Africa, Love
Inside of a blackness touched by light from a minor star, this earth and all that will be simply is or it isn't. Cycles of dark followed by light have their way. Elements degrade into com-mon dirt, and into all dirt some life must fall.
An ancient wind chants this mystery through the swamp followed always by the rain. It drums the usually tranquil black water into a million tiny sounding craters. Close upon this deluge of noise, as if to fulfill its ominous promise, comes the flood.
As the grip of winter loosens and far away ice and snow melt, all of the great rivers grow large and rush into the Mississippi River. This Father of Rivers swells up moving south, and it throws an impossible burden against its banks, until so much sediment is knocked loose that the bottom rises, and a torrent of water and mud is unleashed across the land. When it recedes, the ridges defining streams and bayous begin again to hem in swimming and crawling life. Come summer, a soggy firmament emerges, and seasonal life finds soil upon which to battle for sunlight beneath the ancient cypress, gum, willow, cedar and oak on the high ground. By autumn, all water has returned to land-locked streams and bayous darkening beneath a film of rotting leaves and spores. Everything above water begins to parch and to crack like an aging human face. Then will come again the time of sharp things, thorns and cutting cane leaves, weapons of winter.
Such was The Great Mississippi Swamp, a hot and steamy matrix of inland rivers and sloughs so rich, so teaming with life and towering ancient trees that darkness prevailed at noon. A chief named Chocsas guided his own into these lands. They migrated from camp to camp and grew and prospered until a yet newer group piled out of boats that arrived on Gulf currents. These newer people took over the Gulf coast. They cut trees for houses, gouged furrows into the land. New laws announced that no one before them had owned anything, and the most sacred of the old memories became sacrilege. They who would become the new keepers of recall judged the before-people vagrant for moving off and returning to land from which by custom they had always hunted and fished. Under threat of being killed like varmints, the before-people were forced away with only such history as their singers could hold on their tongues.
