Abstract
Mizelle’s well-referenced work provides an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the impacts of what was considered the disaster that changed the course of American history, while clearly articulating how life, “[f]or black survivors of the 1927 flood had to deal with the dangers of both the environmental world and their second-class status as citizens where skin color alone was all the justification needed to be murdered.” (p. 10). By studying the “racial flood diaspora of black protest, charity, environment displacement, structures of labor, and cultural critique that informed the most significant environmental disaster of the twentieth century” (p. 12), Mizelle’s analysis uses archival data, interviews, historical documents, and musical lyrics (namely, the lyrics of Delta Blues and Creole Zydeco genres) to give voice to the Black survivors of the 1927 Mississippi River flood and their pivotal role in changing America within a cultural context.
The book is divided into five textual chapters with an introduction and a conclusion. The first chapter underscores blues music as a powerful medium to offer valuable cultural perspectives that are unavailable to historians, and he uses the blues music as a means to give voice to individuals in such a way to help write the history of the region to express issues of race and power that were embedded in the process of charity, relief, and social class structure to reveal the tensions amid a transformed environmental landscape. So important is blues music to the undocumented historical record that without the blues, one can hardly understand the voice of the Black citizen eyewitnesses to the times. For example, Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues” and “Homeless Blues” eloquently puts forth what books written at the time do not capture.
“Homeless Blues’s” infinite wisdom, it was direct in its critique of the Mississippi River and the limits of black citizenship. “Oh Mississippi River, what a fix you left me in.
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” When Smith sings the line “Hungry and disgusted, no place to lay my head,” she is indicting both the Mississippi River for creating the initial suffering and American racism for prolonging the pain. At one particular juncture she suggests that death is perhaps preferable to being homeless and without protection, setting the stage for a final critique. She concludes “Homeless Blues” with a scathingly metaphorical critique of the limits imposed on African Americans in the South and their desire to escape a limited life. “Wish I was an eagle, but I’m just a plain old black crow; I’m gonna flap my wings and leave here and never come back no more.
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”
Chapter 2 describes the role of the writers and thinkers from the Harlem Renaissance era where Mizelle uses the work of W. E. B. Du Bois to remind us that “. . . the black artist is compelled to speak the truth of slavery and racial injustice using the creative mechanism at his or her disposal. ‘Thus all Art is Propaganda and ever must be,’ DuBois wrote” (p. 50). Prominent writers and thinkers of the period, including: W. E. B. Du Bois, the sociologist, Ida B. Wells, the journalist, sociologist and social commentator, and the two novelists Zora N. Hurston and Richard Wright understood environmental disasters all too well. As prior disasters did decades before, Hurricane Katrina, exposed societal divisions between racial groups and social classes. Disasters clearly illustrate the limits of Black citizenship and expose the “otherness”—or again, in the case of Katrina refugees—show the double burden of race and racism within a disaster landscape.
One of the significant contributions of the work is the analysis of the racialization of charity and the militarization of flood relief. In Chapter 3, Mizelle addresses the treatment of Blacks and how race and class is used to fortify, protect, and rebuild White property and businesses while unequal treatment, maltreatment, and outright murder were used to force Black men to abandon any interests in preserving their own livelihoods to protect the plantation-based sharecropping economy of the south. Blacks were systematically rounded up to reside in American Red Cross camps on the levees. All able-bodied men were forced to work, often with threat of jail, false imprisonment, use of threats to withdraw aid from Black men’s families, forced labor, and outright murder for those who refused to work at the beck and call of any White citizen—often for no pay. The Red Cross was the sole agency responsible for the care of the survivors. However, the Red Cross failed to treat Black flood survivors as American citizens. And, while nationwide appeals went forth to gather funds to distribute good and compensate survivors, the charity distribution process further victimized Black survivors with great inequities, which led to the creation of local Black-led assistance programs.
Chapter 4 positions the 1927 flood as an opportunity because many Blacks viewed the flood as an opportunity to leave Louisiana to migrate to Houston to form communities. The most famous community, Frenchtown, became a bustling community filled with craftsmen, tradesmen, business owners, and professionals who forged a vibrant Creole of Color culture community where Zydeco and la las (represent distinct yet similar musical traditions linked to Louisiana culture) became an important social and political outlet for the Frenchtown residents who no longer viewed themselves as flood refugees, but rather a well-connected community that by the 1950s began to prosper with opportunity for those willing to leave the sharecropping plantation-economy of the Mississippi River delta.
By the 1050s, Frenchtown was also know for zydeco clubs, which attracted people from all over Houston. The clubs included the Continental on Des Chaumes Street, Matinee on Lyons Avenue, El Dorado, Whispering Pines, Creole Knights Social Club, and Paradise Club; all were located within two miles of Frenchtown.
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(p. 121)
Chapter 5 documents the blatant exploitation of the survivors. In many cases, Black men were forced to work with no pay by gunpoint. So bad were the conditions, the Red Cross Refugee camps were synonymous with what we would consider slave labor camps. Mizelle goes to great lengths to explain the retched conditions of the camps and how many of the White locals exploited the situation, retained aid, or used Red Cross aid as a means to force men to work. The author also clearly points out that the 1927 flood also forced America to review its labor and labor compensation laws in an era when the prevailing racial ideology considered Blacks to be inferior and childish, and this was the reason Blacks needed the supervision of Whites. The Army Corps of Engineers first lieutenant, Charles Holle, maintained in his report to the Mississippi River Commission that
the long intervals between pay periods and the withholding of wages were argued away as normal and necessary for the welfare of black workers who could not be trusted to take care of themselves without white supervision. If paid on a regular basis, Holle argued, workers would lose all their money gambling and in other frivolous pursuits. With strong undertones of paternalism the corps defended the withholding of wages as in the best interests of black workers. Holle’s report admitted that an epidemic of overcharging in commissaries was common throughout the [Mississippi Flood Control Project] MFCP, but again provided justification by planning blame on the genetic deficiency of workers. It was inevitable, Holle reported, that largely uneducated and illiterate workers would be overcharged. (p. 141)
However, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was influential in forcing the Army Corps of Engineers to recognize the federal protections, not local customs and ideologies, because,
For the NAACP, “The lives, the welfare of the entire group is at stake. For if this fight Is won, a decisive blow will have been struck for better working conditions and opportunity and decent wages for colored workers throughout the country.
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” If over a million dollars was lost in 1932 for just three areas, the monetary loss on the entire project was so significant as to make this battle the single most important fight for African Americans in the country, with ramifications not just of the present, but also for the future economic status of black workers. (p. 147)
Mizelle concludes the book by drawing on the historical legacy of the 1927 flood and draws parallels to modern disasters such as Katrina and how blues musicians and literary figures used the disaster to explain their experience and how this event changed working conditions as the NAACP applied the experience of the flood to demand livable wages for Black levee camp workers during the New Deal.
Overall, Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination makes an outstanding contribution to not only the history of African American in America but also to the field of disaster studies. I am impressed how Mizelle can weave a narrative using the lyrical text to bring life to the historical print and lend voice to an often marginalized people in the Mississippi delta. So vivid are his images of the precursors of our modern-day convict lease system that his work speaks to some of the very same struggles that continue to this day in northern Louisiana.
While Backwater Blues offers an insightful, thought-provoking analysis, it could benefit greatly from the sociological analysis of disasters to help connect this tragedy to the contemporary example of Hurricane Katrina. In all, this book accomplishes its goal to provide a deep analysis of the flood diaspora of Black protest, charity environmental displacement, structures of labor, and a cultural critique. Mizelle’s well-documented study offers an insightful view of how national disasters changed the lives, futures, and fortunes of African Americans while drawing parallels to Hurricane Katrina. For students and scholars alike, this book is a seminal work that helps define the roots of Black protest and Black labor. The Mississippi River flood of 1927 changed the heart and soul of America in such a way that the country is now different as a result and Mizelle’s analysis is at the very center of the scholarship that helps us understand this time period and the personalities that forever shaped the American cultural, political, economic, and social landscapes following a natural disaster.