A hearing of Paul Robeson’s ‘Ol’ Man River’ (1928), in which the mighty Mississippi is chided for “rolling along” oblivious to the discrimination faced by many, usually results in tears and goosebumps for its indictment of black oppression.
Many others, including Frank Sinatra, have covered the song. For Indians, it invariably leads to Bhupen Hazarika’s ‘O Ganga Boicho Kyano’, admonishing the river Ganga for flowing freely seemingly impervious to people’s hardships.
The Mississippi, of course, is a legend of literature, having been the playground of life’s realities in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. As Huck Finn escapes from his alcoholic father by faking his own death and begins his journey down the Mississippi in a raft, he meets an escaped slave, Jim, and together they grapple with issues such as prejudice, fear, but also joy, hope and freedom.
British travel writer Jonathan Raban, who passed away last month, first read Huckleberry Finn when he was seven years old, and lived inside the book. While Huck sneaked off in disguise to forage in a riverside town, Raban, playing it out in his mind, stayed back on the raft, laying trot lines for catfish. He took out the family atlas and traced the river’s course from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, loving the sounds of the “legendary and heroic” places it passed through: Minneapolis, Dubuque, Hannibal, St. Louis, Cairo, Memphis, Baton Rouge.
‘Everything would be left to chance’
Thirty years later, he made the journey down the Mississippi, painting for readers a river full of rage and beauty once described by T.S. Eliot as a “strong brown god”. In Old Glory: An American Voyage (1981), he takes a 16-ft. aluminium skiff to cruise down the river for most of its length, writing about the world he travelled through with sincerity, passion, wit, lyrical prose and self-deprecating humour.
It seemed he had obsessively prepared for this voyage all his life, adding scraps of detail from every source possible, dog-eared National Geographic editions, Zadok Cramer’s The Navigator, other river books such as Henry Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to a painting by George Caleb Bingham.
Though he realised it’s hard to make travel arrangements to visit a dream, he decided to go with the flow: “The book and the journey would be all of a piece. The plot would be written by the current of the river itself. It would carry one into long deep pools of solitude, and into brushes with society on the shore. Where the river meandered, so would the book, and when the current speeded up into a narrow chute, the book would follow it. Everything would be left to chance.”
But before he set off, Raban read up on the river, its history — filing away minute details like how in 1890, 30 million tonnes of freight had been carried downriver; and that in 1979, after a long and catastrophic decline in river trade, business was up again to 40 million tonnes — the impact of the Civil War, right down to its lock and dam system, and why Minneapolis had turned its back on the river.
Learning the river
He tucked away advice from well-wishers in the crevices of his mind. “You’ve got to watch the sky,” a veteran tells him, “…if the clouds look wrong somehow, you get off the river,” teaching him how to sense if hurricanes and other storms were brewing. “The time you got to start worrying is when she goes dead quiet. That’s when she means to get up to something,” another tells him.
Long before Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Big Country or The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America, Raban was telling Americans about their country, in not very flattering terms. “Every time I tried to turn my head, I found someone else’s hot dog, bloody with ketchup, sticking into my own mouth.” At Hannibal, Missouri, Raban finds Huck’s hometown all decked up in touristy traps.
But the most eloquent bits are left for the river, “as big and depthless as the sky itself,” and its impact on him. Like her, he understands he has no gift for permanence, “running away… was what I was good at”. Raban left his homeland, Britain, and set roots in Seattle, going on to write many books including Coastland, Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and its Meanings and others.
Before he passed away, he finished his memoir, Father and Son, to be published later this year.
(The writer looks back at one classic every month.)
sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in
