The Yazoo Blues. John Pritchard

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СКАЧАТЬ out at the lake from Uncle Hinroo’s or the bridge over the Pass—and down toward the levee and that, back before the Civil War, durin’ high water, river boats used to use it all the time to get way back up into the Delta so, as Ottis put it, they could “serve the plantations.” In a way, Moon Lake is just a kind of wide spot on the Yazoo Pass, if you want to think of it like that. And I do.

      “But,” said Ottis, “the state built a levee in 1853, and that cut the Pass off from the Mississippi River and vice versa. The levee blocked the entry to the Pass, so, after that, them steamboats couldn use it no more to serve all them isolated plantations back up in the Delta. You see, before the levee cut off the Yazoo Pass from the Miss’sippi, all them riverboats had to do—durin’ high water—was steam out of the Mississippi into the Pass, chug up and across Moon Lake over to where the Pass went out, and then they could go east into the Coldwater, on into the Tallahatchie, and, after that, into the Yazoo at what would later be present-day Greenwood. Plus, in so doin’, they could cover a helluva lot of the Delta—and come right out into the Mississippi again, just above Vicksburg! . . . which was why, in 1863, the Yankees thought about usin’ the Yazoo Pass durin’ the Vicksburg campaign.”

      “But further,” I said, catchin’ on real fast, “them sumbiches had to blow the levee first.”

      “Natchaly,” Ottis said. “And they did it on February the third. Lieutenant-Colonel James Wilson said it was like lookin’ at Niagara Falls, and it took four days for the water in the river and the flood on this side of the levee to even up. That musta been sumpn to see.”

      “Oh,” said Voyd, which meant he wuddn really listenin’.

      But I was. It turns out that Ottis had got hissef all involved with this one tee-niney episode of the whole Civil War. He’d even gone over to Ole Miss and took a buncha college courses on the history of the War Between the States, till finally, so the story goes, the professors had to just say to him one day that if he was goin’ to go to school there, he had to take courses in other stuff, too, but he wouldn do it, so that was that. Them sumbiches over at the uni-fukkin-versity was too smart just to be inter-rested in one little ol’ thing about something. And they didn’t see how this one teeny-ass little piece of history could be worth some muthafukka devotin’ a whole lifetime to it. But, hell, it was his life, and, Chreyest, it was history!

      However, to them pasty-lookin’ little diklikkers over there, unless it’s some useless de-tail they’re interested in, they’re not gonna have shit to do with it. Hell, one nem coksukkas wouldn even get in the car with Ottis and ride over to Moon Lake to take a look at the Pass. He “didn’t see what purpose it would serve” because, in his view, “the ‘episode’ was such a minor event of the time and had little to do with the outcome of the conflict.”

That’s what he thinks. If he believes that six thousand[4] Yankee soldiers and sailors in thirty-two[5] fukkin steamboats—which, accordin’ to Ottis, “Each was supposed to be just under 180 feet long but at least one of em, The Rattler, was two hundred feet long,” and that ten of em, leadin’ the way, was fukkin battleships: namely, “two r’nclads, six tin-clads, and two steam rams”—if that goggle-eyed, pipe-puffing muthafukka thinks all that ordinance, smokin’ and churnin’ across Moon Lake, is a “minor event,” I’d sure like to have tickets to a major one. That just goes to show you, readin’ too much’ll fuk you up.

      Anyhow, after listenin’ to Ottis, I got a brand new slant on things. Next to planters and bankers, I’m about to add a whole new group to the All American Ass’ole Association, and that’s them fukkin professors. Hell, Ottis woulda made ten of them sumbiches.

      Course some reading is okay, and one of the major facts I got from Ottis, who got it from James Truslow Adams’s book, The March of Democracy—which is a multi-fukkin-volume set of books—was that the North had nineteen million white men available for duty, and the South only had five million. He said they woulda had five hunnuhd thousand more, but that number was mostly them hillbillies over in the mountains who for one reason or another decided to fight on the side of the Yankees.

      As it turned out, only about 1,750,000 diklikkers in the North signed up, whereas some 800,000 Rebs—near one-fourth of the available white men—enlisted, so that you could say almost all the worthwhile sumbiches in the South were out there puttin’ their ass on the firing line. In the North it was a different story altogether. They didn’t ante up but about two-nineteenths of their men, and 100,000 of them was niggas. I mean, what the hell. Them Yankee ass’oles didn’t stand to lose nothing except a few fukkin states which they didn’t give a shit for nohow. At least, as I understand it, those abo-whatchamacallit-litionist coksukkas up around Boston didn’t. Them sumbiches hated the fukkin planters worse’n I do and woulda been just as happy to have seen em all th’owed smack-ass into the Guffa-gotdam-Mexico.

      As I indicated, Ottis didn’t much give a shit about anything else as far as the War Between the States was concerned, and that greatly disturbed the good doctors over at the University. They wanted him to be more interested in the “economic aspects of the period and the wider scope of the war.”

      Fuk that. I’m with Ottis. I want to hear about the shootin’. Who cares about all that other dull-ass crap? Plus, I ain’t never been to Virginia and I ain’t plannin’ on goin’. Appa-fukkin-mattox, Bull-ass-run, or any of them other places ain’t nothing to me—and they didn’t set Ottis’s hair on fire neither.

      I wanted to know what was goin’ on then where I am now. Gotdam—when Ottis described it, I could see it! And I wished to hell I’da been there. I wouldna cared about no slaves—my people didn’t own none—and I sure as hell wouldna been fightin’ for them rich-ass planters. I’da done it just for the fukkin fun of it and because them Yankee sumbiches didn’t have no business comin’ down here in the first place. Fukkum.

      The truth is, the so-called “Old South” wouldna done me no good a-tall. Them planters run it, and the slaves run them, and both of em looked down on my kind as nothing but scum. Well, some of us was—and still are today—because we never learned there was any other way to be, or if we did, we didn’t give a shit. In fact, Mr. Brainsong said we was that way when we was still back on the border between England and Scotland—and that a bunch of us, back then, went to Ireland but was asked to leave, so then we come over here and kept on bein’ what we was. Looks to me like that’s kind of a fukkin heritage. But it’s not what I want to talk about, and Mr. Brainsong is a whole nuther subject hissef.

      Anyway—to make a long story somewhat longer—and I don’t know why Voyd and me didn’t already know all this—Ottis had done got to be the leading datgum authority on what was officially called the Yazoo Pass Expedition. One reason was that he lived right next to the Pass at Moon Lake. The other reason is that almost nobody in the rest of the South, and America, too, had ever heard of the thing.

      Plus, we learned something else. The Civil War is not called the Civil War! Ottis says the official name, in the Liberry of Congress, is the War of the Fukkin Rebellion.

      Stop me if I get too technical. You see, this Yazoo Pass stuff kind of got me all fired up about history. Particularly when you realize that they was some pretty big names involved in the thing at the time. ’Course, for the most part, they was all Yankees, but they was big-ass names none-the-fukkin-less. I’m talkin’ about Admiral Porter, General Quimby, and Ulysses S-hole-fukkin Grant hissef, and he was drunker’n Cooter Brown a large part of the time. Hell, his fellow officers on one occasion had to keep him locked up in the bottom of a riverboat till he sobered up so none of the enlisted personnel would see his knee-walking se’f and lose faith in his fukkin “ability to lead,” and all that crap. I think that happened down near Yazoo City somewhere. СКАЧАТЬ