Flood Blues of Tomorrow

By Natalie Doggett

I gaze out beyond the East River towards the Lower East Side from a bench in Domino Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. As I do so, I cannot help but imagine what the city will look like years from now. In my mind’s eye, I see the saltwater spilling out across the low-lying streets of Manhattan and creeping onto the sidewalks, a pedestrian in heels splishing through the floodwater in annoyance.

“I woke up this mornin', can't even get out of my door

I woke up this mornin', can't even get out of my door

There's been enough trouble to make a poor girl wonder where she want to go”

Bessie Smith, endearingly known as the “Empress of Blues”, wrote the song to which these lyrics belong, “Backwater Blues,” as a sentiment to the flood of the Cumberland River in her home state of Tennessee on Christmas Day in 1926. “Backwater Blues” was not the singer’s first hit, having sold approximately 800,000 copies of “Downhearted Blues,” her first single with Columbia Records in 1923. By then, she was the highest-paid African American performer of all time.

Smith was on tour during the Cumberland flood. The singer would have arrived in Nashville in the aftermath of the flood to perform at Nashville’s Bijou Theatre on December 30th, perhaps then writing “Backwater Blues”. By New Year’s Day of 1927, the excessive rainwater exceeded 56.2 feet beyond the river’s 40 foot crest in Nashville. The flood displaced approximately 2,000 people, mainly African Americans, from their homes, according to the New York Times.

The flood of the Cumberland River that Smith originally wrote the song about gave way to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the flood that “Backwater Blues” eventually came to be popularly associated with. The song was released on March 20th, 1927, but advertisements for the record in the Pittsburgh Courier in May of 1927 connected it to the levee-breaking flood with the statement:

Bessie Smith sings “MUDDY WATER”, a vivid soul-stirring song of the ravishing levee-breaking Mississippi, a song picture of the disastrous Mississippi flood. “BACK WATER BLUES” brings your mind the heart-rending scene of the thousands of people made homeless by the mighty flood. ORDER NOW”

Those “thousands of people” displaced from their homes by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 were over 200,000 African Americans. In the flood’s aftermath, white male contractors subjected them to live in poorly sanitized “community-boarding tents” and work at levee camps along the Mississippi Delta until approximately 1940.

Today, many of New York City’s most vulnerable residents are housed in its most vulnerable places along the coastline. Like African Americans living along the Mississippi Delta in levee camps in 1929, poor people of color living in New York City’s public housing along its coastlines are more vulnerable to displacement as an effect of climate change.

Uncontrollable nature and causes rivers to overflood, but it is corporate technologies that disrupt the natural environment and institutionalized racism that causes poor relief provided to African American victims of climate change. Looking back, “Backwater Blues” was more than just a commemoration of a single flood event, but a still-relevant protest against environmental racism.

The blues, like 70s hip-hop of New York, are of a distinct African American historical culture in oral tradition as an act of defiance against systemic racial injustice and brutality. Smith sang raw, uncut country blues inspired by life in the South, in which everyday experiences were related in plainspoken language—not unlike the rap music that would emerge more than half a century later. The blues is a narrative of personal experience, but it also speaks to collective experiences. The blues singer calls out to those whose individual experiences are physically distant, but spiritually communal.

Perhaps Smith felt a sense of solidarity with the African American women on Forrest Jones camp in DeSoto County, Mississippi. The camp housed approximately 12 white people and approximately 70 African American manual workers.

According to John Cowley, the author of “Shack Bullies and Levee Contractors: Bluesmen as Ethnographers”, the African American workers were subjected to poorly sanitized “community boarding-tents”, while the kitchens and mess tents for white folk were in “good shape”. The camp held cows, hogs, horses and mules which African American women were largely responsible for tending to. They were also employed as cooks and prostitutes. Like the African American men employed in the camps, were beaten, overworked, and starved by white male contractors.

“There's been enough trouble to make a poor girl wonder where she want to go

Then they rowed a little boat about five miles 'cross the pond

I packed all my clothes, throwed them in and they rowed me along”

Activist and author Angela Davis wrote a book entitled “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism” in 1998, in which she argues that the “flood blues,” a blues subgenre on the commemoration of any and all historical or future floods, were really “metaphors about oppression.”

“Black people were often considered expendable,” Davis wrote. “And their communities were forced to take the overflow of backwaters in order to reduce the pressure on the levees. While most white people remained safe, black people suffered the wrath of the Mississippi, nature itself having been turned into a formidable weapon of racism.”

“There's thousands of people ain't got no place to go

Then I went and stood upon some high old lonesome hill

Then looked down on the house were I used to live”

In Brooklyn, the Red Hook Houses, or the “Versailles for the Millions,” as hailed by architecture critic Lewis Mumford in 1940, are classified as being in “flood zone 1” by the city, indicating a high flood risk. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy left Red Hook residents without power and drinking water for months. The six feet of water that flooded the buildings left a mold that resulted in many residents becoming ill. Now, those living in the Red Hook Houses are unprotected under Mayor de Blasio’s proposal for $10 billion from private real estate development to extend Lower Manhattan’s coastline against storm surges and rising sea levels due to climate change.

“We’re going to protect Lower Manhattan, which includes the Financial District, home to a half-million jobs, 90,000 residents, and the nexus of almost all our subway lines,” de Blasio wrote for The Intelligencer in March 2019.

These 90,000 residents de Blasio refers to however are nestled in luxury apartments, and like the white families who were forewarned and safely distanced in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, will likely be fully equipped to evacuate the area with their household effects in any case the East River experiences severe flooding.

In March 2019, Mayor de Blasio said a study undertaken by his office and others determined that if the city does not prepare for climate change, rising seas will expose 20 percent of Lower Manhattan to daily flooding by 2100.

I imagine if Smith were at the waterfront in Hunts Point of the South Bronx today, overlooking the East River out to Rikers Island, singing to herself and inevitably anyone who will listen:

“'Cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more

Mmm, I can't move no more

There ain't no place for a poor old girl to go”

It’s been an hour that I’ve sat and stared out onto the river. I feel my own quickening pace of breath and threat of tears and concern myself with the toddlers playing with dogs in the park to avoid thinking about how their lives will look like in 2100.

EMBODIEDDecember 13, 2019Comment