In 2020, at a time when travelling was curtailed, we wanted to celebrate John Murray’s history of publishing exceptional travel writing and rediscover some timeless journeys from the past, introduced by today’s most exciting writers.

We wanted the series, like the best adventures, to be surprising. These books capture the wonder that comes from travelling, from opening our imaginations to unfamiliar places and cultures, or allowing us to see familiar things through different eyes. These Journeys give fresh perspectives not only on the times and places in which they were originally published, but on the time and place we find ourselves in now.

As a traveller who has walked and written across much of Europe, the author of Walking the Woods and the Water, Where the Wild Winds Are (both finalists for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year), and most recently Outlandish: Walking Europe’s Unlikely Landscapes, I was thrilled to take on the role of seeking out these books. Literally hundreds of suggestions came to me from the travel writing, nature writing and adventure communities, and also, appropriately enough, through serendipity – one of the titles on this list, A Vagabond for Beauty, was randomly dropped through my letterbox by a passing neighbour.

In this spirit of chance discovery, we invite your suggestions for books to republish in the future. We are looking for titles currently out of print in the UK, books that have been forgotten about, left to languish on dusty bookshop shelves or that were unjustly ignored when they were first published – potentially including translated works by foreign language writers. If you have a suggestion, please get in touch with us on Twitter @johnmurrays or @underscrutiny. #JMJourneys

Nick Hunt, Series Editor

Mississippi Solo

A River Quest

Eddy L Harris

Introduced by Adam Weymouth

www.johnmurraypress.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by John Murray (Publishers)

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Eddy L Harris 1988

Introduction © Adam Weymouth

Lines from ‘Th e Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot © Faber and Faber Ltd.

The right of Eddy L Harris to be identified as the Author of

the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: Laris Alara Kilimci / Lar.studio

First published in the USA in 1988 by

Henry Holt and Company, New York

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

in which it is published and without a similar condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 978-1-529-37785-9

Paperback ISBN 978-1-529-37784-2

John Murray

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.johnmurraypress.co.uk

Look out for linked text (which is in blue) throughout the ebook that you can select to help you navigate between notes and main text.

To my Uncle Robert

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river

Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable . . .

               Unhonoured, unpropitiated

By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting . . .

The river is within us.

‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot

Introduction

Eddy Harris grew up in St. Louis on the Mississippi River, and as a small boy he watched the river every day. On their way home from dropping his father off at work, his mother, a seventh generation St. Louisan and proud of it, would park up and together they would watch its passing, beckoning, urgent for the sea. ‘The river captured my imagination when I was young,’ writes Harris, ‘and has never let go.’

The Mississippi bears a nation’s history and myth as it bisects the country north to south on its two-thousand-mile journey from Minnesota to the sea. Like the Amazon or Nile, it is one of those rivers that you have always known about, without perhaps knowing very much about it, whose name alone conjures a vivid sense of atmosphere and place. I remember the early joy of learning how to spell it. And it is impossible to read far into American literature without coming to its banks. Mark Twain first, of course, read to me as a boy, and for whose characters the river spelled freedom itself. Then later came Faulkner, Melville, T. S. Eliot, himself born in St. Louis, and with whose quote from the Four Quartets, of the river as a ‘strong brown god’, Harris opens his account. It is right to understand the river here as both muse and god, because it is the Mississippi that made Harris a writer, and it is the Mississippi that gave him back his life.

In 2016, I set out to canoe the length of the Yukon River in Alaska. It strikes me as extraordinary that the United States is a country where not just one but several canoe journeys of several months are possible. I chose a canoe because I was writing about salmon, but I also chose a canoe as there is no better way of unravelling a place than by travelling its rivers. The distance I travelled from Lake McNeil to the Bering Sea, or that Harris travelled from Lake Itasca to New Orleans, may be the same distance, say, as London to Cairo, but those that live along a river’s length are intimately bound up with each other. They share similar waters, similar dreams. On previous trips to far-flung Alaskan communities, travelling by road or plane, I had been met as an outsider. But in a canoe I was welcomed into the villages I passed, I think because for a short time I was inhabiting the same river that dictated the daily rhythms of these peoples’ lives. Harris finds kinship in the barge workers, the tugboat operators, the fishermen, the lock keepers, the old men sat on benches on its banks watching the river unfurling. The Mississippi drains half of the United States, and to travel its length is to travel into the meaning of the country. Each character becomes another handle on which to try and get a grasp on this most vast and slippery of subjects. When Kerouac, another writer besotted with the river and who Harris channels perhaps more than any other, came to the Mississippi on the first of his great transcontinental hitchhikes, he wrote of the river’s ‘big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself’.

But as much as this is a journey outwards, it is also a journey in. With its locks and dams the river has had much of its innate wildness tamed out of it and Harris, too, longed to break out of the confines that have been set for him. He had quit a white-collar job with IBM, but then had failed to make it as a writer, and now he was approaching thirty. The States was halfway through Reagan’s presidency, and Harris wanted no part of it. His is a deeper version of the American Dream, Kerouac’s version, the emancipation of the individual as more than a mere economic unit. It is easy to forget quite how unusual this would have been in 1986, long before the era of ten-a-penny Instagram adventurers. He says he wants to undertake the trip to break free of a world where life ‘has become a media event’, but this journey, in his search for payphones, his lack of maps or gear, his utter solitude, feels prelapsarian by today’s standards, closer to Huck Finn’s experience than to my own.

This is a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage is an embodied metaphor, so that the challenges faced and overcome become physical symbols for the inner journey. If you can endure this, what else can you endure? Canterbury, or Mecca, or in Harris’s case, New Orleans, provide a framework to the journey, a reason to keep going to the end, but the growth comes from the daily practice. His triumph over himself is hard won. He writes of the river growing as a man, from cooing baby at its source to a ‘skinny youth . . . getting used to his power and size’, and then at last the full blown river, miles wide, fathoms deep, with its vast barges and one-hundred-pound  catfish. ‘Inch by inch I’m becoming somebody else,’ he says. ‘A taller man. And at the same time, softer.’

Towards the end he mourns the river’s passing, its imminent death as it flows out into the ocean. But rivers don’t die, he realises, they only merge with a greater whole. Because for all his preoccupation about his own character, in the end what defines a journey – Harris’s, mine, any journey of this kind – are the connections made along the way. When I think of the Yukon, it is the people that I think of. In that space of two people meeting who will never see each other again, and inspired by an openness that comes from extended periods spent alone outside, strangers unburden secrets, divulge the mysteries of their lives. This is the recompense for long, solitary journeys: the parts of ourselves that we leave behind with others, the parts of them that we carry on with us. Harris writes poignantly of a common thread of humanity linking everyone along that river, a common thread that he is now joined with, too.

Yet this vision at times obscures other aspects of America that remain just as real. Harris sees his being black as a physical attribute, much like his height or his receding hairline, perhaps as a ‘signifier for the police’, and this he writes without any sense of irony. He dismisses a racial slur aimed at him in a cafe as ‘a harmless little joke’. He has determined from the outset, although he is canoeing from ‘where there ain’t no black folks to where they still don’t like us much’, that for the duration of this trip he will not make race an issue, and despite the occasional passage, despite acknowledging the existence of a ‘core of American racism’, it is a stance that he stays mostly true to. ‘Too selfish? Too simplistic?’ he asks.

The Mississippi is haunted by its ghosts, both past and present. This is the river that spawned the phrase ‘sold down the river’ for the slaves that were traded in Louisville and shipped to the plantations of the south, a virtual death sentence. This is the river of Cancer Alley, a stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where more than a hundred factories pump a devastating cocktail of poisons into the air, where eighty per cent of African-Americans live in polluted neighbourhoods and where, in some of those communities, the risk of contracting cancer is fifty times the national average. Such omissions feel deafening in their absence, but perhaps those omissions speak to how far the conversation has moved on. Reading the book more than thirty years later, in the wake of a year when Black Lives Matter protests swept the country and when race was one of the key questions that defined an American election, it is impossible to ignore. Harris, too, seems to have arrived at this position. His subsequent two books about the States wrestled with the question of race head on, and in 2016, for a documentary, he canoed the river once again, and this time with race foremost in his mind. Whilst in Mississippi Solo Harris was ready to wrestle with the underbelly of his own character, he was perhaps not yet ready to tackle the darkness of his country. He had first to learn about himself.

From Eliot’s opening quote and on, the river to Harris is a god. It tests him, it rewards him. Frequently he muses on that god’s generosity, its providence, and nearing the river’s mouth he wrestles with what he is giving in return. What he has given is this book. A rich insight into America, and into one man’s struggle to locate his place within his country. A deeply honest and humble account of how a river made a man. For that, I think the river would be grateful.

Adam Weymouth, 2021

Chapter 1

The Mississippi River is laden with the burdens of a nation. Wide at St. Louis where I grew up, the river in my memory flows brown and heavy and slow, seemingly lazy but always busy with barges and tugs, always working (like my father), always travelling, always awesome and intimidating. I have watched this river since I was small, too young to realize that the burdens the Mississippi carries are more than barges loaded with grain and coal, that the river carries as well sins and salvation, dreams and adventure and destiny. As a child I feared this river and respected it more than I feared God. As an adult now I fear it even more.

I used to have nightmares filled with screams whenever I knew my family planned some excursion across the river and I’d have to go along. That old Veteran’s Bridge seemed so weak and rickety. My imagination constructed a dilapidated and shaky span of old wooden slats, rotted and narrow and weak with no concrete support anywhere. The iron girders that held the poor thing up were ancient and rusty, orange and bumpy with oxidation where they should have been shiny and black. The bridge wavered in the wind and was ready to collapse as the car with my family in it approached, and then we would plunge through the air after crashing the brittle wooden guardrail and we’d dive toward the river. Everyone screamed but me. I held my ears every time and waited for the splash. It never came. I always awoke, always lived to dream the dream again and again, not only when asleep but even as we crossed the river.

The river was full of giant catfish and alligators, ice floes and trees that an often enraged and monster-like river had ripped from the shores along its path.

The Mississippi. Mighty, muddy, dangerous, rebellious, and yet a strong, fathering kind of river. The river captured my imagination when I was young and has never let go. Since I can remember I have wanted to be somehow a part of the river as much as I wanted to be a hero, strong and brave and relentless like the river, looming so large in the life and world around me that I could not be ignored or forgotten. I used to sit on the levee and watch the murkiness lumber down to the sea and I’d dream of the cities and towns the river had passed, the farms and fields and bridges, the magic in the debris picked up here, deposited there, and the other rivers along the way: Ohio, Illinois, Arkansas, taking all on a beautiful voyage to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. I wanted to go too. I wanted to dip first my toes in the water to test, then all of me, hanging onto whatever and floating along with it, letting the river drop me off wherever and pick me up later and take me on again. I didn’t care where, I just wanted to go. But my parents wouldn’t let me.

But now I am a man and my parents can’t stop me. I stand at that magical age, thirty, when a man stops to take stock of his life and he reflects on all the young man’s dreams that won’t come true. No climbs up Everest, no try-out with the Yankees, no great American novel. Instead, reality: wives and babies and mortgages, pensions, security and the far-away future. No great risks. No more falling down. No more skinned knees. No great failures. I wondered: is all this inevitable?

I’ve never minded looking stupid and I have no fear of failure. I decided to canoe down the Mississippi River and to find out what I was made of.

Chapter 2

Once they have reached a certain age, dreamers are no longer held in high esteem. They are ridiculed instead, called loony and lazy, even by their friends. Especially by their friends!

Dreams are delicate and made of gossamer. They hang lightly on breezes and suspend as if from nothing. The slightest wind can tear them apart. My dream was buffeted by my friends. What the hell for? they asked me. What are you trying to prove? Why don’t you just go over Niagara Falls in a barrel?

And this was from my friends. God, how that hurt. One friend even told me to take a bus, for God’s sake. Instead of helping me fly, my friends were pulling me down, and laughing at me.

Putting a canoe into the headwaters of the Mississippi and aiming it for New Orleans is not something a man is supposed to do. It is not considered normal or sane. Perhaps it is the danger involved, or perhaps it is too much an act of desire and determination, an act of passion and volition, or simply too out of the ordinary.

For whatever reasons, my idea met with disapproval, and instead of childish jubilation I approached canoeing the river with doubt and sorrow – sorrow because the glory with which I first came upon this adventure was dashed by friends. Like Galileo before the Church, I was ready to relinquish my radical approaches and be normal.

But this dream of mine, still suspended on the breeze and delicate as ever, was just as real as those flimsy summer spider webs hanging in the air, and just as clinging. Once the webs attach themselves to you they are hard to get rid of. And so it was with my desire to ride the river.

Chapter 3

A man blessed with a flood of ideas has the luxury to squander them, to sift through his wealth until he finds the right idea for the right occasion. He may lose a great many of them, but he can afford it.

When a man has only one great notion, it becomes all the more valuable, a jewel, a prized and noble possession. He cherishes it like a kid with his last stick of candy. He guards it, he secretes it away, taking it out every night at bedtime just to look at it, to hold it up to the light and ponder it and wonder just when to taste it at last, all the while being haunted by its existence and his burning desire to hurry up with it. An obsession.

For weeks I ached with the thought of doing the river. But I had no canoe. I had no camping gear. I had no money. The initial reaction from my friends had left me secretive and without allies to support even spiritually my idiotic plan. And pretty soon it would be too late to go. Already it was the first week of October and Minnesota, where I would start, had seen its first snowfall.

One friend came to mind and I turned to him not because he could help give birth to this dream I had, but because of all the people I knew, Robert would at least listen to me and not tell me I was crazy. He would not tell me to give it up.

He was an old man, and every time I went to see him I was sure it would be the last I’d see him alive. He’s been my special friend since long before I can remember, more like an uncle than just some old man I knew and liked, the kind of friend who will always understand. He is always your last resort, when he should be your first. An old man from a long time ago when every problem could be solved with a couple of drinks and a couple of hours of talking – with him mostly listening. When you need good advice, the one to turn to is the one who listens well; the best talk, the best advice comes from yourself.

Robert and I used to drink sodas together, back when he tried to teach me music. About the time I was heading off for college, I graduated to beer. Tonight I would be doing advanced studies. Tonight, he did most of the talking.

A skinny black man with a head shaped like a peanut, Robert had very little hair and what hair he did have he wore cut so close to his scalp it looked more like razor stubble. He always wore a fedora, either grey or brown, even indoors.

Normally I would come to him and he’d be working on the transmission of his car or taking his stereo apart and putting it back together. He was always tinkering with something and there was junk lying all around. I’d come over and watch him and hint in roundabout fashion that something was bothering me, and he’d tinker patiently with me and we’d take our time until we’d squeezed the problem out. Then we’d have a look at it and a drink.

But not today. Today he wanted to get right to it, as if he were in a hurry. Not that he had someplace to get to, but a different kind of hurry, as if he hadn’t much time to waste anymore.

‘Well, let’s get to it,’ he said. And I knew this session was going to be different from all the others. If there was any advice or wisdom to offer, he was going to give it out straight and not have me scratch around until I found it.

‘I haven’t seen you in a long time,’ he said. ‘Something must be bothering you. What is it?’

I felt like a worm of a man who only calls his friends when he needs some favour. But more than that, I felt all the frustration that surged through Robert and made the squiggly vein in his temple twitch, frustration I was noticing for the first time.

I told him my plans, that I was going to do the river. I told him the obstacles that blocked me, that I still had no canoe, no gear, no money, and that everyone I knew had said it was impossible and stupid. And he said:

‘Don’t you listen to them. They got no imagination. They got no vision. And it makes them jealous because you do, and they’ll try to stop you, try to change you. But don’t you let them.’

It was not advice. It was a command.

Robert had at one time been a wonderful tap dancer. His apartment was littered with photos and newspaper clippings and momentos of when he and his partner used to tear up the boards on the circuit. Their special routine: standing back to front, only inches apart and dancing in unison, so swiftly as to be a blur, their timing so exquisite that from head on you could see the movements of only one man. The big time called, movies, New York, but he never went. He never said why, but now I had a glimpse.

He turned instead to music, taught himself the trombone, played in local jazz bands and learned music so well that he did most of the arrangements for the bands he played in. Again there was a chance for the big time. Again he stayed in St. Louis.

He got married, had children and settled into a normal job. The closest he got to music any more was teaching it to me. He used to give me trumpet lessons. The jobs he settled for were all a black man in those days could expect: shining shoes, being a custodian in office buildings and schools, mopping and polishing floors, cleaning desks and mending broken things.

He reached across the table and grabbed me. His fingers were long and bony, his hands strong from building things. He held me by the wrists and squeezed me hard.

‘I know you can do it,’ he said. ‘I have confidence in you. Always have.’

Canoeing? Writing?

His eyes gathered in the soft light around us and sparkled with a thousand secrets.

‘And maybe there ain’t nobody else who does,’ he whispered, ‘but we don’t much care what they think about us no how. Do we?’

The old man licked his lips, his dry-looking tongue flicking out past his dentures, feeling the air, and smacking his lips lightly as if he were tasting something. He wore an expression I took to be sadness, but maybe it was just fatigue or longing. Maybe it was the inevitable expression of commingled jealousy and exhortation an old man finds when he knows his time has come and gone and all he can do is pass the baton.

He pulls down a bottle of whiskey from the shelf and one glass. Before he comes to sit again he pauses and looking down at me he shifts the false teeth in his mouth and nods to himself with a satisfied smile. He grabs a second glass from the shelf and slides it across to me. Without a word, Robert is telling me plenty.

He leans in close. His eyes squint, studying me.

We sit quietly just like that for a moment. I squirm in my seat until we drink. Our drinking is clean, without ceremony. No clinking of glasses, no toasts. Just eyes locked, his on mine, and the simultaneous raising of glasses to lips.

The whiskey burns. I emit a noise you might hear in a cartoon. Robert screws up his face as though suffering with each swallow. He clears his throat with a guttural, teeth-clenched ‘Aaah!’

When he finally speaks, he whispers.

‘Are you afraid?’

‘Well,’ I reply. ‘I’m no expert canoeist. I swim okay, but—’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘What else is there to be afraid of? Drowning? Freezing to death? Wild animals? Or just not being able to take it?’

‘Well,’ he says. ‘If you get out and you can’t take it, that sure is going to mess with your mind. How you deal with failure is just as important as the failure itself, but that’s not what I’m talking about neither.’

He reaches slowly for the bottle and he pours. This time, before we drink, he tilts his glass toward me.

‘You’re black too, you know,’ he says. His smile is cunning. ‘Or have you forgotten?’

‘I haven’t forgotten, but so what? What’s that got to do with anything?’

He takes a long slow sip and sneaks a peek at me from over the rim of his glass.

‘What is it you’re wanting to do?’

‘Canoe the Mississippi.’

‘From where?’

‘From the beginning.’

‘And where’s that?’

‘In Minnesota.’

‘In Minnesota,’ he repeats. ‘Do you know how many black people there are in Minnesota? About six.’

He takes another sip.

‘And how far you planning to go?’

‘New Orleans.’

‘Through the South,’ he said. He sips again. ‘From where there ain’t no black folks to where they still don’t like us much. I don’t know about you, but I might be a little concerned about that.’

Then I see the river. First as a blue line on a map. Then, as Robert talks on and I see myself out there, a black man alone and exposed and vulnerable, the blue line blurs and fragments until there is more than one Mississippi River. There is the river of legend, the Father of Waters. The river of steamboats and gamblers. The river flowing with the tears and sweat of slaves. I can hear the beating of Indian drums and the singing of slaves resting in the shade of plantation willows on the banks of the old man river. The river has come alive in my mind, the sights, sounds and smells of the river in my imagination.

But I know the river won’t be like that, fur trappers in buckskin shirts, paddlewheelers piled high with bales of cotton, Indian canoes sliding silently. I know it won’t be like that, but I don’t know what to expect. If I had any idea before of how it might be, I don’t now.

Robert says to me: ‘Did you ever stop to think that your friends might not want you to do this because it might be dangerous?’

‘No, I never did. They just made fun of me.’

‘You know how friends are. Maybe it’s their way of saying they don’t want you to get hurt.’

I hesitate. ‘Maybe.’ I’m not convinced.

‘Maybe they don’t want you to get shot by some redneck in the woods. Maybe they don’t want you to fall in and drown. Or maybe they’re trying to protect you from something else.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You see, everybody thinks his way is the right way. The Bible-bangers think God is the answer. A man with a wife and kids and a house and a good job, if he’s happy with them all, he thinks that’s where satisfaction comes from. Everybody thinks he knows what’s best so when a friend comes by with a different way, especially a risky way, you want to save him. You see?’

‘I see,’ I say, but I’m really confused. ‘But what about imagination and vision? What about jealousy?’

‘Oh, I’m not saying they’re not jealous. Envy is what fuels their convictions. When a man secretly wants what you have and maybe he’s ashamed of it and maybe he knows he can never have it, that’s when he goes out of his way most to make it seem worthless. Just like some men are reassured by other people’s failure. That’s where vision and imagination come in.’

‘Without vision and imagination,’ Robert says softly, ‘you never look for your own path to glory. And glory can mean Mount Everest or Nobel Prizes or a wife and kids and security. It can even be canoeing down the Mississippi. But it takes vision to see what shoes fit you and what shoes fit the other guy. And the thing to remember is: don’t take it all so serious. Failure is horrible, but it’s not the worst thing there is.’