Books: When the Dam Breaks

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The Book. The story begins in May 1927, when the river, the Old Man, is on a rampage, when levees are broken, the country flooded, the waters flowing the wrong way, and barns, mules, chicken coops and people bobbing around in a drenched and bewildering world. One of the bewildered people is a tall, lean, 25-year-old hillbilly convict who has never seen much water before. Given a boat which he does not know how to manage, he is sent to rescue a woman perched on an old cypress snag and a man clinging to the ridgepole of a cotton house.

But the boat is soon completely out of the convict's control. It races downstream, hits an eddy, drifts back, finally carries the convict, stunned and incredulous, to the tree where the woman perches on the branch like a bird. "It's taken you a while," she says.

She is pregnant — a quiet, pale girl dressed in a calico wrapper, a sunbonnet and part of an old army uniform. He gets her into the boat, pushes off. From this point on it is the convict against the Mississippi—he trying to get the boat and the woman back to the guards, the Mississippi plunging him through thickets, over cotton fields, up past Vicksburg and down past Baton Rouge, past dead cows, bobbing outhouses; and leaving him the exhausted, hungry, indignant victim of nature on the loose.

When he tries to land at Baton Rouge, soldiers guarding the levee see his convict uniform, open fire. Out in the current again, the boat whirls downstream. Miles from nowhere, on an old Indian mound crowded with snakes, the baby is born. After six days the convict gets so he thinks, "It ain't nothing but another moccasin," when he steps on a snake.

The convict, woman and baby are rescued, get mixed up with Chinese muskrat hunters from the Louisiana swamps, are turned loose, drift to the house of a kind-hearted French-speaking Cajun alligator hunter, somewhere near the Gulf. When the convict sees his first alligator, and understands that it is to be killed, he thinks, "Well, maybe a mule standing in a lot looks big to a man that never walked up to one with a halter before." With that he jumps overboard, catches the alligator around the neck, stabs it. The convict becomes a local hero.

That chapter closes when engineers blow up the levee to save New Orleans, and the convict, the woman and the baby have to move on again. Six weeks from the time he had been washed away, the convict gets back to the place where his journey began. "Yonder's your boat, and here's the woman," he tells the deputy sheriff. "But I never did find that bastard on the cotton house." The deputy and the warden repeating "Them convicts," slap another ten years on his sentence for trying to escape.

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