Word: bayou
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Bitter was the feud in the all-Negro town of Mound Bayou, Miss., between Eugene P. Booze, Republican boss, and his sister-in-law Estelle Montgomery. Cause: both claimed ownership of the house in which Booze and his family lived. Eugene Booze apparently won the argument last month: in an altercation over a court order forbidding her to enter the house, Estelle attacked Booze and two white State policemen with a butcher knife, was shot dead...
...Eugene Booze, Mound Bayou's richest citizen, owner of thousands of acres of cotton and timber land, the end of all arguments came last week. After his sister-in-law's shooting, he was looked on askance by many a citizen of Mound Bayou. One night last week somebody shot him from ambush. John Thomas, Mound Bayou's marshal, declared the shooting was done by persons unknown. All he knew was that Old Man Booze was dead...
...over the State, plunging into account books like alligators plopping in a bayou, were investigators, Federal. State and parish. They were probing WPA irregularities, PWA irregularities, use of the mails to defraud, income-tax evasion and fraud, defalcations and irregularities in L. S. U. construction, evasions of the Connally "hot oil" law, what happens to the famed 5% deductions from all State employes' paychecks, and everything else they could think...
...struck out through driftwood for the shore, he figured it out. Clear Creek Bayou, a peaceful Mississippi stream in dry weather, was on the rampage, had washed clear away the centre section of a concrete highway bridge. While he stumbled back through the underbrush to the highway, other cars zoomed smoothly up to the bridge-and vanished. Frantically he tried to flag three others. Their drivers ignored the dripping, scarecrow figure and sped on into the void. Each time there followed a single booming splash, sometimes a few hoarse shouts and screams...
Finally a car stopped. On the other side of the bayou, another pulled up. The road was blocked. A few drenched survivors of the eeriest U.S. highway tragedy of 1939 joined Truckman Lewis on the road. Later divers and wreckers took his truck and ten pleasure cars from the receding stream, recovered 14 bodies-men, women and one infant. Some had smashed through windows to drown in the flood. Others had been trapped where they sat. One woman had died half out of the back window of a sedan which had landed on its nose on the bayou bottom...