These histories and environmental legacies remain visible all over the landscape of New Orleans. They are seen and felt in the imposing framework of the ancien régime grid, which since the city’s founding has divided and segregated rich and poor, free from unfree, white and Black, collaborating with the networks of reservoirs, levees, pumping systems, and public riverfronts constructed along the edge of the Mississippi to keep the edges of it in line. Some plantation complexes where sugarcane was once harvested and processed still stand along the riverbanks of River Road (with a few transformed into sites of public education). In the space between them, petrochemical refineries financed by Formosa, Shell, and ExxonMobil light the skies with carcinogens and toxic smoke above and fluorescent sludge below, their plants constructed on former plantation sites, ancestral burial grounds of Indigenous tribes, and cemeteries of the enslaved. The will to squeeze and strangle the land, the river, and the Black and brown peoples who live and work there goes on, improvising anew across time and space.
And yet, around this moon-formed meeting of water and land, a landscape has come into being through a constellation of resistances to these strategies of control and occupation. Movements and struggles against the tides of commodification persist in the natural and human worlds, both refusing to abide, seeping into the systems created to quell them. This is affirmed each time the Mississippi River spills over its banks. As Toni Morrison rightly reminds us, “they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places … it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” It is also instantiated in each recorded account of marronage, a permanent and common modality of resistance in the Delta wetlands, which turned the swamps into radical sites of commerce and kinship that sustained Black life and education, kept families together, and granted space for escape from enslavement. Revolts gathered up smaller reverberations of rebellion into visible and communal resistance, as on the night of January 8, 1811, when a group of more than five hundred Black people marched from LaPlace in St. John the Baptist Parish toward New Orleans along River Road. Armed with shovels and axes—the tools of their labor—they formed a thick cloud of protection behind their leader Charles Deslondes, an enslaved Creole of color. The historian Walter Johnson’s account of the 1811 revolt lends names and lands to those who participated: among their group were men named Cupidon, Al-Hassan, Janvier, and Diaca; some were American-born, African, or Creole; some hailed from Congo or the Akan; some were Christian, others Muslim. Each were organized into companies that reflected their origins, which together, representing the global stretch of cultures and communities violently destroyed by the transatlantic slave trade, were “dedicated to the single purpose of its overthrow.” Across their journey, they hid in the deep recesses of swamp and river, harnessing their labyrinthine waterways—places they knew and understood better than did their enemies—for protection. The muddy waters of the Mississippi hold these diasporic histories still; like all rivers, their edges are never still.