Remember When They Blew Up The Levee?

We've been here before with Katrina and Rita and Gustav and Issac. No one -besides us- are helping, and no one -besides us- cares.

The state's going to go to Trump so I guess he doesn't have any reason to address the floods. Hillary doesn't have any reason to come here-much less mention the water we're under-for the same reason. People didn't like it when Obama came to Houma for the Oil Spill, so I guess he'll just say a few words and ask us to watch how he's been working on his long drive.

At least the French Consulate in New Orleans released a heartfelt message.

Everyone has a cousin or friend in Baton Rouge or Gonzales or LaPlace. I have a guy with my exact name in Ascension Parish who ruined my credit score. So naturally we became friends but his mom lost everything (did he mean in the flood or with the credit score?). Such is Louisiana.

And then we look at Acadianna which is so far out of the media's radar that I have to go to Facebook to see a coworker's cousin paddling his pirogue in a trailer park around Ville-Platte.

Plus ça change. But then again Lake Charles didn't get too much of a mention during Rita, much less Erath.

We are the flyover of the flyover. The nameless rabble religious fanatic podunk that the rest of the country has written of as a third-world failed state with irreparable race struggles, class struggles, and people -they say among themselves- stupid enough to build their homes in a swamp.

Meanwhile Californians don't have trouble getting coverage for their natural disasters. Who would want to build a house in a desert? Much less on a fault line?

No, the rest of the country doesn't have to do a song-and-dance to get attention. Or riot. We have to either Mr. Bojangle (Look at us! Jazz! Zydeco! Mardi Gras! For the love of God send us nonperishable food!) or just flip cars and loot to get on the news.

Plus c'est le même chose. We are going to flood and flood again. And like 1927 when the then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover signed off on a New Orleans bigwig plan to dynamite the levees in St. Bernard Parish we are going to see the self-reliant, the humble, the tight knit communities of Louisiana passed over in silence by a country that sees us as too foreign and backwards to take air time away from Reality TV stars. Another failed venture to pull the troops out of and let the fanatics fight it out. The militant, not the meek, inherent the earth as always.

But, wow! What a bachelor party Davie had in NOLA, amirite?

Everyday we have to sober ourselves to the fact that we are headed to a Louisiana without its ecosystem both cultural and geographic. Isle Jean Charles will be gone by the time I reach my forties; most of the barrier islands will be gone. I have five people in my family who still speak French and they have ten to fifteen years left on them combined for a language that is already just a curiosity or a footnote on a tourist brochure. My grandchildren will miss the music, the language, that makes this crazy, dysfunctional place make a modicum of sense.

With each new deluge we loose more of ourselves. Every flood washes out journals and photographs and musical instruments and replaces them with lilly-white hipster kids from the suburbs of Toledo who love how cheap the rent is and love it down here because they feel they are in "like, an authentic culture that just gets me, you know?"


But complaining doesn't do anything.

I'm donating to these dudes. Post who you are donating to or where the Cajun Navy has you stationed.

Why you can never leave The Church (Interview with My Nannan and thoughts on Orlando)

Below is my nannan, my Godmother, Mrs. Jeanne Moreau.

Some notes before you watch:

-We are at the Fresh Catch in Marksville, so thanks to the staff for putting up with us.

-I don't know why Ibrahimia isn't in the shot, or why I am in the shot.

-Would have released this earlier but kept getting confused by videos of the French singer Jeanne Moreau.

-We missed translating a couple of things here. She talks about my grandfather who was a judge and St. Joseph's church in Marksville, so catch it if you can

-You're also going to get mad at me because I'm going to talk about Orlando

We have footage of Mrs. Jeanne saying The Rosary in French, but it wasn't conversational so we edited it out. I'll post it soon because of its cultural value. Ibrahimia says our Rosary contains different, older words that they don't say in France. Is there a Pope Pius IX society for Cajun French?

My buddy and I actually disagreed about putting the Rosary in or not. I conceded because he speaks French and I just quote Zydeco lyrics.

Ibrahimia is right in that busting out religious items at a restaurant it isn't conversational. At least from a modern point of view. But we aren't modern.

Whatever we are -Cajun, Creole, Louisianais- is about pulling out cards of Saints from your wallet in the middle of conversation, a Novena on a long car trip, Chaplet of Divine Mercy when an ambulance passes. It's about eccentric folklore from farmlands in France and rivers in Senegal that connect us to each other and our ancestors like the knots of rosary beads.

Whatever our culture is- French Canadian, Caribbean, West African, Native American- it is unmistakably Roman Catholic.

This flag is based on a hymn by St. Thomas Aquinas

Blogger-Theologian/cultural critic Artur Rosman calls this the Catholic Imagination. I don't think he ever gave a concise definition of it. I don't think precision is what Artur is after, but here's the gist : the cultural imprint of Roman Catholicism is also the cultural imprint of the cultures that preceded it. Likewise, the cultural imprint of Roman Catholicism doesn't leave a person, ethnicity, or nationality. It is inescapable and will infect your actions and thought patterns; whispering into your ear all you should feel guilty about and searching the fun only a robust concept of sin can allow.

But we don't really want to get rid of our Catholic Imagination, do we? Our state is 60% Protestant and 8% unaffiliated but we get drunk all the same on Mardi Gras. Our towns and parishes are named after saints. In the old towns you can see the arrangement is around the church building, and only later, in American fashion, did they construct around the courthouse square.

I know an Anglo-Protestant from North Louisiana with a tattoo of a Fleur-de-Lis on her wrist and I don't have the heart to tell her it's a French Catholic symbol for the Trinity.

What will Monroe do when they find out?

For its part, the Church in Louisiana has always been engaging other cultures Sometimes with success, other times not so much.

So it was no surprise to see the outpouring of compassion from the state's conservative Christian and Catholic community. Churchgoing folks stood in line to give blood, offered prayers for the victims at Mass, and marched at a memorial service on the capitol steps.

Historically, Catholics in the United States are no strangers to the kind of prejudice that would cause a massacre. There was time when the Protestants of Boston destroyed a Catholic monastery,  moving toward more modern times with the lynching of Italians in New Orleans, lynchings of Mexicans in the Southwest, or the resurgence of the Klan in the 1920s against Italian and Irish Catholic immigrants

A member of the Church with any appreciation of history should have an idea of what second-class citizenry means.

And so the outpouring of sympathy was touching, but it was easy.

Massacres are easy to condemn. Blood cries out to the heavens for justice. The visceral, the concrete evoke a reaction.

But what about the things that aren't easy to march for?

Right now, in our country, there are organizations devoted to kidnapping gay teenagers and re-programming them. Are Christians marching against this?

In Louisiana, any gay person can be fired from their job simply for being gay; no anti-discrimination protection. That is, they don't receive the same protections a Christian would receive from being fired based on her religious identity. Do Christians want the same protections for homosexuals? If so, where are the rallies?

Or when Louisiana's Christian conservatives defeated a bill designed to protect students from being bullied based on sexual orientation. I guess it's hard to march against a bill you've helped to write.

You really have no skin in the game when you stand up and say you don't want to murder people. I don't murder several people a day. But what about the slow death homosexuals in this state experience, the isolation, the lack of protection and legal accommodation that so many straight people take for granted?

I couldn't see most of the churchgoers I grew up with wanting to fire an employee for being gay, or bullying a child for questioning their sexuality, or aid in kidnapping a teenager. But I would expect them to stand up for those being kidnapped, kicked out of their homes, or discriminated at in the workplace.

I hope they do.

Black People Speak French

Growing up in the South, or really just by turning on the television, it's easy to hear the differences between African American English (AAVE) and Standard American English (SAE). Even more, with my family being from South Louisiana, I've found Louisiana English (LAE, by this I mean what's typically called Cajun English) has the same differences with SAE as AAVE. Why?

They both have the same origin and that origin is Louisiana French.

What I'm going to do is show the commonalities AAVE has with French grammar and semantics and present an historical explanation of why this is.

I always thought of Lafayette as being purple.

Let's talk about grammar.


*Note, I had to edit this article to make the French a little more clear, thanks to my friend Ibrehemia for protecting me from myself*

In French, and in all Romance Languages (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, etc...), negating a sentence works a little differently. So when you hear someone say in AAVE say

                I ain't done yet

Know that in French there are two place markers for negation (even if informally it doesn't always work that way).

              Je n'ai pas encore fini.

Also, in French, the double negative is okay.

             Je n'ai pas rien

Or in English:

            I don't have nothin'

Recognize the meanings are different between the French and English sentences. In French you're saying you have something, in English you are emphasizing that you have nothing. However, in both ways of speaking, the double negative is acceptable.

Now, in Louisiana French it's okay to go with either 'ai' or 'suis' but why strain gnats?

When you can pinch a crawfish tail?

Have you ever wanted to express something you did frequently in the past, but explain it as something you don't do anymore? Or talk about something you did once or twice, but it isn't something you do all the time? You're thinking about the Imperfect Tense. That is, things that happened in the past but have a definite stopping point. It's how we talk about old habits.

For example:

           No, your Honor, I used to dress up like an Onion and break dance in public libraries, but I                 don't anymore.

We've all been there, right? But I bet having to say 'used to' bunched your cassons -not just because you miss those days of onion induced madness- but because of how clunked 'used to' is in that sentence.

Don't worry, mon ami, we've got you covered, and I don't mean your ragged underwear:

                    Non votre Honneur, j'avais l'habitude de m'habiller 
                   comme un oignon et danser dans les                    
                  bibliotecheques mais je ne le fais plus

In French, you can just change a verb tense!

He is in the process of dressing like an onion. The present continuous tense

And the imperfect tense in AAVE? Just be yourself!

            He be walkin' everyday.
            It's hot, but it don't be hot.

Bad habits can be hard things to break, but in French and AAVE at least it's easier to talk about them.


Then we have lexicon, or the words and phrases used in a language. We find crossover there as well:


                  AAVE/LAE           French               American Standard English
          Bougie                       bourgeoise                   Kardashian
    Makin' groceries          Faire les courses           Costco Membership
    I stay in Mansura        Je reste au Mansura       I live in a gated community.

The list goes on and on and on and on. I be believin'.

Is there a Zydeco cover band? Get Wayne Toups on the phone.

Then there's pronunciation. The 'th' sound as in father, the voiced dental fricative, becomes a 'd' sound in AAVE and LAE

Who Dat Say Dey Need Da Voiced Dental Fricative?

Which makes sense because French doesn't have it either.

He's just as surprised as you.

There are some cultural-linguistic crossovers as well, one in particular I am thinking of, but I can't tell you yet for fear I'll upset you. Save the controversy for the end.

So, what historical events would make it so that African Americans share these linguistic traits with Louisiana English?

To answer that question, we need to look at Census data.

But we can't, because they didn't record that.

However, churches did. If we look at the registrars of Catholic Churches -because Louisiana French people tend to be Catholic- we can see when the church registrars switch from French to English:

                                  Archdiocese New Orleans 1891
                                  Diocese Baton Rouge 1906
                                  Diocese Lafayette 1917
                                  Diocese Houma/Thibodeaux 1916


Of course this doesn't tell us when people stopped talking French  per se. If you've ever been to Hessmer or Rayne you know good and well people are still speaking French. What it tells us is when people in Louisiana became semi-speakers.

A semi-speaker is someone with only partial competence in a certain language. By the 1920s in Louisiana, many of our ancestors became semi-speakers in both French and English -with a dialect in English that borrows heavily from French and a patois in French that borrows heavily from English.

So, we know right around the 1920s Louisiana French people were speaking a quasi-French, quasi-English, as many still are today. What else happened around that time?


The Great Migration.

Driven in part by The 1927 Flood, African Americans left the South, in particular the Mississippi Delta Region, in droves. This was a time, as well, where French still be spoken in southern Missouri and Arkansas as well the Mississippi and Alabama Gulf Coast. This was a trend that would persist well into the 1950s, which is why LA has an L.A. colony.

These African American laborers, standing up to the insanity of the Jim Crow South, crossing boundaries to claim their own autonomy, were the first ambassador's of Louisiana's culture and dialect, long before Justin Wilson did whatever-the-hell-it-is-he-did and Paul Prudhomme overcooked Redfish on a skillet.

Like any good theory, my theory is wrong. What I mean is, AAVE is more than just Louisiana French. It's also Southern English (for example the use of 'gotten' that we find in Southern U.S. English but nowhere else) and it's own developments and idiosyncrasies that I'll let smarter people research.

Point is, though, except maybe for that Formation video, the amount of crossover between Louisiana French culture/dialect and African American culture/dialect isn't a connection I've seen people make and I'd love to see more research on it.

Can I intern?

Now, the controversy.

So, in Louisiana French we call each other 'nigga.' We say 'neg', but yeah, we're terrible and that's what we're saying. I'm sorry and I'll turn in my Cajun card (if I ever really had one) if I've offended whatever Brouillette or Doucet who's reading this.

And I'm not saying we starting doing this after watching Richard Pryor stand-up, either. I mean we've been doing it for a long time.

It's called covert prestige. It's taking a term people call you to put you down, flipping it, and using it solidarity with other people also called that name. This isn't to say white French-speakers and black French-speakers got along -on the contrary Lafourche Parish had one of the highest ratios of lynchings in the United States- but it is to say when people are getting shitted on they at least find a way to make fertilizer.

And what a bizarre, intricate culture we've grown at out this muck of racial caste struggle. A cacophony of color painted by the songs of Africa.

What makes Louisiana unique isn't the French, if you think about it. Maine has a large French-speaking population and I have yet to be invited to a clam bake down here. No, it's our Afro-Caribbean heritage. Without Africa, Louisiana wouldn't have okra, spicy food, or music worth listening to.

We'd just be a tropical New Brunswick without the good healthcare or education.

So, in that respect, in can be hard to define when one culture ends and the other begins, mon neg.

Southeast Louisiana Food, An Interview

              A good meal takes you places. Stuffed bell peppers always remind me of Maman Peggy rubbing my arm and saying ‘sha monp ‘ti bebe’. Roast and rice and gravy make me think of the best storyteller I know, my daddy. These days, any etouffee’s I have eaten are sized up to what my wife can do in her cast iron skillet .

                The recipes in Addie and Jeremy Martin’s Southeast Louisiana Food taste like a summer in Grand Isle. Their shrimp fricassee is the pot stew your cousin put on the stove because you didn’t catch enough Specs that day. It’s the full, earthy flavor you can only get from someone like Addie; someone so immersed in the culture that cooking naturally evokes place and time.

                What’s more, I’ve been fooling my family into believing I’m a good cook by using modified versions of her recipes.

                But this book is more than a cookbook. It is an ambitious attempt to condense 300 years of Southeast Louisiana food culture into a palatable users-guide. Through interviews with everyone from crabbers to professors, politicians to oystermen, Addie and Jeremy capture a living history. What’s more, in the hospitability that Cajuns are famous for, they invite you to experience their journey with an appendix of recipes; most of them garnered from Addie’s family.

                Until recently, Addie and her husband Jeremy were staying in a shotgun house in Faubourg St. John in New Orleans. They received me in their front parlor stacked high with wide, heavy books written in our old French and Spanish. After a couple of beers we moved to the back kitchen, where -along with a few more beers- there sat a fricassee; it’s dark roux seasoned just right and a pot of rice on the table.

                Below are a few questions I had for them:

The Brochure: Now, in Louisiana, everyone says ‘we live to eat’, right? So, why do you think food is so important to Southeast Louisiana? What is it about fisheries in particular?

Addie: I like to tell the story through the lens of the fisheries because the fisheries play such a large role. You know, all the industries were tied up. You know, sugar is the industry, but-

Jeremy: It was always industrialized, it was always a commodity.

Addie: Yeah, the fisheries seem to tap into a more…way of life. Sugar and oil are top-down things. You need capital. It’s run by people with money, but the work being done on a day-to-day basis are everyday people. That allows them to keep their culture. They’re some of the first freelancers, so to speak.

Jeremy: Also, when we get to Cotton or Sugar, it’s often slave labor, historically. But when it comes to fishing, people can do it for themselves.

The Brochure: I notice a lot of the people you interview in the book are the old people. I notice that as well in my family, when you want to understand the culture, if you want to find out what it means to be Cajun, we go to our grandparents. Why do you think that is?

Addie: Well, because their parents were still 100% Cajun and French and in that way of life. Their parents were here before the Americanizing happened. Think about us now. Our parents were born in the 50s, but them and their parents, we are looking at the pre-information age. Things stay more isolated.

What’s more, in our families, sometimes it’s our grandparents who were the first to even graduate high school, so it was a lot different then. There weren’t as many outside influences. It wasn’t something people did on a conscious level. They weren’t thinking ‘well this is my culture, so I’d better do it this way; they were thinking ‘I need to eat tomorrow.’

The Brochure: What does the recent influx of Anglo, nonLouisianians post-Katrina mean for New Orleans?

Jeremy: Look, everyone wants to say it’s a bad thing, but it’s not. A static culture will die and become a museum piece. Now, we’re talking about New Orleans here which is different than what we were talking about in our book, but the same principles apply. But it’s actually great for New Orleans, because they bring new ideas. What we need to try to do is educate and integrate them into the culture.  The mistakes we made in Louisiana has been to isolate them, but guess what? They innovate, they take the culture.

Addie: Yeah, it’s our responsibility to take them into the fold, and show them. For a culture to thrive, it has to change and grow and remain relevant. It’s not up to some board or nonprofit to dictate what the culture is. People have to decide to do it. Crawfish boils, for example, that came in the last 50 yeasr. 60 years ago, eating crawfish meant you were poor, but then the state (LSU Ag department) invested in crawfish fisheries. The tighter you hold on (to a culture) the less control you have.

The Brochure: How critical to our culture is it to speak French, and do you think there is any incentive to speak French?

Jeremy: It’s gone. It’s dead and gone but it lives on in slang. But as a spoken language it’s gone. Why would a child speak Cajun French with his friends when he’d just speak English? However, there is an extensive patois. So when someone says a word with Cajun origin, we can educate people where it comes from...I think, academically, it’s incredibly important. It’s something that’s going to be gone in twenty-five years, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

The Brochure: Damn, Jeremy, you just swallow dark truths. Don’t even flinch.

Addie: When you have a whole generation not learning a language, even if they’re well intentioned…when you’re not taught a language from childhood…it’d be hard to bring it back.

*This book can be found at:

http://www.amazon.com/Southeast-Louisiana-Food-Seasoned-Tradition/dp/1626195498

Making a visit with Tante Sue

In Louisiana, our French resides in the periphery.

It's what the old people speak when they want to talk about how much of a little shit you are but don't want you to know they know, or when the gossip gets so good only the subjunctive tense or feminized nouns capture the scandal.

It's the echo of older languages. The last vestiges of Choctaw in Lagniappe, Atchafalaya, Bayou. The sway of a Caribbean breeze with a Co fa pas? or a mo chagrin. The rustic rhythms of West Africa in gumbo, coush coush, jambalaya.

A language most people in South Louisiana my age have some experience with, but none of us speak.


Here's Tante Sue, my great aunt, having a conversation with my friend Ibrehemia and me.

For the next couple of months I'm going to be posting any family members I have left who still speak French, or at least whatever French they still speak.

Saving the Coast: Interview with Kerry St. Pé

*Two years ago I sat down with Kerry St. Pé, the Executive Director (at the time) of the Barataria-Terrbonne National Estuary Program. This program is one of 28 national programs dedicated to the preservation and restoration of our wetland system. For 40 years Kerry and his staff have fought for our coastline and culture. Last July, Kerry retired as Executive Director, making this possibly the last interview published from a time where he was at the helm of that organization.*

TB: It seems to me like there are two erosions. Not just the coast, you’ve got an erosion of heritage. With these graves it’s very symbolic. More than just the coast, what we’re losing…

St.: Yeah, we’re losing the coast, but more importantly we’re losing the thing that sustains our culture. So, we want to save or restore the coast because we want to save our culture. It’s all about the people. The marshes and wetlands, and all those coastal wetlands aren’t just places for people to travel through and look around and look at the beauty. It’s the thing that protects us from hurricanes, it’s the thing that entertains us (with) fishing, crabbing. It’s the thing that supports our way of life. You know, crabbing, shrimping, oystering, fishing. The wetlands down here are everything to us. It is who we are. So, the reason we want to restore it is to save ourselves.

TB: When did we first notice how dramatic the erosion really is?

St:  Mid-to-late 70s. I was working by that time.  Now, we always knew there was land loss. The 1927 flood. Even dating back to Harnett Cane, he was talking about land loss, wetland loss, back then... the mid-forties, nineteen-forties... but, the land loss really started accelerating after we started digging oilfield canals, you know, exploring for oil and gas. We started sucking fluids out of the earth, and it caved in the earth’s crust...so, we’ve always been sinking. It’s just that the Mississippi has offset that sinking by flooding and depositing silt and sand down there. We’ve been sinking for 10,000 years. People that don’t understand that from around the country, they’ll say we shouldn’t live here because this place is sinking. Well, we’ve been sinking for 10,000 years. That’s not the problem. The problem is, not only have we built levees, but we’ve built locks and dams in the upper watershed. So, even if we didn’t have those levees, there’s not enough sediment coming down the Mississippi river...we have to harvest sediment from where it is.We’re going to need freshwater diversions, freshwater input, but we don’t necessarily need the massive quantities of water people are talking about, that would destroy the very culture we’re trying to save.

TB: Right. So if that’s what we need –to pump the sediment- how would we do that? Open the levees? Or just dredge?

St.: No, just opening the levees would bring in massive amounts of water. It wouldn’t do anything because the sediments are on the bottom, not the surface. So, we need to harvest that sediment with dredges to restore our system.

TB: So what’s the most recent thing being done in terms of restoration, what’s the most recent thing, in terms of projects?

St.: Well, we’re strong advocates of dredging and piping sediment to pipelines to restore the habitat, to restore landscape features, coastal landscape features. This has been done a few times, throughout our history, it’s been done. The place I grew up in was built in 1920 with a pipe and a dredge... So, this has been done repeatedly, but not necessarily to restore wetlands. In the distant past it was more done to fill wetlands. But more recently, we’re using that technique to restore wetlands. The problem is, it’s very expensive. You lay a pipe and you find a sediment source in the river, and you pump it. And, when they finish with that project, historically, they've been picking up the pipe.  So, what we need to do, is do projects like that, like a long distance sediment pipeline. 

TN: Do you think we’ll do it? Do you think we’ll restore the coast?

St: I think we can do it. It remains to be seen if we will. We need the political will. This isn’t just a political game. We need to restore the coast for the good of Louisiana and the nation. But, yeah, I think it can be done. I think we’re running out of time. 

TB: Why aren't people out there demonstrating? I mean, people are upset and very angry. But coordinated action, obviously we have you, and the National Estuary, but coordinated, grassroots action, from what you might see in other parts of the French-speaking world, from say, Quebec. If this was Quebec, the Quebecois would go out into the street, for demonstrations, but we just don’t seem to be a demonstration kind of people.

St: That’s right, we aren't. That’s not our way. The people here are more likely to –they know full well what would happen if we’d lose our wetlands. They know now, they see it. You have oldtimers and they say, they see after Katrina, Rita, they knee deep in water. They say ‘no wetlands.’ I don’t have to tell them that. Out in Port Sulphur, where my house was washed away in a tidal wave. The whole Parish was washed away. Those people know why. No wetlands. So, it’s generally known down here by the people who are intimately affected. But you go not too far, to Baton Rouge, or New Orleans, even, where people live in the city and are not connected to the natural landscape around them. And they realize it much less. That’s mainly what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with the development of a state master plan, for instance. And we have the influence of people who are not from the state. We have scientists from out of state and they aren’t connected to the culture. They don’ know Mr. St. Pierre from Larose who have a camp down the bayou. They don’t know anything about that. They know, ‘hey, I remember in high school and college reading about Southeast Louisiana being formed by the Mississippi River.’ So we should just return to the river, right? No, people are living according to the way the system is now. '

TB: Well, I’m about to go down to Leeville, take some pictures of the graveyards. I was hoping you could tell me about the graveyards. Exactly how many are underwater?

St.: I don’t know exactly how many, but a lot. I mean, people don’t build graves underwater, they burry it on high ground. They build ‘em in elevated places, on high land. This is where they bury the people in Leeville. Leeville was once called Orange City, back in you, know, at the turn of the 19^th Century. It was all high land, they had the Orange orchards everywhere. They had cotton fields, they grew Easter Lilies. But, it’s not just Leeville. We have places like that all over South Louisiana. Katrina just destroyed graveyards all over St. Patrick’s Church, where I grew up. People were having to find their loved ones whose caskets had floated out of the graves. But that’s the shape we’re in today.  

St.: We have hope. There’s still hope here. We can restore this place, but it’s going to require us to pump sediments from the Atchafalaya, and the Mississippi, and other places. But if this place is worth being restored, and I think we’ve all decided that it is. It would be more expensive to just abandon it: the oil, the gas, the roads. It would be very expensive to abandon it. So, to restore it, what do we need? We need dirt, we need sediment. Not water. We need a more concentrated supply of sediment, the kind you get when you pump form the bottom of the river. That’s what we need. That’s the only hope we have.

  

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.