| OCR Text |
Show RTVER paranoid to the point of active fear. I didn't exactly want to discuss civil rights with him, so I asked, "You come down to the river often?" "Yep," he said. "I come down every Sunday and watch it. I used to own that boat"-he pointed at one of the burned out wrecks-"but a barge blew up in the bayou here and set her afire." Sam found out that I was a Civil War buff and gave us the grand tour of Helena. We drove far back into the hills to where the Battle of Helena was fought along the deep-cut backcountry roads and stopped at the Confederate cemetery. It sat on the highest ridge. We could see the hills fade into the South and miles of flatland farms and forest gone orange and yellow and red with the colors of high autumn. Far below, reflecting the sky, the river meandered in and out of our line of vision, huge and twisting as a blue anaconda. The cemetery was old and crumbled by time. Besides a monument to General Patrick Cleburne, only a few of the stones were marked with names. Some listed only dates and some bore only the names of places like Chickamaugua, Chattanooga, Pittsburgh Landing, and Vicksburg. We drove down to the flatlands by the river and passed the fertilizer plant where Sam worked. He showed us the biggest damn soybean silo on God's green earth. Sam rambled from telling us all the wonders of the soybean plant to an insider's view of the levee system. "The levee's a foot higher on the other side of the river," he said. "But if the river ever gits up that high, me and some boys got some dynamite tucked away and we'll make damn sure that Mississippi goes under before Arkansas. Just niggers over there anyway." Sam managed to include a racial jab in about every line he spoke. "Y'know," he said at the cemetery. "I got to admit that the folks up north won the last war- -199- |
