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The Yazoo River
The Yazoo River unlocks the door to one of the most unusual and diverse regions in America, the culturally, strategically, and agriculturally rich Delta flatland embraced by two rivers, the Mississippi and the Yazoo. It is a land that has produced the best cotton, the Blues, celebrated personages, and a style of living like that nowhere else.The author, Frank E. Smith, was a U.S. Congressman from this region. His perspective on the Yazoo Delta Region, therefore, is particularly valuable since it comes from his varied experience as a member of the House of Representatives, where he concentrated on the special problems of conservation and development of natural resources, and from his being a consecrated devotee and native son of the Delta.In The Yazoo River he recounts the important history, the folklife, and the heritage that make this place unique. Though time and social revolution in the Civil Rights era have brought many changes to the Yazoo region, Frank Smith's book remains virtually undated in the fair balance he gives his accounts and in his presentation of historical fact.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published May 14, 2014
About the author
Frank E. Smith
14 books3 followersNovelist Frank E. Smith moved to Florida from New York City in 1959 and lived in New Port Richey at 5566 Shady Acres Boulevard until his death. In his early career he worked in the Pentagon as head research analyst for the U.S.Navy, for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during World War II, and as an adviser to President Truman at the 1945 Potsdam Conference. When he started writing, he used the pseudonyms Jonathan Craig and Jennifer Hale to produce more than 100 mystery and western books and 300 short stories. Several of his novels, all gothics published under the name Jennifer Hale, have a Forida setting.
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December 29, 2017
The Yazoo by Frank E. Smith (Rinehart and Co., New York/Toronto 1954)
Readers unfamiliar with the fabulous “Rivers of America Books” are missing out. Appearing in the 1940s and 50s, and published by the venerable Rinehart and Company, it is a distinguished, singular and entirely delectable collection of world-class social history disguised as “local history”, each handsome volume sporting in the original hardback version lovely, unique jacket art and frequent maps and illustrations that supported, on the inside, abnormally idiosyncratic versions of river—and thus, universal, human stories. American rivers were the original hosts to the camps, villages, towns and cities that became America itself, and the stories of the camp, village, town and city people become the stories of America itself, how people lived, married, brawled, drank, farmed, slaved, fought, died, sang, danced, played, worshipped, screwed and gambled. By the time Frank E. Smith wrote “The Yazoo” for Rinehart, there were 35 volumes in the series, along with a title called “Songs of the Rivers of America", edited by Carl Carmer. “The Yazoo” is a delectable surprise. In the list of titles, perhaps only Hodding Carter’s volume on the “Lower Mississippi” offers a more fulsome and heart-felt tale of the settling and peopling of the old Southwest.
The Yazoo itself rises where the “Tennessee hills meet the Delta of Mississippi, and eventually they drain all of the western half of the state down to Vicksburg.” Thus, the Yazoo is “Delta country”, which is the same as saying cotton country, blues country, plantation country, slave country, and Massah country, along with being lynching country and white supremacy country. Outranked only by the Ohio, the Yazoo is a major tributary of the mighty Mississippi and the story of the Yazoo is more than any other river (more than the Mississippi itself) the story of the Deep South. Needless to say, the story of the Yazoo is more than the story of Darkies and deep porticoed and columned porches where fancy ladies sip iced tea while their aristocratic men sip Julips and play billiards in the parlor. Down past Yazoo City, the country is swampy, the land of “high water”, full of snakes. Originally Choctaw and Chickasaw country, the Indians, by 1817 or so, were losing out, only to be shipped to Oklahoma by the Jackson Administration around 1832.
Smith’s telling is delectable, told in a characteristically southern voice, but for all that, authoritative nonetheless, humorous, autochthonous, and rollicking. Smith, as a man of his time and place, goes easy on slavery, and even easier on Reconstruction and Jim Crow. There is the rise of the KKK to tell and Smith does it obliquely. A modern telling would be more clear-eyed and damning. Nonetheless, nowhere have I read a better telling of the rise of the sharecropper and tenant farming regime that dominated Alabama and Mississippi cotton agriculture for nearly a hundred years, a dastardly and backward economic mode that devastated both land and people, black and white. All of Mississippi remains economically and socially backward and God Knows when that will change. Not any time soon, it seems.
I recall my first forays into book collecting when the “Rivers of America Series” presented an opulent feast for the eye. Back then, forty or fifty years ago, I couldn’t afford a first edition. I probably still can’t. But they’re for the most part available in any good public library. Reading them through would give anybody an honorary Doctor’s Degree in social history.
Readers unfamiliar with the fabulous “Rivers of America Books” are missing out. Appearing in the 1940s and 50s, and published by the venerable Rinehart and Company, it is a distinguished, singular and entirely delectable collection of world-class social history disguised as “local history”, each handsome volume sporting in the original hardback version lovely, unique jacket art and frequent maps and illustrations that supported, on the inside, abnormally idiosyncratic versions of river—and thus, universal, human stories. American rivers were the original hosts to the camps, villages, towns and cities that became America itself, and the stories of the camp, village, town and city people become the stories of America itself, how people lived, married, brawled, drank, farmed, slaved, fought, died, sang, danced, played, worshipped, screwed and gambled. By the time Frank E. Smith wrote “The Yazoo” for Rinehart, there were 35 volumes in the series, along with a title called “Songs of the Rivers of America", edited by Carl Carmer. “The Yazoo” is a delectable surprise. In the list of titles, perhaps only Hodding Carter’s volume on the “Lower Mississippi” offers a more fulsome and heart-felt tale of the settling and peopling of the old Southwest.
The Yazoo itself rises where the “Tennessee hills meet the Delta of Mississippi, and eventually they drain all of the western half of the state down to Vicksburg.” Thus, the Yazoo is “Delta country”, which is the same as saying cotton country, blues country, plantation country, slave country, and Massah country, along with being lynching country and white supremacy country. Outranked only by the Ohio, the Yazoo is a major tributary of the mighty Mississippi and the story of the Yazoo is more than any other river (more than the Mississippi itself) the story of the Deep South. Needless to say, the story of the Yazoo is more than the story of Darkies and deep porticoed and columned porches where fancy ladies sip iced tea while their aristocratic men sip Julips and play billiards in the parlor. Down past Yazoo City, the country is swampy, the land of “high water”, full of snakes. Originally Choctaw and Chickasaw country, the Indians, by 1817 or so, were losing out, only to be shipped to Oklahoma by the Jackson Administration around 1832.
Smith’s telling is delectable, told in a characteristically southern voice, but for all that, authoritative nonetheless, humorous, autochthonous, and rollicking. Smith, as a man of his time and place, goes easy on slavery, and even easier on Reconstruction and Jim Crow. There is the rise of the KKK to tell and Smith does it obliquely. A modern telling would be more clear-eyed and damning. Nonetheless, nowhere have I read a better telling of the rise of the sharecropper and tenant farming regime that dominated Alabama and Mississippi cotton agriculture for nearly a hundred years, a dastardly and backward economic mode that devastated both land and people, black and white. All of Mississippi remains economically and socially backward and God Knows when that will change. Not any time soon, it seems.
I recall my first forays into book collecting when the “Rivers of America Series” presented an opulent feast for the eye. Back then, forty or fifty years ago, I couldn’t afford a first edition. I probably still can’t. But they’re for the most part available in any good public library. Reading them through would give anybody an honorary Doctor’s Degree in social history.
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