Flags on the Bayou

by James Lee Burke

already rich. How did they get so dumb, you ask? The answer is simple. Most of them are illiterate. There are no newspapers or telegraphs where they live; some of them don’t even know a war is taking place. Then they wake up one morning and look out the window and see a regiment of blue-bellies burning their barn, shooting their livestock, and taking a shit in their yard. These kinds of experiences tend to make people resentful. Look, this is how plantation society works. They create identities for themselves and put on airs and screw down and marry up. The little people do the work; it doesn’t matter if you are white or black. We all pick the white man’s cotton. Maybe it is not like that in the North. I have never been there, although I have read the Irish in New York broke the water mains and drowned three hundred darkies in their basements. Herman Melville wrote about this.