Geography of a Culture

The Nature of Life
in South Louisiana

A Confluence of Geography and Heritage

Originally published Oct. 27, 2017

Expanded version published March 8, 2023

A small, hardback book just came in the mail. It’s about a deadly rampage in 1868 in Chalmette, Louisiana, by white vigilantes against Black people recently freed from slavery. Author and historian Chris Dier tells the horrific story of these events in this new work of nonfiction, “The 1868 St. Bernard Parish Massacre, Blood in the Cane Fields,” published by The History Press. Here is his summary of the events:

“Days before the tumultuous presidential election of 1868, St. Bernard Parish descended into chaos. As African American men gained the right to vote, white Democrats of the parish feared losing their majority. Armed groups mobilized to suppress these recently emancipated voters in the hopes of regaining a way of life turned upside down by the Civil War and Reconstruction. Freed people were dragged from their homes and murdered in cold blood. Many fled to the cane fields to hide from their attackers. The reported number of those killed varies from 35 to 135. The tragedy was hidden, but implications reverberated throughout the South and lingered for generations.

Resources such as this little volume safeguard historical accuracy from the threat of extinction on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, where a regional mythology grew from tales of exotic adventures in the romantic Old South. To be fair, accounts of pirates, heroic battles, the steamboat era, hedonistic New Orleans and lush plantation life often are essentially true, such is the spice rack of momentous events in Louisiana history. But, storytellers are fond of painting with high-gloss varnish and overlooking formative events essential to a full understanding of past and present.

Stories of South Louisiana need no such embellishment or omissions to be fascinating. On the contrary, unvarnished narratives of a tumultuous history can be page-turners. Importantly, they show us who we are; we the heirs and stewards of a rich and evolving culture.

LAND AND WATER

Tulane University geographer and author Richard Campanella teaches that to understand the history of a place, we should start by examining its geography. Indeed, Louisiana’s early cast of characters, who would someday inspire epic adventure movies and lavish period dramas, were driven to colonize this land by desire to control the mouth of the Mississippi River and to profit from a vast, fertile territory abundant in natural resources. In spite of the day-to-day difficulties of settling a swampy, flood-prone, subtropical wilderness, the Mississippi River Delta’s importance to military defense justified their efforts. Costs of colonization in terms of funding and loss of human lives was ultimately staggering, to Native Americans and enslaved Africans and to early European colonists who succumbed to disease and starvation.

The Delta’s myriad rivers, bayous, bays, lakes and access to the Gulf provided navigation to and from the interior of the region, which was rich in wildlife, timber and arable land. Campanella explains that towns began to appear at the heads of bays, river confluences and points beyond which rivers were no longer navigable. Sugar cane and cotton plantations appeared along the shores of waterways that offered easy access to the port of New Orleans.

Chalmette was one such riverside town. Its location on the east bank of the Mississippi, just downriver from New Orleans, served both commercial and military purposes. The site was originally a sugar plantation and remained so until 1815, when it was destroyed during the famous Battle of New Orleans when the British Army attacked in an attempt to win control over access to the river. Andrew Jackson’s greatly outnumbered, rag-tag army of soldiers, Free Men of Color, Choctaw Indians and pirate Jean Lafitte and his lawless gang of “Baratarians” handily defeated the British.

Today, Chalmette is a refinery town where you can get the best baked macaroni in the world (trust me on this). Louisiana refineries are constructed along waterways for the same reasons as were plantations – access to navigable water and ports.

Chalmette lies at the far eastern edge of the Louisiana Coastal Plain, a land of wonder and beauty, history and mystery, diversity and contradiction. The Louisiana Geologic Survey describes the plain, less poetically, as a region that stretches the width of the state and comprises flat and low-lying tablelands, prairies, river valleys, natural levees and coastal marshes that lie between the inland hill country and the Gulf of Mexico.

Travelers on Interstate 10 between New Orleans and Houston pass for hours through the northern swath of the Coastal Plain. To the south of the highway, dry land gracefully surrenders to water. Visitors exploring those landscapes pass first through farmlands of rice, crawfish, sugar cane, corn, soybeans or cattle and then encounter grassy wetlands that may appear lonely but are, in fact, full of life. Finally, suddenly, the way is lost in sand and seafoam and in the blinding glint of ceaseless waves. Gulf breezes float the cries of seabirds that fly your dreams to a measureless sky.

Below New Orleans, distributaries of the Mississippi River spread their webbed feet. This celebrated delta, where the Mississippi drains into the Gulf of Mexico, remains one of the world’s most productive and vital wetlands. Complex coastal ecosystems nurture countless species of wildlife and support massive bird populations. The state’s commercial fishing accounts for much of the nation’s seafood.

Westward, Acadiana (Cajun Country) and the Chenier Plain stretch to the Texas border. Storm-toughened cities such as Houma, Morgan City, Lafayette, Lake Charles and the many smaller communities in between depend upon industries tied to the Gulf. Vessel repair yards, shipping services, manufacturing, hospitals, oilfield support companies, shrimping, seafood processing, tourism, entertainment, restaurants and more shore up the region’s economy.

Along the southwest coast of Louisiana, the Chenier Plain stretches 200 miles from Vermilion Bay to East Bay near Galveston, Texas. According to the Louisiana Sea Grant, a program of Louisiana State University, cheniers are ancient gulf beach ridges stranded inland by the historic deltaic processes of the Mississippi River and erosion. The word “chenier” is a Cajun-French term for “oak” or “place of oaks.” Early Acadian settlers gave the name to the ridges because of the large oaks which grew upon them – most of the oaks are now gone; they were harvested for timber. The ridges are separated by large shallow marshes interspersed with larger bayous and a series of large lakes, providing extensive habitat for birds and marine life.

The National Audubon Society calls the Chenier’s Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge one of the most biologically diverse wildlife areas in the nation. It is well known for having the highest alligator nesting density in the U.S. and is home to over 360 species of birds; these include ducks, egrets, geese, raptors, wading birds and shorebirds. The region also serves as a stopover area for many of the transient birds that winter in Central and South America.

From the plains of Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas, coastal nature adventurers can roll farther into Texas, up the narrow Bolivar Peninsula with water on both sides of the road, through sandy beach towns and past vacation homes raised 15 feet high all the way to the Galveston ferry landing. To catch the ferry, you sit in your car and wait to be floated across Galveston Bay, accompanied often by dolphins and always by gulls, to the barrier island where pirate Jean Lafitte and his band of outlaws set up shop after wearing out their welcomes in Louisiana.

Beyond Galveston, the state of Texas, 800-some-odd more miles of it, unfolds to the south, north and west, to the rest of America, to natural environments far different from Southeast Texas and the Louisiana Coastal Plain.

WONDER

Some people are born into this distinctive land possessing an inheritance paid for by generations of their kin. They own the customs of their ancestors. This strange world is in their DNA. They take mystery and enchantment in stride. They can pull joy from the air like meat from a blue crab.

Newcomers arrive expecting the big things – food and music and swamps and Cajuns and Mardi Gras. Then, they may be lucky enough in quiet moments to sense the spirit of this place, a presence as palpable as the scent of a magnolia blossom or the cry of a seabird. Truth ebbs and flows with the tides. It drifts in wind and fog. We breathe it collectively.

In New Orleans, a heady mix of cultural influences dissolves, like sugar in café au lait, into an indulgence of the senses. Part of the recipe is an inescapable chill of sorrow that emanates from crumbling bricks, foot-worn stones, floorboards made of dismantled flatboats, from iron lace railings of a Royal Street balcony or from the dark beneath the Governor Nicholls Street Wharf – the past, whispering, reminding, slavery built all of this.

In the countryside, a primordial peace lingers in secluded bayous and secretive swamps. Beauty belies the danger of unforgiving environments and a relentless climate. Delicate things thrive where men have struggled. In the windswept hush of a salt marsh or on a lonely beach raked by a winter wind, time slows. Quietude settles into low-lying prairies and woodlands. Forgotten stories long to be remembered.

Wildlife repeat ancient rituals of life and death. A Snowy Egret hunting a shallow pond steps at the pace of a sunrise. A redfish patrols the edges of reed beds and wiregrass in a brackish bay, concealed behind ghostly stumps of giant cypress harvested ages ago, steering past submerged gravestones of long-perished loggers and fishermen.

Yellow goldenrod bends to sea breezes, enduring all nature gives – blessing and curse – and then blooms lavishly in the fall to prove the South, too, has an autumn. Heat, humidity and insects thicken the air, indifferent to man’s misery.

CONTRADICTION

On a fabled coast where ground, water and air can be difficult to distinguish, so, too, in the mists of time, became legend and truth, beauty and danger, joy and sorrow, victory and defeat, nature and culture, past and present. Visitors find South Louisiana at once ordinary and peculiar. Old ways of life blend seamlessly with the modern world.

To some people, New Orleans is a paradise. To others, it’s a dystopia. Actually, the city is both and has been since the early days. For every moment of euphoria in this fun-loving place, a frustration of equal energy presents itself, sometimes in the form of flooded streets or broken infrastructure, other times in indiscriminate crime. Lists of the wonderful and the terrible are longer than the dinner menu at Antoine’s. New Orleans diehards will complain without end among themselves about every hardship of life in the city, from the municipal (don’t get them started) to the meteorological, and then tell you they love the place so much they can’t imaging ever living anywhere else.

Upriver from New Orleans, along Great River Road, restored antebellum mansions display the opulence of early sugar cane and cotton planters. Many such plantations once lined both banks of the Mississippi between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, known as Plantation Alley. Oil refineries, plastics plants and chemical facilities have replaced most of them and operate alongside predominantly African American communities. Air pollution there has earned the area another nickname – Cancer Alley.

Patience and a little local knowledge help one comprehend the complexity of this region’s history, cultural and environmental diversity and the fragility of its ecosystems; to appreciate what has survived and what has been lost; what is equally beautiful and tragic.

The mouth of the Mississippi served as a cultural gateway into Louisiana. People of multiple nationalities settled in the Delta region south of New Orleans along with already thriving Native Americans. Many hardy residents of this flood-prone sportman’s paradise, which encompasses much more water than land, continue the livelihoods of their ancestors, harvesting crawfish, oysters, shrimp, fish, alligator and menhaden and growing fruits and vegetables. Local guides treat tourists to world-class hunting and fishing expeditions. Many also work in oil and gas drilling and production – the industry most responsible for extensive destruction of wetlands. Since the 1930s, companies have dredged intricate networks of canals for pipelines and maritime traffic. These canals destroyed wetlands and increased saltwater intrusion, hastening erosion of coastal marshes that serve as uniquely productive estuaries and as natural barriers to hurricanes. The U.S. Geological Survey says Louisiana loses a football field of land to the ocean every hour.

When you cross the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge on Interstate 10 between Baton Rouge and Lafayette for the first time, the beauty of Louisiana is apparent. You may have never seen anything quite like that elevated highway that flies over wooded swamps, the Whiskey Bay Pilot Channel, the Atchafalaya River and Lake Bigeau. But, you may not be as impressed with the flat landscapes that flank other stretches of the interstate; there, old stories and lessons faintly glimmer. Under unrelenting sun in seemingly barren spaces they endure.

A single live oak tree surviving on a slender spit of dry land, surrounded by saltwater, stands as a reminder of a ridge where once existed acres of land upon which fishermen built little wooden houses and schools and raised families within groves of trees. Those days are gone.

Victory and hope are seen in a pink flock of roseate spoonbills winging high above foamy surf and ragged dunes, returning from the brink of extinction. We almost killed them all but saved them just in time.

We certainly did not save everything and we have not been eager to share every story.

Miles of open Gulf saltwater now flow where Cypress forests anchored swamps full of life before we built dams and levees, starving the Delta of alluvial sediment that builds and restores wetlands, and before we harvested the trees for lumber.

Behind each surviving remnant of antebellum splendor, we conceal much of the cruelty, suffering and death that built them. We don’t portray enslaved people on billboards.

Native Americans still work, raise families and safekeep their cultural heritage in South Louisiana. Influences of Indigenous cultures are found through this region, yet few tribal members remain where once their peoples prospered.

CULTURAL GUMBO

According to historians, Choctaw Indians sometimes referred to South Louisiana as Bulbancha, which meant land of many tongues and referred to the multitude of tribes that hunted, fished and traded there. That description remained accurate as European colonizers arrived, followed by Americans from the North and slave ships. The flags of four countries – Spain, France, Britain and the United States – have flown over Louisiana.

Today, the state hosts a potent blend of Americans: white, Black, Cajun, Creole, Hispanic, Asian, Native and more. Each group primarily speaks English, but regional dialects and languages of other nations are commonly heard. Louisiana’s people share deep and complex ties to this land and to each other. The flavors of this cultural gumbo blend most thoroughly in New Orleans.

It is said that New Orleans is the most European city in America. For example, streets in the core of the city, designed for horses and wagons, are narrow, making driving and parking difficult. If you’ve been to Paris or any number of Old World cities, New Orleans may look familiar.

The Crescent City, named for the way a bend in the Mississippi shapes the original sector of the city, is Spanish, French, African, Caribbean, Italian, Irish, German, Asian and American all at once. The dynamic mix of race, religion, sexual identity, languages, art, music, manner of dress, food, you name it, can change from one moment or street corner to the next. Sidewalks are abundant and people use them, which brings locals and tourists face to face. People of nearly every conceivable heritage get together in restaurants and bars and music scenes, drawn together by shared interests and simply the joy of living in a wildly creative and relatively judgment-free place. They start a lot of parties in mansions and tiny shotgun houses, on front porches, in back yards, on rooftops, in the middle of streets – this list could go on and on.

CONFLICT

From the colonization of Louisiana through the American Civil War and beyond, disparate peoples have clashed over race, nationality, religion, land ownership, access to natural resources, etc. The French befriended and then betrayed Indigenous peoples. Settlers purchased Native American slaves. Enslavement of Africans flourished during French, Spanish and American governments. Americans battled the British and forced violent removal of Indigenous tribes. Louisiana seceded from the United States and manufactured war supplies and naval vessels for the Confederacy. If anything, this quick summary is a gross oversimplification of the injustices and violence that embroiled efforts to control and exploit a highly desirable land.

The American Civil War upended a booming economy that had relied upon the slave trade. Wealthy and poor alike suffered major losses. Enslaved people eventually won freedom, but equality was another matter. Southern states successfully legalized racial inequities and derailed Reconstruction. Fear ruled the South.

Many years later, in the 1936 film version of the Broadway musical “Show Boat,” Paul Robeson would sing:

To Robeson’s character, Joe, the world of 1887 appeared indifferent to the unfairness of racial prejudice. Everyone knew. Nothing changed.

Today, New Orleans, the largest city in Louisiana, feels like a small town when you live there. People know each other. News spreads quickly. Wealthy and impoverished neighborhoods abut. Histories of the glorious type and of the reprehensible cannot avoid running into each other. Racial tensions remain a prominent undercurrent on the streets of the city as well as upriver in Baton Rouge, in heated debates in the state Legislature. Nothing of importance ever came easily in The Big Easy.

RURAL

New Orleans gets plenty of attention. Some people in Louisiana think it gets too much. The storied Crescent City is the jewel of the South. It attracts the most tourists. It has professional football and basketball teams. It has the best Mardi Gras celebration on the planet, and the competition is not close. It has museums and architecture and food and all that jazz. But what about the rest of the region?

The big city isn’t for everyone. New Orleans is a world of its own, crowded, noisy and expensive. It has a lot of problems. Even nearby Baton Rouge, the state’s capital and second-largest city, home of legendary political shenanigans, has its own vibe well outside the cultural orbit of New Orleans. But travel into the countryside and you will discover the rest of South Louisiana – it, too, is a whole other world.

In small cities, towns and rural communities across 22 parishes of South Louisiana, a culture strongly influenced by ancestry and tradition thrives. Today’s residents maintain lifestyles initiated by immigrants who first adapted to this challenging region and reaped from the land and water a new way of life. Abundant natural resources continue to nourish this place they call Acadiana. Cajun Country.

The website of the State of Louisiana’s Acadiana Legislative Delegation states, “Despite the frequent association of Cajuns with swamplands, Acadiana actually consists of prairies, marshes, and wooded river (or bayou) lands. Acadiana often is applied only to Lafayette Parish and several neighboring parishes, usually Acadia, Iberia, St. Landry, St. Martin, and Vermilion parishes, and sometimes also Evangeline and St. Mary; this eight-parish area, however, is actually the “Cajun Heartland, USA” district, which makes up only about a third of the entire Acadiana region.”

In Acadiana, Cajun dialect, folk music sung in the Cajun French language and zydeco music are commonly heard on the streets, in entertainment venues and on the radio. Cajuns generously share their charming culture with tourists, but also carry on traditional ways in close-knit communities far from the cameras. With a gusto more rustic, less citified, than the revelry of New Orleans, people of Cajun and Creole descent express their cultural heritage. They know how to pass a good time. Their celebrations are just as colorful, musical and numerous as those of the big city, and their cuisine just as exquisite.

Lafayette sits at the epicenter of Cajun Country, but it is folly to single out a city in a region where culture may become more personal, more family- and community-oriented, and change in countless subtle ways the farther you travel into the countryside. In fact, describing people of a region is a dangerous thing; it perpetuates stereotypes. Not everyone in South Louisiana was born there or is of Cajun or Creole descent. Some residents don’t eat boiled crawfish and others controversially put tomatoes in gumbo. Some of them love to visit New Orleans and some despise that place. They weren’t all raised in a swamp and they don’t all live off the land or hunt alligators. Plenty of people work in ordinary places like insurance offices and hospitals and Walmart. They are doctors and lawyers. They work at gas stations that sell fried boudin balls worth driving two hours to get.

Proximity to the Gulf of Mexico underlies much of South Louisiana culture. Restaurants feature seafood. Hunting, fishing and cooking skills are honed to fine arts by men and women alike. They own a lot of boats. Southeast Texas is much the same way, so swampy and marshy in places it might as well be given to Louisiana. My wife, Lisa, was born in Port Arthur, Texas, a small refinery town on the shore of Sabine Lake, right on the Gulf coast, seven feet above sea level. It’s three miles from the Louisiana border by boat or a 30-minute drive by car – your choice. When we moved to Louisiana as adults, she felt right at home.

I grew to appreciate the regional peculiarities of families like hers who have lived, generation after generation, within an easy journey to the Gulf waters. They are a little different from kin who hail from the far north – say, up by Shreveport, Louisiana. Gulf people are less woodsy, more salty. They eat things that live in shells. They own generators and take hurricanes in stride. They buy fresh shrimp, pounds of it at a time, iced down in old plastic coolers and sold from the tailgates of pickup trucks parked along roadsides.

Then there are the true beach people, who live in houses atop wooden pilings driven into the sand and watch the shoreline erode in front of them year by year, waves moving ever closer to their homes. When removed from the South, I think they still can hear seabirds call to them and feel waves and seaweed tug at their feet. They will never get all the sand out of their shoes. They prefer beaches when no one else is there, like at dawn and in winter. Their eyes are a little damaged from staring out to sea past blinding wavetops to watch the sun set fire to the horizon. You may detect in these dreamers the searching gaze of one who long ago corked hopes in a bottle and set them upon a wave, trusting them to return someday, fulfilled.

I’m not sure I’ve met a native of this region who desired to leave if they could avoid doing so. Many are far from affluent, yet even in some of the most economically struggling communities, happiness seems to be the main export. In storytelling, art, music, dance and especially food they express appreciation for their lives and their communities and they take pride in their cultural identities. People who are new to South Louisiana are often quick to assimilate much of this culture. I’ve met many who loved New Orleans, the Delta and Acadiana instantly, except perhaps in July and August.

PAST IS PRESENT

Louisiana is now at peace, officially. On pleasant weekend mornings in spring, among azaleas blooming white and pink in the sun and magnolia buds showing color, South Louisiana looks like the most peaceful place in the world. So long gone now are the lives and deaths of early inhabitants, so quiet their fields of wildflowers, it seems fair to ask if those people and their struggles still matter. After all, much progress has been made.

Minorities are strongly represented in city, state and federal governments. Laws prohibit discrimination. Daily life is easier than in the past, thanks to conveniences such as modern highways, air conditioning and better drainage. Louisiana people are famously friendly. You can start a conversation with strangers on street corners and they will think nothing of it.

South Louisiana lets the good times roll and serves generous portions of hospitality. But as tempting as it may be to paint a picture of one big, happy culture, a true image would show many subcultures blending together from New Orleans to Southeast Texas, most with edges as indistinct and permeable as the shoreline of a marsh.

People from throughout the region may gather together for big celebrations like Mardi Gras and at any of countless yearly Louisiana festivals, but in between, the wealthy and the less wealthy tend to keep their own traditions in courtyards and back yards and anywhere there is water. Cajuns stick to the countryside. New Orleans lawyers go to Commander’s Palace for lunch. Tourists go to Bourbon Street. Folks who live in far-flung wetlands reachable only by boat lead their own lives. Various groups may offer some cultural practices for public participation while others remain deeply personal.

The fact remains, however, that residents whose ancestors fought and died for the Confederacy live and work among descendants of Africans brought to Louisiana chained in the bowels of ships. Old grudges still simmer beneath the surface of civility.

Vestiges of ancient injustices haunt public institutions. Indifference hardens the most well-meaning of hearts. Tensions erupt again and again, yet grievances remain unresolved. When Louisiana politicians square off with each other and fire rhetoric that sounds like a new civil war (or a resurgence of the old one), this region may appear to have evolved little from those bloody days and nights in the cane fields. If that is the case, were centuries of blood spilled for nothing? How much more will be necessary?

Regional history books such as “The 1868 St. Bernard Parish Massacre” remind us of deeply rooted connections to places, to history and to each other. They show us that some of what we see today we’ve seen before.

The tragic chapter of Louisiana history that played out in Chalmette has largely vanished from local memory. Steamboats no longer glide to the shores of the Mississippi and lower gangplanks to bring aboard sugar and cotton. We are free to sit together on the levee and watch the treasure of the world pass to the north and south. And the river, well, you know.

Guy D. Johnson

Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.