Sheryl St. Germain

Essays

Courante

     Only ten percent of the land in south Louisiana's coastal zone is more than three feet above sea level. The Mississippi River flows above sea level but much of New Orleans is below, and half of it is also below the storm level of Lake Pontchartrain. The city still wants to be a swamp, and it takes a prodigious effort to deter it. New Orleans has the largest drainage system in the country, and engineers from all over the world come to study it. We have twenty-two pumping stations, one of which is the largest pumping station in the world, and more than two hundred and forty miles of canals (Venice has only sixty-eight). One thousand five hundred miles of drainage pipes lie under the city.

     It is, in some ways, an impossible task to keep this city properly drained, but through heroic feats of engineering we've managed to transform a large, thriving swamp into a large, thriving urban area. It takes constant surveillance, though. Look away for a moment, let one levee deteriorate or one pumping station go out and we're on the way to becoming a swamp again.

     Eight generations of my family have lived and worked this land and harvested these waters. Jean Fleuren Cossé and Marie Laisaine were the first of my ancestors to make the trip from France in the mid 1700s, along with hundreds of other immigrants, the ones who would be the parents of those who would come to be known here as Creoles. My French ancestors built an orange plantation along the banks of the Mississippi in Buras Settlement, sixty-four miles south of New Orleans, where most of what was not river was Gulf or coastal marsh or swamp. The land they found themselves on-now Plaquemines Parish-was nothing like the land they had known in France. The "land" that lined the natural levees along the Mississippi where they had to build their homes wasn't really land, but swamp. Some of them drained the swamps or dug canals to try to control the water; others built homes on stilts on top of the swamps.

     Propaganda posters from the time advertise Louisiana as a tropical paradise; the soil, the posters claim, will bear two crops a year without cultivation; Indians adore the white man and work for him-for nothing. There are gold mines, pearl fisheries, a pleasant climate, no diseases. Of course there was nothing of the sort. In fact the air was damp, the waters stagnant, the ground marshy. Tidal waves from hurricanes brought salt water into the orange groves and destroyed the roots or drowned the trees. The moisture in the climate encouraged disease . Cholera and yellow fever claimed more lives in south Louisiana than anywhere else in the country at the time. Even in the nineteenth century when piped drinking water was available, it was too expensive for most. Some drank river water and some drank water from their backyard cisterns, not knowing they were breeding grounds for the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the carrier of yellow fever. The outbreaks of malaria, cholera, yellow fever and typhoid in New Orleans through the latter part of the nineteenth century occurred at twice the rate and intensity of other large urban areas. Many immigrants died soon after landing from some water-borne disease. In one six-year period alone twelve thousand people died of yellow fever.

     Meanwhile the hurricanes came every year, bringing with them floods. Those who chose to live, as my relatives did, on the wiry peninsula on which Buras is situated were (and still are) most affected by hurricanes. The Mississippi runs thick down the whole length of the peninsula to its mouth, and is prone to flooding even without any help from hurricanes because there's so little land, and what's there is below sea level. Most of the land surrounding the Mississippi as it pours itself for its last miles to its mouth is coastal marsh, with some forested wetland and a thin strip of development and farms along either side of the river. It is along this thin strip that my maternal ancestors lived for close to three hundred years. In the early twentieth century their orange plantation, their home, and even the cemetery where some of them were buried, was washed away in the aftermath of a hurricane. Where they lived and worked and loved and died was claimed by the river. And the rest may yet be claimed by the Gulf. Because of coastal erosion, much of Plaquemines parish will be open water in fifty years.

     Those of my ancestors who survived the 1915 hurricane moved to New Orleans and tried to get on with their lives.

     The waters come, the waters recede, we respond by rebuilding or relocating; hurricanes come, hurricanes leave, again we rebuild or move. We answer the weather as we do partners in a dance, following, holding them close, and trying to respond to their moves-even as they step on our feet.