Eroding a Songline

Montegut, an unkept grave sinks in the silt

Indigenous Australians, Aborigines, have a tradition known as Songline by which the singer can identify landmarks throughout their country. Each rock and hill, tree and valley, is transcribed into an epic that includes elements of their clan's history. If a land is disappearing, though, what becomes of its Songline?

Twenty or so yards of land near Bayou Allemends lay in dispute between the Dubroc's and Lamartinaire's. By mischief or miscalculation, this sliver of land found itself on the Dubroc side of the barbed wire fence, a precautionary against cows and coyotes.

Each hurricane Oak and Pecan trees dropped their branches on either half of the demarcation, unaware of the seriousness of their transgressions. The fence itself unraveled at nature’s cruel indifference to our notions of property. Even with the fence gone, the boundary remained. Years later, even as the patriarchs of both families rested in their mausoleums, an unspoken tension haunted their lands that stood atop a hill of river silt and clay. A spot that Avoyelles Parish calls ‘The Island’; a testament to its role in the 1927 flood.

                                                   

Graves incorporate with a Chitimacha mound outside of Dulac

Outside of Lake Charles is a woman who can tell you if your relatives are in Hell, Heaven, or Purgatory. My uncle, a Dubroc and devout as the rest of us, sought her counsel. It was revealed to him that the original erector of that fence, the interred patriarch of the Dubroc family, was in Purgatory. In filial piety he hoped to assuage his grandfather’s suffering. He and his brothers arrived at the home of the oldest living Lamartinaire –who was also the oldest living Dubroc- a woman whose father had fought in the civil war and whose late husband’s land was take by Vieux Sampson Dubroc’s crafty placement of barbed wire.

                                           

The Virgin Mary on top of the mound

This old woman, Tant Sybil Marguerite Dubroc, was my great-grandfather’s sister. She married a Lamartinaire with whom she had two children. As a member of both families, she inhabited the border of the dispute. Wise enough to see the pettiness of the feud, but a good enough Catholic to not push the issue.

South Louisiana has made an art out of the visit. We call it vieller and all it amounts to is drinking coffee, talking a lot, and saying little. 

By my junior year of college my grandparents had passed away. So, I would visit with Tant Syb. When our time together would end and I would leave her home, I could notice the tears in her eyes. At the time, I just attributed it to Latin emotionalism, but in retrospect I recognize I might have been one of the few Dubrocs to frequent her house.

 When I went to South Korea, my father would drop in on Tant Syb for me. Eventually he brought along his two brothers. And, as Tant Syb was now in their cognitive radar, it was only natural that the way to slake Vieux Sampson’s sufferings in Purgatory would be to make peace with the oldest living Dubroc.

Tant Syb passed away not long after in the satisfaction of a rift mended, a final task complete.

                                                             

Unkept grave in Montegut

To the standard southerner, the Southern Baptist or Methodist, the Protestant of whatever stripe, mending rifts because of concerns over purgatory may be hard to believe, but that is because of a misreading.

Rifts between families do not mend because of Purgatory or seers. Peace was possible because, in so many words and for so many reasons, the Dubrocs and Lamartinaires were there. They have a place and a history and they know where which relative is buried where, what that relative accomplished, what that relative means to them. The Dubrocs and Lamartinaires can mend boundaries because they have boundaries. Being defined by place, a structure exists for the preservation of their history and their interaction with the present.

                                              

A cheniere, or oak ridge, dead from saltwater intrusion

At the mouth of Bayou Lafourche sinks the once-called Orange City. Today it is known as Leeville: whatever oranges once grew there are gone with the land that supported them.10,000 miles of canals –dug by oil companies for the past eighty years- scratch themselves through south Louisiana’s marshlands like whip lashes across the back of the condemned.

                                            

Leeville, at the mouth of Bayou Lafourche, pre-Katrina

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Louisiana’s economy depends upon petroleum. The state boomed in the 1970s; pumped out over three times as much oil as Saudi Arabi, before crashing in the 1980s when the swamps could no longer yield as much as expected.

                                            

Center Right: arial vie of a sunken graveyard

                                                

And so, these canals lie unused, increasing in width with the action of waves, bringing in saltwater that kills the plant life holding on to the land whose foundation has been sucked away. Supporting soil and minerals were removed because of oil exploration. This caused the natural process of subsidence (that is, the gradual sinking of the land) to speed up to an unsustainable rate. 

Today Leeville is an island in all but name, but unlike the island that the Lamartinaires and Dubrocs had during ‘27 flood, it is an island that offers no protection. It is connected to the land only by a highway flanked on both sides by water: the exposed spinal cord of a rotting corpse.

Unlike their more northern cultural kin in Avoyelles or Lafayette, the people of the Bayou, of the Southeast Coast, are faced with the loss of their Songline.