Moon Lake: Tennessee Williams and the Oxbow Delta
Mississippi
Moon Lake is an oxbow lake in Coahoma County formed when the Mississippi River changed course and cut off a meander, leaving behind a crescent of still water in the cotton fields of the Delta. In the early twentieth century, Moon Lake was a resort destination for Delta planters and their families, a place to escape the summer heat at clubs along the shore. The playwright Tennessee Williams spent summers here as a child visiting his grandparents in nearby Clarksdale.
He returned to Moon Lake repeatedly in his imagination, setting scenes from several plays on its shores. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois describes a place called Moon Lake Casino where she drank and danced and tried to forget. The actual Moon Lake Club closed decades ago.
Williams drew the Delta landscape from life, transforming the specific flatness of Coahoma County, its heat and stillness and contained violence, into the interior landscape of his most enduring characters.
