An Ill Wind: How a natural disaster barreled into a historical one
On August 17, 1969, a Category 5 hurricane ripped through southern Mississippi, generating sustained winds of 190 miles per hour, powerful enough to skin a human body. More than just a storm, Hurricane Camille was a catastrophe that left survivors and their landscape scarred beyond recognition. By the time it died three days later, Camille had killed 143 people and injured 9,000 others.
Hurricane Katrina, which also reached Category 5 status, landed in southeast Louisiana in August 2005, and the atrocities Katrina wrought are well documented. University of South Carolina history professor Mark Smith focuses here on Camille, a wild and boundless disaster he manages to contain in his book’s neat architecture: a trio of fine and slender essays that detail the damage Camille did to the economic, social, and political landscape of desegregation-era Mississippi.
Camille, 1969, adapted from a series of lectures delivered at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, grew out of Smith’s involvement in a National Science Foundation project designed to examine recovery trajectories from natural disasters. Smith is uneasy with the word recovery, however, and prefers the term recovering, which, he believes, more accurately defines the endless process of personal and public healing necessary to recuperate from disasters like Camille.
Smith is a prominent historian of the antebellum South, and, for the last 10 years, he has put his unique signature on the field of sensory history. As he explains early in the book, “Sensory history tends to consider not only the history of a given sense but also its social and cultural construction.” Smith’s descriptions border on the poetic: “Thirst, the absence of liquid on tongues accustomed to easy quenching, was a feeling horrible in its novelty.” Smells of rotten food and sewage permeated the air. The sounds of chain saws and howling winds haunted victims of Camille for years afterward. Wind and rain treated skin with “contempt.” Clean, dry clothing was hard to come by, and victims had to contend with constant “bone-grinding damp.”