Mississippi Solo
By Eddy L. Harris (2004 Selection)
Published in 1988 and brought back into print at the request of Missouri librarians, this wonderful book is a black man's account of a solo canoe trip down the entire length of the Mississippi River. At age 30, the St. Louisan set out "to find out what I was made of."
Reader's guide for Mississippi Solo
Talking With Abe
Essay by W. Nicholas Knight, reprinted from Missouri Passages, April 2004
About a third of the way into Eddy L. Harris’s travel journal, Mississippi Solo, is a remarkable passage in which he imagines himself meeting Abe Lincoln at the boat landing in Quincy, Illinois, where Harris has pulled in for coffee. Harris, you see, is traveling by canoe in October from the top of the Mississippi River in Minnesota all the way to New Orleans. At this point in the narrative, he is learning to use his aching arms effectively to maneuver his borrowed craft. He is getting the hang of camping outdoors, something he never did before starting this whimsical journey. He is feeling wonderful in the glory of a bright Sunday on the river in the North. He is a St. Louis native, and he is also a man whose black skin will become more symbolic (of who-knows-what?) the farther South he ventures.
He has passed the city park where Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas in 1858, and he imagines Abe Lincoln pondering human progress in the 130 intervening years.
The thumb of his right hand hooked in his waistband, his left hand grabbing onto the lapel of his long black coat, he would express in a tired smile his satisfaction.
“That’s a good thing, such a wonder as I would have hoped for and expected. We are a people as good as any other, good at heart, a great people, quick in a joke and quick in a fight, but we are often so slow to learn.”
Should I tell him just how slow? Should I break his heart and tell him yes, we have changed, yes, nothing is the way he remembers it, which in a way is great, but his plea for emancipation turned first to confused jubilation and then became muffled cries beaten silent and hung out to dry and evolved into quiet anguish and self-destructive frustration, wailing in the darkness, acceptance and the futility that follows and then finally a fatigue so simple that it could not be ignored any longer? Deprived of sleep for so long, the hope twitched into restlessness, the moaning and spirituals rose from the gut as demands, acceptance roared in a blaze, a passionate and riotous outcry.
And still the work started is not finished completely, not done to perfection or even to satisfaction….
Harris’s wonderful book has been selected by Missouri librarians for this spring’s “Read MOre” project, which the Missouri Humanities Council is proud to support. The librarians selected this river journey as a complement to the other river journey we commemorate this year, the expedition of Lewis and Clark. Harris writes of an undertaking of self-challenge and a continual discovery of who his countrymen are, at least along the great river. As he ventures into the land of his fearful stereotypes, he contemplates his own race in new ways. Early in the book he explains that he’d thought of himself primarily in terms of his gift for words. He was a writer, first and foremost, but on this journey he would have to contemplate his situation as a “black man” as well.
The remarkable dialogue with Abe Lincoln is a compelling image of the entirety of what we call “liberal education” in the University. Like Harris, we are all engaged in an imaginary dialogue with figures from the past, with Lincoln, with William Clark, with Martin Luther King, with Ghandi, with Shakespeare. All the people of spirit and genius who left a record of what they thought it really means to be fully human, they are all there at the boat dock in the Quincys of our imagination, to offer an idea and to hear what we have to say in return.
That exchange is the genius of a book discussion. I hope you will all take the time this year not just to read Mississippi Solo but to sit in a group to talk about what moved you in this wonderful book!
