Frank E. Smith – Mississippi Sideboard

August 29, 2024August 30, 2024

Mississippi’s American Rivers

The Rivers of America is an important series of books that started in 1937 with the publication of Kennebec: Cradle of Americans by Robert P. T. Coffin and ended in 1974 with the publication of The American: River of El Dorado by Margaret Sanborn. For the most part, the editors were successful in bringing the regional folk life of America to focus through the lenses of her rivers.

Constance Lindsay Skinner, a Canadian writer and historian initially conceived the series in the early 1930s. She was also the first series editor. In an essay that was included in early volumes of the series, Skinner stated, “This is to be a literary and not a historical series. The authors of these books will be novelists and poets. On them, now in America, as in all lands and times, rests the real responsibility of interpretation.” Skinner lived to edit only six of the volumes, but her criteria for authors and the freedom she granted them—a policy continued by subsequent editors—guaranteed not only the success, but the importance of the series.

The series’ editors sought out a wide cross section of poets, novelists, historians, and illustrators to produce living literary portraits rather than historical tomes. The illustrators included many famous and soon-to-be-famous artists, including R.E. Banta, Ross Santee, John Steuart Curry, Nicolai Fetchin, John McCrady, and Andrew Wyeth. George Annand and Rafael Palacios were the series’ principal cartographers. Annand drew the maps for nearly half the forty-nine Rivers books published in the first eighteen years of the series, including the two “Mississippi Rivers” The Lower Mississippi and The Yazoo.

Skinner wanted the Rivers of America books to create popular literature reflecting the regional history of America. For Skinner, it was imperative to incorporate a Southern region into her work, partially to confirm that a distinct and vibrant population still resided in the South. As she wrote to a potential author during the series’ planning stages, “I had been sure there was this solid ‘backbone’, a sound folk-core, or the southern backcountry would have gone back to timber and wild animals.”

For the South to work in Skinner’s series, its character had to stem from the people’s relationship with nature, specifically with the natural history of the rivers of the nation. Cecile Hulse Matschat’s Suwannee River: Strange Green Land (1938) remains a best-selling volume, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), a landmark in American environmental writing.

Of Skinner’s original vision of twenty-four volumes, three focused on Southern rivers, the Suwannee, the Arkansas, and the Lower Mississippi, designated to portray the Mississippi River south of St. Louis. (The Upper Mississippi: A Wilderness Saga, by Walter Havighurst, the second volume in the River series, was published in 1937). All told, however, only seven rivers in the South are covered in the series: the Tennessee—two books, both by Donald Davidson The Old River, (1946) and The New River (1948), inclusive of the profound changes wrought by the Tennessee Valley Authority—the Santee, the Arkansas, the St. Johns, the French Bend, and in Mississippi, the Lower Mississippi, and the Yazoo.

Skinner died in 1939. Nearly a year later, in 1940, the publisher, Farrar & Rinehart, announced the editors of the Rivers of America series, Stephen Vincent Benét and Carl Carmer. Four Rivers titles were published under their editorial guidance in 1940 (The Wabash, by William E. Wilson; The Arkansas, by Clyde Brion Davis; The Delaware, by Harry Emerson Wildes; and The Illinois, by James Gray). Three more titles followed in 1941, The Charles, by Charles Bernon Tourtellot; and the The Kaw, by Floyd Benjamin Streeter, and The Brandywine, by Henry Seidel Canby, which included the first illustrations of the young Andrew Wyeth.

The Lower Mississippi

A book on the Lower Mississippi is named on the first page of Constance Skinner’s “Rivers of America Journal,” a preliminary plan for the series, dated August 17, 1935. Written as “New Orleans & Lower Mississippi,” the author Skinner designated for the volume was Edward Larocque Tinker. Tinker today is best known as a scholar of Latin American culture, but he wrote several books about New Orleans, including Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days (1924) and Closed Shutters: Old New Orleans – the Eighties (1931), but for whatever reasons did not take on the Lower Mississippi volume.

The editors then committed to a contract with Lyle Saxon, writer and journalist who reported for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, who had written Father Mississippi in 1927. However, Saxon apparently reneged on the project (likely because he was directing the Federal Writers’ Project Works Progress Administration’s Guide to Louisiana (1941). Carmer came to New Orleans to cancel the Farrar & Rinehart contract with Lyle Saxon for the Rivers book on the Lower Mississippi where he met a family friend, Betty Carter, wife of Greenville, Mississippi journalist Hodding Carter II. At the time, Carter was in New York City, working for the progressive newspaper, PM.

While he was at Harvard, in response to an invitation and subsequent encouragement from an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, Hodding Carter had written five chapters of a book which was to analyze the racial and political situation of the South. (Carter’s work was not accepted.) Showing Carmer the material Hodding had written for Knopf, Betty was able to interest Carmer in Hodding as the “perfect” candidate for the writing of the Mississippi work. In July, 1940, Hodding Carter signed the contract for Lower Mississippi, receiving a $400 advance. In September, he resigned from PM and returned to Greenville and his newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times.

The Carters did much of the research for the book at the Tulane University library. In November 1940 the National Guard was called to active duty. Hodding’s regiment was moved to Florida, and he became a correspondent for the Democrat-Times. He had offers for such work from two other newspapers and from the Associated Press, but he concentrated on writing the Rivers book. Reviewing its early chapters, Carl Carmer observed that the book would be one of the two most significant volumes of the series. He advised Carter not to worry about the June 1, 1941 deadline established in the contract, noting that the book was too good to hurry. The Lower Mississippi was published in the fall of 1942 to favorable reviews.

Writing in The New York Times (Dec. 6, 1942), noted critic Horace Reynolds—who also took a strong interest in Faulkner’s first novels as well as the early publications of the Lomaxes—stated, “By responding to the realistic rather than the romantic aspect of his river, Mr. Carter has written one of the best books in the Rivers of America series. His astringent approach is fresh and welcome. He has dug below the surface ease and softness of the delta life to the savagery and pain which lie beneath them.”

“No river in America has been more over-romanticized than the Lower Mississippi,” Reynolds wrote. “Fiction, popular history and popular song have all combined to give it a personality which does not exist. The Lower Mississippi doesn’t look like the pictures or sound like the songs. It is a wilderness of muddy water and deep sky, with a thin wedge of flat land in between. Its great beauty is not easily discernible. To that beauty, which has been best described by Lafcadio Hearn, Mr. Carter is articulately sensitive. But he is no exploiter of the Southern tradition. A man of thought and conscience, he is troubled by the social problems of a section to the intensity of whose plight the phenomenon of a Huey Long is an index. His book cuts deep into the life of his valley.”

The book was illustrated by John McCrady. In a letter to the Carol Fitzgerald, author of The Rivers of America: A Descriptive Bibliography (1991), Matt Martinez, a friend of John McCrady’s widow, Mary, wrote that he had spoken to Mrs. McCrady about her husband’s role as illustrator of The Lower Mississippi: “To address your questions, Mrs. McCrady felt that Hodding Carter approached McCrady, but this was fifty years ago or so, so it’s a little hazy. Mr. Mc and Carter were boyhood friends in Hammond, Louisiana, in the late 19teens. and early 1920s…. I’m not sure of any causal information in terms of who approached who at that time, but the two men who are a big part of The Lower Mississippi had a personal history together that preceded their professional association.”

In his foreword to “John McCrady 1911-1968,” a catalog issued by the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1975, E. John Bullard, the museum’s director, observed, “During the 1930s John McCrady was recognized as the most important exponent of Regionalism working in the South. In his paintings, McCrady visually captured the unique aspects of rural Mississippi and Louisiana with the same authenticity and insight that Benton and Curry brought to their depictions of the Mid-West.” Life published a five-page spread on the artist and commissioned him to paint “the second in a series of dramatic scenes in twentieth century American history.” McCrady chose to paint the assassination of Huey Long and produced perhaps his best-known, and certainly his most controversial artwork.

The Yazoo

The second Mississippi river included in the Rivers of America Series is the Yazoo, However important the Yazoo seems to Mississippians—and the Yazoo Basin undeniably has the richest cultural heritage of any other section of the state—its choice as a subject for the Rivers series gives us some food for thought. Three other rivers, the Atchafalaya, the Tombigbee, and perhaps particularly the Red River (of the South) deserved consideration.

So why the Yazoo? The answer is Hodding Carter. Carter’s friendship—if not to say influence—with Carl Carmer, who by 1949 had become the principal editor of The Rivers of America, and would remain the series editor until the publication of the final book (The American: River of El Dorado, by Margaret Sanborn) in 1974. Carter must also have already had in mind Frank E. Smith as the author. Smith was managing editor of the liberal-leaning newspaper Greenwood Morning Call in 1946 and 1947. He was a legislative assistant to United States Senator John Stennis from 1947 to 1949 and was elected to and served as a member of the Mississippi State Senate from 1948 until 1950, when he was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives from Mississippi’s 3^rd Congressional district.

In a June 1991 letter, Smith wrote, “I started on the Yazoo in 1947, when I was recommended to the editor by Hodding Carter, who had written Lower Mississippi a few years before. He was a friend and associate in newspaper work. I wrote two or three sample chapters, and Rinehart gave me a contract and a $1,000 advance.”

On January 7, 1948, Frank Smith signed an agreement with Rinehart & Company which called for delivery of a completed manuscript of The Yazoo in its final revised form on or before January 1, 1951. He was to receive royalties of 10% of the retail price on the first 5,000 copies sold; 121/2% on the next 5,000 copies. sold; and 15% on all copies sold thereafter. He was to be receive an advance on royalties of $750, $250 on signing the agreement, $250 on delivery of the manuscript, and $250 upon publication of the book.

“I forgot about the contract when I became involved in some personal endeavors,” Smith later wrote, “but was reminded of it in 1953, when Rinehart wrote telling me to produce the manuscript in three- or four-months’ time or return the money. I was busy at that time as a member of Congress, but I didn’t have the money to reimburse them, so I produced the manuscript, and it was published the next year with no revisions or deletions.”

Reviews of The Yazoo were overwhelmingly favorable. Reviewing in the Chicago Tribune, (May 16, 1954) Harnett T. Kane, author of Huey Long’s Louisiana Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship 1928-1940 (1941) wrote, “The author is something of a rarity, a politician who can write. The 36-year-old Mississippi congressman had a role in the ending of Bilboism; he represents a new south. His style is non-lyric, non-emotional, almost matter- of-fact. a novelty in certain circles of regional writing.”

Fellow Mississippian Hubert Creekmore, reviewing in the New York Times (May 9, 1954) states, “Since Frank Smith is a Delta native and a Congressman, it is not surprising that his best passages are those dealing with political, and economic problems. His discussion of the sharecropper-commissary system is concise and understanding, and the survey of flood control and the touchy subject of the four dams on Yazoo tributaries is sensible.” Finally, Hodding Carter himself, in his review of The Yazoo in his newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times (May 9, 1954), writes, “(Smith) is Mr. Yazoo, even Mr. Delta himself; attuned to and informed on its manifold problems.” Here it must be noted that both Creekmore and Carter take Smith to task, Creekmore “for the omission of a full and organized essay on the Delta planters” and Carter for Smith turning a blind eye to Parchman penal farm, “the nation’s worst such institution, where the lash, the convict trust system, and the lack of any real rehabilitation program conspire to breed worse criminals out of men who are to be returned to society.”

The illustrations in The Yazoo are by Janet Turner (1914-1988), a Missourian who graduated with distinction in 1936 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Far Eastern History. Her first postgraduate work was done at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she studied under Thomas Hart Benton and John de Martelly, the illustrator of The Wabash (1940), the eighth book in the Rivers series. In 1941, after five years of postgraduate work, she was awarded the Institute’s diploma. She attended Claremont College for two years, studying under Millard Sheets and Henry McFee, receiving a master’s degree in fine arts in 1947.

During her artistic career, Turner had more than two hundred one-woman shows, won more than a hundred awards, and saw her works displayed in every state of the United States and in more than forty foreign countries. Her works were purchased by prestigious museums and galleries around the world, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Seventy of her prints were purchased by the United States Information Agency for display in U.S. embassies around the world, and more than two hundred of her prints and paintings are held in some eighty college or museum collections.

In the early 1950s, Turner was living in Nacogdoches, Texas, teaching at Stephen F. Austin State College. In 1952, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to experiment with prints of Gulf Coast flora and fauna. She was primarily a printmaker at this time, utilizing different printmaking techniques in new and unique ways. Given her illustration of the Greenwood Leflore Hotel (below), it’s almost certain that Turner came to Greenwood sometime in 1953, though Smith wrote that they never met.

. . .

The first edition of The Lower Mississippi received four printings between 1942 and 1959 (1942, 1945, 1947, and 1959) ranging in price from $2.50 (1942-45), to $3.50 (1947) and $5 (1959). The number of copies printed is unknown, but according to WorldCat, the book is held in 887 libraries worldwide. Almost all are the first (1942) printing,

The Yazoo had an initial printing of 5,000 copies, and a projected reprint of another 5,000. How many copies Rinehart actually published is unknown, however WorldCat finds the 1954 edition in 507 libraries. The Yazoo was reprinted (in paperback) in 1988 by University Press of Mississippi. According to Frank Smith’s son Fred, University Press printed 1000 copies in paperback, and printed 50 special edition hardback copies, all of which were signed by Frank Smith and sold at Choctaw Books in Jackson, Mississippi.

August 13, 2023August 13, 2023

The Yazoo

This heartfelt essay is the introduction to The Yazoo River by Frank E. Smith, the forty-seventh volume in The Rivers of America, a landmark series of books for the most part written by literary figures. The series spanned three publishers and thirty-seven years, starting in 1937 and ending in 1974 with the sixty-fourth volume.

At the time The Yazoo River was published, Smith, was a U.S. Congressman from the Delta region. Rep. Smith’s congressional career ended when redistricting forced him into a contest with fellow Democrat Jamie Whitten in the 1962 primary.

“It was Smith’s refusal to ‘race it up’ in his 1962 campaign that paved his way to defeat,” reporter Robert E. Baker later wrote in The Washington Post. Bowing to political reality, Smith knew “he could not participate in the vital field of human relations as a legislator,” Baker wrote in a 1964 review of Rep. Smith’s memoir, Congressman from Mississippi.”

“I had a problem,” Smith said, “but it did not reach momentous proportions until internationalism in any form became synonymous in Mississippi with socialism, communism, one-worldism, or (worst of all) integration.” Smith noted that “it was hard to find language that would satisfy my constituents and still not stir up hate.”

His perspective on the Yazoo Delta Region, where he concentrated on the special problems of conservation and development of natural resources, is that of a native son. Smith was born in Sidon, Miss. After attending public schools there and in Greenwood, Miss., he graduated from what was then Sunflower Junior College, in Moorhead, Miss. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1941 from the University of Mississippi, where he studied history. He went into the Army as a private a few weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II. He became a field artillery officer in Europe.

After the war, he was editor of the Greenwood Morning Star, and in the late 1940s, he served as legislative assistant to Sen. John C. Stennis (D-Miss.). After holding a state senate seat from 1948 to 1950, he was elected to Congress in 1950. His district encompassed the Delta, from just north of Vicksburg almost to the border with Tennessee.

Smith’s Yazoo (1954 )was preceded by Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi in 1942. Smith dedicated his work

“In Memory of my Brother Fred Cecil Smith
Who loved the Yazoo country
and died defending it
at Guadalcanal/Nov. 19, 1942.”

The first tributaries of the Yazoo rise where the Tennessee hills meet the Delta of Mississippi, and eventually they drain all of the western half of the state down to Vicksburg.

The actual Yazoo watershed includes a few miles in Tennessee, southeast of Memphis, but the river and its basin belong only to Mississippi. The Yazoo carries the waters of the Coldwater, the Tallahatchie, the Yalobusha, the Yocona, the Skuna, the Sunflower, the Quiver, and other sizable streams like Steele’s Bayou, Bogue Phalia, and Deer Creek, which somehow missed the dignity of being called a river. In late summer, before rains, they are clear, pale-green ribbons among the willows. In the winters and springs they are ever-widening seas of yellow mud, taking to the Gulf the wealth of the land they drain.

With its satellite streams, the Yazoo is one of the major tributaries of the Mississippi, outranked only by the Ohio among the streams which flow from the east into the Father of Waters. With the extreme limit of its watershed barely touching Tennessee, the Yazoo is entirely within the state of Mississippi, not even forming part of a state boundary line. Although confined to the northwest quarter of one state, the story of the Yazoo is, more than anything else, the story of the Deep South, a region that was an American frontier for one hundred and fifty years. The story of the Yazoo country is the story of the role of cotton and high water and their influence on American life.

Memphis, on the Mississippi, is the metropolis of the Yazoo country today and a likely starting point for any traveler who wants to go south to visit the area, but the Yazoo wilder- ness had a world-wide fame long before Memphis was even a flatboat landing. Today the Yazoo is still an agricultural region, with no towns of any size. Vicksburg, on the Mississippi at the mouth of the Yazoo, is the largest and best known. But the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, richest and broadest of all the Mississippi Valley bottom lands, is America’s most fabled fertile farmland, the last stronghold of King Cotton and the Southern plantation.

The river’s basic stream begins with the Coldwater, which becomes a respectable river long before it meets the Tallahatchie 220 miles down in the Delta. The Tallahatchie has already curved 190 miles through the hills as the “Little Tallahatchie” and is big enough to dominate at the merger and give its name to the new stream. The Tallahatchie moves south 111 miles through Delta land before it is joined by the Yalobusha, fresh from 165 miles in the upland hills. Together they become the official Yazoo, with 189 more miles to go before joining the mother Mississippi at Vicksburg. The 520 miles of the Coldwater-Tallahatchie-Yazoo make it one of the major tributaries of the Mississippi. For the purposes of this book, I have included all the streams of the Yazoo system, for they are all part of the same story of the cotton country of Mississippi.

The most accepted geological theory is that the Yazoo was once the Ohio. The wide, sweeping scars which have been left on the Delta land in the form of crescent lakes and bayous are too broad and big to have been cut by the Yazoo itself. The Mississippi is known to have been still in place to the west at the time these scars were in the making, and so geologists are convinced that once the Ohio came down the path of the Yazoo, before erupting earth changed its route from south to west and established the Tennessee River as another part of its old channel.

Our story will not be of that geological mystery, but of the people whose lives were influenced and fashioned by the Yazoo and those who today are attempting to better their way of life by refashioning the Yazoo itself. Of necessity the story has to be about cotton, for the fleecy staple has dominated all the history of the white man on the Yazoo, who so often has come to believe it a kind of white gold.

The bluffs and rolling hills of the upper Yazoo country were the great prizes to be wrested from the Choctaws and Chickasaws in the years immediately after Mississippi became a state. This was the frontier of cotton during the famous flush times of the Southwest. The planters of the region where cotton was so vigorously ruling were chief among the Secessionists in 1860, eager to preserve the system which had opened up new land for them, and which annually brought forth a heavy harvest from the fertile acres.

Postponement of the conflict for a few years might have greatly dampened their enthusiasm for the plantation system and slavery. The topsoil was thin throughout the upper Yazoo basin, and it began to wash away into poverty just as soon as farming returned to its peak after the failure of the War for Southern Independence. The evils of the cash-crop economy which the tyrant of the new plantation credit system soon shackled on the land were a major contributing factor to the rapid erosion of the land, but the decline in fertility was inevitable from the start.

Only the Delta land, the major portion of the Yazoo basin, was rich enough to sustain the new cotton system for a long period of time. Before the war the flat Delta country, which had fed to a richness surpassing the Nile Valley on the regularly overflowing rivers, was known as the Wilderness. Bold men willing to push out from the steamboat landings found it a morass of forest and swamp and cypress brake, seemingly all of it under water half the time. Pioneer settlement of both planters and squatters began even before the land was ceded by the Indians, but the Delta was still a frontier for years after the Civil War. This was the time for a new type of pioneer, one who could get the most results from the black laborers who were now free men and thus establish the last stronghold of the feudal plantation system, which did not change materially until it felt the impact of the economic revolution which got underway in the 1930’s.

The people of the Delta define their region as the Yazoo Delta, to differentiate it from the technical delta of the Mississippi south of New Orleans, and they have made the story of the Delta the principal part of the story of the Yazoo. Rich land makes the Delta richer, if the richness has only been by comparison with the poverty-stricken hill cotton country of Mississippi. The symbol of the richness has been Delta cot- ton, which traditionally commands a premium of at least two cents per pound because of its long staple quality. The Delta pattern of life for all of its people, black and white, has been richer in the same comparison, both for those who lived it and those who watched it.

Even though one or two small factories are now found in nearly all the towns of the basin with as much as two or three thousand population, cotton is still the dominant factor in the economy. There is an oil refinery on the banks of the river south of Yazoo City, near the site of the Confederate shipyard, but petroleum development has touched only a portion of the Yazoo country largely outside of the Yazoo watershed. Traditional Southern cotton production is shifting to California and the Southwest, but the Yazoo Delta will likely stay with cotton for a long time still to come.

The Delta is all sky and level lands that never fall beyond the horizon in any direction, for the high riding clouds are tumbled down behind the bayou cypress. No trees are in the cotton that shimmers white through the brown foliage in the September sun, but every field is broken by the lines of willows and cypress that follow a bayou. Delta sunsets bring the whole land into a blaze that gives the brownish light of fire to every object until the grayness of dusk moves in.

There are no theatrical Southern “mammies” here, dressed in store-bought bandannas and gingham for the benefit of tourists. The Delta has not attempted to sell the romance of cotton and the plantation instead of the staple itself. By the same token, the Delta has never known much of the provincialism of other portions of the rural South; the hard lessons of experience have taught Deltans never to let the struggle for livelihood interfere with the enjoyment of life.

In common with most of the rest of the South, the Delta makes a food specialty of barbecue and Brunswick stew, but nowhere else does every segment of the population share in the common institution of the fish fry. Game fish of considerable variety inhabit more than one hundred lakes left like scars on the land by the meandering rivers of other days, but the big cats from the Yazoo itself are standard fare for the best fish fry. True Delta catfish in its most delectable form is prepared by rolling large slices of the fish in meal and salt and frying it in hot pork grease. The very ease of preparation is deceptive, for only a true fish artist can know just the right sizzle for the grease and just the right golden tone that announces the finely done fish.

In the midst of the mechanized farms and the new commerce and industry of the towns, there is still enough left of the hurried combination of frontier and plantation eras to provide a distinctive flavor of both. Little more than a hundred years ago the Delta was a deep forest, with water oak, cypress, sweet gum, and pecan trees blending with walnut, maple, and cottonwood to hide the sun from the virtually impenetrable cane and brush. The Yazoo rose every year to spread a lake over the land, with a new film of rich topsoil left behind for the reservoir of fertility. In the summer and fall it had all the beauty of a placid lake. In 1821, while painting a great-footed hawk which he killed on the river, Audubon described “a beautiful stream of transparent water, covered by thousands of geese and ducks and filled with fish.”

With all the wealth and the lost beauty, the name in Choctaw means “River of Death.” The Indians supposedly gave it the name when they died by thousands from the unknown maladies probably left behind by the soldiers of Hernando De Soto. The death struggle of the Indians was continued by the white settlers who faced the same deadly scourges. The disease of malaria was eventually conquered, but not until the river itself, in combination with the cotton culture, was on the verge of destroying the new civilization in its basin through flood and erosion of both land and people. The people have fought back, however, and they are confident now that the Yazoo will never be death to them.