Southern Cultures: Southern Waters Issue: Volume 20: Number 3 – Fall 2014 Issue

By Harry L. Watson

In the Fall 2014 issue of Southern Cultures…

From mullet fishing on Brown's Island to shrimping on the Gulf Coast, from recreation on the Great Lakes of the South to coastal tourism in the Sunbelt and tramping in the swampy lowlands of eastern NC, we take a look at tourism's vital role in regional economies and the challenges of conservation and sustainability.

Also in this issue, Andrew W. Kahrl examines the Sunbelt's foundation, "plac[ing] the coast at the center of the story and seek[ing] to understand how beaches came to reflect and influence broader changes in the region's cultures and political economy." Christopher J. Manganiello details the rise of dams on the Savannah River, which now block the migration of shad and sturgeon. "What did the shoals look like when the lilies bloomed?" he asks. "And…what would it be like to witness the great shad migrations and fishing parties of the past?" Ian Draves addresses that question by exploring the Tennessee Valley Authority's impact on tourism, and John James Kaiser chronicles the battle over rate hikes and regulated energy from North Carolina's Southern Power Company (now Duke Energy).

David Cecelski's annotated photo essay, "An Eye for Mullet," provides witness to Brown's Island Mullet Camp. The photos, taken by Charles Farrell in 1938, reflect a time when fish dealers in Morehead City, N.C., "loaded so many barrels of salt mullet on outbound freight cars that local people referred to the railroad as 'the Old Mullet Line.'" Bernard L. Herman and William Arnett offer another visual take on water through the work of artists including Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, and Thornton Dial Jr.

ALSO! Poetry by Patricia Smith; and a short recollection by Bland Simpson on the swamps of his youth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Aug 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781469615950

Book preview

front porch

In his classic Old Times on the Mississippi, Twain described the river as a source of infinite knowledge. The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book, he remembered. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Black River, near Ivanhoe, North Carolina, 1997, by Ann Cary Simpson.

As a landlubber, I usually think of the South as solid ground. It’s the Land of Cotton. The place where roots grow. Mountains and Piedmont. It’s only when we get to the Tidewater or Low country that the companion elements earth and water mingle enough to change my mental picture of the South’s composition perceptibly.

But this issue is about southern water, the vital fluid that shapes its land, contours, and boundaries, brings it life, and makes it livable. An early traveler to Carolina called it a watry Country, and so it remains, its liquid and solid selves each depending on the other and each indispensable in giving place its character. The brainchild of Southern Cultures friend and contributor Bernie Herman, the essays in this special issue explore the role of water in the South’s history, art, economy, and sustenance. Water, Herman writes, is something to be crossed; something that resists crossing. Something that gives life; something that can be poisoned and deadly. Those familiar paradoxes permeate all the stories our contributors have to tell.

The great southern waterman Mark Twain went further when recalling his early career as a steamboat pilot. In his classic Old Times on the Mississippi, Twain described the river as a source of infinite knowledge. The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book, he remembered, a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. The stories did not always bring good news to the well-taught pilot, he continued, for a beautiful sunset predicted bad weather; a floating log revealed rising water, and telltale ripples betrayed a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody’s steamboat one of these nights.

For Twain, learning the river’s secrets spoiled its beauty, as picturesque scenery dissolved into portents of danger. The same may be true of some stories here. We see penetrating photos of watermen’s hard work and wry portraits of innovative money-making which morph into fluid visions of painful inequality and somber warnings of ecological disaster. Did Twain intend to spoil his readers’ views of the river while reporting his own, or only to hint at its depths and complexity? Surely not the former; the rest of his story is too beguiling. Perhaps our authors mean something similar. Even the direst belong among the stories that southern waters can tell, but none encompasses them all.

As TVA recreation planner Bob Howes observes in Ian Draves’s essay in the issue, Many of the values which the human spirit regards as most precious simply are not, will not and cannot stand up to commercial and market place measurements. Mildred Southgate of South Fork, Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, at Watts Bar Resort Village, Watts Bar Lake, Tennessee, April 1953, Image ID 17002, Dept. of Conservation Photograph collection, Fishing series, courtesy of the Tennessee State Library and Archives.

Instead of following the articles in printed order, let’s think about them along a conceptual chronology, from most traditional to most contemporary. That schema would begin with David Cecelski’s compelling recovery of a trove of photographs taken by Charles A. Farrell in 1938, documenting the lives and work of mullet fishermen on North Carolina’s Brown’s Island. With lengthy interviews among surviving relatives, Celcelski is able to reconstruct the outlines of the fishermen’s labor as they camped out every autumn to harvest shoals of passing mullet. Rising from the sweat, mess, and offal is a gripping story of the dignity of work and the balance between man and nature. A similar set of stories emerges from the art composed by nine African American artists, assembled and introduced by Bernie Herman with commentary from William Arnett. These paintings and collages tell varied water stories of boats, bridges, migrations, and disaster, all seen through the eyes of men and women whose lives have bent with southern waters, not defied them. And Bland Simpson recounts a warm pastoral memory of a father-daughter canoe outing, which suddenly grips us with the threat of unexpected natural danger that Twain knew so well.

Cecelski’s fishermen made a harmonious living from the sea, but other authors reveal how exploiting water for wealth has led southerners into deep trouble. Ian Draves starts off playfully, by telling how recreation gradually became a major justification for the New Deal operations of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Originally constructed for flood control and hydroelectric power, the TVA’s vast chain of lakes quickly revealed their potential to promote regional prosperity by attracting visitors interested in fishing, boating, and vacationing. It’s easier to pick a tourist than it is a bale of cotton, noted an astute mayor of Knoxville, and recreation soon became as important to the TVA as its original objectives.

The environmental costs of massive dam construction were easily lost in the early flood of motels and marinas, but a look at other damming projects might have carried some warnings. In Fish Tales and the Conservation State, Christopher Manganiello goes back to the 1840s to describe the earliest efforts to dam the Savannah River to power gristmills and textile factories in Augusta. Success brought more construction, until Manganiello now reports there are more than two dozen major federal and private dams on the Savannah that block the migration of shad and sturgeon from the ocean to the upcountry, and the damage does not stop there. In The Sunbelt’s Sandy Foundation, Andrew Kahrl explores the consequences of recreational development on the South’s coastlines and his news is grim. More than we realize, he writes, bodies of water hold a mirror to the societies that inhabit their shores, and in his view, the South’s modern coasts now exhibit environmental degradation, massive land losses for black farmers, immense costs to taxpayers, the privatization of public spaces, and extensive developments that are vulnerable to every passing storm.

Can the South protect its waters by aggressive government protection? The lesson from John Kaiser’s "Clark v. Duke is that it won’t be easy. Early in the twentieth century, Kaiser shows how North Carolina’s Progressive judge Walter Clark struggled mightily to rein in the dams and the water rights of the Duke Power Company, but to little avail. Economic interests have not grown weaker in the meantime, as Andy Horowitz demonstrates in The BP Oil Spill and the End of Empire, Louisiana. Horowitz brings us excerpts from his interviews with the residents of Grand Isle in Plaquemines Parish, at the Mississippi’s furthest reach into the Gulf. Like the mullet fisherman of Brown’s Island, North Carolina, Grand Isle’s hardy inhabitants have wrung a bare living from the sea for generations, surviving one deadly storm after another, but they may never recover from the double punch of Katrina and the oil spill. One informant sums up her bitterness this way: This is, I believe, the culmination of all those sins, and I hope that one day it will heal itself, but I don’t believe that I’ll ever see it the way that it was before this in my lifetime." Despairing of meaningful assistance from government, she and her neighbors blame Washington as much as BP and Mother Nature for the severity of their plight.

Where does this leave us? In Mason-Dixon Lines, we close with two poems by Patricia Smith. Ethel’s Sestina speaks with the voice of a dying black woman whose body remained in a wheelchair for three days after Katrina. Ethel speaks with hope and patience, but Company’s Coming promises that the blow will pass. That message is precious. It will take time and courage to survive the coming blows from southern waters, accompanied by outrage at deaths like Ethel’s and determined action to prevent the next ones. As I once learned from a fortune cookie, Despair is not an option.

HARRY L. WATSON, Editor

ESSAY

The BP Oil Spill and the End of Empire, Louisiana

by Andy Horowitz

Calling this disaster the BP oil spill conditions an inquirer to look for damage caused specifically by oil, and to measure its duration by the length of time that oil was allowed to spill. But listening to the people closest to the Gulf, it becomes clear that as much as this experience has been defined by an acute, chemical event, it also has come to represent a chronic, cultural trauma. Memorial for all that is lost, Grand Isle, LA, 2010. Unless otherwise noted, all photos courtesy of the author.

Karen Hopkins lives in Grand Isle, Louisiana, where she manages Dean Blanchard Seafood, one of the largest seafood processors in the state. Before the BP oil spill of 2010, she recalled, a typical day would be about five nervous breakdowns. That is because Dean Blanchard typically bought between thirteen and fifteen million pounds of shrimp a year. For Hopkins, that meant:

You have three trans-vac suction machines working. You have three crews in three different staging areas unloading boats that are waiting in line, and you have three men coming in with shrimp tickets from three different boats at the same time, and you have people waiting in your office to get paid for their catch. The phones are ringing off the hook because you have fishermen who want pricing and … you have processors who are competing for your product and they’re trying to jack you out of some money because they’re trying to lower the price or they tell you that these shrimp weren’t pretty enough. You have to deal with them. And there’s only one of you.

Before the spill silenced the phones and emptied the office, turned off the suction machines and docked the boats, that was a typical day, and Karen Hopkins loved it.¹

In the months after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, I conducted a series of interviews for the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina with people like Hopkins who live and work on the Louisiana coast. I asked them to describe their experiences during what President Barack Obama defined as the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced. That was more than four years ago. Now, most of the country has put behind them the grotesque images of oiled pelicans; the eighty-seven days the Macondo well spewed millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf, the spectacle broadcast live from 5,000 feet underwater, have faded from memory. On Magazine Street in New Orleans, people are lining up at Casamento’s for a dozen Gulf oysters on the half shell once again. Though in April 2013, a team of biologists from Louisiana State University detected hydrocarbons in the cocahoe minnow—an appetizer for the Gulf of Mexico’s food chain—and in June 2013, researchers discovered a 40,000-pound mat of tar just off the Louisiana coast, our temptation is to declare the disaster over. Historians, ironically, tend to have particularly short attention spans when it comes to disasters, often treating them as acute events that erupt in a catastrophic instant and fade away just as quickly.²

Yet accounts from the Louisiana coast—a place where recent history is so saturated with calamities that USA Today described the people there, in a headline, as living forever in recovery—compel us to reconsider what kind of disaster the oil spill is, how long it might last, and what, ultimately, might be most disastrous about it. Calling this disaster the BP oil spill conditions an inquirer to look for damage caused specifically by oil, and to measure its duration by the length of time that oil was allowed to spill. But listening to the people closest to the Gulf, it becomes clear that as much as this experience has been defined by an acute, chemical event, it also has come to represent a chronic, cultural trauma.³

Grand Isle is a distinct place: down the bayou, as people there say, out past the end of the Bayou LaFourche’s muddy drift from Donaldsonville through Thibodaux and Cut Off and Golden Meadow, across 20 miles of angular bridges into the Gulf. A stretch of sand in the open water, Grand Isle is the barrier island for people farther inland; it receives the undiminished battering of any Gulf hurricane. NASA’s Terra Satellite Sees Spill on May 24, southeast Louisiana coast, May 2010, courtesy of NASA’s Earth Observatory.

For Hopkins, the shrimp tickets and the ringing phones were the stuff of everyday crises. Then there were the adversities that seemed to come once or twice a generation—hurricanes like Katrina, Rita, Camille, and Betsy that define generations on the Gulf Coast. Nobody wished for those terrible challenges, but Hopkins said it was clear how to handle them: you rebuild. The people who live here, she explained, want to be able to fish and shrimp and play and love their families and fight against the storms and rebuild and do it all over again.⁴

After Katrina, Hopkins’ Grand Isle, the alluvial sandbar 50 miles southwest of New Orleans as the pelican flies, was alive with the sound of hammer on nail. But after the Macondo well blew out, the island was deathly silent. Even the mosquitoes, Cherri Foytlin told me, had fled: No mosquitoes, in Louisiana? How is that possible? You know the earth’s dead down here if there’s no mosquitoes.⁵

Unlike a storm, the oil spill was what sociologist Kai Erikson ominously classified as a new species of trouble: a calamity brought on by human action, its trauma more chronic than acute, its poison insidiously working its way at once into the tissues of the human body and the textures of human life. On the coast, the oil spill came to embody what many described to me as a long struggle to sustain feelings of independence and stability in the face of an eroding ecological and cultural context. Increasingly, the place they helped create threatens to push them away.⁶

* * *

Grand Isle is a distinct place: down the bayou, as people there say, out past the end of the Bayou LaFourche’s muddy drift from Donaldsonville through Thibodaux and Cut Off and Golden Meadow, across 20 miles of angular bridges into the Gulf. A stretch of sand in the open water, Grand Isle is the barrier island for people farther inland; it receives the undiminished battering of any Gulf hurricane. Life there is so precarious that in 2003, journalist Jake Halpern wrote a chapter about Grand Isle in a book called Braving Home, which described extreme locales where one needed courage, daily, just to live there.⁷

Hopkins built her house out of