The Tag Said Who You Belonged To — An Interview the Archive Wouldn't Keep

On July 30, 1927, the Chicago Defender ran a headline that read: "Flood Refugees Are Held as Slaves in Mississippi Camp."¹ The story described conditions on the Greenville, Mississippi levee, where up to 13,000 Black men, women, and children had been held at gunpoint by the National Guard while white families evacuated by train. The men carried 60- to 80-pound sandbags until their bodies gave out. They wore identification tags showing which plantation they "belonged to." Women without a working husband received no supplies unless they had a letter from a white man.²

The archive preserved these conditions in meticulous detail. What it did not preserve are the voices of the 13,000 people living inside them. As historian Richard Mizelle documented in Backwater Blues*, "African Americans left only a faint trail of documentary sources describing the 1927 flood event."*³ What survives are blues recordings, a Richard Wright short story, a handful of oral histories recorded seventy-four years after the fact, and the structural facts of detention, labor, and departure.

Ezekiel Mound is not a real person. He is assembled from what the record allows: documented conditions on the Greenville levee, the known experience at Mounds Landing where as many as 200 Black laborers drowned when the levee broke on April 21, and the mass migration that followed.⁴ Every factual claim in this interview is footnoted to its source. Every gap is named. The interview exists because the conversation couldn't happen, and the reason it couldn't happen is part of the story.

You survived Mounds Landing before you ended up on the Greenville levee. What happened at the break?

Ezekiel: They had us filling bags. Two thousand of us, maybe more, and the Guard right there making sure nobody stopped.⁴ When the levee started going you could hear it before you could see it. The ground shaking under your feet. The water came through with more force than Niagara Falls, that's what people said after.⁵ I don't know about Niagara Falls. I know about the sound.

The Guard officer wrote in his report afterward that "no lives were lost among the Guardsmen."⁵

That was the whole report on who died.

How did you end up on the Greenville levee?

Ezekiel: Where else was there? The water was everywhere. You went to the levee because the levee was the only ground left. But then you couldn't leave.

The Percy family, LeRoy Percy and his people, the big planters, they got together and decided that if they let the Black workers evacuate, the labor force for the whole Delta would disappear.⁶ So they kept us. Thirteen thousand people on eight miles of levee, Guard at both ends.²

The white folks went on the trains. I watched that. Everybody watched that.

Tell me about the tags.

Ezekiel: They gave you a tag. You wore it. It had which plantation you worked on. Who you belonged to, is how they said it.² Sixty-two years after they said nobody belongs to anybody anymore.⁷

I'll tell you what the tag was. Before the flood, you're a sharecropper, you work the cotton, you owe the store, you can't leave until the debt is settled and the debt is never settled. But there's no tag. There's no piece of paper on your chest. The flood took away the pretending. That's all it did. Made you look at the thing you'd been standing inside of your whole life.

What were conditions like on the levee?

Ezekiel: Not enough tents. Not enough food. No mess hall, no utensils.⁸ Canned peaches came in from the Red Cross, and they wouldn't give them to us. One white man said giving peaches to Black folks would "teach them a lot of expensive habits."⁸

[Silence.]

Expensive habits. Peaches.

What was the work like?

Ezekiel: Sandbags. Sixty, eighty pounds each, all day, and if you stopped they beat you.² The Guard whipped men. They beat men. At least one woman was—

[He stops.]

The Guard did what they did to her and killed her.⁹ At least one man was shot for refusing the work.⁹

And you did it for nothing. No pay. Percy ordered all the Red Cross labor done free.⁸ You carried bags to protect land you'd never own for people who wouldn't give you a peach.

When did you know you weren't coming back?

Ezekiel: You're asking me like it was one moment. Like I was standing there and something clicked and I said, that's it. Maybe for some people it was like that. For me the knowing was already there before the flood. The flood just made it so I couldn't un-know it. The tag did that. Took away the last little bit of whatever story you tell yourself. That it's just hard times. That the arrangement is temporary.

When the water went down, people started getting on trains going north.¹⁰ Maurice Sisson, he lived there, he said it later: "So many people wanted to leave here to go to Chicago. They just knew they were going to the promised land."¹¹ And Mildred Commodore said, "When you go North, there were chances of work. If they had remained there with cotton 50 cents a pound and meat, meal, and molasses, how long could they have existed?"¹¹

Within a year, tens of thousands left the Delta.¹⁰ I was one of them. You want my name? Nobody wrote it down.

Why isn't your voice in the record?

Ezekiel: Most of us couldn't write.³ And even if you could, Mizelle, the historian, he figured out that people put what they had to say into blues songs because if you said it straight they'd hurt you for it.³ More than fifty songs came out of that flood.³ That's where the voices went. Into the music. Into Richard Wright's stories.¹² Into the Defender, which we read in secret.¹

You want to know what I said on that levee? Go listen to Bessie Smith. Go read Wright. That's where I am.

Is there anything you want people to understand now, ninety-nine years later, about what happened on that levee?

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 accelerated the Great Migration, one of the largest internal population movements in American history. The infrastructure decisions that followed, particularly the Flood Control Act of 1928, reshaped the Mississippi River system and established the federal government's role in flood management. The people who built and maintained the levees, who were detained on them, who carried the sandbags, are largely absent from that legislative record too.

Footnotes

1. "Flood Refugees Are Held as Slaves in Mississippi Camp," Chicago Defender, July 30, 1927. Accessed via ProQuest: https://search.proquest.com/docview/492137164 ↩ ↩²

2. Mississippi History Now (MDAH), "The Flood of 1927 and Its Impact in Greenville, Mississippi" — https://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/issue/the-flood-of-1927-and-its-impact-in-greenville-mississippi ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Richard Mizelle, Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) — https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781452943978/backwater-blues/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (Simon & Schuster, 1997); see also NPR interview — https://www.npr.org/2005/09/03/4831423/the-mississippi-flood-of-1927 ↩ ↩²

5. Face2Face Africa, drawing on Barry — https://face2faceafrica.com/article/how-2000-blacks-were-used-as-barriers-at-gunpoint-during-the-great-mississippi-flood-of-1927 ↩ ↩²

6. National Geographic, "Man vs. Nature: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927" — https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/mississippi-river-flood-culture ↩

7. BlackPast, "The Mississippi River Great Flood of 1927" — https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/mississippi-river-great-flood-1927/ ↩

8. National Geographic (drawing on Barry), ibid. ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Britannica, "Mississippi River flood of 1927" — https://www.britannica.com/event/Mississippi-River-flood-of-1927 ↩ ↩²

10. Mississippi Encyclopedia, "Flood, 1927 Mississippi River" — https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/mississippi-river-flood-1927/ ↩ ↩²

11. PBS American Experience, Fatal Flood (2001) — https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/flood/ ↩ ↩²

12. Mississippi Encyclopedia, "Richard Wright" — https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/richard-wright/ ↩