Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  But Will had not discussed the plan with his father.

  Senator Percy had been focused on problems only he could resolve, most recently convincing banks in New York, New Orleans, and St. Louis to honor checks drawn on Delta banks. Will had simply assumed his father’s support and made the decision himself. Evacuation was after all the right thing to do, and the only honorable option.

  What they did would define their society.

  ON MONDAY, April 25, the government steamer Control left Greenville with 500 white women and children. The Minnesota loaded more than 1,000 refugees, mostly black, at the wharf. Two other steamers, the Wabash and the Kappa, were standing by. The Sprague, Tollinger, and Cincinnati were en route, each towing barges capable of carrying several thousand each. The city would be virtually emptied in a day.

  Blacks who lived in Greenville protested to Will that they did not want to leave their homes. Will simply had troops round them up, later explaining, “[N]one of us was influenced by what the Negroes themselves wanted: they had no capacity to plan for their own welfare; planning for them was another of our burdens.”

  But he could not ignore angry planters who went to LeRoy and denounced any evacuation. LeRoy told them Will was in charge. They then stormed into Red Cross headquarters to demand that he rescind his order. Will responded bitingly, accusing them of thinking of their pocketbooks while he was thinking of the Negro’s welfare. Furious now, the planters went back to LeRoy. He gave them no satisfaction. But when they left, LeRoy went to find his son.

  LeRoy Percy had spent his life trying to help Delta blacks. He had opposed stripping them of the right to vote, had insisted upon educating them decently, had confronted the race-baiting politicians like Vardaman and Bilbo, had even confronted and defeated the Klan in Washington County. For all this he had earned praise from around the nation. Yet all this he had done not simply because it was right and good; self-interest had operated too. He had needed their strong backs.

  Now he found Will bursting with fury on the levee. It resembled a war zone, all confusion and noise, choked with smoke from kitchens, people on litters, squalling children, and a few men with purpose struggling to establish order. White women and children massed around gangplanks waiting to board the steamboats; the barges would carry Negroes and terrified livestock. Several white men, claiming illness or urgent business, also demanded space on a steamer; the crowd hissed at them for being cowards and the National Guard turned them back. Gangs of black men under white foremen were unloading supplies. Several more gangs of men were banging hammers, building a scaffold above the floodwater to connect the Red Cross headquarters, the second floor of the American Legion Building, the Opera House, the Cowan Hotel, and the levee.

  Through the chaos, through the thickets of people, LeRoy and Will began to walk. Along the levee they walked as if alone, a study in generations. The elder could easily have been a character out of Henry James, immaculately dressed, formal, pacing through the muddy quagmire in a suit and hunting boots, a man of substance and influence and no illusions. Will, smaller physically, less of a man in every way by the standards of the Delta, had illusions of a once-great and noble South, of a brilliant and shimmering aristocracy, and of the perfection of the man beside him.

  LeRoy raised the issue of the evacuation gently, asking Will if he had listened carefully to the complaints of the planters. Yes, Will replied sharply, he had heard from louts who cared more about money than about what was right. He would not be cowed by them. LeRoy agreed. One did not yield to pressure. Yet was it really necessary to send the blacks away? Could steamboats not supply the refugees on the levee? Had Will really considered the harm to the Delta of removing its labor force?

  Their conversation was intense but private. Will would not be shaken, not even by his father. Despite the stream of decisions others needed from them, no one interrupted. They paced, their boots mud-caked, up the levee, turned, headed back. Neither yielded to the other.

  Finally, LeRoy said that the decision was too important for Will to make alone. He had to consult the other members of his committee. Will replied that he had done so. There was no reason to speak to them again. Consult them again, LeRoy insisted. Do it for him.

  Will finally agreed. They stood outside the Red Cross headquarters. Will went in and abruptly ordered the loading of the refugees to stop. The steamboat captains angrily protested that their boats and barges represented a tremendously valuable resource in the disaster. Far more than Greenville was involved. They could not simply wait; time was too valuable. Will would not budge for them either. The captains had to wait.

  Instead, he summoned his committee members to an emergency meeting. But before it convened, LeRoy informed each member that Will had spoken only for himself in proposing evacuation. He asked them to oppose the evacuation now and, to prevent embarrassment to Will, not to reveal the fact that he had talked with them. With relief the members agreed. When Will convened the committee a few hours later, one after another the members said the Negroes should stay on the levee. Will was astounded. How could they reverse themselves? Why? He argued with them for two hours, but the committee members were as unyielding as he. Finally, Will capitulated, then went to tell furious ship captains that the blacks would remain on the levee.

  The steamers did not leave quite empty. The Wabash, capable of carrying several thousand, departed with thirty-three white women and children.

  ALTHOUGH WILL CLAIMED that only years later did he learn what his father had done, he had to have known what had happened. He knew these men. He understood they would have abandoned him only for his father. His father had betrayed honor and his own son, for money. There is a saying that if a man has to choose between the truth and his father, only a fool chooses the truth. Will chose not to be a fool. He wrote a poet friend how much he appreciated his father’s support, that without it he would have had a “breakdown.” He was forty-two years old and had been treated as less than a child. In his humiliation, he began to humiliate the black men and women at his mercy on the levee. There would be national repercussions.

  THE NEXT MORNING Hoover and his traveling party arrived in Greenville on their first trip downriver. Hoover was cordial. He was pleased to meet LeRoy, of whom he had heard so much good. He spoke with Will of Belgium. Then he listened.

  Hoover had already approved the evacuation plan. Now Will presented a new plan as if it were his own. Rather than evacuate the city, it would become a point of concentration. All supplies—food, clothing, tents, construction material—for the roughly 50,000 people stranded in the county would be shipped to Greenville, unloaded, and transshipped elsewhere. A refugee camp would be established on the levee; blacks from the camp would provide the workforce to move these goods.

  Hoover approved, then headed south, to be met that evening by Jim Thomson in Vicksburg. Meanwhile, Will issued a public statement that, to ease the burden, “We are urging all white women and children to leave the city. White men may also go although there is a need for them to stay…. There is need for negro men to stay and establish the camp.”

  The same day Hoover visited, the first refugee death occurred in Greenville. A black man who had not eaten for days gorged himself on bananas and suddenly collapsed, dead. His body was put in a boat and rowed out into the middle of the river. Several thousand people, white and black, silently lined the levee. Stones were tied around the dead man’s feet and arms. A minister said a few words. A boatman lifted the body over the gunnel. It splashed into the river and sank. But rumors spread that the National Guard had thrown him into the river alive as punishment for stealing the bananas.

  There were other rumors. The police chief was a man named Red Taggart. He could be rough. On Saturday nights he would find blacks rolling dice, walk in, and nobody would move. He’d pick up all the money on the table and smile. But he treated people fair in the jail. He didn’t beat people. Now, in the flood, he regularly towed black bodies found floating in the streets to the levee. Untru
e rumors spread that Taggart had caught the men looting and shot them, then towed the body through the streets as a warning. Looting had become a problem, and this rumor was useful to whites; instead of correcting it, they decreed an 8 P.M. curfew enforced only on blacks.

  The truth was harsh enough. Although the Red Cross would ultimately operate 154 “concentration camps” in Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, only one camp would generate enough criticism to bring intense political pressure on Hoover—the camp on the levee in Greenville. And his approval of Percy’s course would haunt him.

  IN GREENVILLE, a week after the flooding, a very different routine for black and white had developed. Approximately 4,000 whites remained on second floors and in offices or hotels. A few hundred whites, like the Percys, continued to occupy their own homes. For whites daily life came to resemble a dreary holiday. Paperboys delivered the newspaper, which was down to four pages, by boat. The scaffolding became a boardwalk extending throughout the business section; peddlers set up stands on it and sold soda, peanuts, and popcorn. Frank’s Café was accessible from the boardwalk and stayed open twenty-four hours. Rowboats were ordered to the middle of streets so motorboats could use the deeper water near the curb. City court opened. One mechanic used blocks of wood to elevate the frame of his truck five feet and drove down the shallower streets; others imitated him. Boys invented new games: they punctured the carcasses of floating cows and mules and ignited the escaping gas. The 125-room Cowan Hotel on Main Street, the Delta’s finest, kept open its Blue Bird Café, poolroom, cigar stand in the lobby, and fine dining room. On its mezzanine, people constantly played the piano, sang, and danced. It had no trouble getting meat and supplies from Armour, Swift, or Goyer. The general public could find, for the right price, most things—except sugar, which did run out—either from bootleggers or at the Roslyn Hotel, where a thriving black market operated.

  But elsewhere in Greenville the situation was desperate. Two black children had been bitten by rabid dogs, and orders had gone out to shoot all dogs on the levee. Percy Bell, a prominent attorney involved in relief work (and not related to the Percys), had sent his family out of the city. Ten days after the crevasse he wrote them: “The town is a pitiful and horrifying sight. The yards with the trees and abundance of roses everywhere are really beautiful, and yet when one gets near and sees the water in the houses and furniture floating around on the inside, sees a dead mule clinging to the veranda, the horror of it strikes in. Hundreds of mules have been dragged to the levee and dumped in.” In the black neighborhoods, where the water had come hard, many houses were only splinters. On Nelson Street “water [is] up to the top of all roofs, tops of porches and second stories are covered with darkeys and cats in one terrific welter.”

  Roughly 5,000 blacks crowded into warehouses, oil mills, and stores. Up to 13,000 more blacks lived on the levee in an elongated city that ultimately snaked more than eight miles, complete with electric lights, pipes for water, barges for latrines. Tents had finally arrived for shelter and the weather had turned warm, but the tents were not floored and cots had not arrived, so refugees still slept on the wet ground. There were no eating utensils or mess hall. Blacks had to eat with their fingers, standing or squatting on their haunches like animals. Beyond the line of tents, for more miles farther up the levee, were thousands of livestock. The stench was unbearable.

  In the first hours of the flood, black and white had risked their lives to save each other. There had been a feeling of humanity, not race. Now the disparity between life for black and white seemed greater than in normal life. Blacks, who had believed Greenville to be a special place, felt betrayed.

  Petty insults stirred more resentment. Whenever the steamer Capitol pulled away from the dock, its calliope routinely played “Bye Bye Blackbird.” It was like a slap in the face to the blacks; even many whites were bothered. The blacks also resented Will’s orders, which were printed every day on the newspaper’s front page. First he required “groups of negroes outside of Greenville…[to] get to the levee and be rationed there.” Leaders of the black community complained. So did whites. Bell told LeRoy that moving “all the negroes from the country to the levee…was utterly impossible…. There are not tents to shield them and nothing to feed them.” And if they stayed where they were, “as soon as the water was down to a foot or two they could work through the water” and accomplish something. Within hours after the paper published his order, Will countermanded it, reversing himself again, this time publicly, further undermining his own authority.

  There were more substantive problems. The food blacks received was vastly inferior to that given whites, and not much more than what was needed to stay alive. Canned peaches were sent in; none went to blacks for fear it would “spoil” them. Charlie Loeb, who ran a first-rate restaurant, slaughtered six to eight cattle a day at the main levee kitchen. Few blacks got the meat.

  But the most serious grievance penetrated to the soul. The blacks were no longer free. The National Guard patrolled the perimeter of the levee camp with rifles and fixed bayonets. To enter or leave, one needed a pass. They were imprisoned.

  This was true in every camp in the state. Mississippi was determined to keep its workers if it required force to do so. The governor declared, “It is our duty to return these people to their homes and every camp under our control will handle the situation in this manner.” Green, the Guard commander, ordered, “[I]n no case will the camp commander release refugees without…an American Red Cross request in writing…or upon direct orders from this office.” The Red Cross cooperated. A memo on “return of refugees” stated, “Plantation owners desiring their labor to be returned from Refugee Camps will make application to the nearest Red Cross representative,” whereupon they “will issue passes to refugees.” In Greenville, Will told planters to “furnish a list of their negro tenants” and to advise him “when they wanted the tenants returned to their homes.”

  Oscar Johnston did more than supply a list. He ran the Delta & Pine Land Company, the largest cotton plantation in the world, and counted among his intimates not only LeRoy and such bankers as Jim Butler and Rudolph Hecht in New Orleans, but also executives at the Chemical and Chase Banks in New York and stockholders in London. Like LeRoy, he had charm and joked, “I have seen nothing but water for the last three weeks, and what I have seen has been too muddy for bathing and too filthy to serve as a chaser.” Also, like LeRoy, he had no humor when it came to labor. In an effort to hold tenants from his plantation, he established his own refugee camp, supplied by the Red Cross, patrolled by the National Guard, and managed by his foremen. But 450 of his tenants had been rescued from rooftops or the levee and taken to Vicksburg; he had the Illinois Central make up a special train, without charge, to carry them 260 miles to his camp at Deeson.

  In Greenville control was tighter still. While whites in the city could stay in their homes, Will ordered all Greenville blacks to the levee. He intended to use them. Salvador Signa, a white man, was one of those sent to round up Negroes. He wore a gun. “‘Don’t give ’em anything to eat,’ they told me. ‘Get them to go to levee…’ ‘Hey white folks,’ this nigger said. ‘I’s hungry.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you don’t have to be hungry long. You can just put your feet right in the boat and we’ll take you right on up to the levee, up to the kitchen, and we’ll give you all the food you want.’”

  Once on the levee, blacks were worked. LeRoy, seeking more aid from the Red Cross, described the need to the press: “Here 440,000 acres of land in one county, totally submerged, touch no dry land except the remnant of the levee on the western border. Every ounce of food for man or beast has to be transported first by large boats and then distributed by all sorts of small boats over miles of yellow, ofttimes stormy water, to a hundred almost inaccessible spots, each holding from 25 to 3,000 people and their surviving livestock.”

  Unloading barges to feed and supply nearly 50,000 people, and thousands of animals—horses, mules,
cattle, pigs, oxen, poultry—required constant labor. Reloading onto smaller boats for distribution required labor. To supply drinking water alone meant unloading thousands of 5-gallon containers, each weighing more than 40 pounds. Preparing the food, feeding livestock, sorting and distributing supplies, all required labor. Extending the boardwalk, cleaning buildings, repairing the water supply system, putting flooring under tents, all required labor. Will Percy had to get labor. Humiliated twice by being forced to reverse himself, sensitive to criticism, he had turned cold. He was not in the mood to ask black men for help. He had the National Guard.

  Paxton, the Guard commander, wired the state adjutant general, “Imperative to increase guard force here…. Urge you order 200 additional guardsmen here at once.” The additional troops came. Will used them against the blacks. And word of the treatment of black refugees began to leak out of Greenville, despite its isolation, into the North.

  IN GREENVILLE blacks had believed they had a special relationship with whites, especially the Percys. LeRoy had allowed them pride. Now Will was emasculating them, turning them into cattle, with each new order stripping more pride away. Will declared, “No able-bodied negro is entitled to be fed at all unless he is tagged as a laborer.”

  The tags were given out with a job assignment and also used to keep track of those who had received typhoid shots; they were large, like laundry tags, worn on shirts. To wear one was humiliating. Without one, a man could get no food for himself or his family.

  And in other refugee camps, even where work was forced, laborers earned wages. Will ordered that all Red Cross work be done for free. Food was the only compensation. The levee camp became a slave camp.

  Salvador Signa delivered the mail and recalled: “Me and Horace both had great big guns strapped on, heavier than the [mail] bags…. We’d just knock on those tents and those darkeys…we’d tell ’em, ‘All right. We got some [mail sacks] to go.’ Well, they’d always want to haul mail so they wouldn’t have to unload that alfalfa hay on them barges in the hot sun…. If the sack was heavy, I’d let one darkey carry in the front and one in the back.”