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A memoir from the author concerning the writing
of Africa, Love, Volume
3 of The New Africa Chronicles.
Twenty years ago, my Aunt Rose insisted that if I wanted to be a real writer I should write about New Africa, located a few miles outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi, where I was born. She mentioned a 'road war.' As Rose told it, white men grading a logging road were ambushed by people who considered the wooded area to be their sanctuary.
To that point in my life, Mississippi represented stereotypes and bad memories, for which reason I had always refused to write about the South, but it was a Christmas party and Rose was animated. Maybe a short story set in New Africa.
When I traveled to Mississippi, I encountered other seniors who added a number of stories about a time of logging, gunfights with white people and a wilderness community called Africa. Growing up, all I had ever seen were endless cotton fields. Apparently, this Africa had been one of the last remnants of the Great Mississippi Swamp, also a new concept.
Thinking by this time, why not a novel about some baaad negroes who refused to be made victim, I searched out Federal Writer's Project oral history, archival newspapers and books in Delta libraries. They introduced me to a swamp that covered all of what became the Delta. A map of the Sunflower River from the Army Corps of Engineers showed me Africa. Runaway slaves, 'vagrant' Indians and white outlaws made the swamp home. It was the kind of place Faulkner's greatest lyrical skill allowed him occasionally to write about other than from the propagandist position of a Goebbels with a drawl. Even then, Faulkner's people too often appeared to be darkies too stupid and Injuns too savage to quit singing, dancing, suffering, dying and being exotic to the last page, living in abject harmony alongside southern colonels and their poor-white SS in that grandest concentration camp there would ever be, Mississippi.
A long time ago, millions of acres of new land were stolen from the Chickasaw and Choctaw, followed immediately by development of a mechanical cotton gin. Slave value doubled. Escapes into the swamp so troubled landowners south of Vicksburg--which was the only "developed" part of the state--they scapegoated free blacks out of the state by accusing them of fomenting all the unrest. The first white settlers in what would become the Delta farmed land cleared for steamboat fuel. After slave imports were banned, slaves were bought in trade and often stolen to work the new land. To ease the labor crunch, Irishmen were contracted (often Shanghaied) to build levees to protect the new farms.
I reread Saunders Redding and Lerone Bennet, then visited Mississippi's Department of Archives in Jackson. Hold-over Confederates attempting to wield power in the Mississippi Theater of War seized my attention. General Ord was the commander until Lincoln was assassinated. President Johnson replaced him with a general from Tennessee. Then the so-called Black and Tan Convention wrote a postwar constitution that would be rejected by the voters. Reconstruction steamed ahead after General Grant became president, but Federal troops were being withdrawn, and 40 acres of swampland and a mule was ridiculed by all the Northern soldiers buying up Mississippi land and dead set against having their labor force go off on their own. Thus, as with Bill Clinton's New Democrats, it became fashionable among post-Lincoln Republicans to speak of an end to liberal wartime spending, an end to welfare programs.
And back grounding all of this was the swamp. From the first slaves in the Carolinas abandoned when Native Americans ran European settlers off, black men and women made inaccessible swamp, mountains and desert home. History has largely ignored them. They were maroons, a name applied to indigenous peoples and slaves from Africa who sought wilderness sanctuary all over the Americas. Maroons walked away to build new lives, as did the earliest settlers of Africa.
In my own lifetime, I had refused to write about Mississippi because the fiction I had read didn't seem worth adding to. Especially, I couldn't make human sense of the murky time of Reconstruction. There are so few stories in the public consciousness about what actually happened in the day to day lives of black people or of our elected representatives. Growing up I had absorbed stereotypes and shadow footnotes to a history written by white people in which war and commerce rendered even ordinary white folks irrelevant.
A friend in Chicago did a thesis describing settlement by ex-slaves off of plantations owned by Joseph and Jefferson Davis of the black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, southwest of Africa. To her work I added much of what I could glean of my grand-father's generation who had lived in New Africa, the farming community that grew out of Africa.
Thus, came into being, my New Africa Chronicles. They recount how self-reliant African americans carved Africa out of The Great Mississippi Swamp in order to remain both free and as happy as humanly possible. Five novels in all, the story began with Mississippi Swamp. The latest is Africa, Love.
