Steamboat Katie Adam

While loading cotton or stringing telegram lines on the banks of the Mississippi River, Henry Speller watched steamboats crawling up and down the broad, muddy river. Gleaming ships and locomotives captured his dream of leaving the South to migrate north. Speller focused on the architecture of the steamboat in this drawing, but still included passengers. Three figures, likely women from their well-defined

chests, stand in the lower segments of the hold while a captain with fluid limbs drives up top. As a musician as well as an artist, Speller imbued his images with a blues sensibility, creating beautiful images out of the vernacular scenes and rhythms of everyday life in the Mississippi Delta.