Eating Mississippi

Two downriver journeys, disparate in time and intent, alarmingly similar in increasing violence: When Robert Day discovers a French diary written by Octavius, an ex-slave who fled to Haiti well over a century before, he impulsively decides to imitate Octavius’s journey down Mississippi’s Pearl River to the Gulf of Mexico. This, in hopes of overcoming his own grief over his anthropologist wife, recently murdered by poachers in Africa. But as Robert floats down the river and translates the diary, he learns just how terribly violent young Octavius’s escape was, starting with the Bowie-knife murder of his master—and lover—after Octavius learned that the man intended to take on a wife. The escalating violence of Octavius’s river journey becomes reflected not only in Robert’s life, but in the lives of the three friends he asks to accompany him down the Pearl River.