In his new book “The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi,” writer Boyce Upholt seeks to break down the barriers that keep us from seeing the Mississippi River. The narrative he constructs engages with the wildness of the river while also explaining the forces that have long sought to tame it. Far from a simple history, Upholt’s book gives readers a direct sensory encounter with the beauty and boldness of the river.
Upholt recognizes that it is nearly impossible to describe the sum and substance of the Mississippi, given the way some parts of the river have been reworked and others have been controlled. He proves to be a skilled bricoleur, one who seeks to build a new identity for the river using the pieces that already exist and showing how they fit together in a new way. Rather than thinking of the river as something to be controlled, with man playing God, Upholt wants us to see the river as a deity. “If my time on the river has convinced me of one thing, it’s that we do not make good gods. The river is the true god here,” albeit an unappeasable one. As Upholt explains further, “The fight along the Mississippi River can’t be against nature, since it’s impossible to say what ‘nature’ is here. It’s always a fight among humans, people who can’t agree what kind of world they want to build.”
The fights and debates about what the river is and what it means show that there’s nothing more American than the Mississippi. For planters, farmers and engineers, it is a source of flooding or a means for transporting goods. For environmentalists, it is something to be preserved and revered. It’s one of the world’s major river systems, as well as a timeless source of literary inspiration for writers as varied as Mark Twain, Eudora Welty, John McPhee and Jonathan Raban.
Upholt’s own fascination with the river began when he set out on a canoeing expedition exploring the river’s islands and back channels. Before he paddled the Mississippi, Upholt saw its waters as “irrelevant because they were invisible, hidden behind the wall.” Hemmed in by woods and water as he traveled the river, his perspective began to change. “I felt like I was in a separate world,” he writes. “This place was windswept and water-blasted, composed of curling lines. It was not a typical wilderness, perhaps, but it was as wild a place as I had ever been.”
Although he is enraptured by the river, Upholt does not allow his fascination to cloud the story. He begins by engaging with the river’s history through the ways the Indigenous people who once inhabited the Mississippi River Valley might have seen it long before White men traveled its waters. Rather than view the burial mounds they left behind as simply ancient structures that have survived time and shifting waters, Upholt wants us to see these markers of the river’s connection with Native Americans as a body of literature with its own systems of meaning, knowledge preservation and transmission. This is an idea that he takes beyond the early history of the river. As the book progresses, the idea of the Mississippi as a cosmic river begins to stand in sharp contrast to the ways the river was part of a program of social engineering.
Along the lower Mississippi, the levees were a tool that created the region’s social structure. In the alluvial plain known as the Mississippi Delta, the levees were “that big green wall that protects the wealth.” Taming the river allowed the White planter class of the Mississippi Delta to create a plantation empire based in the vast cotton fields that seem to flow from the river. These fields in turn were harvested largely by Black workers in the 20th century through a system of sharecropping, which kept Black Southerners in debt to and under the control of the plantation owners. In time, sharecropping created a culture rooted in White patriarchy, racism and cheap Black labor.
Although I wish Upholt had focused a bit more on the ways the people who constructed the levees were exploited through a system of peonage organized by the federal government and paid for with American tax dollars — for example, pay was deliberately drawn out two or three months so workers could accumulate debts through the commissary system — he doesn’t shy away from the way the river has been used to exercise power over the powerless. Upholt’s real focus is on the numerous ways the river has been manipulated by engineers and wealthy planters only to damage an ecosystem that was once vibrant. Equally important to Upholt are the ways engineers, in their desire to tame the river, ignored how their efforts to control floodwaters focused almost exclusively on the needs of wealthy farmers, who have long been masterful at steering government assistance their way.
Like Upholt, I have traveled the Mississippi River by canoe, and it changed my entire way of thinking about the river. Finally, I can see beyond the levee’s edge. For those who have never placed a paddle in those historic waters, reading “The Great River” is the closest thing to traveling the sacred waters of the Mississippi and engaging with its story and its ferocity. This book tells an eloquent story of the ways the Mississippi River is a separate world hidden in plain sight.
W. Ralph Eubanks is the author most recently of “A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape.” He is at work on a book on the history, culture and enduring mythology of the Mississippi Delta.
The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi
