Coast to Coast (10 page)

Hymn followed hymn, and gradually I sensed among the worshippers a growing intensity of devotion. An old bespectacled farmer stood alone at the rostrum to sing an unaccompanied hymn, and during the performance some of the massed elders began to interrupt him with mournful shouts of “Amen, amen! Glory be! Amen!” These interpolations grew more frequent during the succeeding hymns, and soon the whole congregation (barring a few totally insensible yokels) seemed gripped by some undefined passion, and stood singing the hymns with a strange tenseness. Four young men with a banjo sang a long Easter hymn,
molto
adagio,
and during this the elders fostered in themselves a regular frenzy of devotion. From all corners of the room there now came deep-throated
“Amens!” with supplications, ejaculations, cries of joy and despair and awful imprecations. “Oh yes, Lord! That’s right, Lord! Jesus, Jesus! Ah, glory be to the Lord! Yes! Oh, oh, save us, glory be! Oh, Lord, save us miserable sinners! ! Oh, the hell fire! Must we be condemned, Lord? Oh, no, glory be! The hell fire! Glory be! Save us, save us! They shall be cast into the darkness of the pit! Hallelujah! Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, glory, glory, glory, glory be! ! ! Amen! Yes, Lord, glory be, amen, miserable sinners!”

By now the scene was one of general confusion. Everywhere men were raising their arms to the heavens, or clutching at their hair with both hands. Around me people were swaying from side to side, muttering snatches of prayer, or suddenly bursting into ear-splitting yells of “Glory! ! Glory be! ! !” The pastor strode between the ranks of his flock, the book still under his arm, alternately denouncing and beseeching its members. “Oh, you poor miserable brethren, poor suffering sheep, repent, repent! My friends, come with me and repent! Come to the altar! The fires of everlasting perpetual hell will be upon you for ever and ever! The flames of the inferno will lick you, my brethren! Oh, you sinners, you wicked children of sin, it is not too late. No! Come to the altar! Will you come, my friends? Will you come? Ah, salvation! Come, my friends, miserable sinners!” At the end of the church the quartet was now singing a syncopated hymn, to the strumming accompaniment of the banjo. Now and then, through the babel, I could hear some of its words:

The minister shouted harder and more furiously, and eventually one or two elderly men, shaking with emotion, staggered out of their benches and threw themselves on the floor. Others followed, and soon from all parts of the church groups of quivering worshippers were moving towards the front, to hurl themselves out of my sight beyond the benches. The pastor swirled around them, shrieking commands and entreaties; the tears were streaming down his cheeks. A number of women were sobbing helplessly, and large numbers of children were screaming, and the strident cries of the elders filled the church.

At once deafened and bewitched, I left the building in a kind of blasted trance, and stood for a moment on the steps. A small boy who had been kicking stones about the road approached me with the information
that, according to his mother, the pastor was a genuine saint; that he lived in the mountains and drove twenty miles to the church every Sunday; and that his grandfather was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. I thanked him, and drove away down the country road, pursued by the raucous cacophony from the church; the faint earnest voices of the singers, the thump-thump of the tireless piano, and an occasional penetrating “Hallelujah, Lord! Glory, glory be! !”

In every hamlet and prosperous suburb, as I travelled back to Chattanooga through the sunshine, the churchgoers were on the move again, home to a handsome lunch. Whether they had echoed the cool formality of an English cathedral, or had screamed their jungly declamations to the Almighty, they went home contented, each in his way. And perhaps nearest to the soul of the South were those determined
yogis,
hidden away in mountain cabins, who had spent their Easter morning among the serpents.

F
ervency of race and religion has moulded the nature of the South; but scarcely less pervasive has been the influence of the Mississippi, in many ways a secret and eccentric river. It is slow, sticky and yellow (“running liquid mud” is how Dickens described it); but also huge and overbearing, powerful in character, aged, laden with memories, sometimes sleepy and placid, sometimes menacing, always rolling and changing its course, full of strange currents and drifts, twisting and tortuous, unpredictable, remote yet always familiar, awful but lovable; like some tough old wayward warrior, sprawling across half a room with a glass of brandy in his hand. The Mississippi and its minion streams drain half a continent, from the Rockies to Pennsylvania and the Gulf of Mexico, and all this water pours down to New Orleans in an endless ooze. The best way to appreciate the grandeur of the process is to stand on the point at Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River joins the Mississippi, and to watch the waters from these two masterful rivers combine; the one stream from Kentucky and the mills of Pittsburgh, the other down from the north, from the dairylands of Wisconsin and Minneapolis. Or, in an isolated spot in the squalid outskirts of St. Louis, you can watch the muddy waters of the Missouri come in. (There is an allegorical representation of the scene outside the St. Louis railway station, all nudity and dolphins, entitled
The
Meeting
of
the
Waters
;
but it is strangely difficult to penetrate to the confluence itself.) A score of great
rivers contributes to the Mississippi; the Illinois and the Tennessee, the Yazoo, the Arkansas and the North Platte, the Cumberland, the Allegheny and the White River; and their combined water, carrying countless tons of mud, sweeps down the valley to join the Gulf of Mexico near a humid, swampy, mosquito-ridden, desolate Louisiana village called Venice. The lower river lays its own bed, and is constantly changing its course, finding shorter or easier routes to follow, building up bars, banks and islands, now overrunning its shores with terrible floods, now shifting its way and leaving some perfectly respectable old river town high and dry, like an impoverished dowager.

So the places along the banks of the lower Mississippi, where the waywardness of the river is most dangerous, crouch warily beneath high levees. People have been building these protective walls since the Mississippi valley was first settled (De Soto, in 1542, encountered a Mississippi flood). Sometimes, if you drive along the edge of the river, you will see a rotting, crumbling bank of soil, covered in grass, decidedly archaeological in character, that was built by the French pioneers in the 1700’ s. But everywhere there are modern levees, too, stout and well-constructed, with a dirt track running along the top of them.

You can taste the arid, fascinating flavour of the Mississippi valley by driving along these tracks in the heat of a summer morning. Below you on one side of the levee there is likely to be a tumbled mass of foliage, and beyond it, through the trees, you may catch a glimpse of the wide river. On the other side is the immense flat cotton country stretching away into the distance where the colours blur. There in interminable mathematical rows stand the cotton plants, and sometimes you may see negroes working in the fields, men and women, with big hats and bright clothes. Here and there, in ordered patterns, are the little shacks they live in, and sometimes away in the distance, surrounded by groves of trees, is the comfortable old house of a plantation owner. The chequer-board of the land is dotted with clouds of dust, marking the passage of a car along unpaved roads. Sometimes the levee track will take you past a river town, with some white frame houses, a dusty main street, and a church or two. There will be a general store (perhaps run by a cotton company) thronged with cheerful negroes, all smiles and gaudy colours; and an old ship’s outfitters, built to supply the Mississippi packets, open fronted, crammed with pans and stoves and hammers, with an old white man smoking his pipe on its broad steps, and a couple of negro children playing hide and seek around its counters. The scenery varies little from southern Missouri, in the north, to Louisiana in the south; but the binding factor, the thing that makes this country rich, and brought
it into being, and causes the little towns to squat so cautiously behind their levees, is the presence of the river, at once life-giving and destructive.

I was flown over the lower Mississippi in a small amphibious aircraft, to see the tremendous engineering problems the river offers, and how the American Army is tackling them. The first difficulty is the Mississippi’s perpetual tendency to change its course. From the air it looks like a great brown twisting serpent, so erratic in its route that often a bend in the river nearly forms a circle. Often and again the Mississippi water, finding itself following a wildly circuitous course, decides to do without one of these great horseshoe bends and instead slices a shorter way across the neck of it. Such new channels are called “cut-offs” and a chart of the lower Mississippi is positively littered with them—between 1722 and 1928 twenty-two natural cut-offs occurred. Because of them, several old river ports are now not on the river at all. (One of them, Greenville, left a mile or two from the river by such a movement, has gone to the extent of cutting an artificial channel so that barges can come up to the town.) The old, semi-circular river courses sometimes dry up, but sometimes remain as lakes, and very pleasant they can be, if a little muddy, to a traveller hot and tired from the dusty road. In one of them, at Lake Providence, Louisiana, I once saw a tame monkey being taken for a swim; he was a graceless but indomitable diver.

This maddening tendency to wander has recently been giving the engineers particular cause for worry. In our aeroplane we flew to a spot not far from Natchez where a short channel connects the Mississippi with the Atchafalaya River. Through this channel an ever-increasing amount of Mississippi water has been flowing into the Atchafalaya, and then running southwards to meet the Gulf of Mexico at a small fishing port called Morgan City. Every year more water has been going this way, instead of following the Mississippi proper, and the engineers estimate that if it continued unchecked, by 1975 or so the Atchafalaya would be the main stream, and the great port of New Orleans would be on the way to extinction. They are therefore building a big control dam and a whole series of subsidiary works to prevent the water going the wrong way—emergency action, no less, to keep the map of the United States roughly the shape it is.

This direction of the stream is a chief preoccupation of the engineers, because if the water flows in a relatively deep and narrow channel it is less likely to spread itself in disastrous floods. Sometimes they create artificial cut-offs, for this reason, and they are always active in dredging the channel and building up the protective embankments. Over the
years these levees have been repeatedly heightened, but luckily there is no truth in a popular belief that the bed of the Mississippi is always rising, and that the level of the water rises as often as the level of the embankments; however much the Mississippi wants to wander, the level of its bed remains the same. (It is interesting, though, that the first Federal levees, built in 1882, were only 9 feet high, whereas the ones they build today rise more than 30 feet.)

Such protective measures are now designed to take care of the maximum flood believed possible. This is estimated at a flow of 2,450,000 feet per second at Cairo, where the lower Mississippi might be said to begin. Under the existing control plan, this water is to be confined by the levees and drawn off into unimportant areas by artificial means. From the aircraft, with the river meandering below us, we could see exactly how this would be done if ever so disastrous a flood occurred. First, 600,000 cubic feet would flow away through the Old River, into useless land in the Louisiana swamps, and eventually down the Atchafalaya. Then, by means of an immense concrete aqueduct, the Morganza Floodway, another 600,000 would also be diverted that way. Finally, embankments would be blown up north of New Orleans, and another 250,000 would rush away across the fields through a prepared channel into Lake Pontchartrain, and thence into the sea; leaving only a harmless (but still mighty) residue to flow down the normal route to the Gulf.

It sounds simple enough, and from the air it looks simple, but the control of floods on the Mississippi is really one of the greatest of all engineering problems. Not only the main stream, but all the contributory rivers have to be restrained, and there are scores of dams and reservoirs and smaller floodways. To study the effect of the entire scheme, the engineers have built a gigantic model of the whole Mississippi basin, to meticulous scale. It is on a site of 800 acres near Jackson, Mississippi, and it portrays the main stream and all its lower tributaries with scrupulous accuracy. Water is pumped down the model channel at a rate of about 1,000 gallons a minute, and its flow at various points is measured by immensely complicated little instruments. They are necessarily complex, for whereas the horizontal scale of the model is 1 to 2,000, the vertical scale is 1 to 100, and the resultant mathematical problems are distinctly above the 11-plus level. Any part of the model can be worked alone; that is to say, you can have a flood on the Red River, if you want it, without having one on the Yazoo. This wonderful device long ago proved its value. Soon after its completion there was a big flood on the Missouri River. When the crest of the flood reached Pierre, South
Dakota, the engineers introduced a similar crest on the model. They could soon see more or less what was going to happen farther downstream—that a levee would break there, or a revetment must be strengthened somewhere else—and were able to warn the people on the spot in good time. The first excavations for this model were made by German prisoners during the war. The purpose of the work was not explained to them, and at first some of them (led by a distinguished Afrika Korps general) refused to do it on the grounds that it was helping the American war effort. Told that they were beginning a big model of the Mississippi River, they went to work suspiciously, still half convinced that it was all some Pentagon subterfuge; but, like the hand that rounded Peter’s dome, they builded better than they knew.

Besides preventing damage, all this work has done a great deal to help navigation on the river. Almost everywhere on its lower reaches the Mississippi is lined with a narrow wilderness. There are thick trees, with their roots in the water, and tall grasses, jumping insects, the cries of improbable birds, an occasional deer, mosquitoes, brambles, and sometimes a turtle sunning itself on the mud. It is a lonely little jungle, but if you manage to push your way through it, and emerge on the bank of the river itself, you are unlikely to preserve your solitude for long; before an hour is past you will almost certainly hear the distant pounding of engines, and see the long line of a Mississippi tow creeping downstream. The river has become a tremendous industrial artery, and there is a ceaseless flow of traffic on it, winter and summer. Few Americans know how important the Mississippi is to them, for they have been brought up to believe that river traffic was killed by roads and railways, and they think of the Mississippi instinctively in nostalgic terms of stern-wheelers, gamblers, ornate steamboat captains, Huckleberry Finns and log rafts. It is true that passenger traffic is all but dead (despite many brave attempts to revive it) and there are probably fewer craft on the river than there were in the brassy days—in 1849 there were more than 1,000 packet boats on the Mississippi; but the tonnage carried is immeasurably greater than ever before. There are a few stern-wheelers on the river still, things of dignity, with black funnels belching smoke, and white upperworks, and great paddles churning up the muddy water; but most Mississippi boats are now steam or diesel screw-driven craft, very trim and sturdy, and they push (rather than pull) enormous loads of modern barges anywhere from Pittsburgh to Texas. These are the boats you will see go by from your vantage-point among the brambles. They are powerful and well-tended, generally spruce, with company crests emblazoned proudly on their funnels, and radar screens and wireless
masts on their superstructures. Sometimes they push a miscellaneous collection of barges, lashed together shapelessly, piled high with coal or yellow sulphur; sometimes a line of “integrated” barges, made to fit each other, and generally containing oil. Occasionally you may see a triple-decker barge, looking rather like a waffle, carrying cars downstream from Detroit.

Sometimes the towboats move mammoth loads, in weight as in length. It is common for a string of barges to be as long as the
France
and such a tow often carries 6½ m. gallons of oil. The heaviest tow recorded was pushed by a mighty stern-wheeler, the steamboat
Sprague,
which now lies in honoured retirement at Vicksburg, a beloved and familiar personality. On her big day she moved 60 barges, with a deck area of 6½ acres; in them there was 67,307 tons of coal.

All this traffic moves in an unceasing stream from the industrial regions southwards, and from the southern oilfields up to the Middle West. Pittsburgh, on the upper Ohio, is an important river port, and so is St. Paul, more than 2,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. There is river traffic on the Missouri, the Tennessee, the Allegheny, the Cumberland, and many other famous tributary rivers, and some barges go by canal eastward into Florida, or westward into Texas. A towboat can be 1,000 miles from its home port, and as isolated as any Atlantic liner; for the boats sail inexorably, day and night, never putting in at the river towns they pass, nor picking up passengers at stages, nor stopping for wood as the old packets used to, nor delivering the mail to riverside plantations. From the banks of the Mississippi they seem totally cut off from life along its shores, as if they were part of the river, and cognizant of all its moods and manners.