Books

The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous: Fighting to Save a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina
By Ken Wells. Yale University Press, 2008. 272 pp.

I read this book while Hurricane Gustav headed toward Louisiana. I am writing this review while Hurricane Ike pounds Cuba. Before it is published, that storm will have entered the Gulf and taken aim at Louisiana once again. How much, one has to ask, can people and a place endure?

A great deal, if those people live in Saint Bernard Parish, southeast of New Orleans and in the heart of Cajun country. Saint Bernard was and still is the home of hardworking commercial fishermen and refinery crews. Those folks knew and know the marshes, the canals, and the weather. But even the best of them were not ready what took place in late August and early September of 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit the area.

Author Ken Wells is from a parish nearby. A writer for the Wall Street Journal, he was a natural to go and see and report, which he did. Then he went back, again and again. This book is the result of those trips, those experiences, those impressions.

The story of Katrina is familiarly told from the New Orleans perspective, as if nothing worse could have happened to anyone or anything anywhere else. "Worse," however, is a relative term, and if what the storm did to Saint Bernard was not worse, it was, in its own way, just as bad.

Focusing on a few individuals and families, Wells brings the impact of Katrina home with a personal touch so often missing from the statistics that reflected the damage in the Crescent City. But there is more here than the story of survivors. This is an account of how a way of life made survival possible, and in some cases essential.

That way of life was in danger long before Katrina hit. Marshes drained and lost for navigation, industrialization and commercialization had made making a living from the bays and Gulf all the more difficult, but bayou folks had held on and, in some cases, prospered. However, this very closeness to the land made the Katrina an even more tragic event and return and recovery all the more necessary.

Few accounts better describe the sheer terror of the storm and the devastation that followed. The saga of a 90-year-old woman and her 70-year-old disabled son trying to cope dramatizes the danger and dislocation as well as any I have read. Their story, however, is only one. There are more.

Although Wells does not concentrate on conditions that made the storm's impact far worse than it might have been, he does not ignore them. There was the oil company that did not secure its tanks, as its own plans require, and turns much of the parish into petroleum-polluted wasteland. Yet this is less the story of environmental insensitivity and bureaucratic bungling than of people who coped, cobbled things together, and carried on.

Their attitude was pretty well summed up when, on Sept. 12, well after the storm and when help was finally dribbling in, President Bush arrived by helicopter. He was greeted by Junior Rodriguez, parish president. The conversation went like this.

The President: "Mr. Rodriguez, I've been so worried about you. But why didn't you call me?"

Rodriguez: "How could I call you? Everything's blown up down here, we're in trouble, the whole country's under water. And people are gonna call you?"

Instead of calling, the people of Saint Bernard did for themselves as best they could. And they are doing yet again.

Harvey H. Jackson is a history professor at Jacksonville State University.