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Sep. 29th, 2005 12:17 amGhost Town
Down at the End of the World, Houses Walk and the Dead Rise Up
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 21, 2005; Page C01
DAVANT, La. Directions to Davant are simple: "Go to the end of the
world and turn left."
End-of-the-world Louisiana means going down, deep down, past New
Orleans and its silent, flooded neighborhoods, through ruined St.
Bernard Parish where the oil spilled after Hurricane Katrina, and
down even deeper, down into the sinking marshes and bayous of
Plaquemines Parish, where Creoles with lyrical French names talk
matter-of-factly of walking the levee next to ghosts and spirits.
Down to Davant.
Except now it's hard to say what is Davant and what isn't Davant. New
Orleans filled up with water slowly. Davant was swept away fast,
destroying the false sense of security that ever-taller levees gave
to the place. Even in battered New Orleans, tones go hushed when
conversations turn to Plaquemines (PLACK-uh-min), which takes its
name from a Native American word for persimmon. "It's worse down
there, bad, bad, bad," they say.
This is where Katrina acted like a tsunami, treating the big "ring
levee" that comes to a looping end south of town--bent in the shape
of a paper clip--as if it were a child's sand castle. The Mississippi
River came roaring through here, frothy and white and mean, up over
the levee on one side of town, and the salty marsh water broke
through the levee on the other.
Plaquemines is the place where the people who want to resurrect New
Orleans, people such as President Bush, who has vowed "to build the
levees higher" to protect the Crescent City, might look for lessons,
and where people who love the marsh and build the levees want
everyone to take note. It was the first line of defense thrown up by
human beings against Katrina, and it buckled, unable to withstand a
surge that cascaded through fraying marshes that in another era might
have slowed the water.
"Plaquemines has been kind of out of the news," Lt. Gen. Carl Strock,
commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, said recently. "But
clearly, it's an important area, it needs to be brought back up."
All that's left on some blocks in this town of 900, and some of the
neighboring communities along the levee, are concrete stoops. That's
it. Churches and stores simply vanished and a big chunk of the road
that is so important to maintaining Louisiana's rich oil fields is
washed away. Sturdy wood frame houses that survived when the wind got
strong and the water got high in the past were ground into kindling,
reduced to mere smudges of color on the sloping sides of the river
levees.
The levee that failed to protect Davant is twice as tall now, local
officials say, as it was when Hurricane Camille blasted through the
parish in 1969. All that extra dirt and clay had a lulling effect,
and the men and women who worked the oil fields out in the marsh, or
plied the bayous for oysters, got to thinking Davant was a safe place.
"People felt pretty good with the levee 18, 19 feet high," said John
Barthelemy, a parish councilman with droopy eyes and a quick
smile. "They'd say, 'Now we have the levees. We don't have to worry
about water. We'll just worry about wind.' "
Wind and legends, that is. The Creole boys and girls down here put as
much faith in the tales of their grandmothers -- their memeres -- as
they do in the Army Corps of Engineers. And the memeres said
Plaquemines was fated for doom. As the legend goes, the people of
lower Plaquemines took vengeance on a priest in the early 1800s,
killing him after he was accused of committing a heinous crime. That
act of vigilantism -- passed from generation to generation in scary
bedtime stories filled with werewolves called loups-garous and
screaming "yi, yi, yi" spirits -- came with consequences, the memeres
warned.
"There was something about 'thou shalt not kill,' " Simon Duplessis,
70, said as he looked for pieces of his small private plane on the
narrow strip of land that his ancestors have owned since 1820. "Dad
said the place was cursed."
Certainly Plaquemines, which now has a population of about 29,000,
has suffered. During the great Mississippi River flood of 1927, the
wealthy men upstream in New Orleans decided to save their city by
blowing up a downstream levee and flooding Plaquemines. For decades,
the parish was a corrupt kingdom ruled in dictatorial fashion by
Judge Leander Perez, an iconic segregationist whose blunt,
inflammatory speeches in the 1950s and '60s made him a national
figure in the Southern stand against integration.
The Plaquemines that Judge Perez ruled looks like a cursed place now.
Cattle roam untended on deserted streets, and pecan trees -- once
tall and majestic -- lie down in the fields, toppled and broken. The
lush groves that produced satsumas, sweet oranges coveted each
harvest season by Louisianians, have gone brittle and brown, burned
crispy by 14 feet of salty water that came through a 200-foot-wide
break in the marsh levee.
On the other side is wild Louisiana, part land, part water, a place
that was vanishing even before Katrina, and that environmentalists
are begging harder than ever for the federal government to
restore. "As a child I always used to think, 'What's beyond this?'"
said Duplessis, who remembers going for swims in the Mississippi with
his father. "The ducks would fly off, and I would always wonder where
in the world they would go."
This part of Plaquemines once had a boomtown feel to it. A railroad
passed near the Duplessis home, to bring in supplies for the oil rigs
and bring out rice and oranges and pecans. The country stores held
Friday night dances and showed movies. But the marsh has been
dropping steadily -- it has grown more sickly over the years as the
Mississippi was trapped in a man-made channel that prevented it from
spreading silt. Each year it sinks up to an inch. The lower it goes,
the worse the storm surges become, and the more inhospitable the
place becomes, even with its bigger levees.
"The ones who are left are pretty much your die-hards," said Gina
Meyer, a Plaquemines native who cruised over submerged neighborhoods
in an airboat to grab people off rooftops.
Die-hards and, to hear the locals tell it, ghosts. Even Barthelemy, a
feet-on-the-ground sort who commandeered school buses to evacuate
residents before Katrina struck, talks about the spirits. On the
night before the storm, Barthelemy says quite seriously, a good
friend of his walked home with a whole pack of ghosts. Barthelemy
asked him if he was scared, and the man replied, "What they gonna do?
The dead can't hurt me."
Lynell Williams, born and raised in Plaquemines Parish, felt a sense
of foreboding around the same time. She says she saw two lines of
ghosts--"bright people," she noted, invoking a local colloquialism
for whites--marching over the levee. The ghosts were getting out of
Davant. That was all she needed to see. She left, too.
Williams, who has been trying to find her house, also can't find her
church. Bethlehem African Judea Baptist was strong enough to stick
around for 143 years, celebrating an anniversary on the weekend
before Katrina arrived. Now the sturdy brick sanctuary has gone
missing. All that remains is the sign out front, which seems to
invite congregants to a 43rd-anniversary party. The "1" fell off.
"That Katrina, she really pitched a party," Williams said, shifting
the blue kerchief on her head and wiping tears on the spot her church
once stood. "We just in slow motion. I feel like I'm in a dream."
Up the road another house of worship, St. Thomas, is a skeleton, its
windows and doors blown out, its brick frame chipped and scraped, but
still standing. Meyer was baptized there, celebrated her First
Communion there and was married there, following the same track that
the faithful in Davant have gone down since they broke ground for the
church in 1844. She'll pray there again, she says, even though it's
hard to imagine anyone but the buzzards inhabiting this place for a
long, long time.
Out back, there are people crying in the cemetery, walking slowly
past headstones that commemorate the French and Creole families that
made this place: the Fontenelles and Gravolets and Falgouts. No one
should have to see what the weeping men and women in the burial
ground are seeing, but they linger there, blinking their eyes, as if
refocusing will bring some sense to what lies before them.
The aboveground sarcophagi, which performed so well in storm after
storm for decade after decade, couldn't hold on anymore. The lids
popped off more than a dozen, and some let their coffins go floating
out. A delicately carved wooden casket lies in the middle of the main
path, upside down. Mud cakes its sides. And the little white angel
figurines that once looked to the heavens from each of the coffin's
corners are now staring straight down.
Down at the End of the World, Houses Walk and the Dead Rise Up
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 21, 2005; Page C01
DAVANT, La. Directions to Davant are simple: "Go to the end of the
world and turn left."
End-of-the-world Louisiana means going down, deep down, past New
Orleans and its silent, flooded neighborhoods, through ruined St.
Bernard Parish where the oil spilled after Hurricane Katrina, and
down even deeper, down into the sinking marshes and bayous of
Plaquemines Parish, where Creoles with lyrical French names talk
matter-of-factly of walking the levee next to ghosts and spirits.
Down to Davant.
Except now it's hard to say what is Davant and what isn't Davant. New
Orleans filled up with water slowly. Davant was swept away fast,
destroying the false sense of security that ever-taller levees gave
to the place. Even in battered New Orleans, tones go hushed when
conversations turn to Plaquemines (PLACK-uh-min), which takes its
name from a Native American word for persimmon. "It's worse down
there, bad, bad, bad," they say.
This is where Katrina acted like a tsunami, treating the big "ring
levee" that comes to a looping end south of town--bent in the shape
of a paper clip--as if it were a child's sand castle. The Mississippi
River came roaring through here, frothy and white and mean, up over
the levee on one side of town, and the salty marsh water broke
through the levee on the other.
Plaquemines is the place where the people who want to resurrect New
Orleans, people such as President Bush, who has vowed "to build the
levees higher" to protect the Crescent City, might look for lessons,
and where people who love the marsh and build the levees want
everyone to take note. It was the first line of defense thrown up by
human beings against Katrina, and it buckled, unable to withstand a
surge that cascaded through fraying marshes that in another era might
have slowed the water.
"Plaquemines has been kind of out of the news," Lt. Gen. Carl Strock,
commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, said recently. "But
clearly, it's an important area, it needs to be brought back up."
All that's left on some blocks in this town of 900, and some of the
neighboring communities along the levee, are concrete stoops. That's
it. Churches and stores simply vanished and a big chunk of the road
that is so important to maintaining Louisiana's rich oil fields is
washed away. Sturdy wood frame houses that survived when the wind got
strong and the water got high in the past were ground into kindling,
reduced to mere smudges of color on the sloping sides of the river
levees.
The levee that failed to protect Davant is twice as tall now, local
officials say, as it was when Hurricane Camille blasted through the
parish in 1969. All that extra dirt and clay had a lulling effect,
and the men and women who worked the oil fields out in the marsh, or
plied the bayous for oysters, got to thinking Davant was a safe place.
"People felt pretty good with the levee 18, 19 feet high," said John
Barthelemy, a parish councilman with droopy eyes and a quick
smile. "They'd say, 'Now we have the levees. We don't have to worry
about water. We'll just worry about wind.' "
Wind and legends, that is. The Creole boys and girls down here put as
much faith in the tales of their grandmothers -- their memeres -- as
they do in the Army Corps of Engineers. And the memeres said
Plaquemines was fated for doom. As the legend goes, the people of
lower Plaquemines took vengeance on a priest in the early 1800s,
killing him after he was accused of committing a heinous crime. That
act of vigilantism -- passed from generation to generation in scary
bedtime stories filled with werewolves called loups-garous and
screaming "yi, yi, yi" spirits -- came with consequences, the memeres
warned.
"There was something about 'thou shalt not kill,' " Simon Duplessis,
70, said as he looked for pieces of his small private plane on the
narrow strip of land that his ancestors have owned since 1820. "Dad
said the place was cursed."
Certainly Plaquemines, which now has a population of about 29,000,
has suffered. During the great Mississippi River flood of 1927, the
wealthy men upstream in New Orleans decided to save their city by
blowing up a downstream levee and flooding Plaquemines. For decades,
the parish was a corrupt kingdom ruled in dictatorial fashion by
Judge Leander Perez, an iconic segregationist whose blunt,
inflammatory speeches in the 1950s and '60s made him a national
figure in the Southern stand against integration.
The Plaquemines that Judge Perez ruled looks like a cursed place now.
Cattle roam untended on deserted streets, and pecan trees -- once
tall and majestic -- lie down in the fields, toppled and broken. The
lush groves that produced satsumas, sweet oranges coveted each
harvest season by Louisianians, have gone brittle and brown, burned
crispy by 14 feet of salty water that came through a 200-foot-wide
break in the marsh levee.
On the other side is wild Louisiana, part land, part water, a place
that was vanishing even before Katrina, and that environmentalists
are begging harder than ever for the federal government to
restore. "As a child I always used to think, 'What's beyond this?'"
said Duplessis, who remembers going for swims in the Mississippi with
his father. "The ducks would fly off, and I would always wonder where
in the world they would go."
This part of Plaquemines once had a boomtown feel to it. A railroad
passed near the Duplessis home, to bring in supplies for the oil rigs
and bring out rice and oranges and pecans. The country stores held
Friday night dances and showed movies. But the marsh has been
dropping steadily -- it has grown more sickly over the years as the
Mississippi was trapped in a man-made channel that prevented it from
spreading silt. Each year it sinks up to an inch. The lower it goes,
the worse the storm surges become, and the more inhospitable the
place becomes, even with its bigger levees.
"The ones who are left are pretty much your die-hards," said Gina
Meyer, a Plaquemines native who cruised over submerged neighborhoods
in an airboat to grab people off rooftops.
Die-hards and, to hear the locals tell it, ghosts. Even Barthelemy, a
feet-on-the-ground sort who commandeered school buses to evacuate
residents before Katrina struck, talks about the spirits. On the
night before the storm, Barthelemy says quite seriously, a good
friend of his walked home with a whole pack of ghosts. Barthelemy
asked him if he was scared, and the man replied, "What they gonna do?
The dead can't hurt me."
Lynell Williams, born and raised in Plaquemines Parish, felt a sense
of foreboding around the same time. She says she saw two lines of
ghosts--"bright people," she noted, invoking a local colloquialism
for whites--marching over the levee. The ghosts were getting out of
Davant. That was all she needed to see. She left, too.
Williams, who has been trying to find her house, also can't find her
church. Bethlehem African Judea Baptist was strong enough to stick
around for 143 years, celebrating an anniversary on the weekend
before Katrina arrived. Now the sturdy brick sanctuary has gone
missing. All that remains is the sign out front, which seems to
invite congregants to a 43rd-anniversary party. The "1" fell off.
"That Katrina, she really pitched a party," Williams said, shifting
the blue kerchief on her head and wiping tears on the spot her church
once stood. "We just in slow motion. I feel like I'm in a dream."
Up the road another house of worship, St. Thomas, is a skeleton, its
windows and doors blown out, its brick frame chipped and scraped, but
still standing. Meyer was baptized there, celebrated her First
Communion there and was married there, following the same track that
the faithful in Davant have gone down since they broke ground for the
church in 1844. She'll pray there again, she says, even though it's
hard to imagine anyone but the buzzards inhabiting this place for a
long, long time.
Out back, there are people crying in the cemetery, walking slowly
past headstones that commemorate the French and Creole families that
made this place: the Fontenelles and Gravolets and Falgouts. No one
should have to see what the weeping men and women in the burial
ground are seeing, but they linger there, blinking their eyes, as if
refocusing will bring some sense to what lies before them.
The aboveground sarcophagi, which performed so well in storm after
storm for decade after decade, couldn't hold on anymore. The lids
popped off more than a dozen, and some let their coffins go floating
out. A delicately carved wooden casket lies in the middle of the main
path, upside down. Mud cakes its sides. And the little white angel
figurines that once looked to the heavens from each of the coffin's
corners are now staring straight down.
