This essay contains images that some may consider distressing.
His face haunts me. Through the blur of the rain that splatters his face, I see his short black hair slicked against his olive skin. I see his features contorted, perhaps permanently, in anguish deeper than I hope to ever know. He cries out in a language I don't understand.
Weary, he stumbles through waist-high, toxic, putrid water clutching the shrouded body of a small child. I don't know how many more bodies there are, floating in the water or trapped beneath the rubble. Lifeless, abandoned, betrayed. Through his rain-soaked sweatshirt, I can almost see his heart breaking, again.
He is in the Jabalia Refugee Camp in Gaza. It is December 2023. I am in New Orleans, scrolling through Instagram.
For months, my phone has been inundated with images from Gaza that break my heart and soul: children shivering with fear, men clambering with their bare hands through rubble looking for survivors, doctors amputating the limbs of their own children with no anesthesia and precious little hope. I see them on Instagram, Twitter, Al-Jazeera, CNN. I see them in my dreams.
But even in that deluge, this man's face lingers.
Images can do that. Reach through time and space to arrest you, suck you in. Make you part of a place you've never been. Haunted by people whose names you'll never know.
It's happened to me before. I don't remember where I first saw the image. It might have been in a book or a documentary. Perhaps in a museum. A child stands tall in her white nightgown, her hands clasped in her middle. Her hair is short and slightly frazzled against the tents behind her. Her face is sullen or confused. It's hard to tell in black-and-white photos sometimes.
Next to her, a woman squats atop a pile of blankets, probably the makings of a tent as well. Her head is covered with a thick scarf and her face looks worn, frozen. She may be in shock.
Behind them, I can see a white, phallic sculpture jutting out into the sky. I know that it is not the Washington Monument in DC, but the Louisiana Memorial at the Civil War Battlefield in Vicksburg, Mississippi, some 20 miles from where I grew up.
Like the man in Jabalia, the woman and child are in a refugee camp, one of many set up all over Mississippi—as well as Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee—in great haste after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, an event in which American citizens (precarious as Black citizenship was in those days) were referred to as refugees in their own country, nearly 80 years before another notorious flooding event: Hurricane Katrina.
Outside of very specific circles, like Southerners, historians, climate aficionados, and disasterologists, the disaster has largely faded from public memory—even though its impact was so deep, so enduring, that once you see images from it, not only can you never unsee it, but you can see it a whole world away, nearly 100 years later.
Like the flood in Jabalia, the story of the Great Mississippi Flood starts with settlers. When the first settlers arrived in the region, the Indigenous people warned them to expect the river to flood every 14 years. Instead of accepting their wisdom as a fact of nature, the settlers took it as a dare and set out to put the mighty river in her place. They, of course, thought of the river through a colonial lens: man vs. nature. Settlers and planters (as plantation owners, who rarely touched dirt, were known) built a hodgepodge levee system in an attempt to wall the mighty river off.
When white folks realized that their levees weren't strong enough, they lobbied the federal government for reinforcement. In 1879, the government acquiesced and created the Mississippi River Commission, which expanded the levees-only approach to flood control, leaving the river with no outlets to release water as she charged toward the Gulf of Mexico, weighted with the excesses of her many, many tributaries.
When the Indigenous people had warned of 14-year floods, the land along the river had been lush with vegetation. Panthers roamed the wilderness. Curtain-like trees speckled the grounds. But by the 20th century, the riverbanks were lined with sprawling cotton and sugar cane plantations, especially in the Mississippi Delta. Many of those same plantations still stand today, while others have been replaced with fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities. Extraction is extraction.
Indeed, all over the country, the banks of the Mississippi's tributaries had been deforested for industries, and the wetlands devastated. So, when the rain started and didn't stop in 1926, it fell on land that was ill-equipped to absorb it. The water rose and rose, beating against the walls of the levees like the Big Bad Wolf. You can build all the walls, all the levees you want, but a river will flow to the sea.
Again, I think of the man in Jabalia and the dramatic, unforgivable ways that colonization and occupation have warped the Palestinian landscape. Palestine, too, was once lush and green before the settlers came and slashed and burned olive groves en masse. There, too, the settlers have tried to tame the river and turn it into a weapon, diverting drinking water and poisoning what they couldn't curtail.
To be clear, the 2023 Jabalia flood was not a result of river-tampering in the same way that the 1927 flood was. While deforestation, relentless bombardment, and the general vulnerability of refugee camps surely played a significant role, we also have to consider the contribution of climate change—the ultimate result of centuries-long global environmental engineering on the backs of colonialism and slavery. Gaza is a particularly climate-vulnerable area. In addition to heat and drought, climate change makes the Gaza Strip more susceptible to more erratic and intense rainfall events. In that way, the images from Jabalia in December allow us to behold the past and future in the same frame.
Back in time in Mississippi: the rain fell, hard and angry, into the early months of 1927. In the face of the coming calamity, planters in the Mississippi Delta did what they knew best to protect themselves: they brought back slavery. I mean that quite literally. They forced "free" Black men, and a smattering of Black and white prisoners, to work on the levees. The men worked never-ending shifts of backbreaking labor, often at gunpoint, carrying heavy sandbags from the bottom to the top of the levee in an effort to raise it against the swelling waters. Some fell to their deaths and washed away with the river, becoming part of the levee itself.
There were more than 145 levee ruptures up and down the river, but none more devastating than the April 21 crevasse at Mounds Landing, Mississippi, the largest ever along the Mississippi River. The river thundered out of the levees at literal breakneck speeds, covering 1 million acres with water 10 feet deep, washing away homes, drowning livestock, and destroying entire crops. At the time of the breach, the thousands of men working on the levee had no time to run and nowhere to run to, for that matter. While the official death toll is still contested, it is accepted that at least 1,000 people died and more than 700,000 thousand were displaced.
Enter: the refugee camps.
The planter class of the Mississippi River Valley fought so hard to control the river because they had a lot to lose: homes, businesses, farmland, crops. But the one thing they were most afraid of losing—the thing they couldn't rebuild if it went away—was their labor force. By this point, a steady stream of Black people flowed away from the South in the Great Migration, trading farmland for the factories of the North.
In the immediate aftermath of the breach, planters and police corralled Black folks into tents atop the levees, the only dry land left. What little food or supplies they received came by boat. The white population, on the other hand, either stayed in their homes—which were often built on higher land—or they found refuge on the second or third floor of hotels. Many of them cashed in on the privilege of their whiteness and fled the devastated area altogether. Eventually, though, the water stood for so long and the conditions on the levees deteriorated so badly that the planter class realized they might lose their labor force another way: they could all die. So they gave in and evacuated the levees.
Still, the planters' fear of the Great Migration overpowered their sense of logic. Instead of evacuating the Black folks from the Delta up North to Tennessee or Missouri, where the water was lower, they rounded up steamships and sent them South to Vicksburg, Natchez, Yazoo City. All places treading the same floodwaters, just with a bit more high ground. And that's where the refugee camps were created: atop the bluffs.
As I recall the woman from that image from the Vicksburg camp, I am aware (and perhaps she is as well) that the Civil War battles fought on the ground she sat upon were especially bloody, evident in the trickiness of Vicksburg's hilly landscape. I can imagine how tired she must have been. Not just of the flood, but everything surrounding it: the daily fight for dignity in a system that fed on her humiliation and subjugation, and the illusive nature of her freedom, which literally loomed over her in the form of concrete monuments.
There were certainly survivors of the Civil War and slavery in the camps with her. I wonder if she knew any of them—or if she was one. I wonder what stories they told one another when they had a modicum of privacy when the person holding the camera (undoubtedly a white man) wasn't looking. It reminds me that there are Nakba survivors in Gaza today, living in tents in the cold, biting rain.
This, once again, takes me back to the man in Jabalia. While the planters of Mississippi wanted Black people to stay, the settlers of "Israel" have been quite explicit in their desire for the Palestinians to leave—or be exterminated. However, in both cases, they are obsessed with their movement. I am also struck by the shared absurdity of the term "refugee" for people who have not left their country. Black Mississippians were referred to as refugees not only in their own country but in their own state. Palestinians are the Indigenous people of Palestine. The very idea that they could be refugees on that land is obscene. Settler colonialism, however, has never shied away from the absurd. In fact, it thrives on it.
Another way in which the Great Mississippi Flood broke the mold was through the flow of information. With the advent of radio broadcasts, it became the first disaster in American history that the nation could follow in real-time. In that way, it became both a spectacle and a sensation, as radio broadcasters and print journalists fought to cover the story. There were even traveling exhibitions recreating the extent of the damage for folks from far away.
But it was the Black press that broke the story about the true conditions in the refugee camps and the state of Black flood victims. As much as soon-to-be-president Herbert Hoover—who had been put in charge of the flood response by then-President Calvin Coolidge—tried to deny the abuses in the camps, journalists like J. Winston Harrington of the Chicago Defender, Walter White of the NAACP, and the great Ida B. Wells kept exposing them in exhaustive detail. While they might have struggled to influence the mainstream narrative at the time—as evidenced by Hoover's ascendance to the presidency, with a campaign that relied heavily on his handling of the flood—they did control it in the long term.
In Palestine, we are witnessing, in all its horror, the first ever live-streamed genocide. Gazan journalists are risking great harm and even death to themselves and their families to get the stories of their people out to the world, to get them into my phone. As horrific as these images may be, their efforts ensure that we can never say we didn't know. Their work refutes Israel's bold and bald-faced claims that they are not doing exactly what we see them doing, aided and abetted by my tax dollars. Motaaz Azaiza. Bisan Odwa. Hind Khoudary. Wael el Dahdouh. Lama Abu Jamous. It is through their heroism, and countless others, that these faces, these stories, find their way to my Instagram feed.
Reem, the soul of her grandfather's soul. Little Hind, who begged the Red Crescent to come get her. The little girl who knew her mother by her hair. The babies who turned to dust in the abandoned NICU. The man who was eaten by cats on the street. Refaat and his Expo marker. The doctors who refused to leave their patients even under the imminent threat of death. The children's press conference. The girl with blackened eyes. And, of course, the man in the Jabalia floodwaters.
Mississippi is a land that I love, and it is one haunted by the burning of churches and the imprisonment and murders of children—including one especially gruesome and infamous murder of a 14-year-old, whose body was dumped into the Tallahatchie, one of the tributaries that overflowed into the Mississippi that winter of 1927. It bears the scars of apartheid all over. I cannot read about the bombing of churches and mosques and refugee camps and hospitals in Gaza and not hear the echoes of history. These are crimes that should shock us. These crimes demand a response and that response should be, bare minimum: stop.
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Last winter, I visited Greenville, Mississippi, and walked along the levee that burst open in 1927. I tried to step lightly, knowing that there were Black bodies buried—or, rather, trapped—beneath me. As I looked around me, it felt like I could see forever. The land was so flat, so naked. It seemed every square inch had been cut bare to make way for King Cotton. From this vantage point, the images I'd seen from the flood, and the stories I'd read, all took on a new life.
While I was there, the Mississippi was low, all the way at the bottom of the levee. I could imagine how high it must have risen that winter and that alone was terrifying. But I could also see how, if the river were to climb over the levee, there would be absolutely nothing to stop it. There wasn't so much as a hill in sight. I could feel the terror in a whole new way.
Perhaps that's what haunts me the most about Gaza: the things I can't know. I know Gaza is 141 square miles and prior to Oct. 7, 2023, it held more than two million people. I know that now there are more than 1 million people crammed into Rafah, in the southernmost part of the strip. I've heard the screams and shells from the videos. But I can't know what it sounds like to live under nonstop bombardment. I can't know what that level of starvation and sleep deprivation feels like. I can't know what the level of death and waste smells like.
And as an American whose government is a not-so-silent partner in this genocide, I have no right not to know. That will haunt me forever and ever.