn fields that breeds worship among the river’s poor, as though the less people have, the more thankful they are.

What the area lacks in strip malls, subdivisions, interstates, and fast food it makes up for in a livable feeling of unique culture both good and bad — a spirit reflected in the enormous oaks that are both witnesses to and reminders of slavery and liberation, beating and celebration, Sunday dancing and Monday headache, baptism and heatstroke. The old houses remain, though the families die off and disperse, sometimes to be re-colonized by a new line hoping to live on the place forever. Restaurants and tourist places in larger riverside towns are inevitably full of pictures of steamboats, pistols and knives of riverboat gamblers, references to Mark Twain or Mike Fink, cotton scales hanging from the ceiling weighing only dust and the gaze of tourists. The public mansions, which overlook the river, draw in those hungry for history, while the newly arrived casino boats draw in the bored and adventurous. Among the favored foods are thick slabs of river catfish, now mostly grown in ponds, or catfish court bouillon, smothered catfish, and more recently, catfish nuggets.

People who for, say, fifty years have driven about once a year along the real river roads, the little two-lane blacktops stuck right against the base of the levee, notice that nothing ever changes much. Paint peels off, a windowpane falls out, the words erode off a sign, but the locals remember what was written so there’s no need to reletter anything. Houses great and small collapse, but either the heap is left in place to be overtaken by brambles, or the spot is burned over and healed
by weeds.

Many places just flat don’t seem to change at all. But part of this illusion of sameness is caused by the fact that things are not being replaced. Each year, over the hundreds of miles of river road there are fewer mansions, overseer’s dwellings, slave cabins, graveyard fences, sugar mills, plantation bells, commissary buildings, ferry landings, depots, cypress fences, two-hundred-year-old shacks, and foot-worn churches. The buildings of heart pine or cypress and slate have hung on as long as they can, but at some point even cypress lumber fails to hold a nail.

What never seem to disappear are the trees, whether geriatric rows of towering pecans rising above the untended brush, or the thick biceps of the live oaks bearing memories like lightning strikes, giving messages one can feel by laying a hand against the bark.