It took three days for the water to reach L. T. Wade, deep within the Delta. But when it arrived, it covered the horizon. And it still came in force: “The water just came in waves, just like a big breaker in the ocean, coming over this land. It was a really frightening thing to see something like that. It didn’t follow the… It just came right on over and rolled over.”
“The situation is far worse than can possibly be imagined from the outside,” stated General Green from Greenville. “It is the greatest disaster ever to come to this section and we need help from the federal government to prevent the worst kind of suffering.”
FOR GOD’S SAKE, SEND US BOATS! was the headline blared across page 1 of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, quoting a plea from Mississippi Governor Dennis Murphree: “For God’s sake send us boats. It would be impossible to overestimate the distress of the stricken sections of the state. Back from the levees, where the land is flooded by backwaters, people are living on housetops, clinging to trees, and barely existing in circumstances of indescribable horror. The only way we can get them out of there is by boat and we haven’t the boats at present. Please try to make the people of New Orleans realize how urgent this is.”
In fact, it was nearly indescribable. Mounds Landing was the greatest single crevasse ever to occur anywhere on the Mississippi River. It would flood an area 50 miles wide and 100 miles long with up to 20 feet of water. It would put water over the tops of houses 75 miles away in Yazoo City. A total of 185,459 people lived in the region that would be flooded by it. Virtually all of them would be forced out of their homes; 69,574 would live in refugee camps, some for as long as five months. The Red Cross would feed an additional 87,668 outside the refugee camps—jammed into shelters ranging from elegant hotels to boxcars. Most of the remaining 30,000 would flee the Delta.
There would be many other crevasses to come, devastating hundreds of thousands more people downriver.
GREENVILLE SEEMED SAFE. The river levee protected the city from the Mississippi, and a rear protection levee protected it from water that came from a crevasse such as this one. Even before the Mounds Landing break, the city had actually pulled hundreds of black men off the river levee and put them to work raising the protection levee. But people were afraid. Within three hours after the crevasse special trains began carrying people out of town.
All that day police rounded up hundreds more black men and carried them to the protection levee. Levee board engineers assured citizens it would hold, assured them the city itself would not be flooded.
Waiting, the city seethed with anxiety and activity. LeRoy Percy spent the day as he had spent the preceding several days, at the levee board office on the phone. He had called planters who had refused to send their sharecroppers to the levee and demanded that they do so. He had spoken with Lewis Pierson, president of both the Irving Trust Company in New York and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce about organizing a national campaign for legislation to settle the river problem once and for all. He had involved his peers in New Orleans, bankers and lawyers with whom he hunted and played cards at the Boston Club, about the same issues. He had once again assured nervous bankers in New York and St. Louis that any money advanced for sandbags, lumber, and wages—blacks on the levee were paid 75 cents a day, less than they got to pick cotton—would be repaid. He had spoken to executives of the Illinois Central, arranging for supplies and more empty boxcars to use for shelter in case of the worst. His son had helped him in all this.
Now the levee board headquarters became even more a beehive, the National Guard headquarters a great Army camp preparing for war. Large Army tents were going up on the levee and giant kitchens were being built to feed thousands of refugees and workers. Trucks rattled through the streets carrying laborers and supplies. Hammers were pounding boats together in the lumber mills. Police and guardsmen impressed every black male they saw and sent them to the protection levee.
The crevasse water first encountered the Greenville protection levee deep into the night. “The water was just rolling, like an ocean wave,” said Levye Chapple, a leader of the black community who was sacking the protection levee. It struck the way the sea strikes against rocks, with violence, roaring, shooting up waves 12 and 15 feet high, jumping over the levee, sweeping away sandbags, backing up and rising higher. Within moments the water had climbed to a depth of 8 feet—the same as the levee—while oceanlike swells rolled over it. Still deeper water was coming. Most workers ran. Chapple—along with dozens of others—had guns pointed at him and stayed, working as the swells washed over him, washed the sandbags away, washed over the levee. Finally, as the levee gave way, he shouted, “Everybody run for your life!”
At 3:10 A.M. the fire whistles and church bells in Greenville sounded, and suddenly the streets were thick with people running to churches, to city hall, to the courthouse, to commercial buildings, and to the only dry land left—the river levee itself.
In the city streets the water initially retained the same ferocity as outside the city. Huge oil tanks from the Standard Oil storage facility in the northern part of the city came rolling down the street. Lamar Britton, a black woman, recalls, “You could see waves coming in big as you, five-, six-feet-high surf, rolling over, like the ocean, rolling chicken coops, mules, cows mixed up in it.”
Britton’s neighborhood—the bottomlands, the black section—soon had 15 feet of angry roiling water. The buildings acted like breakwaters. A few blocks away, Mrs. Henry Ransom, a white woman, saw a still-violent but calmer scene: “The water was coming in just in a whirling fashion, and there were plenty cows, and it was a bale of cotton…on the bales of cotton there was chickens…there was horses and mules coming down the street in this water…this current…the water was just spreading.”
Up to 10 feet of water inundated downtown. For weeks the current through the heart of the city, at the intersections of Broadway with Main, Nelson, and Washington Streets, would remain violent and deadly; like crisscrossing rapids, currents collided in spray, capsizing boats, drowning several people.
In the best neighborhoods, on the highest ground, the water came gently. It snaked up streets, running first in the gutters, filling them, spilling into the street, rising steadily, climbing steps and porches, but often stopping at the door. The highest ground in the city had only a foot of water.
WHEN THE FIRE WHISTLE BLEW, the Percys knew what it meant. Everyone in Greenville knew what it meant.
In the darkness of early morning, in his vast quiet house, LeRoy Percy had to face the great disaster he had always feared and fought to prevent. Now it had come. It threatened to end the life he had known, end the life he had tried to build, not only for himself, but for all of the Delta. The river was seizing the Delta back. LeRoy was sixty-seven years old, but he would concede nothing yet, not even to the river. At whatever cost, he was determined to preserve what he had built.
Meanwhile, the river rolled South.
AS GREAT AS THE DISASTER of Mounds Landing was, the flood had not even begun to exhaust itself. All the water flooding the Delta would be funneled by hills back into the Mississippi River at Vicksburg, a hundred miles south. From there, reenergized, the flood would continue downriver, shouldering levees aside.
The Memphis Commercial-Appeal warned: “Louisiana waits with fear and foreboding…. In St. Bernard Parish, below New Orleans, the section in which the crevasse of 1922 occurred, levees were being patrolled by guards armed with shotguns and all strangers were halted.” The guards were fur trappers who trusted no one and would not hesitate to use their shotguns. They had already shot at least four men who had come too near the levee.
But the men who ran New Orleans—indeed, ran the entire state of Louisiana, or at least what they cared about in it—did not now contemplate anything so unsophisticated as sabotage. They had power, and, like LeRoy Percy, they intended to exercise it to protect their interests.
On the day that newspapers from Portland, Maine, to San Diego, California, put the Delta’s plight on p
age 1, in New Orleans the headline of the Morning Tribune read, “Coolidge in Conference on Spillway.” The story made no reference to the meeting a few years before, when the head of the Corps of Engineers had advised that New Orleans businessmen should, instead of building a spillway, simply dynamite the levee in an emergency. But the men of consequence in New Orleans recalled that advice. One site long considered for a spillway, of course, was in St. Bernard.
The struggle against the river had begun as one of man against nature. It was becoming one of man against man.
Part Four
THE CLUB
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IN NEW ORLEANS each lamppost on Canal Street, which local boosters claimed was the widest street in the world, bore a plaque engraved FRENCH DOMINATION, 1718-1769, SPANISH DOMINATION, 1769-1803, CONFEDERATE DOMINATION, 1861-1865, AMERICAN DOMINATION, 1803-1861, 1865—. The inscription suggested something secret about the city, that New Orleans was willing to yield on its surface, but that the real city lay deeper, that from behind a mask it had seen everything, and that it intended to survive.
No American city resembled it. The river gave it both wealth and a sinuous mystery. It was an interior city, an impenetrable city, a city of fronts. Outsiders lost themselves in its subtleties and intrigues, in a maze of shadow and light and wrong turns. Houses were built with faux stone fronts facing the street; the faux stone did not extend to the sides. Modern poker, the most secretive of games, was invented there. New Orleans had not only whites and blacks but French and Spanish and Cajuns and Americans (the white Protestants) and Creoles and Creoles of color (enough to organize their own symphony orchestra in 1838) and quadroons and octaroons.
Each group lived an apparently separate existence. In the mid-1920s, the Vieux Carré, or French Quarter, was mostly a gritty working-class slum where people spoke French as often as English. Women lowered baskets to the street to grocers who loaded them with food and added a pint of gin. Artists and writers had taken to the area, seduced by its cheap rents. Oliver Lafarge wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning Laughing Boy there; Faulkner began writing there, encouraged by Sherwood Anderson, who entertained visitors like Theodore Dreiser, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, and Bertrand Russell. One of Anderson’s friends even wrote a book about Paris without ever having visited it, instead using New Orleans as his model; Parisians read it, Anderson reported, with “delight.” The smells of the docks hung over the whole area: sickly sweet rotting bananas—the United Fruit Company was the single largest user of the port—and the more intimate smell of the dozens of bakeries making bread. The finest restaurants—Antoine’s, Galatoire’s, Arnaud’s, Broussard’s—were there, and so were working-class cafés. In Jackson Square at Billy Cabildo’s, for 50 cents one got an enormous bowl of homemade soup, boiled beef, an entree, dessert, and coffee. The square itself was surrounded by hedges where prostitutes took clients.
Downriver from the French Quarter lived working-class whites. They made their living from the port, from sugar and timber mills, from great slaughterhouses.
The social elite, those with whom LeRoy Percy hunted and played poker, lived upriver in the great homes on St. Charles and in the Garden District. There maids waxed the grand ballrooms by sitting on towels and sliding across the floor. Chauffeurs picked up teenaged girls for lavish parties where a black jazz band—one included Sweet Emma—entertained. Fine young men took young ladies to Furst & Kramer’s downtown; it had a pastry counter, a candy counter, a soda fountain, a marble fountain in the middle of the room, cages of songbirds everywhere, and every box of candy carried the slogan “Happiness in every box.” On Canal Street at Katz & Besthoff drugstore, soda jerks delivered ice-cream sodas to cars parked on the street. Well-dressed doormen at Maison Blanche and Holmes department stores knew all the chauffeurs and called for them by name as their employers came out.
But underneath this perfect order lay a drumbeat. It was heavy and sensual. Most streets, even uptown, were graveled, not paved. The ice man sang and sweated delivering blocks of ice. Wagons rolled past the houses selling fruits and vegetables, sometimes three men on a cart creating a melodic, contrapuntal effect. Louis Armstrong said: “Yeah, music all around you. The pie man and the waffle man, they all had a little hustle to attract people…. The junk man had one of them long tin horns they celebrate with at Christmas—could play the blues and everything on it.”
Only recently, jazz had been born from deep in the bowels of the city, its beat emerging from the African jungle into Congo Square, then spreading to the whorehouses of Storyville, where Jelly Roll Morton and the Spasm band, possibly the original jazz combination, and a little later Louis Armstrong, played. At its peak, Storyville had had two newspapers and its own Carnival ball, and the best houses had advertising brochures. One claimed to be “without a doubt, one of the most elegant places in this or any other country…. Miss Lulu stands foremost, having made a lifelong study of music and literature.” There were also one-dollar “cribs” that were less than elegant, and women who threw mattresses down in doorways less elegant still. It had closed in 1917 by order of the Secretary of the Navy, exercising wartime authority, but its legacy still lingered, only spreading the women and houses and music into other neighborhoods. “Jazz is all the same—not anything new,” said Armstrong. “At one time they was calling it levee camp music, then in my day it was ragtime. When I got up north, I commenced to hear about Jazz, Chicago Style, Dixieland, Swing—all refinements of what we played in New Orleans. I always think of them fine old cats way down in New Orleans—Joe and Bunk and Tio and Buddy Bolden—and when I play my music, that’s what I’m listening to…. You want to feel the smell—the color—the great ‘OH MY’ feeling of the jazzmen and stomp around in the smoke and musk of the joints.”
One joint in particular was called the Frenchman’s, where musicians gathered after work, usually not until 3 A.M. Jelly Roll Morton recalled, “It was only a back room, but it was where all the greatest pianists frequented…. The millionaires would come to listen to their favorite piano players…. People came from all over the country and most times you couldn’t get in.” Across the street a drugstore sold cocaine; newsboys sold three marijuana cigarettes for a dime.
If all these societies seemed separate, they were not. Personal, social, political, and financial histories ran deep, connecting everyone. And perhaps more than any other city in America, New Orleans was run by a cabal of insiders, and everything from politics to the money the jazz musicians made depended upon them. Looking on as if from behind a two-way mirror, these insiders watched and judged and decided.
THERE WERE LAYERS of insiders, and folds within layers, with position largely defined by Mardi Gras. “Mardi Gras runs New Orleans,” said one socialite. “It separates people.”
The celebration itself—the balls, masking, street partying—began in the 1700s. In 1857 men of the finest families organized the first pageant of Comus. By the 1920s the city’s Christian male elite belonged to at least one, usually more, of the exclusive “krewes”—Comus, Rex, Momus, the Atlanteans, and Proteus.
The commoners, those not inside, had only the parades. Even in the 1920s, several hundred thousand people lined the parade routes, and the krewes marched at night except for Zulu, the black parade, which marched Mardi Gras morning, and Rex, which followed later in the day. The night parades were led by a cadre of flambeau carriers, black men carrying torches burning oil, dripping fire on the streets. Then came horsemen all masked, then float after float, each an elaborate creation in line with that year’s theme; the krewe members on the floats, all men, passed by high above the crowds, looking down at a horde of screaming people seeking attention and favor, elbowing for position, stretching out their hands in supplication, begging to be thrown a trifle. For the moment the krewe members truly felt like royalty.
Not every krewe paraded, but each gave a Carnival ball. They were the peak of the social season and doubled as debutante balls. Men planned every aspect of them, and they suffo
cated differences. One Carnival historian wrote, “There is perhaps no other city in America where men are social arbiters…. The most prominent gentlemen of the city abandon their urgent business obligations to spend their hours considering who shall be invited to their ball. Demand for these invitations surpasses all bonds of reason, and throws the commercial and professional life of the city into chaos…. No qualities whatever are of any force unless an invitation is requested [by a krewe member] and issued through regular channels, and there are no other channels. This strict care in the list of guests may find occasional resentment, but no injustice is done. Any request that is refused was already in doubt beforehand. If a member’s request is not granted, he knows the reason and seldom has cause to be dissatisfied when he learns it…. Carnival is generous but in its social aspects protects its own. Wealth is no consideration, nor is ancestry unless supported by becoming character…. Instead of listening to the voice of scandal, Carnival hushes it, even where scandal looks to the masquerades for pabulum.”
Carnival mattered. National Book Award winner Walker Percy, a Greenville Percy and Boston Club member, would later observe, “[Carnival] queens are chosen by the all-male krewes at sessions which can be as fierce as a GM proxy fight. New Orleanians may joke about politics and war, heaven and hell, but they don’t joke about society.” One prominent New Orleans attorney speaks of a friend who was president of the Louisiana bar, president of the Chamber of Commerce, and president of the Dock Board, which runs the port of New Orleans, “Yet he values most that his daughter was queen of Comus.”
Rex, nominally “King of Carnival,” was the public face of Mardi Gras; his identity was announced. But the real king was Comus, whose identity was secret; at midnight Mardi Gras day, Rex and his court left their own ball to attend that of Comus. Secrecy added to the cachet. The queen of one important ball notes, “Often the men don’t even tell their wives who is what.”
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