Sandra Jackson-Opoku is the author of an award-winning novel, The River Where Blood is Born and Hot Johnny and the Women Who Loved Him, an Essence Magazine Bestseller in Hardcover Fiction. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic works are widely published and produced, appearing in Midnight & Indigo, Aunt Chloe, Another Chicago Magazine, New Daughters of Africa, Adi Magazine, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, About Place Journal, the Chicago Humanities Festival, Lifeline Theatre, and others. She also coedited the anthology, Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks. Her debut mystery novel, Savvy Summers and the Sweet Potato Crimes will be published in July 2025. Professional recognition includes a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an American Library Association Black Caucus Award, the Chicago Esteemed Artist Award, a Lifeline Theatre BIPOC Adaptation Showcase, the Globe Soup Story Award, the Plentitudes Journal Fiction Prize, a Circle of Confusion Writers Discovery Fellowship, the Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award, the Hearst Foundation James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell Arts, a Pushcart Prize nomination, the Casa África Purorrelato Prize, and the Chicago Sun-Times “Finding Chicago's Next Voices” Award. She placed as a quarterfinalist in the Stage 32 Springboard Diversity Screenwriting Competition and Roadmap Writers Short Story Competition. Sandra Jackson-Opoku taught literature and writing at the University of Miami, Columbia College Chicago, and Chicago State University. She presents workshops, readings, and literary events worldwide.
Ghost Waters
That old Mississippi is such a tyrant, some say it must be a man—Old Man River, the Father of Waters, Big Muddy, Old Blue. He ain’t asking much. All he wants is to sprawl along a path of his own making, to flex and flow like he’s done for millions of years.
What if people went to clogging up your courses and scraping at your bottom? If they built earthen walls to keep you out, then dumped farm and factory waste in you, don’t think you wouldn’t be acting up too.
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I’ll tell you how the river took from us and gave back if you want to hear it.
I was the oldest of four children raised right up against the water. Delta dirt was so rich they said you could plant a dime and grow a dollar tree. Both my parents had worked cotton on Crawford’s Acres. After the war, they continued sharecropping right where they had been slaves.
Captain C.W. Crawford was getting nigh up in age. His wife, Miss Mary up and died, and all his children had left him. That’s when he offered to sell my folks the old plantation.
I had left the family sharecrop at 16 years old and went off to Yazoo City, first to work as a nursery schoolma’am then as a white folks’ nanny. Helping the family back in Bethel Bluffs meant scrimping on every nickel. I sometimes went without doing for myself to do for the folks back home. It took years but we made it, hallelujah, praise the Lord!
My folks were finally able to own their piece of land. Now they didn’t have to give up half their harvest every season. My parents, brother, and two younger sisters had left the shotgun cabin and were living high on the hog up in the Crawford’s Acres big house. They didn’t need to sharecrop for anyone ever again. Now they had folks that were sharecropping for them.
Then came 1927, Lord have mercy, Jesus. That big, terrible flood came and plowed the length of the Mississippi. We were in Greenville at the time. I have never seen nothing like it and I don’t want to see it again.
Old Man River swole up like a snake that swallowed a cow then he went and busted his guts across the land. He exploded over levees and banks, a hungry bear just a-snuffling along and gobbling ground as it went. Brown water boiled up in a muddy stew, grabbing everything in its path--houses, horses, barns, trees, tractors, and cotton fields. And people sometimes too.
My family used to think they were safe living high on the bluffs above water until that great gushing beast clawed up the rocky soil beneath them. All of Crawford Acres went sliding into the river, and with it the money, sweat, and dreams we poured into it over the years.
No, baby. I wasn’t there. If I’d been able to see it, you might not be around to hear it. I knew about it from the only one who got out alive. Old Blue took the four as a sacrifice but left me my sister, Little Bay.
But oh, that shifty, sly, winding, fickle river. Come seven years gone it shrunk back down to a thin blue snake. A long dry spell in ‘35 sent The Father of Waters bolting the banks like a runaway slave. A mudskipper raising up on all fours, it crawled way back from the shore.
The settlement beneath the river broke through to the surface. A soggy ghost of a town came rising up—rubbled bluffs and bottomlands, the old ferry landing, the brick jailhouse, the hotel, post office, and church. River water poured like tears from all the doors and windows.
Your grandpa, Little Bay, and I took the train up to see it. We thought of leaving the city, reclaiming the land, and trying to farm it. But Big Muddy had other plans.
Like a hand that offers a perfect ripe peach then snatches it clean away, Old Man River came back again to take what he had given.
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Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats.
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