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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
COMMENT
THE FINANCIAL PAGE
James Surowiecki talks with Ben Greenman about the economic effects of Hurricane Katrina
From September 19, 2005, Jon Lee Anderson on holdouts in New Orleans
From September 19, 2005, continuing coverage of Hurricane Katrina
From September 12, 2005, initial coverage of Hurricane Katrina
From September 12, 2005, Nicholas Lemann talks with Daniel Cappello about the fate of his home town, New Orleans
Mississippi is among the red states, which supported President Bush in the last election, and the Mississippi coast, which is where I grew up, was the most pro-Bush region of the state. When Bush visited Biloxi, on the Friday after Hurricane Katrina, he was greeted warmly by friendly politicians, including the state's two United States senators, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, who are Republicans; and Governor Haley Barbour, an old friend, who was the head of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997. Barbour thanked Bush for coming, and, as the President picked his way along streets littered with the splinters of destroyed houses, he encountered hurricane victims who actually seemed glad to see him. One man assured Bush that he had survived Hurricane Camille, in 1969, "and we'll go through this storm." New Orleans was Bush's next stop, and he seemed almost to dread having to leave Mississippi, for all its wreckage. "You know, there's a lot of sadness, of course," he told reporters. "But there's also a spirit here in Mississippi that is uplifting."
My guess is that the President could sense in Biloxi, Gulfport, and other coastal towns something of Midland, Texas, a boom-and-bust oil town that, unlike New Orleans, was forever reinventing itself, with an eye on the next big deal and, more important, a capacity for finding opportunity in misfortune. In Midland, disaster is an oil bust; on the coast, it's a direct hit from a once-in-a-lifetime storm. Now the coast has endured two in thirty-six years.
In a place where hurricanes are the local calamity, one might expect history to have a tenuous grip. On the coast of Faulkner's Mississippi, the past was a treasured, if superficial, asset--an adornment more than a way of life. The coastline was strikingly beautiful, not only for its stark white beaches but also for its fine old houses, many of them painstakingly maintained antebellum structures, situated along the twenty-five miles of beachfront between Pass Christian and Biloxi. These were summer homes, built by Delta planters and wealthy New Orleans merchants and their successors, and they lent the coastal Highway 90 an aspect of elegance, like a grand esplanade. The best known of them was Beauvoir, a building in the raised cottage style, which was the final residence of Jefferson Davis. After Davis's death, it was operated as a home for Confederate veterans, and in the nineteen-fifties it became a museum.
Beneath the coast's moonlight-and-magnolias veneer was a restive spirit that reflected both a heterogeneous population and the fevered ambition that occasionally seizes small-time tourist centers. By the fate of geography, the coast had its own sociology, unbound by the feudal arrangements that locked much of the rest of Mississippi into its melancholy past. The alluvial soil of the Mississippi Delta fostered an agrarian culture of fabulous wealth and aristocratic conceits, which depended upon the labor of slaves and, later, of freed blacks effectively consigned to indenture. The soil in the southern portion of the state, from the piney woods down to the coastal plain, was sandy, meagre stuff, incapable of growing much more than scrub. Nor were there vast marshes, like those which sustain the rice plantations of lowland Carolina, or cane fields, as in Louisiana. Although Mississippi has been a black-majority state through most of its history, blacks are distinctly a minority in the south, particularly along the Gulf Coast.
The people of the coast were formed by the maritime influences of the Gulf: first, when the French made Biloxi the capital of eighteenth-century French Louisiana (before New Orleans); and, later, when the seafood industry attracted an ethnic mix that was sharply distinct from the Mississippi norm. The warm waters of the Gulf, rich in oysters, shrimp, and marketable fish--snapper, Spanish mackerel, speckled trout--supplied a seafood industry based in Biloxi that boomed in the early...
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