The Yazoo Blues. John Pritchard
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the barrel up his butt and pulled the trigger.
Bad as Sno-Cone was, I didn’t never think he deserved that, but you just can’t go on and on beatin’ the shit outta people for no good reason and not expect something to happen to your ass.
Not much happened to that little fukka that killed him, though. Sno-Cone had too many people in the right places that was glad he was gone. Still, I noticed a long time ago that, personally, I always got kind of sad in the picture show whenever the monster got killed. That’s because I understand those sumbiches. They ain’t necessarily bad, they’re just monsters, bein’ what they was meant to be and doin’ what they was meant to do. Hell, you wouldn have no show without em. Plus, things—and people—that are too nice and too peaceful tend to piss me off.
Anyway, we was down there, lookin’ around, reminiscin’ like a muthafukka about the old days when, like I just said, Uncle Hinroo’s was a place you could get caught dead in if you called the wrong sumbich a son of a bitch and he was. Then sumpn catches our attention, and we look down the road, and there’s Ottis[3] Alexander just standin’ there on the bridge goin’ over the Pass, right there at the curve, in front of the old bait store where you used to be able to rent a rowboat, which is closed now because all them farmers and lake-house owners killed all the fukkin fish with sewage and crop chemicals by letting it all wash into that beautiful-ass lake without giving a single ballscratchin’ thought to what they was doin’, or bygod I know they wouldn have done it.
But they did, so there ain’t no fishing, and no boats to rent neither, down there no more. Well, I expect there’s something up under the surface of the lake, probably just a’crawlin’ along through the mud on the bottom. I wouldn want to see it. No sir-fukkin-ree. It gives me the creeps just to think about it, and I guarantee you it ain’t one nem two-hunnuhd-pound alligator snappin’ turtles. Actual alligators of course are only a once-in-a-while thing at Moon Lake. They generally start gettin’ common about eighty miles down the road . . . although, as I said, occasionally, one’ll pop up around here, in Mhoon County—even though there’s always been some since anybody can remember over at Hinchcliff and all in nem sloughs around Marks and Lambert, and, I hear, down at Stovall as well—over on the Old River—and those big-ass muthafukkas builds nests and lays eggs and the whole fukkin alligator thing, plus those sumbiches get to be over thirteen feet long, and they can move quicker’n a lunchtime fuk and will flat come up after your ass if you mess with their nests. Here, let me get my billfold out—I got a Kodak of one. I call em polar-gators because these muthafukkas I’m talkin’ about live on the absolute furthest mos’ northern edge of their gotdam range, although I do hear you can find em up even higher, all the way up to the top of North Carolina on the East Coast. Well, I ain’t never been there, but I saw a thing about em on TV.
Anyhow, these sumbiches is some serious lizards. One of em over just east of Belen bit the shit out of a friend of mine’s truck. Tore that muthafukka up. He had to explain five times to the service manager at the dealership what happened. A lot of people who live in town don’t know what the fuk’s out there around em. And if they did, they’d think they was in Jurassic-ass Park.
But, about Moon Lake, the good news is I’m told the fish are comin’ back, which means, I guess, so will the people. I don’t know what they’ll do about that other thing down there on the bottom. It’ll probably stick its head up one day and eat a bass boat and some muthafukka from Meffis.
Anyhow, we said, “Hey, Ottis! What the fuk are you doin’?” And he said, “Well, Junior Ray, I’m thinking about the Yazoo Pass.”
He was standin’ right over where the Yazoo Pass, itself, goes east out of the lake. And I didn never know till that very day, talkin’ to Ottis, that the Pass comes into the lake way on around to the right—if you’re lookin’ out at the lake from Uncle Hinroo’s or the bridge over the Pass—and down toward the levee and that, back before the Civil War, durin’ high water, river boats used to use it all the time to get way back up into the Delta so, as Ottis put it, they could “serve the plantations.” In a way, Moon Lake is just a kind of wide spot on the Yazoo Pass, if you want to think of it like that. And I do.
“But,” said Ottis, “the state built a levee in 1853, and that cut the Pass off from the Mississippi River and vice versa. The levee blocked the entry to the Pass, so, after that, them steamboats couldn use it no more to serve all them isolated plantations back up in the Delta. You see, before the levee cut off the Yazoo Pass from the Miss’sippi, all them riverboats had to do—durin’ high water—was steam out of the Mississippi into the Pass, chug up and across Moon Lake over to where the Pass went out, and then they could go east into the Coldwater, on into the Tallahatchie, and, after that, into the Yazoo at what would later be present-day Greenwood. Plus, in so doin’, they could cover a helluva lot of the Delta—and come right out into the Mississippi again, just above Vicksburg! . . . which was why, in 1863, the Yankees thought about usin’ the Yazoo Pass durin’ the Vicksburg campaign.”
“But further,” I said, catchin’ on real fast, “them sumbiches had to blow the levee first.”
“Natchaly,” Ottis said. “And they did it on February the third. Lieutenant-Colonel James Wilson said it was like lookin’ at Niagara Falls, and it took four days for the water in the river and the flood on this side of the levee to even up. That musta been sumpn to see.”
“Oh,” said Voyd, which meant he wuddn really listenin’.
But I was. It turns out that Ottis had got hissef all involved with this one tee-niney episode of the whole Civil War. He’d even gone over to Ole Miss and took a buncha college courses on the history of the War Between the States, till finally, so the story goes, the professors had to just say to him one day that if he was goin’ to go to school there, he had to take courses in other stuff, too, but he wouldn do it, so that was that. Them sumbiches over at the uni-fukkin-versity was too smart just to be inter-rested in one little ol’ thing about something. And they didn’t see how this one teeny-ass little piece of history could be worth some muthafukka devotin’ a whole lifetime to it. But, hell, it was his life, and, Chreyest, it was history!
However, to them pasty-lookin’ little diklikkers over there, unless it’s some useless de-tail they’re interested in, they’re not gonna have shit to do with it. Hell, one nem coksukkas wouldn even get in the car with Ottis and ride over to Moon Lake to take a look at the Pass. He “didn’t see what purpose it would serve” because, in his view, “the ‘episode’ was such a minor event of the time and had little to do with the outcome of the conflict.”
That’s what he thinks. If he believes that six thousand[4] Yankee soldiers and sailors in thirty-two[5] fukkin steamboats—which, accordin’ to Ottis, “Each was supposed to be just under 180 feet long but at least one of em, The Rattler, was two hundred feet long,” and that ten of em, leadin’ the way, was fukkin battleships: namely, “two r’nclads, six tin-clads, and two steam rams”—if that goggle-eyed, pipe-puffing muthafukka thinks all that ordinance, smokin’ and churnin’ across Moon Lake, is a “minor event,” I’d sure like to have tickets to a major one. That just goes to show you, readin’ too much’ll fuk you up.
Anyhow, after listenin’ to Ottis, I got a brand new slant on things. Next to planters and bankers, I’m about to add a whole new group to the All American Ass’ole Association, and that’s them fukkin professors. Hell, Ottis woulda made ten of them sumbiches.
Course some reading is okay, and one of the major facts I got from Ottis, who got it from James Truslow Adams’s book, The March of Democracy—which is a multi-fukkin-volume set of books—was that the North had nineteen million white men available for duty, and the South only had five million. He said they woulda had five hunnuhd thousand more, but that number was mostly them hillbillies over in the mountains who for one reason or another decided to fight on the side of the Yankees.
As it turned out, only about 1,750,000 diklikkers