Blackwater Rivers

The allure of murky water

When I first moved to the South, I was greeted by a disturbing sight. I stayed those first few weeks with a friend in Leland, Mississippi, where a twist of the tap launches a trickle of brown water—the color you might get when you rinse out a coffee pot.

This was not, as it turns out, a sign that Leland was enduring a Flint-like crisis. The discolored water is due to natural tannins.

A little 101 on tannins: these are water-soluble molecules—polyphenols, technically, given their particular arrangement of oxygen and hydrogen—that are present in the bark and leaves and skins of plants. If you know anything about wine, then you know about tannins: produced by the grape skins, they provide bitterness, plus that puckery feeling to your mouth. Tannins are also an antioxidant—so, so long as other contaminants are absent, the murky look of the Mississippi Delta wat…