Harry L. Watson - Southern Cultures: Southern Waters Issue

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Guest Editor Bernard L. Herman
Editors	Harry L. Watson
Jocelyn R. Neal
Executive Editor	Ayse Erginer
Deputy Editor	Emily Wallace
Poetry Editor	Michael Chitwood
Multimedia Editor	Ashley Melzer
Music Editor	Aaron Smithers
Associate Editor	Jeff DeLuca
Assistant Editors	Whitney Lohr
Alex Ponikvar
Michael Grathwohl
Founding Editor John Shelton Reed

Center for the Study of the American South
Kenneth R. Janken, director

Editorial Board
Edward L. Ayers University of Richmond
E. M. Beck Sociology, Emeritus, University of Georgia
Catherine W. Bishir North Carolina State University Libraries
Merle Black Political Science, Emory University
James C. Cobb History, University of Georgia
Peter A. Coclanis History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Thadious Davis English, University of Pennsylvania
Pam Durban English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
William R. Ferris History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Wayne Flynt History, Emeritus, Auburn University
Thavolia Glymph History, Duke University
Rayna Green National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Larry J. Griffin Sociology and History, Georgia Southern University
Ferrel Guillory The Program on Public Life, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Peggy Hargis Sociology, Georgia Southern University
Trudier Harris English, Emerita, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Fred Hobson English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Lisa Howorth Square Books, Oxford, Mississippi
Patrick J. Huber History, Missouri University of Science and Technology
Anne Goodwyn Jones English, University of Florida
Michael Kreyling English, Vanderbilt University
Louis Kyriakoudes History, University of Southern Mississippi
Malinda Maynor Lowery History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Michael OBrien History, University of Cambridge
Ted M. Ownby Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi
James L. Peacock Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Theda Perdue History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
C. David Perry University of North Carolina Press
Tom Rankin Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University
John Shelton Reed Sociology, Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Anne Firor Scott History, Emerita, Duke University
Bland Simpson English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Vincas P. Steponaitis Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Steven Stowe History, Indiana University
John M. Vlach American Studies, George Washington University
David Wilkins American Indian Studies, University of Minnesota
Charles R. Wilson History, University of Mississippi

Southern Cultures Copyright 2014 Center for the Study of the American South
Indexed in Humanities International Complete. Back Issues are available through www.SouthernCultures.org

Contents

The Sunbelts Sandy Foundation
Coastal Development and the Making of the Modern South

Photo Essay
Southern Waters
A Visual Perspective

Not Forgotten
In the Lowlands Low
Swamping About the South

Its Easier to Pick a Tourist Than It Is a Bale of Cotton
The Rise of Recreation on the Great Lakes of the South

Photo Essay
An Eye for Mullet
Charles Farrells Photographs of the Browns Island Mullet Camp, 1938

Clark v. Duke
The Struggle for Water Rights and the Future of North Carolinas Public Energy Policy

MasonDixon Lines
Ethels Sestina and Companys Coming

front porch

In his classic Old Times on the Mississippi, Twain described the river as a source of infinite knowledge. The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book, he remembered. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Black River, near Ivanhoe, North Carolina, 1997, by Ann Cary Simpson.

As a landlubber, I usually think of the South as solid ground. Its the Land of Cotton. The place where roots grow. Mountains and Piedmont. Its only when we get to the Tidewater or Low country that the companion elements earth and water mingle enough to change my mental picture of the Souths composition perceptibly.

But this issue is about southern water, the vital fluid that shapes its land, contours, and boundaries, brings it life, and makes it livable. An early traveler to Carolina called it a watry Country, and so it remains, its liquid and solid selves each depending on the other and each indispensable in giving place its character. The brainchild of Southern Cultures friend and contributor Bernie Herman, the essays in this special issue explore the role of water in the Souths history, art, economy, and sustenance. Water, Herman writes, is something to be crossed; something that resists crossing. Something that gives life; something that can be poisoned and deadly. Those familiar paradoxes permeate all the stories our contributors have to tell.

The great southern waterman Mark Twain went further when recalling his early career as a steamboat pilot. In his classic Old Times on the Mississippi, Twain described the river as a source of infinite knowledge. The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book, he remembered, a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. The stories did not always bring good news to the well-taught pilot, he continued, for a beautiful sunset predicted bad weather; a floating log revealed rising water, and telltale ripples betrayed a bluff reef which is going to kill somebodys steamboat one of these nights.

For Twain, learning the rivers secrets spoiled its beauty, as picturesque scenery dissolved into portents of danger. The same may be true of some stories here. We see penetrating photos of watermens hard work and wry portraits of innovative money-making which morph into fluid visions of painful inequality and somber warnings of ecological disaster. Did Twain intend to spoil his readers views of the river while reporting his own, or only to hint at its depths and complexity? Surely not the former; the rest of his story is too beguiling. Perhaps our authors mean something similar. Even the direst belong among the stories that southern waters can tell, but none encompasses them all.

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