Unreliable Earthen Dams
Keying off a radical investment by former Mayor Leland Speed, a small group of investors began developing the hilly, swampy area, northeast of Jackson, creating one of the most rapidly growing areas ever in Mississippi. Speed’s tenure as mayor was profitable and successful, but seeing what was happening to the people of Jackson following the Brown V Board ruling, Speed decided it was time to get out of the mayor business and dedicate himself full-time to the real estate business.
His successor, Alan C Thompson, was one of the most remarkably racist politicians in Mississippi history. Thompson so hated the black race that when the courts ordered him to integrate public swimming areas, he shut them down instead. Gone were all city swimming pools, Lake Hico, and Livingston Lake. By 1969, when black Americans promised aggressive protests to secure the rights guaranteed them in the Constitution, Thompson wanted a tank, but couldn't get one, so he had steel plating welded to a school bus and solid rubber tires. Dubbed “Thompson’s Tank” by the press, it was so heavy that it could barely move.
There was an area where the new neighborhoods built by First National people abutted the Eastover neighborhoods, built by Deposit Guarantee. In those days, people were more loyal to their commercial bank than they were to their political party. Daddy bought a lot on the West side of Warren Hood’s lot; a creek divided the territories of the two banks.
A natural creek fed the Pearl River, and the new streets were built with drainage pipes dumping runoff from the entire Honeysuckle subdivision into the creek between our property and Warren Hoods. Most of the time, it was stagnant pools cutting through natural clays, filled with tadpoles, red-eared slider turtles, and leopard bullfrogs. To me, it was both Skul Island and the Garden of Eden. I preferred it to my bedroom.
The creek formed a rubicon between the houses of Trustmark and the houses of Deposit Guarantee and emptied out into Eastover Lake, a feature added by Mayor Speed to help with drainage in the neighborhoods he built. In normal weather, the lake was rarely more than six feet deep, but you could never count on normal weather.
Before my summers became a matter of moving and lifting fifty-pound boxes of books in the confined heat of a West Jackson Warehouse, the creek was my kingdom, and I would patrol it with my dog, Mugsy, every afternoon.
“Don’t you get dirty!” My grandmother would shout as I left Castle Campbell for my own domain. Silly woman. By the end of the day, depending on how much fun I had, Hattie May Grant sometimes made me strip nekkid in the driveway, where she would hose me off before allowing entrance to Castle Campbell, where my supper would soon be ready.
Visiting my brother Joe, Matt Miller, and he secured my mother’s gardening tools and began constructing an earthen dam, blocking the drainage waters at a wide point in the creek, promising a natural swimming pool. When a brisk summer shower came, much like the one today, the efficiency of the earthen dam became evident. We had a pool!
oh, wait…
If the plans of little boys work, they generally work too well. The entire backyard was now flooding and approaching the steps to the door. Jim Campbell, who normally did not engage himself with the creek he was paying for, took a shovel to create a failing point in the great earthen dam. Soon, gravity and hydrolics took over as the force of the retained water pushed the remains of the earthen dam downstream.
A few years later, on a beautiful, sunny Easter Weekend, rains to the north of us filled the Mighty Pearl River with murderous intent. Jackson politicians built a “flood-control” reservoir in Rankin County, which was mainly about providing real-estate opportunities, turning pine forests and chicken farms into millions of dollars.
Just like the pool in our backyard, the poorly-named Ross Barnett reservoir was becoming dangerously overfull.
The Lake Mayor Speed built to improve drainage was filling backyards and living rooms with water the color of chocolate milk, swarming with mosquitoes, water moccasins, and alligators. His own daughter-in-law wept as her beautiful home turned to mud.
Some of us boys learned to use johnboats to move and rescue furniture. One guy figured out he could strap a four-by-eight piece of plywood to two canoes, creating a flood-rescue catamaran that we used to move out beautiful pianos and console TVs. The great beast and the poor knight were in their element, saving the day, while up to their nipples in stagnant water.
When night fell, the national guard made us cease our efforts to prevent looting in the dark. Anyone returning to the flood zone after the sun went down risked arrest or gunfire. A group of us boys, some victims, some rescuers, put on dry clothes and went to Mr. Gatti’s pizza.
Mr. Gatti’s had the first projection TV I ever saw. With a six-foot diagonal screen, we watched our neighbor, Dale Danks, telling us the situation. Danks was a small man, deeply tanned, and profoundly devoted to his job.
The flooding had swollen the poorly named Ross Barnett reservoir beyond its capacity, and the earthen dam holding the waters back was now at risk of failing. Two years before, Matt Miller, who built the earthen dam in our backyard, broke his neck waterskiing in the reservoir. My mother went to the hospital to visit the dying boy, “How’s cowboy Joe?” he asked, meaning my brother, among his last words. In the years to come, his father would teach a course at Millsaps College “on Death and Dying” as part of our religious studies major—a subject he became an expert at, through the worst possible navigation of his own life.
A future lawyer, John Robinson, whose home now held about four feet of water, threw his beer (still illegal since we were just sixteen) against the wall when Mayor Danks announced a controlled release of water from the Reservoir to save the earthen dam levies.
If it keeps on rainin’, the levee gon’ break. If it keeps on rainin’, the levee gon’ break. When the levee breaks, we have no place to stay. Danks saved the city, but added an extra four feet of water in some homes. The power company came to Cowboy Joe’s dorm and collected college boys to man a sandbag brigade to protect the computers controlling the power grid in central Mississippi.
If it keeps on rainin’
Only, the rain wasn’t here. The skies here were blue as a robin’s egg, while the city turned the color of cafe-au-lait, and lives were ruined.
I haven’t had much to do with earthen dams since then. It seems the design of men is no match for the force of God’s own rain.