Please open your Bibles to The Levee chapter, under the subtitle Knee Deep in Six-Shooters, to the incident where people from Arkansas are caught trying to sabotage the levee. (It's page 220-221 in the copy I have.)

This is one story that really stuck in my memory after reading the book, probably because of its brief flash of rationality in the middle of the ugliness of the rest of the story, and the ugliness of the rest of the book. It's an awful story in so many ways: from Windy George's job of carrying out violence against other blacks, to all the bragging about murder, to the business of sabotaging other sections of the levee, to the vigilante justice in retaliation, and finally the whole business of making their black workers actually carry out the execution. But in the middle of the story there's this incongruent decision to punish only the guilty and spare the innocent - so unlike the rest of the book, which seems to largely be an account of punishing the innocent.

So I put the story into song form, using several phrases directly from Windy George's account of it.

THE BALLAD OF WINDY GEORGE

There wasn't nobody like me, Windy George
Down in the land where they say the blues began
I killed many a man, but it never was in anger
And I never pulled a pistol unless I shot a man.

I teched the trigger, told the hammer to hurry
All I shot um for was, their time had come to die
You better not be caught on the levee at night
On the levee at night when the water grows high.

I remember a time when the river was a-rising
We was watching out for people from the Arkansas side
River was so high it was bound to bust somewhere
So we laid low in behind the levee to hide.

Way later on, we see a skiff come a-rowing up
Two white men, two coloured boys too
They start to make a hole in the Mississippi levee
I said, "Don't ask no questions, just shoot."

After awhile they come out with the dynamite
So I stood up and let um see my gun
The boys held their hands up and said "Don't shoot
They'da killed us in Arkansas if we hadna come."

The white men start to move away, I told um,
"I'll kill your souls with these bullets, don't you doubt."
Old Eph rides up, and "What's all this?" he says.
"Step on that dynamite and you'll find out."

I said, "These coloured boys, they was forced to do this
You hurt em, I ain't gonna watch for you no more."
Old Man Eph was a blue hen's chick, he says:
"We'll leave em alone, if you say, Windy George."

The engineer took those white men from Arkansas
Two heavy plows round their necks he bound
Said "You're trying to bust the levee and drown somebody
Tonight you're gonna feel what it's like to drown."

He made their boys row them out into the midstream
And heave them in the river like a chunk of stone
So you better not be caught on the levee at night
On the levee at night when the highwater's grown.

Marion