The following is an excerpt from Acoustic Shadows: Men at War and a Daughter Who Remembers Them by Betsy Howell. At 31, after the death of both her parents, Betsy sought solace in a family heirloom–the diary of her great-great-grandfather James Darsie Heath’s journals documenting his service in the Union army during the Civil War. As the author explores the highways and rivers of the Midwest and South, retracing her ancestor’s steps, she comes to understand the ways in which her father’s combat experience affected her growing up and the ways in which she must learn to give up her own sadness and anger. Next week, we’ll have an interview with the author about her experience using the journals, her road trips, and participation in Civil War re-enactments to write her way to new understanding.

From Chapter 10, “River of Death”
October 2000, northwest Mississippi

During a dry southern fall — a year after my first journey following Darsie’s footsteps — I had made my way to Clarksdale, Mississippi, the birthplace of the blues and the nearest large city to the Yazoo Pass, an appellation that for me brought to mind a mountainous gap, not a slow-moving waterway. I was looking for John Ruskey, owner of Quapaw Canoe Company, who had agreed to help me reenact the 1863 Yazoo Pass expedition. In John’s yard languished several aluminum canoes and one large, shiny wooden craft named Ladybug. A tunnel of vegetation led to the front door, where John, a man in his mid-thirties, met me wearing only a pair of shorts. He had wild, free-flowing hair that he tied back with a rubber band. He looked like a river himself, with a long, sinewy body punctuated by peaks and valleys of muscle.

Inside, away from the early-autumn heat, John brought out some Army Corps of Engineers maps of the Yazoo waters that he had purchased in Vicksburg. Not knowing anything about the rivers, I had told him only that I wanted to canoe from the Yazoo Pass to where Fort Pemberton, the Confederate stronghold where the Union fleet had been forced to turn back, had been.

 “The Delta is in a drought,” he said. “I looked at the Yazoo Pass from three road crossings and every one was dry. The only part that is accessible and floatable is a short distance out of Moon Lake. But it quickly dries up and stays dry until the confluence with the Coldwater. The Coldwater is flowing and entirely canoeable, but it’s low, which means it’s slow and will take some paddling and time.”

My disappointment rose. I wanted to do the entire route. And the pass itself had captivated me the most. This segment had provided the greatest challenge to the Union forces. On Sunday, March 15, 1863, Darsie had written:

We left Moon Lake at sunrise and entered the Pafs It was verry narrow and we had to go slow the pipes were let down on the deck and we had to keep low to escape the limbs that brushed we only went ten meter It was tedious

Along this waterway only a twilight world had existed beneath a dense canopy of intertwined branches. Here the river bent so sharply that hundreds of men had to haul the ships around with hawsers, which slowed the flotilla. This long-ago landscape was the wilderness of my childhood imagination. It was the “backwoods” where my friends and I played war, times a thousand. It was a landscape that I desperately wanted to see.

“My suggestion,” continued John, “is to do two day trips: one from Helena to the mouth of the pass, and the second from Moon Lake east as far as there’s water. Then we’ll put in at the confluence of the pass and the Coldwater. From there it will be possible to canoe to Fort Pemberton.”

This sounded good to me; I would just have to live with the reality of drought conditions. The next day we loaded up John’s 1956 two-ton Chevy Apache truck with river gear for the float from Helena, Arkansas, downstream to the mouth of the Yazoo Pass. John wore shorts and a wide-brimmed hat. Around his neck dangled a piece of rope with a compass and lighter attached. As we drove to Helena, I read passages aloud from Darsie’s journal.

“On March 9, 1863, he wrote: reached Helena at 5 in the evening landed and got our supper on an Island. The next day they moved downriver: We are on a sand bar, 3 miles before Helena waiting for smaller transports to carry us through the Zoo Zoo Pass–we are in a poor place to camp no wood to cook with.”

John looked thoughtful. “Does he write anything else about the sandbar?”

“No. The next entry is March 14, when the 72nd boarded the Empire City and turned into the mouth of the Yazoo Pass.”

The sign on the levee wall at the Helena harbor read, “Long ago is not so far away.” Before taking off, we sat in the canoe and discussed the 1863 expedition.

“I’m pretty sure this is where the Union ships were docking,” John said. “It was the only harbor between Memphis and Vicksburg.” He had cut out the pertinent sections of the Army Corps maps and set them in plastic sleeves in a three-ring binder. He pointed to a place on the map. “About four miles south of here is the Montezuma Bar, which I think is the sandbar your granddaddy camped on before traveling into the pass.”

Water Pony, John’s seventeen-foot aluminum canoe, sliced into the waves as we paddled into the center of the river. Though I knew the Mississippi could be dangerously unpredictable, I trusted John and his canoeing skills. I assumed he must have grown up in the Delta.

“No, actually I’m from New Mexico,” he said. “But I’ve always wanted to travel the Mississippi. In the early ’80s, a buddy and I built a raft in Minnesota and floated for five months. We learned all about the river, read lots of books, played music. We built a huge chessboard, four feet square, as the cover for our box of supplies, and played chess as we meandered downstream. It was in the middle of an involved chess game that we collided with a TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] tower and had to make our way to shore. That was my first introduction to the state of Mississippi.”

Hazy air on either side of the river obscured the land. October is the time of year for chopping cotton and burning fields. Cormorants and gulls flew over us and tugboats passed by toward destinations north and south. John said that grains and crops generally went downstream to New Orleans for global destinations. Oil went north to various places along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Workers waved to us cheerily from the tugboat Grandma Girt. Another tug, Crimson Tide, pushed thirty-six barges past us, creating hefty swells.

Four miles south of Helena, we landed on the sandbar. The glare of white sand blinded me when I took off my sunglasses. It was large — one-quarter mile wide and one mile long — partially due to the drought. It would have been a prime spot, in terms of size, for several regiments to camp, and as it was upriver from where James Wilson blew the dike, it would not have been flooded. John spread out a blanket, arranged our lunch, and then jumped into the water for a swim. Though I am fond of swimming in lakes and rivers, the muddy Mississippi did not appeal to me. I ate some fruit and crackers and then began exploring.

The nearest vegetation, shoreline strips of black and sandbar willows, waved quiet greetings. There were no large trees. Darsie had written that there wasn’t any wood to cook with on the sandbar, and probably my view wasn’t much different than his had been. From what I had seen in Cairo and Columbus, I knew the great river’s energy and inclination toward change in the form of flooding, sucking land away on some shores and depositing it on others, allowed little time for trees to grow. I looked across the bar and imagined hundreds of dog tents, campfires smoking from the green wood of willows, and men moving about. Thanks to my reenacting experiences, begun that spring, I knew how to envision the camp down to the smallest detail.

John had his watercolors out and was painting the Helena Bridge when I returned to the canoe. I sat on the sand and thought about my father.

While transcribing Darsie’s journals, I had opened up several U-Haul boxes in which I had packed away my father’s possessions. Buried beneath baseball caps, scrapbooks, and the American flag that had draped his casket, I found four small notebooks. They were not journals of prose, but rather notes and ideas, including jokes, lists of books to read, and “Trips I would like to make.”

On the “Trips” page, Dad had written, “Going down the Mississippi River by raft.” He had made a table of necessary equipment, including a twelve-foot rowboat, a five-horsepower outboard motor, water cans, and fishing gear. Another entry in the little notebooks was, “Projects for year ending 21 July ’56,” one of which was, “Type up Grandpa’s diary,” which I assumed referred to Darsie’s journals. While transcribing them I had wondered if my father had ever read them. If he had, then perhaps his desire to raft the Mississippi was a mission, much like my own, to know Darsie better.

The notebooks also told me my father had wanted to be a writer. He listed sixty-five ideas for brief articles, including “Mosquitoes: History and Geography,” and “Prospecting in the Yukon.” There were ideas for short historical essays on the Civil War, including one on “Lesser known battles and leaders.” His fictional story ideas ranged from someone finding a time bomb on a pleasure yacht, to a soldier, captured by the Chinese, devising an escape route. Some of his topics were clearly autobiographical: “Older people having children,” “Time I forgot to buckle my leg harness — first jump in five years,” and “Answer of a father to his son when son says to father that he (father) hasn’t ever done anything.”

Reading these notebooks had provided me a glimmer of my father’s complexity. He hadn’t been just a man who drank too much and shouted, “Sieg Heil! In case we lose!” or a middle-aged father, or a person who liked animals. He had been a man of many layers. However, for each clue I found, several questions surfaced that would never be answered. What were his thoughts about having a third child at age forty-five? What did the father say to his son? Like searching the landscape for Darsie, I strove for completeness in putting together a narrative of my father’s life. Not only did I want details, I wanted all the details. Only an entire story, it seemed, could ameliorate the effects of physical separation.

John and I packed up Water Pony and continued downstream to the mouth of the Yazoo Pass. He estimated the entrance to be east of Montezuma Island, approximately another four miles south of the sandbar. It is no longer possible to enter the pass from the Mississippi. Following the 1927 flood, the levee was built up to colossal proportions. We landed in a narrow channel and watched the hazy sun dropping for the night. The world had turned silver, where only that afternoon it had been a brilliant gold flecked with airborne soil. The memory of my father took me into a familiar melancholy as the Mississippi rolled by. I told John that the river, because of dams and levees and the efforts of humans to squeeze it into a predictable existence, seemed sad to me. He didn’t agree.

“I don’t think it feels bad. No matter what we humans do, it just keeps on being its river self. It creates its own levees anyway. It does great curves and bends and then cuts the bend off abruptly, causing its isolation. It destroys and renews itself all the time.”