Vanishing point: The point where parallel lines receding from the observer seem to come together; a time, place, or stage at which something disappears or ceases to exist.In the early 1950s, when suburbia was making its first great strides into the countryside of post-war America, my grandparents, Paul King Huffman and Florence West Huffman, immigrated from the growing city of Jackson to the sparsely populated, almost impenetrable swamps of Issaquena County, Mississippi.
The move was counter to prevailing trends, and a complete departure from my grandmother's upbringing in the genteel plantation society of the upper Delta. Swamps, in most people's minds, were for avoiding or draining. Few people of the eraÑand particularly few MississippiansÑrecognized the value of the wilderness that so many had labored so long to beat back.
Florence Huffman was diligent almost to the point of obsession in documenting their foray into the surviving wilderness of the Delta. Her record is both comprehensive and detailed. From her letters and diaries, it is clear that one question was perennially on the minds of her family and friends: Why would anyone want to go to this inhospitable tract of overlooked swampland to live?
Among those who did venture into the big woods to hunt or fish, most stayed only briefly. Women, in general, were rare. But in Issaquena County my grandmother saw a world perfectly tailored for her and my grandfather, who shared her lifelong interest in nature. Their sojourn in Issaquena County became inextricably woven into the fabric of their life together, and resulted in one of her crowning achievements: A remarkable collection of photographs of early hunting and fishing scenes spanning the decades of the 1920s through the early 1960s. This collection would be valuable if only because so few people thought to photograph such pastimes. But their value is heightened by the high quality of the photographs, and by their comprehensive nature, focusing as they do upon one group of people over the course of forty years involved in every aspect of hunting and fishing in a primeval world that is now lost.
When my grandparents first visited the wilds of Issaquena County in the late 1920s, they found a wooded paradise where deer and other wildlife abounded. Issaquena County was the last stronghold of the prolific bottomland hardwood forest that had once spread over hundreds of thousands of acres of the Mississippi Delta. Their decision to move there permanently in the 1950s was a nod toward a way of life that was rooted in the frontier, which had attracted them for three decades, during which their frequent visits ran into weeks, and then months.
Mama Florence, as we called her, appears to have been undaunted by the hostile side of this wooded paradiseÑthe frequent high water and the legions of mosquitoes, ticks, redbugs, alligators, snapping turtles and snakes that were even more at home in Issaquena County than she was. She took every aspect of nature in stride.
Florence Huffman, who chronicled life at Ten Point hunting club with her camera in boat on the lake. Photograph by P.K. Huffman
As a child, I remember the cutouts of wild animals she had mounted on homemade cardboard stands and arranged on her mantel, and the prints, clipped from magazines, of ducks, moose and deer, which she framed to hang on the wall. In her guidebooks, she dutifully recorded every species of flower, tree and animal that she had personally observed, and in the back of her journal for 1941, she listed each river she'd been on and every kind of tree she'd seen in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina.But it wasn't nature alone that inspired her love of the relatively rugged life that Issaquena County offered. It was the comeraderie she experienced with my grandfather and the friends and family members who loved the big woods. In the majority of her photographs we see the faces of people who shared her affinity for the wilderness, their names penned in the margin in her own hand.
For most of the time that they visited or lived in Issaquena County, my grandparents were unaware that the way of life that had drawn them there was doomed. But from the beginning, for the sake of posterity, Mama Florence carried alongside her shotgun a Hollywood Reflex camera. The resulting snapshots, the best of which she arranged in albums or framed to hang on the walls of the Ten Point Deer Club house, proved to be the greatest trophies anyone took from the Issaquena woods.
Over time, she developed a compulsion to chronicle her experiences in the wilderness, and by 1962 had produced a collection of more than three thousand photographs, a score of movies, and numerous diaries and scrapbooks. Though the collection contains many scenic landscape shots, the focus of her effort was more on individuals and shared personal experience than the majesty of an isolated natural world. There is nothing reminiscent of the landscape photo imagery of Ansel Adams or Elliot Porter in her collection; instead, there are poignant snapshots of a small group of people enjoying hunting and fishing in the wilderness of the Deep South. Mama Florence had no academic, historical or artistic goals. Her aim was to preserve the ephemera of a world she loved. She thrived on the personal connections she made in the context of the Issaquena woodsÑwith her friends, with her husband, with the old ways, and with nature. The photographs were her way of giving something in return.
Looking back now, it is easy to confer greater meaning upon the photographs than Mama Florence originally intended. Whether she knew it or not, Mama Florence was oddly poised to document one of the last great communications between civilization and the primeval world of the Delta wilderness. Her photographs today represent a comprehensive and vivid record of a personal, cultural and historical crossroads: A time and place where conflicting trends of American historyÑthe relentless drive of progress and the persistent draw of natureÑmet, embraced, and then collapsed upon one another in the Delta.
Any collection documenting such a crossroads would be significant, particularly since the culture of early hunting and fishing in the South has been so little explored and the photographic evidence is so rare. But the value of Mama Florence's collection is heightened by its completeness and intimacy.
Archaic rituals and familiar faces provided her with a broad range of subjects that defy the stereotype of the southern hunting experience as the sole province of white men. And the quality of the work belies the limits of her equipment, technical knowledge and training. Many of the photographs are interesting as historic snapshots, but others reach the level of documentary art.
The setting of Mama Florence's photographs changed little over the course of three decades. Her photographic forays began in the late 1920s, on hunting and fishing expeditions with my grandfather and a group of friends who were mostly doctors, lawyers and businessmen from Jackson. Together, they formed the Ten Point Deer Club, which oversaw the final years of one of North America's most fabled hunting grounds from 1929 until 1962.
Mr. Myrick with deer strapped to car hood, 1940.
Photograph by Florence Wood Huffman
The first trips the group made were in wagons and T-Model Fords, to a remote tract of land bordering Steele Bayou and the Yazoo River. They camped in canvas tents, chased deer on horseback to the sound of baying hounds, brought down their prey with simple shotguns and cooked their meals on open fires. They performed all the old rituals: Smearing blood on the face of the hunter who had made his first kill, cutting the tail from the shirt of the hunter who missed. They spent hours fishing with cane poles from boats or from the banks of the numerous rivers, bayous and lakes. Later, they built a rustic camp house, high on stilts on the banks of the bayou, which eventually became my grandparents' permanent home.The clubhouse, which also became the gallery for Mama Florence's photographs, was as comfortable and convenient as the wilderness allowed, which is to say it was large and well lit, but without telephones, television or paved roads for miles around. Electric power was drawn from a generator, heat from a wood stove, and water from cisterns that captured rain. It was a place from which the members could set off through the old woods to hunt or fish, and at night, retire to feather beds on the high sleeping porch to watch the fireflies drift or listen to the hoot of the owls echo across the bayou.
During the time that she was there, Mama Florence seems to have recorded every unfolding scene. The photographs were treasured by the Ten Point members from the beginning. But only later would their valueÑand the value of the big woods themselves Ñbe fully reckoned. Though Mama Florence never read the works of William Faulkner, it was he who most accurately assessed the fate of her beloved Delta woods, which would eventually confer greater meaning upon her photographs.
In his short story "Delta Autumn," published in 1940, Faulkner's character Ike McCaslin mulled over the disappearance of the wilderness, which by then had been largely cleared but for the southernmost and lowest part, where Issaquena County lay. McCaslin saw in the declining wilderness a parallel of his own life, which reached its highest value as its time played out, "Ébecause it was still wildernessÉ He had watched it, not being conquered, destroyed, so much as retreating since its purpose was served now and its time an outmoded time, retreating southward through this inverted-apex, this V-shaped section of earth between hills and River until what was left of it seemed now to be gathered and for the time arrested in one tremendous density of brooding and inscrutable impenetrability at the ultimate funnelling tip."
If a sharp eyed woman had been present in Ike McCaslin's camp, toting a camera, she might have produced photographs such as Mama Florence's. It was at that "ultimate funneling tip" that the members of Ten Point found themselves between 1929 and 1962.
Issaquena County was a place where the lines of civilization and frontier, of river and hills, of past and future, converged. And then, in the blink of an eye, the lines broke. In early 1962 came the first harbinger of the end of the Issaquena woods as the Ten Point hunters had known them: a bridge spanning Steele Bayou, opening the wilderness to a new, paved highway that passed within view of the clubhouse. With the highway came powerlines, telephones, and new opportunities for development that would be rapidly exploited.
By the end of 1962 the land upon which the clubhouse stood had been condemned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a floodgate across the bayou and system of levees that would lead to the clearing of most of the remaining old woods. The world that had given Ten Point its highest value was suddenly closing in for the kill.
With the condemnation of its land, the Ten Point club as it existed for Thirty-five years disbanded. A few members remained behind to hunt the surviving forests, which lay outside the protective levees, but the clubhouse was razed and my grandparents took refuge in the wooded hills of Choctaw County, in Mississippi's northeast hills. Most of the old, familiar faces disappeared from the Issaquena landscape, and the woods themselves were not far behind.
From that point on, Issaquena County underwent a compressed history of the entire Mississippi Delta, and the greater South, as civilization crept and then thrashed its way into the wilderness. By the early 1970s, when the price of soybeans passed the lucrative $10 per bushel mark, the Issaquena wilderness was rapidly being subduedÑits bayous dredged and leveed, its huge trees pushed into windrows and burned, thousands of acres at a time. The destruction was equal in scale to what we see occuring in the rain forests today. Panthers were soon the stuff of legends, and the few surviving bear were forced into the open, where many were hit by cars or shot. The remaining hunters found themselves competing with droves of newcomers who buzzed the shrinking woodlands on four wheelers.
Today, the wooded remnants of Issaquena County are small, natural islands in a landscape radically altered by man. Steele Bayou itself is a muddy, pesticide-laden ditch, and virtually everything recorded in Mama Florence's photographs is gone.
Florence Huffman with dog, Blackout and bait bucket. March 17, 1946.
Photograph by P.K. HuffmanTellingly, Mama Florence's record comes to a halt just prior to the end. There are no photographs of the destruction. After leaving Issaquena County in 1962, she seldom picked up her camera again. But she went to her grave satisfied that she had faithfully captured on film what had mattered most in her life.
"Maybe we didn't have much business being out there anymore," she told me once, as she sat in an easy chair in her Choctaw County home. "Paul's health was bad. We didn't have a phone. We couldn't come and go when the water was up except in the boat. I got to where I worried, living out there with him alone."
But lifting a photograph of my grandfather astride his horse on the banks of the bayou, she smiled at the memory of a time and place where everyone and everything came together under a seemingly endless mantel of mossy trees.
After staying up late many nights looking through the photographs with Mama Florence and listening to her Steele Bayou stories, I realized she had produced something more than a record of love or friendship or of a lost and beautiful world. Though the stories and relics kept Ten Point alive long after the place itself was gone, it was the photographs, framed in composites, arranged in albums, tucked away in their original sleeves from Jackson's Standard Photo Company, that fascinated me most, and honoring my recognition, she gave them to me before she died. Over time, I realized the value of the collection transcended my family, and that as a painstaking record of a vanished time it should be preserved. Under the guidance of Patti Carr Black, then-director of the Old Capitol State Historical Museum, I placed the majority in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and embarked upon the compilation of a book, which is still in progress.
The photographs were the essence of folklife documentary. They were the product of a good heart and a good eye, of a woman who found herself in an exceptional setting with people she loved. Mama Florence was attentive, observant and diligent, and in the end, history bore her out. I can think of no more fitting epitaph for Mama Florence's life or for the lost, old woods than the photographs she left behind.
In many ways, it is as if a photographer had ventured back to record scenes in the original frontier of the Delta. Yet there is the tenuous, unmistakable overlap of twentieth century lifeÑthe jeeps, the motorized boats, the prominent presence of women, children and black men in what historically would have seemed the province of white men. The odd contrast and harmony are evidence that the photographs could only have been made by someone situated as Mama Florence was.
Today, a new historical moment is unfolding. Changing economics and persistent floods have resulted in the reforestation of many of the farm fields that were wrested from the lower Delta wilderness. With so little public hunting land available in the Delta and the value of hunting rights at a premium, countless new refuges and wildlife resorts have appeared in the young forests. There is widespread interest in mitigating past losses, and the continuing flood control works of the Corps of Engineers, which enabled the destruction of the '60s and '70s, are under siege by environmental and hunting groups. Nestled between Mississippi 467 and the Yazoo River, a facsimile of the Ten Point Deer Club still clings tenaciously to its small domain.
But if the tide has now turned in favor of the woods, there is no going back. Of the original Mississippi Delta wilderness, all that remains are the occasional virgin cypresses towering above the landscape, a few relics and old stories, and photographs such as these. Without the presence of Mama Florence and her Hollywood Reflex camera, the period of denouement of the original Delta wilderness, and the happy times that accompanied it, would exist only in the imagination, like each epoch that preceded it.
