The Yazoo Blues. John Pritchard
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firing line. In the North it was a different story altogether. They didn’t ante up but about two-nineteenths of their men, and 100,000 of them was niggas. I mean, what the hell. Them Yankee ass’oles didn’t stand to lose nothing except a few fukkin states which they didn’t give a shit for nohow. At least, as I understand it, those abo-whatchamacallit-litionist coksukkas up around Boston didn’t. Them sumbiches hated the fukkin planters worse’n I do and woulda been just as happy to have seen em all th’owed smack-ass into the Guffa-gotdam-Mexico.
As I indicated, Ottis didn’t much give a shit about anything else as far as the War Between the States was concerned, and that greatly disturbed the good doctors over at the University. They wanted him to be more interested in the “economic aspects of the period and the wider scope of the war.”
Fuk that. I’m with Ottis. I want to hear about the shootin’. Who cares about all that other dull-ass crap? Plus, I ain’t never been to Virginia and I ain’t plannin’ on goin’. Appa-fukkin-mattox, Bull-ass-run, or any of them other places ain’t nothing to me—and they didn’t set Ottis’s hair on fire neither.
I wanted to know what was goin’ on then where I am now. Gotdam—when Ottis described it, I could see it! And I wished to hell I’da been there. I wouldna cared about no slaves—my people didn’t own none—and I sure as hell wouldna been fightin’ for them rich-ass planters. I’da done it just for the fukkin fun of it and because them Yankee sumbiches didn’t have no business comin’ down here in the first place. Fukkum.
The truth is, the so-called “Old South” wouldna done me no good a-tall. Them planters run it, and the slaves run them, and both of em looked down on my kind as nothing but scum. Well, some of us was—and still are today—because we never learned there was any other way to be, or if we did, we didn’t give a shit. In fact, Mr. Brainsong said we was that way when we was still back on the border between England and Scotland—and that a bunch of us, back then, went to Ireland but was asked to leave, so then we come over here and kept on bein’ what we was. Looks to me like that’s kind of a fukkin heritage. But it’s not what I want to talk about, and Mr. Brainsong is a whole nuther subject hissef.
Anyway—to make a long story somewhat longer—and I don’t know why Voyd and me didn’t already know all this—Ottis had done got to be the leading datgum authority on what was officially called the Yazoo Pass Expedition. One reason was that he lived right next to the Pass at Moon Lake. The other reason is that almost nobody in the rest of the South, and America, too, had ever heard of the thing.
Plus, we learned something else. The Civil War is not called the Civil War! Ottis says the official name, in the Liberry of Congress, is the War of the Fukkin Rebellion.
Stop me if I get too technical. You see, this Yazoo Pass stuff kind of got me all fired up about history. Particularly when you realize that they was some pretty big names involved in the thing at the time. ’Course, for the most part, they was all Yankees, but they was big-ass names none-the-fukkin-less. I’m talkin’ about Admiral Porter, General Quimby, and Ulysses S-hole-fukkin Grant hissef, and he was drunker’n Cooter Brown a large part of the time. Hell, his fellow officers on one occasion had to keep him locked up in the bottom of a riverboat till he sobered up so none of the enlisted personnel would see his knee-walking se’f and lose faith in his fukkin “ability to lead,” and all that crap. I think that happened down near Yazoo City somewhere. But you couldn never tell when he was gon’ start chuggaluggin’, and looks like to me he mighta did it all the time. Hell, I don’t hold it against his ass. My only quarrel with the sumbich is that he was a gotdam Yankee. Fuk a buncha habits. Everybody’s got some. Plus, I don’t know who Cooter Brown ever was, but I judge he musta been a mighty drunk muthafukka to get as well known as he did.
Anyhow, it’s the Yankees I’m most concerned with. For one fukkin thing, it was really all their show. The Confederates were mostly in the bushes, in the shadows, and in the hair on the back of the necks of those farm boys from up there in Wisconsin and Iowa and Illinois who made up the majority of the coksukkas that participated in that fantastic fukkin undertaking that took em way-ass into the Mississippi Delta, snakin’ down them little rivers that was so overgrowed on the sides the tree limbs knocked the fukkin smoke stacks off the ships, and they just had to stay in them boats with their heads down, hemmed in by high water everywhere they looked, so much so, that when they finally got down there around Greenwood, most of em couldn even get out of their “transports” because there wuddn hardly no dry land to stand on—much less to take a stand on.
But it didn’t bother them old Confederate boys. No sir-ree. They was knee deep in water in a place called Fort Pemberton, which wuddn much more’n a buncha cotton bales put up by niggas. But —and this is important—them Rebs had em a special gun.
It was a six-point-five-inch Whitworth rifle, which was a fukkin cannon, and it tore the livin’ shit outta them Yankee ships. You see, that rifled barrel could th’ow out a cone-shaped shell with more muzzle velocity than you could say Oh Hell-o Bill to. It hit one nem r’nclads—The Chillicothe—so hard that it knocked the bolts holdin’ the armor together back into the inside of the cabin, and them bolts acted just like bullets,[6] ricochetin’ around in there, and kilt a whole gang of them Yankee sailors . . . and tore up some others pretty bad. I think it’s safe to say that, apart from the Delta itse’f, it was mainly the Whitworth rifle and its fast-ass “conical shell” that turned the blue-suits back—well, that and the fact that the naval commander of the whole Yankee expedition went nuts.
Personally, that don’t surprise me none. I’ve always thought there was something about this place that makes people go crazy. Anyway, according to Ottis, the sumbich did in fact do just that. His name was Watson Smith—Lieutenant-Commander Watson Smith. All this, mind you, was goin’ on right in there on the map before where the Tallahatchie meets the Yalobooshee[7] and gets to be the Yazoo.
But them Yankees never got past our boys. Lieutenant Commander Watson Smith wouldn go no farther and was all for turnin’ around and goin’ back to Moon Lake. Personally, under the circumstances it looks to me like he was the only one who wuddn crazy. Only, Ottis says he was, and I think the commander was beginnin’ to see things that wuddn there.
The Yankee r’nclads had some big guns. They was called eleven-inch Dahlgrens, and they was protected by thick-ass armor—and I’ve got a z-rocks to prove it. But it didn’t do no fukkin good. Them Yankees didn’t never get no closer to the Confederates than eight hunnuhd yards, and the Yankee soldiers, lyin’ around back up-river in their “transports,” couldn do nothin’ but twiddle their thumbs, swat mosquitos, worry about snipers, play with their tallywhackers, and, as one famous-ass historian said, shoot at alligators.[8] I got all this from Ottis, and he told me he got some of it from that fellow in Meffis who become famous for knowin’ all about the Civil War and was on TV. I can’t ’member his name right off, but he was a good ol’ Delta boy from down there around Green-ville. ’Course, like almost every other sumbich in the world, he does live in Meffis now. But hell, if you’re a sho-nuff historian, you got to go to a lot bigger place than Green-ville. They don’t even have the airbase there no more. Anyhow, Ottis said he liked him because he trusted his ass, and he wished there was more fukkin historians like him. Well, if that’s the way Ottis feels, bygod I do, too!
[1] Mississippi State University’s football team.
[2] The Yellow Dog is a branch of the Illinois Central Railroad that runs north and south through the Delta. It crosses the Southern Railroad at Moorhead, Mississippi—“Where the Southern cross the Dog.” The origin of the name, Yellow Dog, is obscure. Speculation includes a reference to “yellow dog” scab labor and the one my father offered, which is that the nickname Yellow Dog is derived from the short-lived “Yazoo Delta” line, which later became the “Yazoo