Driving in the Delta.

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



I spent hours and hours last night and this morning hacking apart, rearranging, and rewriting a sprawling, flowery 3-page paragraph from the first draft, the old chapter 7, concerning a drive through the Mississippi delta, into 3 paragraphs across one page.  It may not be the final product, but it's a good deal better than it was.  Here it is:

He could feel the flatlands out there.  The Mississippi delta.  It didn't look like it now, but this was the downed country, the submerged land that would always dry out again and be reborn as if by magic.  Such notions lay at the heart of Egyptian mythology.  The black Mississippi mud country gave the impression of idle, unchanging timelessness.  The sun and moon swung across these monotonous lands day after day, golden ball, white ball, unchanging.  That was the illusion.

This was not an authentic delta:  no triangular alluvial fan that protruded out into the Gulf of Mexico:  Δ.  They were more than 300 miles from the Gulf coast.  But people here had always spoken of the region as a delta, in precisely the way that sun-baked Nubians had spoken of riverbanks miles and miles inland from the wine-dark Mediterranean as the Nile delta.  This place they called the delta was an antediluvian floodplain, a baklava of sedimentary deposition.  Ancient layers of mud and sand and organic films and deep mineral and nutrient wisdom were intercut with human ambition for wealth, greed, love, blood, vengeance, charity, power, sorrow, faith, despair, all of it here, poverty, abuse, cruelty, torment, murder, laid down in consecutive strata of psychological coercion across the ages, complex as any physical geological formation, impenetrable, cryptic, and deep.  He imagined, if you listened closely enough, you might hear the lilting song of the steady but insistent Mississippi inseparable from lingering echoes of ghostly voices that recalled epic dramas played out along the river banks and in the surrounding fields and croplands.

Charlie was right to emphasize that this country should not be romanticized.  How long this land had howled under the whips and pistols and shotguns of white masters.  This troubled region, so unchallenging to the eye, occupied a mental topography that struggled incessantly to enclose the cycles and oscillations of perennial flood and retreat, flood and retreat, within the bounds of order and control.  Always that bothersome, vexing word control when Americans struggled to wrap their minds around the immense, contorting, serpentine body of the Mississippi River system.  The river could be channelized, its flow could be shaped, it could be pushed back behind locks and levees, but it could never be controlled any more than the desires and dreams of the men living and laboring and loving and dying behind those levees could be controlled.  That was an unnatural human arrogance that could last for a season or two, no more.  Nature eventually brushed those vanities aside.