Edited excerpt from Rising Tide
At 4:30am a new contingent of men arrived. At 6:30 word flashed down-a small break in the levee had appeared.In a car he rushed to the scene. Water 12 inches deep and 25 inches wide was gushing through the low spot he had noted earlier.
Within half an hour 1,500 men were working on the low spot. By then the flow of water had grown to the size of a roaring stream.
"The negroes ran to the break also," Sanders wrote in his official report, "but as they arrived they soon became demoralized and ran away. It then became necessary for the civilian foreman and my detachment to force the negroes to the break at the point of guns."
Hundreds of blacks, held by guns, began risking their lives for someone they had to see as a white fool. Under the guns they filled sandbags, threw them into the breach, passed them down the line to men standing in the breach. The water poured through in a growing torrent, washing the sandbags away as fast as they threw them in. Under their feet the levee quivered, shook. The breach was wider, deeper. The river was overflowing the levee along a front of several miles.
Mason remembers, "You could see the earth just start boiling. A man hollered, 'Watch out! It's gonna break!' Everybody was hollering to get off. It was like turning a hydrant on-water was shooting forward."
Men began running. Everyone was yelling at the top of his voice. The levee "just seemed to move forward as if 100 feet of it was pushed out by the river."
Word spread instantly amid confusion. Cora Campbell remembers "I was . . . right where it broke. My husband, he was working on that levee. . . . I run and run and run. . . .The bells was ringing and the whitstles was blowing. Oh it was a terrible time. We made it to the levee."
The levee was the only land. The rest would soon be water. At plantations all through the district bells rang, dogs barked, cows bellowed, people hurried about gathering necessities. In Greenville at 8am, the fire whistle and every whistle at every mill began to blow, and every church bell rang. Immediately water pressure dropped to nothing as thousands of people tried to fill their bathtubs with a supply of drinking water.
At 12:30pm, Thursday, April 21, the Corps of Engineers received a wire, "Levee broke at ferry landing Mounds Mississippi eight am. Crevasse will overflow entire Mississippi Delta."
Things would never be the same again.