“Rough Mens†in “the Toughest Places I Ever Seen†: The Construction and Ramifications of Black Masculine Identity in the Mississippi Delta's Levee Camps, 1900–1935

This article examines the “levee camp†as a social and cultural site for reconstituting rural black workers' masculine identities in the early twentieth-century Mississippi-Arkansas Delta. The construction of the Mississippi River's levees during this period depended heavily on the labor of black mule-drivers drawn from the Delta's cotton plantations. In spite of this dependency, the levee camps' exploitative commissaries and harsh disciplinary violence quashed workers' efforts to reclaim a sense of autonomy that was increasingly denied them on the region's plantations. However, partly in response to the perceived erosion of their authority within the sharecropper family, levee workers successfully used the notorious after-hours culture of the levee camps to construct a hyper-masculine image of themselves as “rough mens†who had been to the levee camps, enjoyed the sexual attention of camp women, and were manly enough to survive the murderous violence of white bosses and other “rough mens†alike. Using a series of 1930s labor investigations as well as early Delta blues hollers and songs about the levee camps, this article shows how black workers' efforts to cultivate this hyper-masculine levee worker image ultimately proved detrimental to their class interests. Levee contractors and foremen welcomed levee camp gambling, prostitution, drinking, and fighting as ways of reducing workers' wages and maintaining labor control in the camps. Ultimately, the levee camps provide a useful example of an all-male work site where gender had important, if unintended, ramifications for workers' class position.