Mississippi Quarterly

Mann's lifeless eyes hide behind a shade approaching the color of coal. They appear as shadowy features of his dark face before their magnificent details, elusive to a casual glance, captivate in their emptiness. By the time Mann's charcoaled pupils escape into the world beyond the canvas, he has traveled across five exquisitely painted etchings of his journey through a flood of deep blue water, each print heavy with the weight of his impending demise. In the sixth frame, the one with those haunting eyes that draw living eyes into his corpse, Mann lies on a beach, his mouth agape. His large, limp left hand sinks into white sand, while his right hand covers wounds on his bare torso exposed by his ripped white shirt. His unnaturally sprawled limbs, arrested by the river, hang on the embankment. A crucifix at the water's edge.

With thick, pronounced lines and a mix of dark hues that boost the visual dimensions of Mann's slaying, John Wilson (1922–2015) commands the viewer to face "The Death of Mann" (fig. 6), the final etching in his The Richard Wright Suite (2001). A visual dramatization of Wright's novella "Down By the Riverside," from the 1938 collection Uncle Tom's Children, the six etchings of the Wright Suite retell the story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 when perpetual rains pushed the massive waterway to more than thirty feet in height, fracturing close to 150 levees between Illinois and Louisiana. Wilson's [End Page 89] etchings, a visual reimagining of Wright's novella, depict the river as a striking cerulean stream. Laboriously crafted in aquatint, the blue water not only memorializes the power of climate disasters fomented by industrial capitalism but enshrines Mann as an enduring symbol of those sacrificed by the calamitous machineries of the plantationocene.¹

When the Great Flood came, waters covered 26,000 square miles along the lower Mississippi River leading to a reported death toll of 246, although it is believed that more Black deaths were never accounted for. More than a million people, over half of whom were Black, were left homeless from the nearly $400 million in property damage left in the flood's wake. The American Red Cross organized relief camps to administer medical and financial aid, but white planters, fearing loss of control over their Black laborers and the diminishing value of their cotton harvests, used the camps to conscript Blacks, under the threat of brutal violence, into work gangs.²

Wright was eighteen and residing in Memphis, Tennessee, when the flood ravaged the Mississippi Delta, including his hometown of Roxie, Mississippi, and left thousands in refugee camps in Phillips County, Arkansas (Bearden 401), where he had lived in the small township of Elaine with his aunt and uncle between the ages of eight and ten. The three locales—Memphis, Roxie, and Elaine—formed for Wright a "triangulated" spatial and cultural geography of the South (Davis) from which he imagined the flood and its aftermath. Wright gathered accounts of the disaster from the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and from friends and family who had been impacted, to mythologize the flood through a series of stories that weaved in his commitments to Marxist and race critiques of Western civilization (Howard). He wrote "Riverside" and the short story "Silt," which appeared in New Masses in 1937, and was reprinted in Eight Men as "The Man Who Saw the Flood." "Riverside," the most acclaimed of these fictional accounts, centers on Mann, a tenant farmer at the bottom of the Mississippi River industrial [End Page 90] complex³ who worked each season on a field of crops, presumably cotton, to diminish his insurmountable debt. Although Mann knows the flood is approaching, he waits until the very last moment to leave his home, well after government aid to vacate him and his family was no longer available, because he did not want to abandon his seasonal harvest. Faced with massive debt, Mann's crop shares would be even more valuable if he could sell them before his evacuated competitors took theirs to the market.

When the levee near his farm breaks, Mann desperately commandeers a boat stolen from a white family, leading to his murdering Henry Heartfield, the family's patriarch, to conceal his theft. Mann's mother-in-law, Grannie, his young son, Peewee, and his wife, Lulu, board the stolen boat to escape the flood, but also to procure reproductive care for Lulu, who is in need of medical assistance to deliver her and Mann's second child. Mann's efforts are ultimately too late: Lulu and their unborn child die before they reach a doctor at the American Red Cross camp, and the owners of the boat identify Mann as a murderer while he works under conscription to bury the bodies of the drowned. Once he is exposed, an angry white mob of deputized soldiers executes Mann for his sin of stealing a white man's vessel to carry his Black family to safety. His remains straddle the bank of a river Wright describes variously as "clayey yellow," "brown," "blurred green," and black as "liquid tar" (74, 166).

Wright's selected title, "Down by the Riverside," invokes the African American spiritual that celebrates the power of the biblical Jordan River as a site of multiple events—the Old Testament waterway the Israelites crossed to reach the promised land of Canaan and the New Testament locale of Jesus's baptism. As a refrain, "down by the riverside" is sung in call and response throughout each verse following a leading first line that moves the story across time. The introductory lyric of the first stanza, "Going to lay down my sword and shield," suggests the battles the Israelites faced after reaching Canaan to secure their sacred covenant, and the second, "Going to lay down my burden [End Page 91] refers to emulating Jesus's path of peace after years of war and struggle. In the African-derived cosmologies of the enslaved and their descendants, the spiritual's "riverside" was both material and psychic—an edge of a body of water that had to be physically crossed to reach freedom, a ceremonial site of baptismal immersion into Christian life, and the horizon of earthly existence where the faithful ascended to the kingdom of heaven.

Wright, who was highly critical of the Seventh-day Adventist church in which he was raised,⁴ does something distinctive in his narrative rendering of the "Riverside" spiritual. In a pivotal scene, Murray, a community elder, leads Mann and his family in prayer as they prepare to board Heartfield's boat to find help for Lulu. As Mann anxiously anticipates fleeing his home, fully realizing the vicious battle that will likely come with transporting his family in a stolen vessel, Elder Murray pleads for God to intervene on behalf of the Mann family, and to "[p]urify the hearts" of the "white folks" who will stand in their way. At the end of his prayer, Elder Murray leads the family through the first verse of "Down By the Riverside," repeating the phrase, "Ah ain gonna study war no mo" ("Riverside" 89, 88). The refrain is as much a plea for God to lead whites to redemption for desperately offering up Black lives to ensure their own survival as it is a prophecy of Mann's final, peaceful surrender to the insurmountable powers waged against him in his fight to save his loved ones. Just before deputized white men gun down Mann with rifles, "[h]is fear subsided into a cold numbness. . . . Yes, now! . . . Yes, now, he would die! He would die before he would let them kill him." Finally at peace with his imminent death, Mann runs through trees towards the river as his body succumbs to a hail of bullets that leave his physical remains "trailing in the brown current" of wastewater from the flood's destruction (165, 166).

While the spiritual "Down by the Riverside" provided the title of Wright's novella, and lyricized Mann's story, the blues, as Ralph Ellison noted in a review of Wright's Black Boy, "helped shape [Wright's] attitude towards his life" (491). If the blues, with its lyrical mourning of personal tragedy, permeated Wright's storytelling, then "Riverside" is part of a chorus of blues commemorations of the flood. Take, for instance, Bessie Smith's "Backwater Blues," in which she lamented that [End Page 92] the flood's long rains turned the skies "dark as night" and forced her to "pack her things and go"; or Barbecue Bob's "Mississippi Heavy Water Blues," a wave of sorrowful cries about how the storm washed his house and woman away, leaving him with tears as heavy as the flood waters. And perhaps most famously, Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy fearfully moaned over swift guitar strides about the torrential downpour that overflowed barriers and left them homeless in "When the Levees Break," a tune Led Zeppelin revived forty years later. In all three tracks, flood waters metaphorize tears brought on from forced displacement. Songs and stories mythologizing Mississippi's Great Flood form an intertextual archive of catastrophe and loss.⁵

Wright understood how the legacies of the plantation not only racially ordered society through material dispossession and tactics of psychological terror but also created environmental conditions that structured Black folks' relationship to the natural world. Besides "Riverside," a water motif runs through each of the other four stories in Uncle Tom's Children, directing the Black characters on their individual paths to dignity and freedom. It eludes characters when they need it most, immobilizes them from action, and metaphorizes their desire for white bourgeois society. "Riverside" tells of water's violent, uncontrollably destructive character that lays bare the routine hardships faced by those on the lowest end of the South's racial order. By the fifth and final novella, "Bright and Morning Star," a waterway is the site of a figurative baptism. Sue, the central character, crosses a creek to retrieve her son, Johnny-Boy, who hasn't returned home from organizing a communist meeting. Her physical passage through the water represents a transition in her consciousness, a diminishing of paralyzing fear, and the emergence of resolve that empowers her to sacrifice her life to gun down a law officer who tortures her son for political organizing (Webb 13–15). In the cosmology of Uncle Tom's Children, water is a formless wonder, at once elusive yet overwhelming, destructive yet liberating.

Wilson's Wright Suite lures the viewer into the scenario of "Riverside," but its foregrounding of the color blue in its representation of the Mississippi River thickens water as a character in the story. With the [End Page 93] assistance of printmaker James Stroud, Wilson used etching and aquatint techniques to engrave his drawn images of Mann's passage onto copper plates. "Etching techniques like aquatint and spit biting," Wilson explains,

were ideal to interpret the dark brooding, murky atmosphere. Above all, the river with its powerful currents and its violent energy lends itself to aquatint. . . . I wanted the blue translucent shapes and flowing rhythms of the water to carry the figures from one episode to the next.

(Afterword)

Bold, black lines form angles in faces, bodies, and the physical structures surrounding them, including the river's distinctive blue, with its blend of ultra marine, cerulean, and Prussian paints Wilson and Stroud intentionally mixed for the Wright Suite. The combination of colors and shapes commands viewers to see and feel the presence of death, much like Wilson's now erased mural The Incident, which he painted on a wall in Mexico during the early 1950s, or the surviving study lithographs and sketches he created in preparation for that larger work.⁶ All bring the terror of lynching to stillness.

Each of the six etchings captures a scene from the novella: a frontispiece of the family of four, with Mann rowing along a shoreline of light blue water and white sand as they approach the Red Cross hospital ("Journey of the Mann Family," fig. 1); Mann lifting Lulu into a white boat as Peewee and Grannie sorrowfully look on ("Embarkation," fig. 2); Mann steering the boat towards a house lit bright in the distance while Lulu lays in her mother's arms, and Peewee sits in the bow ("Light in the Window," fig. 3); Lulu lying on a medical table as Mann pitifully bows his head over her stiff body that holds the flesh of a child who will not enter the world alive ("Death of Lulu," fig. 4); four white men violently ambushing Mann while two young white boys look on in the distance ("Mann Attacked," fig. 5); and finally, Mann's slain body sprawled on the banks of the Mississippi ("The Death of Mann," fig. 6).⁷ Wilson omitted the scene of Mann's murder of Heartfield, [End Page 94]

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Fig. 1.

John Woodrow Wilson, "Journey of the Mann Family," etching/aquatint, 2001.

Courtesy of the estate of John Wilson.

[End Page 95]

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Fig. 2.

John Woodrow Wilson, "Embarkation," etching/aquatint, 2001.

Courtesy of the estate of John Wilson.

[End Page 96]

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Fig. 3.

John Woodrow Wilson, "Light in the Window," etching/aquatint, 2001.

Courtesy of the estate of John Wilson.

[End Page 97]

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Fig. 4.

John Woodrow Wilson, "Death of Lulu," etching/aquatint, 2001.

Courtesy of the estate of John Wilson.

[End Page 98]

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Fig. 5.

John Woodrow Wilson, "Mann Attacked." etching/aquatint, 2001.

Courtesy of the estate of John Wilson.

[End Page 99]

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Fig. 6.

John Woodrow Wilson, "The Death of Mann," etching/aquatint, 2001.

Courtesy of the estate of John Wilson.

[End Page 100] choosing instead to foreground Mann's direct care for his family. Mann carries Lulu onto the boat in "Embarkation," and steers their boat across the river in two others, "Journey of the Mann Family" and "Light in the Window." Lulu, Peewee, and Grannie appear in four of the six frames, and the family's collective movement holds until Lulu's death in the fourth frame. Only the final etching leaves Mann as the central human character. Wilson's focus on Mann's strict attention to his family ultimately evades Zora Neale Hurston's critique of Wright's portrayal of Mann, a character she found to be "a stupid, blundering character, but full of pathos" because the narrative is structured around his singular choices that lead to his vicious killing (3). Without the context of the vessel's origins, Wilson's images portray Mann as a heroic boat captain in desperate search for his and his family's safety after a massive flood has hindered their access to health care and left them vulnerable to vicious white attackers.

Wilson read Uncle Tom's Children in the early forties while struggling with his place in the art world. As a Black man in his early twenties, Wilson faced difficulties identifying professional models in the culture of commercial art. As he approached the end of his five-year training at the Boston Museum School, he was uncertain whether he could make a life as an artist, not only because of his racial identity, but also because of his emerging artistic vision. "I was beginning to express in my art what I felt conflicted about in this world," he told Patricia Hills in 1995, "And it was a black world [that could not be accommodated in art culture]. I remember feeling this conflict—a world that promised freedom and opportunity for anyone who worked hard . . . but clearly if you are black, you realize that these nice sounding phrases did not include you" (27).

On the recommendation of Karl Zerbe, one of his Museum School professors, Wilson applied for, and then received, a John Hay Whitney Fellowship, an award that supported projects dedicated to education and social welfare. The Fellowship funded Wilson's travel to Mexico in 1950, where he studied at the government-operated art school, La Esmeralda, and with the printmaking cooperative, Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP). While in Mexico, Wilson worked with artists like Elizabeth Catlett to cultivate a visual aesthetic—characterized by simplified forms, bold abstraction, a contrast of light to dark to create three-dimensionality—to translate the terror and beauty of what he witnessed [End Page 101] in Wright's writing. "I wanted to create images," he confessed to Hills, "that would be as powerful as what Richard Wright and James Baldwin wrote about, but I wanted to do it visually" (29). When commissioned by Limited Editions Art Books to illustrate a story of his choosing, Wilson selected "Riverside" "because of Wright's vivid dramatic setting" of the Mississippi, which "seemed to symbolize basic forces of nature."⁸

The terror Wilson summoned in his visual interpretation of Wright's story endures as the industrialization complexes that led to the 1927 Great Flood continue to draw nature's ire by warming the climate to temperatures that have yielded increasingly volatile and unpredictable hurricanes, the effects of which are disproportionately felt by Black communities in the global South.⁹ Each fall, monstrous storms in the Gulf and in the Atlantic—Betsy, Hugo, Maria, Irma, Laura, and Katrina, for instance—threaten coastal lands as well as inland areas, as winds carry waste and debris to immense heights, and drive storm surges that submerge homes in murky water. But the power and impact of climate-related disasters have begun to transcend seasons. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 lasted for 152 days, a record duration until more recently when, from December 2018 until August 2019, the lower Mississippi River flooded for 226 days ("Mississippi River Flood History"). For almost twenty years leading up to the historic flood, dating back to 2000, the Mississippi had six major flood events, four of which were triggered by spring rainfall and snowmelt from northern states. And it is not just the Mississippi, but also the rivers with which it intersects; in the [End Page 102] winter of 2020, for instance, rains rose the Pearl River, which meets the Mississippi in Tougaloo, to thirty-six feet, about eight feet above flood stage, flooding a thousand homes in the state's capital of Jackson.

Besides hurricanes, flooding episodes persist from torrential rains that overwhelm Jackson's neglected water system, rendering it incapable of consistently bringing clean water to the city's Black majority. Residents report that the liquid that comes out of their faucets looks similar to what Wright describes in "Riverside"—"black" and like "goo"—requiring them to boil their water for everyday uses like bathing, washing dishes, and running a toilet. The racially segregated development of infrastructures, supported by legislation that disproportionately funnels tax revenues to white districts,¹⁰ preserves the legacy of the plantationocene that Wright illuminated in his narrative of Mann's servitude in sharecropping, and that Wilson reproduced in the Suite he devoted to Wright's "Riverside." The increased warming of the climate further compromises the mechanical systems that manipulate the Mississippi as drought conditions in the Midwest have reduced water levels, diminishing the waterway's resistance to the intrusion of saltwater flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico. Increased masses of salt in the Mississippi endangers drinking water systems and deteriorates the physical fabric of coastlines.¹¹

Still, given the fear and trembling the engineering of the Mississippi continues to bring, how are we to explain Wilson's intentional—and laborious—making of the river as an alluring cerulean in contrast to Wright's own gloomy narration of the water as a series of dark, hideous colors? The blue Mississippi River runs through five of the six frames of the Wright Suite, connecting each with subtle force. The aquatinted tones accentuate the coal-like outlines of the characters' anatomies, seizing the viewer in each still image, while rhythmically guiding the gaze from etching to etching. In "Embarkation" (fig. 2), the cerulean river floods the grounds around the home of the Mann family, covering the steps leading to their front door, and reaching the windows of a house in the far distance of the image. "Embarkation" is where the [End Page 103] river's hue achieves its highest concentration of blue in the entire series. Its color holds in the subsequent frame, "Light in the Window" (fig. 3), as Mann guides the boat towards a house that is illuminated only by a glow in a small window.

The river is absent only in the fourth frame, "Death of Lulu" (fig. 4), a stunning portrayal of her and her never-to-be-born child's passing. A white sheet drapes half of Lulu's dead body. Her left arm hangs over the side of the hard wooden examination table. The dark, defining lines in her sleeve emphasize the stillness of her limb, and extend to the skin on her left hand and fingers, the nailbed of her left thumb refracts the black lines on her hand. Wilson achieves the effect of lifelessness not only in his detailed rendering of Lulu's arm, and her closed lips and eyes, but also in the movements around her—a white doctor looks over Lulu with his left hand behind her head, and Grannie and Peewee peer from the doorway of the examination room, while Mann, emasculated by his inability to save his wife and unborn child, holds his hat with bowed head and slightly parted lips. The etching's dim tones mourn the scene Wright imagines in his novella around the pervasive legacy of a medical system that has minimized Black women's access to health care and commodified their reproductive and birthing capacities for the regeneration of captive labor (Cooper Owens and Schroering).

Wilson resurrects the blue river in the next image, "Mann Attacked" (fig. 5), as a mob of four bloodthirsty white men encircle Mann while he struggles to break free of their custody. One of the men holds a heavy baton near Mann's head and is draped in overalls colored in the blue of the river behind him. The cerulean tones in the violent attacker's garment implicate him in the destructive force of the flood caused by the industrial system that initiated the demise of the Mann family and foregrounds the blue river that surrounds Mann's body in the final frame. The club-wielding man's overalls, however, also bear the same blue tone that adorns Peewee in "Embarkation" (fig. 2) and "Light in the Window" (fig. 3). The two figures are brought together in blue—one, a white adult member of a mob that executes Mann; the other, a Black boy who boards and sits portside of the vessel ostensibly carrying his family to safety from a racially structured disaster. Opposing forces of slaughter and desperate yearning for freedom joined in the color of the water. [End Page 104]

In this sense, Wilson's pronounced coloring of the river not only visually channels its industrial manipulation for the US's commercial production at the expense of the lives of Mann, Lulu, and their unborn child. The blue, with its shared tones with Peewee's clothes, also conjures the sentiment of crossing as deliverance lyricized in Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," which Hughes wrote after journeying over the Mississippi River on his way to Mexico in 1920 (Granger 190–91). "My soul has grown deep like the rivers," Hughes lyricizes repeatedly in the poem to etch a relation among the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile, and the Mississippi waterway he looked out upon (Hughes). In "Light at the Window" (fig. 3), Peewee, too, looks out over the alluring blue water as his father oars the boat towards a glimmer of light.

Wilson's soul was also deepened by the power of crossings, as sites of connection and possibility.¹² In interviews, he spoke repeatedly of moving among the restrictive of boundaries of racial segregation. The son of immigrants from British Guiana (now Guyana), Wilson witnessed firsthand the transnational differences in race and class structures produced under the plantationocene. Upon arriving to the United States, Wilson's parents fell from their middle-class status in Guyana's plantation system to a lower-working class status in Depression-era Boston. In Guyana, his father, Reginald Arthur Wilson (1893–1971), had been a small business owner and a technician in Guyana's sugar industry, but when he arrived in the United States, he had difficulty finding employment. Wilson's mother, Violet Serena Caesar Wilson (1896–1981), the daughter of a director of a sugar plantation refinery, worked as a domestic laborer in the United States. "My father was a kind of broken man by [entering the Black working class in the US], but the idea was that his children should not be disillusioned or not be psychologically hurt to the point where they couldn't fight to have their chance to grow and develop or prosper" (Wilson, "Oral history" 11).

Wilson abided by his father's aspirations for him and his siblings to cross racial lines to obtain whatever they needed to realize their dreams in the United States. As a young man, Wilson spent his afternoons and evenings after school at the racially and ethnically diverse [End Page 105] Roxbury Boys Club, which offered art classes taught by students at the Boston Museum School. His instructors at the Boys Club, Peter Paul Dubaniewicz and William Halsey, taught Wilson art techniques, and entered his work in national competitions that Wilson would regularly win. It was also through the Boys Club that Wilson acquired a summer job as a dishwasher at the Windsor House, a hotel in the affluent residential community of Duxbury in Plymouth County, and the site of Wilson's first art installation. Wilson's teachers at the Boys Club collected his artwork, put it in a portfolio, and submitted the collection to the Boston Museum School on Wilson's behalf, which led to his art training after high school. The support Wilson received from his instructors at the Boys Club and the Boston Museum School did not, however, blind him to the global racial structures that restricted the social advancement of Black populations while broadening possibilities for whites. These experiences of moving across racial lines were deeply formative to Wilson's maturation as an artist, and his understanding of racial structures in neighborhoods, regions, and nations. By the time he entered the Boston Museum School, he was prepared to endure the social alienation of being a Black artist in a predominantly white industry, even as his training at the Boston Museum School did not sufficiently nourish his artistic imagination. His time there, nonetheless, led to his winning a John Hay Whitney Fellowship for travel to Mexico, which provided him the space and time to hone his artistic perspective on Black worlds.

Wilson credited his father with nurturing his aspirations to become an artist. Wilson's achievements in the art world, his father believed, would redeem his own failure to find financial success in the US. Wilson's father often spent time with Wilson at the Boys Club, even consulting with the art instructors about Wilson's progress. When Wilson won awards, his father would send announcements of his son's prizes to local Black newspapers, in essence making Wilson a celebrity in Roxbury. While the elder Wilson's desire for his son to live out his father's dream in the US is a common trope in immigrant narratives, Wilson's father saw his family's movement within Marcus Garvey's crusade for Black people to leave the plantations of the Western Hemisphere to go "back to Africa." Garvey's campaign was, for Wilson's father, a generational expression of "deliverance narratives" that were common in Guyana at the end of the nineteenth century. These narratives, [End Page 106] cultivated by a community of liberated Africans from the Kongo, saw reality as "parallel worlds of the living and the dead, separated by a permeable body of water, which extraordinary people could cross." The abundance of rivers in Guyana's ecology reinforced imagined ties between enslavement and spiritual deliverance, and descendants of the Kongo performed riverside rites hoping to return to Africa (Schuler 346). For Reginald Wilson, Garvey's movement could lead the Wilson family to earthly deliverance by ultimately recrossing the Atlantic to Africa, where they would contribute to elevating the continent to a world economic power.

Whereas Reginald was devoted to Garvey's message of deliverance, Wilson, much like other Black Caribbean-descended artists of his generation, found a social philosophy in Wright's writing.¹³ For Wilson, Uncle Tom's Children illuminated the "underbelly of America, at some level. . . . And I think this . . . I got to know . . . I began to get a feeling for a kind of an analysis of the world, of America, through this understanding of a kind of class system" (Wilson, "Oral History" 263). Wilson ultimately agreed with Wright's analysis of the racial and class order, as well as with Wright's critique of Garvey's movement, that Black folk in the Western Hemisphere could not return to Africa to elevate the continent as a world power because Africa, too, was "owned by the imperial powers of Europe" (Wright, Black Boy 286). Wilson's father sought freedom from a social system by moving to physical places that promised a better life; his son came to understand the same system—what we can term the plantationocene—as inherently global, and therefore inescapable, in its geographical expanse. For Wilson, under such material conditions, a more productive mode of elevating human consciousness was to translate his father's pursuit of deliverance through physical relocation into powerful visualizations of crossing.

The story Wilson tells in the Wright Suite is not only about the terror of the Great Mississippi Flood. His symbolic recounting of Wright's story also remembers his family's complicated and unfinished passage in the modern world. Just follow Wilson's elegantly crafted river through the Suite. It begins as a flood at the home of the Mann family in "Embarkation" (fig. 1), where they board a boat to escape the elevated waters, and runs through "The Light in the Window" (fig. 3) [End Page 107] before receding in "Death of Lulu" (fig. 4), the only etching without any depiction of the river. "Lulu" marks a break in the flow of the cerulean stream between "Embarkation" and "The Light in the Window," on the one hand, and "Mann Attacked" (fig. 5) and "The Death of Mann" (fig. 6) on the other. The Mississippi returns in "Mann Attacked," but only minimally so, as a rivulet behind the trees surrounding Mann as he is overpowered by an angry white mob that ushers him to an ultimate crossing into death. The blue river presides over the final frame, "Death of Mann." Through dark lines outlining the river's body, Wilson gives the water depth that embraces Mann's corpse while reaching towards an undefined horizon.¹⁴

As Mann lies at the bank of the Mississippi River, the blue liquid fibers brush against his burdened body, not fully enveloping him, but only hugging his legs and feet. Rough, charcoal-like lines outline the water's waves, reed grass, and the surrounding sand. Mann's elegantly engraved corpse, sacrificed at the cross of unbridled economic production, assumes the shape of a wave, certain to join currents that will eventually pull him from the river's edge into its mouth, making way for his son, who is swathed in the promise of the cerulean river.¹⁵ Ordained in white, a color that symbolizes the world of unseen powers in West and Central Africa, Mann becomes a candidate for a baptismal crossing into the world of ancestors, rendering the surging waters of the flood that ultimately led him there as abundant love awaiting his return. As he lies on its bank, the river eulogizes Mann, and all those who have been brutalized under the structures of plantations, and their spatial and environmental aftermaths. Seeing "The Death of Mann" (fig. 6) is a visual ceremony that mourns lost lives at a river waiting to redeem what is brought to its shore. [End Page 108]