It's summertime! Otherwise known as prime reading season. And in this episode, you're going to meet the people behind a couple of the summer's hottest books.
We talk with Boyce Upholt about his new bestseller, The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi. The book tells the epic story of the Mississippi River, and he writes about how centuries of human meddling have transformed both the river and America.
And we also meet Mary Annaise Heglar, who tells us about her new novel, Troubled Waters. It’s a distinctly Southern story about family, Black resistance, and the climate crisis.
Eva Tesfaye and Carlyle Calhoun Despeaux host this episode. Eva and Garrett Hazelwood interviewed the authors. Sea Change's managing producer is Carlyle Calhoun Despeaux. Our sound designer is Emily Jankowski, and our theme music is by Jon Batiste.
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
You can reach the Sea Change team at seachange@wwno.org.
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TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors (including name spellings). Please be aware that the official record for our episodes is the audio version.
CARLYLE: It’s hot and steamy around here. But least that means it’s prime snowball season. And prime sit yourself on a beach season.
EVA: And…it’s also prime reading season. Long, hot days where hanging out in the AC with a page-turner just sounds like all you want to do.
CARLYLE: Or you’re lucky enough to be packing a bag, off on vacation when you finally have the time to relax and lose yourself inside the books you’ve been waiting for the chance to read.
And, some excellent new books have dropped just in time for the season
EVA: I’m Eva Tesfaye
CARLYLE: And I’m Carlyle Calhoun, and you’re listening to Sea Change.
Today, you are going to meet the people behind a couple of our favorite new books.
Short Clip from each
EVA: That’s Boyce Upholt talking about his new book, the Great River. It’s a sweeping history of the Mississippi
And Mary Annaise Heglar on her novel, Troubled Waters. It’s a distinctly Southern story about family, Black resistance, and the climate crisis.
CARLYLE: Coming up, conversations with the authors of these hot summer books.
THEME MUSICGREAT RIVERCARLYLE: We’re going to start with friend of the pod, Boyce Upholt. If you haven’t checked out his episode of Sea Change about the iconic Louisiana Red Fish, called “Redfish Blues,” queue that up in your podcast feed after this. You’ll get another taste of his amazing storytelling.
EVA: Boyce’s new book, The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi tells the epic story of the Mississippi River. The book manages to cover 10,000 years, the entire known history of humans living alongside the Mississippi. It’s a watershed that spans half the country. And he writes about how centuries of human meddling have transformed both the river and America.
CARLYLE: Garrett Hazelwood sits down with Boyce to talk about his new best seller.
INTERVIEW
GARRETT: It's great to talk with you, Boyce.
BOYCE: Great to be here, Garrett. Thank you for having me.
GARRETT: So I’ve lived a few blocks from the river now for almost a decade. First in Baton Rouge and now in New Orleans where you also live. Um, and I've had this river so close for so long, but I also knew so little about it. Um, and after reading now I know a lot more, so thank you for that. but I kept thinking as I was reading about how just disconnected the river is from so many of the people who live right beside it. I mean, even just visually it's hidden behind the levee. It's this thing that looms so big in our cultural imagination and national identity, but it's also obscured.
I mean, there's not that many bars or restaurants or houses that overlook it. Um, you have to hike up to get to it. Um, and you can live here without hardly ever seeing it. So, it's hard to see unless you go looking. Um, and I was curious what got you looking.
BOYCE: Yeah. So similarly, I live, I, in my mid twenties, I moved to the Mississippi Delta. So not the river Delta down here, but, um, sort of that, that big floodplain land South of Memphis. And I moved there. For a job with a nonprofit, but I knew I wanted to be a writer, and part of moving there was like, this place seems curious.
Um, lived there for six years, literally on land that had been carried to that place, or on, yeah, soils that had been carried to that place by the Mississippi River. And also, never really saw the river, never really thought about it, but, um, in 2015, When I first started out as a journalist, I got an assignment to write a profile of this pretty well-known canoe guide in the Mississippi Delta who was like the guy if tourists were going to go out on this big river.
So to profile him, I had to go out on it myself and spent three days and two nights camping on the Mississippi and actually a little bit on the Atchafalaya River. And was just staggered by what was there, especially in that stretch. It's this giant waterway, but it also includes this giant wilderness, huge sandbars, and islands–this forest all around it.
And so I was, it was, I was so taken with that landscape and I wanted to spend more time there. But I was also struck by what you were just saying. Like, I've lived here for six years and nobody told me that in my backyard right here is one of the most beautiful wilderness spaces in the country.
GARRETT: yeah, I mean, I think so many people who do live by the river don't think of it as wilderness. At least and sort of on the other side of the wilderness picture is all the engineering that's been done to the river. Um, and, you know, we think of the levees and we think of dredging, but you document in this book just the, like, staggering number of interventions that have been made and the amount of construction that has been done to the river.
Can you talk a little bit about the types of projects that have been done that have changed the course of the river and and the scale of like this massive construction project that's been going on for however many hundred years now?
BOYCE: Almost basically 200 years this year. This is the 200th anniversary of the army corps tinkering with the Mississippi river. So um It, it, yeah, it's, it's sort of, I tried to contain it in a paragraph in the introduction, and there are so many things you could name. Again, with my expansive definition of the river, if you include the tributaries, there's like dozens and dozens of locks and dams on the Ohio, the upper Mississippi, the Arkansas, the Ouachita.
There are a different kind of dams on the Missouri that hold back these giant reservoirs that are meant to hold water for farms in a, in a pretty dry region. Um, but then even down here on the lower Mississippi River, the number of things that we've got, we've got sort of, There's no dams because the river is so big that we didn't really need to deepen it for boats, but there are wing dams, which are these like dams that only go partway through the river and narrow the channel.
Um, there's weirs in places, so those are sort of like underwater dams. There are 14 man made cutoffs between Memphis and the Atchafalaya River. That were, you know, the river was shortened with the thought that like a straighter, faster river is going to flood less. Um, we've got the four floodways, um, which are sort of alternate routes to the Gulf of Mexico.
Got the levee, as you said, I think that's the most familiar thing to people down here. But, but the thing about the levee to me is the scale of it. It's basically a thousand miles both sides of the river. There's some bluffs that don't need to be leveed. But there's one piece of levee that's 380 miles long.
Thanks unbroken going from, uh, the mouth of the Arkansas River in Arkansas down to the head of the Atchafalaya River, which is, according to a textbook I found, the second largest land, human made landform on the planet. And so, like, all these things together, I say this in the book, it's really hard, I've visited all these floodways,
I've walked, you know, probably hundreds of miles of levees, walked or driven or biked, um, and it's hard to think of these as sort of one object together, but I think we should think of all of this tinkering as one giant machine that's been placed around this river.
GARRETT: I was like really fascinated too about the financial picture that you lay out in the book. I guess probably hundreds of billions of tax dollars have been spent on quote unquote taming the river and making it navigable for freight ships all up and down and it cost just a tremendous amount of money and sweat. What did those investments buy us and like who ultimately benefited from them?
BOYCE: Yeah, I mean, it's the investment is staggering and it was I was unable to get very accurate numbers is when there's a long footnote about that search. Um, I mean, what we got is the landscape that we see in the south. Now, right? We got New Orleans. We got the Mississippi Delta and this farmland empire. And I should say those are, you know, I lived in the Mississippi Delta for nine years.
I've been in New Orleans for six years. Uh, they're both, uh, places that have like deeply shaped the culture of the United States of America. They are, they both, I consider them both home, the places I love.
So, you know, it's hard, it's hard to think of like, oh, without the levies, we wouldn't have these places that mean so much to me. But I think the part of your other question of like, who gets that money? That is where I get a little bit more trouble looking at the way we've done this. And so, yeah, as these levies came up, um, in tandem with kind of a farming economy that led to consolidation that led, it's always been plantations in the Mississippi Delta and through the years it's in many ways only gotten worse.
There were brief moments in time where land was cheap and there might be smaller farms and black owned farms, but those have largely been taken away, often stripped away, through intentional actions of these wealthier White landowners. And so, yeah, you really see, I mean, it's most stark in some of the conflicts that continue now over flood control infrastructure, infrastructure, like debates about whether we should build pumps to protect farmland.
And when I look at those numbers, I see, okay, there's a 400 million project on the table in rural Mississippi. And the analysis shows that like 80 percent of that money will go to quote, landowners and landowners tends to mean, you know, probably a dozen or so people who own 5, 10, 000, maybe 15, 000 acres of land.
Um, and this is being built in Issaquena County, Mississippi. One of the poorest counties in the country, I believe still the poorest county east of the Mississippi River where the per capita income is, I think, you know, less than 30, 000 a year. And so when I think 400 million in a place like that, like, what if we just distributed that money differently?
How could that transform lives? And that's, So much that's been built has been built at the behest of people that already have money and power, and therefore can kind of more easily poke at the government and say, Hey, do this for me. Um, and as I think about the river of the future, I would love to think about how we can build things that, um, spread the value more widely.
GARRETT: There's also a thread that runs through the book about attention between the river as an ideal, I think, and then the realities of what we've done. And so maybe the ideal is, is captured by this idea that you talk about Thomas Jefferson having, um, that it's a democratizing force and that if we control it, then we can give people Americans room to spread out and build independent homes and communities, and then they'll have, like, self determination in their little, small plots of land. But the reality is quite different. Can you tell us about that, about some of the anti democratic systems that were tied up in the project of controlling the river?
BOYCE: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I should have mentioned that as well, right? Like, the wealth that was required to clear land was not just, you know, you need to be a wealthier person, but you, initially along the river in its American years, you need to be a wealthy person within slave laborers. It was sort of the de facto sense of, like, that's the only economic system that will be able to build the levees and, um, tear down the trees.
And then, yeah, even hundreds of Years later, like into the 20th century when, after emancipation, it remained, uh, black hands that were building the levees and kind of building everything along the river, um, and it remained under highly exploitative conditions. And so when you look at that, this, the levee along the river, it's so simple and quiet and just this, you know, mound of earth, but it contains, again, a lot of pain in there and a lot of the troubles of America.
GARRETT: So the book is divided into three parts and in the latter section you, you focus on today and sort of where things stand now. And that's the section in which you talk about sort of what has happened to the natural system and to biodiversity as a result of what we've done to the river.
I kept somewhat strangely thinking about fire. I mean, like our relationship with fire is that for the past hundred years, we've suppressed it. And whenever a fire starts, it gets put out and the result is that all this fuel has built up. And so now when a wildfire burns in so much of the country and even, you know, in Canada and around the world, um, it burns really hot and it burns really big and it devastates the landscape. And so instead of being this renewing force, it becomes this destructive force. And I was wondering, do you think that we're there with flooding in the basin also? I mean, is this a thing where like the intervention that we have done has made the problem worse and more devastating?
BOYCE: Yes, absolutely, I think it's it's a way it's a strikingly stark analogy like yeah We know that by suppressing fires we've made them bigger. I think on the mississippi river at this point We've attempted to suppress floods. I mean, it's more complicated that like we have Swallowed up so much of the watershed. And it used to be that, you know, if rain hits soil, it will sit in that soil for a while before it kind of leeches back into rivers. But now we've built so much that it just runs right back into the rivers. And then the rivers are so narrowed by this engineering that we get these, um, These bigger floods.
Um, and that's what we're seeing now. And combined with climate change, that makes it even worse.
And when you're saying that, I mean, it makes me think too. I've had conversations with people. This is sort of like a line of thinking I'd like to pursue more in the future. I think there's a growing awareness of sort of traditional ecological knowledge with fire and that the indigenous people have had. Smarter notions than us Westerners about how to deal with fires and that we need to start looking at those and adapting to those. And I think we should start thinking about traditional ecological knowledge in terms of flooding. And it's a fi fire is essential to so many ecosystems. It's essential to human life.
And that was true of, of floods on the Mississippi River. It was essential to the, the cultures that thrived here. And I think, you know, in the book, I, I, in researching the book, I came to the conclusion that I think the Delta in particular was for a long time one of the most important, if not the most important, places on the continent, culturally and spiritually, and I think that is because, uh, indigenous people recognized how much life was delivered by the chaos and flooding of the river.
GARRETT: your book covers like 10, 000 years and all of these interventions are in the past 200 years, really like, and before that, for, you know, over 9, 000 years, there were people living alongside this river and they were thriving. There were a bunch of different cultures. We created a bunch of problems in a really relatively short period on this timescale. Which I think is both gives me some hope for the future and also a bit depressing.
BOYCE: This is a little terrifying. Yeah, but on that time scale thing, I mean, one thing I write a lot of in the book about earthworks, as I call them, often people know them as Indian mountains. And I think some of the most important earthwork sites were under construction for 300 years. So one earthwork site lasted longer than the project of building it lasted longer than than our engineering so far.
GARRETT: Well, and something I'm aware of too is concrete infrastructure just fails at some point. And so in a relatively small amount of time we built so much stuff out of concrete on this river and are all these structures gonna start failing at the same time? I mean, is that Something that you've heard about?
BOYCE: Probably, I mean, I hope not at the same time. Um, I mean, potentially I think a lot of, yeah, a lot of our locks and dams are for a 50 year lifespan and now they're 100 years old. And so it is this crisis of like, where do we get the money and how do we update them? But I think the other question is like, should we update?
Like, is just making them bigger and stronger and newer the option, or do we build back in some places? Um, so it's hard to say if, If they all fail at the same time, but I do think, you know, I say in the book, this like old engineering adage of like their levies that have failed and their levies that will fail and you can examine anything human built.
Someone was telling me yesterday. It's like every glass is just glass that has not yet broken. When you build something, human built things eventually fall apart. Um, and so one way or another, the things we built on the river, we're gonna, they're gonna fall apart. Um, and so it's, yeah, there's something Sisyphean here and we're always working to maintain the river that we built.
GARRETT: You chart a lot of just crazy facts in this book. There's a lot that was surprising. Um, one thing really stood out though, for me, which was that you drank multiple cups per day of river water coffee, like as far south as Mississippi. Um, Let's talk about pollution in the river and like, what, like, is, is it a Louisiana thing?
I mean, is it so much cleaner in Mississippi that you can do that? What about all the sediment? Like talk about this river water coffee.
BOYCE: , all good questions. I mean, I, like I, you said, you mentioned before, I'm about to, in an hour, like, launching on a canoe trip up here. I'm in Mississippi now, and, uh, tomorrow morning, I'm gonna wake up and do the same, I think, if it's not too hot for hot coffee in the summertime. Um, yeah, I would not do it in Louisiana.
That is for sure. Um, it is, the water, I mean, there's just so much industry, so, so things, I also wouldn't do it, um, you know, if I, if I was living in a shack on the river, I'm not sure I would want to do it every day, but the Clean Water Act in the 1970s really made a difference, right? The river was quite, quite dirty for a long time.
It was, you know, the effluent of Chicago was coming down the river once. Um, I mean. So there's human waste. There were so many different chemicals. Um, the worst of those chemicals have been cleaned up pollution. And so, so it fits in with, you know, the notion I had before I found the Mississippi river, that it was a canal and it was toxic and it is not a canal.
It's a wilderness and it is not, not toxic. It's just not as toxic as we think. Um, there's still huge pollution problems, but, uh, you know, they tend to be agricultural runoff causing dead zone in Louisiana, famously. There are a lot of plastics, I mean, I think the thing in drinking it that I probably should be thinking more about, I think we need more research, but in all waterways, there's more and more pharmaceuticals being flushed into them, um, so there are things there, but, um, for a swim or for, you know, river water coffee that gets boiled for a good long time, and that will also help the sediments settle out, um, it, it is something that I've, you know, maybe in another couple decades, I'll be like, man, I really wish I hadn't done that, but so far it's been okay.
GARRETT: Well, yeah, I'm glad you're doing all right. I think that was all the big questions I had for you. But how how are you doing?
How's the tour going?
BOYCE: That's been good. It's like You know, we don't typically get to like speak in front of people and it's like a little bit of a thrill, probably by the end of the week it will stop being a thrill and I'll be ready to go back to my office and just writing and reporting again.
GARRETT:
this river is, it like, it looms big for us. People are really interested in it, there's a lot of mystery and, and myth around and it's exciting to learn more about it, so, thanks for writing this book and thanks for talking with us.
BOYCE: Yeah, thank you for having me.
TROUBLED WATERS
CARLYLE: Now we’ve been huge fans of Mary Anna-ise Heglar over here at Sea Change for quite a while. She’s known for her heartfelt essays dissecting and interrogating the climate crisis. Hernew novel Troubled Waters, follows young college student, Corinne and her grandmother Cora.
EVA: After Corinne’s brother dies on an oil boat she wakes up to the realities of climate change. And she decides to do something about it. But that scares her Grandma, Cora, who was one of the first Black kids to integrate schools. The two generations are coming to terms with what it means to be family, Black women, and alive in a world on fire.
CARLYLE: Here’s Eva talking with Mary.
INTERVIEW
EVA:Hi, Mary. Thank you so much for coming here to be on C Change.
MARY: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
EVA: You're known for your essays on climate. At least that's where I knew you from. and you have this children's book. But what made you decide to take on writing a novel?
MARY: Actually, so I have been working on the novel pretty much the entire time people knew me for essays. It was more like a return to form for me, actually. I've always written short stories and poems. And I started thinking about what the types of things I need to show and not those types of things I need to tell. and so one of the things that, that came up for me was wanting to explore, putting climate change into conversation with, The civil rights movement. in particular, my family's story with school desegregation in Nashville, Tennessee, but yeah, I wanted to show that you don't have to go to the future to talk about climate change. You can go to the past. Um, so I thought 2014 was a really, really interesting year in particular. and if you look back at 2014 you see people sleepwalking, um, into the climate crisis into fascism, into so many other problems that are just so glaring right now. They were very present in 2014, but people were in denial about them and I wanted to, explore what it would look like.
What that looks like through the eyes of my main character, Corinne, who I think is very awake and sees these things happening and feels like, how is nobody else freaked out about this?
EVA: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, no one like really takes her seriously kind of at the beginning of the story And one of the lines in the book that I thought really was interesting that she says to her friends is she says, we're all focusing our attention on the Arctic.
It can make you feel like the whole reason we need to stop global warming is for the polar bear sake. And it ain't. And. It just made me reexamine kind of what the climate movement looked like back then. Do you think that was one of the mistakes we made? separating the environment from us?
MARY: Yeah, for sure. So I think what's, what's interesting with Corinne is that she is Finding in different ways, the limits of white environmentalism and how she can fit into it as a black girl. So the first types of environmentalism that when you meet her, she's getting frustrated with is this type of environmentalism.
That's always framed as a charity, you know, sort of save the polar bear, save the trees that doesn't sit right with her. And to her, it feels like. Sweeping leaves on a windy day. and so eventually she wants to do something more radical and she goes to another type of white environmentalism. some people might call it eco terrorism. Like she starts exploring where that can take her. Um, and, um, yeah, so that's, I think where she where she's going with it.
I would say that. I would say that the mainstream climate movement has made a lot of these mistakes, but that's not the entire climate movement. I think the mainstream climate movement is very white, but there are, climate activists, climate organizations, frontline organization movements that don't make those types of mistakes.That's Corrine has found herself yet.
EVA: Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. and. I want to talk about, like, the other movement that goes on in this book. So I mean, throughout the book, there's parallels between Corinne and her experience with the climate movement, but then her grandmother, Cora, and her experience with the civil rights movement and integrating schools when she was little.
how did you make that connection between the two? Like, what connections do you see?
MARY: Mm hmm. Well, they connect for me because
I come from a family that was very big in the civil rights movement, particularly in Nashville, Tennessee. my grandfather, in particular, was very active in the school desegregation movement he, uh, I enrolled my aunt Jackie in the first cohort of first graders to integrate the schools in Nashville, Tennessee in 1957. and it's a story that I heard little bits and pieces of growing up. but it wasn't a story anybody wanted to like sit me down and tell me in detail. Right?
And so I wanted to use the opportunity to of writing this book to explore that story in in more detail. so to write this, I had to do a lot of Internet research, a lot of academic journals, historical journals, and finally go to Nashville myself and go to the archives, visit the school that she integrated, visit their old house. It is still there. Um, and I am really grateful that I got to.
Do that, last summer because, my aunt Jackie passed away just last month. Yeah. Thank you. but I'm really glad I got to do that while she was still with us and give her some closure. Cause as I, as I did the research, I started to realize there is a lot that she doesn't know. in particular, I found this article that was a of my grandparents where they talked about, When they decided to do it, why they decided to do it, when they had misgivings and when they really questioned themselves and what you know, what it was like to get that many death threats.
EVAL Yeah. Wow. That is very cool that you were able to, like, find the actual archives and just piece it togetherand yeah, well, let's talk about, I mean, there's a lot of grief and trauma in this family. They've lost. Quite a few people, one of them being Corinne's brother, Cameron, who died in a storm on an oil boat on the Mississippi River. So I want to talk about, like, the specific way Cameron died. Like, how does that affect the different characters in the book?
MARY: Yeah. So 2014 was the height of these oil boats going up and down the Mississippi River. Working on an oil boat in a lot of places in Louisiana, Mississippi. Mississippi, and I'm sure all along the river systems of the United States, can be one of the few good jobs you can get in a rural area. it, it pays very well, but it is extraordinarily dangerous, and even if you don't sustain an injury or, unfortunately, die. you know, die on one of these boats, you're very likely to get cancer because you're transporting poison for praying out loud. so I, I wanted to explore that and just for some of the characters, his death, it hits all of them really, really hard because he dies young. Um, he's in his early twenties when he passes away. It hits Cora really hard because One of the ways that her trauma plays out is that she always kind of feels like she's a failure. and so everything that happens around her, she kind of takes as a reflection of her.
She failed by, you know, when she loses her daughter, her daughter dies in a car accident. When Cameron dies, she feels like that's her fault. What if I had done this? This isn't this. And then Cameron wouldn't have done X, Y and Z. Right. And so she internalizes it that way.
for Karen, it was really hard. I think also because yeah. She didn't have the relationship with her brother that she wanted to have. they weren't super close And so she goes down this really, strong bout of climate grief. And that combines with her grief for her brother. And it's just, she's literally carrying the world on her shoulders.
EVA: Yeah, yeah, that. leads me to my next question, which is like the ideas of climate anxiety and climate grief, which I first heard about from your essays.
And Corinne obviously has that, likeshe has these kind of images in her mind of the world kind of just up in flames or floods and things coming like that. And so first of all, what is climate anxiety?
And, just talk about, like, how that manifests in current in the book.
MARY: Yeah. So there's a lot of different words for it. Some people say climate anxiety. Some people say climate depression. I usually say climate grief because, to me, it encompasses all of those, all of those different emotions and it mirrors the traditional grief cycle where you have bargaining and shock and depression and anger and all of those sorts of phases.
I think of it more as a syndrome than a, uh, process, because to me, there's no end to it because the end of the grief cycle is supposed to be acceptance. and with climate change, you can't really accept it because that's promising is going to get worse.
and the way that it shows up for Corinne is, I think for the most part of the book, she is in the depression phase of it.
I think it's the phase people are most afraid of, especially if you work in, you know, Climate communications. People are always like, Oh, you can't scare people. You can't scare people. But everyone I know who's gotten involved in in climate fight and has made a big difference has a story of going through a deep depression before they were able to do that.
I know I definitely did. Right.
And so One of the things that that Corinne is experiencing in the books that you alluded to is this thing that I've started calling climate visions, where you kind of see things happening that aren't happening I definitely experienced it, really heavy in 2015, 2016, and I would see, You know, tornadoes coming down the street or floods coming and nothing was happening. Nothing was happening at all. But I was, you know, reading so much climate literature that the projections felt very real to me or tangible, like they were just around the corner.
Turns out they were. because you can just look out the window. and well, one thing I wanted to ask about Corinne, she has this like kind of hyper fixation on the great flood of 1927.
EVA: Yeah, which was this really horrible flood on the Mississippi River. And I was wondering why that specific event.
MARY: Yeah. so Corinne grows up in Port Gibson, Mississippi, which, by the sound of the name you might think it's on the Gulf Coast. It's not. It's on the Mississippi River near Vicksburg, Mississippi. And, so growing up there, Kind of are going to be at least a little bit obsessed with the Mississippi River. Corinne is really obsessed with the Mississippi River. Like she loves this river like it's a family member. Right. And so when she hears about the 1927 flood, it's like, wait, the river can be mean.
And to her, it's like horrifying to realize that her river can flood and kill people and hurt people. Right. And she wanted to figure out why, why, why, why. And so she's constantly searching for answers for that. And the only answer she ever gets is like, It rained, it flooded, that's it.
Right? But it's not until she gets much older that she starts to look more into it, and realize that it is, that actually wasn't it, right? that flood was the result of people trying to control the river too much, it also was the result of cutting down tons and tons of wetlands and forests all over the country to build plantations and factories.
Right? So, yeah. I wanted to explore the 1927 flood also because it was the worst, disaster in U. S. history until Katrina. And it has a lot of other parallels with Katrina.
EVA: Yeah, yeah, the flooding is like, it's a monster of our own, like, human making and it's, it's just, yeah, that I never had thought about the, the parallels between that and Katrina before. okay, I'm going to try to, bring it back to like a more happy place because we've been getting deep and dark. But, but I know some of the characters are based off of your family members.like Uncle Harold is, there's a real life Uncle Harold. Could you talk a little bit about him?
MARY: I just remember even when I was a little girl, I always felt good to be around Uncle Harold. Like whenever he was around, you knew you could relax and he was very funny. if anyone knew how to diffuse a situation.
It was Uncle Harold. and so I, I decided to write the, the story was forming in my head in the spring of 2019 and I knew I was going to write this character.
and then, in late June 2019, June 29th, that was the day my uncle Harold died. which is why I can remember specifically the day I started writing it So I started writing the book with tears driving down my eyes, which is probably why you feel a lot of grief in it.
you probably feel a lot of homesickness in it too, because I was living in New York and really missing Mississippi, really missing the South. And so,
EVA: but it's in a good way. Like, it's like, I don't know, I, I like sad things. I like sad books.
MARY: It's relatable.
EVA: And, you know, I did cry reading it and, you know, I love that.
MARY: That's the goal. I mean, I cried writing it, but I'll say as much as it's about grief, as much as it's about, you know, going to these dark places, it's about going to those dark places for a reason. That reason is healing. so I really wanted to paint a picture of intergenerational healing. Healing and what that can look like when a family decides to heal together.
EVA: Yeah, yeah. Is there any of you in the book?
MARY: Oh, yeah, for sure. I went to Oberlin for starters, like, um, you know, I grew up in Port Gibson, not, not as much as, I grew up in Birmingham until I was nine, and then we moved to Mississippi.
Mississippi and I am stubborn like Corinne is, but I'm not nearly as brave as her. Not, not on my gullible day.
EVA: Yeah. She does some, some pretty out of pocket stuff, but I see where she's coming from though.
MARY: Exactly. She does, she's 20. That's the thing I had to keep remembering as I was writing her. her brain is not done developing, you know, she doesn't have that frontal lobe where you can assess risk sort of thing.
EVA: and if she did, the book wouldn't be nearly as entertaining. So, but, um, you mentioned that you're, you're from Birmingham, Mississippi, you live in New Orleans now. How does growing up there, Black in the South shape your work?
MARY: Oh, that's hard to answer. Yeah. I don't know what it would be like to grow up as anything else.when I was growing up in Birmingham, it, I don't know, it felt like 90 percent Black. Like, I remember the first time I saw a white person. Um, and the part of Mississippi I grew up in as, You know, it's the black belt.So I can't, I don't know what it's like to grow up anywhere else.
So like, that experience that Corinne has going to Oberlin, which is a white school and being like, Oh wait, this is different. That culture shock, I had that. I remember like the first time I went to a grocery store and they didn't have okra and I pitched a fit and people looked at me like I had three heads.
EVA: Well, I think that's perfectly understandable. How do you live without okra? Like, what are you doing? People say it's slimy. I'm like, you just don't know. Yeah. You don't know how to cook it. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I've been having so much fun, but I have one more question for you and that's, what do you hope people take away from the book?
MARY: Yeah. that's my favorite question. what I hope people take away from the book is just the knowledge that it is still possible to heal on a burning planet. and to question this. whether healing is an individual or a collective process. I think it can be both.
but what I would like for us to broaden our conversations about healing to be more collective, more familial and less isolated. and so I want us to start thinking about, healing as a revolutionary act.
EVA: Yeah. Yeah, and I think it does that. So thank you. All right. Well, thank you so much.
MARY: Thank you. This is fun.
OUTRO
CARLYLE: Thanks for listening to Sea Change.
This episode was hosted by Eva Tesfaye and me, Carlyle Calhoun. Garrett Hazelwood and Eva Tesfaye interviewed the authors. Our theme music is by Jon Batiste and our sound designer is Emily Jankowski.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX.
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
