Tough, intelligent and bold men have toiled and wrangled with its might. Some have invested pockets as deep as canyons into it, some have dismally drowned in its muddy darkness, while some have amassed empires and built their Greek Revival castles to overlook its mysterious tide.

The Mississippi River has been said to exert mystical powers over man, with the ability to create its own destiny and destroy anything or anyone who dare challenge its prowess. To call it coincidence that the Mississippi River and the American South are so synonymous in consideration is a fallacy — it was a marriage derived from fate.

Mark Twain’s Mississippi writings — “Tom Sawyer,” “Life on the Mississippi,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Pudd’nhead Wilson” — portrayed the lazy but adventurous South so many of us have grown to love in satire so strong and crude that we oftentimes forget he was referring to us.

A major theme of Twain’s stories and throughout the history of the South is double-sidedness, or irony and contradiction. And when we conceptualize the Great River, it is a dynamic geographical feature that holds in store an antonym for each aspect it produces.

Seen foremost in the slaves’ eyes as the road to hell, it was the main street for being sold farther south and farther away from the lines of freedom. But the river was just as well a lifeline, a route for escape in many instances.

In circumstances of industry the giant has brought unfathomable amounts of commerce to its regions and to the nation, but its strong currents have also left men bankrupt.

As a mere geographical feature, aesthetically it is as peaceful as a child’s distant laughter. Nothing so describes a sweet springtime afternoon as the banks of a slow moving river. However, as in the Great Flood of 1927, when the winters are hard and April is wet, that peaceful current can suffocate millions of developed acres and destroy all goodness on its bordering lands.

These blaring contradictions of the Mississippi River are as well within old Southern society, a society that still permeates today’s culture.

Like a slave owner commending himself for sparing a slave the horrors of being sold south — when that same man endorsed perhaps the greatest crime against humanity, slavery — the Mississippi bestows upon its delta beautifully rich soil for an abundant harvest, and then can so ruthlessly, in tidal wave fashion, rip away the fruits of a potential harvest.

The River’s gentle eddies can be as deceiving as the plantation owner’s hospitality and as bitter as the illiterate white sharecropper, engulfing its own shores while hiding islands and snagged trees waiting to stab passing riverboats.

It has a god-like grip on the South, like the overseer to a slave. Just as he who feedeth the slave may taketh his plate, the Great River has so fed the fertile soil of the South, provided so much industry and wealth, but in the same breath taken its life.

Discrimination seemed instilled in the River’s governance — the muddy water was most cruel to the black man. Having birthed New Orleans, the antebellum Mecca of cotton and slave trade in one of its Louisiana crescents, it supported the economy that depended on the shoulders of black slaves. From its inception, the Great River pushed to mold moist soil to be tilled by laboring black hands. The current, so deep and strong and forever running home to the South, beholds a sort of social gravity separate from Earth’s magnetic pull.

I descend from such old southern heritage, one that upholds tradition and respect for those who have gone before me. I have grappled with what principles the Old South stood for and the problems my South still seeks to eradicate. There are many stories our land could tell that would not bear much pride, but there are equally as many triumphs worth telling.

Our contradicting South has been to hell and back. Although those above us may look down across the Mason-Dixon thumbing their noses at our apparent illiteracy and poverty, at our seemingly delusional sense of nostalgia, we still maintain a familial connection between us, a connection with our spirit that is one of a kind.

Our delta history is intertwined with this godfather of waters. Just as we mustn’t forget what the Great River can accomplish by its own will, we mustn’t forget the treachery of our past. Nevertheless, we should never loose pride in our South.

Chris Ortte is 22-year-old political science senior from Lafayette, La.