In a place where hurricanes are the local calamity, one might expect history to have a tenuous grip. On the coast of Faulkner’s Mississippi, the past was a treasured, if superficial, asset—an adornment more than a way of life. The coastline was strikingly beautiful, not only for its stark white beaches but also for its fine old houses, many of them painstakingly maintained antebellum structures, situated along the twenty-five miles of beachfront between Pass Christian and Biloxi. These were summer homes, built by Delta planters and wealthy New Orleans merchants and their successors, and they lent the coastal Highway 90 an aspect of elegance, like a grand esplanade. The best known of them was Beauvoir, a building in the raised cottage style, which was the final residence of Jefferson Davis. After Davis’s death, it was operated as a home for Confederate veterans, and in the nineteen-fifties it became a museum.

Beneath the coast’s moonlight-and-magnolias veneer was a restive spirit that reflected both a heterogeneous population and the fevered ambition that occasionally seizes small-time tourist centers. By the fate of geography, the coast had its own sociology, unbound by the feudal arrangements that locked much of the rest of Mississippi into its melancholy past. The alluvial soil of the Mississippi Delta fostered an agrarian culture of fabulous wealth and aristocratic conceits, which depended upon the labor of slaves and, later, of freed blacks effectively consigned to indenture. The soil in the southern portion of the state, from the piney woods down to the coastal plain, was sandy, meagre stuff, incapable of growing much more than scrub. Nor were there vast marshes, like those which sustain the rice plantations of lowland Carolina, or cane fields, as in Louisiana. Although Mississippi has been a black-majority state through most of its history, blacks are distinctly a minority in the south, particularly along the Gulf Coast.

The people of the coast were formed by the maritime influences of the Gulf: first, when the French made Biloxi the capital of eighteenth-century French Louisiana (before New Orleans); and, later, when the seafood industry attracted an ethnic mix that was sharply distinct from the Mississippi norm. The warm waters of the Gulf, rich in oysters, shrimp, and marketable fish—snapper, Spanish mackerel, speckled trout—supplied a seafood industry based in Biloxi that boomed in the early part of the last century, with the arrival of railroad refrigeration. Canneries and seafood factories sprang up all along Biloxi’s waterfront, and the demand for labor was met by Slavonian immigrants, dislocated by the First World War, and by Cajuns, forced from Louisiana by failures of the sugarcane crop. The new workers inhabited a world that was more Steinbeck than Faulkner. They lived in shotgun houses provided by the companies that owned both the boats, which were crewed by the men, and the canneries, which were worked by the women and children. These Biloxians lived in neighborhoods like Point Cadet, the edge of land that curled into the Back Bay, and developed a culture, and even a manner of speech—a clipped sort of Cajunized Southern English—that was unique.

The coast’s fishing industry, along with its tourism ambitions, shaped a population that was diverse, and ever open to the next big prospect. A new development boom or foolproof tourism strategy was always on the way, and in the meantime the impulses of the present were generously indulged. The Mississippi coast of my youth was constantly being “cleaned up” by crusading authorities, politicians (backed by church groups) who would raid the night clubs and underground casinos and make a show of dumping slots and pinball machines into the Back Bay. Yet eventually the gracious highway would once again bear the interested back to the Peacock Club and other vice and clip joints. Our psychic tides were pulled equally by New Orleans and the Bible Belt. We had Catholics and revellers, and a Mardi Gras celebration that was older than the one in New Orleans, but we inhabited a state that was ruled by Southern Baptist mores.

[...]

The last once-in-a-lifetime storm to strike the Mississippi coast was Hurricane Camille, which came ashore at Pass Christian the night of August 17, 1969—Woodstock weekend for the rest of America. Camille, still the strongest recorded hurricane to strike the continental United States, bore hundred-and-ninety-mile-per-hour winds and dropped swarms of tornados all along the coast and for miles inland. Camille was, for anyone who lived through it, the gauge by which all other storms are measured. [...] The Federal Emergency Management Administration did not yet exist, although I’m fairly certain that Senators John Stennis and James Eastland managed to direct a decent portion of the federal budget Mississippi’s way. President Nixon came to town for what seemed like five minutes, and, the next thing I knew, it was New Year’s Day and Ole Miss was playing Arkansas in the Sugar Bowl (Archie Manning’s Rebels 27, Razorbacks 22). What I mainly remember is an overriding sense that we were a community that lived in hurricane alley, and that Camille was an extreme example of an indigenous feature.

Communities briefly halted new beachfront construction, until more rigorous codes were adopted, and then the coast leaned into reconstruction and, eventually, recovered, actually living up to the local boosters’ vow to raise up a community that was “better than ever!” The annual hurricane seasons came and went, bringing some minor storms and a few frights, but, like coastal people everywhere, locals mostly chose to stay put and ride the storm out.

[...]

The casinos were built after Camille, and were made possible, in part, by a slump in one of the principal local industries, shrimping. Beginning in the late nineteen-seventies, there had been an influx of Vietnamese, mostly boat people and other refugees. The area was naturally suited to the newcomers, who found a familiar climate and familiar work—fishing. They took jobs in the seafood factories that many of the traditional Biloxians had abandoned, but when they began to run their own boats they were seen as unwelcome competition. The Vietnamese worked unheard-of hours at an astonishing pace, many living with their families on their boats, and they employed fishing methods that caused locals to worry that the shrimp beds were being overharvested. Most of the Vietnamese also received some government assistance as part of a federal resettlement program, fuelling the notion that they were being granted an unfair advantage. There were some confrontations, and a few incidents (though nothing like the violence that erupted among fishermen on the Texas coast), but by the end of the eighties the Vietnamese had become an accepted part of the community. They moved into the shotgun homes of the Point and Back Bay, and opened restaurants along Howard Avenue on the east end of town, and the shrimp industry remained central to the coast’s identity. In the late eighties, however, competition from shrimp farms in Asia depressed market prices, and the local economy clearly needed a boost.

The casinos that followed were an unmistakable indication of the coast’s willingness to distinguish its particular character from the state’s Bible Belt mores. In the past decade and a half, gambling has transformed the area, mainly through the seemingly quixotic efforts of a man named Rick Carter, who is a client of Billy’s and was a schoolmate of mine in Gulfport. After an early career in the clothing business, Carter and two partners, Terry Green and William (Si) Redd, a Nevada slot-machine tycoon, bought a small forty-year-old cruise ship and renamed it the Pride of Mississippi, in the hope of conducting “cruises to nowhere”—gambling excursions into international waters beyond the Mississippi Sound. In 1989, the men persuaded the Mississippi legislature to allow gambling on boats cruising along the shore. It had been an audacious quest, given that Mississippi’s politics were (and are) so deeply influenced by religious conservatives. (Mississippi was the last state to vote to repeal Prohibition, in 1966, and some counties are still dry.) Lottery initiatives were regularly defeated. In the late eighties, though, the unemployment rate was high, and prospects for a turnaround in shrimping and the other principal industry, timber, were low.

The following year, a Natchez legislator proposed a bill that would allow gambling cruises on riverboats along the Mississippi. Then began one of the legendary episodes in Mississippi back-room politics. Sonny Meredith, a state representative who was a powerful committee chairman, concluded that, if gambling cruises would be an economic benefit to river towns, then gambling boats that operated while docked in a town—his own Delta city of Greenville, for example—would be even better. Meredith changed the language in the bill, secured its passage by obscuring the changes, and sent the legislation on to the state senate. Gambling opponents had more than enough votes to kill the bill. But State Senator Tommy Gollott, an old up-from-the-Point Biloxi pol, reportedly persuaded ten Delta senators to absent themselves from the vote (most of them claiming a sudden stomach ailment), and the measure passed. Within months, dockside gambling had found its way to the coast as well.

More.

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