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After the Storms: Tradition and Change in Bayou La Batre
Frye Gaillard
| About once a century in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, a catastrophic storm comes roaring from the Gulf of Mexico. Ninety-nine years before Hurricane Katrina there was the hurricane of 1906, a mighty wind that lasted for more than twenty-four hours, long before these events had names. The memories of it are present even now in the oral history of the Bayou—in the family stories handed down for generations in this coastal fishing village. |
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Alma Bryant, a girl of thirteen in 1906, and later her community's leading educator, remembered being separated from her family in the storm, as the tidal surge tore her house from its moorings. "Rain, the coldest and heaviest I have ever felt, pounded me relentlessly," she said. "Then the vicious wind picked me up and immersed me in one of those craters made by an uprooted tree. I clutched the limb ... and held on for dear life, barely conscious of the weird noises all around me—the shrieks of frightened birds, the woeful cry of a drowning calf, the dying moans of Mr. Deakle's old white mare pinned beneath the demolished barn."1 |
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Bryant, in the end, was one of the lucky ones. She managed to swim and clamor through the floating debris—"the limp, dead chickens, bloated hogs, writhing snakes"—toward the flickering light of a house in the distance. At least 135 others did not make it, and the Mobile Register, the morning newspaper in the nearest city, carefully recorded the details. Two Bayou women lining up the bodies, covering them with shrouds; a frightened family emerging from the woods, where they had drifted all night in an open skiff; a writer's description of those who survived: "Most ... resembled great chunks of liver-colored beef, so badly were they battered and bruised."2 |
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This now is a part of the lore of Bayou La Batre, a place where residents freely acknowledge that life on the edge of the continent is hard. The hurricanes come and the hurricanes go, requiring resilience of those who survive. So it was in 1906, and so it is after Hurricane Katrina. But there is another understanding more subtle and elusive, more difficult for many people to explain. When the truly massive storms hit the Bayou, those once-a-century calamities, they have often changed the course of local history, much as they might alter the course of a river. |
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In the decade after 1906, the thriving tourist industry in Bayou La Batre and the neighboring coastal village of Coden began to shrink into almost nothing, as turn-of-the-century resorts—the Rolston Hotel, the Oleander Hotel—began to close their doors. The Bayou slowly turned in on itself, returning to the source of its identity and survival: extracting a modest living from the sea. The work was hard, but the people found satisfaction in the harvest of shrimp and oysters, fish and crabs, depending on the season. "We love it like a farmer loves digging in the dirt," said longtime oysterman Avery Bates. "You sweat hard and see the bounty of the sea, and you're part of a heritage going back for generations. You're feeding your family and the people around you. You know you're involved in something worthwhile."3 |
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But as Bates and others are quick to tell you, the seafood industry has changed over time. The technology improved, and the catches grew large. But by the early years of the twenty-first century, high fuel prices, imported shrimp, and the growing complexity of government regulations had made many in the Bayou fear for the future of their profession. They had already lived through major upheavals, chief among them, a massive immigration in the 1970s of Asian refugees—Laotians, Cambodians, and Vietnamese—fleeing war and genocide in their homelands. These new arrivals made a place for themselves in the life and economy of Bayou La Batre, many of them working in the seafood industry, but soon they too faced an uncertain future. |
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