Louisiana State University Press, 1993

Joy Jackson’s Where the River Runs Deep sets out to tell two stories: first, the life of the author’s father, Oliver Jackson, who spent most of his life on or near the Mississippi River, and second, the modern “history of the river between Baton Rouge and the Gulf.” Jackson provides us with an unusual entree into both the little-known world of ship’s pilots on the nation’s greatest inland waterway and the ordinary lives of a white working-class family in the towns, cities, and river hamlets from the mouth of the Mississippi north to the bluffs at Baton Rouge.