The Mississippi Riverboats

• In Event: Rivers and enslaved lifeworlds

Description for Program

In his 1853 novel Clotel or The President’s Daughter, William Wells Brown creates a scene that indelibly imprints the link between slavery and riverboat gambling onto 19th century African American literature. In the chapter titled “Going to the South” Brown describes a typical steamboat trip on the Mississippi and the wealthy “gentlemen” planters—slaveowners—who would bet on anything, including dangerous steamboat races, often losing everything, including their enslaved property to the hard core gamblers or “Blacklegs” who populated the steamboat saloons.This history of steamboats, slavery and gambling is all but forgotten as people flock to one of the most profitable casino “meccas” in the South, Biloxi, Mississippi. Drawing on the poet Natasha Tretheway’s Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I discuss how the people living along the gulf coast were deceived into believing that riverboat gambling would improve their lives. Instead, their needs were ignored as casino moguls scrambled after Katrina to replace the riverboats and barges with land based casinos, thereby further eroding an already vulnerable ecosystem.

Author

• Sandra Adell, University of Wisconsin-Madison