 The river gave up manifold jetsam: roots, silt, limbs and a number of dead fish; and human flotsam: beer bottles, food wrappers and an occasional automobile license plate. Yesterday, under the Greenville bridge, it gave up a body. The Mississippi river basin is the second largest in the world, covering almost 2 million square miles. Its watershed encompasses almost forty percent of the lower 48 states. Along its length of over 2300 miles is a marked path: areas, regions, neighborhoods and homes, all with indigenous qualities born of some function of the river with its strength and power and sometimes gentleness: like a midwife allowing new birth. But as it gives life, it takes life. For it could also be a monster, as in the 1927 flood. But death is the beginning of life as life is the beginning of death, and all floods create a full cycle, from washing away to leaving behind the rich sediments that build the areas, regions, etc. One such area, the Delta, spread across three states: Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana, and though geologically unspecific, the area is truly an alluvial plane, the river has adopted the area as a child of a true delta, and the richness of life it brings. The Mississippi region of this area is the Mississippi Delta. One writer has described the Mississippi Delta as: “Beginning in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ending on catfish row in Vicksburg”: Clever prose for a subjective standard. Bounded geographically on the east by the Yazoo River and the west by the Mississippi, the region has been cleared, farmed, invaded, fought over in THE WAR, and farmed again. Originally occupied by Indian tribes living in swaps and marshes the Delta was cleared by pioneers and made due for farming from its fertile envelope. Central African Negroes, enslaved by West Africans, sold to and transported by English and New England slave traders to the New World, were purchased by Carribean and South American planters as CHATTEL instruments to be worked until dead; in the Southern American colonies, as PEOPLE for labor. Before The War white and black worked side by side, free and slave, master and servant. After The War white and black worked side by side, free and free, together and apart, THE NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM imbued a bitterness brought by Northern cruelty with its imposed BLACK CODES and RECONSTRUCTION. The preceding is the prologue of the book Mississippi Cotton : A Southern Novel by Paul Yarbrough.
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