"The Marsh Came Back. I'm Still Borrowing Everything I Touch."

Editor's note: The Docket does not, as a rule, employ time-traveling correspondents. Celestino "Tino" Serpas is an imagined composite, assembled from documented accounts of Isleño trappers in St. Bernard Parish during the winter of 1928–29. His circumstances, grievances, and the figures he cites are drawn from the historical record. His opinions, his profanity, and his feelings about the Acme Land and Fur Company are entirely his own. — Eds.

The trapping season of 1928–29 was, by the numbers, a recovery. Some 900,000 muskrats would be taken from St. Bernard Parish marshes that year, a startling rebound from the 70 percent population loss caused by the Caernarvon crevasse just twenty months earlier.¹ The muskrats had come back. Whether the people who depended on them had was a separate question, and nobody from Canal Street was asking it.

We find Celestino Serpas mending a borrowed pirogue on a mud bank near Delacroix Island, the community the Isleños call simply The Island, where Canary Islander families have trapped, fished, and buried their dead since 1779.² He is forty-six, weather-creased, missing the tip of his left ring finger from an old trap. He has strong opinions about the Citizens Flood Relief Committee and does not lower his voice when expressing them.

You're back on the water. How does the marsh look?

Tino: The rats are back. That's what people upriver want to hear, yes? The rats are back, so everything is fine. I'll tell you what the rats did. They bred. That's what rats do. Nobody had to pass a law. Nobody had to form a committee. The rats just did what God made them to do.

Now. You want to ask me if the people are back? That's a different animal.

What does "back" look like here?

Tino: It looks like me in a boat that isn't mine, with traps I'm borrowing from my brother-in-law, running lines I used to run with my own equipment. Equipment that is sitting at the bottom of a marsh somewhere between here and Poydras. I had two pirogues, good ones. I had steel traps, maybe two hundred. I had a drying shed. I had a life that worked. Not a rich life. But it worked.

And they told us it was temporary. Temporary. That was the word. Three days, gather your things. So I gathered what I could carry and I left, and then I watched from the levee while they blew it and the river came through like it owned the place. Which I suppose it does now.

You went back into the floodwaters before they receded.

Tino: Because the rats were drowning. A muskrat can swim, sure, but when there's nothing to climb onto, when every piece of high ground is gone, they exhaust themselves. I saw thousands of them on anything that floated. Logs, planks, a door from somebody's house with six rats sitting on it like passengers. So yes, some of us went back in and set rafts out. Boards, palmetto bundles, anything. A man from the conservation department came through in a canoe and wrote it all down. Said the rats had lost their fear of man.³ Well. I could have told him that. When you're drowning, you'll climb onto whatever's offered.

And then you filed a claim.

Tino: [short laugh] I filed a claim. Yes.

What happened with it?

Tino: You want the short version or the version that makes me want to set something on fire?

The short version: I got three hundred dollars. For everything. The pirogues, the traps, the shed, a season's worth of pelts I had stored, the garden my wife kept. Three hundred dollars. And that's before they took out what they said we owed for food.

They deducted the cost of feeding you while you were displaced?

Tino: That is what they did. The committee, these bankers, these gentlemen from Canal Street, they put us in shelters that smelled like a barn, fed us rice and whatever else, and then when the settlement came, they subtracted the cost of that food from what they owed us.⁴

The total claims from both parishes exceeded thirty-five million dollars. The committee paid out less than three million.⁵

Tino: And you know where most of that three million went? You know this already or you wouldn't be asking me.

Acme Land and Fur Company. One company. A million and a half dollars.⁶ One company got a million and a half, and I got three hundred. My neighbor got nothing. Acme has lawyers in New Orleans. Acme has men who eat lunch with the same bankers who sit on the committee. What do I have? I have a claim written in English by a man who speaks better Spanish than English, filed with a committee that already decided what it was willing to pay before I walked in the door.

The Trappers' War was only two years ago. Does it feel different to you now?

Tino: [long pause]

In twenty-six, Perez and his people tried to triple the lease on our own marsh. They brought a gunboat, the Dolores, with machine guns. Machine guns! Against trappers. And we fought them. Manuel Molero bought the land back and leased it to us fair, and we thought, I thought, bueno, we won. We are Isleños. We have been here since before Louisiana was American. We will be here after these politicians are dust.⁷

Then four months later the governor signs a paper and the river takes it all anyway. And the same kind of men, not Perez this time but the same kind, they decide what we're owed for it.

You fight the thief and win, and then the landlord burns the house down and tells you he'll pay for it, and then he doesn't. What did the war matter?

Governor Long won St. Bernard Parish by a wide margin.⁸

Tino: Every vote. He could have promised us nothing and we'd have voted for him, just to put a boot in the face of the men who did this. But he promised plenty. Share our Wealth. We'll see. I've been promised before.

The muskrats recovered faster than anyone expected. What does that mean for your season?

Tino: It means the marsh works. It means God or nature or whatever you want to call it repairs itself. The rats breed, the grass comes back, the water finds its way. The marsh doesn't need a committee.

But I need a boat that doesn't leak, and traps that are mine, and a shed to dry pelts in.

If they came to you tomorrow and said they needed to open the crevasse again, to save New Orleans again, what would you say?

Tino: [very long silence]

I'd say what Sheriff Meraux said. You're doing it because we can't stop you.⁹ That's what I'd say. That's what I said last time, only I didn't know it yet.

Celestino Serpas returned to full-time trapping by the 1929–30 season. The Isleño communities of lower St. Bernard Parish would be flooded again by Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The levee at Caernarvon was rebuilt. It was breached again, this time by Katrina's storm surge, seventy-eight years later.

Footnotes

1. Country Roads Magazine, "The Louisiana Flood of 1927," citing naturalist Edward Avery McIlhenny's field surveys. https://countryroadsmagazine.com/art-and-culture/history/the-louisiana-flood-of-1927/ ↩

2. 64 Parishes, "Isleños," entry on Canary Islander settlement history in St. Bernard Parish. https://64parishes.org/entry/islenos ↩

3. Country Roads Magazine, citing a four-day canoe survey of flooded muskrat habitat conducted by a conservation department associate (likely connected to Edward Avery McIlhenny's field work). https://countryroadsmagazine.com/art-and-culture/history/the-louisiana-flood-of-1927/ ↩

4. Richard M. Mizelle, Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), cited via Louisiana The History Project, "Caernarvon Crevasse." https://1927flood.lthp.org/story/caernarvon-crevasse/ ↩

5. 64 Parishes, "Treading Water" (Monique Verdin, 2023). https://64parishes.org/treading-water ↩

6. 64 Parishes, "Treading Water"; Louisiana The History Project, "Caernarvon Crevasse." https://64parishes.org/treading-water ↩

7. 64 Parishes, "Isleños," on the 1926 Trappers' War, the gunboat Dolores, and Manuel Molero's resolution. https://64parishes.org/entry/islenos ↩

8. Chris Dier, "When the Levees Blew Up," citing John M. Barry, Rising Tide (Simon & Schuster, 1997). https://chrisdier.com/2014/02/16/when-the-levees-blew-up-a-public-execution-of-a-community/ ↩

9. Sheriff L.A. Meraux, quoted in Lyle Saxon, Father Mississippi: The Story of the Great Flood of 1927 (Pelican Publishing, 1927), and cited in Louisiana The History Project, "Caernarvon Crevasse." https://1927flood.lthp.org/story/caernarvon-crevasse/ ↩