“Kick the nigger!” “He ought to have his neck broke!” “He ought to be hung!” said the indignant passengers, by whom the captain’s prompt and energetic action was strongly commended.
The unwelcome couple went quietly ashore, and one of the hands pitched their trunk after them. They were in a dilemma: their clothes were too fine for a filthy deck passage, and their skins were too dark for a cabin passage. So they sat down on the shore to wait for the next steamer.
“They won’t find a boat that’ll take ’em,” said the grim captain. “Anyhow, they can’t force their damned nigger equality on to me!” He was very indignant to think that he had landed at their signal. “The expense of running this boat is forty dollars an hour,—six thousand dollars a trip;—and I can’t afford to be fooled by a nigger!” I omit the epithets.
Afterwards I heard the virtuous passengers in calmer moments talking over the affair. “How would you feel,” said one, with solemn emphasis, “to know that your wife was sleeping in the next room to a nigger and his wife?” The argument was unanswerable: it was an awful thought!
There is not a place of any importance on the river between Memphis and Vicksburg, a distance of four hundred miles. The nearest approach to an exception is Helena, on the Arkansas shore, a hastily built, high-perched town, looking as if it had flown from somewhere else and just lit. Another place of some note is Napoleon, which was burnt during the war. Here there is one of those natural “cut-offs” for which the Mississippi is remarkable; the river having formed for itself a new channel, half a mile in length, across a tongue of land about which it formerly made a circuit of twelve miles. We passed through the cut-off, and afterwards made a voyage of six miles up the old channel, which resembles a long, placid, winding lake, to Beulah Landing, called after a novel of that name written by a Southern lady.
I remember Beulah as the scene of a colored soldier’s return. He had no sooner landed from the steamer than his friends in waiting seized him, men, women, and girls, some grasping his hands, some clinging to his arms and waist, others hanging upon his neck, smothering him in their joyful embraces. All who could reach him hugged him; while those who could not reach him hugged those who were hugging him, as the next best thing to be done on the happy occasion.
Below Napoleon, the cleared lands of many plantations extend to the river, while others show only a border of trees along the shore. The banks were continually caving, masses of earth flaking off and falling into the turbid current, as we passed. The levees, neglected during the war, were often in a very bad condition. The river, encroaching upon the shores upon which these artificial embankments were raised, had made frequent breaches in them, and in many places swept them quite away; so that whole plantations lay at the mercy of the usual spring freshets, which render cotton culture on such unprotected lands impracticable.
The power and extent of these freshets is something astonishing. The river averages nearly half a mile in width. Its depth is very great, often exceeding one hundred feet. Its average velocity is something over two miles an hour. Yet when come the sudden rains and thaws, and the great tributaries, with their thousand lesser streams, pour their floods into the bosom of the Father of Waters, this huge artery becomes but an insignificant channel for them, and they spread out into a vast lake inundating the valley. The course of the river is then traceable only by the swifter current in its vicinity, and by the broad sinuous opening through the forests. A gentleman of my acquaintance told me that in Bolivar County, Mississippi, he had ridden thirty miles back from the river, and seen all the way the marks of high water on the trees as far up as he could reach with his riding-whip.
The crevasses, or breaks in the levees and banks, which occur at such times, are often terrific. Plantations are destroyed, and buildings swept away. Boats are drawn into the current and carried inland, to be landed, like the Ark, on the subsidence of the waters, or lost among the trees of the deep swamps.
The violence of these freshets is said to be on the increase of late years, from two or three causes,—the drainage of newly cultivated lands; and the cut-offs and the levees, which project the floods more directly upon the lower country, instead of retarding the water, and suffering it to spread out gradually over the valley, naturally subject to its overflow.